Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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ssss1To acknowledge all the authorities from whom data for the story of the Overland Trail have been drawn would be to cumber pages with a modern and ancient bibliography. Mrs. Paine, Stella Drumm, Doane Robinson, Grace Hebard, T. C. Elliot, Judge Carey, Mr. Himes, Professor Meaney, Ezra Meeker, Dr. Driggs, Alter,—the names of moderns are almost countless. I give these because they lived on the spot and knew descendants of the old heroes and the few of the old heroes who today survive, though nearing the century mark. I remember among my own personal friends two or three of these dear old people. One passed away, while I was writing this book. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in the West, where many of the old fur traders had retired, and passed my school days with their children and grandchildren. The traditions of their descendants were already fading and it was comical to hear how many of the old generation differed as violently as to dates and spelling and this and that as modern study-chair critics. I have seen old fellows almost coming to blows over whom and what to blame; and I have tried in this narrative to take no sides but to set down as far as possible facts. On certain types of facts, the definite can never be set down and for obvious reasons, to anyone who has gone on long camping trips, whether by horseback or canoe. Down to at least the 1860’s, the daily brigades of fur traders, colonists, surveyors, dotted their notes on anything from dry parchment to tissue paper criss-crossed with a goose quill pen or carpenter pencil. Their notes could not be made daily as any traveler knows, and I myself, have found. They got in at night always dog tired, often drenched to the skin, frequently in haste to get up camps against an impending storm. Often notes had to be made a week after the places named were passed, or the day of the event happening to stamp their memory. This accounts for many of the differences as to places and dates. Take a man away from calendars for six months—yes, a month—and if absorbed by adventures of a life and death struggle, he will lose track of dates, even days of the week. If he didn’t you would have good ground for regarding his entire record as “doctored” afterward. Also what one man along the trail saw, another man in the same group missed. One man might be on the south shore of a river, the other on the north. Both were struggling through sage brush, over fallen trees,—perhaps running for dear life from a charging buffalo bull, or cocking a rifle at an ugly bear contesting the path. Would these two men remember the same episode? They would not. I say no more of that type of difference.More puzzling and confusing are the almost countless different names and sites given to the same forts. The reason is apparent, almost transparent on the spot. Sometimes, the first fort was so close to flood waters it had to be shifted back up the hill. Again, on the crest of the bank it was too easy and exposed a target for Indian raiders, or too vulnerable to violent storms; and the next fort would take the name of the army commander supervising the new structure, only to be razed for another later. In the majority of the cases, but not all, the name that emerged has been the old one, though the modern city may be from five to twenty miles from the first site. Laramie, Fort Hall, Boisé, Walla Walla are all examples of this; but monuments now mark most of the old sites but not all. That has been impossible. Farmhouses, barns, dam sites, water backed up by dam sites covered the old sites. I think of one great modern city, which in its history has had five different fort names. Again, I shall say no more of these differences. They are all along the Trail and do not detract in the least from the tremendous significance of this epic highway. Where I do not give the differences, it is only because they confuse the mind and needlessly cumber the memory, when what really matters is the intensely interesting document of heroism on the Trail.

METROPOLITAN KANSAS CITY