fading. Unless there was 'a quick change,' he wrote in a letter back home, 'a few days will end her mortal carear.'
SIX DAYS LATER, THE EMIGRANTS STOOD looking down into the churning waters of the Big Blue River, muddy and menacing and wide as a football field. Driftwood bobbed on the swift surface. Trains typically forded here, in what is now northern Kansas, but rains had raised the water level until it was nearly even with the banks, and the normally gentle ford was instead a wagon-wrecking torrent. They were only hours too late. Two companies ahead of them had reached the river the night before, crossed safely, and could now be seen in the distance, rolling west over the broken landscape.
That night a thunderstorm hit. 'The whole arch of the heavens for a time was wrapped in a sheet of flame,' one man remembered. In the morning the river was higher than the night before, and the emigrants had to accept that they were stuck, probably for days.
Fortunately, they found a delightful place to wait. A few hundred yards short of the river lay a bountiful spring in a cool and shaded gully, the water 'of the most excellent kind.' There was good wood for campfires and grass for the stock, and even a short, steep hill nearby that offered a splendid view of the countryside. Edwin Bryant, a newspaperman going west who was the wordsmith of the group, dubbed the site 'Alcove Spring,' presumably because he thought a small cliff in the gully formed a natural alcove. Another man carved the new name in one of the rocks. Characteristically, Reed engraved his name and the date in big, bold letters.
Such an agreeable campsite should have done them good, but as they waited for the river to fall, Sarah Keyes's health flagged. She grew speechless, weakened before their eyes, and then, still in the presence of the daughter she had vowed not to leave, drew a final labored breath. The men of the party had already started work on a raft so the wagons could be floated across, but the rites of the dead took precedence. The men felled a cottonwood tree, hewed it into planks, and hammered together a coffin. About sixty or seventy yards from the trail they dug a grave. John Denton, a young Englishman traveling with the Donners, found a gray stone and carved on its face the dead woman's name and age.
At 2:00 P.M. the emigrants formed into a funeral procession and marched solemnly to the grave. They sang a hymn—'with much pathos and expression,' Bryant noted—and then, gathered beneath the oak boughs, listened to a sermon by a Presbyterian minister along on the journey. Like any good preacher, he tailored his message to his audience. 'Trouble yourselves not about those that sleep,' he urged, taking as his biblical text the Book of Thessalonians. It was important, he said, to seek a 'better country,' a place without sickness, like the place where Keyes now rested. George McKinstry, a sickly Mississippi merchant heading west for his health, wrote in his diary that it had been a 'sensible sermon.' That was true, and the reasons were more than theological. In a race against time amid a great wilderness, the pioneers standing bareheaded at the grave of Sarah Keyes would do well to hustle along toward the better country they were seeking, not tarry over the old woman they had just laid to rest.
THE NEXT MORNING THE RIVER was still running high, too high to ford, and the men returned to building a raft for the wagons. They chopped down two more cottonwoods and hollowed them out to make huge canoes, at least twenty-five feet long and close to four feet wide. Then they laid a cross-frame over the tops of the two craft, creating a platform on which the wagons could be taken over. When it was ready to be launched, they named the raft the 'Blue River Rover' and shouldered it out into the swift current. When it stayed afloat, cheers erupted.
They crossed nine wagons that day and were up early the next morning to continue the job. In the afternoon a cold wind blew in from the northwest, and as the temperature dropped rain began to fall. Many of the men were standing in the river working the raft from bank to bank with ropes, holding their footing against a current strong enough to knock a man down, and the brutal conditions began to take their toll. Two normally affable men got into a fistfight, even drawing knives, although peacemakers stepped in before anyone was seriously hurt. The last wagon finally crossed about 9:00 P.M., and they made camp in a brake of trees on the western side of the river, but with the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, many men were shivering violently by the time they reached their tents. They were back on the trail the following morning, but between the funeral and the raft-building, more than five days had been lost, time in which a lucky train might make seventy-five miles.
Cold north winds began to blow relentlessly, forcing the men to bundle up in overcoats, the women in shawls. Some of those who had been riding in the wagons started walking, the better to stay warm. Then, almost overnight, a heat wave struck, and people started looking forward to the shade of their tents or a cooling breeze. On the open prairie, Bryant wrote, the heat could be 'excessively oppressive.'
But they were making good distances across the tabletop flatlands of southern Nebraska, or at least good distances for a journey that occurred at the pace of an ox—fifteen to twenty miles a day. In early June they reached the first milestone of their trip: the Platte River. Too shallow for navigation, the Platte had been useless to trappers and fur traders, who used heavy keelboats to carry their supplies upriver and their spoils down. But for emigrants, the Platte was perfect—a gentle, unmistakable byway that pointed directly at an important pass in the Rocky Mountains. In the era of the wagon trains, the Platte, which pours down out of the Rockies and traverses the length of modern Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri, was the great highway of the West.
The Donners and the Reeds and their companions encountered it about at the site of modern-day Kearney, Nebraska, where they turned west and began working their way upstream along the south bank.
On June 12, Reed shot the first elk taken by the company. Hunters had seen some antelope, but the fleet- footed animals were too fast for most of the horses, and it was hard to get within range. As a result, the meat in the emigrants' diet had been mostly the salted supplies they had purchased in Independence, and the tender, fatty flesh of Reed's elk was welcome.
The next day, Reed lost a little of his glory when two other men rode back from a hunt with fresh buffalo steaks. Reaching the buffalo herds was always a notable occasion for the westward emigrants, many of whom had never seen the great animals before. 'If we had found a gold mine,' one man wrote during the Gold Rush, 'there could not have been a greater commotion.' Not surprisingly, Reed's fellow hunters were feted as heroes in camp, and in a letter back home Reed made plain his feelings about their success. The men were hailed as 'the best buffalo hunters on the road—perfect
And now, as
So Reed mounted Glaucus, took three companions, and rode out until he found a buffalo herd so large that it darkened the plains. Disregarding the danger, he outran his friends and then rode straight into the herd. Within minutes, he had shot three buffalo—two bulls and a calf—and was so far ahead of his companions that he rode to a small knoll and sat in the grass to wait. He claimed to have counted 597 buffalo, although it's hard to imagine that he could really have kept track. From his perch, he watched his friends, whose balky horses refused to get close enough to the buffalo to bring one down. Reed had a laugh at their expense, then rode over and joined the hunt, chasing down a bull and shooting him. He shot one more calf, and then they set about the butchering, taking what meat they could carry and leaving the rest for the wolves, unmoved by the waste.
The fresh meat must have boosted spirits, but it was the acclaim that Reed cherished most. When they made it back to camp, he reported proudly, he was hailed as 'the acknowledged hero of the day.' Other men huddled around Glaucus and pronounced her the finest horse in the train. When he wrote home, Reed made sure to mention the compliment.
3
Vexatiously Slow
