The sight and smell of the carrion so common in camping places in our first trip was gone; no bleached bones even showed where the exhausted dumb brute had died; the graves of the dead emigrants had all been leveled by the hoofs of stock and the lapse of time. "What a mighty change!" I exclaimed. We had been following the old Trail for nearly 150 miles on the west slope of the mountains with scarce a vestige of civilization. Out of sight and hearing of railroads, telegraphs, or telephones and nearly a hundred miles without a postoffice. It is a misnomer to call it a "slope." It is nearly as high an altitude a hundred miles west of the summit as the summit itself. The country remains as it was fifty-four years before. The Trail is there to be seen miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path so solid that vegetation has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of wagons years ago.
As in 1852 when the summit was passed, I felt that my task was much more than half done, though the distance was scarcely compassed. I felt we were entitled to a rest even though it was a solitude, and so our preparations were made for two days' rest if not recreation. The two days passed and we saw but three persons. We traveled a week on this stretch, to encounter five persons only, and to see but one wagon, but our guide to point the way was at hand all the time—a pioneer way a hundred feet wide and in places ten feet deep, we could not mistake. Our way from this Camp 81 on Sweetwater led us from the river and over hills for fifty miles before we were back to the river again. Not so my Trail of '52, for then we followed the river closer and crossed it several times, while part of the people went over the hills and made the second trail. It was on this last stretch we set our 1,000-mile post as we reached the summit of a very long hill, eighteen miles west of where we again encountered the river, saw a telegraph line, and a road where more than one wagon a week passed as like that we had been following so long.
"Camp No. 85, June 30.—Odometer 1,044. About ten o'clock encountered a large number of big flies that ran the cattle nearly wild. We fought them off as best we could. I stood on the wagon tongue for miles so I could reach them with the whip-stock. The cattle were so excited, we did not stop at noon, finding water on the way, but drove on through by two-thirty and camped at a farmhouse, the Split Rock postoffice, the first we had found since leaving Pacific Springs, the other side of the summit of South Pass and eighty-five miles distant."