By November, the brigades were on the height of land between the Sacramento and the Columbia, in the regions of alkali plains and desert mountains in northern California and Nevada. Ogden at once sent back word of his whereabouts to Chief Factor McLoughlin of Fort Vancouver, little dreaming that the trail southward, which he was now finding, would be marked by the bleaching bones of treasure hunters in the rush to the gold mines. Trappers under McKay and Gervais and Sylvaille were spread out on the headwaters of the Willamette, and the Klamath and the Sacramento; but the dusty alkali plains were too dry for beaver. In three months, only five hundred were taken, while man and beast were reduced to extremity of endurance from lack of food and water. By the 16th, they were on the very apex of the divide, a parched, alkali plain, where the men got water by scooping snow from the crevices of the rocks and tried to slake their horses’ thirst by driblets of snow-water in skin-bags. Two thirst-maddened horses dropped dead on the march, the famished trappers devouring the raw flesh like ravenous wolves. Two little lakes, or alkali sinks were found--“a Godsend to us”--writes Ogden, and the horses plunged in to saddle girths drinking of the stagnant, brackish stench. From where they paused to camp--though there was neither wood nor sage bush for fire--they could see the Umpqua in the far north, the Klamath straight northwest, a river which they did not know was the Sacramento, south; and towering in the west above the endless alkali and lava beds of the plains stretching east, the cones of a giant mountain high as Hood or Baker, opalescent and snow-capped. Ogden named both the mountain and the river here Shasta, after the name of the Indian tribes whom he met. He was on the borderlands of California, on the trail which thousands of gold-seekers were to follow from Oregon in ’49. Speaking of the Klamath Indians, he says: “They live in tents built on the water of their lakes, approachable only by canoes. The tents are of logs like block houses, the foundation stone or gravel made solid by piles sunk six feet deep. The Indians regretted we had found our way through the mountains. They said, ‘the Cayuses tried to attack us, but could not find the trail. Now they will follow yours.’”