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Show Page 151 In many ways, this was the most difficult part of the trail. Wagon ruts left by several hundred wagons the previous season were virtually untraceable, and the Donner-Reed party had wandered panic-stricken in and out of the box canyons of the Wasatch for days before finally breaking through. Orson's specific charge was to find "Mr. Reid's route" and guide twenty-three wagons through the dry, itching heat of the mountains to Great Salt Lake. And make a road for the thousands who were coming. "We resumed our journey," reads Orson's entry for July 14, the record of thirteen miles to the Weber River through the eerie resonance of Echo Canyon, between rock walls a thousand feet high and as red as the sun. With characteristic detachment Orson writes," truly...very interesting and exceedingly picturesque." Constantly taking his bearings, he led the van into the green scrub and aspen of the Wasatch, a twisting terrain delved by creeks and towering dry bluffs. He was fortunate to have chief outrider Stephen Markham with him, along with Porter Rockwell and John Brown. Markham sidled down the north defile, while Orson and John Brown struck out to look for the Donner-Reed traces in the gullies south of the Weber. Convinced he had found the trail in a cottonwood ravine, Orson returned to the camp with the cheerful news that the thickets they were about to pass through had been trampled with huge tracks and holes - the bears, he reported, "must be very numerous." The road took shape slowly. Orson directed a dozen men with axes through the narrowing, nearly imperceptible ruts, criss-crossing streams and hacking at willows. The discouraging prospect of "hills piled on hills and mountains on mountains" met him when he ascended asummit to look for the valley, and what was worse, to discover that his road had hit one of Donner-Reed's dead-ends. Sunday they rested, and Monday Orson and John Brown plunged down "Kanyon Creek" four miles to a high ridge. "On the |