e
men with them must have had a raft, we were pretty sure that the men in
charge of them were white men. Another day we passed the mouth of a
swollen stream which came in from the west side. The water was thick
with mud, and the fish, about a foot long, came to the top, with their
noses out of water. We tried to catch some, but could not hold them. One
night we camped on an island, and I took my gun and went over toward the
west side where I killed a deer. The boys hearing me shoot, came out,
guns in hand, thinking I might need help, and I was very glad of their
assistance. To make our flour go as far as possible we ate very freely
of meat, and having excellent appetites it disappeared very fast.

It took us two or three days to pass this beautiful valley, and then we
began to get into a rougher country again, the canons deeper and the
water more tumultuous. McMahon and I had the lead always, in the big
canoe. The mountains seemed to change into bare rocks and get higher and
higher as we floated along. After the first day of this the river became
so full of boulders that many times the only way we could do was to
unload the canoes and haul them over, load up and go ahead, only to
repeat the same tactics in a very short time again. At one place where
the river was more than usually obstructed we found a deserted camp, a
skiff and some heavy cooking utensils, with a notice posted up on an
alder tree saying that they had found the river route impracticable, and
being satisfied that the river was so full of rocks and boulders that it
could not be safely navigated, they had abandoned the undertaking and
were about to start overland to make their way to Salt Lake. I took down
the names of the parties at the time in my diary, which has since been
burned, but have now forgotten them entirely. They were all strangers to
me. They had taken left such heavy articles as could not be carried on
foot. This notice rather disconcerted us, but we thought we had better
keep on and see for ourselves, so we did not follow them, but kept on
down the rocky river. We found generally more boulders than water, and
the down grade of the river bed was heavy.

Some alders and willows grew upon the bank and up quite high on the
mountains we could see a little timber. Some days we did not go more
than four or five miles, and that was serious work, loading and
unloading our canoes, and packing them over the boulders, with only
small streams of water