Poor Merryman had all that heat to bear, with the mere pretence of an awning to screen out the sun from his close muslin cockloft.
He did not fail till somewhere hard upon noon. He then began to grow restless to know accurately the distance travelled. He made them give him water, too, much more frequently; and when they stopped for this purpose, asked a number of obscure questions. A little after this he discovered himself that a film had come over his eyes. He confessed that this was discouraging; but said with stubborn resignation, that if denied to see the brethren, he still should hear the sound of their voices.
After this, which was when he was hardly three miles from our camp, he lay very quiet, as if husbanding his strength; but when he had made, as is thought, a full mile further, being interrogated by the woman that was driving, whether she should stop, he answered her, as she avers, "No, no; go on!"
The anecdote ends badly. They brought him in dead, I think about five o'clock of the afternoon. He had on his clean clothes; as he had dressed himself in the morning, looking forward to his arrival.
Beside the common duty of guiding and assisting these unfortunates, the companies in the van united in providing the highway for the entire body of emigrants. The Mormons have laid out for themselves a road through the Indian Territory, over four hundred leagues in length, with substantial, well-built bridges, fit for the passage of heavy artillery, over all the streams, except a few great rivers where they have established permanent ferries. The nearest unfinished bridging to the Papillon Camp, was that of the Corne a Cerf, or Elkhorn, a tributary of the Platte, distant maybe a couple of hours' march. Here, in what seemed to be an incredibly short space of time, there rose the seven great piers and abutments of a bridge, such as might challenge honors for the entire public spirited population of lower Virginia. The party detailed to the task worked in the broiling sun, in water beyond depth, and up to their necks, as if engaged in the perpetration of some pointed and delightful practical joke. The chief sport lay in floating along with the logs, cut from the overhanging timber up the stream, guiding them till they reached their destination, and then plunging them under water in the precise spot where they were to be secured. This the laughing engineers would execute with the agility of happy diving ducks.
Our nearest ferry was that over the Missouri. Nearly opposite Pull Point, or Point aux Poules, a trading post of the American Fur Company, and village of the Pottawatamies, they had gained a favorable crossing by making a deep cut for the road through the steep right bank. And here, without intermission, their flat-bottomed scows plied, crowded with the wagons and cows and sheep and children and furniture of the emigrants, who, in waiting their turn, made the woods around smoke with their crowding camp fires. But no such good fortune as a gratuitous passage awaited the heavy cattle, of whom, with the others, no less than 30,000 were at this time on their way westward: these were made to earn it by swimming.
A heavy freshet had at this time swollen the river to a width, as I should judge, of something like a mile and a half, and dashed past its fierce current, rushing, gurgling, and eddying, as if thrown from a mill race, or scriptural fountain of the deep. Its aspect did not invite the oxen to their duty, and the labor was to force them to it. They were gathered in little troops upon the shore, and driven forward till they lost their footing. As they turned their heads to return, they encountered the combined opposition of a clamorous crowd of bystanders, vieing with each other in the pungent administration of inhospitable affront. Then rose their hubbub; their geeing and woing and hawing, their yelling and yelping and screaming, their hooting and hissing and pelting. The rearmost steers would hesitate to brave such a rebuff; halting, they would impede the return of the outermost; they all would waver; wavering for a moment, the current would sweep them together downward. At this juncture, a fearless youngster, climbing upon some brave bull in the front rank, would urge him boldly forth into the stream: the rest then surely followed; a few moments saw them struggling in mid current; a few more, and they were safely landed on the opposite shore. The driver's was the sought after post of honor here; and sometimes, when repeated failures have urged them to emulation, I have seen the youths, in stepping from back to back of the struggling monsters, or swimming in among their battling hoofs, display feats of address and hardihood, that would have made Franconi's or the Madrid bull-ring vibrate with bravos of applause. But in the hours after hours that I have watched this sport at the ferry side, I never heard an oath or the language of quarrel, or knew it provoke the least sign of ill feeling.
After the sorrowful word was given out to halt, and make preparations for winter, a chief labor became the making hay; and with every day dawn brigades of mowers would take up the march to their positions in chosen meadows—a prettier sight than a charge of cavalry—as they laid their swarths, whole companies of scythes abreast. Before this time the manliest, as well as most general daily labor, was the herding of the cattle; the only wealth of the Mormons, and more and more cherished by them, with the increasing pastoral character of their lives. A camp could not be pitched in any spot without soon exhausting the freshness of the pasture around it; and it became an ever recurring task to guide the cattle, in unbroken droves, to the nearest places where it was still fresh and fattening. Sometimes it was necessary to go farther, to distant ranges which were known as feeding grounds of the Buffalo. About these there were sure to prowl parties of thievish Indians; and each drove therefore had its escort of mounted men and boys, who learned self-reliance and heroism while on night guard alone, among the silent hills. But generally the cattle were driven from the camp at the dawn of morning, and brought back thousands together in the evening, to be picketed in the great corral or enclosure, where beeves, bulls, cows, and oxen, with the horses, mules, hogs, calves, sheep and human beings, could all look together upon the red watch fires, with the feeling of security, when aroused by the Indian stampede, or the howlings of the prairie wolves at moonrise.
When they set about building their winter houses, too, the Mormons went into quite considerable timbering operations, and performed desperate feats of carpentry. They did not come, ornamental gentlemen or raw apprentices, to extemporise new versions of Robinson Crusoe. It was a comfort to notice the readiness with which they turned their hands to wood craft; some of them, though I believe these had generally been bred carpenters, wheelwrights, or more particularly boat builders, quite outdoing the most notable voyageurs in the use of the axe. One of these would fell a tree, strip off its bark, cut and split up the trunk in piles of plank, scantling, or shingles; make posts, and pins, and pales—everything wanted almost, of the branches; and treat his toil from first to last with more sportive flourish than a school-boy whittling his shingle.
Inside the camp, the chief labors were assigned to the women. From the moment, when after the halt, the lines had been laid, the spring wells dug out, and the ovens and fire-places built, though the men still assumed to set the guards and enforce the regulations of Police, the Empire of the Tented Town was with the better sex. They were the chief comforters of the severest sufferers, the kind nurses who gave them in their sickness, those dear attentions, with which pauperism is hardly poor, and which the greatest wealth often fails to buy. And they were a nation of wonderful managers. They could hardly be called housewives in etymological strictness, but it was plain that they had once been such, and most distinguished ones. Their art availed them in their changed affairs. With almost their entire culinary material limited to the milk of their cows, some store of meal or flour, and a very few condiments, they brought their thousand and one receipts into play with a success that outdid for their families, the miracle of the Hebrew widow's cruise. They learned to make butter on a march, by the dashing of the wagon, and so nicely to calculate the working of barm in the jolting heats, that as soon after the halt as an oven could be dug in the hill side and heated, their well kneaded loaf was ready for baking, and produced good leavened bread for supper. I have no doubt the appetizing zest, their humble lore succeeded in imparting to diet which was both simple and meagre, availed materially for the health as well as the comfort of the people.