An oppressive silence prevailed as we drove to the river and pitched our camp within a few feet of the bank, where we could hear the rippling waters passing and see the fish leaping in the eddies. We had our choice of a camping place just by the skirt of a refreshing green brush with an opening to give full view of the river. It had not been so fifty-four years before, with hundreds of camps ahead of you. The traveler then had to take what he could get, and in many cases that was a place far back from the water and removed from other conveniences.
[Illustration: _United States Geological Survey_
Devil's Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the many beautiful streams in the uplands of Wyoming. The pioneer trail followed the course of this river.]
The sight and smell of carrion, so common in camping places during that first journey, also were gone. No bleached bones, even, showed where the exhausted dumb brute had died. The graves of the dead pioneers had all been leveled by the hoofs of stock and the lapse of time.
The country remains as it was in '52. There the trail is to be seen miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path that vegetation has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of wagons years ago.
As in 1852, when the summit was passed I felt that my task was much more than half done, though half the distance was scarcely compassed.
On June 30, at about ten o'clock, we encountered a large number of big flies that ran the cattle nearly wild. I stood on the wagon tongue for miles to reach them with the whipstock. The cattle were so excited that we did not stop at noon, but drove on. By half-past two we camped at a farmhouse, the Split Rock post office, the first we had found in a hundred miles of travel since leaving Pacific Springs.
The Devil's Gate, a few miles distant, is one of the two best-known landmarks on the trail. Here, as at Split Rock, the mountain seems to have been split apart, leaving an opening a few rods wide, through which the Sweetwater River pours in a veritable torrent. The river first approaches to within a few hundred feet of the gap, then suddenly curves away from it, and after winding through the valley for half a mile or so, a quarter of a mile away, it takes a straight shoot and makes the plunge through the canyon. Those who have had the impression that the emigrants drove their teams through this gap are mistaken, for it's a feat no mortal man has done or can do, any more than he could drive up the falls of the Niagara.