Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/87

Rh "unerring necklace" which the Mexican vaquéro has taught it to be: they often missed their aim, or caught the wrong animal. The effect, however, was magical: a single haul at the noose made the most stiff-necked mule tame as a costermonger's ass. The team took, as usual, a good hour to trap and hitch up: the latter was a delicate operation, for the beasts were comically clever with their hoofs.

At 3 P.M., after a preliminary ringing, intended to soothe the fears of Madame, we set out au grand galop, with a team that had never worked together before. They dashed down the cahues with a violence that tossed us as in a blanket, and nothing could induce them, while fresh, to keep the path. The yawing of the vehicle was ominous: fortunately, however, the road, though self-made, was excellent; the sides were smooth, and the whole country fit to be driven over. At first the view was sadly monotonous. It was a fair specimen of the rolling prairie, in nowise differing from any other land except in the absence of trees. According to some travelers, there is in several places an apparently progressive decay of the timber, showing that formerly it was more extensive than it is now. Others attribute the phenomenon to the destruction of forests in a former era by fires or by the aborigines. It is more satisfactory to account for it by a complication of causes—a want of proper constituents, an insufficiency of rain, the depth of the water below the surface, the severity of the eight months of winter snow, the fierce winds—the hardiest growths that present their heads above the level of the prairies have dead tops—the shortness of the summers, and last, but not least, the clouds of grasshoppers. According to Lieutenant Warren, whose graphic description is here borrowed, these insects are "nearly the same as the locusts of Egypt; and no one who has not traveled on the prairie, and seen for himself, can appreciate the magnitude of the swarms. Often they fill the air for many miles of extent, so that an inexperienced eye can scarcely distinguish their appearance from that of a shower of rain or the smoke of a prairie fire. The height of their flight may be somewhat appreciated, as Mr. E. James saw them above his head, as far as their size would render them visible, while standing on the top of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, 8500 feet above the plain, and an elevation of 14,500 above that of the sea, in the region where the snow lies all the year. To a person standing in one of these swarms as they pass over and around him, the air becomes sensibly darkened, and the sound produced by their wings resembles that of the passage of a train of cars on a railroad when standing two or three hundred yards from the track. The Mormon settlements have suffered more from the ravages of these insects than