"The Humboldt River" by John Rollin Ridge
With a sound like the wailing of souls!
And guarding their dust, may be seen
The ghosts of the dead by the green
Billowy heaps on shore—
Dim shapes, as they crouch by the graves,
And wail with the rush of the waves
On seeking desert before!
Guarding their dust for the morn
Which shall see us, new-born
Arise from the womb of the earth—
That, through rain or through dearth,
Through calm or through storm,
Through seasons and times, no part may be lost,
By the ruthless winds tost,
Of the mortal which shall be immortal of form.
No leaf that may bud
By that dark sullen flood;
No flower that may bloom
With its tomb-like perfume,
In that region infectious of gloom;
No subtleized breath
That may ripple that River of Death,
Or, vapory, float in the desolate air,
But is watched with a vigilant, miserly care,
Lest it steal from the dust of the dead that are there;
For the elements aye are in league,
With a patience unknowing fatigue,
To scatter mortality's mould,
And sweep from the graves what they hold!
I would not, I ween, be the wight
To roam by that river at night,
When the souls are abroad in glooms;
Enough that the day-time is weird
With the mystical sights that are feared
Mid the silence oaf moonlighted tombs;
Weird shores with their alkaline white—
That loom in the glare of the light;
Weird bones as they bleach in the sun,
Where the beast from his labors is done;
Weird frost-work of poisonous dews
On shrub and on herb, which effuse
The death they have drank to the core;
Weird columns upborne from the floor
Of the white-crusted deserts which boil
With the whirlwind's hot, blasting turmoil!
As ghost-like he glides on his way.
Each ghastly, worn pilgrim looks gray
With the dust the envenomed winds flail;
And the beast he bestrides is as pale
As the steed of the vision of John,
With him, the Destroyer, thereon.
Dark river, foul river, 'tis well
That into the jaws of thy Hell—
The open-mouthed desert**—should fall
Thy waves that so haunt and appal.
'Tis fit that thou seek the profound
Of all-hiding Night underground;
Like the river which nine times around
The realm of grim Erebus wound,
To roll in that region of dread—
A Stygian stream of the Dead!
*For three hundred miles its banks are one continuous burying ground.
Emigrants to California died on its shores by thousands.
**Sink of the Humboldt.