which saves so much distance is closed by bogs for the greater part of the year, and the size of the wild sage would impede our wagon-wheels.
The great desert of Utah Territory extends in length about 300 miles along the western side of the Great Salt Lake. Its breadth varies: a little farther south it can not be crossed, the water, even where not poisonous, being insufficient. The formation is of bottoms like that described above, bench-lands, with the usual parallel and perfectly horizontal water-lines, leaving regular steps, as the sea settled down, by the gradual upheaval of the land. They mark its former elevation upon the sides of the many detached ridges trending mostly N. and S. Like the rim of the Basin, these hills are not a single continuous mountain range which might be flanked, but a series of disconnected protrusions above the general level of the land. A paying railway through this country is as likely as a profitable canal through the Isthmus of Suez: the obstacles must be struck at right angles, with such assistance as the rough kanyons and the ravines of various levels afford.
We are now in a country dangerous to stock. It is a kind of central point, where Pávant, Gosh Yuta (popularly called Gosh Ute), and Panak (Bannacks) meet. Watches, therefore, were told off for the night. Next morning, however, it was found that all had stood on guard with unloaded guns.
At Lost Springs the party was mustered. The following was found to be the material. The Ras Kafilah was one Kennedy, an Irishman, whose brogue, doubly Dublin, sounded startlingly in the Great American Desert. On a late trip he had been victimized by Indians. The savages had driven off two of his horses into a kanyon within sight of the Deep-Creek Station. In the hurry of pursuit he spurred up the ravine, followed by a friend, when, sighting jerked meat, his own property, upon the trees, he gave the word sauve qui peut. As they whirled their horses the Yutas rushed down the hill to intercept them at the mouth of the gorge, calling them in a loud voice dogs and squaws, and firing sundry shots, which killed Kennedy’s horse and pierced his right arm. Most men, though they jest at scars before feeling a wound, are temporarily cowed by an infliction of the kind, and of that order was the good Kennedy.
The next was an excellent traveler, by name Howard. On the road between Great Salt Lake City and Camp Floyd I saw two men, who addressed me as Mr. Kennedy the boss, and, finding out their mistake, followed us to the place of rendezvous. The party, with one eye gray and the other black, mounted upon a miserable pony, was an American. After a spell at the gold diggings of California he had revisited the States, and he now wished to
