Pioneers

[The following authentic letters, which the Atlantic has been privileged to copy from the yellowing sheets still in the writer’s possession, tell a story of the pioneer spirit which ought to be preserved. No introduction is necessary, but the reader should know that the writer was, in 1865, a wife of ten years. Mrs. Devereux still lives, at the age of ninety-three.}

COLUMBUS, NEBRASKA, October 15, 1865.
(Geographical centre of the United States)
DEAR MOTHER, —
I have a long story to tell you, of why I am here with Will, in this small, rough prairie village, so small and remote, I am sure you have never heard of it before. It is 90 miles from our home in Council Bluffs, with no nearer settlement of any size in any direction, and hundreds of miles from any railroad, and I doubt if the view from our window would impress you very favorably, yet it seems very good to us to be here.
My last letter to you told of Will’s successful return journey from Denver, as far as Cottonwood Springs; from Fort Kearney later he wrote of greatly improved health; he would be home ready for duty in two weeks more, coming on slowly to get the full benefit of longer outdoor life in the early October days; and his enthusiasm over wagon-travel and camping-out for health was greater than ever. Ranches were not so far apart, and the ranch women could bake his bread, which, he owned, with his own baking in the Dutch oven, had been often very poor. Nor need he wait to join the slow progress of pack-trains, as he was forced to do farther West, where the Indians were dangerous and an escort of soldiers was furnished. He would enjoy camping by himself in freedom and quiet, and he would soon be home.
At 4 o’clock P.M. of the very day this letter reached me, a telegram came from Grand Island, saying, ‘Very ill by the roadside; come at once and bring the doctor.’ You can imagine how dazed I was for an instant, and then the impulse to move heaven and earth to reach him quickly; but where Grand Island was, or how I was to get there, I knew no more than if I had not lived two years at one of the gateways to that great plain stretching 500 miles west to Denver.
I called to a passing friend, who, fortunately, was a woman of presence of mind, and had been to Denver herself. She recalled at once the important fact that it was the day for the Overland coach, which only every other day left Omaha at evening for Denver; and it was nearly time for the last boat on the ferry to Omaha, and the ferry was two miles away.
‘Send me the doctor and someone to take me to Omaha,’ was all that I waited to say; and hastened to put the few things in my bag I could think of.
She found our good friend and banker, Mr. Deming, at the first corner, in his buggy, and he drove to the door at once, and offered to see me started on the coach; and best of all, a need I had not yet thought of, he could furnish me funds for the journey, and arrange, as we drove on, for any emergency which should call for more. It was impossible for the doctor to go with me, but he came to me, and gave me all the advice he could.
In half an hour from the time the telegram reached me, we were on our way, and I had a little time to collect myself before reaching the ferry. I was so absorbed in going over that terrible telegram, to gain some new light on it, that I had no fear or hesitation about taking the journey, nor did I recall what little I knew about such rough travel in the unsettled West, or what it might demand of my strength, if not of my courage; and I wondered, vaguely, why Mr. Deming should ask me if I were sure I had better try to go. Of course I must go.
We reached Omaha just in time, and Mr. Deming secured the whole of the back seat of the coach for me; and as I crawled into it at 9 o’clock, in the darkness, I heard the driver say, ‘Two nights and a day will bring her there’; and the dim lanterns outside showed me Mr. Deming’s pale and frightened face as we rolled away.
It was well fear was not added to my anxiety. The rapid movement of the four horses gave me relief, and the intense silence of the black night left me free to think; for though Mr. Deming said with trembling voice, as he shut the coach-door, ‘A lady going to her sick husband; won’t you be kind to her?’ and I was conscious of persons in the other seats, I thought no more of them, and set about making myself comfortable enough for one who could not sleep. I rolled the ill-smelling blanket into pillows, and made a tent-cover from head to foot of the big mosquito net that my thoughtful friends insisted I should take, as I left home.
When day dawned, we had left the rolling hills between Omaha and the Elkhorn behind us, and were passing rapidly over the plains of the Platte valley. I had grudged the delays of the night, when they stopped to change horses, for every hour made one less of that terrible sum of ‘ two nights and a day,’ before I could reach Will, ‘ill by the roadside’; but when the light became clearer in the coach, there was a moment’s sense of repugnance, but no fear, when I met the eyes of three of the roughest-looking men I had ever seen, staring at me. They had not spoken a word through the long night, I believe in kindness to a lone woman, though they seemed not only coarse, but dull. They rarely spoke to each other during the time I was with them, and never to me; and when awake, seemed filled with astonishment at my presence there.
