The great plains; the romance of western American exploration, warfare, and settlement, 1527-1870 . its pathless distance, its inevitable hardships, and its fre-quent savage perils, reckoned with the character of the men,women, and children concerned, it stands alone. The era wasone of national hard times; and not only the professional failures,but ministers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and farmers, withtheir families, caught the new yellow fever, and betook them-selves to a journey fifty times as long and hard as the averageof them had ever taken before. Powder, lead, food-stufifs, house-hol
The great plains; the romance of western American exploration, warfare, and settlement, 1527-1870 . its pathless distance, its inevitable hardships, and its fre-quent savage perils, reckoned with the character of the men,women, and children concerned, it stands alone. The era wasone of national hard times; and not only the professional failures,but ministers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and farmers, withtheir families, caught the new yellow fever, and betook them-selves to a journey fifty times as long and hard as the averageof them had ever taken before. Powder, lead, food-stufifs, house-hold goods, wives, sisters, mothers, and babies rode in the Osna-burg-sheeted prairie schooners, or whatsoever wheeled convey-ance the emigrant could secure, up from ancient top-buggiesto new Conestogas; while the men rode their horses or mules,or trudged beside the caravans. A historic party of five French-men pushed a hand-wagon from the Missouri to the Coast; andone man trundled his possessions in a wheelbarrow. At its best,it was an itinerary untranslatable to the present generation; at [174]. REIGN OF THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER its worst, with Indian massacres, thirst, snows, tenderfootedness,and disease, it was one of the ghastliest highways in worst chapter of cannibalism in our national record wasthat of the Donner Party, snowed in from November to March,1849-50 in the Sierra Nevada. In the fifties the Asiatic choleracrawled in upon the Plains, and like a gray wolf followed thewagon-trains from the River to the Rockies. In the height ofthe migration, from four thousand to five thousand immigrantsdied of this pestilence; and if there was a half-mile which theIndians had failed to punctuate with a grave, the cholera tookcare to remedy the omission. The two-thousand-mile trip wasa matter of four months when least, and of six with bad were born, and people died; worried greenhorns quar-relled and killed one another — and the train straggled on. Upon the b
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Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherchicagomcclurg
