Well I moved the things that live in the bed area blocking that part of the front wall and got the plate off.
It only helped a little w/ viewing the area. It seems to mainly be for accessing the rear cab mount point.
A few hours later I had finally gotten the spring in place. Thats a ridiculous amount of time to invest in putting a spring on, two days w/ a total hours around 4.
This is how I eventually made it happen,
First off I turned the bolt that it goes on in far enough that there was enough of the bolt above the locking nut. It was adjusted so that that part was very short, probably to compensate for there being no spring in place?
Then I adjusted the point where the cable attaches so that the shoe and the bracket that the bolt goes through were closer together.
After that I tied a loop of cord around the frame cross member and had it go through the loop in the end of the spring. On the outside of that cross member I added a rod to act as a lever and a ratchet strap to hold it once it was pulled.
Then underneath I added another ratchet strap to pull down once the spring had been stretched far enough.
After stretching the spring till it was almost in place I started tightening the lower strap. Of course this required going from underneath to around the other side multiple times as I loosened the top strap a bit and then tightened the lower strap again and again.
The spring popped onto the bolt nicely using this method. Now I just need to do all the adjustments to have it working right. I can definitely understand why I found the spring in the glove box and not in place on that shoe location.