Free The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

the Missouri revolved around Reason Penelope Tucker and his sons. Like Franklin Graves, M. D. Ritchie, and John Stark, Reason Tucker was a large-framed man. Gentle and soft-spoken, he wore his beard, as was popular at the time, in a fringe around his clean-shaven face. A Virginian born of Scottish parents, he had been married and widowed once already, and he now found himself a bachelor again as his second wife refused to follow him west. Traveling with him, though, were his three oldest boys—John Wesley, Stephen, and George Washington.
    All three of these families—the Tuckers, the Ritchies, and the Starks—and most of the others that gathered by the Missouri that third week in May had much in common with the Graves family and with one another. Whether their ancestors first stepped ashore on the rich tidelands of Virginia or the stony shores of New England, they were almost all the children and grandchildren of men who had fought in the American Revolution. Many of them carried in their hands weapons that had been used in that conflict, and they carried deep in their hearts an absolute devotion to the idea that their liberty was the most valuable thing they owned. They commonly and solemnly referred to the fourth day of July as “the Glorious Fourth,” without the slightest hint of irony or embarrassment. They named their sons Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Lafayette, or Adams, lest those sons forget where they came from and how they had gained their unique and sacred freedoms. For the most part, they despised what they called “the trammels of civilization” and preferred to stay close to the frontier, even as it moved relentlessly westward. They believed deeply that they were destined to spread the light of liberty across the continent—to create, in fact, as Thomas Paine had put it, “the birthday of a newworld” in the West. They tended to be forthright, plain-speaking, earnest, friendly, and trustworthy. They took a man at his word, unless they had good reason not to. And above all they were fiercely self-reliant, unflinchingly independent. In the trying weeks and savage months ahead, though, they would find that one man’s freedoms could become another man’s fetters.
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    T hey broke camp and moved out on May 23, climbing up out of the Missouri bottomlands, following the course of a stream called Clear Creek. When they reached the top of the bluff, they got their first full view of what lay to the west. The blue-green prairie grass was knee-high now, still pushing up through the taller, dry, dead grass of the previous year. Gently rolling hills extended to the horizon, and the swell of those hills, along with the grass billowing in the wind, created the overwhelming impression—shared by nearly all who saw it—that they were about to set forth on a great, windswept sea.
    In the first fifty miles, they had to cross a series of muddy creeks, some of them running in gullies etched as deep as twenty feet into the surrounding prairie. At many of them, they had to fill the stream with brush and then pull the wagons across with ropes. At Mission Creek they came across the last sign of American civilization that they would see until they reached Fort Kearney in present-day Nebraska—a thirty-seven-room, three-story brick Presbyterian Indian mission just being constructed that spring to replace an older log structure. West of the mission, they moved out into flatter, wide-open country.
    For the first time, they started to see what many of the men in the party, and many of the women as well, had been looking forward to since leaving home, an astonishing quantity of wild game—turkeys, prairie hens, wild geese, elk, deer, and occasionally pronghorns—or “antelope,” as they called them. They had not yet come to the buffalo herds, which everyone eagerly anticipated, but this was the beginning of an extended hunting excursion that many of them had