"Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the men froze their feet.... In the Wet Mountain Valley, which they reached in mid-January, ... starvation stared them in the face. There had been a heavy snow-storm; no game was to be seen; and they had been two days without food. The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel. Two of the soldiers went out to hunt but got nothing. At the same time Pike [and a comrade] ... started, determined not to return at all unless they could bring back meat. Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp 'and behold the misery of our poor lads.' All day they tramped wearily through the heavy snow. Towards evening they came on a buffalo, and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as death. That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their thin rags; they had not eaten for three days. But ... they at last succeeded, after another heartbreaking failure, in killing a buffalo. At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the party broke their four days' fast."[4] Pike at length succeeded in his design of reaching the Rio Grande, and here he built a fort and threw out to the breeze an American flag, though knowing well that he was on Spanish territory now. The Louisiana boundary was ill defined, but in a general way it ran up the Red River, passed a hundred miles northeast of Santa Fé and just north of Salt Lake, thence it struck straight west to the Pacific. By any interpretation the Rio Grande was south of the line. The Spaniards, who came suddenly upon the scene, diplomatically assumed that the daring explorer had lost his way; he suffered nothing from their hands, and was sent home through Chihuahua and Texas.