At the noon station a new passenger took the vacant seat in front of me, and it was very pleasant, to see the unmistakable signs of a more cultivated type of man. He was kind to me, giving me helpful attentions at the rough stagestations, where we tried to eat. Once he insisted, without any complaint of mine, that a basin of water should be placed on a chair inside the shanty for my use, instead of my sharing with the men the towels and basin on the bench outside the door. A sense of being protected by this good man encouraged a little sleep, and the slow hours wore on.
Toward night I began to inquire about Grand Island, supposing that I was to go on to that station, and should reach it next morning. But when, later, the driver was changed with the horses, the new one came to the coach-door and asked, ‘Is there a woman here, going to her sick husband? To my eager inquiries of what he could tell me about Will, he could only say, ‘They told me to watch out for ye, and leave ye at Lone Tree; get there in the night some time.’ This, I found, was eight miles east of Grand Island, from which the telegram came.
After midnight I began to peer into the darkness with beating heart, full of vague and terrible fears. I think my friend in the coach was anxious, too, with too much sympathy to sleep; for he was good to me in a silent way, which helped me to wait quietly.
At two o’clock in the morning the coach suddenly stopped, and we knew it was not to change horses; it was too quiet. The coach-door opened, and in silence my neighbor sprang out, and I silently followed. The driver bade us make for a dim light not far away; it was a lantern hanging under Will’s wagon, standing by the roadside. My friend helped me to climb into the dark opening under the canvas cover, from which a voice strangely unnatural called faintly, ‘ I thought you would never come; now let me go to sleep.’
Instinctively I knew there was peril, though I could not distinguish his face.
The stranger exclaimed, ‘I can’t leave you so; this is dreadful; I will stay.’
Rut I knew Will must, first of all, get rest that night. No doubt he had forced himself to keep awake until the coach came by. I hope the man knew I was grateful for his kindness, but I could only whisper, ‘Go on; I can do; send me a physician if you can find one.’ Later on, I did get comfort at a critical time, through his remembrance of us, though he found no physician.
I crawled along the wagon-bed until I came to Will’s head, and sat down on the straw and soothed him to sleep. He was too ill to tell me anything about himself, only feebly saying once, ‘I shall get well now.’
When it was light enough to see, I crept out the front, and found the wagon was drawn up beside an old empty hut, and near-by was a newly built log-cabin, and a long sod-barn, and no other habitation in sight. Two half-grown boys came out of the new cabin, and I went in to find someone to get me the nourishment I must have for Will, and food for myself, and to learn something about him.
A frowzy, dull-eyed woman met me; her yellow face and yellow hair and lank figure told me the kind of emigrant she was. She seemed to have not a particle of interest in the sick man outside; had I been some unknown species of human kind, she could not have appeared more dazed. A coarse-featured girl of eighteen, maybe, joined her, and paying no attention to my wants, they continued to stand silent, and stare at my face, my clothes, and my hair.
I think nothing up to that time came so near breaking my courage as the silent stare of that dull, passionless woman. I knew then that I was little better than alone, on the wide prairie, with a very sick man. I begged for fire, and hot water, and milk, and gained by degrees from them, that Will had come to their cabin a week before and given his horses to the care of the sons, because he was ill, and had sent one of them back to Grand Island with the dispatch to me, later; and they had made soup for him once, when he said they must. Did I think he would die? and, Was it a catching sickness?
I knew as little as they what his sickness was; but I meant that he should not die, and that they should give me help, though I did not say so. The hot milk I gave him revived him, and he slept again, while I searched his box of stores, and made myself a homelike cup of tea on their old broken cook-stove. A spider and a kettle were all the utensils they had; but I cleaned up Will’s saucepans, and then looked about me. He could not stay longer in that wagon. I could not climb in and out, and care for him. They insisted there was no place for him in their cabin, and indeed he needed quiet and good air, which he would not have there; but I found in the old hut a bedstead frame, with boards across it, and on them a ragged hay-bed.
The floor of the hut was like that of an old barn, and the sod-roof was broken in spots, but was shelter enough for those mild sunny days. I asked for fresh hay for the bed, and in perfect silence they did just what I bade them to do, and then stood again and stared at me.
