Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/463

Rh After passing them here, we never saw the Oregonians again. They elected a young lawyer of some eminence as we were told, named Burnett, as their captain, and engaged an old mountaineer, known as Captain Gant, as their guide through the mountains to Fort Hall. Several enactments were made and agreed to, one of which was called up to be rescinded, and something of an excitement arose in regard to it. The law made was that no family should drive along more than three head of loose stock for each member composing it, and this bore hard on families that had brought with them cattle in large numbers. The dispute resulted in a split of the large body into two or three divisions; and so they moved on, making distinct encampments all the way. Captain Gant was to receive $1.00 a head from the company, numbering about a thousand souls, for his services as guide. But a few more such expeditions following in the same trail will soon imprint such. a highway through the wilderness to Oregon that emigrants may hereafter travel without such assistance.

We left them here about the last of May and encountered no sign of them again until returning in September, when we struck their trail on the Sweetwater, near the south pass of the mountains. They had followed in our own trail as far as this point and had here turned off, our course lying in another direction. From here, all the way to Fort Laramie, we found the now deeply worn road strewn with indications of their recent presence. Scaffolds for drying meat, broken utensils thrown away, chips showing where wagons had been repaired, and remnants of children's shoes, frocks, etc., met our notice at every deserted encampment.

But one death seemed to have occurred among them, and this was far out under the mountains. Here the loose riders of our moving camp gathered one morn-