The Emigrant Trail

The Emigrant Trail, by
Geraldine Bonner

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Title: The Emigrant Trail
Author: Geraldine Bonner
Release Date: August 24, 2006 [EBook #19113]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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EMIGRANT TRAIL ***

Produced by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: He gathered her in his arms, and bending low carried her
back into the darkened cavern.]

THE EMIGRANT TRAIL
BY
GERALDINE BONNER

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
Published, April, 1910

CONTENTS
PART I
THE PRAIRIE
PART II
THE RIVER
PART III
THE MOUNTAINS
PART IV
THE DESERT

PART V
THE PROMISED LAND

THE EMIGRANT TRAIL
PART I
The Prairie
CHAPTER I
It had rained steadily for three days, the straight, relentless rain of early
May on the Missouri frontier. The emigrants, whose hooded wagons
had been rolling into Independence for the past month and whose tents
gleamed through the spring foliage, lounged about in one another's
camps cursing the weather and swapping bits of useful information.
The year was 1848 and the great California emigration was still twelve
months distant. The flakes of gold had already been found in the race of
Sutter's mill, and the thin scattering of men, which made the population
of California, had left their plows in the furrow and their ships in the
cove and gone to the yellow rivers that drain the Sierra's mighty flanks.
But the rest of the world knew nothing of this yet. They were not to
hear till November when a ship brought the news to New York, and
from city and town, from village and cottage, a march of men would
turn their faces to the setting sun and start for the land of gold.
Those now bound for California knew it only as the recently acquired
strip of territory that lay along the continent's Western rim, a place of
perpetual sunshine, where everybody had a chance and there was no
malaria. That was what they told each other as they lay under the
wagons or sat on saddles in the wet tents. The story of old Roubadoux,
the French fur trader from St. Joseph, circulated cheeringly from mouth
to mouth--a man in Monterey had had chills and people came from
miles around to see him shake, so novel was the spectacle. That was the

country for the men and women of the Mississippi Valley, who shook
half the year and spent the other half getting over it.
The call of the West was a siren song in the ears of these waiting
companies. The blood of pioneers urged them forward. Their
forefathers had moved from the old countries across the seas, from the
elm-shaded towns of New England, from the unkempt villages that
advanced into the virgin lands by the Great Lakes, from the peace and
plenty of the splendid South. Year by year they had pushed the frontier
westward, pricked onward by a ceaseless unrest, "the old land hunger"
that never was appeased. The forests rang to the stroke of their ax, the
slow, untroubled rivers of the wilderness parted to the plowing wheels
of their unwieldy wagons, their voices went before them into places
where Nature had kept unbroken her vast and pondering silence. The
distant country by the Pacific was still to explore and they yoked their
oxen, and with a woman and a child on the seat started out again,
responsive to the cry of "Westward, Ho!"
As many were bound for Oregon as for California. Marcus Whitman
and the missionaries had brought alluring stories of that great domain
once held so cheaply the country almost lost it. It was said to be of a
wonderful fertility and league-long stretches of idle land awaited the
settler. The roads ran together more than half the way, parting at Green
River, where the Oregon trail turned to Fort Hall and the California
dipped southward and wound, a white and spindling thread, across
what men then called "The Great American Desert." Two days' journey
from Independence this road branched from the Santa Fé Trail and bent
northward across the prairie. A signboard on a stake pointed the way
and bore the legend, "Road to Oregon." It was the starting point of one
of the historic highways of the world. The Indians called it "The Great
Medicine Way of the Pale-face."
Checked in the act of what they called "jumping off" the emigrants
wore away the days in telling stories