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Show 27 But the Forty-niners pushed ahead, aud, notwithstanding their tragedy, they explored a sizeable portion of virgin territory in the Great Basin. The missionaries and others who turned back also explored some new territory when they took new routes to intersect the Spanish Trail. Coincidently, it was a survivor of the Death Valley affair who would guide the White Mountain expedition across some of the same desert nine years after his own close brush with death. Also in 1849 came the expedition of Captain Howard Stansbury of the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers. Stansbury, however, penetrated the deserts of the Great Basin only as far as Pilot Peak near the present, Utah-Nevada line west of the Great Salt Lake. His was basically a survey of the lake. The ill-fated Gunnison survey was the next to enter the Basin. The Gunnison party came to Utah to survey for a railroad in 1853• Captain John W. Gunnison had first come to the area with the Stansbury expedition. The topographical engineers had not penetrated the desert very far, however, when they were surpised and massacred by a party of Ute warriors on October 26. This occurred on the Sevier River not far from the Sevier Lake. As a result, punitive expeditions against the Indians were sent out by the Utah militia and penetrated the Sevier desert to an unknown extent. Command of the Pacific railroad survey now fell upon Lieutenant Edward G. Beckwith, one of Gunnison's assistants. In 1854 Beckwith was successful in establishing a route across the Great Basin at roughly the 40th parallel, but according to Simpson, a fellow engineer,;"it was too far north and too tortuous to be of great value."9 The trail ran approximately parallel to the Humboldt River but about a full degree south of it. A most circuitous route, it wound around every mountain range from the south end of the Great Salt Lake to the Sierra Nevadas, The trail was rarely, if ever, used. |
