United States Geological Survey
The sight and smell of carrion, so common in camping places during that first journey, also were gone. No bleached bones, even, showed where the exhausted dumb brute had died. The graves of the dead pioneers had all been leveled by the hoofs of stock and the lapse of time.
The country remains as it was in '52. There the trail is to be seen miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path that vegetation has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of wagons years ago.
As in 1852, when the summit was passed I felt that my task was much more than half done, though half the distance was scarcely compassed.
On June 30, at about ten o'clock, we encountered a large number of big flies that ran the cattle nearly wild. I stood on the wagon tongue for miles to reach them with the whipstock. The cattle were so excited that we did not stop at noon, but drove on. By half-past two we camped at a farmhouse, the Split Rock post office, the first we had found in a hundred miles of travel since leaving Pacific Springs.
The Devil's Gate, a few miles distant, is one of the two best-known landmarks on the trail. Here, as at Split Rock, the mountain seems to have been split apart, leaving an opening a few rods wide, through which the Sweetwater River pours in a veritable torrent. The river first approaches to within a few hundred feet of the gap, then suddenly curves away from it, and after winding through the valley for half a mile or so, a quarter of a mile away, it takes a straight shoot and makes the plunge through the canyon. Those who have had the impression that the emigrants drove their teams through this gap are mistaken, for it's a feat no mortal man has done or can do, any more than he could drive up the falls of the Niagara.
This year, on my 1906 trip, I did clamber through on the left bank, over boulders head high, under shelving rocks. I ate some ripe gooseberries from the bushes growing on the border of the river, and plucked some beautiful wild roses, wondering the while why those wild roses grew where nobody would see them.
The gap through the mountains looked familiar as I spied it from the distance, but the roadbed to the right I had forgotten. I longed to see this place; for here, somewhere under the sands, lies all that was mortal of my brother, Clark Meeker, drowned in the Sweetwater in 1854.
