XIIIAN APPROACHING STORM
“We came eighteen miles to-day,” wrote Jean, under date of May 28, “and halted for the night opposite Grand Island, in the Platte River, where we find both wood and pasture. All day we floundered through the muddy roads, occasionally getting almost swamped in heavy and treacherous bogs,with ‘water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ I’m too tired to write, and too sleepy to think.”
On the evening of May 29 she added: “We started early, and reached Fort Kearney after eight miles of heavy wheeling, where we halted to write letters for the folks at home, and examine many things quaint and crude and curious. The old fort is weather-worn, and a general air of dilapidation pervades its very atmosphere. There are two substantial dwellings for the officers, though; and they (I mean the officers) keep up a show of military pomp, very amusing to us, but quite necessary to maintain in an Indian country, to hold the savage instinct in check. The officers were very gracious to daddie, and very kind and condescending to the rest of us. They made us a present of some mounted buffalo-horns, some elks’ antlers, and the stuffed head of a mountain sheep, all of which, mother says, we’ll be glad to leave at the roadside before the weary oxen haul them very far.
“A week ago a party passed us, going westward with a four-wheeled wagon, two yokes of discouraged oxen, two anxious-looking men, two dispirited women, and about fourteen snub-nosed, shaggy-headed children. On their wagon-cover was a sign, done in yellow ochre, which read: ‘Oregon or bust!’ To-day we met the same outfit coming back, and no description from my unpractised pen can do it justice. The party, doubtless from over-crowding, had quarrelled; and the two families had settled their dispute by dividing the wagon into two parts of two wheels each. On the divided and dilapidated cover of each cart were smeared in yellow ochre the words, ‘Busted, by thunder!’
“May 30. We forded the Platte to-day. It is a broad, lazy, milky sheet of silt-thickened water, with a quicksand bottom. It is about two miles wide at this season of the year at the ford, and is three feet deep.
“The day was as hot as a furnace, and the sunshineburned us like blisters of Spanish flies. Our wagon-beds were hoisted to the tops of their standards to keep them from taking water, and at a given signal from daddie, they were all plunged pell-mell into the quicksand, over which teams, drivers, wagons, and all were compelled to move quickly to avoid catastrophe.
“Poor dear mother suffered from constant nervous fear because of the quicksand and the danger that some of the children might be drowned. It took us two and a half hours to ford the stream; but we reached the opposite bank without accident, and camped near an old buffalo wallow, where we get clearer water than that of the Platte, but we are not allowed to drink it till it has been boiled. Cholera has broken out in the trains both before and behind us; and daddie lays our escape from attack thus far to drinking boiled water. We have no fuel but buffalo chips, and almost no grass for the poor stock. The game has disappeared altogether, and the fishes in the Platte don’t bite. But we have plenty of beans and bacon, coffee, flour, and dried apples; so we shall not starve.
“June 1. The day has been intensely hot. The stifling air shimmers, and the parched earth glitters as it bakes in the sun. The mud has changed to a fine, impalpable dust, and the loaded air is too oppressive to breathe, if it could be avoided. We passed a number of newly made graves during the day. We meet returning teams every day that have given up the journey as a bad job. Daddie often says he’d die before he’d retrace his tracks, and then he wouldn’t do it! We found at sundown, just as we were losing hope, a bountiful spring of clear, cold water, beside which we have halted for the night.
“June 3. Another insufferably hot day. But we encountered at nightfall a stiff west wind, which soon arose to a gale, in the teeth of which we with difficulty made camp and cooked our food. Heavy clouds blacken the sky as I write, and vivid flashes of sheet lightning, whichblind us for a moment, are followed by thunder that startles and stuns.
“June 4. The storm passed to the south of us, on the other side of the Platte. But daddie has ordered the tents and wagons staked to the ground hereafter every night, as long as we are travelling in these treeless, unsheltered bottom-lands, as he says we would have been swept awayen masseinto the river if last night’s storm had squarely struck our camp.”
The hoods of the wagons, so white and clean at the outset, were now of an ashen hue, disfigured by spots of grease, and askew in many places from damage to their supporting arches of hickory bows. Heavy log-chains, for use in possible emergencies, dangled between axles, and the inevitable tar-bucket rode adjacent on a creaking hook, from which it hung suspended by a complaining iron bail.
“The incessant heat by day, followed by the chilly air of night, is perilous to health, John,” said Mrs. Ranger, one evening, as she lay wrapped in blankets in the big family wagon, watching the usual preparations for the evening meal.
He gazed into her pinched, white face with sudden apprehension.
