The official report gave the loss in killed and wounded by the Indians as 1137, or 36 Indians to each defender. In July, 1908, the old chief, Red Cloud, at the age of ninety years, met with General Carrington, and a few other survivors of the Wyoming command of 1866, upon those bloody Wyoming battlefields to review the scene of those conflicts.
As stated in the St. Louis Globe Democrat, and also by General Carrington, who again met Red Cloud on the battlefield in 1909, the old chief then admitted a loss of 1500 braves—and that was the result of the wagon box fight, possibly the most thrilling and disastrous Indian defeat of which we have any record. All this closely followed the Laramie treaty of July, 1866, to which reference has been made so repeatedly.
Thus the war ended. The pathway was opened for emigration to what was then more attractive territory further west, and there was removed one obstacle to the final development of Wyoming, which was still a part of the Great American Desert. These events are mentioned also to show the general condition of affairs in Wyoming while we and hundreds of other travelers were following its trails.
[CHAPTER XVI]
The Mormon Trail
IF while we were at our camp near Laramie on the bank of the North Platte we could have turned the wheels of time backward just nineteen years, we might have seen the first pioneer Mormon train in a long, straggling line slowly trekking across the trackless sands down the western slope that leads to the shore of that turbulent river, for this was the point where that band ferried the stream in a flat boat.
According to the description of the expedition given in the diary of William Clayton, who was one of the party, and in our personal interviews with other participants, it was a promiscuous line of vehicles, seventy-two in all. Some of them were drawn each by two oxen, others by horses, and still others by mules. One hundred and forty-three men and boys and three women composed the party, the greater number being on foot. A few cows were driven in the rear. For seven weeks they had been pushing their way across the trackless plain, marking out the first white man's path that had been traced north of the Platte.
Their wagon tracks were followed year after year, chiefly by teams of Mormon emigrants, and came to be known as the Mormon trail. Some of these trains consisted in part of hand carts drawn by men and women struggling to reach the desert valley in the mountains. Nearly every curve in the course of this trail until near the junction of the North and South Platte Rivers was followed later by the Union Pacific Railway as originally laid, its ties along much of its course being placed in the tracks of the first Mormon wagons. The railroad in recent years has been appreciably straightened. The Mormon trail entered the Oregon trail at the point where our boys were camped. This Mormon pilgrimage, as described in Mormon annals that were kindly furnished me by Mr. Jensen (at one time their church historian) reads like the exodus of the Children of Israel through the deserts of Arabia; and Brigham Young was the Moses. On reaching the river at the point where we were camped, they were famishing with hunger. With the aid of a boat made of ox hides, they ferried some Oregon emigrants over the upper Platte in exchange for flour, which in their Thanksgiving service they described as manna sent from heaven. Fiery serpents were stated to have been encountered at various times, but later pilgrims have encountered nothing worse than rattlesnakes. They were surprised to find bitter waters along this unknown pathway, and their stock was suffering from thirst, but those who followed them found only alkali ponds, which indeed sometimes proved fatal to horses. They met hostile Indians, who were quite as much to be feared as were the giant sons of Anak, or the large-limbed Og of Bashan.
This movement of the Mormons marks an important epoch in the physical development of the vast deserts of the West. They were the first emigrants to plant a successful colony between the Missouri and the Pacific Coast. If there ever was an apparently hopeless desert, on which agriculture would seem to be utterly impracticable, it was that which lies around and west of the Great Salt Lake. The climate was arid, and the dry soil was loaded with alkaline salts, supposedly destructive to most vegetable life. Risking the hazards of famine in a venture hitherto untried, they solved the problem of arousing the latent energies of an acrid, sterile soil in an arid climate, and made the desert bloom.