Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Can the Overland Trail be set down definitely as running always from here to there, and from this point to that?

How many people were on the Trail each year?

Remember there was first the fur traders’ migration West. Then there was the Missionary-Pioneer-Oregon migration. Then there was the gold stampede to California.

Parallel with these was the Mormon movement. Also the Santa Fé wagon travel. Five distinct migrations paralleling and diverging en route as each traveled westward. Just to state that fact is to show the absurdity of the disputes.

In some years there were as many as twenty thousand wagons following a road so dusty the wagons behind could not see the wagons ahead and many wagons moved five and eight abreast and, as each platoon of wagons formed for each day, self-imposed regulations compelled the dust-free leaders of yesterday to fall to rear today. It is nonsense to imagine the same fords could always be used, or the same ferries were in service. Fords and ferries depended on flood tides and dry seasons; and these varied each week and each day as they do today. I have been over these routes—all of them—in years when rail tracks were washed out by a cloudburst and in the very same season in the next year when the rails would gladly have paid the loss of a washout to help the scorched crops to increase traffic. I have been out in the month of June when sixteen-foot snow banks stopped us in a motor and we had to diverge to a lower road; and I have been out in April when you would have paid an extra fare for a whiff of snow air to lower the temperature. It has always seemed to me such disputes are a bit futile. Enough to set down that if you draw a broad belt from Kansas City and Omaha westward up the Platte to South Pass, you are on the Overland Trail, the epic road of human history.