Hurry, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of
four persons—a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers,
and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We
put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the
wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon. The
horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be
better if one or two of us got out and walked. It was an
improvement. Next, we found that it would be better if a third
man got out. That was an improvement also. It was at this time
that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a
harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would
have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility. But in a
little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the
drive got out and walked also. It was at this time that I
resigned the position of driver, and never resumed it again.
Within the hour, we found that it would not only be better, but
was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a
time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push
it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but
keep out of the way and hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well
for one to know his fate at first, and get reconciled to it. We
had learned ours in one afternoon. It was plain that we had to
walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two
hundred miles. So we accepted the situation, and from that time
forth we never rode. More than that, we stood regular and nearly
constant watches pushing up behind.
We made seven miles, and camped in the desert. Young Clagett
(now member of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and
watered the horses; Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire
and brought water to cook with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith
did the cooking. This division of labor, and this appointment,
was adhered to throughout the journey. We had no tent, and so we
slept under our blankets in the open plain. We were so tired that
we slept soundly.
We were fifteen days making the trip—two hundred miles;
thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place,
to let the horses rest.
We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if
we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of
that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and
the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor. Parties
who met us, occasionally, advised us to put the horses in the
wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness no
sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the
provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being
“bituminous from long deprivation.” The reader will excuse me
from translating. What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used
a long word, was a secret between himself and his Maker. He was
one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble
sphere of life. He was gentleness and simplicity itself—and
unselfishness, too. Although he was more than twice as old as the
eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or
exemptions on that account. He did a young man’s share of the
work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the
general stand-point of any age—not from the arrogant, overawing
summit-height of sixty years. His one striking peculiarity was
his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their
own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon
the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his
ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left
them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so
natural and so simple that one was always catching himself
accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they
really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand
and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man’s love, and
he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a
sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were
perfectly luminous with meaning.
We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on
the frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our
foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him,
Oliphant got to admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr.
Ballou, hugging the dog’s warm back to his breast and finding
great comfort in it. But in the night the pup would get stretchy
and brace his feet against the old man’s back and shove, grunting
complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug,
grateful and happy, he would paw the old man’s back simply in
excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the
chase and in his sleep tug at the old man’s back hair and bark in
his ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these
familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his
statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal
to admit to bed with tired men, because he was “so meretricious
in his movements and so organic in his emotions.” We turned the
dog out.
It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its
bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger
appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and
black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning
around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert
was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very
summit and culmination of earthly luxury.
It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men,
whether city or country-bred. We are descended from
desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward
perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic
instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of
“camping out.”
Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made
forty miles (through the Great American Desert), and ten miles
beyond—fifty in all—in twenty-three hours, without halting to
eat, drink or rest. To stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony
and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty
miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost
seems cheap at the price.
We camped two days in the neighborhood of the “Sink of the
Humboldt.” We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink,
but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak
lye, either. It left a taste in the mouth, bitter and every way
execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very
uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that helped it very
little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent taste
and so it was unfit for drinking.
The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man
has yet invented. It was really viler to the taste than the
unameliorated water itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and
builder of the beverage felt constrained to endorse and uphold
it, and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to
praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out the remainder,
and said frankly it was “too technical for him.”
But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient,
and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to
interrupt it, we entered into our rest.
