"Kind o' seems to me they were right," Samson remarked thoughtfully. "Kind o' seems as if the great spirit of America was in that water. It moves on in the way it wills and nothing can stop it. Everything in its current goes along with it."
"And only the strong can stand the journey," said Sarah.
These words were no doubt inspired by an ache in her bones. A hard seat and the ceaseless jolting of the wagon through long, hot, dusty days had wearied them. Even their hearts were getting sore as they thought of the endless reaches of the roads ahead. Samson stuffed a sack with straw and put it under her and the children on the seat. At a word of complaint he was wont to say:
"I know it's awful tiresome, but we got to have patience. We're goin' to get used to it and have a wonderful lot of fun. The time'll pass quick—you see."
Then he would sing and get them all laughing with some curious bit of drollery. They spent the night of July third at a tavern in Buffalo, then a busy, crude and rapidly growing center for the shipping east and west. Next day there was to be a great celebration of the Fourth of July in Buffalo and our travelers had stopped there to witness it. The bells began to ring and the cannon to bomb at sunrise. It was a day of great excitement for the west-bound travelers. The horses trembled in their stalls. Sambo took refuge in Colonel's manger and would not come out.
There were many emigrants on their way to the far West in the crowd—men, women and children and babies in arms—Irish, English, Germans and Yankees. There were also well dressed, handsome young men from the colleges of New England going out to be missionaries "between the desert and the sown."
Buffalo, on the edge of the midland seas, had the flavor of the rank, new soil in it those days—and especially that day, when it was thronged with rough coated and rougher tongued, swearing men on a holiday, stevedores and boatmen off the lakes and rivers of the middle border—some of whom had had their training on the Ohio and Mississippi. There was much drunkenness and fighting in the crowded streets. Some of the carriers and handlers of American commerce vented their enthusiasm in song.
In Samson's diary was the refrain of one of these old lake songs, which he had set down, as best he could, after the event:
"Then here's three cheers for the skipper an' his crew,
Give 'er the wind an' let 'er go, for the boys'll put 'er through;
I thought 'twould blow the whiskers right off o' you an' me,
On our passage up from Buffalo to Milwaukee-ee."
Each of these rough men had dressed to his own fancy. Many wore fine boots of calf skin with red tops, drawn over their trousers, and high heels and blue and red shirts and broad brimmed straw hats. A long haired man, in buckskin leggings and moccasins, with a knife at his belt and too much whisky beneath it, amused a crowd by a loud proclamation of his own reckless and redoubtable character and a louder appeal for a chance to put it in action. It was a droll bit of bragging and merely intended, as the chronicler informs us, to raise a laugh.