The bed was the sole piece of furniture in the hut, and there was not much more in the newer cabin. I looked about for a box to serve as a chair, but none could be found. A cask of onions and one of oats stood at one side of the small square room, and the chickens ran in and out of the broken door, freely, all day. When the boys came to their breakfast, I got them to carry Will to the hut on the mattress-bed in his wagon, on which he had slept during his two months’ journey; and on my taking off his heavy clothing, he slept more quietly, but could tell me little about himself.
I gradually learned that, after his last letter to me, he had failed for some nights to get good sleep. Mosquitoes appeared in swarms, and horse-thieves were about, so that Punch and Judy had to be watched at night. He felt himself growing ill, and pushed on, hoping at least to get to Columbus, the nearest place he could find advice and care. But that was 60 miles farther east, and when his strength gave out entirely, he stopped beside this cabin, because there was a barn where his horses could be made safe. How he had lived since he sent the dispatch, he did not know. He thinks the women brought him water, and he wanted nothing more. He was waiting for me.

I made a seat for myself on the foot of his bed, with his overcoat as a pillow, and watched, and fed him with all the nourishing things I could contrive from our limited stores, and did not know enough to know that he had a low, malarial fever, fast assuming a typhus form. He insisted that he needed nothing but rest, and in his weak state I dared not experiment with the few medicines I had with me. I ate in the other cabin, with the silent family, living mostly on rice and crackers, and tea of my own making; their bacon and mashed potatoes, with the bacon fat stirred into the potato until it was almost a soup, was intolerable to me; and badly made hot soda bread, with coffee, was all they had besides to eat.
They came west from Southern Indiana. The women wore home-made linsey-woolsey gowns, with straight, scant skirts, and I envied them, as I went about in the dust with full skirts and hoops; so I packed away the hoops, and sewed up my skirts in festoons, and laid aside my small hat, which seemed so absurd a covering in that spot, and went bareheaded to and fro in the sun.
One evening the boys came in with an antelope thrown across one of their ponies, which they had shot at some distance, somewhere, and I thought Will could have soup, and I could have a change in food; but before morning they had it all packed in salt, and the stew they made for dinner had a dreadful taste.
All day long the sun shone from a cloudless sky. A few rods in front of our door, the perfectly level trail to Denver stretched in a yellow line of dust to the limits of the horizon, east and west. Four or five miles away, a brown spot indicated a cabin, and a dim fringe of low trees, still farther away, marked a stream; otherwise, the circle of the horizon bounded an unbroken plain, green as in summer, but utterly silent and unvaried, except when clouds of dust rose in the west, and long lines of oxen came slowly by the door, sometimes as many as sixteen pairs fastened behind each other, drawing as many huge white-covered empty wagons on their return trip to Omaha. Made up in this fashion, one or more men could manage the train returning; and in these days of emigration west, wagondrivers could be readily found to go to Denver; but few wished to return. Every day the stage-coach passed, east or west, and it seemed a friendly link between us and the world, 150 miles away.
The mail was carried the alternate day on a buckboard with a single seat, sometimes shared with the driver by a passenger. After ten days of hope and despair, I saw plain signs of increasing weakness in Will, and watched eagerly for the buckboard to pass at noon. I must get advice from someone, if only from the stage-man. It seemed odd that it should halt before I went out, and a passenger should spring out and come at once to me, asking, ‘How is your husband?’ I knew at a glance he was an Eastern man and a gentleman; and oh! the intense relief to my overstrained nerves just the sight of him gave me, utter stranger as he was.
In a few words he explained: he had heard of our desolate state from the man who was kind to me in the coach when I came to Will; he was not sure he should find us still there, but he would inquire. He was engineer of the force then at work at points east and west, surveying the line of the Union Pacific Railroad.
I could not speak of our great need, but he turned away and ordered the man to go on without him. I protested, ‘You will lose your place in the stage, and cannot get away from here, maybe for days.’

‘ I can walk, and nine miles farther on I have a corps of men, and can overtake them.’
‘But you will have no place to sleep, and little to eat.’
‘I shall do; and this is dreadful for you and your husband,’ he said, and bade the stage-man go on. He told me he knew nothing at all of sickness, and Will was too weak to bear the sight of a strange face; so he sat down on the wagon-tongue outside, and I went back to the hut with more courage.
