CAPTAIN JOSEPH R. WALKER 357
division to find and explore the Great Salt Lake, of which Bonneville had heard, and was most anxious to gain accurate information from a trustworthy source.
More than a year had now elapsed since the expedition had left Fort Osage, and Bonneville had resolved to continue his explorations to the Columbia and trace that mighty river of the northwest to its mouth and discharge intp the vast Pacific.
"This momentous undertaking," as Captain Bonneville him- self termed the exploration of the route and the survey of the Great Salt Lake, now entrusted to Walker, resulted dis- astrously, through circumstances against which it was im- possible for him to successfully contend.
With his forty men, he had left the main body at Green River valley late in July, and pushed westward toward their alloted destination, to be met and joined by Bonneville the ensuing spring or summer.
It was an unexplored country through which they were to force their way and meantime they were to trap for furs and hunt for their own subsistence.
Along Bear River and on the headwaters of the Cassie they hunted and trapped, gathered furs and laid in a store of buffalo meat and venison.
Away southward they could see, from their greater altitude, the shining surface of the Great Salt Lake they were to reach and report upon. But they could not find or trace any stream which led to it or was tributary.
Beyond and surrounding it were deserts and utter sterility. Any who have in these times traveled overland by railroad or otherwise through the Weber canyon, and become acquainted with the impracticability of surmounting the Wahsatch range, or suffered the fatigues of the desert which stretches from the Sierra Nevada mountains to that range, will readily under- stand why Walker's party, in that primitive period of the exploration of that inhospitable, barren, and then unknown region, were unable to accomplish their desperate and perilous mission.
