Indiana and to assist each other whan needed, on the trip we had many rivers and streams to ford, at that day bridges had not been built over them. The first river to cross was the Missouri, one of the largest in the world, we went over this on a flat boat towed by a long rope, one of the company had the misfortune to lose a span of fine horses and carriage, they accidently went off the boat while crossing and floated away down streams. They belonged to Orson Pratt, one of the twelve Apostles,, The mishap Brigham Young, who was present, to remark "What was got over the Devil'n back, was sure to go under his belly". The point in the remark being that Orson had gotten a large stock of things from the Saints in England in a way that Brigham did not fully like, and was making off with them to Zion. After crossing this river we were fairly started on our way in a journey of a thousand miles to Utah through an almost unknown country. The usual route taken by emigrants after crossing the Missouri river is in the direction of the North Platte river but this river being high and considerably overflowed along lot banks, owing to the spring freshets now prevailing, we took another direction one further north, so as to avoid the Platte, This now route was one that had never been travelled before by any one, so we were the pioneers over it, it led to the Horn river which we reached and crossed at a point about four hundred miles from our starting place on the Missouri, we had to make a bridge over this stream, as there was no ferry boat, fortunately however along its banks grew large quantity of timber and by cutting some of this down we were enabled to construct a bridge that we could cross on. I think I an safe in saying that we were the first white people to come over this route to this point where it again struck the regular emigrant trail. And the suffering and the hardships which we bore during this four hundred miles, still brings tears to my eyes while I write about it. On the way wo had to travel through a sandy desert, that was sixty miles wide. Some nights we were forced to camp in it without a drop of 208