Transcript
Transcript for James A. Little, From Kirtland to Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Printed at the Juvenile Instructor Office, 1890), 205-6
"June 26th, 1849.
"Bros. Geo[rge] A Smith and E. [Ezra] T. Benson:
"My Dear Sirs: We arrived here on the 22nd and 23rd, all in tolerable health. Soon after the arrival of Brother W[illia]m Miller’s fifty, Brother Nelson McCarthy was attacked with cholera and is buried at this point. [text missing] We have waited here three days with but little prospects of crossing until today about twelve o'clock, when the Disposer of all good seems to have ordered a place for us to cross. [text missing] We have found the road very heavy. Yet our cattle have improved. [text missing] As yet I have not been able to send back the report of our numbers, but have them ready for the first opportunity. I leave them here hoping you may receive this. I do it short as I am in feeble health. Wagons, 120; souls, 352; oxen, 480; cows, 315; loose cattle, 17; horses, 29; mules, sheep, 102; pigs, 31; chickens, 62; 25 cats; dogs, 25; geese, 2; ducks, 2; doves, 7; hives of bees, 1.
Samuel Gully.”
Considering this was the third season's emigration, this company was well fitted out with animal life for the benefit of the new colony.
With the wonderful changes of forty years, it seems like a dream of the past that the writer crossed the plains in 1849, with Enoch Reese's fifty, of Captain Perkins' hundred. At one time stampedes were so frequent and dangerous that there seemed but little room for choice between hostile Indians and stampeding cattle.
So subject to panic did the cattle become, that the leaders of the people thought it advisable for the companies to break up into tens long before reaching Laramie. The following morning, after this was done, the cattle of Captain Lorenzo Clark's ten to which the writer belonged, stampeded with quite serious loss. He arrived in Great Salt Lake valley on the 16th of October.