He brought me my food to the door; and when, at evening, the mosquitoes grew worse than usual, he built a smudge of damp grass before the door, and all night I saw him at intervals, pacing backwards and forwards beside it. He could not rest in the wagon even, for there were no blankets, and the mosquitoes had taken possession. Toward morning Will revived, and I could leave him, to consult with my new friend a moment. He said I must send one of those boys back twenty-five miles to Wood River, where there was said to be a physician; and he undertook the task of getting the boy off.
Then, finding he could do little for us, and the coach going east fortunately having a vacant seat, he took it, charging me, if we needed assistance later, either there or on our way east, to send someone to hunt up a surveyingparty, and he would give orders to them, along the line, to go at once at my call. This gave me much comfort; for a vague, horrible sense had been growing clearer to me of what might be my needs if Will did not improve in that desolate land, sixty miles from an Eastern settlement.
The doctor came next day; he proved to be a German, from a small cattleranch, with little knowledge of English, and less of medicine. He looked at Will in astonishment and then at me, and fairly gasped as he exclaimed, ‘Whatever sent such a man as he out here?' Will’s pale, refined face certainly was not that of the ordinary ‘freighter’ he had prescribed for.
He finally said that he did n’t know what to do for ‘ his kind,’ and he thought ‘he would die if he did n’t get out of here,’and he ‘minded he would anyway’; and then he turned away indifferently, and went to gossip with the woman in the cabin.
That coarse bluntness was needed to settle my mind. We must move east early next morning, and that man should go with us and drive. He protested that he could not. He must go back to his cattle. But I still had some faith in his medical knowledge, and meant he should go with us, and set about getting ready. Will was too ill to counsel me about arrangements, and the wagon was ready to start before I disturbed him, to tell him my plans.
My firmness about its being best to go gave him courage to allow us to move him carefully into his old place in the wagon; and when I turned to the doctor, who still doggedly declared he could not go, and told him to get into the driver’s seat at once, he obeyed, as if I had some right to control him.
With our small store of brandy at hand, I climbed in beside Will, and we moved on slowly. At first the motion exhausted him; but he was certainly no worse when we halted at noon, four or five miles on; and at the end of a short day’s journey, we found, at a ranch, a comfortable lounge in the livingroom of the family, which made a bed for him; and he took milk more freely, and slept quietly; and I lay on the floor beside him, and slept, too.
It was strange how little sleep I needed, and how little I minded the roughness of everything.
Still under protest that his cattle would suffer for care, the German helped me make things comfortable for the second day’s journey, and, to my relief, went with us, though sulky and silent. As for nursing or giving advice to his patient, the man was utterly incapable; but I believed he could drive and care for the horses; and, in my anxiety, I had failed to take carefully the direction in which the surveyingparty were to be found, and no one seemed to know anything about them, nor could we make any delay with safety, to find help from them. We must make a longer drive that day, to reach shelter at night; but the deathlike look had gone from poor Will’s face, and the smooth prairie trail gave little jar to the spring wagon, as the horses never moved faster than a steady walk.
Noontime brought us to the best sodhouse I had seen; it was really a comfortable home. There were no floors, but the ground was hard and polished, and the inside walls were covered with white cotton cloth, and a ceiling, made of the cloth, was suspended under the roof of sod-covered poles. I made tea and toast for Will on the good cookstove, and ate with relish, myself, the good dinner that the wholesome-looking women of the house prepared for the doctor and me; for though it was not a stage-station, in that new country all houses ‘keep,’ as the people say. At night, the house where we had planned to stay was more pretentious, but I did not like the looks of the ranch men and women who came out to help us; and having my choice between a bed in the living-room of the family and one in an empty old cabin near-by, I chose the latter. The door would not shut, the bed was not clean, the dirt-floor was no better than the roadway, and the dust from the old sod-roof above us lay in black ridges on our faces next morning; but it was enough that Will was certainly gaining strength.
The weather was still soft and mild, and the sun shone all day; the air was a tonic, and Will dozed away the hours in comfort. I had been able to buy an empty soap-box, of which I made a better seat for myself, and we started, with good courage, on our last day’s ride to Columbus, where we should find a hotel and a good physician, and could dismiss our German, and rest until Will was well enough to go home.
