I was amazed when they told me I’d been delirious for 18 days. They had made up a cot in the back of the wagon once owned by Michael Dawson and that’s where I’d stayed ever since Mary discovered I was feverish the morning the company was leaving the fort. Because the two doctors who had traveled with our train along the Platte had both left the company at Fort Laramie, it fell to the fort’s company clerk to do what he could for me before our wagons again hit the trail. The clerk, half-French and half-Sioux, assured the rest of our company that he had seen others with the same disease as me.

Judge Baldwin rose early the next morning and walked quietly over to the Wades’ wagon to wake me. The night before, he and Colonel Barker had discussed the various options regarding the Jayhawkers and Joshua Brown’s murder. Then the two had agreed to sleep on the matter and meet again before dawn to arrive at a final solution. It was a full hour before sunrise and dead quiet in camp as I fumbled about in the darkness to retrieve my clothes without waking Mary or the children. Hastily slipping on my pants and putting on my hat, I joined the judge and a few moments later we were treading lightly across the encampment toward the wagon of Colonel Barker.

Judge Thaddeus Baldwin was a stout, silver-haired gentleman with a commanding presence and a booming baritone voice. His large, square-jawed face was framed on both sides by muttonchop sideburns and capped with bristly eyebrows that seemed to travel about his forehead with little regard for the rest of his features.

It was now mid-August and temperatures along the river had become nearly unbearable. As if the heat and humidity were not sufficient irritation, clouds of mosquitoes and sand flies plagued us without end as we moved along the monotonous road.

Cholera struck the Barker Company in early August, about the time our journey up the Platte was at its midway point. There had been no signs of the disease for the first several weeks along the river, but during the last few days we’d begun to see small wooden grave markers along the road, each of them clearly marked with the name of the victim and cause of death. Now, the first member of our own company had come down with it.

As Ben Isham and I stumbled back down the hill in the growing darkness, we were met by the sounds of children’s laughter and the aroma of a hundred suppers simmering all at once.

“Join me at the hoe-down tonight,” he said when we reached the bottom of the pathway. “Mr. Fish and I will be playing in the clearing by the bonfire. There’s even been some talk of dancing, if we can clear a floor and boot a few dogs out of the way.”

Nebraska Territory in late July was not a pleasant place to be. The trail along the muddy Platte River was hot, dry and monotonous. As we moved along, our lengthy caravan of oxen and horses and mules and wagons kicked up billowing clouds of fine red dirt, which slowly fell back to earth, leaving a gritty layer of dust on our skin, our clothes, our equipment and our food. At the outset, before the jumbled collection of individual companies had organized and spaced themselves out, more than 400 wagons extended for several miles along the river. It was as if we all belonged to one large household, one large family reunion slowly moving west.

The route before us loomed as a land of great unknown. At the St. Jo feed and grain, I’d paid dearly for a map and ever since had spent a good number of hours looking it over. But it showed me little more than I’d already known about the route we’d be taking. On this map, major landmarks such as Court House Rocks and Scott’s Bluffs were clearly marked, but there was little else to leave me with a real sense of the land ahead. Farther west, the Rocky Mountains appeared on the map as a broad band of uplifted peaks with one lone wagon route cutting through at a place called South Pass. From the Mormon stronghold at Timpanagos, or the Great Salt Lake, only a faint track of a southern route had been drawn, and the words “Sandy Desert” stretched across the rest of the map nearly all the way to the California coast. All told, I figured I’d been hoodwinked.

From author John Soennichsen:

I’d like to preface this chapter with a note about authenticity. Writers of historical fiction share one key objective: to make their plot, descriptions and dialogue as authentic and believable as possible. In doing so, there is often a clash when contemporary sensitivities to words or phrases come into conflict with the authenticity gained by using such words or phrases, which were once commonplace. Such is the case with the word “nigger,” voiced by a handful of characters in this chapter.

In the United States, the word was not originally considered offensive. It was used by many as merely a description of dark skin, originally derived from the Spanish/Portuguese word Negro, meaning black. In Victorian-era literature, the word is found frequently with no negative meaning intended. Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad (whose “The Nigger of the Narcissus” was published in 1897) used the word without racist intent. Mark Twain often put the word into the mouths of his characters, white and black, but did not use the word when writing as himself in his autobiographical “Life on the Mississippi.”

