Deadly Robideaux's Pass

After coming through Robideaux's Pass, which was exceedingly difficult, we descended into Grand River Valley. The snow lay deep, as elsewhere, and there was no sign of vegetation. One broad, white, dreary-looking plain lay before us, bounded by lofty white mountains. The Rio Grande lay fifty miles ahead, so we determined to get through the snow-covered plain as quickly as possible. We traveled late and camped in the middle of it, without any shelter from the winds, and with no fuel but some wild sage, a small shrub which grew sparsely around. At night the thermometer stood at seventeen degrees below zero. During the day Ducatel, a young fellow in the company, had come very near freezing to death. By collecting a quantity of the sage we made sufficient fire to cook, or rather half-cook, our supper of deer meat, five deer having been killed that evening by two of the men. Bolting down the half-cooked meat, we quickly turned into our blankets in order to keep tolerably warm and to protect ourselves against the driving snow, for since leaving the States we had scarcely stretched our tents. In the night, as ill luck would have it, our mules, poor creatures, which had stood shivering in the cold with bowed backs and drooping heads, suffering from their exposed situation and half-starved, being now reduced to a pint of corn twice a day, and having no other resource for food, broke loose from their weak fastenings of sage bushes and started off en masse on the back trail. As soon as it was ascertained that they were gone, in the middle of the night, we had to rise from our beds, lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike out in pursuit of them. We overtook them several miles from camp, and, taking them back, made them secure. But we rested little the remainder of the night.

Mountain man's feet frozen

The next day we reached the Rio Grande del Norte. This we found frozen over, and we camped on the river bottom, which is thickly timbered with cottonwood and willow. Here my feet and those of several others were frozen - the result in part of wearing boots, for which I quickly substituted moccasins, with blanket wrappers, which are much warmer than socks, and which, with leggings of the same material, afford the best protection for the lower extremities against severe cold.

Continuing up the river two or three days, we again entered the mountains, which soon assumed a very rugged character. Nature, in the ascent towards the Sierra Madre, presents herself with all her features prominent and strongly marked, her figures bold and colossal. Our progress became slow and laborious. Our track lay through deep mountain gorges, amid towering precipices and beetling crags, and along steep declivities where at any other season it would have been next to impossible to travel, but where now the deep snow afforded a secure foothold. In making the ascent of some of these precipitous mountain sides, now and then a mule would lose its footing and go tumbling and rolling many feet down. My saddle mule took one of these tumbles. Losing her foothold, she got her rope hitched upon a large log which lay loosely balanced on the rocks, and, knocking me down and jerking the log clear over my head, they went tumbling down together. But fortunately no one was hurt. A great obstacle to our progress were the rapid, rough-bottomed, but boggy streams which we had frequently to encounter in the deep and narrow ravines, where the mules would get balked, half a dozen at a time, with their packs on. Then we had to wade in up to our middle among the floating ice in the freezing water to help them out.

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