San Gabriel Mission, to which place after trapping up the Sacramento
Valley, they again returned, in season to assist the Spaniards to reduce
the natives around the settlement to submission. This was accomplished
by the simple method of killing one-third of them.

* Life of Kit Carson, by Charles Burdett. There are several Lives by
other biographers.

Limited space prohibits my recounting the exploits of even the smaller
part of the trappers of this period, but with what follows I believe
the reader will possess a sufficient picture of the life of the Rocky
Mountain Trapper at this time.* A trail from Santa Fe to California was
opened by way of what is now Gunnison Valley on Green River, and thence
west by about the same route that Jedediah Smith followed, that is, down
the Virgen River, by William Wolfskill who went out by this route to
Los Angeles, in 1830.** There were trappers now in every part of the
wilderness, excepting always the canyons of the Green and Colorado,
which were given a wide berth as their forbidding character became
better known; and as time went on the stories of those who had here
and there looked into the angry depths, or had essayed a tilt with the
furious rapids at one or two northern points, were enlarged upon, and,
like all unknown things, the terrors became magnified.

* The reader is referred for exact details to the admirable work by
H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West.

** H. H. Bancroft says 1831-2.

It was in 1832 that Captain Bonneville entered Green River Valley, but
as his exploits belong more properly to the valley of the Columbia, I
shall not attempt to mention any of them here, referring the reader to
the delightful account by Washington Irving.

In May, 1839, a traveller who was a careful observer, Thomas J. Farnham,
went from New Mexico across the mountains to Brown's Hole en route for
Oregon, and a portion of his narrative* is of deep interest in this
connection, because his guide, Kelly, gave him some account of the Green
and Colorado, which reflects the amount of real knowledge then possessed
concerning the canyon-river.

* Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky
Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory, by Thomas J. Farnham. There is a
copy in the library of Columbia University, New York.

"The Grand unites with the Seedskeedee or Green River to form the
Colorado of the West. From the junction of