Here they had found the old trapper amid a score of nondescript human beings, white men, Indian women, and half-breed children.
Bridger had told them very concisely that he would pay them a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised in Salt Lake Valley.

It is true that Bridger seemed to have become pessimistic in many matters.

For one, the West was becoming overcrowded and the price of furs was falling at a rate to alarm the most conservative trapper.

He referred feelingly to the good old days when one got ten dollars a pound for prime beaver skins in St.Louis; but "now it's a skin for a plug of tobacco, and three for a cup of powder, and other fancies in the same proportion." And so, had his testimony been unsupported, they might have suspected he was underestimating the advantages of the Salt Lake Valley.

But, corroborated as he had been by his brother trappers, they began to descend the western slope of the Rockies strong in the opinion that this same Salt Lake Valley was the land that had been chosen for them by the Lord.
They dared not, indeed, go to a fertile land, for there the Gentiles would be tempted to follow them--with the old bloody end.