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Show Page 150 seven hundred feet above sea level. They had reached the Great Basin. While scouting the dividing ridge, Orson spotted a smoke in the distance which came from the campfire of the only white man who could be called a permanent resident of the Basin - Mr. Miles Goodyear, "a mountaineer... informed us that he had just established himself near the Salt Lake, between the mouths of Weber's Fork and Bear River..." and that he had a small garden which was doing quite nicely. When watered. The pioneers breathed both relief and anxiety - the specter of irrigating the desert clouded the future with drought and disaster. Moreover, Goodyear's pass through the Wasatch, he declared, was impassable to wagons; the only practical wagonroad was "Mr. Reid's (Donner-Reed) route across the 35 mountains." The ice of the high country gave way to more pleasant temperatures as they descended the next day to Bear River, crossed, and climbed once again to the lacy escarpments of the Weber headwater, marking the present boundary of Utah. Scrub cedar and pudding-stone. Orson made his observations as he hiked the hills and waited for a new scourge to pass - the leader was prostrated. Brigham Young suffered an attack of "mountain fever" that morning - the thin oxygen at this elevation had downed several of the 36 camp with nauseating headaches and dysentery. Orson's wagon moved slowly ahead and stopped at Reddin's Cave nearly two thousand feet below the Bear River Divide. While Orson slept, leadership of the advance party of the Camp of Israel fell to him. Brigham Young was delirious throughout the night, and though lucid in the morning, couldn't "think of moving today." The vote of the brethren called for saving time and moving forty-two men down to the valley as soon as possible - Orson was elected to lead them. |