Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

21 страница из 56

And right here from the look-out of the lone Indian, you get the very birth and growth of Kansas City. The river flats of the fur traders. Independence, where presently clustered and grew the blacksmith shops to shoe horses and oxen and repair wagons. Then the traders’ shops to supply goers and comers. Then some enterprising citizens took another jump to Westport to get the trade away from Independence. Thence, the city grew and spread from buckskin tents a century ago on river flats to seven hundred thousand people today.

Why did not the Oregon Trail jump into the unknown from St. Louis, from which Lewis and Clark had set out? Because Kansas City by the river’s windings was five hundred miles from the outlet of the Missouri. By cutting off the loops of the river, the Overlanders from the East could save some two to three hundred miles in their traverse across the plains. One was the circumference of the half circle. The other was the diameter.

Here in a steady stream every spring—usually in the months of April and May—from 1843 to 1853, converged lines of emigrant wagons in thousands. They came in neighborhood groups from various states and territories. One group might be from Missouri—one hundred, two hundred, to the group. Another band might be Illinois or Iowa families; yet another old South and Middle South frontiersmen; and in the Whitman Missionary era, from 1839 to 1849, families from as far east as New York State and New England. Motives were as various as the groups; but the lure was the same as from the beginning—the lure of the Western Sea. Missionary zeal, hard times back East, youth’s love of adventure, the chance of fortune in gold mine or land might be the bayonet prod of necessity; but the Oregon stampede had become what the New York Tribune called “an insanity.”^[1]