Here is the "Ford of the Green River." This reviewing has been
lengthy, but we near its close. This ford of the river is not where
the railway crosses it at the present time, but farther up the stream,
where in the distance, to the north-east, the jagged summit of the
Wind River Mountains were again in view, and where on the river banks
are groups of cottonwood trees and thickets of wild raspberry and
rose, and the air is aromatic with the exhalations of wild thyme. It
is a stirring scene, for the water was both deep and swift and the
fording not accomplished without considerable labor and risk. A
half-day's rest on the banks of the Green River, as well as the
attractiveness of the place itself, makes the scene of that sketch
remembered with pleasure.
Small need to tell how expectancy grew upon us as the number of miles
ahead became less and less. Even those who had at last apparently
grown apathetic and walked silently along, or sat questionless in the
wagons, began to again manifest the same eager interest which had
marked the days of our starting out. Wake up! wake up! wake up! Fun
and frolic must sometimes take the place of sentiment and sobriety,
and so one who was ever brimming over with both, could not wait the
poetic summons of the clarionet. Beating together two old tin pans he
frisked around the corral, rousing with the unseemly noise all
laggards and slug-a-beds.
"Cliffs of Echo Canon." This brings us within the borders of Utah. We
had climbed from Green River to Cache Cave, we looked upon the one
range of hills, the one only, that divided us from our destination.
Clear shone the September sun, as our long train moved slowly under
the conglomerate cliffs; slowly, for half of the cattle were footsore,
and all very weary. Several hours were consumed in passing through the
wild defile, and night was falling ere the mouth of the canon was
reached. Later, as the camp-fires were blazing, the full moon
illuminated the fantastic scene.
Who of all those who traversed Echo Canon in an ox-train will forget
the shouting, the cracking of whips, the wild halloes, and the
pistol-shots that resounded along the line, or the echoes, all
confused by the multitude of sounds, and passing through each other
like the concentric rings on a still pond when we throw in a handful
of pebbles, flying from cliff to cliff, and away up in the shaggy
ravine and seeming to come back at last from the sky.
"O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying;
Blow, bugle, answer echoes, dying, dying, dying."
No wonder the place recalls Tennyson's song, but, it must be told,
there were none of "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing" about the
wild hilarity of sounds which were sent back from the cliffs that day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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