small piece of thin wood covered with a rabbit skin, and putting the baby under one arm, and giving a smart jerk to a small girl that was crying to the top of her voice, she bounded off and fairly flew up the gentle slope toward the summit, the girl following after very close.  The woman’s long black hair stood out as she rushed along, looking over her shoulder every instant as if she expected to be slain.  The mother flying with her children, untrammeled with any of the arts of fashion was the best natural picture I ever looked upon, and wild in the extreme.  No living artist could do justice to the scene as the lady of the desert, her little daughter and her babe, passed over the summit out of sight.  I followed, but when I reached the highest summit, no living person could be seen.  I looked the country over with my glass.  The region to the north was black rocky, and very mountainous.  I looked some time and then concluded I had better not go any further that way, for I might be waylaid and filled with arrows at some unsuspected moment.  We saw Indian signs almost every day, but as none of them ever came to our camp it was safe to say they were not friendly.  I now turned back and examined the Indian woman’s camp.  She had only fire enough to make a smoke.  Her conical shaped basket left behind, contained a few poor arrows and some cactus leaves, from which the spines had been burned, and there lay the little pallet where the baby was sleeping.  It was a bare looking kitchen for hungry folks.

I now went to the top of a high butte and scanned the country very carefully, especially to the west and north, and found it very barren.  There were no trees, no fertile valleys nor anything green.  Away to the west some mountains stood out clear and plain, their summits covered white with snow.  This I decided was our objective point:  Very little snow could be seen elsewhere, and between me and the snowy mountains lay a low, black rocky range, and a wide level plain, that had no signs of water, as I had learned them in our trip thus far across the country.  The black range seemed to run nearly north and south, and to the north and northwest the country looked volcanic, black and desolate.

As I looked and thought, I believed that we were much farther from a fertile region then most of our party had any idea of.  Such of them as had read Fremont’s travels, and most of them going to California had fortified themselves before starting by reading Fremont; said that the mountains were near California and were fertile from their very summits down to the sea, but that to the east of the mountains it was a desert region for hundred of miles.  As I explained it to them, and so they soon saw for themselves, they believed that the snowy range ahead of us was the last range to cross before we entered the long-sought California, and it seemed not far off, and prospect quite encouraging.