The travelling through the deep snow, whether exploring or hunting, was heart-breaking work.  The horses suffered most; the extreme toil, and scant pasturage weakened them so that some died from exhaustion; others fell over precipices and the magpies proved evil foes, picking the sore backs of the wincing, saddle-galled beasts.  In striving to find some pass for the horses the whole party was more than once strung out in detachments miles apart, through the mountains.  Early in January, near the site of the present Canyon City, Pike found a valley where deer were plentiful.  Here he built a fort of logs, and left the saddle-band and pack-animals in charge of two of the members of the expedition; intending to send back for them when he had discovered some practicable route.

    He Strikes Across the Mountains on Foot.

He himself, with a dozen of the hardiest soldiers, struck through the mountains towards the Rio Grande.  Their sufferings were terrible.  They were almost starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the men froze their feet.  Pike and Robinson proved on the whole the hardiest, being kept up by their indomitable will, though Pike mentions with gratification that but once, in all their trials, did a single member of the party so much as grumble.

    The Party almost Perishes from Starvation.

Pike and Robinson were also the best hunters; and it was their skill and stout-heartedness, shown in the time of direst need, that saved the whole party from death.  In the Wet Mountain valley, which they reached mid-January, 1807, at the time that nine of the men froze their feet, starvation stared them in the face.  There had been a heavy snowstorm; no game was to be seen; and they had been two days without food.  The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel.  Two of the soldiers went out to hunt, but got nothing.  At the same time, Pike and Robinson started, determined not to return at all unless they could bring back meat.  Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp “and behold the misery of our poor lads.”  All day they tramped wearily through the heavy snow.  Towards evening they came on a buffalo, and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as death.  That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their thin rags; they had not eaten for three days.  But they were men of indomitable spirit, and next day trudging painfully on, they at last succeeded, after another heart-breaking failure, in killing a buffalo.  At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the party broke their four days’ fast.  Two men lost their feet through frost-bite, and had to be left in this camp, with all the food.  Only the fact that a small band of buffalo was wintering in the valley had saved the whole expedition from death by starvation.