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Our supply of wood was now run out and the scanty supply of buffalo chips that we picked up on the road was not sufficient to make fire enough to warm our water for tea or coffee and often times we had to eat half raw corn dodger. The least small chip or twig laying by the road was eagerly picked up and carefully hoarded untill evening. we used the greatest engenuity to husband our fuel. we would dig a little hole in the ground about four inches wide, four deep and twelve inches long then light the fire and put on our coffee pot and frying pan then we were very saving and only put two or three little twigs into the fire at a time, the instant cooking was finished we extinguished the blaze immediately and saved the black embers for the next occasion. Journeying along slowly for we made only fifteen miles a day on an average it took us three weeks to accomplish the same distance that we had made in one week on our journey out. we arrived at the cotton wood springs and felt as though we had escaped a death from starvation by gaining the friendly shelter of the cotton woods. Unless you have experienced it you cannot imagine the luxurious feeling that comes over the prairie traveler on finding abundance of any thing that he has suffered for and been deprived of for a long time. We rested a whole day and cooked and feasted the whole time it made us perfectly happy to see the steam puffing out of the coffee pot and the slapjack "done brown" to a turn. We were now about a hundred miles from F Karney immigration still continued to flow westward in a constant stream up to this time we had met forty one crushers in route for the mountains and according to the estimate we made of people it could not be much short of twenty thousand almost every day immense government trains passed us en route for Camp Floyd and Carson Valley they were mostly owned by Mayor and Russel of ? City the proprietors of the Pony Express.