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Updated: June 2, 2025
He cut sage-brush and tore up tules by the roots, and piled them as a wing-dam against the outer bank, and heaped dirt like mad upon the mats; and as he worked, alone, where forty men were needed, came Nancy, with glowing face, flying down the ditch-bank, calling the word of exquisite relief: "I've shut off the water. Was that right?" Right!
Off to the right at last she thought she saw a building. It seemed hours they had been flying through space. In a second they were close by it. It was a cabin, standing alone upon the great plain with sage-brush in patches about the door and a neat rail fence around it. She could see one window at the end, and a tiny chimney at the back. Could it be that any one lived in such a forlorn spot?
He urged the pony onward again, and for some little time rode with bowed head, trying to keep himself steady by watching the trail. He rode through a little clearing, where the grass was matted and some naked rocks reared aloft. Near a clump of sage-brush he saw a sudden movement a rattler trying to slip away unnoticed.
Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots.
"Has that low-down liar an' thief been comin' it over you, Polly? Did he tell you how he gave the place he promised me to Sage-brush?" "That wasn't until you gave him slack, Bud. I'm sure he ain't a thief; why " "Thief, of course he is, an' a blacker-hearted one than the man that killed Terrill. Ain't he going to steal my brother Dick's girl this very night?"
The great stretches of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily grow very close together.
There they are as we see them, on a long stretch of sage-brush plateau. The surface of the plain is only sand and gravel, as far as the eye can reach. The atmosphere is hazy, with dust and vibrating waves of heat arising from the ground. Far away to the northwest is the outline of some mountains, just visible in the dim distance.
The valley itself at that time was a vast desert without tree or shrub, nothing but the wild sage-brush and the white alkali soil could be seen, if we except the scrub-oaks and lebanon cedars that covered the mountain sides and the emerald colored waters of the lake. Utah was then Mexican Territory, and this fact, as much perhaps as any other, determined Brigham Young to settle there.
All were more or less excited and impatient, and, wherever the road would permit, urged their horses to a run. The trail climbed and descended rugged steeps, crossed smooth intervals, skirted the edges of precipices, wound along borders of dry creeks, and threaded forests of pine and clumps of sage-brush and greasewood.
All fights and drunks must be put off till she's gone. Persons neglecting to do so will be taken out into the sage-brush by members of the committee, and are likely to get hurt. Mr. Hart regrets this occurrence as much as anybody, and agrees his aunt's visit sha'n't last beyond a day and a half if she comes down from Denver, and only one day if she comes in from Santa Fé.
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