March had come, when the wild turkey gobbled and strutted resplendent in the forest lands.  April had passed, and the wild fowl had gone north.  May, and the upland plovers now were nesting all across the prairies.  But daily had more wagons come, and neighbors had waited for neighbors, tardy at the great rendezvous.  The encampment, scattered up and down the river front, had become more and more congested.  Men began to know one another, families became acquainted, the gradual sifting and shifting in social values began.  Knots and groups began to talk of some sort of accepted government for the common good.

They now were at the edge of the law.  Organized society did not exist this side of the provisional government of Oregon, devised as a modus vivendi during the joint occupancy of that vast region with Great Britain—­an arrangement terminated not longer than two years before.  There must be some sort of law and leadership between the Missouri and the Columbia.  Amid much bickering of petty politics, Jesse Wingate had some four days ago been chosen for the thankless task of train captain.  Though that office had small authority and less means of enforcing its commands, none the less the train leader must be a man of courage, resource and decision.  Those of the earlier arrivals who passed by his well-organized camp of forty-odd wagons from the Sangamon country of Illinois said that Wingate seemed to know the business of the trail.  His affairs ran smoothly, he was well equipped and seemed a man of means.  Some said he had three thousand in gold at the bottom of his cargo.  Moreover—­and this appeared important among the Northern element, at that time predominant in the rendezvous—­he was not a Calhoun Secesh, or even a Benton Democrat, but an out and out, antislavery, free-soil man.  And the provisional constitution of Oregon, devised by thinking men of two great nations, had said that Oregon should be free soil forever.

Already there were mutterings in 1848 of the coming conflict which a certain lank young lawyer of Springfield, in the Sangamon country—­Lincoln, his name was—­two years ago among his personal friends had predicted as inevitable.  In a personnel made up of bold souls from both sides the Ohio, politics could not be avoided even on the trail; nor were these men the sort to avoid politics.  Sometimes at their camp fire, after the caravan election, Wingate and his wife, their son Jed, would compare notes, in a day when personal politics and national geography meant more than they do to-day.

“Listen, son,” Wingate one time concluded.  “All that talk of a railroad across this country to Oregon is silly, of course.  But it’s all going to be one country.  The talk is that the treaty with Mexico must give us a, slice of land from Texas to the Pacific, and a big one; all of it was taken for the sake of slavery.  Not so Oregon—­that’s free forever.  This talk of splitting this country, North and South, don’t go with me.  The Alleghanies didn’t divide it.  Burr couldn’t divide it.  The Mississippi hasn’t divided it, or the Missouri, so rest assured the Ohio can’t.  No, nor the Rockies can’t!  A railroad?  No, of course not.  But all the same, a practical wagon road from free soil to free soil—­I reckon that was my platform, like enough.  It made me captain.”