“We came eighteen miles to-day,” wrote Jean, under date of May 28, “and halted for the night opposite Grand Island, in the Platte River, where we find both wood and pasture. All day we floundered through the muddy roads, occasionally getting almost swamped in heavy and treacherous bogs, with ‘water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ I’m too tired to write, and too sleepy to think.”
On the evening of May 29 she added: “We started early, and reached Fort Kearney after eight miles of heavy wheeling, where we halted to write letters for the folks at home, and examine many things quaint and crude and curious. The old fort is weather-worn, and a general air of dilapidation pervades its very atmosphere. There are two substantial dwellings for the officers, though; and they (I mean the officers) keep up a show of military pomp, very amusing to us, but quite necessary to maintain in an Indian country, to hold the savage instinct in check. The officers were very gracious to daddie, and very kind and condescending to the rest of us. They made us a present of some mounted buffalo-horns, some elks’ antlers, and the stuffed head of a mountain sheep, all of which, mother says, we’ll be glad to leave at the roadside before the weary oxen haul them very far.
“A week ago a party passed us, going westward with a four-wheeled wagon, two yokes of discouraged oxen, two anxious-looking men, two dispirited women, and about fourteen snub-nosed, shaggy-headed children. On their wagon-cover was a sign, done in yellow ochre, which read: ‘Oregon or bust!’ To-day we met the same outfit coming back, and no description from my unpractised pen can do it justice. The party, doubtless from over-crowding, had quarrelled; and the two families had settled their dispute by dividing the wagon into two parts of two wheels each. On the divided and dilapidated cover of each cart were smeared in yellow ochre the words, ‘Busted, by thunder!’
“May 30. We forded the Platte to-day. It is a broad, lazy, milky sheet of silt-thickened water, with a quicksand bottom. It is about two miles wide at this season of the year at the ford, and is three feet deep.
“The day was as hot as a furnace, and the sunshine burned us like blisters of Spanish flies. Our wagon-beds were hoisted to the tops of their standards to keep them from taking water, and at a given signal from daddie, they were all plunged pell-mell into the quicksand, over which teams, drivers, wagons, and all were compelled to move quickly to avoid catastrophe.
“Poor dear mother suffered from constant nervous fear because of the quicksand and the danger that some of the children might be drowned. It took us two and a half hours to ford the stream; but we reached the opposite bank without accident, and camped near an old buffalo wallow, where we get clearer water than that of the Platte, but we are not allowed to drink it till it has been boiled. Cholera has broken out in the trains both before and behind us; and daddie lays our escape from attack thus far to drinking boiled water. We have no fuel but buffalo chips, and almost no grass for the poor stock. The game has disappeared altogether, and the fishes in the Platte don’t bite. But we have plenty of beans and bacon, coffee, flour, and dried apples; so we shall not starve.
“June 1. The day has been intensely hot. The stifling air shimmers, and the parched earth glitters as it bakes in the sun. The mud has changed to a fine, impalpable dust, and the loaded air is too oppressive to breathe, if it could be avoided. We passed a number of newly made graves during the day. We meet returning teams every day that have given up the journey as a bad job. Daddie often says he’d die before he’d retrace his tracks, and then he wouldn’t do it! We found at sundown, just as we were losing hope, a bountiful spring of clear, cold water, beside which we have halted for the night.
“June 3. Another insufferably hot day. But we encountered at nightfall a stiff west wind, which soon arose to a gale, in the teeth of which we with difficulty made camp and cooked our food. Heavy clouds blacken the sky as I write, and vivid flashes of sheet lightning, which blind us for a moment, are followed by thunder that startles and stuns.
“June 4. The storm passed to the south of us, on the other side of the Platte. But daddie has ordered the tents and wagons staked to the ground hereafter every night, as long as we are travelling in these treeless, unsheltered bottom-lands, as he says we would have been swept away en masse into the river if last night’s storm had squarely struck our camp.”
The hoods of the wagons, so white and clean at the outset, were now of an ashen hue, disfigured by spots of grease, and askew in many places from damage to their supporting arches of hickory bows. Heavy log-chains, for use in possible emergencies, dangled between axles, and the inevitable tar-bucket rode adjacent on a creaking hook, from which it hung suspended by a complaining iron bail.