“Don’t be afraid of the cholera, dear,” he said tenderly. “I understand the nature of the epidemic, and I don’t fear it at all. Cholera is a filth disease, and we are guarding against it at every point. Your blood is pure, darling. There’s nothing the matter with you but a little debility, the result of past years of overwork. Time and rest and change of climate will cure all that. No uncooked food or unboiled water is used by any of us, and no cold victuals are allowed to be eaten after long exposure to this pernicious, cholera-laden air. You can’t get the germs of cholera unless you eat or drink them.”
That Captain Ranger should have thus imbibed the germ theory of cholera long in advance of its discovery by medical schools, is only another proof that there is nothing new under the sun. A newer system of medical treatment than that of the Allopathic School, styled the Eclectic by its founders, had come into vogue before his departure from the States.
Many different decoctions of fiery liquid, of which capsicum was supposed to be the base,—conspicuous among them a compound called “Number Six,”—proved efficacious in effecting many cures in the early stages of cholera; and the contents of Captain Ranger’s medicine chest were in steady demand long after his supplies for general distribution had been exhausted.
“Can you imagine what this wild-goose chase of ours is for?” asked Mrs. Benson.
“I undertook it to gratify my good husband,” was Mrs. Ranger’s prompt reply.
“And I to gratify my daughter.”
“Excuse me, ladies; but I came along to please myself,” interposed Mrs. O’Dowd.
“I, too, came to please myself,” cried Jean; “that is, I made a virtue of necessity, and compelled myself to be pleased. There are two things that mother says we must never fret about: one is what we can, and the other what we cannot, help. Every human being belongs primarily to himself or herself, and to satisfy one’s self is sure to please somebody.”
“But a married couple belong, secondarily, at least, to each other,” said Mrs. Ranger. “No couple can pull in double and single harness at the same time.”
“Some day,” said Mrs. Benson, “it will become the fashion to read your journal, Jean; and then the dear public will both praise and pity our unsophisticated Captain, who led these hapless emigrants out on these plains to die.”
“That’s so, Mrs. Benson,” exclaimed Jean; “and they won’t see that it’s all a part of the eternal programme. Evolution is the order of nature, and one generation of human beings is a very small fraction of the race at large.”
“Haven’t you gossiped long enough, mamma?” asked Mrs. McAlpin, petulantly. “Your supper is ready and waiting. What has detained you so long?”
“I was listening to the chat of the Ranger family. They are an uncommon lot; very clever and original.”
“Yes, mamma; they talk like oracles. A little brusque and unpolished, but that will be outgrown in time. You’re looking splendid, mamma! The society of your neighbors is a tonic. You must take it often.”
“I wish we might all stop here, Daphne.”
“We’ve no more right to these lands of the Indians than we have to—”
“Oregon,” interrupted her mother. “Oregon was Indian territory originally.”
Jean approached with a plate of hot cakes, saying: “I fell to thinking so deeply over the problems we had been talking about that I forgot what I was doing, and baked too many cakes. They’re sweet and light, and we hope you’ll like them.”
“Thank you ever so much, Miss Jean!” said Mrs. McAlpin. “I congratulate you with all my heart upon the way you cheer your mother, my dear. You are a jewel of the first water!”
“We all try to keep mother in good spirits,” replied Jean. “Dear soul! she’s weak and nervous; and what seem trifles to us often appear like mountains to her. Never can I forget, to my dying day, the look of terror that came into her gentle eyes when we were crossing the Platte that day in the quicksands. The raised wagon-bed had tilted, for some cause. I suppose the weight of so many of us was not evenly distributed; and we should all have been pitched into the water if it had not been thatdear mother hustled us to the other side. She forgot her own danger in her effort to save the children, giving her orders like a sea captain in a storm. Each of us grabbed a baby,—Susannah’s coon fell to my lot,—and we clung like death to the upper edge of the wagon-bed till the danger was over, and the great lopsided thing settled back to its place.
“But I must go now. Daddie’s calling me to write up that pestilent old journal!”
On the evening of the 4th of June, the train had its first encounter with a blizzard.
Captain Ranger, seeing the approach of the storm, as did the cattle and horses, ordered a sudden halt a little way from the banks of the Platte. The day, like a number of its predecessors, had been oppressively hot; but about five o’clock a sudden squall came up, though not without premonitory warning in the way of a calm so dead that not a blade of grass was quivering. The wagon-hoods flapped idly, like sails becalmed in the tropics. Suddenly the air grew icy cold, bringing at first a moment of relief to suffocating man and beast.
“Gather your buffalo chips in a hurry,” exclaimed the Captain, addressing the girls. “Get ’em under cover in the tents, under the wagon-beds; anywhere so they’ll keep dry. Turn out the stock in a jiffy, boys. Head ’em away from the river. Drive ’em up yonder gulch. Be on the alert, everybody!”