of your children the numerous vicissitudes and dangers I have encountered by land and sea since I parted with you in Brimfield. It would fill a volume of many pages. But I will give a few items from the time I left Missouri, in April, 1846, for Oregon.
THE PARTY AND THEIR OUTFIT.
I expected all three of my children to accompany me, but Mathano was detained by sickness, and his wife was unwilling to leave her parents. I provided for myself a good ox wagon-team, a good supply of what was requisite for the comfort of myself, Captain Brown and my driver. Uncle John insisted on coming, an-l crossed the plains on horseback. Orus Brown, with his wife and eight children, Virgil K. Pringle, Pherne Brown, husband and five children, fitted out their separate families and joined a train of forty or more for Oregon, in high expectation of gaining the wished-for land of promise. Our journey, with little exception, was pleasing and prosperous until after we passed Fort Hall. Then we were within eight hundred miles of Oregon City, if we had kept on the old road down the Columbia River.
THE FALSE GUIDE.
But three or four trains of emigrants were decoyed off by a rascally fellow who came out from the settlement in Oregon assuring us that he had found a new cut-off, that if we would follow him we would be in the settlement long before those who had gone down the Columbia. This was in August. The idea of shortening a long journey caused us to yield to his advice. Our sufferings from that time no tongue can tell. He said he would clear the road before us, so that we should have no trouble in rolling our wagons after him. But he robbed us of what he could by lying, and left us to the depredations of Indians and wild beasts, and to starvation. But God was with us. We had sixty miles of desert without grass or water, mountains to climb, cattle giving out, wagons breaking, emigrants sick and dying, hostile Indians to guard against by night and day, if we would save ourselves and our horses and cattle from being arrowed or stolen.
We were carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon into Utah Territory and California; fell in with the Clamotte [Klamath] and Rogue River Indians, lost nearly all our cattle, passe-l the Umpqua Mountains, 12 miles through. T rode through in three days at the risk of my life, on horseback, having lost my wagon and all that T had but the horse I was on. Our families were the first that started through the canyon, so that we got through the mud and rocks much better than those that followed. Out of hundreds of wagons, only one came through without breaking. The canyon was
