With an experience of suffering that would have well served a
better cause, this picked detachment of the United States army
made its way to the Green River country; and there, counting well
the cost of proceeding farther, went into camp at Fort Bridger.
Many of the troops had almost perished in the storms, for it was
late in November, and the winter had closed in early. Colonel
Cooke reported to the commandant that half his horses had
perished through cold and lack of food; hundreds of beef cattle
had died; yet the region was so wild and forbidding that scarcely
a wolf ventured there to glut itself upon the carcasses. In
Cooke's own words we read that for thirty miles the road was
blocked with carcasses--and "with abandoned and shattered
property, they mark, perhaps beyond example in history, the steps
of an advancing army with the horrors of a disastrous retreat."

With the army traveled the new federal appointees to offices in
the territory. Cumming, the governor-to-be, issued a
proclamation from his dug-out lodgings, and sent it to Salt Lake
City by courier; he signed it as "Governor of Utah Territory."
This but belittled him, for by the very terms of the Organic Act,
to uphold which was the professed purpose of his coming, he was
not governor until the oath of office had been duly administered
and subscribed. A few days later he went before his
fellow-sufferer Eckles, the appointee for chief justice of Utah,
and took an oath; but why did he swear so recklessly when the one
before whom he swore was no more an official than himself?

The army wintered at a satisfactory distance from Salt Lake City,
and such a winter, according to official reports, the soldiers of