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Show THE GREAT BASIN OF UTAH. 27 Artillery, the assistant of Captain Gunnison, Topo-graphical Engineers, in his expedition for the survey of a railroad route, near the forty- first parallel of lati-tude, who took charge of the expedition after the massacre of Gunnison and a portion of his party by Indians on Sevier Kiver, on the 26th October, 1853. The party entered the Great Basin from the valley of Green River, by the Wasatch Pass, and a creek he calls Salt Creek, a branch of the Sevier;* and thence they returned to the usually traveled southern route from Los Angeles, and proceeded by the way of Nephi, Payson, Provo, etc., to Great Salt Lake. In the ensu-ing year, 1854, Captain Beckwith explored some of the tributaries of Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake, issuing from the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains, and, passing over the southern end of Great Salt Lake, he struck generally a north of west course, across the Great Basin, to the Humboldt Pass of the Humboldt Range; thence southwardly, in Ruby Valley, to the Hastings Road Pass of this same range; and thence, * Messrs. Beale and Heap passed over nearly this same route in 1853, in advance of Captain Gunnison's party, and, after reach-ing Yegas de Santa Clara, took the Spanish trail route to Cali-fornia. ( See Heap's Journal, published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854.) Colonel Fremont also subsequently, during the winter of 1853- 54, followed very nearly the route of Captain Gunnison to Grand River, and thence to Parowan and Cedar City, on the Spanish trail ; thence his course was directly west over the Great Basin to the Sierra Nevada, which, on account of snow, he was obliged to cross by Walker's Pass, some sixty to eighty miles to the southward. ( Fremont's letter to the editor of the National Intelligencer of June 13, 1854. House Mis. Doc. No. 8, 2d Sess., 33d Cong.) |