THE TOLL OF THE DESERT.

          MIRAGE of Water, or Mirage of a Mine ! It matters not which it may be, the end is the same for him who follows after the Siren who is always in league with Death. All the years of his life the Old Prospector gives to the Desert his best and his all—gives hope, and joy, and love, even as he gave youth. He gives his very soul; then, finally, he commits his body to the Desert's keeping—to sleep there in its everlasting silence. It is the final toll that the Desert takes of a man. Cruel? Nay, the Desert is kind; for in death the body rests where the heart found its joy in life. What lover could ask more?

          The sands, that knew his every footfall, cradle him. The everlasting mountains—the heights he loved—stand watch and ward. And the night-wind, that was with him when he lay out under the stars, shall sing his slumber-song now, as some Indian mother croons over the babe that, in the twilight, falls asleep at her breast. In such wise, does the Old Prospector find rest in the Desert.

          In such wise, would all lovers of that land meet the end. To go to sleep there under the white stars; to go away into the land of dreams, lying in the arms of the Desert; to rest—and rest— and rest, through all time, through centuries of silence and solitude! What would you that one (loving the land) should have,

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when the Night comes, that could be more desired? They who have lived long there ask for no other burial, be assured.

          And of this, too, you may be sure. If you have gone into the Desert and found its Soul, you have climbed more than half-way up the ladder that reaches God-ward. Therefore, I say, these men who live there are not men without religion; though creeds they may not (and probably do not) claim as theirs. But it is not a far thing from reverence, as one knows it in a temple, to stand with voice hushed and ear inclined, while God and the Desert speak together. Not once a week—on the Sabbath—is this so. But it is part of what comes to one (though unconsciously, mayhap) daily. They know it, but give it no name.

          So you will understand that he who has lived there —if he has lived a life that has harmed no man—dies unafraid. To spend many years of one's life there, in the gray land, takes away the coward fear of Death. That is because one has learned to measure all things in the balance of just proportion; and then one comes to see how small is the atom, Self. More! This truth is taught in Nature's wisdom—that all things are best. He has led the life he believed was best; and he believes it is best that so he should die.

          "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes." If you come upon some Desert grave one day as you ride along any of the roads of old days, and if the words of the burial service come to you as you draw rein there, do not hesitate to add: "In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection." For none died without religion—as all great silence and space teaches religion—and few died without hope.

          And this shall you remember. Though the Desert in its time takes full toll of the men who go there; yet never do they give unwillingly.

 

 

GRAVES OF THE DESERT.

          GRAVES of the Desert! Forgotten graves. How many there are! In lonely places by the wayside, where civilized man has not yet succeeded in making "two blades of grass to grow" where once there was but the wide sweep of shifting, drifting sands; where still are found Desert stretches, alternating with the green oases which follow in the white man's wake across the plains, there are the graves of men fifty years dead—graves that bear silent testimony to the march of those battalions of America's heroes who were first to tempt the unknown in a land that once seemed God-despised.

          Forgotten graves—dug in the sand and alkali that lightly covers the great inland Western states, whose priceless foundations—sunken far into the bowels of the earth, thousands of feet below the drab, sad-colored soil—were laid by the gnomes in those aeons when the world was being created in marvelous ways.

And the gnomes quarried huge masses of solid silver, and hewed and cut them cunningly, fashioning them into great polished cubes. These they laid for the far Western states to rest upon. And the blocks were cemented together with mortar made of molten, shining gold. Then over it all they spread the sand

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and the soil and hid their handiwork, leaving it for man to uncover in the ages to come, when on these foundations he should upbuild the States.

          Up and down the valleys, never resting, the whirlwinds go—those dancing dervishes of the Desert. They blow the sands hither and thither, back and forth unceasingly, as they spin giddily around year after year in their mad dance. Sometimes it seems as if they have almost brushed aside the sands and bared the foundations of these Silver States—these States of Gold. But a stronger whirlwind comes hurrying up the valley and buries the treasure deep again.

          The little winds, as they go spinning on tiptoe round and round and round, until you are dizzy with the watching, whirl fast and mad; but, whirl as they will, whirl they never so madly, they are not strong enough to blow the sands away. And the people go back there to the

                   "tending of cattle and tossing of clover;

                   the grazing of cattle and growing of grain,"

in those places where Nature helps them make another oasis; and they will tell you that they are waiting for a wind that is in leash now; a great wind that will come out of the East.

