Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/48



38 LINDSAY APPLEGATE

which it flows. Like the Nile, this stream rises sufficiently every year to overflow and fertilize its valley, so that it pro- duces the finest grass. Since 1843, immigrants had occasion- ally traveled down this stream to its sink, and had thence crossed the high, snowy range of the Sierra Nevada, from Truckee run via Donner lake, to the Sacramento valley; and as we proceeded up the river, we frequently met small parties, like ourselves, sunburned and covered with alkali dust, and worn and wearied by the long and difficult journey.

Game was our principal dependence for food, and this we found exceedingly scarce along the Humboldt, and the thou- sands of Indians who inhabited the valley at this season seemed to subsist chiefly upon grasshoppers and crickets, which were abundant.

One day, during our march through this country, Capt. Scott and myself, leaving the party on the west side, crossed the river for the purpose of hunting, and, while pursuing a band of antelope, came upon wagon tracks, leading away from the river towards a rocky gulch among the hills, two or three miles distant. Several wagons seemed to have been in the train, and on either side of the plain tracks made by the wagon wheels in the loose sand were numerous bare-foot tracks. Following the trail into the mouth of the gulch, we found where the wagons had been burned, only the ruins being left among the ashes. We found no human remains, yet the evidences were plain that a small train of immigrants had been taken here not a great while before, and that they had perished at the hands of their blood-thirsty captors, not one having escaped to recite the awful tale of horror. Possibly the bodies of the victims had been thrust into the river. Possibly the drivers had been com- pelled to drive their teams across the sage plains into this wild ravine, here to be slaughtered and their bodies burned. By a more extended search along the river and among the hills, we might possibly have found some of the bodies of the victims, and might have obtained some clue as to who the ill-fated