James David Gillilan

“ How hungry were his eyes as he viewed the great opaline pool which reflected the sinewy cedars and pointed pines; as he looked upon the surrounding glen, the ancient game-range, the distant dissolving plain, the hills heightening through their timber-covered sides up to the very sky! His bursting heart cried out, “I have but one thing to ask for from the White Father: Give me this lake and the land around it, and some few acres surrounding the grave of my father.” ”

“ The Old Oregon Trail takes bold way through some of the very finest scenery of the West. These new ships of the desert, the passenger trains, glide gracefully down from the aerial highways of the mountain passes into the heart of our fertile oases. Whichever way the traveler turns he sees something absolutely new, and often in strange contrast with what he has just been beholding. ”

“ Entering the mountain side by way of a yawning cañon we soon come to a sheer precipice lying in a deep gorge with perpendicular sides, while, leaping from the top of the declivity high above our heads, as if from the very zenith, a stream of crystal water cleaves the air. It is dashed into countless strands of silvery pearls before it reaches the deep bed of moss spread down to receive it, and where it lies resting awhile for its downward journey toward the moon-whipped ocean. ”

“ The loping jack rabbit slips softly to his greasewood shelter and the prairie dog bounces barking from his snake-infested haunt, noisily preparing for his day’s digging and foraging.
The stubborn mountains begin to let the sun’s forerunning rays glide between them; the sky, now old gold, is fast transforming into kaleidoscopic crimsons and other reds, while the swift arms of the day-painter are reaching from between the peaks of the precipitous crags and dyeing the scales of the mackerel sky with hues and tints the rainbow would covet. ”

“ Before the bold and bustling railway noisily elbowed its way into the affections of travel and commerce and pushed aside the patient wagon of the nation-builders, the tens of thousands of hurried travelers enjoyed (or endured) the hospitality of its rocking thorough-braces as they, hour by hour, day after day, and night after night, and even week after week in the longer journeys, sat atop or inside this leviathan of the sand-ocean making the most rapid trip possible and under safe guidance. ”

“ Pioneer-like, the father scans the horizon, locating all the prominent features of the landscape. He makes a rude map, not forgetting the juniper. As best he can he prepares the body for the burying. And such a burying! No lumber with which to make even a rough box; nothing but their daily clothing and nightly bedding was to be had. The unlined grave was more than usually forbidding. The desert demon had trailed that brave body and was now swallowing it up. ”

“ Like blasts of a blizzard, the shrapnel of the desert is hurled into eyes, face, ears, and nostrils; little rivers pour down the back and fill every discoverable wrinkle and cranny of the clothing with their gritty load.
If in summer, buttoning the clothing is suffocation, and the perspiration soon makes one a mass of grime; if in winter, it is 35 not so unbearable, for a comfortable fencing can be made against the sand and the cold. ”

“ The story of Chief Joseph is one of the most interesting unwritten chapters in the history of the great Northwest. The fact of the capture of this wily Indian leader with most of his band is well known. They were banished from the Alpine regions of eastern Oregon and compelled to make their home across the marble cañon of the Snake in the State of Idaho, far from their loved Wallowa.
The valley of Wallowa (an Indian name) is one of the most beautiful spots imaginable. At its southern end stand pillared peaks, eternally snow-crowned, rivaling the finest to be seen in Switzerland. ”

“ Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush––these all conspired to make the task next to impossible.
Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains ”

“ It may be that we subconsciously dread the helpless state of unconsciousness into which the anæsthetic plunges us, and hesitate at a trip, no matter how short, into death’s borderland, preferring to keep our own hands as long as possible on the helm of the ship of life.
I wonder why we become terror-stricken at the thought of ghosts. The untutored child needs only a hint to make him shy at the dark; and a lad has to be pretty large before he can walk far at night without 170 once in a while looking behind him, just to be certain there is nothing following. ”

“ It was the one indispensable link in the endless chain of evolution popular and powerful, the only public agent of the Trail and the plains until the unconquerable initiative of the lord of the world had time to steel a highway with trackage for more rapid transit. What a living link was that old overland stage! To look upon an isolated and abandoned relic of earlier pioneerdom is like standing at the marble monument 110 of some human pivot in the mighty march of man’s progress. ”

“ Then the blue, black, and brown clouds change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse. ”

“ By the time church was dismissed the blizzard was on in full force, and the roads were already so filled with the new drifts that to return with the buggy was hardly thinkable. I borrowed a saddle, and leaving the little lad with friends, started for home, where I was under appointment to preach that evening. My way lay in the north, in the very teeth of the raging storm. With head tucked down, I trusted the reins to Jenny, who had never disappointed me in many a mountain trip, but I had not gone far until I found the storm was at my back. ”

“ The public denial of John Taylor, later president of the church, is abundant evidence. When they deny polygamy now they have the consistency of definition to back them; to their manner of explaining, polygamy is the act of taking new wives; to the non-Mormon, polygamy is the possessing of more than one wife. For this reason we are very bold in saying that polygamy is publicly practiced in Utah––witness Joseph F. Smith as chief example. ”

“ She had been taken most unwillingly, so far as both were concerned, and placed in one of the Eastern schools for Indian youths. Ben had objected strenuously, but the stronger arm prevailed.
The teacher at the mission had never in all her many years in that place felt fear until after Mary was taken away. When the father would come to the school to ask for news of her, he had his face painted black, indicating madness or war––“bad heart” he called it. The little woman who had won the hearts of the people did not know what the enraged man might do or when he would do it. ”

“ As they climbed, and climbed, and climbed, the ripening service-berry, blackened by weeks of attention by the unclouded sun, and the pine-hen and the speckled beauties from the noisy trout-streams, added to their comforts, and for a little while appeared to enliven the tired and fading woman. ”

