Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/82

64 ty; we seem, in fact, to be traveling for twenty miles over a convex, treeless hill-top. The air became sultry, white clouds shut in the sky, and presently arose the high south wind, which at this season blows a gale between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M. The ground, bleached where sandy, was thinly scattered here and there with wiry grass, dun and withered, and with coarse and sunburnt shrubs, among which the "leadplant" (Amorphe canescens) was the characteristic. A dwarf aloetic vegetation became abundant; vegetation was fast going the way of all grass; after rain, however, it is doubtless fresh and copious. The buffalo grass sought the shade of the wild sage. A small euphorbia, the cotton-weed, a thistle haunted by the Cynthia cardua, that butterfly common to the eastern and western hemispheres, and a bright putoria, mingled with mushrooms like huge bulbs. The cactus was of two kinds: the flat-leaved species is used by white men to filter water, and by the savages, who peel and toast it, as provaunt: there is another globular variety (an echinocactus) lying stalkless, like a half melon, with its brilliant flowers guarded by a panoply of spines. We pursued a sandy tract, broken by beds of nullahs and fiumaras, between two ridges of hillocks, draining to the right into a low bottom denoted by a lively green, with bays and bends of lush, reed-like grass. This is the well-known Lodge-Pole Creek or Fork, a mere ditch, the longest and narrowest of its kind, rising from a mountain lakelet near the "New Bayou" or "Park," in the Black Hills, and falling into the South Fork of the Platte, about seventy miles west of the bifurcation. By following up this water along the Cherokee trail to its head in the Cheyenne Pass of the Rocky Mountains, instead of describing the arc viâ Fort Laramie, the mail would gain 61 miles; emigrants, indeed, often prefer the short cut. Moreover, from the Cheyenne Pass to Great Salt Lake City, there is, according to accounts, a practicable road south of the present line, which, as it would also save time and labor, has been preferred for the mail line.

In the American Sahara animal life began to appear. The coyote turned and stared at us as though we were trespassing upon his property. This is the jackal of the Western world, the small prairie-wolf, the Canis latrans, and the old Mexican coyotl, best depicted by the old traveler, Abbé Clavigero, in these words: "It is a wild beast, voracious like the wolf, cunning like the fox, in form like the dog, and in some qualities like the jackal." The