Fool's Gold

by Steve Stroble

and set down the terms for his rejoining the company.

  “All right, Mr. Smithton. You might be the richest one of this here party but you are also the luckiest and the dumbest all at the same time.”

  “Why, thank you.” Broken, the miscreant never again questioned what Dan said, at least until they got to Ft. Laramie.

  “Here’s the deal. Your compadres done went and voted you back in. Why is beyond me. Now it’s my job to git all of you tenderfeet to Californy less some of you decides to join another train, turn around and head back home, or up and die on me. To be successful we can’t be hurtin’ both ourselves and the stock pullin’ you out of the mud. We got to do it as easy as possible and only this one time and never again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So’s first off, throw off all the mining equipment you brought along and then break out the meat you got in there. We’ll feast on that today and tomorrow to celebrate that there’s still 61 of us alive and well. Usually there’s at least a few that don’t make it through the first week.”

  At first Smithton balked at sharing food and jettisoning his precious cargo. But when Dan pointed at the vultures circling over a dead horse further up the trail and then walked over to the wagon and pulled out a choice cut of beef that was covered with maggots, he relented. While five of the men cooked the first meat that they had seen in a week the rest went to work unceremoniously tossing the mining equipment by the wayside. They then dug out the wagon’s wheels from the half-hardened mud. It took only four oxen to pull it free.

  Dan allowed camp to be made early that night, an hour before nightfall. “This’ll be a good spot to rest on up tomorrow.” He informed them. “It’ll be Sunday.”

  “But I always thought the wagon trains traveled seven days a week.”

  “Some does, others don’t. What I noticed is the ones who rest up a day a week has stock that be in a lot better shape once they git toward the end of the trail. The ones that don’t rest up leaves a lot of dead animals behind. And more dead people, too.”

  The few that protested about resting that first Sunday did not protest by the second Sunday. They welcomed the break from rising before dawn and not bedding down until after dark on travel days. The hardest working among them never had tested their endurance as it was now. Even building a fire was tiresome. Earlier settlers had long since cut down the few trees that once grew near the trail. This meant that fuel for fires to cook over had to be scrounged from anything made from wood that had been tossed along the trail to lighten the load. Plows, books, tools, wheelbarrows, pianos, beds, bookcases, guns, ammunition, stoves, mattresses, clothes, safes, and anvils were to be found. There was also a seemingly endless supply of buffalo chips for fires. But the chips were scattered far and wide.

  Some of those who discarded possessions along the trail still clung to them in their hearts. Their envy was so great that they made sure no one else would benefit from them. One dejected forty-niner wrote about such excess baggage:

  “We were compelled to throw away a quantity of iron, steel, trunks, valises, old clothes, and boots, of little value and I may observe here that we subsequently found the road lined with cast-off articles, piles of bacon, flour, wagons, groceries, clothing, and various other articles which had been left, and the waste and destruction of property was enormous. In this the selfish nature of man was plainly exhibited. In many instances the property thus left was rendered useless. We afterwards found sugar on which turpentine had been poured, flour in which salt and dirt had been thrown, and wagons broken in pieces or partially burned, clothing torn to pieces, so that they could not be worn, and a wanton waste made of valuable property, simply because the owners could not use it themselves and were determined that nobody else would.”

  The first two hunting parties of Lakota Sioux that they had spotted produced panic among the Easterners. They scurried for their weapons and jumped into the wagons awaiting the order to fire. However, Dan knew enough of that tribe’s language to ensure that his party’s oxen would not be rustled or its pace slowed by overzealous bartering from the Native Americans for about the next hundred miles. He gave them a handful of silverware to seal the deal. During the third week of the company’s travel, the trails out of Independence, St. Joseph, and Old Ft. Kearney had merged to the south of Dan’s party, which was about 15 miles to the north. With dozens of wagon trains now clogging the single artery of the Oregon Trail, it stretched to ten miles wide at points to accommodate the hundreds of wagons and thousands of two- and four-legged creatures. Pushing west to get there first was their shared goal. The clouds of dust that they produced were visible to those traveling on the less congested Mormon Trail.

