Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Pioneers from the Middle West were very religious and sang “Old Hundred” round the camp fires blinking above the yellow flood of the Missouri. Indians lounged about, stoically observing each party. Voyageurs gambled and sang and fiddled and danced. “Eat—drink—be merry—tomorrow we die.” Mormons, when their day came, though their chief jumping-off place was Omaha, were a bit grimmer and more fanatical than the Middle West and New England colonists. The Mormons had been hounded with persecutions; and martyrdom always acts as cement. It hardens into adamant unity. There were always Mexicans to swap saddles and horses and silver jewelry to traders and voyageurs and colonists. A great many wagons had come to grief and the blacksmith’s anvil above the ridge rang day and night to mighty blows. There were no lazy men in the camp. The Overland was not a trail for lazy men. Housewives rinsed out clothing in the river or baked bread in tin reflectors banked opposite the fire. I think it was at Leavenworth, Narcissa Whitman’s white hands did the first family washing on the Trail! Poor delicate hands—they were to know rougher, harder duty for delicate hands within three years; and they never flinched, however deep her hopes sank. Matches were few and bottled for security against damp. Butter had been packed in the middle of cornmeal sacks. So had eggs and sometimes the jars of travel had mixed an omelet all ready for the bake tin. Ready money was carried in a box or belt but was very sparse. Wages were from twenty-five cents a day to four dollars for good guides or as much as five dollars by clever fellows for each passage across a ferry. These men had calked their wagon-boxes with tallow and tracts sent out by misguided missionary societies in far lands, when, “the hell fire” missive was apt to be mixed with tar and tallow and serve a more immediate use. Many an Oregon Pioneer from 1843 to 1848 learned his first A B C’s from these “hell fire” tracts and they sent him to bed with such fright, as a boy, sleeping in the cabin loft above the grown-ups below, that he would awaken howling with a nightmare complex of too much pudding and too much imaginary sulphur.