ed to me I should surely freeze.
Toward morning I began to get numb, and felt more comfortable, but that
was the longest and hardest night I ever experienced.

"In the morning, when it became light enough so that I could see two or
three rods, I got up, but my legs were so numb that I could not walk. I
rolled around until I got up a circulation, and could stand on my
feet. Leaving my horse tied to the tree, I found the road, went about a
hundred yards around the point of a hill, and saw the camp-fire up in a
little flat about a quarter of a mile from where I had spent the night.
Going up to camp, I found the men all standing around a fire they had
made, where two large pines had fallen across each other. They had laid
down pine bark and pieces of wood to keep them out of the water. They
had stood up all night. The water was running two or three inches deep
all through the camp. When I got to the fire, and began to get warm, my
legs and arms began to swell so that I could hardly move or get my hands
to my face.

"It never ceased raining all that day nor the next night, and we were
obliged to stand around the fire. Everything we had was wet. They had
stacked up our dried beef and flour in a pile, and put the saddles and
pack saddles over it as well as they could, but still it got more or
less wet. The third morning it stopped raining about daylight, and the
sun came out clear and warm. We made scaffolds and spread our meat all
out, hung up our blankets and clothing on lines, and by keeping up fires
and with the help of the sun, we managed to get everything dry by night.
The next morning we packed up and started on until we came to a little
valley, where we found some grass for our horses. We stayed there that
night. The next day we got to Steep Hollow Creek, one of the branches
of Bear River. This stream was not more than a hundred feet wide, but it
was about twenty feet deep, and the current was very swift. We felled a
large pine tree across it, but the center swayed down so that the water
ran over it about a foot deep. We tied ropes together and stretched them
across to make a kind of hand railing, and succeeded in carrying over
all our things. We undertook to make our horses swim the creek, and
finally forced two of them into the stream, but as soon as they struck
the current they were carried down faster than we could run. One of them
at last reached the bank and got ashore, but the other went down under
the tree we