The scenery at times is fascinating in its very wild-
ness and sterility, and in the strange and fantastic
shapes it often assumes. There are the weird buttes,
and a Chimney rock, at once the monument and rem-
nant of an ancient bluff, beaten upon and worn away
by the winds and waters of ages, yet lifting still into
the face of heaven its long, fixed finger of hope or
warning, as you choose to regard it. S^ott bluffs
spread for miles their sandstone towers and sand-cliffs,
grand as the hills of Bashan and the giant cities ; but
one by one, through the long ages, their wandering,
terrible foe, heralded by cloudy column and pillar of
fire, girdles their ramparts, and the crash of a Jericho
is heard again through the horn-blasts of the tempest,
and the roar of the beleaguerinof elements. Then the
grass becomes scarce as the emigrant passes on, and
in many places is all consumed, and new and untrod-
den routes must be sought, and cattle begin to faint
for food, and women and children to sicken and die,
and men, ill-fed and poorly clad, keeping the saddle
from daylight till dark, and exposed to alternate blasts
of heat and cold, begin to fail. Wagons must be
lightened of their load or emptied. Meanwhile the
poor dumb brutes thus slowly dying, sacrificed to their
owners' greed, gasping, and insensible to the goad,
open-mouthed, with lolling tongue and slobbering
jaws and dull sunken eyes, drag along their two or
twenty miles a day, or with limbs swollen and trem-
bling fall dead from thirst and hunger.
Better their masters, brutes scarcely more reason- able, should thus have died; and so they did, poor fellows, many of them, and mingled their bodies with the carcasses of their beasts. All the way from the valley of the Mississippi westward, long, tortuous tracks were marked by the broken wagons, demolished tents, cast-off clothing, stale provisions, and household effects that lined the roadside ; all along the several routes by which these pilgrims marched were scattered bones, and the rotting carcasses of cattle intermingled
