Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/29

 Ewing Young in Far Southwest 17 dently in the Mojave valley. They continued up the river until they ' 'reached a point of the river where the moun- tains shut in so close upon the shores that we were com- pelled to climb a mountain, and travel along the acclivity, the river still in sight, and at an immense depth beneath us." This was evidently at the mouth of Black Canyon. Up the river they continued for a hundred leagues, ac- cording to Pattie's estimate, through snow from a foot to eighteen inches deep, when they finally arrived at the place "where the river emerges from these horrid moun- tains, which so cage it up/' This was possibly the open- ing between Lee's Ferry and the mouth of the San Juan. Here for a couple of days they trapped up a small stream which enters the main river from the north. This may have been the Paria, Sentinel Rock, or Warm Creek, all of which enter the Colorado between Lee's Ferry and the Crossing of the Fathers, so named from the fact that here the Dominguez-Escalante expedition crossed the Colorado on their homeward journey in 1776. While in this vicinity they met a party of Shoshones who had recently destroyed a company of French hunters on the head waters of the Platte. Pattie here remarks: "One of our company could speak their language, from having been a prisoner among them for a year." After a brief encounter with these Indians, the trap- pers resumed their march up the river to the point where it forked again. They had now evidently reached the mouth of the San Juan, for Pattie says they proceeded up the right hand fork (i. e., up the San Juan) to the chief village of the "Nabahoes" (Navajoes). The trappers enquired of the Navajoes as to the best route across the Rocky Mountains and were informed that they would have to ascend the other fork. They, therefore, retraced their steps to the junction and then proceeded up the Colorado and Grand Rivers to the con- tinental divide which they crossed near Long's Peak to the South Fork of the Platte.