Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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About sixteen to twenty miles north of Omaha, General Henry Atkinson from 1821 to 1828 held his Fort Atkinson as a sort of breakwater to hold these Pawnees in check till, the flats proving too unsafe, the fort had to be moved down to Leavenworth. Atkinson is another of the old soldier heroes whom Fort Leavenworth has as completely forgotten as though he had never existed.

Then began to drift past the Bluffs the fur trade up the Platte because it was shorter than up the far Northern Missouri from the river route across to the headwaters of the Snake; and after the fur traders came the missionaries of the 1830’s and the Pioneers of the 1840’s—then the Overland rush to California from 1848, then the rail era.

In the 1850’s, when the Oregon Massacre had temporarily stopped the Oregon Pioneer rush, the Mormon migration had been in full flood west. Kanesville—modern Council Bluffs—was the jumping-off place for the Mormons to the great unknown West. It is said at this period as settlers approached Council Bluffs (then Kanesville) the converging lines of travel to the river, the covered wagons resembled a great flat iron pointing to water front. There were ferries of every variety on the Missouri at this time—flatboats propelled by polesmen, which swirled and whirled like tops to the current; steamers, side-wheelers, which puffed and grunted day and night from side to side of the broad river; wagons calked with tar and tallow, which were unsafe in flood waters of spring; Indian canoes, rowboats, log rafts for single passengers; and the flats below the cliffs on the west side resembled a tent city roofing every sort of frontier character from scoundrel riff-raff to such saints as the Whitmans. Crime was, of course, rampant.