Acting on Saxton's advice, Governor Stevens reduced his party at Fort Benton, stored much of his government property there, and started west with a pack train, for the sake of greater speed. He moved on September 22, anxious lest snow should catch him in the mountains. At Fort Benton he left a detachment to make meteorological observations during the winter. Among the Flatheads he left another under Lieutenant Mullan. On October 7 he hurried on again from the Bitter Root Valley for Walla Walla. On the 19th he met McClellan's party, which had been spending a difficult season in the passes of the Cascade range. Because of overcautious advice which McClellan here gave him, and since his animals were tired out with the summer's hardships, he practically ended his survey for 1853 at this point. He pushed on down the Columbia to Olympia and his new territory.
The energy of Governor Stevens enabled him to make one of the first of the Pacific railway reports. His was the only survey from the Mississippi to the ocean under a single commander. Dated June 30, 1854, it occupies 651 pages of Volume I of the compiled reports. In 1859 he submitted his "narrative and final report" which the Senate ordered Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to communicate to it in February of that year. This document is printed as supplement to Volume I, but really consists of two large volumes which are commonly bound together as Volume XII of the series. Like the other volumes of the reports, his are filled with lithographs and engravings of fauna, flora, and topography.
The forty-second parallel route was surveyed by Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith, of the third artillery, in the summer of 1854. East of Fort Bridger, the War Department felt it unnecessary to make a special survey, since Frémont had traversed and described the country several times and Stansbury had surveyed it carefully as recently as 1849-1850. At the beginning of his campaign Beckwith was at Salt Lake. During April he visited the Green River Valley and Fort Bridger, proving by his surveys the entire practicability of railway construction here. In May he skirted the south end of Great Salt Lake and passed along the Humboldt to the Sacramento Valley. He had no important adventures and was impressed most by the squalor of the digger Indians, whose grass-covered, beehive-shaped "wick-ey-ups" were frequently seen. As his band approached the Indians would fearfully cache their belongings in the undergrowth. In the morning "it was indeed a novel and ludicrous sight of wretchedness to see them approach their bush and attempt, slyly (for they still tried to conceal from me what they were about), to repossess themselves of their treasures, one bringing out a piece of old buckskin, a couple of feet square, smoked, greasy, and torn; another a half dozen rabbit-skins in an equally filthy condition, sewed together, which he would swing over his shoulders by a string--his only blanket or clothing; while a third brought out a blue string, which he girded about him and walked away in full dress--one of the lords of the soil." It needed no special emphasis in Beckwith's report to prove that a railway could follow this middle route, since thousands of emigrants had a personal knowledge of its conditions.