          Long they have watched and waited, and the sands are not yet blown away. Still they hope, as we all hope for the thing our heart leans to; and they will tell you that surely, some day, the East wind will come, sent by a power that will say, as it speeds it on its more than a thousand miles of journeying over mountain, and upland, and plain: "go, blow the sands aside! brush them away, that the States may be built up from the foundations which the gnomes laid!"

          These are the things they will tell you. Are they

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right, or are they wrong? Are they prophets, or only men who pray? Do they see into the future, or are they but dreamers? Who knows?

          But, all the while the whirlwinds are tossing the sands about, and uncovering and covering over again the dead men's bones—men who made a way across States that, unknown to them, were built upon foundations of precious metals. And those who faltered and fell by the way in their quest for gold as they struggled to push on to California—California by the sea—little dreamed of the wealth beneath their feet.

          They strung themselves out—a living thread—across the plains, over half a hundred years ago ; today the engine's whistle shrieks from shore to shore. Progress provides us the luxuries of the modern mode of travel, and in journeying westward from States far beyond the Rocky Mountains' jagged ridge, here and there, after entering that vast tract which belongs to the great West, looking from the windows of the Pullman sleeper one may see faint traces of an old wagon road running parallel with the railway's double line of steel. It is not the road which is nearest the track—that is the newer road made by a newer people—but the old one traced there by the emigrants of fifty years ago, in their half a twelvemonths' journey across the Great American Desert. At first one does not see it; the track is not visible in the grass-covered Nebraska soil, when the train, after crossing the great river at Omaha, puts behind it all things having a likeness to the East.

          Looking from the window as one rushes by, he sees bits of a rolling plain, where—here and there—tall and scattered trees having the semblance of gray ghosts in the late afternoon light, go hurrying across the landscape, their slender branches outlined against

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a gold and glowing horizon, where red and fiery piled-up clouds fill full the western sky. Long stretches of shallow water, left by late rains, glisten amidst the growth of tall grasses, and in the reedy places—shaded by bush and tree—are grouped great flocks of ducks that in the fading daylight seem of a velvety blackness—scenes to thrill the heart of a hunter and charm the eye of an artist. Then the dusk's gray mantle drops slowly down and spreads over the sleeping world. Night has come—night on the plain—ere one has noted its approach, the while the train is rushing on into the darkness and the Western land.

          On and on till the dawning of day; on and on throughout the long, hot, dusty daylight hours ; each revolution of the wheels of the mighty creature whose sinews are of steel, and whose blood is of fire, has plunged one farther and farther into that vast land which was once but the land of sand and sage, and of silence. Human progress has plowed and planted here and there, civilization has made grain to grow in many of the waste places, and has garnered where once was but the illimitable Desert.

          Cities have sprung up out of the once silent plains, and a hundred thousand homes of the living now line the great pathway which was marked out by the skeletons of the dead.

          Half a century ago it was the land of the dried-up alkali lakes; of the far-reaching sage; of the biting, white dust; of the ever-beckoning mirage; of the strangely slender, cloud-touching whirlwinds which come writhing and winding and twisting their way up the valley to meet you, and greet you with a whisper of unknown things, and then pass on, twisting and swaying and whirling, to mingle with the mystery of the Desert.

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          Into this land, more than fifty years ago, an army of heroes voyaged. Across the dried-up sea, whitened by salt and alkali, their Desert-ships drifted on and into the farther West. The courage that was theirs to dare the dangers they met upon the way, the hardships they encountered and endured, have passed into the great volumes of unwritten history.

          We know of the many who reached Pacific shores, but who can count those who died like that other weary traveler of whom a loving brother wrote: "He lay down by the wayside ; and using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still." Time is levelling the cairns which mark their resting places, and those mile-stones of their great and awful journey are being scattered and destroyed.

          Along the road marked out by their slow-moving ox-teams, which stretched its weary way from the Missouri river to the Sacramento„ the graves of those who fell by the roadside marked its course. Even unto this day the old road is traceable, although but little used. Not everywhere may it be seen from the car windows; for in some places the railroad leaves it miles and miles away to the right or left. Yet, through that vast plain lying between the Rockies and the Sierras, one sometimes sees it close beside the track for a long distance; then, to avoid a grade, it winds around a rise in the plain and disappears.

          The railroad has cut a tunnel through the rise, and where the ground is levelled it has laid its track of pine and steel; but in those long past days no shovel was struck into the earth, save to hollow out the shallow graves wherein were laid away the bones of those who are asleep in the Sahara of America.

Wherever these graves are found—if it be in a lo-

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cality where there are rocks about—one will see that they are heaped with stones. After the soil had been scraped into a long, low mound—the one form into which earth is shaped to wear the sign of pathos—stones were closely piled upon it to keep the dear dead from the ghouls of the Desert; for coyote and badger alike disinterred them unless they were protected in this way.

