River comes out of the Rocky Mountains is a solid rock gap claimed to be three hundred feet deep. I know it was so deep we couldn't look over into it without laying down flat on our stomachs. From here we proceeded to what is called the South Pass, a low flat place in the Rocky Mountains, and some two days' travel brought us to a place where the roads forked. At this place we held an election to determine which road to take, the left road going to Salt Lake City and the right-hand road was the Fremont Trail going west. The majority voted to go by Salt Lake City. Will say, before reaching the forks of this road, we had overtaken another party, called the Priest Train, making a total of seven wagons and twentyeight men.

On our road to Salt Lake City we had to go into what is called Echo Canyon. The Mormons, on going down into this canyon, let their wagons down by putting ropes and chains around trees that grew upon the side of the canyon and fastening same to rear of wagon. When we reached this place the trees were all dead, so we took all the oxen loose except the wheel team and fastened them. to the rear axle and let the wagon down into the canyon. It required half a day to let our seven wagons down. After getting down into this canyon the road travels down same into the Salt Lake Valley.

Will also add that our principal fuel on this trip was buffalo chips, but west of the Rocky Mountains there were no buffalo so we used cow chips.

It is eight hundred miles from Salt Lake City to California and there were only two different tribes of Indians, the Utahs and Piutes. In the summer time the Piutes live mostly on roasted lizards and grasshoppers, there being no game in this part of the country to amount to anything, only a few scattering black tail deer.

We arrived in Salt Lake City a day or two before the Fourth of July, 1852, and spent the Fourth there. About

all the celebration was a few horse races on the main street of the city. At this time it was a small town, there being only two good houses in the town, the Mormon Temple and Brigham Young's Temple. At this time it was told by the Mormons that Brigham Young had some sixty-odd wives and, of course, it required a large house to hold them.

We were never bothered by the Indians, as we watched them day and night, and an Indian is good only when he is watched. I never saw one with a gun or pistol on the entire trip. Their fighting weapons were bow and arrows, tomahawk and scalping or bowie knives.

After leaving Salt Lake City we crossed the River Jordan and the next water was a good spring at the head of the Humbolt River. This river, however, is three hundred and thirty miles long, running through a flat alkali country, and the worst water a human or beast ever tried to drink. It spreads out and sinks into the earth, not emptying into any other stream. While traveling down this stream one of our men took sick and we had no good water for him. While nooning one day, on this stream, one of the boys went fishing with a little fly hook not larger than a sewing thread and caught four or five fish. When he returned he found an old Piute Indian in camp. This Indian wanted to see what our boy had caught the fish with and when the boy showed him the hook he examined it very closely and, from his actions, it seemed this was the first hook he had ever seen. He had on an old ragged coat and from the tail of this he unwound a string and brought out a Mexican dollar and gave it to the boy for the fish-hook. This old Indian having a Mexican dollar was as much a curiosity to us as the fish-hook was to him. He was four hundred miles from Salt Lake City and about the same distance from California or any white settlement, and the question was "Where did he get the Mexican dollar?" Where this Humbolt River sinks into the earth we cut grass and

filled our wagons to feed our stock on, as we had to cross a desert fifty miles wide, and filled all of our water kegs so as to give stock water that night, and this was all the water they had until we crossed the desert. The last twelve miles of this trip was deep white sand. It took a day and night to cross this desert and we fed our stock one time and gave them one drink. This brought us to Carson River, where our sick man died. We rolled him in his blankets, as we had no coffin, and buried him under a large elm tree, covering him the best we could with timber and dirt. We traveled up the Carson River, the worst road we had on the entire trip, crossing the Sierra Nevadas and followed the slope to Hangtown, California, the first mining town we struck. There we sold out everything we had in the shape of teams and wagons. We arrived there the 27th day of August, 1852. This being Dry Diggings, meaning no gold to be found, after resting a few days we all scattered and went to the South Fork of the American River and four or five of the boys I have never seen or heard of since. I know they never came back home. After staying about two years and a half I returned home. I was the youngest of the outfit, being only 20 years old, and was called a 20-year-old boy.

RAISED ON THE FRONTIER

By Walter Smith, Del Rio, Texas

It made me feel twenty-five years younger to attend the reunion of the Old Trail Drivers in San Antonio, for I met so many of my old boyhood friends, many of them I had not seen in forty-five years, boys that I had been associated with during the early days of the frontier.

I was born at Corpus Christi, May 8th, 1856, and

moved to San Antonio when I was six years old. Went to school at the old Free School house which stood on Houston Street in that city. San Antonio was then only a small adobe town. In 1869 I landed in Uvalde in an ox-wagon owned by Bill Lewis of the Nueces Canyon. There were only six ranches in the canyon at that time, but lots of Indians were there to harass the few settlers, We had many narrow escapes, but we were a happy and seemingly contented people. I have lived on the Western frontier ever since I reached manhood, and have had many thrilling experiences and hard trials, but have lived through all down to this day of the high cost of everything. We lived then on the fat of the land, and that was not a luxury. Our food was plain but wholesome, and if the people of today would be content with the table comforts we had in those days the doctors' signs would soon disappear.

I went up the trail six different times, the last herd being driven from Uvalde County in 1882 for the Western Union Beef Company to the South Platte River, Colorado. I have had so many ups and downs that if I were to undertake to tell all of them it would more than fill this volume.

Was married at Uvalde, Texas, May 8th, 1879, to Sarah A. Fulgham, and we have had eleven children, eight of whom are still living.

DROVE A HERD OVER THE TRAIL TO CALIFORNIA

By W. E. Cureton of Meridian, Texas

I was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, in 1848; came to Texas with my father, Captain Jack Cureton, in the winter of 1854-55; settled on or near the Brazos River below old Fort Belknap in what is now

Palo Pinto County, and began raising cattle. The county was organized in 1857.

W. E. CURETON

In 1867 we (my father and John C. Cureton) drove a herd of grown steers from Jim Ned, a tributary of the Colorado of Texas, now in Coleman County, up the Concho at a time when the Coffees and Tankersleys were the only inhabitants there. That year the government began the building of Fort Concho, which is now a part of the thrifty little city of San Angelo. The Indians killed a Dutch

man and scalped and partly skinned him a little ahead of us, and Captain Snively, with a gold hunting outfit, had quite a skirmish along the Concho with them.

From the head waters on the Concho we made a ninety-six-mile drive to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River without giving the cattle a good watering. Our trail was the old military stage route used by the government before the Civil War. The Indians had killed a man and wounded a woman ahead of us at the old adobe walls at Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos, and captured a herd of cattle belonging to John Gamel and Isaac W. Cox of Mason, Texas. A few miles above Horsehead Crossing the Indians stole eleven head of our horses one night; only having two horses to the man, we felt the loss of half our mounts very severely. A little further up the river the Indians wounded Uncle Oliver Loving, the father of J. C. and George B. of the noted Loving family of the upper Brazos country and the founder of the great Texas Cattle Raisers' Association. The old