But a new trouble met me. Our driver had found whiskey at the ranch, and brought a bottle away with him. He soon fell asleep and, after a little, tumbled in a heap on the floor of the wagon, under the high seat. I could not reach the reins nor dare I alarm Will, who was sleeping and had observed nothing. I only hoped the man would continue to sleep, for the dear horses were old friends, and I knew they would keep to the trail, and turn all right if they should meet a train, which was not likely to happen, as at this season they were all going east. Before we reached the crossing at the Loup River, not far from Columbus, which was a difficult ford and my dread all the anxious day, the man had slept off his stupor enough to climb to his seat and take the reins again; and to my great relief, another single wagon, like our own, was about to crawl down the steep bank into the deepest portion of the current. Our Punch and Judy did not need guiding to follow the lead; and we went safely on across the many islands and channels of the wide river, dangerous, some of them, from quicksands, if you lost the trail, and soon after drew up before this house, where I am writing to you; and it seems a palace to me, though it really is a dingy two-story building, very bareand common-looking. Freighters and stage-drivers, dressed in rather uncouth style, lounged on the dirty narrow porch; but I climbed down from the rear of the wagon, in my soiled, oddly draped cotton dress, with a confidence in their good-will that I did not find misplaced. A dozen strong men came forward to lift Will out, and take off the horses, and unpack the wagon — not employees of the house, but its guests on the porch; and if I had suggested to them to take that drunken doctor away and hang him, I think they would have done it.
An Ohio woman kept the hotel; she had heard of us from the stage-men, and a word secured us a room up the stairs, in her barrack-like house, though it was already overfull of men.
The wretch who had kept me in fear all day, and could then stand with difficulty, was paid and dismissed. He had seemed to obey me in coming, as if I owned the world; and I am sure he believed I owned it all when I paid him what he asked for coming; but it mattered little to me so long as we were safe and among friends, and Will was better. I ate my supper with pleasure, though the forty rough men seated at the table with me seemed much embarrassed at my presence. I recognized respect for me in my helpless state, when they scarcely lifted their eyes from the table, and spoke to each other in whispers.
But oh, dear! when I came back to our room, hoping to find Will resting and happy, he was, for the first time in his illness, wildly delirious. The sight of so many people, and the bustle and noise of the house, after the worries of the day, were too much for his weak state. I sent in haste for the physician here whom I had heard of, and when he came, I saw I could rely on his aid and his knowledge. He gave a quieting medicine, and this morning, as I sit beside Will, writing, he is quite himself, resting and stronger.
Daylight has shown the room to be exceedingly dirty; the house has been full of disbanded soldiers going east from stations and camps north of the Platte River. The bed was unfit for decent people, and we grow more particular when we reach settlements. As there seem to be few, if any, women attendants in the house, I have taken the room in hand myself a little. I succeeded in getting a ‘ bucket’ of warm water and a mop, and have taken up a good deal of the dust, and no doubt some fleas and other vermin. We hope soon to be able to go on home.
I have not dared to write to you before this. To think of you and my Eastern home, and put in words, during the past two weeks, what has taken all my strength and courage to face, would have weakened my self-control. Now I write full of hope and in comparative comfort.

COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA
October 30, 1865.
It is two weeks since I wrote to you, soon after reaching Columbus, and we thought a day or two would see us on our way to our home; but Will did not mend as fast as we hoped he would. Sometimes I lost hope; but had I not escaped with him alive, from those desolate prairies behind us, the very ‘valley of the shadow of death’! We had the aid of a kind and intelligent physician, and the essential comforts of life.
I cooked Will’s food on the kitchen stove myself; but I was in no way disheartened, nor did my appetite fail me, when I saw the process of cooking the food for the public table; I even helped pull out some of the flies from the batter of soaked bread, which stood on the cooking-table ready to be fried into great balls, in spiders full of grease, and knew, when I ate them later for supper, that not a few remained. To show daintiness, or seem to be different from those about me, would repel the kindness so freely given, which was our support and help.
When I could leave Will, I went to the porch and talked with the stage-drivers, as they came in, about the 90-mile journey still before us — learning how many miles we would be forced to travel in a day to reach the stage-stations at night; for our experience had taught us the wisdom of staying at public places on the road. That we were not molested the night our German doctor found the whiskey, at that lonely wayside ranch, was fortunate.
But, after ten days without much change, we both grew restive; there were so many things to make our goingon more and more imperative.
It was the last of October; these constant days of sunshine must soon end. What if November winds and cold storms set in early? We had no clothing warm enough for late traveling on the plains, and, to my great satisfaction, Will had come to see, what I had long known, that at his best, even in our pleasant city home, he would not be equal to the demands of Western life upon his physical strength, and we must go back to New York before winter. A coach-ride from Council Bluffs to Des Moines, of 150 miles, was not to be thought of at that season, and the only other way to reach the nearest railroad was by the Missouri River; and if we delayed too long at Columbus, the last boat of the season would leave for St. Joseph, Missouri. We must go on.
