making a record surprisingly akin to the journals kept by Lewis and Clark, and left on record half a century earlier, of the existence of which she had no knowledge. There was one theme of which her father enforced daily mention,—a regular account of the scarcity of grass and game and wood and water.
A murder by the roadside, and the consequent trial, conviction, and execution of the murderer by a ^'provisional government*' temporarily organized for the purpose received a painstaking record, as did also a difficulty with some thieving and beggarly Indians, whose hostility was awakened by the rashness of one of a trio of bachelors, who were encamped one night near the Ranger wagons. Captain Ranger made the Indians a pacifying speech, but only by the aid of some trifling present among the women of the tribe, and a gift of a pair of blankets to their chieftain, was the impending danger averted. A double guard was placed outside that night; and, for several nights following, a corral was made ^ of the wagons in the shape of a hollow square, into which the cattle were driven to rest and sleep.
The now famous Soda Springs, known to the commercial world as Idanha, next caught the coloring of Jean's pen. The different geysers rising from the tops of the gutter-sided mounds of soda-stone were carefully and graphically described. The crater of a long-extinct volcano received special mention. The bad water- of alkaliinfected streams and swamps, left by slowly evaporating pools and ponds, through which cattle and wagons labored with the greatest difficulty; the dreary wastes of sagebrush, sand, and rock, through which everybody who was able to walk at all was compelled to trudge on foot; the devastations of prairie fires; the endless wastes of stunted sage and greasewood; the struggling aspens on the margins of tiny streams,—all met graphic and detailed delineation, such as nobody can appreciate to the
