The Awakening of the Desert

"Will you join us in a camping trip to the Pacific Coast?" This alluring invitation was addressed to the writer one cold, drizzly night in the early spring of 1866 by Captain Hi...

Whitmore and Wilson, who were the leading spirits in our expedition, urged that twenty-five Henry repeating rifles (which had recently been invented) and thirty Colt's revolvers...

Have you ever carefully watched the movements or caught the earnest spirit of the immigrant who, after traveling many hundreds of miles along the difficult roads through an unbr...

From the western boundary of the state that bears its name, the attenuated channel of the Missouri River stretched itself far out into the unsettled Northwest, projecting its lo...

It was in the gray light of the quiet early dawn, when all members of the camp except one were in peaceful slumber, that these familiar lines of Longfellow's heartening lyric we...

We were now upon the most frequented thoroughfare of western transcontinental travel, known as the old Oregon trail, and this course was pursued for the succeeding two weeks. It...

Late in the afternoon of June 18th, when the tin supper dishes had been laid aside and the men were enjoying their after-dinner smoke, the four closely parked groups of wagons,...

On a following night we camped on what for the lack of a better word I would term the shore of the so-called Plum Creek. There was naught in it of what is generally regarded as...

Jack Morrow's ranch was left far behind us before the sun appeared above the hills, for we had made an early start, as had been our recent practice, so that we might rest during...

When one sleeps upon the open ground at night with nothing above one's head but the clear blue sky, the sun seems to rise wonderfully early on a bright, unclouded, midsummer mor...

Early on the following morning, as a sufficient number of men and teams to conform to the requirements of the War Department had been reported as ready to proceed, we were at th...

A portion of the compound constituting the waters of the Platte, with which many of our effects were saturated, passed into the air by evaporation in the sun, but a residuum of...

As is well known, a wonderful story may be enfolded in the mute testimony of the hills and rocks, and far more enduring than ever written by human hands. Some of these interesti...

Leaving the fossil beds, a six-mile tramp was made to a point beyond Fort Mitchell, where the train was reached. The course lay across a dry clay land which, though in appearanc...

The statement that a satisfactory treaty had been concluded with the Indians was communicated to the various parties of travelers who were camped near the post. There being a su...

If while we were at our camp near Laramie on the bank of the North Platte we could have turned the wheels of time backward just nineteen years, we might have seen the first pion...

There are spots in foreign lands, the objects of never-failing interest because of some heroic deeds with which they are associated, the memory of which has been perpetuated in...

It was a clear and beautiful moonlit night. The towering cliffs of Red Buttes cast their shadows to the westward, but in every other direction not a tree nor shrub large enough...

The Prince of Darkness has been highly honored by the trappers in the West in the nomenclature of various freaks of nature, in the same manner, though perhaps not with the same...

Except perhaps a sudden view of the blue waters of the broad ocean, few things in nature are more inspiring to the pilgrim who has plodded his way across our barren plains than...

The picturesque red-sandstone cliffs of Red Buttes and the granite-ribbed range of the Sweetwater Mountains were left behind us. Slowly our train climbed up the gentle grade to...

Before our little outfit rolled out from Nebraska City, Captain Whitmore gave us many suggestions concerning our route, and instructions as to where long drives must be made alo...

Fred, who one afternoon had been riding in advance, was observed toward the close of the day waving his old hat and shouting, "Hurrah, here is water!" We had been traveling many...

The history of Utah is a history of the Mormons, but that history, as is well known, strikes its roots much further East. It is not the purpose of this story to give a chronicle...

"That fellow is a Danite, one of Brigham's destroying angels," remarked a man who formed part of a group with whom I and some of our boys were sitting in front of the Salt Lake...

In the older days, when polygamy was a recognized institution in Utah, there was much in the organization of a Mormon home that was calculated to excite interest, bordering on c...

The boarding house train of the older days was not an institution peculiar to the West alone, for we know that tramp outfits afforded protection to wanderers in ancient times, a...

In later years, through the influence of one of its ambitious citizens, the little settlement referred to in the last chapter as Pumpkin Holler had come to be known by the more...

It was long after the time of which we are writing that Conan Doyle led his readers into some of the secrets of detecting crime by the observance of circumstances devoid of sign...

In the past few months we had crawled many hundred miles with a slow moving ox train. Several weeks had the writer spent with a few intimate associates, while convoying a small...