The anxiety and thinking kept Will from getting strong; but he could not yet walk, much less drive horses, and I could find no one to hire. Every man who could work was out on the prairie with hay-machines, cutting and curing hay for the keeping of the great trains of oxen and mules, which, coming and going to and from the far West, made Columbus a ‘ refitting’ station, as Council Bluffs is called an ‘outfitting one.'
Huge stacks of hay, high and long, and long barns, built of sod and stacked over with hay, stretched in every direction from the little cluster of cabins near the hotel, which made what we call a village and they call a town. They had been cutting hay since July, and would keep on till the frost drove them in; but there were not men enough to do the work of getting in the hay still needed. There was a camp of soldiers stationed a few miles away, and someone mentioned that a convalescent soldier, an under-officer, had received a furlough, and would be glad of the free passage east, and would be a suitable person to help us. I wrote at once to the commandant of the post, and received a courteous reply, that the man would come the next morning and go with us as we wished; so, without delay, I made everything ready, and Will grew bright at the prospect of moving on. Our good friends, the stage-drivers, brought him to the porch next morning before they went out with their coaches, and our horses were put on the wagon, already loaded up and before the door. Good-byes were said to our hostess and her barkeeper, who stood smilingly in the doorway (after confirming to us our previous surmises, that they would soon make a united head to the house), and we waited for our soldier. He came with a note from the commandant, saying there had been a mistake. The soldier’s papers required him to report by the Southern route at Leavenworth, and he could not go with us! Will grew faint with disappointment, and exclaimed, ‘I shall certainly die if I stay here.’ One glance at his despairing face, and then at our trusty horses, and a look at the sunny sky, and a thought of those stage-drivers who had promised to meet us at the stations, and I said, ‘I will drive myself; help him in.’ Will did not object, and in ten minutes he was in his old place on the mattress and pillows, and his voice sounded quite strong and cheery as he called to tell me how to climb over the high sides of the wagon, to reach the seat, perched up so high that the canvass cover almost touched my head; and I felt elated and happy as I gathered the reins in my bare hands, and turned into the trail to commence our four days’ journey, and, in a few moments more, left all signs of habitation behind us. I knew a good deal more about prairie traveling than when I came out. I had not yet resumed my hoops; the demands of fashion at Columbus, proud and central city as it claimed to be, had not required it. I had completed that morning a most satisfactory bargain, some days under consideration, with a stagedriver’s wife, who had come for a few days to the hotel, for her last summer’s Shaker sunbonnet, with a buff chambray cape and strings, in exchange for my quite stylish and new hat. I was to pay her two dollars in cash besides, for she was not sure that the hat was quite the thing. ‘Most uns wore Shakers.’ At the last moment, she yielded. I knew the comfort of that deep shade and fast strings, under the bright sun and prairie winds; not that my complexion needed shade: I was already brown as the prairie dust, and my gloves were long ago worn out. A heavy flannel shirt of Will’s, put on under my dress, may have looked a trifle clumsy, but gave me warmth and left my arms free. I was a little dismayed when Punch began to go lame after a mile or so. I dared do a good many things, but not to lift his foot to see what was the matter, and Will must not be worried. But he soon cast a shoe, and I climbed down and recovered it; the soft, stoneless soil could do no harm, and the first stationmaster put it on again. Our lunch-box was well filled and I made tea on the station stove, while the men hastened to take off the horses and care for them. When our stage-man John came swinging up later, on his coach from the East, he gave a ringing whoop at sight of us, and said I ‘ would do,’ which gave me satisfaction.
And from that time on, for the whole four days, we were under the special care of the stage-men. They looked after the horses and our comfort, in every way possible to them. It was not one man, for of course we could not keep up with the coach, and the men were frequently changed; but going east and going west, all knew about us, and passed us on to each other, so that a bed was ready for us, and men waiting to lift Will out tenderly and carry him to it, at every night station.
The stations were sometimes very rough places, sometimes only one room for living and sleeping; but the one curtained bed was always ours; at least it was Will’s; and if it was only a lounge, I spread our blankets on the floor for myself, as I had done farther west. It did not ruffle me in the least, if one or two men snored lustily in another corner of the room; I had learned to trust kind hearts under very rough exteriors. All our good Johns waved their hands to us, as they passed us on the road; and each day’s travel was laid out for us by one of them each morning.
