Tales and Sketches.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 39, 21 October 1871, Page 16

Tales and Sketches.

A DRIFT BOR LIFE. [From All the Yeab Round.] The Great Central Pacific Railway, just opened across tire whole continent of America from sea to sea, runs in the neighborhood of some of the wildest territories now left to explorers There is particularly one district beyond the Rocky Mountains, marked on the map as belonging partly to the State of Utah, and partly to that of Colorado, which has scarcely ever been approached till the last two vears and which contains some of the strangest scenery in the world. It consists of a series of high table-lands in steps, one behind the other, seamed with gulfs or chasms, thousands of feet deep, at the bottom of which .runs the rivers. It is completely barren, as every drop of water drains off at once from the surface above: an arid desert, with no vegetation beyond a prickly scrub or a distorted cactus. Whether these extraordinary fissures, called canons, are volcanic rents in the earth, or have been produce by the action of the rivers themselves, or by both together, is a geological point not yet decid.ed. In some of the shallower ravines trees are to be found growing by the beds of the streams and in their broken sides, and an enormous cactus is mentioned which often reaches forty feet in height, but the deeper clefts are more like immense drains than anything else, sometimes even larger at the bottom than the top, where the sdfter rock is worn by the water and not more that a hundred feet wide ; the sun scarcely penetrates to such enormous depths, the soil is washed away by the floods, and there is scarcely an footing for plants or shrubs. The only white men who have hitherto explored this inhospitable region have been the “prospectors” or seekers for gold, and latterly some of the Yankee pioneers in search of “new tracks.” One of these, General Palmer, is quoted by Dr Bell in his recent interesting work on these regions,* as follows : « Suddenly there yawned at our feet, without the least previous indication, one of those fearful chasms with its precipitous sides hundreds of feet deep, and apparently so narrow that you hardly realise the fact that, before you can continue your march you must either find a place sufficiently broken to descend and mount again on the other side with your loaded mules, or consume days in heading the inexorable channel.” On one occasion, he with his party of soldiers had decided on going down and travelling in the bed of the stream, following an Indian trail, when upon reaching a spot where the cliffs in the rear, ahead, and above, looked like a grey coffin, they suddenly heard a horrible war-whoop echoing as if all the savages in the Rocky Mountains were upon them, and they received a perfect shower of arrows and bullets, followed by the rolling down of enormous stones on their heads by the stealthy Apache Indians. In this case General Palmer’s force was large enough to send two scaling parties, who mounted the cliff like cats, took the Indians in the rear and put them to flight; but, says he, if the soldiers had been fewer in number they must all have been killed. The hero, however, of canon explorers, though an involuntary one, is a certain James White, whose story, as given by Dr Bell, follows here somewhat stewed down as it were. In the spring of 1867 a small party of Yankee prospectors having heard that small lumps of gold had been seen in the pouch of an Indian from that district, set off to try their luck. At the miserable village called Colorado city, situated on the last hem of the known land, they heard such an account of the hardships of the country and the dangers from the Indians, that one of the party fell off. The other three, with two pack mules to carry their provisions, mining tools, and blankets, travelled on in a south-western direction four hundred miles beyond all trace of the white man. They found a little gold, on “ striking” the San Juan, but not enough to satisfy them, and went on another hundred miles or so, into the wilderness, until they reached the great canon of the Colorado river, by no means at its deepest part. They and their animals were suffering sadly from thirst, and the only water was foaming and dashing like a silver thread two thousand feet below, at the bottom of perpendicular cliffs. They pushed on, hoping to find a place by which they might climb down. After a most toilsome day among the rough rocks, they succeeded in discovering a smaller canon, where a stream made its way into the main river ; and got at last to the bottom, where they encamped. They were much disheartened and talked of returning home. Captain Baker, however, kept up their spirits, and sang songs over the camp-fire, and when they started next morning they were in very good heart. They were climbing the precipitous bank, Baker in front, then James "White, lastly, Strode with the mules, when suddenly they heard the war-whoop of the Apache, the most cowardly and cruel of the Indian tribes thereabouts. A shower of bullets and arrows followed, poor Baker fell immediately, and though he raised himself against a rock and fired In return, he called out t o the others who were hurrying up to Ins help, “ Back, boys, save yourselves, I’m dying!” They stood by him nevertheless, till the breath left his body, firing on the Indians as they came up. The delay of the wretched Apache in scalping the dead body enabled the two men to rush down the chasm once more, secure the anus, a stock of provisions, and the “lariats” of the mules. There was no chance of saving the animals.

