a 
392 New Mexico and California. 
breadth of the columns was that of the sun’s apparent diameter, and 
their height about twelve times the same diameter; they were between 
twenty and thirty degrees distant from the sun. Before the sun had 
" risen more than ten degrees, this phenomenon entirely disappeared. 
__- Some of the men calle dm my attention to this strange appearance, but 
so engrossed were they with their own calamities, that they hardly 
seemed to be in the least astonished at what they saw. 
After some little while we missed Preston and the sick man; we 
inquired, but no one knew anything about them. It was now evident 
that they had been buried beneath the snow drift, which, for some 
ee oy had filled up the nook in which we had encamped to 
the I the prairie ; as the drift was of considerable extent, much 
tl a be wasted in examining it, unless we could find where they 
had pee te tent. At-last I noticed one poor napa digging away 
to find 3 he showed me where the sick man I call- 
ed the men, an y set to work. he snow ie six te deep, 
and we head only a little piece of board to dig with, and the cold was so 
great that no one could work very long before his hands became per~ 
7 rigid. After a good deal of hard digging, we found a pair of 
s, which were recognized ‘ the men as aie 's » aoa This 
get at “a ie pole ‘of the tent, which we cut in two with ou 
Ve drew Preston out of the drift, Shick had like to bees “ated 
his eee, His bed-fellow, who had been much weakened by sickness, 
was already dead; he was the man whom we had dragged from Jack- | 
tn ’s grove to “ Pawnes, fork ;” where he had been picked u Mr. 
Brown ; since which time he had been recovering fast. Poor Pe fcc 
it was Be tiowss, erst to leave his bones on the desert prairies, where 
is requiem. JI caused the mien to dig him also out of the 
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ft, and to ee this body into a wagon, in order that we might bury 
him at the Cotton Wood fork. 
Several mules had already been frozen to death. As we proceeded, 
mules, that had d started off in apparently good condition, would drop 
down in the harness, and their limbs would become perfectly rigid. 
Even one of the oxen fell down -benumbed with cold. In a few hours 
e e lost six mules and one ox, so that our road was marked out with 
ng animals. As we approached our destined camp ground, we saw @ 
~ wolf that was so badly frozen as to be unable to move. One of the men 
‘put an end tovits sufferings by a bullet from his rifle.—pp. 126, 127. 
s in Cali, in 
