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Show Page 149 Sandy River, where they encountered another, more renowned voice in the wilderness - Jim Bridger on his way to Laramie. "His information was rather more favorable than that of Major Harris," Orson writes, though Bridger cautioned them about bringing a big emigration into the basin 33 until they were sure the soil was good. By this time, two thousand Saints were already tramping the Nebraska River four hundred miles back. With time closing in from both ends, the van pushed southwest for Fort Bridger, plagued by summer mosquitoes and unsettling rumors about the desert they were planning to colonize. To add to their anxieties, Sam Brannan came tottering into camp after having raveled his way eastward on the nightmarish Donner-Reed trail. Though they were excited to see him, the brethren palled at the tales of cannibalism he carried as an eyewitness to the tragic scene - he had examined himself the "skulls, bones, and carcasses" that lay strewn in the passes and had interviewed the old German Keseberg, who had personally devoured several of his fellow wanderers. Brannan was himself staggered at Brigham Young's determination to settle the salt waste, huckstering California for all he was worth. 34 No one was listening. In the southwest corner of what is now Wyoming, the pioneer leaders could smell Zion in the distance. Ham's Fork, Black's Fork Rivers, and at last the trading post of Jim Bridger, surrounded by Shoshone lodges and mosquito-infested gullies. They found frost on the ground on the eighth of July. Orson spent two days at the fort, taking astronomical observations and examining the route southwest to the lake valley, while carpenters and blacksmiths were shoring up and repairing the dilapidated wagons. In many ways, the journey ahead to achieve Zion was yet the most perilous. On July 10, they left the Oregon trail beyond Muddy Creek, where Orson i _.-.-_J f^a oo-ralled 'Bear River Divide" at an elevation seven thousand, |