Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/136



126 S. H. TAYLOR

should be low, and it is better to have it round at the top. The sloughs "slews" of this state are perfectly horrible. A man who has not been across it can form no conception of the evil. On any direct line from here to the Mississippi 397 miles by the road there are doubtless 2000 miserable "slews." The only way possible to cross them is to have a wagon that will go over them on the turf. This a carriage with a heavy top can- not do. Nor can these "slews" be crossed with heavy loads. We found it necessary to reduce the weight on our wagon's below 900 pounds. No wagon, in a wet season like this, can go over the sloughs with certainty with more than about 800 pounds. With such an amount it goes along over the turf, while with 1000 pounds perhaps it will invariably go down and such a going down as you never saw ! We have had ten good yoke of oxen on one wagon to get it out of a "slew," and that perhaps near ten times in one day. We have sometimes trav- eled for miles over high wet prairies where the wagon would constantly settle 3 to 6 inches into the ground.

I would advise any man intending to cross this state, to go down below Rock Island before crossing the Mississippi. The Indians had a trail striking from a point there, to the Bluffs, keeping a series of "divides" forming the water shed of the Missouri and Des Moines. The road from Dubuque by Cedar Rapids, that from Lyons by Iowa City, and all the others, strike right west or south west from the Mississippi into this ridge, and keep it. The Mormons, when they went to Salt Lake, took it on the Mississippi, and made the best road, now called "the Mormon Trail," that the ground will admit of. This is a good road. It is serpentine, but even, dry and hard. We came by Lyons and Iowa City, and have had about 140 miles of it, and we had rather our cattle would travel that 140 miles, than 50 of the road before we came to it. From Beloit, on the line of Wisconsin and Illinois, an ox team will go to Kanesville, at least in a wet season, in ten days less time by going down to the mouth of Rock river and taking this route, than by the straight roads.