Along the Burnt River portion of the Oregon Trail, emigrants faced disease, death, wildfire-blackened hills, difficult canyon travel, exhausted livestock, and occasional theft as they struggled westward. Emigration peaked in 1852 with 10,000 would-be Oregonians, and poor sanitation and contaminated water brought fever, cholera, and dysentery to travelers who often could not stop to recover. Abigail Scot recorded the death and burial of her four-year-old son Willie there in August 1852. The Burnt River, also called Riviere Brule, took its name from fire-blackened hillsides, likely shaped by the fire ecology of local Indians, and travelers such as John C. Fremont, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, James Cayman, and Ester Belle McMillan Hanna described smoky air, burning grasslands, and dramatic fires across the mountains. The canyon itself was one of the trail's hardest stretches, requiring days of labor as emigrants cut through brush, crossed the river repeatedly, climbed steep walls, and endured frequent accidents; Joel Palmer, Riley Root, William J. Walton, Susan Cranston, Loren B. Hastings, and Joe Palmer all portrayed it as rough, crooked, hilly, rocky, and in places almost impassable. Wagons were not the only means of travel, but oxen were the preferred draft animals, even though many died of exhaustion along the Burnt River, forcing some emigrants to improvise and continue in desperate circumstances, as Sarah Sutton wrote in 1854. The route ran from Farewell Bend on the Snake River through Burnt River Canyon to Virtue Flats and around Flagstaff Hill into the Powder River drainage, now Baker Valley. Although frontier tales often emphasized violence, violent encounters with Indians were rare before 1849; emigrants more often feared or suffered horse theft, which John Kirk Townsend suspected after meeting a Snake Indian family near Brule Creek in 1834.