Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/87

Rh competent. The doctor left us to have his grist-mill put in order by the time we should reach his mission. We now arrived at a most critical period in our most adventurous journey, and we had many misgivings as to our ultimate success in making our way with our wagons, teams and families. We had yet to accomplish the untried and most difficult portion of our long and exhaustive jourey. We could not anticipate at what moment we might be compelled to abandon our wagons in the mountains, pack our scant supplies on our poor oxen, and make our way on foot through this terribly rough country as best we could. We fully comprehended the situation, but we never faltered in our inflexible determination to accomplish the trip, if within the limits of possibility, with the resources at our command. Doctor Whitman assured us that we could succeed, and encouraged and aided us with every means in his power. I consulted Mr. Grant as to his opinion of the practicability of taking our wagons through. He replied that, while he would not say it was impossible for us Americans to make the trip in our wagons, he could not himself see how it could be done. He had only traveled the pack-trail, and certainly no wagons could follow that route, but there might be a practical road found by leaving the trail at certain points.

On the 30th of August we quitted Fort Hall, many of our young men having left us with pack-trains. Our route lay down Snake River for some distance. The road was rocky and rough, except in the dry valleys, and these were covered with a thick growth of sage or wormwood, which was from two to three feet high, and offered a great obstruction to the first five or six wagons passing through it. The soil where this melancholy shrub was found appeared to be too dry and sterile to produce anything else. It was very soft on the surface, and easily worked up into a most disagreeable dust, as fine as ashes or flour.

The taste of the sage is exceedingly bitter; the shrub has a brown, somber appearance, and a most disagreeable smell. The stem at the surface of the ground is from one to two inches in diameter, and soon branches, so as to form a thick, brushy top. The texture of the stem is peculiar and unlike that of any other shrub, being all bark and no sap or heart, and appears like the outside bark of the grapevine. How the sap ascends from the root to the branches, or whether the shrub draws its nutriment from the air. I am not able to decide. One thing I remember well, that the stems of the green growing sage were good for fuel and burned most readily, and so