It was quite impossible to escape by the upper country, where they were certain to fall into the hands of the Indians, and they followed the stream for four hours, when it flowed into the great Colorada at a low strip of “ bottom land,” where the cold grey walls

which must here have been two thousand fee high, hemmed them in, and there was no possible outlet but along the river itself. A good deal of drift-wood lay on the shore, and they put together a frail raft of three trunks of the cotton-tree, about ten feet long and eight inches in diameter, fastened with their mule ropes, and then picked out a couple of stout poles to serve as paddles to guide it. It is a proof how little they realised the frightful security of their prison walls that they waited until the moon went down for fear they should be seen by Indians. About midnight they launched their miserable raft, and went rushing down the yawning canon, tossing and whirling about in the eddies, and dashing, against the rocks in the dark. Early in the morning they found a place where they cotdd land, but the walls seemed to be increasing in height. They strengthened their raft, and ate some of their food, which was by this time quite soaked. The width of the canon seemed to them some sixty or seventy yards, and the current carried them about three miles an hour. That day they reached the confluence with the Rio G-rande, but the two rivers were hardly wider, though deeper, than the one ; the depth of the fissure at this point is estimated, by trigonometrical estimates made afterwards, to be about. four thousand feet, with pinnacles of immense height standing out in places. At night they fastened themselves to a rock, or hauled up their raft on some “ bottom land.” The perpendicular walls were composed of grey sand-rock, the lower portions worn smooth by the action of floods, up to about forty feet. A little line of blue sky showed high above them, but the sun shone only for an hour or so in a day—it was a dark gloomy abyss, where nothing grew, and not so much as a bird was to be seen. Every now and then they shot past side canons, which looked black and forbidding, like cells in the walls of a massy prison. They remembered, however, that Baker had told them the town of Colville was at the mouth of the canon where the river Colorado entered the plain. They thought they could make their provisions last five days, and “surely such wonderful walls could not last for ever.”

Before long, they reached what they, believed to be the opening into the San Juan river, and attempted to turn the raft into it; but the swift current drove them back, the water reached from wall to wall, and there was no possibility of landing. Still they floated on every bend seemed to take them deeper into the bowels of the earth; the walls above appeared to come closer and shut out more of the narrow belt of sky; to make the shadows blacker, and redouble the echoes. They were constantly wet, but the water was comparatively warm (it was August), and the currents were more regular than they had expected. Strole steered, and often set the end of the pole against a rock while he leaned with his whole weight on the other end to push off the raft. On the third day they heard a deep roar of waters, the raft was violently agitated, and seemed as if it must be whirled against a wall which barred all further progress. The river, however, made a sharp bend, and they saw before them a long vista of water lashed into foam, and pouring through a deep gorge full of hugh masses of rock fallen from above. The raft swept on, shivering as if the logs would break up; the waves dashed over the men, and they seemed to be buried under them. Strole stood up with his pole to attempt to guide their course, when suddenly they plunged down a chasm amidst the deafening roar, and with a shriek that went to the solitary survivor’s heart, the poor fellow fell back and sank into the whirlpool amidst the mist and spray. White still clung so the logs, and in a few minutes found himself in smooth water, floating fast away. It was nearly night, the provisions had all been washed away, and the raft seemed to be coming to pieces. He succeeded, however, in getting it on to some flat rocks, and there he sat all night, thinking over his horrible loneliness, and wishing he had died with Baker fighting the Indians ; but when he remembered home, he says he resolved “ to die hard, and like a man.” At dawn he strengthened his raft and once more put off, taking the precaution of lashing himself to his logs; he passed over a succession of rapids where the river must have fallen, he thinks thirty or forty feet in a hundred yards, and was blocked with masses of stone ; he wns whirled about and thumped and submerged, until, at last the fastenings of the upper end of the raft gave way and spread out like a fan : the rope, however, held him firm, and when he floated into calmer water he managed to get upon a rock, and once more contrived to fasten the logs together. Some miles below this lie reached the mouth of another great river, the Chiquito, more rapid than the San Juan, and where the current was at right angles to the main stream : causing a large and dangerous whirlpool in a black chasm on the opposite shore. He saw it from a long way off, but the Colorado current was so strong that he hoped with his pole to guide himself straight. But when he reached the meeting of the waters, the raft suddenly stopped, swung round as if balanced on a point, and was then swept into the whirlpool; he felt as if all exertion were now fruitless, drooped his pole and fell back on his raft, hearing the gurgling water, and expecting to be plunged into it. He waited for death with his eyes closed. Presently he felt a strange swinging motion and found that he was circling round and round, sometimes close to the vortex, sometimes thrown by an eddy to the outer edge. He remembers looking up and seeing the blue belt of sky and some red clouds, showing that it was sunset in the upper world, five thousand feet or more above him. He grew dizzy and fancies he must have fainted, for, when he again became conscious, the sky had grown dark and night shadows filled the canon. Then as he felt the raft sweeping round in the current, he suddenly rose on his knees and asked God to help him. “Iu i my very soul I prayed, O God, if there is &

