We passed a social evening at Green-River Station. It boasted of no less than three Englishwomen, two married, and one, the help, still single. Not having the Mormonite retenue, the dames were by no means sorry to talk about Birmingham and Yorkshire, their birthplaces. At 9 P.M. arrived one of the road-agents, Mr. Cloete, from whom I gathered that the mail-wagon which once ran from Great Salt Lake City had lately been taken off the road. The intelligence was by no means consolatory, but a course of meditation upon the saying of the sage, "in for a penny, in for a pound," followed by another visit to my namesake's grog-shop, induced a highly philosophical turn, which enabled me—with the aid of a buffalo—to pass a comfortable night in the store.
We were not under way before 8 A.M. Macarthy was again to take the lines, and a Giovinetto returning after a temporary absence to a young wife is not usually rejoiced to run his course. Indeed, he felt the inconveniences of a semi-bachelor life so severely, that he often threatened in my private ear, chemin faisant, to throw up the whole concern.
After the preliminary squabble with the mules, we forded the pebbly and gravelly bed of the river—in parts it looks like a lake exhausted by drainage—whose swift surging waters wetted the upper spokes of the wheels, and gurgled pleasantly around the bags which contained the mail for Great Salt Lake City.[1]
- ↑ Sticklers for strict democracy in the United States maintain, on the principle that the least possible power should be delegated to the federal government, that the transmission of correspondence is no more a national concern than the construction of railways and telegraphs, or the transit of passengers and goods. The present system was borrowed from the monopolies of Europe, and was introduced into Amer-
7. Mr. M'Cox, of Missouri, surveyed the boundaries of the Indian reservations: his work was in part revised by the late Captain Hood, United States Topographical Engineers.
8. Mr. Nicollet (French) in 1833–38 mapped the country west of the Upper Mississippi: he was employed in 1838–9 to make a similar scientific reconnoissance between the Mississippi and the Missouri, on which occasion he was accompanied by Mr. Frémont. He died in 1842.
The explorations of Colonel Frémont, Captain Howard Stansbury, Lieutenant Gunnison, and Lieutenant Warren have been frequently alluded to in these pages.
9. Lieutenant, afterward Captain Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, set out in 1838, and, after a long voyage of discovery in South America, Oceanica, and the Antarctic continent, made San Francisco on August 11, 1841. It is remarkable that this officer's party were actually pitched upon the spot (New Helvetia, afterward called Sacramento City) where Californian gold was dug by the Mormons.
10. Captain R.B. Marcy, U. S. Army, "discovered and explored, located and marked out the wagon-road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fé, New Mexico." The road explorers, however, are too numerous to specify.
11. Governor I.I. Stevens, of Washington Territory, surveyed in 1853 the northern land proposed for a Pacific railway near the 47°-49° parallels, from St. Paul to Puget Sound. No portion of that line had been visited since the days of Lewis and Clarke, except a small portion toward the Pacific Ocean.
12. Captain Raynolds, United States Topographical Engineers, accompanied by Colonel Bridger as guide and interpreter, is still (1860) exploring the head-waters of the Yellow Stone River.
