Thomas Fitzpatrick

Fremont wants to ride over and inspect the canyon mouth yon, where he's coming down in his rubber boat on our way back." "Here, are he?" grunted Ike.

"Humph! Poor Whitehead tried that once, didn't he, 'fore his hair turned?" By Whitehead, Oliver knew that Thomas Fitzpatrick, a noted trapper captain, was meant.

"Well, he knows that Fitz lost all his furs and nigh lost his life voyaging into those canyons.

But he's bound to find out for himself, and I guess he will." The canyon mouth was located at the red cliffs up the valley about three miles.

Ugh! Too many white people in their country.

Overtook party of whites, immigrants, I reckon, at Independence Rock on Sweetwater.

Broken Hand Oliver knew that this meant Thomas Fitzpatrick again or leading party.

Half a Sioux wanted to attack, half didn't.

The mountains had trapped Bridger just as Bridger had trapped Beaver.

He told a friend in St. Louis, a man called Clayton, that he had no fixed residence and led a roving life, changing his camp as he pleased.

Bridger invited Clayton to go west with him.

Go with me now, Bridger said.

California travelers had to cross five hundred miles of dry country from Fort Hall to Reno and then get up over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and down to Sacramento, California before winter closed the mountain passes.

It had taken the Donner Party a month and a half to do the easy part of the journey from Missouri to Fort Bridger, and now they had a month to do the hard part.

But a month earlier at Fort Laramie, the party had met Lansford Hastings and Bridger's old mountain man friend, James Clyman.

Hastings and Clyman had just returned from California on horseback, and they pioneered a new trail from the middle of the Nevada Desert through the Great Salt Lake Desert in the middle of Utah, south of the Great Salt Lake, and straight through the Wasatch Mountains to Fort Bridger.