tretched several miles farther up and down what in
winter is the river. Passing over to Big Sandy, the most northerly
tributary of the Arkansas, I found dry sand (often incrusted with some
white alkaline deposit) the rule; water the rare exception throughout
the twenty or thirty miles of its course nearest its source. At Denver,
on the 6th of June, Cherry Creek contributed to the South Platte a
volume amply sufficient to run an ordinary grist-mill; ten days
afterwards its bed was dry as a doctrinal sermon. My first encampment on
the North Platte above Laramie was by a sparkling, dancing stream a yard
wide, which could hardly have been forced through a nine-inch ring; but
though its current was rapid and the Platte but three miles off, the
thirsty earth and air drank up every drop by the way. Big Sandy, Little
Sandy and _Dry_ Sandy are the three tributaries to be crossed between
South Pass and the Colorado, and the latter justifies its name through
the better part of each year. Golden River runs through too deep a
narrow valley and bears too strong a current from the snowy peaks in
which it heads to be thus dried up; so with Bear, Welso, and the
Timpanagos or Jordan, the principal affluents of Salt Lake, which tumble
and roar between lofty peaks the greater part of their respective
courses; but when you have crossed the Jordan, moving California-ward,
you will not find another decent mill-stream for the five hundred miles
that you traverse on your direct (Simpson's) route to the sink of the
Carson. At intervals which seem very long, you find a spring, a scanty
but welcome stream rushing down between two mountains, to be speedily
drunk up by the thirsty plain and valley at their base; but you will
oftener pass some 'sink' or depression below the general level of the
valley you are traversing, where a shrewd guess has led to brackish or
sulphurous water by digging two or three feet. A mail station-keeper
lost his oxen, at a point a hundred miles south-west of Salt Lake; they
had wandered southward on the desert, and he followed their trail for
(as he estimated) a hundred miles, without finding a drop of water, when
he gave them up, still a day's tramp ahead of him, and turned back to
save his own life and that of his suffering horse. He might, I presume,
have gone a hundred miles further without finding aught to drink but
their blood.

This dearth of wood and water can hardly be realized from any mere
description. A life-l