Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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“We are brought a little closer to the tragic cost of it all when we realize that fully twenty thousand lost their lives in the effort to reach the Golden West. You can appreciate that I have a tender interest in the story when I tell you that somewhere among the velvety hills of old Iowa four of my great-grandparents lie in unmarked graves. They had no means of marking the graves of the dead in those prairie stretches. They might have put at the mound of the loved one laid away the skull of a buffalo, the end gate of a wagon or some other temporary marker, but mainly what they did was to scatter the ashes of their camp fires over these resting places to keep the bodies of their dear ones from being dug up by the wolves.

“Very few graves out of all the twenty thousand, so far as we know, are surely marked. One of these is the grave of the pioneer mother near Scott’s Bluffs, Nebraska. When Rebecca Winters passed away, one of the company had the happy forethought to pick up an old wagon tire that lay along the trail. Bending it into an oval he set the tire within the grave. On the top of the tire was chiseled the mother’s name and age. For more than three-score years it stood over the mound. Finally a party of surveyors laying out a railroad along the old North Platte, by mere chance happened to run their line right over the mother’s grave. As they read the inscription on the old wagon tire, they were touched by the love of a mother’s heart. They telegraphed into Salt Lake City, because it was on the old Salt Lake branch of the Oregon Trail, and relatives of the pioneer mother wired back who she was. Then the railroad builders protected the grave, erecting a neat, substantial fence about it. A monument, inscribed briefly with the story, was sent from Utah and set beside the old wagon tire, which still arches above the mound.