are too lame to move. A horrible road we have had for ten days of rock and stone. We have taken in all two hundred and sixty-five beaver and nine otter here. Our course is due east over barren hills, a lofty range of mountains on both sides covered with Norway pines. Thank God if we can cross these mountains I trust to reach Snake River. There are six feet of snow on the mountain pass here. We must try another. For ten days we have had only one meal every two days. January 29th--A horse this day killed--his hoof was found entirely worn away, only the raw stump left.” February 2nd, they left the streams flowing west and began following down a cañon of burnt windfall along the banks of a river that ran northeast. The divide had been crossed, and the worn bronchos were the first to realize that the trails of the mountains were passed. Suddenly pricking forward, they galloped full pace into the valley of Burnt River, a tributary of the Snake. “A more gloomy looking country,” writes Ogden, “I never saw. We have been on short allowance too long and all resemble so many skeletons. We are skin and bone. More beggarly looking fellows the world could not produce. All the gay trappings at the beginning of the march have disappeared. Still I have no complaint of my men. Day after day, they labor in quest of food and beaver without shoe or moccasin to their feet. The frozen ground is hardly comfortable for people so scantily clothed. Ten days east is the buffalo country of the plains, but in our present weak state we could not reach it in a month.” Ogden was now in the beaver country of the Snakes and to avoid starvation divided his brigade into small bands under McKay and Gervais and Sylvaille. These, he scattered along the tributaries of the Snake River north and south, in what are now known as Oregon and Idaho, some to the “Rivier Malheur (Unfortunate River) so-called because this is the place where our goods were discovered and stolen by the Americans last year”; others to Sandwich Island River, and Reed’s River, and Payette’s and the Malade, given this name because beaver here lived on some root which made the flesh poisonous to the trapper.