tway out of this fearful place show it to me, take me out!” It was the only moment, says the narrator who wrote down what he had heard from White himself, that the man volunteered any information ; the rest came out only with close questioning, “ but here his somewhat heavy features quivered, and his voice grew husky.” Suddenly he felt a different motion in the raft, and, peering into the dark, found that he had left the whirlpool at some distance, and that he was in the smoothest current he had yet seen. One of his questioners smiled at this part of the story, and he said with emotion : “ It’s true, Bob, and I’m sure God took me out!” After this the course of the river became very crooked, with short, sharp turns; the current was very slow', the flat precipitous walls were of white sand-rock upon which the high-water mark showed strongly, forty feet above. And here it w r as found afterwards by barometrical observations, to be nearly seven thousand feet in height. The deepest part, in fact, of the canon is between the San J uan and the Colorada Chiquito. The wretched man’s clothes were torn to shreds, he was constantly wet, every noon the sun blazed down, burning and blistering his uncovered body. Four days had dragged on since he tasted food, hunger seemed almost to madden him, and as the raft floated on he sat looking into the water, longing to jump in and have done with his misery. On the fifth day he saw a bit of flat land with some mesquit bushes on it: a relief after the utter absence of any living thing ; he had seen no plants, nor animals, nor birds, at that dreary depth. He managed to land, and ate the green pods and leaves, but they seemed only to make him more hungry. The rocks now became black, and igneous formation, with occasional breaks in the wall, and here and there a bush; they were becoming gradually lower, though he was unconscious of it. He had been six days without food, it w r as eleven since he started, and he was floating on almost without any sensation, when he heard voices and saw men beckoning from the shore ; a momentary strength came to him, he pushed towards them, and found himself among a tribe of Yampais Indians who had lived for many years on a strip of alluvial land along the bottom of the canon, which is here somewhat wider, and the trail to which, from the upper world, is known only to themselves. One of the Indians made fast the raft, another seized White roughly and dragged him up the bank, and began to tear away the remains of his shirt, and was doing the same by his trousers, when a third interfered. White could not speak, but pointed to his mouth, and they gave him some meat and roasted mesquit beans. He stayed with them all night; next morning, having found out by signs that he might reach the dwellings of the white men in about “ two suns,” by the river he once more pushed off. He had still a revolver left tied on to the with which he purchased half a dog and some more beans. In spite of good resolutions, the temptation of food was too great, and he ate all he had, on the first day. For three more days he floated on; the prison walls must now have been gradually expanding and lowering, but he had grown so weak that he lay utterly exhausted, indifferent to life and death, having given up all hope. On the third day, however, from leaving the Indians, and the fourteenth from first starting, he heard voices and the plash of oars. He understood the words he heard, though he could not reply ; he found himself lifted into a boat, he had reached the open world, and the battle of life was won.

The people of the Mormon settlement of Colville treated “ this waif out of the bowels of the unknown canon” with the greatest kindness; but he was long in recovering; they declared that they had never seen such a wretched looking creature : his feet, legs, and body were literally flayed from exposure to the scorching rays of the sun, when drenched with wet. His reason at first seemed almost gone, his eyes were hollow and dreary, and though a great strong fellow of thirty, he stooped like an old man. It was calculated that he had floated above five hundred miles along this hitherto unexplored chasm : thereby solving a curious geographical problem, the great missing link between the Upper and Lower Colorado. It is not likely, at least at present, that any one will be bold enough to repeat the voyage. His story was taken down from his own lips by aDr Parry, who had himself been occupied in surveying the district in order to discover “ minerals,” and to try to find a level route through the country. It is a curious proof of the close proximity in which these utterly wild districts are found in America, with the latest inventions of the nineteenth century, that the account of Colville in the following chapter mentions that “steamers come four hundred miles up the river from the Pacific,” as high as this Mormon town.

Dr Bell’s work contains much curious, new, and interesting information, and well merits reading.