[pg 183]
But as the people fed full there began a curious sloughing off of the social compact, a change in personal attitude. A dozen wagons, short of supplies or guided by faint hearts, had their fill of the Far West and sullenly started back east. Three dozen broke train and pulled out independently for the West, ahead of Wingate, mule and horse transport again rebelling against being held back by the ox teams. More and more community cleavages began to define. The curse of flies by day, of mosquitoes by night added increasing miseries for the travelers. The hot midday sun wore sore on them. Restless high spirits, grief over personal losses, fear of the future, alike combined to lessen the solidarity of the great train; but still it inched along on its way to Oregon, putting behind mile after mile of the great valley of the Platte.
The grass now lay yellow in the blaze of the sun, the sandy dust was inches deep in the great road, cut by thousands of wheels. Flotsam and jetsam, wreckage, showed more and more. Skeletons of cattle, bodies not yet skeletons, aroused no more than a casual look. Furniture lay cast aside, even broken wagons, their wheels fallen apart, showing intimate disaster. The actual hardships of the great trek thrust themselves into evidence on every hand, at every hour. Often was passed a little cross, half buried in the sand, or the tail gate of a wagon served as head board for some ragged epitaph of some ragged man.
It was decided to cross the South Fork at the upper ford, so called. Here was pause again for the Wingate train. The shallow and fickle stream, fed by the June rise in the mountains, now offered a score of channels, all treacherous. A long line of oxen, now wading and now swimming, dragging a long rope to which a chain was rigged--the latter to pull the wagon forward when the animals got footing on ahead-- made a constant sight for hours at a time. One wagon after another was snaked through rapidly as possible. Once bogged down in a fast channel, the fluent sand so rapidly filled in the spokes that the settling wagon was held as though in a giant vise. It was new country, new work for them all; but they were Americans of the frontier.
[pg 184]
The men were in the water all day long, for four days, swimming, wading, digging. Perhaps the first plow furrow west of the Kaw was cast when some plows eased down the precipitous bank which fronted one of the fording places. Beyond that lay no mark of any plow for more than a thousand miles.
They now had passed the Plains, as first they crossed the Prairie. The thin tongue of land between the two forks, known as the Highlands of the Platte, made vestibule to the mountains. The scenery began to change, to become rugged, semi-mountainous. They noted and held in sight for a day the Courthouse Rock, the Chimney Rock, long known to the fur traders, and opened up wide vistas of desert architecture new to their experiences.