Fort Victoria Jan 28th/56

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Dear Brother George

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Again after a very long interval I will endeavour to go on with the story of my travels and experience in search of the golden harvest which is raised from California’s prolific soil. You think me extremely long winded likely and have almost despaired of ever hearing from me more and it will be well perhaps to excuse myself first and then go on with my history. In the first place then, I awaited long to receive an answer from you. Then again there were new regulations made in the post office department requiring all postage to be prepaid and I was not able to procure any stamps or get my letters mailed otherwise, and in the third place for the last twelve months my business has always been pressing and it was almost impossible for me to write letters.

For the New York Tribunes you had the kindness to send me I was very thankful although for the first half of the year I did not receive over one in two or three months. I suppose owing to the mail carriers and Post Masters on the American side of The Puget Sound appropriating them to their own use or giving them to their friends. At least I have been informed by good authority that they were in the practise of extracting papers in that way. You suggest in one of your letters that in the part of my journey I gave you I said nothing of coming in contact with Indian and Buffalo. I saw but one buffalo on my whole route, a straggler which crossed our track one day at full speed and was soon out of our sight. This emigration was so great that season that I supposed they were frightened and did not often come near the road most generally travelled though from where we struck the river Platte to within a day or two’s drive of the South Pass of the Mountains. The traces of them indicated that they had once roamed in bands innumerable over the plains and their trails beaten deep and hard in to the soil were crossed by us daily, oftentimes by hundreds, but a few yards intervening. For many days we used nothing but the dried excrements of these animals there being no wood on that part of the route. I do not recollect seeing any traces or indications of them on this side of the Mountains. As to Indians I think we passed a small settlement of them in western New York on the rail road cars but of course it would be but a mere glimpse one would get of the critters riding past on the cars. Again I saw some real wild ones, a dozen or so, walking in a row one behind the other in the streets of St. Jo. and making some small purchases in the shops paying in quarter dollars which they carried about with them tied up in strips of calico or something of the sort and knotted into the corner of their blanket or the skirt of their shirts. After crossing the Missouri we often encountered them but met with no incidents among them worthy of mention except their exacting toll from all emigrants crossing their country and also for going over some brush bridges which they pretended to have thrown over some small insignificant streams though it is more than likely that some of the first emigrants of the season constructed those rude bridges for their own convenience as we ourselves bridged one or two streams. We however paid what toll they demanded without much hesitation as we did not wish to provoke hostilities although we looked upon it as a sort of imposition. We traversed the whole of the Indian territory without any difficulty with them in any way although many companies did not succeed so well, some losing stock and some coming to blows with them. And now I will take up my narrative where I left if off which was if I recollect arright at the Pacific Springs, the water we saw flowing into the Pacific. On the 8th July we left those Springs and now we are on the great sandy plains which constitute the great American desert. Plains of burning sands upon which the summer sun beats scorching, withering, destitute of vegetation, some to or three species of stunted shrubs bitter as wormwood and altogether such as one might suppose to grow on the banks of the dead Sea, the site of sunken Sodom. On the sixth day of July we travelled over 22 miles of this desert and encamped on a stream of water away up towards the sources of which almost reach to the mountains. At least some ten or twelve miles we were obliged to take our horses to get grass and in the performance of this task I was lost from my companions and belated and being unable to find my way from the darkness was compelled to spend the night under a bush to the branches of which I tied my horses. A stormy night, in the fore part rain, in the after part frost. alone and unarmed in a country infested with the Grizzly bear and hostile indians, and my poor horses were so frightened that I had much ado to keep them quite. Though cold and wet I was so weary that I fell asleep taking the precaution to wind the ropes by which the animals were made fast around my limbs that when they started suddenly from fright I might awaken and thus I passed one of the most disagreeable nights of my life. At the break of day when I rose from my couch of brambles I was so stiffened from the fatigues of the preceding day and from the wet and cold chills of the night that I could hardly move and my poor beasts were even worse than myself.

By the friendly light of the sun I readily found my companions after an hour’s ride or so and we remained here two days to recruit. We left here in the early part of the evening and drove seven miles to another stream where we stopped till towards morning and then made a long days drive to the green river, a distance of near fifty miles. No water, no grass. On the 13th we reached the Bear river which empties it’s waters into the Salt Lake and found here plenty of good grass and caught plenty of trout, large and fine, from the small streams, it’s tributaries. On the 16th we passed what are called the Soda Springs, water quite warm and strongly mineral issuing from small holes in the top of a large rock of a most curious formation. Probably formed from some substances held in solution by the water.

There are some half dozen of these springs I suppose, not far distant from each other and the most of them have formed a sort of cone rising from the face of the rock and of the same material, from one to three feet and three or four feet in diameter at the base. In the top of these cones is a sort of basin containing several gallons constantly filled through a small aperture in the bottom, the water flowing over on all sides. Half a mile or so from there is one called the Steam boat Spring where the water being quite warm rising in a cone similarly formed is thrown up in jet to height of five or six feet and it is really beautiful, strongly soda.