Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/90

 82 T. C. ELLIOTT "Feb. 5th. Course E. N. E. Crossed river three times and found the ice sufficiently strong to bear our horses One of the men detected this day stealing a beaver out of another man's trap; as starvation was the cause of this he was par- doned on condition of promising not to do it again. "10th Feb. Followed the banks of Burnt River S. S. E. 10 miles. One horse killed. Nearly every bone in his body broken. Two of the men could not advance from weakness. We have been on short allowance almost too long and re- semble so many skeletons ; one trap this day gave us 14 beaver. "11 Feb. Crossed Burnt River within 3 miles of its dis- charge into Snake River or South branch of Columbia. It has given us 54 beaver and 6 otter." But such experiences did not discourage in the least; the following season always found him at the, same post of re- sponsibility and subject to the same exposures. Those respon- sibilities were even greater than had existed in earlier years because the American trappers had arrived from across the divide of the Rockies and the competition was more keen and the Indians more troublesome. On his way to the Portneuf in 1827 Mr. Ogden found Rocky Mountain Fur Company trap- pers at work as far west as the Weiser river and heard of them even in this very vicinity. And with three thousand beaver skins in his packs valued at between ten and twenty thousand dollars at Fort Vancouver it meant some care and responsibility to journey from the extremes of the Snake Coun- try (Pocatello or Winnemucca for instance) to the Columbia, often with less than a dozen people in his company. The usual custom was to leave Fort Nez Perces in September by the trail leading up the Walla Walla river as far as the Forks of that stream, five miles above Milton, Oregon ; to cross the Blue Mountain Range by what has become the Toll Gate road to the lower end of the Grande Ronde Valley at Summerville (and there they used to cut the lodge or tepee poles for the season) ; thence they passed through the Grande Ronde Valley and over the divide to the Powder river usually making a camp for the night at the large spring, called by them a fountain, now