The Covered Wagon | Page 6

had more wagons come, and neighbors had
waited for neighbors, tardy at the great rendezvous. The encampment,
scattered up and down the river front, had become more and more
congested. Men began to know one another, families became
acquainted, the gradual sifting and shifting in social values began.
Knots and groups began to talk of some sort of accepted government
for the common good.
They now were at the edge of the law. Organized society did not exist
this side of the provisional government of Oregon, devised as a modus
vivendi during the joint occupancy of that vast region with Great
Britain--an arrangement terminated not longer than two years before.
There must be some sort of law and leadership between the Missouri
and the Columbia. Amid much bickering of petty politics, Jesse
Wingate had some four days ago been chosen for the thankless task of
train captain. Though that office had small authority and less means of
enforcing its commands, none the less the train leader must be a man of
courage, resource and decision. Those of the earlier arrivals who passed
by his well-organized camp of forty-odd wagons from the Sangamon
country of Illinois said that Wingate seemed to know the business of
the trail. His affairs ran smoothly, he was well equipped and seemed a
man of means. Some said he had three thousand in gold at the bottom
of his cargo. Moreover--and this appeared important among the
Northern element, at that time predominant in the rendezvous--he was

not a Calhoun Secesh, or even a Benton Democrat, but an out and out,
antislavery, free-soil man. And the provisional constitution of Oregon,
devised by thinking men of two great nations, had said that Oregon
should be free soil forever.
Already there were mutterings in 1848 of the coming conflict which a
certain lank young lawyer of Springfield, in the Sangamon
country--Lincoln, his name was--two years ago among his personal
friends had predicted as inevitable. In a personnel made up of bold
souls from both sides the Ohio, politics could not be avoided even on
the trail; nor were these men the sort to avoid politics. Sometimes at
their camp fire, after the caravan election, Wingate and his wife, their
son Jed, would compare notes, in a day when personal politics and
national geography meant more than they do to-day.
"Listen, son," Wingate one time concluded. "All that talk of a railroad
across this country to Oregon is silly, of course. But it's all going to be
one country. The talk is that the treaty with Mexico must give us a,
slice of land from Texas to the Pacific, and a big one; all of it was taken
for the sake of slavery. Not so Oregon--that's free forever. This talk of
splitting this country, North and South, don't go with me. The
Alleghanies didn't divide it. Burr couldn't divide it. The Mississippi
hasn't divided it, or the Missouri, so rest assured the Ohio can't. No, nor
the Rockies can't! A railroad? No, of course not. But all the same, a
practical wagon road from free soil to free soil--I reckon that was my
platform, like enough. It made me captain."
"No, 'twasn't that, Jesse," said his wife. "That ain't what put you in for
train captain. It was your blamed impatience. Some of them lower
Ioway men, them that first nominated you in the train meeting--town
meeting--what you call it, they seen where you'd been plowing along
here just to keep your hand in. One of them says to me, 'Plowing, hey?
Can't wait? Well, that's what we're going out for, ain't it--to plow?' says
he. 'That's the clean quill,' says he. So they 'lected you, Jesse. And the
Lord ha' mercy on your soul!"
Now the arrival of so large a new contingent as this of the Liberty train
under young Banion made some sort of post-election ratification

necessary, so that Wingate felt it incumbent to call the head men of the
late comers into consultation if for no better than reasons of courtesy.
He dispatched his son Jed to the Banion park to ask the attendance of
Banion, Woodhull and such of his associates as he liked to bring, at any
suiting hour. Word came back that the Liberty men would join the
Wingate conference around eleven of that morning, at which time the
hour of the jump-off could be set.
CHAPTER III
THE RENDEZVOUS
As to the start of the great wagon train, little time, indeed, remained.
For days, in some instances for weeks, the units of the train had lain
here on the border, and the men were growing restless. Some had come
a thousand miles and now were keen to start out for more than two
thousand miles additional. The grass was up. The men from Illinois,