Chapter XII

Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon emigrant train of
thirty-three wagons; and tramping wearily along and driving their herd of
loose cows, were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and
children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for
eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our
stage had come in eight days and three hours--seven hundred and ninety-
eight miles! They were dusty and uncombed, hatless, bonnetless and
ragged, and they did look so tired!

After breakfast, we bathed in Horse Creek, a (previously) limpid,
sparkling stream--an appreciated luxury, for it was very seldom that our
furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind. We
changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours--changed
mules, rather--six mules--and did it nearly every time in four minutes.
It was lively work. As our coach rattled up to each station six
harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable; and in the twinkling of an
eye, almost, the old team was out, and the new one in and we off and away
again.

During the afternoon we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock,
Devil's Gate and the Devil's Gap. The latter were wild specimens of
rugged scenery, and full of interest--we were in the heart of the Rocky
Mountains, now. And we also passed by "Alkali" or "Soda Lake," and we
woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the
world when the driver said that the Mormons often came there from Great
Salt Lake City to haul away saleratus. He said that a few days gone by
they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry
lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads
of a drug that cost them nothing, to Salt Lake, they could sell it for
twenty-five cents a pound.

In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been
hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see.
This was what might be called a natural ice-house. It was August, now,
and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men
could scape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of
boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice--hard,
compactly frozen, and clear as crystal!

Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised
curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first
splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain
peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as
if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with
a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotel-keeper, the
postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the