FEVER OF NEW FORTUNES

The notes of a bugle, high and clear, sang reveille at dawn.  Now came hurried activities of those who had delayed.  The streets of the two frontier settlements were packed with ox teams, horses, wagons, cattle driven through.  The frontier stores were stripped of their last supplies.  One more day, and then on to Oregon!

Wingate broke his own camp early in the morning and moved out to the open country west of the landing, making a last bivouac at what would be the head of the train.  He had asked his four lieutenants to join him there.  Hall, Price, and Kelsey headed in with straggling wagons to form the nucleuses of their columns; but the morning wore on and the Missourians, now under Woodhull, had not yet broken park.  Wingate waited moodily.

Now at the edge of affairs human apprehensions began to assert themselves, especially among the womenfolk.  Even stout Molly Wingate gave way to doubt and fears.  Her husband caught her, apron to eyes, sitting on the wagon tongue at ten in the morning, with her pots and pans unpacked.

“What?” he exclaimed.  “You’re not weakening?  Haven’t you as much courage as those Mormon women on ahead?  Some of them pushing carts, I’ve heard.”

“They’ve done it for religion, Jess.  Oregon ain’t no religion for me.”

“Yet it has music for a man’s ears, Molly.”

“Hush!  I’ve heard it all for the last two years.  What happened to the Donners two years back?  And four years ago it was the Applegates left home in old Missouri to move to Oregon.  Who will ever know where their bones are laid?  Look at our land we left—­rich—­black and rich as any in the world.  What corn, what wheat—­why, everything grew well in Illinois!”

“Yes, and cholera below us wiping out the people, and the trouble over slave-holding working up the river more and more, and the sun blazing in the summer, while in the wintertime we froze!”

“Well, as for food, we never saw any part of Kentucky with half so much grass.  We had no turkeys at all there, and where we left you could kill one any gobbling time.  The pigeons roosted not four miles from us.  In the woods along the river even a woman could kill coons and squirrels, all we’d need—­no need for us to eat rabbits like the Mormons.  Our chicken yard was fifty miles across.  The young ones’d be flying by roasting-ear time—­and in fall the sloughs was black with ducks and geese.  Enough and to spare we had; and our land opening; and Molly teaching the school, with twelve dollars a month cash for it, and Ted learning his blacksmith trade before he was eighteen.  How could we ask more?  What better will we do in Oregon?”

“You always throw the wet blanket on Oregon, Molly.”

“It is so far!”

“How do we know it is far?  We know men and women have crossed, and we know the land is rich.  Wheat grows fifty bushels to the acre, the trees are big as the spires on meeting houses, the fish run by millions in the streams.  Yet the winters have little snow.  A man can live there and not slave out a life.