During the years 1862, 1863 and 1864, I went into this business with a small freighting outfit.  This certainly was not just the thing for a preacher to do, but necessity knows no law.  In the spring of 1862, Bro.  James Butcher was going to Denver with a freighting train, and he with myself agreed to go in the same train for mutual convenience.

The President, Abraham Lincoln, had ordered a draft, and many young men in Missouri had found themselves in a sore strait.  In the South were their kindred, and they felt that they could not and would not fight against their own flesh and blood; and to avoid this they determined to flee to the gold mines in the mountains, where every man did what was right in his own eyes—­and so they came to Atchison or Leavenworth and engaged to drive these freighting teams to Denver.  Many of them were sons of rich fathers, well educated, and had never engaged in manual labor, much less in such menial work as this, and when these proud and high-spirited fellows felt what an ignoble life they had been reduced to, the reader may well believe they did not feel good-natured over it.  And now, when these young gentlemen came to understand that they were to be associated with a man that was reported to be the representative of the hated Yankees, who had made war on the people of the South, and set free their slaves, they bitterly attacked me in wordy warfare.  Of course I defended myself.  And so day after day, in the intervals while our cattle were grazing, we debated every question relative to slavery that has been debated within the last fifty years.  Their hearts were bitter; they were passionately excited, and would often end the talk, which they themselves had begun, With noisy profanity.  They seemed to think they had this advantage of me, that they could swear and I could not.

We were now traveling up the valley of the Platte River.  It was the month of June.  The weather had become rainy and there were frequent showers.  One night we had corralled our train on an almost dead level bottom, and I was sure, from the appearance of the heavens, that we should have a storm.  Bro.  Butcher had been taken sick and had returned home, and, except myself, there were none to think or care what was coming; and yet it was plain to be seen that the air was thick and sultry, and the heavens overcast with clouds, and that everything betokened a tempest.  Our canvas-covered wagons had been so crowded with merchandise that we could not get into them, and we had slept on blankets on the ground; but here on this dead level bottom, in case of a heavy rain, we would be drowned out by the flooding of the ground.  I dragged under my wagon a number of ox-yokes, and with these and some strips of boards I made a platform, and on this I laid a narrow pallet, and crept under the wagon, where I would be sheltered from the rain by the wagon-bed above me.  During the night there fell frequent showers, and the boys were soon drowned out from their pallets on the ground.