Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/609

558 tings as to the northern route, and hoping to escape its eight hundred miles of mountains, ravines, and precipices by taking the southern one, a caravan of ninety or a hundred wagons, including Kirquendall's company, left Fort Hall on the 9th of August, arriving at the rendezvous of the exploring party at Thousand Springs on the 12th, where David Goff and Levi Scott assumed the duty of guiding them to the Willamette, while the Applegates and the remainder of the company pushed forward to mark out or cut out the road, as the case might demand, accompanied by a volunteer party of young men from the immigration.

On arriving at the tributary of the Humboldt, they proceeded up°the stream to the spring before discovered, which they called Diamond, but which is now known as Antelope spring, and which they enlarged by digging. Thence they took a north-west course to Rabbit-hole Mountains, where they enlarged the Rabbit-hole spring. They found no way of avoiding the Black Rock desert of alkali and mud lakes between there and the Granite Mountains, the same course being followed in locating the road west of Black canon that was pursued on the first exploration. The real labor of road-making began when the company reached the Cascade Mountains, and was repeated in the chain to the north of the Rogue River Valley, and in the Umpqua canon. On arriving in the Umpqua Valley, at the north end of the canon, feeling that they had removed the greatest obstacles to travel with wagons, and being reduced to the necessity of hunting to supply themselves with provisions, the passage through the Calapooya Mountains was left to be opened by the immigrants themselves, and the company hastened to their homes, from which they had been absent fifteen weeks.