Love, upon “The Journey”—O it was sure to come! Where will not love follow, where is it not to be found? Coquettishly the sun-bonnet may be worn; coquettishly the sun-flower may be placed at the waist, or the cactus bloom amid the dark-brown hair. By what strange and circuitous routes are lovers brought to meet! Through what strange and unforseen circumstances does love begin! In our Company were there not those maidens who could still walk coquettishly and with grace, although it was their truthful boast that their feet had measured each mile of the lengthened way? Were there not those in whose red cheeks the prairie sun kissed English blood? The man from the west, why should he not learn to love that beauty from Albion’s Isle?
How delightful when danger did not lie in ambush, to walk, arm locked in arm, far ahead of the leading wagon; how delightful to sit amid the flowers and to feel the solitude of the boundless prairie! Yet love is a danger that lurks everywhere. To linger, ever so short a distance behind the train was a grave offense. Each member of the Company knew this rule, they knew it was a rule that must not be broken. Of course one need not make a capture as did that savage brave; one need not, whirling by upon his desert horse, stoop sideways and lift to his side a screaming and unwilling bride. Nor did one care to imitate that enamored chieftain of the Cheyennes. Should one make an offer of a hundred ponies? Yet, if the Captain, upon his steed, like a Knight of old, should be found with a pretty girl riding beside him, what an example for others to follow! One there was in our Company, a youth, who had returned from the west, passing over the road again to find his father’s grave. He had come, too, to meet his mother and sister by the Missouri’s banks. Fate had willed, however, that the father’s grave should not be found; two years had elapsed since it had been made, and nature, with storm and floods had hidden it away, and so the one who slept there, sleeps there still, and the mountain winds, the thunder, and the voice of the passing stream, still make his requiem. On that eastward trip our Captain had learned to love this youth. And on the westward trip he learned to love even more the sister. For she it was who later became our Captain’s wife. But why repeat the romance?
Life, Romance, Death—indeed they were busy in our little world! The space between the two semi-circles of wagons made a wide division; it was like the two sides of a street, each wagon a dwelling. One could hardly believe that in such a company, isolated from all the rest of mankind, such a separation could exist. Yet such a separation existed between “the wings.” At times the members of the one side hardly knew what was happening among those of the other. But there were certain events, of course, that would form the link. As we proceed upon our way what changes come! I mean into the lives and hearts of many. But come there new joy, or come there new sorrow, the Pioneer must live the pioneer’s life. There were always the labor, the privations, a certain kind of pleasure. There was left but little time in which to brood. Except, it may be, in the silent watches of the night. There was something remarkable, too, about the manner in which the cattle became imbued with the spirit of their driver. What individuality, for instance, there was among the cattle themselves, our own four yoke, I mean, it was modified by the driver. Tex and Mex, Spot and Jeff, how easy to distinguish their characters from that of either Tom and Jerry, or Lep and Dick. And yet as a body how quickly they reflected the mental condition of the one who drove them. Be he calm, be he dejected or peevish, and the cattle knew it at once.
Here is a suggestion of a sometimes unpleasant duty—“The Night-Guard.” His was a trust in which anxiety and danger were often combined. The picket on duty at the front of war is scarcely more important to the safety of the troops than was the Night-Guard to our Company. In those days of lawlessness in red man and white, constant vigil had to be kept. On the faithful performance of the Night-Guard’s duty our safety depended. If we were not attacked, then the cattle might be driven away, and we might be left stranded, as it were, in the wilderness. Alone with his thoughts, this important one at his post, had ample opportunity for careful reflection. The youth of the writer released him from the duty of guard, and his father suffered from an accident—a foot partly crushed by one of the oxen—but as owners of cattle, as “Independents,” we must do a share and a double task fell to the lot of an older brother. We had seen the disaster which came upon the Company preceding ours, and at Deer Creek we had also seen heaps of red and yet smoking embers, all that remained of the station there, and of the surrounding cabins. We knew that the Indians who had done both the acts of driving away the cattle and applying the torch, were, in all likelihood, watching upon the road for us. Our Captain never allowed an inexperienced man to occupy too important a post, but the “tenderfoot” could serve as aid.
We, like ships that pass on the sea, sometimes spoke a returned. No gloomy recital of disappointment could turn us back. The Golden West was our goal, and those who returned were but, to us, the too timid ones. In truth, has not the dream of the Pioneer been fully realized? Those men and women who endured so much? Did they not gain, enmass, the victory? And those who fell by the way—they were as those who perish in battle, but who leave the fruits of their devotion and success to others. Those young men who put their shoulders to the wheels, when our wagon might have otherwise become fast in the quicksands of the Platte, and those older men and women, too, that I looked upon as they trudged toward the West with the dogged determination of age, all made possible the future commonwealth. They ate of the fruit that was raised from the soil, their sons and daughters inherited the land.
Ford of the Green River.
Men who now count their wealth by hundreds of thousands, some by the millions of dollars, can remember their vain strivings when poor and on night-guard to look into the future; to see some faint glimpses of what Providence held in store for them in the Westward, Ho!
Three subjects that follow are by the Sweetwater River. In one the Rattlesnake Hills are shown dim in the summer haze; in the second is the Rock Independence, and in the third is the noted “Devil’s Gate,” with its reflection in a pool of the stream. What a real blessing, though perhaps in disguise, is often enforced attention; enforced activity! Upon “The Journey” such it was. O, it was a balm to many an aching heart! A blessing the swiftly-changing scenes, the labor, the unavoidable routine of camp-life! Those whose trials were so great; those whose grief was so intense; those who were so quickly compelled to leave the new-made graves of their dead; yes, even these must take their part. There was no escape. It was a fiat—“thou shalt.” The very aged, the sick would lift themselves up in their beds to look upon some famous place. The Rock Independence, The Devil’s Gate—was not the writer propped up with pillows to look out, through the opening of the covers at the wagon front, upon them? Those places we had thought of, spoken of, for three months past—there they were. Many looked at them through tear-dimmed, or sick-weary eyes. The apathy that sometimes comes upon the traveller when he has reached some famous or hoped-for place, is well understood. But sometimes these climaxes are too strong even for that to conquer. The burial-tree of the Sioux; the first band of Indian braves; the buckskin dressed, the beaded, the dusky beauty of the wild, they made a claim. Yes, as I said, even the heart-stricken must look around, must take an interest, even if languid or disliking, in the passing world. There was perhaps a cruel kindness in this fact. All were compelled to hear the music, the singing, the laughing, the dancing, that followed, be the Company never so weary, after many a long day’s travel. This all could hear as well as the hymn, the prayer. A sudden shout—“antelope!” “buffalo!” would rouse the most dejected. Weariness, grief, found many a strange yet wholesome tonic.