Illustrating the continually evolving connotations of words, the preferred term for blacks at the beginning of the 20th century had
changed to “colored,” as reflected in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909. For most,
this term has now assumed offensive status as well, reflecting ever-changing viewpoints and preferences over the decades.

In short, many words used throughout this novel are an attempt to mirror the language actually used in the historical period this book covers. Also keep in mind the character traits exhibited by the people in this book who use offensive words the most. If use of certain words makes readers feel somewhat uncomfortable, this is a good thing because we should encounter their use as a discomforting experience.

We spent the rest of that first day in Kanesville looking for someplace where Mary and the children could stay while Henry and I made the trip to Saint Joseph, Mo. There we planned to buy a yoke of oxen and any supplies found wanting in Iowa. If the animals were available right away and a long stopover wasn’t needed, we’d return in 10 days or less, then hitch the oxen to our new wagon and depart for the trail head at Kanesville Crossing. This, we were told, was some eight miles north at a wide, easily forded spot in the river.

Nestling between low hills that line the banks of the Missouri, the town of Council Bluffs sits at a point where Iowa sidles up alongside Nebraska. When we arrived there in the first few weeks of July 1849, the place was still called Kanesville. But city fathers had already started talking about legally changing the town’s name to commemorate a pow-wow held between Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and a whole slew of Indians back in 1804. Their hope was that a new name might bring more settlers and a railroad to the growing river town.

Throughout the two weeks we spent crossing Iowa, the weather was warm and the skies clear. All I can really recall about this new state was its muddy rivers, fields of corn and small, shabby farm towns. It was the mountainous west – the rugged peaks of the Rockies and forested slopes of the Sierras – that beckoned to me. But these ranges and the vast dry country east of Nebraska seemed as far away now as they’d been when a Michigan innkeeper first described them to me scarcely three days out on the road.

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Back in the summer of 1845, a man named John Louis O’Sullivan wrote these words for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. I remember Miss Winslow reading the article to us that fall and using a long wooden pointer to identify distant points on a map of America and the western wilderness. She was trying, I guess, to give us some sense of how important this movement west really was, but I was only 10 at the time and couldn’t be bothered with anything weightier than buying a new slingshot at the mercantile or sloshing through the creek bed with Johnny Hawkins, looking for crawdaddies.

January 1, 1849. Like a collicky newborn, the year arrived with a kick and a holler. We rose that morning to the sound of northerly winds brushing across the logs of our cabin, sweeping their rough-hewn surfaces free of snow. For the next three months we would stand at the window, our breath frosting its cold surface as we watched one frigid nor’wester after another surge over the northern Michigan landscape in waves.

By the first part of February, deep drifts imprisoned the frozen ground. So much moisture had the winds drawn out of the lakes, that a dense shell of ice now encased the banks of white. When March came round, tree limbs and saplings were snapping from the weight of the snow. And as it continued to fall, the three of us huddled inside with little more to do than wait until the storms let up.

Despite the towering drifts outside and blasts of icy winds that winter, I can’t say I harbored any special fears as the season's fury unfolded around us. Having spent my entire boyhood in Michigan territory, I had grown comfortable with long stretches of bad weather each year. Fact is, only when Ma and Pa began taking great pains to reassure me, did I begin to regard that winter with new suspicion. Perhaps they saw my silence as a sign of apprehension. Maybe they hoped to reassure themselves through their own words. But it also was possible they had sensed the resounding changes this new year was about to usher in.

All I know is what I recall, and the image that lingers longest is that of Pa, edgy and preoccupied, stopping at the window for long moments at a time to gaze at the mounting drifts through the fog of his own breath.

The time is late. The last few embers have nearly burned themselves out and the room has grown cold. I should stop gazing out the window and rise from my chair to tend the fire, but images have already begun to appear on the etched surface of the frosted panes. Memories are stirring to life and rising from beneath the drifts of snow just outside my door. Once again I find myself thinking back to that remarkable year, as I have done so many times before. And though the winter of 1849 is decades behind me, events that began to unfold with that season still live in my mind. And so, I sit unmoving in my chair, thinking back to that singular year and wondering at the way my life could have changed so greatly in so little time.