  “Look at that dust storm!” Rudolph said when it first was sighted. He had become what Dan called his “right-hand man” and was constantly at the guide’s side on a horse that Dan had picked out for him from a farm near Kanesville.

  Dan chuckled. “That’s a manmade dust storm, boy, cause of all the wagon trains down there on the Oregon Trail. Bet yer glad to be up here where the air’s cleaner and there ain’t near as much of what the stock drops to have to try and step over all day long. I came back east on that Oregon Trail south of here last summer. It smelled a whole lot worse down there than this here trail does.”

  The landscape was covered with high prairie vegetation such as tall grass and thousands of wildflowers due to the late spring rains. Butterflies, birds, crickets, and grasshoppers flew and jumped everywhere. High above soared the crows, owls, buzzards, and other eaters of dead flesh that feasted on the livestock that fell by the wayside. They had to compete with wolves and coyotes. Because quicksand was hard to spot Dan carefully led the wagons along the tracks of those who had started out earlier. The Platte now in spots had up to a dozen channels that surrounded sandy islands. Swollen streams, sloughs, and rivers that fed into the Platte made them dangerous to ford. The company lost no one – man or beast – while crossing them because its late start had allowed the waters to recede to safer levels.

  This was not so for the first one they met who had turned around and was headed back east and home. He had been part of one of the first wagon trains to head into the prairie that year. Only one yoke of oxen pulled a battered wagon with missing parts. When Dan halted the company everyone hurried forward to hear why someone would abandon the trail westward this early.

  “What happened partner?” Dan asked.

  The weary man sighed. “I give up. I guess my wife was right. She told me not to go. Wish now I’d listened.”

  “You lose part of your oxen?”

  “Yeah. Two of them drowned and I lost most of my possessions and food when we tried to get across a stream that was too high and running too fast. That left me with only these two sorry beasts. But somehow they seem happier now that I turned around. They probably got more sense than anyone headed west.”

  “Where you headed in particular?”

  “Back to my farm in Iowa.”

  “Did the rest of your train git across the stream?”

  “After we waited five days for the water to go down far enough. After they saw what happened to me they all wanted to wait. I was the first one to try. After most of them were across I had had enough time to think it over and decided to quit. Folks in my wagon train were all saying how sorry they was for me but that they couldn’t spare any of their food. We plumb left too early. The first couple of weeks we only made five to ten miles a day because the trails were so full of mud. Us always stopping to pull wagons out of the mud wore our oxen and horses out. Us too.”

  “How many days ahead before we git to that stream?”

  “About one. Chances are you might even catch the wagon train I was with once you get across it. Your stock looks to be in a lot better shape than what ours were. There were a bunch of trains backed up there waiting to cross but they’ll probably all be across by the time you get there.”

  Dan’s wisdom in delaying their start slowly dawned on the company. He s
hared more wisdom as the eastbound man prepared to leave.

  “Be careful. The injuns sometimes will go after a lone wagon. Easy pickings.”

  “Oh? Then you mind if I turn around and travel with you until we meet the other two wagons that I saw headed back to Kanesville? I can travel with them even though they’re going slower than molasses going uphill in the middle of winter. Don’t want to become another set of bleached bones out here.”

  “Sure. Better for you and them other wagons both.”

  It was late afternoon before they met the other two wagons heading east. One contained a family that had been bound for Oregon. Its father and husband had died from cholera. The other wagon held two young men who had had their fill of wind, rain, hail, dust, hot days, cold nights, unsavory food, and no girls their age for company. Dan quickly explained to them how three wagons traveling together was safer than one or two.

  The usual music and storytelling was absent that evening. Instead Dan and the others asked the eastbound contingent about what lay to the west and their plans.

  “Lots of strange rocks ahead. There’s Courthouse Rock. Looks like one. We got as fur as Chimney Rock.” One of the youths lamented. “Even wrote our names on it. When the cholera started killing off some of us, my friend here and me