Edwin Bryant's Trail Through Western Utah

EDWIN BRYANT'S TRAIL THROUGH WESTERN UTAH

By Henry J. Webb

Edwin Bryant, member and chronicler of one of the first westward-trekking emigrant parties to reach Fort Bridger in the summer of 1846, was convinced by Lansford W. Hastings that the new route west, via the south end of the Great Salt Lake, would shorten the distance to California by 150 to 200 miles. As a result, he and eight others under the temporary guidance of James M. Hudspeth left the fort on July 20 and struck out for Salt Lake Valley and the mountains and deserts to the west.

Much of his route as far as Grantsville, Utah, has been carefully retraced; but to my knowledge, no one has endeavored to cover precisely the trail he took from Skull Valley to Pilot Peak on the Utah- Nevada border, although J. Roderic Korns and Charles Kelly have contributed generously to our knowledge of this area. With the help of a grant from the University of Utah Research Fund, a small party of historians spent many days over a period of four years in the mountains and deserts attempting to map and photograph Bryant's trail, which deviates considerably from the wagon road cut by the Harlan-Young company and their followers.

J. Roderic Korns surmised, and I agree, that Bryant crossed the Stansbury Mountains by way of North Willow Canyon. The entrance to this canyon is an inviting and gentle slope. The canyon itself, until the foot of the ridge is reached, rises easily. The saddle in the ridge, which could have been seen as soon as Bryant skirted the Oquirrh Mountains, appears deceptively low and accessible — so low and accessible, in fact, that any rider not wanting to swing north of the Stansbury Mountains would have headed for it without hesitation.

Today it is a simple matter to go up the canyon to the base of the saddle, for a well-defined dirt road has been bladed out to several mine shafts; and any horseman or hiker can readily continue up the winding path that leads over the hump into Skull Valley. This path has been well worn by modern cattle and sheep men. Sheep herders whom I met in the vicinity told me that in their youth they had used this trail to go to dances in Grantsville from the spread of ranches in Skull Valley, and, because of the description of it by Bryant in What I Saw in California, I am reasonably sure it is the same route — or within yards of the same route — that Bryant and his party pioneered.

The descent on the western side of the mountain, "although steep," as Bryant says, "is not difficult"; and one making the hike soon runs into a jeep road that leads through Pass Canyon, which contains several cool and invigorating springs ,down to Iosepa (now the Deseret Ranch). The eventual importance of the springs above Iosepa — springs which earlier had been missed by both Fremont and Clyman and which were subsequently used by all immigrants traveling the Hastings Cutoff — was not recognized by Bryant, probably because he had just come out of North Willow Canyon, which runs plenty of water. Bryant merely acknowledged the presence of "a faint stream which flows from the hills and sinks in the sands just below." But the later members of the wagon parties, all of whom went around the northern tip of the Stansbury Mountains and, therefore, had only salt springs with which to refresh themselves, welcomed this sweet water with enthusiasm, the wheels of their prairie schooners cutting a well-defined road to their source.

On the slope, still standing, just as Bryant describes it, is "a grove of small cedars, the deep verdure of which is some relief to the brown and dead aspect of vegetable nature" all around.

From this point, Bryant's route across the alkali of Skull Valley to Redlum Spring on the eastern slope of the Cedar Mountains becomes a matter of conjecture. There is a kind of sugar-loaf, terraced butte directly east of the spring in what might be called the foothills of the Cedars, and a trace of the pioneer wagon road skirts this butte on the north and then loops southwest again to Redlum.

Perhaps Bryant went this way. It is even reasonable to suppose that the wagon trains took the route which they did because they happened upon the relatively fresh tracks left by Bryant and followed them to the spring. (Bryant, it will be remembered, was less than a month ahead of the leading wagon trains.)

That this may indeed be the direction taken by Bryant is further supported by the fact that he struck Fremont's trail on the east slope of the Cedars; and Fremont, approaching Redlum Canyon along a southwest course, would certainly never have circled south of the butte.'

In any event, we know that on August 2 Bryant camped at Redlum Spring at the spot used earlier by Fremont and later by all the wagon trains preparing for the "long drive" through Hastings Pass and across the Great Salt Desert. With his usual attention to detail, Bryant portrays the area as follows: "There are a few dwarf cedars in our vicinity, and scattered bunches of dead grass. In a ravine near us the sand is moist; and by making an excavation, we obtained a scant supply of water, impregnated with salt and sulphur."

The site remains much the same to this day, except that ranchers have piped the water to a number of troughs for their cattle so that the flow is now greater than it was when the immigrants went through. Immediately below the troughs is a small pond; above them, a large, rusted water tank. On the north bank of the ravine is the remnant of a small cabin. Around the source of the spring the ground is always moist — even in mid-summer and early fall — and we, by digging down a foot or so, obtained a trickling of murky but not unpalatable drinking water. Interestingly enough, although we drank of the spring, our horses, like the cattle in the Hoppe party, refused to touch it.

