I did not, however, feel willing to give up the work after having accomplished so much on the 1,700 miles traveled, and with less than 200 miles ahead of me, and so I said, "I will try again at Grand Island," the next place where there was a center of population, that an effort would probably succeed. Here I found there was a decided public sentiment in favor of taking action, but at a later date—next year—jointly to honor the local pioneers upon the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the settlement around and about the city; and so, this dividing the attention of the people, it was not thought best to undertake the work now, and again I bordered on the slough of despondency.
I could not repeat the famous words, I would "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," for here it is the 30th of August, and in one day more summer will be gone. Neither could I see how to accomplish more than prepare the way, and that now the press is doing, and sowing seed upon kindly ground that will in the future bring forth abundant harvest.
Gradually the fact became uppermost in my mind that I was powerless to move; that my team was gone. No response came to the extensive advertisements for an ox or a yoke of oxen, showing clearly there were none in the country, and that the only way to repair the damage was to get unbroken steers or cows and break them in. This could not be done in hot weather, or at least cattle unused to work could not go under the yoke and render effective service while seasoning, and so, for the time being, the work on the Trail was suspended.
As I write in this beautiful grove of the old court house grounds, in the heart of this embryo city of Grand Island, with its stately rows of shade trees, its modest, elegant homes, the bustle and stir on its business streets, with the constant passing of trains, shrieking of whistles, ringing of bells, the reminder of a great change in conditions, my mind reverts back to that June day in 1852 when I passed over the ground near where the city stands. Vast herds of buffalo then grazed on the hills or leisurely crossed our track and at times obstructed our way. Flocks of antelope frisked on the outskirts or watched from vantage points. The prairie dogs reared their heads in comical attitude, burrowing, it was said, with the rattlesnake and the badger.
But now these dog colonies are gone; the buffalo has gone; the antelope has disappeared; as likewise the Indian. Now all is changed. Instead of the parched plain we saw in 1852, with its fierce clouds of dust rolling up the valley and engulfing whole trains until not a vestige of them could be seen, we see the landscape of smiling, fruitful fields, of contented homes, of inviting clumps of trees dotting the landscape. The hand of man has changed what we looked upon as a barren plain to that of a fruitful land. Where then there were only stretches of buffalo grass, now waving fields of grain and great fields of corn send forth abundant harvests. Yes, we may again exclaim, "What wondrous changes time has wrought."
At Grand Island I shipped to Fremont, Neb., to head the procession celebrating the semi-centennial of founding that city, working the ox and cow together; thence to Lincoln, where the first edition of "The Ox Team" was printed, all the while searching for an ox or a steer large enough to mate the Dave ox, but without avail. Finally, after looking over a thousand head of cattle in the stock yards of Omaha, a five-year-old steer was found and broken in on the way to Indianapolis, where I arrived January 5, 1907, eleven months and seven days from date of departure from my home at Puyallup, 2,600 miles distant.
CHAPTER L.
FROM INDIANAPOLIS TO WASHINGTON.
Upon my arrival in Indianapolis, people began to ask me about the Trail, and to say they had never heard that the Oregon Trail ran through that city, to which I replied I never had heard that it did. A quizzical look sometimes would bring out an explanation that the intent of the expedition was as much to work upon the hearts of the people as to work upon the Trail itself; that what we wanted was to fire the imagination of the people and get them first to know there was such a thing as the Oregon Trail and then to know what it meant in history.