xtreme. No
living artist could do justice to the scene as the lady of the desert,
her little daughter and her babe, passed over the summit out of sight. I
followed, but when I reached the highest summit, no living person could
be seen. I looked the country over with my glass. The region to the
north was black rocky, and very mountainous. I looked some time and then
concluded I had better not go any further that way, for I might be
waylaid and filled with arrows at some unsuspected moment. We saw Indian
signs almost every day, but as none of them ever came to our camp it was
safe to say they were not friendly. I now turned back and examined the
Indian woman's camp. She had only fire enough to make a smoke. Her
conical shaped basket left behind, contained a few poor arrows and some
cactus leaves, from which the spines had been burned, and there lay the
little pallet where the baby was sleeping. It was a bare looking kitchen
for hungry folks.

I now went to the top of a high butte and scanned the country very
carefully, especially to the west and north, and found it very barren.
There were no trees, no fertile valleys nor anything green. Away to the
west some mountains stood out clear and plain, their summits covered
white with snow. This I decided was our objective point: Very little
snow could be seen elsewhere, and between me and the snowy mountains lay
a low, black rocky range, and a wide level plain, that had no signs of
water, as I had learned them in our trip thus far across the country.
The black range seemed to run nearly north and south, and to the north
and northwest the country looked volcanic, black and desolate.

As I looked and thought, I believed that we were much farther from a
fertile region then most of our party had any idea of. Such of them as
had read Fremont's travels, and most of them going to California had
fortified themselves before starting by reading Fremont; said that the
mountains were near California and were fertile from their very summits
down to the sea, but that to the east of the mountains it was a desert
region for hundred of miles. As I explained it to them, and so they soon
saw for themselves, they believed that the snowy range ahead of us was
the last range to cross before we entered the long-sought California,
and it seemed not far off, and prospect quite encouraging.

Our road had been winding around among the buttes which looked like the
Indian baskets turned upside down on the