Upon the upper Mad river, now called Snake, they met with a party of four trappers, which the Astorians had left in the mountains the year previous. These consisted of Edward Robinson, a Kentuckian who in a brush with the Indians at an earlier date had lost his scalp, and John Hoback, Jacob Rizner and Jacob Miller. The Blackfeet had stripped them completely, and the first three named returned to the mountains to recoup their lost fortunes, while Miller joined Stuart's party, which made it again seven in number. Robinson. Hoback and Rizner all perished in the wilderness.

Stuart's party proceeded onward, and met with many hardships. When near the continental divide, which they crossed on October 20th; when for several days they had been without food, LeClerc, a French-Canadian, came to the leader with the startling proposition that they cast lots to see who should die to furnish food for the others. To obtain the consent of Stuart, he proposed that the leader should not take the hazard. Unable to prevail upon the man to desist from his horrible suggestion in any other way. Stuart told him that if In- heard another word of it. the man who made the suggestion would be the one to die. The Canadian subsided, and fortunately they soon thereafter killed a run-down buffalo bull.

With lives sustained, the party was enabled to continue proceed as tin- discoverers of 1 Iverland Trail, which from the east as far west as western Wyoming, has been used with only slight variation-, by ( Iregon emigrants, California gold seekers, ami Mormons.