From Redlum Spring almost to the crest of the Cedars, the trail is obvious. (This trail, of course, is not the one which Hastings took over the Cedars going east nor the one which the Harlan-Young Company and others cut with their prairie schooners going west. The wagon road looped north and then west from Redlum, entering Hastings Pass at a point approximately 2.5 miles from the spring.) Redlum has a smooth sand and gravel bottom and a gentle incline for approximately 3.5 miles; even after a rain storm, which usually tears great ruts in this canada, a jeep can readily pull up to the base of the ridge. For a horseman to follow any other route is unimaginable. At the head of Redlum Canyon, however, several forks occur; and it is very difficult to decide which one Bryant may have taken. We know that he lost the Fremont trail somewhere in the Cedars, for he speaks of picking it up again in the valley; and perhaps here, at one of these forks, the Fremont and Bryant trails part company for a while.

To satisfy ourselves that we were doing our best to retrace this portion of the course, we abandoned jeep and foot and enlisted the services of an experienced rancher and pathfinder — Mr. Keith Holbrook of Salt Lake City — and beginning at the spring, rode horseback over the summit of the Cedars and down into the valley below. Relying on his horseman's instinct and more than fifty years in the saddle, Mr. Holbrook chose the most likely fork leading west. This fork, a narrow ravine winding between a steep hill on the south and several leg-tiring hogbacks on the north, ends in a sharp incline at the summit of the mountain; and once we lurched to the top of this ridge, we had a clear and magnificent view of Pilot Peak, approximately seventy miles away.

The descent was almost exactly as Bryant remembered: "two or three miles, by a winding and precipitous path through some straggling, stunted, and tempest-bowed cedars." We ran into several dune-like sand hills and some ridges of slippery, black gravel, however, which Bryant does not mention; and at one point, being rim-rocked, we had to retrace our steps for a hundred yards or so; but we moved down into the valley without great difficulty, coming out by Lone Rock.

When we were on the summit of the Cedar Mountains, we could see where Bryant should have gone had he, at this point, been guiding himself on Pilot Peak — in a straight line from Lone Rock, over the southern-most saddle in Grayback, to the north of Floating Island, and through the Donner-Reed Pass in the Silver Range. But unfortunately Bryant could not see the peak since, on August 3, 1846, the whole basin was filled with a smoky haze. Accordingly, instead of striking directly for Pilot Peak when he came out of the mountains, he had to search for Fremont's trail among the sage and greasewood of the valley floor. He found a "blind" trail, visible and invisible by turns, which he assumed to be Fremont's; and this trail led him "through a narrow gap" in Grayback, "the walls of which were perpendicular, and composed of the same dark scorrious material as the debris strewn around. . . ." Passing a little further on, Bryant stood "on the brow of a steep precipice. . . ."

There is only one gap in Grayback that fits this description. It is a mile or so north of U.S. Highway 40 and now contains a rough access road to a line of telephone poles that march over the ridge and into the desert. A jeep can pull up to this ridge and horses can take riders down the cliff to the brink of the desert.

We made a careful search of the area at the western base of Grayback in several different seasons — sometimes on horseback, once with Tote-Gotes, but mostly by jeep and on foot — but our efforts were not especially rewarding. Trails there are in profusion, streaking off in different directions, crossed and re-crossed by jeep tracks, military roads, and sheep and cattle paths — but that one of these might be a remnant of Bryant's (or Fremont's) course, no one, I am sure, will ever be able to say. In fact, even the old road made by the wagon trains is, in this particular sector of the desert, effectively obscured by nature and the activities of modern man.

Spring in Pass Canyon in the Stansbury Mountains used by all immigrants.

Looking west toward Pilot Peak ffom the brow of the Cedar Mountains.

Further west, the sand dunes remain mute. Even the mud flats, which retain clear signs of the pioneer road, no longer hold the hoof marks of Bryant's mules, not even in the wettest portion where the animals sank to their knees in the mixture of salt, sand, and clay. We can only surmise that Bryant, warned by Hudspeth of the necessity for speed on this grim and desolate plain, pressed his animals directly toward Pilot Peak as soon as he could see it through the haze, which was about 2:00 P.M. on August 3. We can place him at this time between six and nine miles east of Floating Island, for, having dismounted from his mule to make it easier for her to plough through the muck, he did not reach Floating Island until three hours later, at 5:00 P.M. At 2:00 P.M V however, he would have easily noticed the gap that separates Silver Island from Crater Island, the gap now known as the Donner-Reed Pass; presumably he headed directly for it.

In any event, the route from Floating Island to Pilot Peak is unmistakable to anyone who has ever examined this terrain and who has also read What I Saw in California. Heading northwest, Bryant temporarily left the salt and clay plain behind him, and mounting the alluvium that surrounds Silver Island, bent to the left and spurred directly across Pilot Valley for the spring that flows up from the base of Pilot Peak. There he and his companions remained for two nights and a day recuperating strength for the harsh, dry journey through Nevada.

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