As they did not return next day according to the plan, scouts were dispatched, who found the bodies cut to pieces and spitted before a great fire.
On the 28th of March they came to a place on the river where "the mountains shut in so close upon its shores that we were compelled to climb a mountain and travel along the aclivity, the river still in sight, and at an immense depth beneath us." This was probably Black Canyon; they are the first white men on record to reach it.

They now took a remarkable journey of fourteen days, but unfortunately little detail is given, probably because Pattie's editor considered a cut across the country of little importance.

They travelled, they thought, one hundred leagues along these canyons, with the "river bluffs on the opposite shore never more than a mile" from them.* Thus they evidently did not see the Grand Canyon at its widest part.

By April 10th they arrived "where the river emerges from these horrid mountains, which so cage it up as to deprive all human beings of the ability to descend to its banks and make use of its waters.

No mortal has the power of describing the pleasure I felt when I could once more reach the banks of the river." They had suffered for food on this journey, but now they were again in a beaver country and also killed plenty of elk, the skins of which they dressed for clothing.