          So, if you will do as I have done, and—in the saddle—ride over mile after mile of the old emigrant road where it winds in and out among the gullies along the foothills, or where it dips further down into the lowlands, or as it trails along the mesa, or stretches out straight across the hard, alkali flats; or where it follows the banks of the muddy Humboldt, crossing and re-crossing the bends where the old fords are, you will surely chance upon some long-neglected mounds which tell their silent stories of the sufferings and privations of those whose names must forever remain unknown. Sometimes a roughly-lettered board was placed at the head, but oftener it was "a grave without tombstone or token.' The new years of this century find very nearly all of the boards fallen or lost. Even the piled-up stones are being scattered. The graves are suffering the neglect which comes to all forgotten things; perhaps many of these dead men were themselves forgotten two-score years ago.

          "None come who knew them. There are none to say

          Where lived they, whom loved they, ere they passed away.

          They sleep with none to marvel o'er them, save

          Some stranger musing by the sunken grave."

          Riding along the road one day, where it winds its way down the valley of the Humboldt, I came upon two half-hidden graves. They were just above the

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river bank, near an old-time emigrant ford. The headboards had rotted and fallen; the sagebrush—tall and thick—hid them from the passer-by. The brief inscription told but little:

John Knudson,

died Sept. 13th, 1854,

aged 43 years.

From La. Co., Wis.

          The words had been cut in a small board, evidently part of some box taken from their scanty store, and then nailed across the top of another narrow piece. It had, no doubt, once been set firmly in the ground. A bit of board had also been at the foot; but, like the other, it, too, had broken off and fallen. The other grave bore these words—cut clearly, and with great care—on the little headboard:

John Walling,

Died

by drowning

September 1st, 1859.

Aged 28 years.

          The lettering in the storm-stained, weather-checked wood had been cut so beautifully true and even that one is certain that it was the work of someone to whom the dead man was dear; for only loving hands could have been so painstaking. The graves were sunken; the stones were scattered. I went away; and when I came again it was to bring some one to re-set the boards at head and foot, and with a shovel heap the earth into the shape it bore when other hands than strangers' had done the same office for the dead forty years before.

          Who were they? Were any of their kindred with them when, with their journey but half done, they stepped aside from the trail made by the path-finders

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of the West, to stay in the barren valley, while the others went on to the land of promise by the Golden Gate? Or did they leave wives and children far behind them in the safer East, while they braved the perils of the plains to reach the land of gold for the sake of the wealth they would find, and all the great and good things it would bring to the dear ones at home? Or did mothers and children mourn, and wonder at the silence; and so die with their questioning ever unanswered? Who is there that dare say what that silence meant to them?

          These are but two among the many hundreds barred along the route of the old emigrant road; and how pitifully alike would be the histories of their trials by the way, could we but know them all!

          Almost all of these graves are nameless; yet in this valley there is at least one that bears a name, and is a grave well known. It bears the name of "Lucinda Duncan" upon a large, white cross, erected by the railway company when its roadbed was being made ready for the rails more than thirty years ago. It is "The Maiden's Grave," near Beowawe; and they placed the cross above the young girl sleeping in the valley, ere they passed on.

          But the names of the dead lying in the numberless graves are, for the greater part, unknown; and age and sex can only be vaguely guessed at.

          Here is one who was, perhaps, the captain of his caravan; a beloved leader of the men who manned some Desert-ship. How disheartened the survivors were when they had lain him away and had to push on under the burning, blistering skies without the companionship, the leadership, or the cheering encouragement of their trusted guide! Their ship was without a captain or pilot in this sea of gray, shoreless sand.

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Could they carry it safely into port? they asked. And we, half a hundred years later, wonder—did they?

          Here is a smaller, shorter grave, that holds, perhaps, the remains of some youth, hopeful and enthusiastic in his first venture into a new life; impatient at the slow pace of the weary oxen, dragging the wagons so few—so very few—miles each day toward the golden West he was so eager to reach.

          Or perhaps it might have been a woman; one of those brave souls who, cleaving to the men of her household, left behind her all the dear associations of a lifetime to enter upon a new experience, and, hand in hand with father or husband or son, went out into the unknown new country to share the work, the sickness or the dangers of the uncertain venture. No fear of the savages, who crept down upon many a one and left the victim murdered and mutilated by the road; no fear of disease that might claim them before the journey's end; no fear of any of the perils which made more than one man turn back before the journey had well begun, could keep these women from joining their dear kindred in the six months' march that reached almost from sea to sea. O men, men! how little you know the place you hold in the hearts of the women who love you!

