Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/322

 tively determined) is among the archives of Whitman College at Walla Walla, Washington, and a photostat copy has been furnished for publication in the pages of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. The text differs slightly, but not essentially, from a previous printing by the Oregon Pioneer Association in 1891.

Mrs. Whitman's narrative begins at the McLeod camping place ten miles from the Rendezvous. The missionary party had moved to his camp at his request about the 11th of July, so as to be able to leave at any time. Rendezvous, the annual summer event in the fur trade of those days, was a highly exhilarating occasion, to the temptations of which Mr. McLeod of the Hudson's Bay Company did not wish his trappers and servants to be subject. It is hoped and anticipated that the story of the travel of the missionary party through South Pass and of their arrival and five or six days stay at Rendezvous may be gathered from letters of various members of the party for publication at a later date.

The annual rendezvous of the American field hunters and trappers of the Rocky Mountains with the fur traders from Saint Louis in the summer of 1836 was held in the valley of a creek flowing into Green River from the west, about sixty miles northwest of the present Union Pacific Railroad division point of Green River in Wyoming. The location was northerly of where the Sandy River flowing from South Pass empties into the Green. Seven years later than 1836 the first large train of emigrant wagons came over South Pass and down the valley of the Sandy to cross Green River and detour south to Fort Bridger (southwest of Green River on the railroad), and to then turn northward to the waters of Bear River in Idaho. These wagons made the first track of the historic Oregon trail, and, broadly speaking, the Oregon Short Line of the Union Pacific system follows that trail very closely as far as Soda Springs in Idaho. At the town of Cokeville on this railroad near the boundary line between Wyoming and Idaho the maps show a pack train trail coming from the Green River Valley and designated as the Sublette cut-off.

No attempt will be made to follow in much detail the itinerary of the McLeod-Whitman-Spalding party on this section of their journey to the Columbia. It is impossible to more than