Lean boys, brown, barefooted girls flanked the trail with driven stock.  Chickens clucked in coops at wagon side.  Uncounted children thrust out tousled heads from the openings of the canvas covers.  Dogs beneath, jostling the tar buckets, barked in hostile salutation.  Women in slatted sunbonnets turned impassive gaze from the high front seats, back of which, swung to the bows by leather loops, hung the inevitable family rifle in each wagon.  And now, at the tail gate of every wagon, lashed fast for its last long journey, hung also the family plow.

It was ’48, and the grass was up.  On to Oregon!  The ark of our covenant with progress was passing out.  Almost it might have been said to have held every living thing, like that other ark of old.

Banion hastened to one side, where a grassy level beyond the little stream still offered stance.  He raised a hand in gesture to the right.  A sudden note of command came into his voice, lingering from late military days.

“By the right and left flank—­wheel!  March!”

With obvious training, the wagons broke apart, alternating right and left, until two long columns were formed.  Each of these advanced, curving out, then drawing in, until a long ellipse, closed at front and rear, was formed methodically and without break or flaw.  It was the barricade of the Plains, the moving fortresses of our soldiers of fortune, going West, across the Plains, across the Rockies, across the deserts that lay beyond.  They did not know all these dangers, but they thus were ready for any that might come.

“Look, mother!” Molly Wingate pointed with kindling eye to the wagon maneuver.  “We trained them all day yesterday, and long before.  Perfect!”

Her gaze mayhap sought the tall figure of the young commander, chosen by older men above his fellow townsman, Sam Woodhull, as captain of the Liberty train.  But he now had other duties in his own wagon group.

Ceased now the straining creak of gear and came rattle of yokes as the pins were loosed.  Cattle guards appeared and drove the work animals apart to graze.  Women clambered down from wagon seats.  Sober-faced children gathered their little arms full of wood for the belated breakfast fires; boys came down for water at the stream.

The west-bound paused at the Missouri, as once they had paused at the Don.

A voice arose, of some young man back among the wagons busy at his work, paraphrasing an ante-bellum air: 

Oh, then, Susannah, Don’t you cry fer me!  I’m goin’ out to Oregon, With my banjo on my knee!

CHAPTER II

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

More than two thousand men, women and children waited on the Missouri for the green fully to tinge the grasses of the prairies farther west.  The waning town of Independence had quadrupled its population in thirty days.  Boats discharged their customary western cargo at the newer landing on the river, not far above that town; but it all was not enough.  Men of upper Missouri and lower Iowa had driven in herds of oxen, horses, mules; but there were not enough of these.  Rumors came that a hundred wagons would take the Platte this year via the Council Bluffs, higher up the Missouri; others would join on from St. Jo and Leavenworth.