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Show THE GREAT BASIN OF UTAH. 15 they beheld the Great Salt Lake, spread out like a sea; but they found no stream running into it. A desert extended around them, and stretched to the southwest, as far as the eye could reach, rivaling the deserts of Asia and Africa in sterility. There was neither tree, nor herbage, nor spring, nor pool, nor running stream; nothing but parched wastes of sand, where horse and rider were in danger of perishing. " Their sufferings at length became so great that they abandoned their intended course and made to-ward a range of snowy mountains, brightening in the north, where they hoped to find water. After a time, they came upon a small stream leading directly toward these mountains. Having quenched their burning thirst, and refreshed themselves and their weary horses for a time, they kept along this stream, which grad-ually increased in size, being fed by numerous brooks. After approaching the mountains, it took a sweep toward the southwest, and the travelers still kept along it, trapping beaver as they went, on the flesh of which they subsisted for the present, husbanding their dried meat for future necessities. " The stream on which they had thus fallen is called by some Mary's River, but is more generally known as Ogden's River, from Mr. Peter Ogden, an enterprising and intrepid leader of the Hudson's Bay Company, who first explored it."* * It must be borne in mind that the Humboldt River consti-tutes a portion of the Great Basin system. Lieutenant Warren, in his Memoir, p. 36, says, " The party from the Hudson Bay Company, referred to in the postscript to Mr. Campbell's letter, was under the enterprising leader, Mr. Peter Ogden, who dis- |