Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/238

176 that amount of rations, or until we should meet some emigrants. We were gone about three weeks, but did not see either Indians or emigrants. The fact is, that it was getting so late in the fall that the Indians had all gone south, and the emigrants were not moving on the desert at that season.

On our return the Colonel had everything ready and we pulled out for San Francisco. We camped the first night at Steamboat Springs, a place that has since grown to be a famous health resort. On the second day we passed over the country where now stands Carson City, the capital of Nevada. At that time, this region, like all of that country then, was a wild, unsettled, sagebrush desert, or mountain wilderness.

The morning we left Eagle Valley the Colonel rode in advance of the column with me, and I saw there was something on his mind. In a little while he said he would like to kill a deer with big horns, so that he could send it—the horns—to his father in New York, who had never seen a deer, and he added that notwithstanding he—the Colonel—had been on the Pacific coast two years, he had never killed a deer in his life. I told him that I would fix it for him to get one the very next day, and he was as pleased as a child.

That night we camped by a big spring at the mouth of a great canyon, and about the spring stood a number of large pine trees. Many persons who had passed that way had carved their names in the bark of the trees, and among the names were two that were quite familiar to me. One of these was the name of Capt. Molujean—I wondered how he had done it without stuttering—and