The Emigrant Trail

by Geraldine Bonner

Here they found the New York Company and a Mormon train filling up their water casks and growing neighborly in talk of Sublette's cut off and the route by the Big and Little Sandy. A man was a man even if he was a Mormon, and in a country so intent on its own destiny, so rapt in the calm of contemplation, he took his place as a human unit on whom his creed hung like an unnoticed tag.

They filled their casks, visited in the two camps, and then moved on. Plain opened out of plain in endless rotation, rings of sun-scorched earth brushed up about the horizon in a low ridge like the raised rim on a plate. In the distance the thin skein of a water course drew an intricate pattern that made them think of the thread of slime left by a wandering snail. In depressions where the soil was webbed with cracks, a livid scurf broke out as if the face of the earth were scarred with the traces of inextinguishable foulness. An even subdual of tint marked it all. White had been mixed on the palette whence the colors were drawn. The sky was opaque with it; it had thickened the red-browns and yellows to ocher and pale shades of putty. Nothing moved and there were no sounds, only the wheeling sun changed the course of the shadows. In the morning they slanted from the hills behind, eagerly stretching after the train, straining to overtake and hold it, a living plaything in this abandoned land. At midday a blot of black lay at the root of every sage brush. At evening each filigreed ridge, each solitary cone rising detached in the sealike circle of its loneliness, showed a slant of amethyst at its base, growing longer and finer, tapering prodigiously, and turning purple as the earth turned orange.

There was little speech in the moving caravan. With each day their words grew fewer, their laughter and light talk dwindled. Gradual changes had crept into the spirit of the party. Accumulations of habit and custom that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into sterner lines. The acquired deceptiveness of the world of men was leaving them. Ugly things that they once would have hidden cropped out unchecked by pride or fear of censure. They did not care. There was no standard, there was no public opinion. Life was resolving itself into a few great needs that drove out all lesser and more delicate desires. Beings of a ruder make were usurping their bodies. The primitive man in them was rising to meet the primitive world.

In the young girl the process of elimination was as rapid if not as radical as in the case of the men. She was unconsciously ridding herself of all that hampered and made her unfit. From the soft feminine tissue, intricacies of mood and fancy were being obliterated. Rudimentary instincts were developing, positive and barbaric as a child's. In the old days she had been dainty about her food. Now she cooked it in blackened pans and ate with the hunger of the men. Sleep, that once had been an irksome and unwelcome break between the pleasures of well-ordered days, was a craving that she satisfied, unwashed, often half-clad. In Rochester she had spent thought and time upon her looks, had stood before her mirror matching ribbons to her complexion, wound and curled her hair in becoming ways. Now her hands, hardened and callous as a boy's, were coarse-skinned with broken nails, sometimes dirty, and her hair hung rough from the confining teeth of a comb and a few bent pins. When in flashes of retrospect she saw her old self, this pampered self of crisp fresh frocks and thoughts moving demurely in the narrow circle of her experience, it did not seem as if it could be the same Susan Gillespie.

All that made up the little parcel of her personality seemed gone. In those days she had liked this and wanted that and forgotten and wanted something else. Rainy weather had sent its ashen sheen over her spirit, and her gladness had risen to meet the sun. She remembered the sudden sweeps of depression that had clouded her horizon when she had drooped in an unintelligible and not entirely disagreeable melancholy, and the contrasting bursts of gayety when she laughed at anything and loved everybody. Hours of flitting fancies flying this way and that, hovering over chance incidents that were big by contrast with the surrounding uneventfulness, the idleness of dropped hands and dreaming eyes, the charmed peerings into the future—all were gone. Life had seized her in a mighty grip, shaken her free of it all, and set her down where she felt only a few imperious sensations, hunger, fatigue, fear of danger, love of her father, and— She pulled her thoughts to obedience with a sharp jerk and added—love of David and hatred of Courant.

These two latter facts stood out sentinel-wise in the foreground. In the long hours on horseback she went over them like a lesson she was trying to learn. She reviewed David's good points, dwelt on them, held them up for her admiration, and told herself no girl had ever had a finer or more gallant lover. She was convinced of it and was quite ready to convince anybody who denied it. Only when her mental vision—pressed on by some inward urge of obscure self-distrust—carried her forward to that future with David in the cabin in California, something in her shrank and failed. Her thought leaped back as from an abhorrent contact, and her body, caught by some mysterious internal qualm, felt limp and faintly sickened.

She dwelt even more persistently on Courant's hatefulness, impressed upon herself his faults. He was hard and she had seen him brutal, a man without feeling, as he had shown when the Mormon boy died, a harsh and remorseless leader urging them on, grudging them even their seventh day rest, deaf to their protests, lashing them forward with contempt of their weakness. This was above and apart from his manner to her. That she tried to feel was a small, personal matter, but, nevertheless, it stung, did not cease to sting, and left an unhealed sore to rankle in her pride. He did not care to hide that he held her cheaply, as a useless futile thing. Once she had heard him say to Daddy John, "It's the women in the train that make the trouble. They're always in the way." And she was the only woman. She would like to see him conquered, beaten, some of his heady confidence stricken out of him, and when he was humbled have stood by and smiled at his humiliation.

So she passed over the empty land under the empty sky, a particle of matter carrying its problem with it.

It was late afternoon when they encamped by the Big Sandy. The march had been distressful, bitter in their mouths with the clinging clouds of powdered alkali, their heads bowed under the glaring ball of the sun. All day the circling rim of sky line had weaved up and down, undulating in the uncertainty of the mirage, the sage had blotted into indistinct seas that swam before their strained vision. When the river cleft showed in black tracings across the distance, they stiffened and took heart, coolness and water were ahead. It was all they had hope or desire for just then. At the edge of the clay bluff, they dipped and poured down a corrugated gully, the dust sizzling beneath the braked wheels, the animals, the smell of water in their nostrils, past control. The impetus of the descent carried them into the chill, purling current. Man and beast plunged in, laved in it, drank it, and then lay by it resting, spent and inert.

They camped where a grove of alders twinkled in answer to the swift, telegraphic flashes of the stream. Under these the doctor pitched his tents, the hammering of the pegs driving through the sounds of man's occupation into the quietude that lapped them like sleeping tides. The others hung about the center of things where wagons and mess chests, pans and fires, made the nucleus of the human habitation.