r was an apprehension for the
safety of Captain Marcy. A prisoner, whom the Mormons had captured in
October on Ham's Fork, escaped from Salt Lake City at the close of
December, and brought news to Camp Scott that they intended to fit out
an expedition to intercept the command and stampede the herds with which
that officer would move from New Mexico. The dispatches in which these
anxieties were communicated to General Scott, together with suggestions
for their relief, were intrusted in midwinter to a small party for
conveyance to the States. The journey taught them what must have been
the sufferings of the expedition which Captain Marcy led to Taos.
Reduced at one time to buffalo-tallow and coffee for sustenance, there
was not a day during the transit across the mountains when any stronger
barrier than the lives of a few half-starved mules interposed between
them and death by famine. All along the route lay memorials of the march
of the army, and especially of Colonel Cooke's battalion,--a trail of
skeletons a thousand miles in length, gnawed bare by the wolves and
bleaching in the snow, visible at every undulation in the drifts.

But before the arrival of these dispatches at New York, the arrangements
of the War Department to forward supplies to Utah had been completed.
The representations of the contractors' agents with regard to the
condition of the cattle at Fort Laramie were received without question,
and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Hoffmann, of the Sixth Infantry, was
dispatched to that post to superintend the advance of the trains.
Additional contracts, of an unprecedented character, were entered into
for furnishing and transporting all the supplies which would be needed
during the year 1858, both for the troops already in the Territory
and for the reinforcements which were ordered to concentrate at Fort
Leavenworth and march to Utah as soon as the roads should be passable.
These reinforcements were about three thousand strong, comprising
the First Cavalry, the Sixth and Seventh Infantry, and two
artillery-batteries. The trains necessary for so large a force, in
addition to that at Fort Bridger, it was estimated would comprise at
least forty-five hundred wagons, requiring more than fifty thousand
oxen, four thousand mules, and five thousand teamsters, wagon-masters,
and other _employes_. To the shame of the Administration, these gigantic
contracts, involving an amount of more than six million dollars,
were distribut