While Elijah Elliott undertook to guide people across the new route , he himself had never been over it . On his trip West he had thought to have gone first to California and then North into Oregon. Coming from the Willamette Valley to meet his family , he supposedly took the Barlow trail around Mt Hood, then joined the usual Oregon Trail near The Dalles.Elliott was also not aware that the party surveying and blazing the new route had turned back in July because of unusually deep snow in the high Cascades .Dr Robert Alexander,who had taken the contract to "improve" the as far as the Deschutes by June 1853, had also given up after working as far as it was marked . A few other tales of experiences along the trail have been told and retold in various branches of the Rickard family ,although no one in their party seems to have kept a diary. What was remembered fits perfectly in precisely with the Nenefee account .For some days it was possible to follow the tracks of a previous lost wagon train, that of 1845. Their guide,Stephen Meek, had lost his way , deserted them, and they had finally gone north to the Columbia after considerable hardship and wandering in Eastern Oregon. Headwaters of the Deschutes River were supposed to be much farther east than they really are,and the Silvies River was mistaken for a branch of the Deschutes. Looking for an easier place to ford that river,the trains turned south, upstream, leaving the Meek tracks.Eventually they circled clear around to south Harney and Malheur Lakes.Much of this country is low and marshy. The fact, a huge bird refuge has been established there in more recent years.For some reason they kept on circling, until they finally realized they could seethe point where they had started south a week earlier. Since it was routine to follow in the tracks of the previous train, if the first ones went astray , the others would follow. Scouts sent ahead to mark the route and and waterholes were able to reach the Deschutes in 11 days. Wagons, traveling much more slowly, could not always reach water in time to keep from making a dry camp .Bird Rickard wrote that " two days they wandered in a sandy desert, and a ox died for which a milch cow was substituted". Sarah (Rickard) Conger said that........ for seven weeks they wandered over the country, in a pitable plight, their food supply almost gone......." On one occasion a party was said to have returned to a prevous camp site,gathered up the bones from butchering and boiled them for the marrow. Since they reached the Willamette Valley on the first day of November , they must have left Vale about the second week of September. -- Linda Rogers