One day we were told not to go to the regular stage-station at night; it was too rough; but to leave the trail at a certain point and make for a house in sight, two miles across the prairie, where we would get a good room and bed. The owmer knew we were coming, how, we could not tell, and welcomed us like friends; and when Will found he could sit at the table with us, and taste the fried bacon, our host looked at him with tears streaming down his face, and swore big oaths at him roundly, to show how glad he was. Later, the tall figure of our John stood in the doorway of our room, and he too cried like a child because Will called out ‘Hullo’ in a good full voice. The man had walked across the prairie several miles, ‘to see if they was square with the horses,’ he said, but really to see if we were all right. I cannot begin to tell you the comfort these men were to us. They scorned any reward for their services, and had few words to say; if we expressed gratitude, they turned away shyly and disappeared; they still looked at us in that wondering sort of way, I suppose because we showed plain marks of being ‘tender-feet,’ as newcomers from the East arc called.
I was never frightened at our loneliness on the prairie, even when one day they told us there would be a stretch of 16 miles without a house. One day, I was startled for a moment, at a sudden apparition, behind a slight rise of ground, of a dozen Indians, coming in single file, at right angles across our trail; and the horses, too, showed signs of fear; but their squaws were with them with loaded ponies, and I knew we were beyond dangerous Indian ground, and they were soon out of sight.
Once, at our noon halt, we found no men at home at the station, only a young German woman who could not speak English; and as the usual custom for travelers was to water and feed their own horses, I was at a loss what to do; for to lift a pail of water to those thirsty, eager horses, was beyond my strength and my courage as well; but the woman came to my help, and did it all with ease.
Until the afternoon of the third day we had been following the unbroken trail on the level prairie; then we came to a large stream with deeply worn banks, and, to my dismay, some of the planks of the long bridge were upset, and it was impassable. I could not leave the horses nor could I lift the heavy planks to replace them. It was nearing sundown; what could we do if darkness found us in that place? The coach had already passed us, and not a train or house was in sight. For the first time my teeth chattered with fear.
A half-hour’s waiting, and two men in an open spring wagon came rapidly up beside us. Spring wagons are unusual on the plains. The slow-moving heavy white-covered wagons we call ‘prairie schooners’ are commonly used, and they can be seen at a long distance. I thought this one had dropped from the sky, and still more, when the men came quickly to speak to us, and in the tone and language of the far East, asked us how we were. They were entire strangers, but belonged to the surveying-party, of whom we had seen and heard nothing since that morning at Lone Tree, when our friend left us after his night’s vigil. They had been told by their chief to look out for us, and had been expecting to find us at some point farther west, days before that time. Just when all other help failed us, they appeared, and we were soon safely on our way, to the last night station of our journey.
The last day was a difficult one for me, though Will was already so nearly well he needed but little care, reclining cheerfully on his cushions, telling me stories and enjoying the sunshine.
But the country changed to high rolling prairie after leaving the valley of the Elkhorn River, and the frequent long descents were perfectly smooth, like ice, and the worn shoes of the horses obliged me to ‘put on the brake.’ It was hard to reach it, and harder to press it down. Then the front bow of the wagon cover had broken, and left the canvas to flap about my face, and the sun beat in my eyes, altogether bringing on a violent headache. For the first time in all the four weeks of care and labor, I came near giving out; and the nearer we came to thickly settled country and town life, the less we could expect of personal interest in us. We were being lost in the edges of the rushing, busy life of that world, which seemed to commence at the Missouri River; and Heaven, which had been so near, and Angelic care, in the shape of good Johns and civil engineers, no longer seemed about us. When at last, we took our places in the line of white-topped wagons, waiting their turn to cross the river on the ferryboat at Omaha, I hoped I might never again see the valley of the Platte. We realized, too, when we were unrecognized by friends on the boat with us, that we were filling well the rôle of emigrant ‘poor white,’ whose fadedout, shabby look had often excited half pity, half contempt in us, in the streets of Council Bluffs.
When we drew up at last, at our own door, safe and nearly sound, amid the congratulations of the kindest of neighbors and friends, I still kept in mind the tender, almost worshipful respect and care of our stage-driver friends.
And now Punch and Judy, our faithful horses, are to be sold, and a few days must see us on our way down the Missouri, for November’s chill air is here, and our faces are set towards New York and home.