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Show SALT FLAT NEWS, JULY, 1971 fe tetf !x 0 5 0 db rll BY HENRY J. WEBB On August 17, 1962, an ex- pedition (joculaily termed Expedition Mirage) was conducted across the Great Salt Desert in the wake of the Donner-Ree- d party. Tlie trail is called the Donner-Ree- d trail, not because the Don-ner- s and the Reeds pioneered the road, but because their unfortun-- . ate experiences along it made their names seem paramount to later historians and map makers. Actually the first white men to cross this desert perhaps the first men of any race, since its forbidding nature would have discouraged red men from venturing upon it were members of John Charles Fremonts third expedition. Led by the scouts Kit Car-soLuden Maxwell, Auguste n, Archambeau, and Basil the Fremont party made the trek from Redlum Spring in the Cedar Mountains to Lajeunesse, Pilot Springs between October 26 or 27, and October 39, 1845. The following year on May' 28 and 29 a group led by Lansford W. Hastings and chronicled by James Clyman, made file same journey from west to east. Finally, in the summer and fall of 1846, the the Bryant-Russel- l, Harlan-Youn- g, the Hoppe, and the Donner-Ree- d parties all made the fearful long drive on the Hastings . Cutoff (as this whole route south of the Fort Hall road came to be called). Some forty-ninetraveled the cutoff in their mad rush to get to the gold fields, and numerous eager souls braved it in the early 1850s. Thereafter the road remained unused until modem historians endeavored to unravel the secrets kept so well by salt, sand, and mud. First thoughts would lead one to believe that,- after all these years, the road would have been obliterated; and, indeed, in most rs - places it has either been eroded away, sur planted by modern highways, or completely garbled by the chuck wagons and jeeps of sheepherders and cattlemen. It can, of course, be followed across over sand dunes (which occupy several miles of the desert in the vicinity of Knolls); churned the Cedar Mountains, for Hastings Pass is still used, albeit infrequently; and there is a short dugway in Grayback that may have been constructed by members of file lead wagons in 1846. But out on file mud flats themselves, for mile after mile, the old road stretches out in unbelievable clarity, not as ruts cut deep by the passage of numerous wagons, but as streaks of black on gray or, in certain places, white on gray a phenomenon undoubtedly caused by the churning up of different colors of mud and sand with subsequent filling in and flattening out by the action of water which stands on the desert a great portion of each year. Our expedition of August, 1962, was a successful attempt to follow these streaks from a point several miles north of Knolls, Utah, to Pilot Springs on the Utah-Nevad- a border. We, of course, were not the first to all or portions of this fascinating road, but we may well have been the last. Since this section of the desert is used as a bombing range, the United States Air Force is reluctant to give persons permission to travel upon it. Among recent attempts to explore the area were those made by Charles Kelly in 1929, Walter M. Stookey in 1936, and the present writer and his colleagues every year since 1956. This time our vehicles were three Trackmasters and one Spryte provided by the Thiokol rec-onnoit- er Chemical Company. 'These tracked vehicles were ideal for the trek,, for with ease they pulled through sticky, gumbo mud; and climbed in and out of the steep ravines which slash through the western slopes of Silver Island. We intercepted the pioneer road at 7.2 miles north of U. S. Highway 40 on a stretch of mud that bore unmistakable traces of the wheels of prairie schooners. Here the wagons did not follow one after the other so as to produce a single set of tracks, but instead spread out over an area of several yards testifying to the fact that some of the wagons either traveled abreast or pulled out and around deep and muddy ruts cut by wheels rolling ahead of them. From time to time as we progressed across the desert, we encountered similar multitracked areas, the widest being in the vicinity of Floating Island, not a great distance beyond some abandoned wagons. We lost the tracks in the dunes, as from previous experience we knew we would, for the shifting sands do not retain impressions which the mud does. But after a brief search, we picked them iip again. The tracks were heading, not for Pilot Peak, however, but in a southwesterly direction, for all the world as if the pioneers had changed their minds and wished to use the pass in the vicinity of Wendover. Actually, present-da- y were they making a wide swing to the southwest, only to turn back toward Pilot Peak after approximately five miles. The reason for this mysterious switch is perhaps not so mysterious after all. Although the diaries do not say so, the summer of 1846 must have been inordinately wet at least salt-encrust- ed compared with onrecent (Continued page 6) NCWt pfcMo courtesy UTECHNIC MAGAZINE Dr. Henry J. Webb commonly referred to as the Flying Banana saw a great amount of action in operations on the Great Salt Lake Desert. In above picture the Banana assists in the retracing of the Hastings Cutoff near Knolls, Utah. H-2-1 |