"_3d June._--After much bother about a guide, and loss of linch-pins, fitting of harness, kicking and jibbing of mules, &c., we left the Missouri, and camped five miles from the town. We pitched our tents in a beautiful spot, on the slope of a hill, surrounded by a large wood. A muddy little stream ran at the bottom. To this (with sleeves turned up and braces off, trying, I suppose, to look as much like grooms or dragoons as we were able) we each led our horses: no doubt we succeeded, for we felt perfectly satisfied with everything and everybody. The novelty put us all in excellent humour. The potatoes in the camp-kettle had a decidedly bivouacking appearance; and though the grass was wet, who, I should like to know, would have condescended to prefer a camp-stool? As to the pistols, and tomahawks, and rifles, it was evident that they might be wanted at a moment's notice, that it would have been absolutely dangerous not to have them all in perfect readiness. Besides, there was a chance of finding game in the wood. If the chance had been a hundred times as diminutive, we were in duty bound to try it."
Playing at travelling, like playing at soldiers, is all very well when the campaign is brief. The raw recruit or amateur campaigner plumes himself on a night passed upon straw in a barn. Give him a week's bivouacking in damp ploughed fields, and he sings small and feels rheumatic, and prefers the domestic nightcap to the warrior's laurel. Thus with Messrs Coke and Company. They were in a monstrous hurry to begin gipsying. What would they not have given, a week or two later, for a truckle bed and a tiled roof? The varnish of the picture, the anticipated romance, was soon rubbed off by the rough fingers of hardship and reality. What a start they made of it! Mr Coke is tolerably reserved on this head; but through his reserve it is not difficult to discern that, unless they had taken hair powder and a grand piano, they could hardly have encumbered themselves with more superfluities than those with which their mules and waggons were overloaded. Many who read these lines will remember the admirable and humorous account given by our lamented friend Ruxton, of the westward-bound caravan which fell in with Killbuck and La Bonté at the big granite block in Sweet Water Valley. Few, who have ever read, will have forgotten that characteristic sketch;--the dapper shooting-jackets, the fire-new rifles, the well-fitted boots and natty cravats, the Woodstock gloves and elaborate powder-horns, the preserved soup, hotch-potch, pickles, porter, brandy, coffee, sugar, of the amateur backwoodsmen who found the starving trappers dining on a grilled snake in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, and generously ministered to their necessities. With somewhat similar but still more extravagant provision did our jockey of Norfolk, Fred, and Julius Cæsar, go forth into the prairie. Less fortunate than Ruxton's Scotchman, they failed to retain or enjoy what they had dearly paid for. Sadly altered was their trim, piteous their plight, long, long before they reached the Rocky Mountains. Disasters soon arrived, with disgust and discord in their train. At their first halting place, five miles from St Joseph, a pouring rain, pattering on their tent, forbade sleep; a horse and mule, disgusted by the dirty weather and foretaste of rough work, broke loose and galloped back to the town. These recovered, and the new guide, successor to the faithless Fils, having joined, they again went ahead. We may cull from Mr Coke's pages a few of the impediments and annoyances encountered at this early period of the journey:--