Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/364

346 Our route lay over the bench; on our right was a square adobe fort, that had been used during the Indian troubles, and fields and houses were scattered about. Passing the mouth of Parley's Kanyon, we entered the rich bottom-land of the Great Cotton-wood, beautified with groves of quaking asp, whose foliage was absolute green, set off by paper-white stems. After passing through an avenue of hardheads, i. e., erratic granite boulders, which are carted to the city for building the Temple, we turned to the left and entered the mouth of the kanyon, where its sides flare out into gentler slopes.

A clear mountain stream breaks down the middle. The bed is a mass of pebbles and blocks: hornblende; a white limestone, almost marble, but full of flaws; red sandstone, greenstone, and a conglomerate like mosaic-work. The bank is thick with the poplar, from which it derives its name; willow clumps; the alder, with its dry, mulberry-like fruit; the hop vine, and a birch whose bark is red as the cherry-tree's. Above the stream the ravine sides are in places too steep for growth; as a rule, the northern is never wooded save where the narrowness of the gorge impedes the action of the violent south winds. On the lower banks the timber is mostly cleared off. Upon the higher slopes grow the mountain mahogany and the scrub maple wherever there is a foot of soil. There is a fine, sturdy growth of abies. The spruce, or white pine, rises in a beautifully regular cone often 100 feet high; there are two principal varieties of fir, one with smooth light bark, and the other, which loves a higher range, and looks black as it bristles out of its snowy bed, is of a dun russet. Already appeared the splendid tints which make the American autumn a fit subject "pictoribus atque poetis." An atmosphere of blue seemed to invest the pines; the maple blushed bright red; and the willow clumps of the bed and the tapestry of ferns had turned to vegetable gold, while snow, bleached to more than usual whiteness by intervals of deep black soil, flecked the various shade of the poison hemlocks and balsam firs, and the wild strawberry, which the birds had stripped of fruit.

Great Cotton-wood Kanyon, like the generality of these ravines in the western wall of the Wasach, runs east and west till near the head, when it gently curves toward the north, and is separated from its neighbor by a narrow divide. On both sides the continuity of the gap is cut by deep jagged gullies, rendering it impossible to crown the heights. The road, which winds from side to side, was worked by thirty-two men, directed by Mr. Little, in one season, at a total expense of $16,000. After exhausting Red Buttes, Emigration, and other kanyons, for timber and fuel, Great Cotton-wood was explored in 1854, and in 1856 the ascent was made practicable. In places where the gorge narrows to a gut there were great difficulties, but rocks were removed, while tree-trunks and boughs were spread like a corduroy, and covered