          There were many such grand and loyal women who went out beyond the pale of civilization, whose presence helped their men-folk onward, whose bravery spurred them forward to reach their golden goal, when heart-sick and weary they would have given up the struggle in despair.

          These men were brave; yet there were times when courage failed them. As their hopes of reaching the sea faded in the face of unforeseen dangers met on the way, and they came to feel that, after all, the earth

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was only a place in which to dig graves, these women lifted them up with hopeful words and helpful deeds and carried them through to the end.

          Here is a tiny mound of stones; "a little grave, a little, little grave, an obscure grave." What this one holds, we know. But no one can ever guess the anguish of that mother who laid her baby here, nor how she suffered as she looked backward, ever backward, as the ox-teams carried her away. Before that day, she had complained because the oxen went so slowly; but afterward their pace was never slow enough. Every step was making the tiny mound grow fainter to her sight, as the journey was resumed, when the wee little one had been lain away. How she looked, and looked, back to the place where they had halted a day! And as she looked, she kept whispering to herself : "Tomorrow I shall not be able to see it at all." Backward, all the while backward, did she turn her face to the spot where "baby" was ;—the little child that was yet too young to have another name. The mother forgot then that she had ever looked forward. Oh, how fast the oxen went! If they would but go slower, so that she could see the little, low mound in the Desert a while longer! It seemed to her that all those great stones they had piled there, had been heaped upon her heart—her poor, bruised heart—because of the load there that was so, so heavy. All her life long her heart would ache, her whole body would throb with pain—wrists and palms and finger-tips—with the intensity of her longing to know once again the sound of its voice, the sight of its face, the touch of its satiny, rose-leaf hands. Oh, to know again the thrilling touch of soft, warm, baby fingers laid upon her check—the touch of moist baby lips laid against her breast!

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          Never again! She was going alone out of the Desert —out of the Valley of Death; going, and away back there by the roadside she had left a little grave.

          Graves—graves—graves; how many there are! They are scattered all along the roadside from the far-away East to the farthest West; and yet not all who died on the old emigrant road received burial. The bodies of many, pierced by Indian arrows, never found sepulture, but, scalped and mutilated, were left by savage hands to the birds and coyotes, their bones bleaching there in the sun year after year.

          Forgotten and neglected graves of the Desert! For more than fifty years they have been a part of that vast silence; visited only by the snows of winter or the rays of the burning summer sun. No one comes to mourn them. None come to lay flowers above their dead.

          The afternoon sun goes down, shooting arrows of fire into the heavens, above a banner of crimson and gold. A curtain of blood-red grandeur fringed with flame is flung athwart the west in the magnificence of a Desert sunset—the like of which is not seen elsewhere in all the world—and as the sun sinks lower and lower behind the purple mountains, heaven above and earth beneath are all aglow with color. The sun's rays touch the highest peak of the range that guards the eastern side of the valley, and the snow-covered crest thousands of feet above is crowned by the dying sun with a diadem of more than regal splendor.

          Slowly the wonderful light spreads over the landscape, changing the foot-hills to ruby, and the valley to rose, with an indescribable wealth of shading, and seeming to make every bush and briar burst into blossom with flowers of exquisite beauty. It falls with equal glory on green tree and gray shrub; on the

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clover-sweet oasis of a later growth and the Desert that the earth knew of old. And down near the river where the emigrant road runs, where are the graves of emigrants of the early days, where the graves of Walling and Knudson were made, the lovely light creeps in waves of pink and violet, and lines that are faintly blue; and ere the night comes, Nature, who never forgets her children, even in the Desert's solitude, though man forget brother man, has covered them over as with a pall of beautiful blossoms. 

(end of Part 10)

__________ 

Idah Meacham Strobridge, In Miner's Mirage-Land (1904) - Part 1 (Foreword; Mirages of the Desert); Part 2 (The Myths of the Desert; The Secret Mine of the Brown Men); Part 3 (The Charm of the Desert; The Quest of Old Man Berry); Part 4 (The Lovers of the Desert; Forman's Find); Part 5 (The Lessons of the Desert; The Marvelous Hardin Silver); Part 6 (The Lure of the Desert; The Rise and Fall of Hardin City);  Part 7 (The Men of the Desert; Three Little Lakes of Gold); Part 8 (The Beauty of the Desert; The Lost Blue Bucket Mines); Part 9 (A Memory of the Desert; A Desert Mystery); Part 10 (The Toll of the Desert; The Graves of the Desert)