“ The Mormons followed this national road when they trekked to the valley of Salt Lake in 1847––a dolorous path to many.
Because the Oregon Trail was nature’s way, man and commerce made it their way. Road sites are not like city sites––made to order; they are discovered. For 17 that reason the pioneer railway transcontinental also followed this trail. The Union Pacific marks with iron what so many of the emigrants marked with their tears and their graves. From the mouth of the Platte to the heart of the Rocky Mountains and beyond is a continuous cemetery of nameless tombs. ”

“ Salt Lake affords the finest and really the only beach-bathing resort in the whole interocean country. The bathing is attended with little, if any, danger. In thirty years only two persons have been lost. These strangled before assistance reached them. One body was found after four years, lying in the salty sand at the south end of the lake, whither the high winds from the north had drifted it. All the parts protected by the sand were perfectly preserved and as beautiful as if carved from Parian marble. ”

“ In the opposite direction a morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers through the half-unreal corridors. 37
SUNSET
The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace tapestry and rose-tinted down. ”

“ Stately, snow-crowned giants of the lordly hills, fir-fringed up to timber line, stand motherlike, or bishoplike, crozier-cragged, shepherding the verdant uplands and the velvety valleys whose billowy meadows bend beneath the highland zephyrs or fall before the scythe of the prospering farmer. ”

“ Mary Muskrat was one of the Bannock girls in the mission school. The little shrinking, more-than-half-wild papoose of the desert had been toilsomely but surely trained by the teacher, that bravest of little women.
Pulmonary consumption is the bane of the civilized Indians. It carries them off in multitudes. Despite their outdoor living, it seems that few, if any, ever recover from an attack. The dread disease had fastened itself upon Mary and she was sick unto death. Her little shack was no fit place for a living person, and here was one 78 dying. ”

“ Yet another turn and the wrathful river is carrying on its breast the tens of thousands of winter-cut logs dancing like straws on its frothy surface on their way to the busy mills; and the turbulent streams, their wildness tamed and harnessed, serve the needs of man like trusted domestic servants. ”

“ Fort Hall Reservation, until 1902, embraced a large territory of which Pocatello was the center. These Idaho red people are the remnants of the once powerful tribes of the Bannocks and Shoshones, which ranged from the Blue Mountains in Oregon to the backbone of the Rocky Mountains. The compressing processes used by the aggressive white people have encircled, curtailed, and squeezed their borders so that now they are centered at Fort Hall, half way between Pocatello and Blackfoot. Here the government has a school for them, and the Protestant Episcopal Church a mission. ”

“ There are several varieties of sagebrush, and a person not well acquainted with the desert might easily mistake one for the other. There are the white sage, a good forage plant for sheep, and the yellow sage, which, when properly taken, can be made useful for cattle. Then there is the common variety, the sort named above. This is not to be mistaken for the prickly greasewood 42 which infests the more alkaline regions; nor the rabbit-brush with its blossom so like the goldenrod, but with a very disagreeable odor. No man who knows will ever buy land where the greasewood grows thickly ”

“ Who has not fearsomely anticipated that which never came and wasted valuable energy and time in building bridges none are ever to cross? The surgical patient actually suffers more at sight of somber white-clad nurses, and the thought of the operation, than he does from the ordeal itself. ”

“ Added to this is the doctrine of the deification of men. All the true and faithful Mormons are to become gods by and by, and create and populate new worlds; hence the value of polygamy; in fact, this world is but one of the samples of this truth. Adam is the owner and ruler of earth, and to him we pray. ”

“ It was a queer audience. There were some whites, some Indians. It was odd to see Gun, the Agency policeman, there with his only prisoner. There were Billy George, the tribal judge; and Hubert Tetoby, the assistant blacksmith, as well as others of local importance. To add to the excitement of the evening, it was the night before ration day at the Agency, when all the Indians from the entire Reservation were 85 present––fifteen hundred of them––for their share. It was a wild time––the raw blanketed man was there for a Saturnalia. He knew no law but his desires. ”

“ It is unreasonable to the Indian that the white man should take from him his hunting grounds and limit his access to the very streams whence his people for ages uncountable filled their pantries for the winter. 73 He has learned to his disgust (without place for repentance) that equivalents are equivocations, and that the little baubles the fathers of the tribes had for their broad acres were mostly worthless. ”

“ With Christian and cultivated patience the minister listened and then said with captivating and sympathetic tenderness: “But, my dear sir, that is all speculation on the part of those scholarly and eloquent men whom you quote so accurately. They know no better. The religion of Jesus is not speculation; it is practical knowledge. ”

“ Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western tales are travelers’ tales and must be taken with “a grain of salt.” Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true, but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw the Missouri.
Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by Washington Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. ”

“ First would come those of the men too often overworked and underappreciated, like our modern railmen, the drivers of the stage. These, as the ancient Jehu, were compelled to drive furiously on occasion, in order to keep a cramped schedule or make up for the loss of time brought about by a breakdown, a washout, or some Indian depredation. Few drivers there were who did not love their work. It came to be a saying, “Once a driver, always 111 a driver.” ”

“ Thus spirits, spooks, bogies, wraiths, and other uncanny apparitions are unintentional inheritances of the race; a race that knows little more about the impending and impinging unseen than did the Saxon fathers who gave us our spooky speech. ”

“ The doughty Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, who died as late as 1878, obtaining leave of absence and a furlough, endured the pleasure of hardships common to the explorer, and through his happy biographer added the Trail to literature; but his eye of vision did not see these great stones of the commonwealth, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The very region so carefully pictured above as the dreariest of deserts, a veritable Western Sahara, is the exact location of Idaho and a large portion of Oregon ”