In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter at the great altitude to which we had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back saying, “We are on the snow.” The next time we halted, I found that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali. In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush--an Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the “American desert”--the “_Mauvaises terres_.” Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger‘s Pass and the “divide” between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan yâk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know. This Bridger‘s Pass route is that by which the telegraph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange stories of the Indians and their views on this great Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wantonness, but have been known to cut the wire and then lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that repairing parties would arrive and fall an easy prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overlanders lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by a fire which coincided with a gap in the posts, but which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have my doubts as to whether “white Indians” have not much to do with the destruction of the line. From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens we sighted at once Fremont‘s Peak on the north, and another great snow-dome upon the south. The unknown mountain was both the more distant and the loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side of this well-worn track is still as little known as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when we crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, it was strange to remember that the stream is here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds, to be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson‘s mule-trains were captured by the Mormons under General Lot Smith.