Below Green River City, Wyoming, where we were to start, there was not a single settler, nor a settlement of any kind, on or near the river for a distance of more than a thousand miles.

From the river out, a hundred miles in an air line westward, across a practically trackless region, would be required to measure the distance to the nearest Mormon settlements on the Sevier, while eastward it was more than twice as far to the few pioneers who had crossed the Backbone of the Continent.

The Uinta Indian Agency was the nearest establishment to Green River.

It was forty miles west of the mouth of the Uinta.

In southern Utah the newly formed Mormon settlement of Kanab offered the next haven, but no one understood exactly its relationship to the topography of the Colorado, except from the vicinity of the Crossing of the Fathers.