Captain Bonneville now considered himself as having fairly passed the crest of theRocky Mountains; and felt some degree of exultation in being the first individual thathad crossed, north of the settled provinces of Mexico, from the waters of the Atlantic tothose of the Pacific, with wagons. Mr. William Sublette, the enterprising leader of theRocky Mountain Fur Company, had, two or three years previously, reached the valley ofthe Wind River, which lies on the northeast of the mountains; but had proceeded withthem no further.
A vast valley now spread itself before the travellers, bounded on one side by the WindRiver Mountains, and to the west, by a long range of high hills. This, Captain Bonnevillewas assured by a veteran hunter in his company, was the great valley of the Seedske-dee; and thesame informant would have fain persuaded him that a small stream, threefeet deep, which he came to on the 25th, was that river. The captain was convinced,however, that the stream was too insignificant to drain so wide a valley and the adjacentmountains: he encamped, therefore, at an early hour, on its borders, that he might takethe whole of the next day to reach the main river; which he presumed to flow betweenhim and the distant range of western hills.
On the 26th of July, he commenced his march at an early hour, making directly acrossthe valley, toward the hills in the west; proceeding at as brisk a rate as the jadedcondition of his horses would permit. About eleven o'clock in the morning, a great cloudof dust was descried in the rear, advancing directly on the trail of the party. The alarmwas given; they all came to a halt, and held a council of war. Some conjectured that theband of Indians, whose trail they had discovered in the neighborhood of the stray horse,had been lying in wait for them in some secret fastness of the mountains; and wereabout to attack them on the open plain, where they would have no shelter. Preparationswere immediately made for defence; and a scouting party sent off to reconnoitre. Theysoon came galloping back, making signals that all was well. The cloud of dust wasmade by a band of fifty or sixty mounted trappers, belonging to the American FurCompany, who soon came up, leading their pack-horses. They were headed by Mr.
Fontenelle, an experienced leader, or "partisan," as a chief of a party is called in thetechnical language of the trappers.
Mr. Fontenelle informed Captain Bonneville that he was on his way from the company'strading post on the Yellowstone to the yearly rendezvous, with reinforcements andsupplies for their hunting and trading parties beyond the mountains; and that heexpected to meet, by appointment, with a band of free trappers in that veryneighborhood. He had fallen upon the trail of Captain Bonneville's party, just afterleaving the Nebraska; and, finding that they had frightened off all the game, had beenobliged to push on, by forced marches, to avoid famine: both men and horses were,therefore, much travel-worn; but this was no place to halt; the plain before them he saidwas destitute of grass and water, neither of which would be met with short of the GreenRiver, which was yet at a considerable distance. He hoped, he added, as his party wereall on horseback, to reach the river, with hard travelling, by nightfall: but he doubted thepossibility of Captain Bonneville's arrival there with his wagons before the day following.
Having imparted this information, he pushed forward with all speed.
Captain Bonneville followed on as fast as circumstances would permit. The ground wasfirm and gravelly; but the horses were too much fatigued to move rapidly. After a longand harassing day's march, without pausing for a noontide meal, they were compelled,at nine o'clock at night, to encamp in an open plain, destitute of water or pasturage. Onthe following morning, the horses were turned loose at the peep of day; to slake theirthirst, if possible, from the dew collected on the sparse grass, here and there springingup among dry sand-banks. The soil of a great part of this Green River valley is a whitishclay, into which the rain cannot penetrate, but which dries and cracks with the sun. Insome places it produces a salt weed, and grass along the margins of the streams; butthe wider expanses of it are desolate and barren. It was not until noon that CaptainBonneville reached the banks of the Seeds-ke-dee, or Colorado of the West; in themeantime, the sufferings of both men and horses had been excessive, and it was withalmost frantic eagerness that they hurried to allay their burning thirst in the limpidcurrent of the river.
Fontenelle and his party had not fared much better; the chief part had managed toreach the river by nightfall, but were nearly knocked up by the exertion; the horses ofothers sank under them, and they were obliged to pass the night upon the road.
