Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Leavenworth is not on the Oregon Trail; but you have to know its position relative to the Overlanders’ highway. Else you will not understand the hopeless impossibility of moving troops westward fast enough to avert the awful tragedies of the 1847-49 era. Beyond Leavenworth every Pioneer took his life and law in his own hands; and in each covered wagon were more women and children and babies. One does not know whether to tremble at the temerity or applaud the courage. Perhaps both.

How many people were on the Trail each year?

What matters it?

When one Pioneer tells you he was in a band of two hundred and seven people and another tells you he was in a group of forty to fifty, and another tells you he saw five thousand wagons pass Laramie in a day, can such figures be checked up by the census of California or Oregon, when the census was guesswork and no census existed west of the Missouri and these birds of passage in movement across the plains were as varied in numbers as the wild geese winging overhead? As a wise guide of mine once answered in the North, “We don’t travel here as the crows and geese travel in an air line. We travel as the sand bars and head winds compel us.” Yet who has ever attempted to check up a census of the wild geese awing for the North?