Throughout this vast line of road, the only white inhabitants are the garrisons of the military posts, the keepers of mail-stations, and voyageurs and mountaineers, whose cabins may be found in every locality favorable to Indian trade.  These last are a singular race of men, fast disappearing, like the Indian and the buffalo, their neighbors.  Most of them are of French extraction, and some have died without having learned to speak a word of English.  Their wealth consists in cattle and horses, and little stocks of goods which they purchase from the sutlers at the forts or the merchants at Salt Lake City.  Some of the more considerable among them have the means of sending to the States for an annual supply of blankets, beads, vermilion, and other stuff for Indian traffic; but the most are thriftless, and all are living in concubinage or marriage with squaws, and surrounded by troops of unwashed, screeching half-breeds.  Once in from three to six years, they will make a journey to St. Louis, and gamble away so much of their savings since the last visit as has escaped being wasted over greasy card-tables during the long winter-evenings among the mountains.  The Indian tribes along the way are numerous and formidable, the road passing through country occupied by Pawnees, Cheyennes, Sioux, Arapahoes, Crows, Snakes, and Utahs.  With the Cheyennes war had been waged by the United States for more than two years, which interfered seriously with the expedition; for, during the month of June, a war-party from that tribe intercepted and dispersed the herd of beef-cattle intended for the use of the army.

The natural characteristics of the entire route are as unpromising as those of its inhabitants.  At the distance of about two hundred miles from the Missouri frontier the soil becomes so pervaded by sand, that only scientific agriculture can render it available.  Along the Platte there is no fuel.  Not a tree is visible, except the thin fringe of cottonwoods on the margin of the river, all of which upon the south bank, where the road runs, were hewed down and burned at every convenient camp, during the great California emigration.  When the Rocky Mountains are entered, the only vegetation found is bunch-grass, so called because it grows in tufts,—­and the artemisia, or wild sage, an odorous shrub, which sometimes attains the magnitude of a tree, with a fibrous trunk as thick as a man’s thigh, but is ordinarily a bush about two feet in height.  The bunch-grass, grown at such an elevation, possesses extraordinary nutritive properties, even in midwinter.  About the middle of January a new growth is developed underneath the snow, forcing off the old dry blade that ripened and shed its seed the previous summer.  From Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie, almost the only fuel to be obtained is the dung of buffalo and oxen, called, in the vocabulary of the region, “chips,”—­the argal of the Tartar deserts.  Among the mountains the sage is the chief material of the traveller’s fire.  It burns with a lively, ruddy flame, and gives out an intense heat.  In the settlements of Utah all the wood consumed is hauled from the canons, which are usually lined with pines, firs, and cedars, while the broadsides of the mountains are nothing but terraces of volcanic rock.  The price of wood in Salt Lake City is from twelve to twenty dollars a cord.