Burton: To Ruby Valley. 7th October.
Burton: To “Chokop's" Pass. 8th October, 1860.
Burton: To the Wilderness again. 9th October.
Burton: To Sheawit Creek. 10th October, [Roberts Station]
Burton: To Dry Creek. 11th October.
Burton: To Simpson's Park. 12th October.
Horace Greeley:
At Shell Creek, forty-five miles from Pleasant Valley, where we spent our next night, there is a little garden—the first I had seen since Camp Floyd—and at Ruby Valley, fifty miles or so further on, the government has a farm in crop, intended for the benefit, and partly cultivated by the labor of the neighboring Indians. The mail-station also has its garden, and is cutting an abundance of hay. From this station, it is expected that the new cut-off, saving one hundred miles or more in distance to Carson Valley, will be made, so soon as those now scrutinizing it shall have pronounced it practicable.
At Ruby, [where Greeley's route diverges from Burton's and Twain's route] the stage usually stops for the night; but we had been six days making rather less than three hundred miles, and began to grow impatient. The driver had his own reasons for pushing on, and did so, over a road partly mountainous, rough and sideling; but, starting at eight p. m., we had reached the next (Pine Valley) station, forty miles distant, before sunrise. Here we were detained three or four hours for mules—those we should have taken being astray—but at nine we started with a new driver, and were soon entangled in a pole-bridge over a deep, miry stream—a drove of a thousand head of cattle (the first ever driven over this road) having recently passed, and torn the frail bridge to pieces. Our lead-mules went down in a pile, but were got up and out and the wagon ran over, after a delay of an hour. We soon rose from Pine Valley by a long, irregular, generally moderate ascent, to a mountain divide, from which our trail took abruptly down the wildest and worst cañon I ever saw traversed by a carriage. It is in places barely wide enough at bottom for a wagon, and if two should meet here it 1s scarcely possible that they should pass. The length of this cañon is a mile and a half; the descent hardly less than two thousand feet; the side of the road next to the water-course often far lower than the other; the roadbed is often made of sharp-edged fragments of broken rock, hard enough to stand on, harder still to hold back on. The heat in this cañon on a summer afternoon is intense, the sun being able to enter it while the wind is not. Two or three glorious springs afford partial consolation to the weary, thirsty traveler. I am confident no passenger ever rode down this rocky ladder; I trust that none will until a better road is made here; though a good road in such a gulch is scarcely possible. Fifteen miles further, across a plain and a lower range of hills, brought our mail-wagon at last, about seven P. M. of its seventh day from Salt Lake City, to THE HUMBOLDT.
FROM SALT LAKE TO CARSON VALLEY