[XII]
THE EMIGRANT TRAIL
To be beside the friendly guiding Sweetwater was a great relief. Now the South Pass was only eighty or ninety miles west, with a plain trail connecting. But what a trail this had become, in a short year! So many wagons had traversed it—the hoofs of the oxen and of the horses all pointing west—that the tough sage-brush had been crushed flat in a great, winding furrow forever leading onward. Strange was it to come upon such a trail, in this wilderness of plain and butte more than a thousand miles from the frontier.
This morning, when daylight revealed the sudden highway, exclamations of astonishment ran through the camp and adown the column, as now the march was made so much easier.
“Wagh! The Snake woman says it air the great medicine road o’ the whites,” remarked William New.
“Looks to me as if all the folks in Missouri were moving out to Oregon,” called back Ike.
“You would think so, if you had been with us at the start,” responded Basil Lajeunesse, who was riding to chat with the Carson men. “Oregon and California both. Name of a dog! Until the trail forked and we turned off for St. Vrain the Laramie route was a string of beads, so thick were wagons. That Doctor Whitman, he has stirred people up. One thousand for Oregon—men and women and the children—were collected at the Kansas, waiting for him.”
“These air fresh sign,” quoth Ike, with an eye upon the hoof marks and wheel tracks, and the freshly plucked springs where women and children must have wandered, picking nosegays.
“Lieutenant Frémont, he stirred people up, too,” continued Basil, proudly. “It is ‘South Pass,’ ‘South Pass,’ everybody talk about ‘South Pass,’ so easy to cross. And the Congress talk, too, all about Oregon, and it say it will give to every American settler in Oregon six hundred forty acres of land and for his child one hundred sixty acres. I should like to go, myself, but I do not know as my family like to go.”
“Some’ll never get thar,” grunted William New. “Thar’s a grave, already. Wonder the wolves or the Injuns haven’t dug it open yet. They will.”
The South Pass was crossed. Still onward led the great trail. Occasionally at camping-spot or elsewhere relics were to be noted. Once Oliver found a ragged doll; and was seen again a hasty grave.