Free Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston Page B

and no square, just a crowd of weary travelers starting to wonder why they had ever taken the first step on such a journey.
    He was riding from company to company with an open letter to all the emigrants on the trail. It said Lansford Hastings was assembling a new wagon train that he would personally guide along his new and faster route. Right now he was waiting at Fort Bridger.
    Since then I’ve talked with some who saw that letter, written with flourishes in Hastings’s own hand. They say it was somewhere between a travel brochure and a battle cry. Wagons ought to be bunching up in larger groups, it said, now that the U.S. had gone to war. No telling where we’d run into the Mexicans or how many there’d be. But if we all stuck together and followed his lead we would not only finish our trip in record time, we would join the ranks of a new society on the far Pacific shore. And somehow, while all this happened, Hastings himself would be at the forefront.
    Well, you have never seen the kind of buzzing and scurrying around stirred up by this letter. It started an argument that went on for days, just adding to the squabble and disagreement boiling up ever since we’d left Fort Laramie. People argued till we reached the banks of Little Sandy Creek, where each family had to decide which way to go—north by Fort Hall, which is what most folks had done all summer long and continued to do for years to come, or south by Fort Bridger, clear on down in the bottom corner of what is now the state of Wyoming. There were long meetings, and papa was a fervent speaker. It was like an election, where politicians try to convince you who to vote for.
    “I’m heading north,” one fellow said, “and staying north till I git to Oregon, and California can be damned!”
    “I’m sticking with Jim Reed,” said someone else.
    “Jim Reed can be damned, too,” the first fellow said. “You can all be damned! I might just turn around and go back home!”
    “It’s too late to turn around,” said someone else.
    Papa’s voice had the passion that could sway such fellows. He stood on a log and read from Hastings’s book, while fire came into his eyes. He slammed the book shut and cried, “You think I would do this heedlessly? Risk the lives of my very own loved ones? By the southern route we can save two weeks of traveling time. And we NEED those weeks, people! So do our animals. Believe me! They’ll be that much tougher for the final days of climbing!”
    His voice was strong, and many listened and finally set out with papa and the Donners as one long line of wagons started south. And yet there remains the riddle I ponder to this very day. For all his desire to save time and make a speedy crossing, why had papa built that family wagon so big and cumbersome it slowed down everyone who traveled with us? The fact is, nothing like that wagon had ever been seen before. In its day it was the largest thing anyone had tried to move across North America. When I was eight I took it for granted that this was the way you traveled. Looking back, I can see how preposterous it was to imagine something that size could have a chance of rolling clear from Illinois to Sutter’s Fort. Just getting as far as it did must have set some kind of record.
    A few days after papa was banished, we were fifty or sixty miles farther along the Humboldt when that wagon came to its final halt and resting place. The poor creatures pulling us along just stopped in their tracks from exhaustion, and it was decided that we would have to abandon the wagon papa had designed. We would unload what we could and leave it by the side of a river that got smaller day by day, as we drew closer to what the Mountain Man called the Humboldt Sink, where the river finally plays itself out and trickles away into the sand.
    It was another blow for mama. But she knew they were right. We spent the rest of that day moving what provisions we had left into one of the three Graves family wagons,