Limited space prohibits my recounting the exploits of even the smaller part of the trappers of this period, but with what follows I believe the reader will possess a sufficient picture of the life of the Rocky Mountain Trapper at this time.* A trail from Santa Fe to California was opened by way of what is now Gunnison Valley on Green River, and thence west by about the same route that Jedediah Smith followed, that is, down the Virgen River, by William Wolfskill who went out by this route to Los Angeles, in l830.** There were trappers now in every part of the wilderness, excepting always the canyons of the Green and Colorado, which were given a wide berth as their forbidding character became better known; and as time went on the stories of those who had here and there looked into the angry depths, or had essayed a tilt with the furious rapids at one or two northern points, were enlarged upon, and, like all unknown things, the terrors became magnified.

* The reader is referred for exact details to the admirable work by H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West.

** H. H. Bancroft says 1831-2.

It was in 1832 that Captain Bonneville entered Green River Valley, but as his exploits belong more properly to the valley of the Columbia, I shall not attempt to mention any of them here, referring the reader to the delightful account by Washington Irving.

In May, 1839, a traveller who was a careful observer, Thomas J. Farnham, went from New Mexico across the mountains to Brown’s Hole en route for Oregon, and a portion of his narrative* is of deep interest in this connection, because his guide, Kelly, gave him some account of the Green and Colorado, which reflects the amount of real knowledge then possessed concerning the canyon-river.

* Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory, by Thomas J. Farnham.  There is a copy in the library of Columbia University, New York.

“The Grand unites with the Seedskeedee or Green River to form the Colorado of the West.  From the junction of these branches the Colorado has a general course from the north-east to the south-west of seven hundred miles to the head of the Gulf of California.  Four hundred of this seven hundred miles is an almost unbroken chasm of kenyon, with perpendicular sides hundreds of feet in height, at the bottom of which the waters rush over continuous cascades.  This kenyon terminates thirty [should be three hundred] miles above the gulf.  To this point the river is navigable.  The country on each side of its whole course is a rolling desert of loose brown earth, on which the rains and the dews never fall.  A few years since, two Catholic missionaries and their servants on their way from the mountains to California, attempted to descend the Colorado.  They have never been seen since the morning they commenced their fatal undertaking.

“A party of trappers and others made a strong boat and manned it well with the determination of floating down the river to take beaver that they supposed lived along its banks.  But they found themselves in such danger after entering the kenyon that with might and main they thrust their trembling boat ashore and succeeded in leaping upon the crags and lightening it before it was swallowed in the dashing torrent.”