By the middle of May the trail from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie was occupied by a continuous line of wagons.
"That was fine travelling," said the immigrant in the detached way of one who speaks of dead history. "There was grass and water; and the wagon seemed like a little house at night. Everybody was jolly. It didn't last long."
After Fort Laramie there were three hundred miles of plains, with little grass and less water.
"We thought that was a desert!" exclaimed the immigrant bitterly. "My God! Quite a lot turned back at Laramie. They were scared by the cholera that broke out, scared by the stories of the desert, scared by the Indians. They went back. I suppose they're well and hearty--and kicking themselves every gold report that goes back east."
The bright anticipations, the joy of the life, the romance of the journey all faded before the grim reality. The monotony of the plains, the barrenness of the desert, the toil of the mountains, the terrible heat, the dust, the rains, the sickness, the tragedy of deaths had flattened all buoyancy, and left in its stead only a sullen, dogged determination.
"There was lots of quarrelling, of course," said our narrator. "Everybody was on edge. There were fights, that we had to settle somehow, and bad feeling."
They had several minor skirmishes with Indians, lost from their party by disease, suffered considerable hardships and infinite toil.
"We thought we'd had a hard time," said our friend wonderingly. "Lord!"
At the very start of the journey they had begun to realize that they were overloaded, and had commenced to throw away superfluous goods. Several units of the party had even to abandon some of their wagons.
"We chucked everything we thought we could get along without. I know we spent all one day frying out bacon to get the grease before we threw it away. We used the grease for our axles."
They reached the head of the Humboldt. Until this point they had kept together, but now demoralization began. They had been told at Salt Lake City that they had but four hundred miles to go to Sacramento. Now they discovered that at the Humboldt they had still more than that distance to travel; and that before them lay the worst desert of all.