Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/408

390 followed the Humboldt down to its sink. There was trouble with the Indians along the way, respecting which the exact truth can hardly be known, except that the trappers' conduct was dastardly, though their outrages were exaggerated by Bonneville and others.

From the Humboldt sink Walker's men crossed the desert and the Sierra into California by a route about which there is much uncertainty. Said Bonneville to Irving: "They struck directly westward, across the great chain of Californian mountains. For three and twenty days they were entangled among these mountains, the peaks and ridges of which are in many places covered with perpetual snow. For a part of the time they were nearly starved; at length they made their way through them, and came down upon the plains of New California. They now turned toward the south, and arrived at the Spanish village and post of Monterey." Stephen Meek tells us "they travelled now four days across the salt plains, when they struck the Californian mountains, crossing which took fifteen days, and in fourteen days more they reached the two Laries" — Tulares — "killed a horse, and subsisting on the same eleven days, came to the Spanish settlements." Joseph Meek is represented as giving the route somewhat definitely westward to Pyramid Lake, up the Truckee River, and across the mountains — by the present railroad line very nearly — into the Sacramento Valley, and thence southward. This authority also states that they met a company of soldiers out hunting for cattle-thieves in the San José Valley, and were taken as prisoners to Monterey. Finally a newspaper version, founded on Walker's own statements, and corroborated to some extent by that of Nidever, gives what I suppose to have been the correct route from the sink, south-westward by what are now Carson