“The families are coming—­again the families!” It was again the cry of the passing fur post, looking eastward at the caravan of the west-bound plows; much the same here at old Fort Hall, on the Snake River, as it was at Laramie on the North Platte, or Bridger on the waters tributary to the Green.

The company clerks who looked out over the sandy plain saw miles away a dust cloud which meant but one thing.  In time they saw the Wingate train come on, slowly, steadily, and deploy for encampment a mile away.  The dusty wagons, their double covers stained, mildewed, torn, were scattered where each found the grass good.  Then they saw scores of the emigrants, women as well as men, hastening into the post.

It was now past midsummer, around the middle of the month of August, and the Wingate wagons had covered some twelve hundred and eighty miles since the start at mid-May of the last spring—­more than three months of continuous travel; a trek before which the passage over the Appalachians, two generations earlier, wholly pales.

What did they need, here at Fort Hall, on the Snake, third and last settlement of the two thousand miles of toil and danger and exhaustion?  They needed everything.  But one question first was asked by these travel-sick home-loving people:  What was the news?

News?  How could there be news when almost a year would elapse before Fort Hall would know that on that very day—­in that very month of August, 1848—­Oregon was declared a territory of the Union?

News?  How could there be news, when these men could not know for much more than a year that, as they outspanned here in the sage, Abraham Lincoln had just declined the governorship of the new territory of Oregon?  Why?  He did not know.  Why had these men come here?  They did not know.

But news—­the news!  The families must have the news.  And here—­always there was news!  Just beyond branched off the trail to California.  Here the supply trains from the Columbia brought news from the Oregon settlements.  News?  How slow it was, when it took a letter more than two years to go one way from edge to edge of the American continent!

They told what news they knew—­the news of the Mormons of 1847 and 1848; the latest mutterings over fugitive negro slaves; the growing feeling that the South would one day follow the teachings of secession.  They heard in payment the full news of the Whitman massacre in Oregon that winter; they gave back in turn their own news of the battles with the Sioux and the Crows; the news of the new Army posts then moving west into the Plains to clear them for the whites.  News?  Why, yes, large news enough, and on either hand, so the trade was fair.