Weber Canyon
Weber Canyon was free of brush and trees, but it was loaded with boulders and deep water. The ledges were narrow and dead-end canyons. Historian Daniel James Brown describes how one of Hastings’ groups were averaging one mile a day and having so much trouble getting their wagons through that the pioneers had to almost carry them over the boulders. They would use windlasses to drag them up the steep canyon slopes. At Devil’s Gate, one of the windlass ropes broke, sending the wagon, and the poor oxen trying to haul it, down the slope and careening down a precipice and into a bloody heap at the bottom of the canyon. As Brown states, the result was “a heap of splintered wood, twisted iron, and gore.”