an opening to give full view of the river. It had not been so fifty-four
years before, with hundreds of camps ahead of you. The traveler then had
to take what he could get, and in many cases that was a place far back
from the water and removed from other conveniences.

[Illustration: _United States Geological Survey_

Devil's Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the many beautiful streams
in the uplands of Wyoming. The pioneer trail followed the course of this
river.]

The sight and smell of carrion, so common in camping places during that
first journey, also were gone. No bleached bones, even, showed where the
exhausted dumb brute had died. The graves of the dead pioneers had all
been leveled by the hoofs of stock and the lapse of time.

The country remains as it was in '52. There the trail is to be seen
miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track
where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path that vegetation
has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of
wagons years ago.

As in 1852, when the summit was passed I felt that my task was much
more than half done, though half the distance was scarcely compassed.

On June 30, at about ten o'clock, we encountered a large number of big
flies that ran the cattle nearly wild. I stood on the wagon tongue for
miles to reach them with the whipstock. The cattle were so excited that
we did not stop at noon, but drove on. By half-past two we camped at a
farmhouse, the Split Rock post office, the first we had found in a
hundred miles of travel since leaving Pacific Springs.

The Devil's Gate, a few miles distant, is one of the two best-known
landmarks on the trail. Here, as at Split Rock, the mountain seems to
have been split apart, leaving an opening a few rods wide, through which
the Sweetwater River pours in a veritable torrent. The river first
approaches to within a few hundred feet of the gap, then suddenly curves
away from it, and after winding through the valley for half a mile or
so, a quarter of a mile away, it takes a straight shoot and makes the
plunge through the canyon. Those who have had the impression that the
emigrants drove their teams through this gap are mistaken, for it's a
feat no mortal man has done or can do, any more than he could drive up
the falls of the Niagara.

This year, on my 1906 trip, I did clamber through on the left bank, over
boulders head high, under shelving rocks. I ate some ripe