A little trip west--xiv

Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes, the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; lawyers with a few books. Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers "hunting country"--a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth.

Been reading, lately, a novel by an old Sioux City mayor named Herbert Quick, titled Vandemark's Folly, a story that includes some lengthy travel on the way west in the 1850s. Couldn't help but love this description, not because it's so beautiful but because it creates an image so unlike whatever imagies were in my imagination before reading; because when I think of the Oregon Trail, I can't help but imagine something akin to Ward Bond leading a mule train of, say, twenty prairie schooners all alone beneath that huge prairie sky. And that's it.

Imagine the trail full of men, women, and kids, loneliness only rarely a problem. Sometimes tens of thousands would be camping out at a place like Ash Hollow. It's no wonder that the Lakota, up atop the hillside, couldn't help believing they were being overrun by palefaces. They were. 

Always, out ahead, lay a dream so real that when the train would come up on the landmarks in western Nebraska, they could almost see Oregon or California, wherever all those folks Quick counts were headed. 

Weeks of what could be torturous, mind-numbing travel on an rolling sea of grass, here and there maybe a grove or trapper's cabin; and then, finally, up there on the western horizon, you spot something coming a day or more away, something that makes you think that maybe you are finally and truly getting somewhere.

Hope itself falls into place in line. Smiles grow where they'd been scarce as drinking water for far too long. It seems maybe this whole mad enterprise will finally amount to something.

Doesn't matter that what your eyes won't let you leave doesn't amount to much but a strange, miniature mountain. Doesn't matter that doesn't mean anything more than that you've arrived somewhere east of the mountains you know are coming. Doesn't matter that it's just rock because your imagination sculpts that solitary figure up top into a version of you that you just can't help believing is going to make it now, that your destiny is honestly and truly somewhere in view.

Something in that figure beckons, and, once again, just like it was way back in Independence, you're ready once more to go west like all the others. 

So you let the mules know. You tell them as much. You whisper in their ears.