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Chapter 14

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 13

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 12

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 11

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 10

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 9

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 8

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 7

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 6

From author John Soennichsen: ( Full post )

Chapter 5

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.
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Chapter 4

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.
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Chapter 3

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. ( Full post )

Chapter 2

�Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.� ( Full post )

Chapter 1

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. ( Full post )

Preface

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. ( Full post )