THE LONG TRAIL

The Old Overland Trail from the Missouri River to the Willamette is a distance of nearly two thousand miles. Before Jason Lee and Marcus Whitman sanctioned its use for the migrating myriads of Americans seeking the shores of the sunset sea, trappers and adventurers, good and bad, had mapped out a general route over the wind-whipped passes, where the storm stands sentinel and guards the granite ways among the rough Rocky Mountains. They had followed the falls-filled Snake and the calmer Columbia, which plow for a thousand miles or more among basaltic bastions buttressing the mountain sides, or through the lava lands where cavernous chasms yawn and abysmal depths echo back the sullen roar of the raging rapids.

In the early forties of the nineteenth century restless spirits from Missouri and eastward began to filter through the fingertips of the beckoning mountains of the 22 West and locate in the land where storms seldom come and where the extremes of heat and cold are unknown––Willamette Valley, Oregon.

In these early days, a farmer, whom we shall name Johnson, with wife and son, hoping to better conditions and prolong life, thus sought the goal toward the setting sun. Starting when the sturdy spring was enlivening all nature, they left the malarial marshes of the Mississippi Valley, where quinine and whisky for “fevernagur” were to be had at every crossroads store, and in a couple of weeks found themselves west of the muddy Missouri, where the herds of humped bison grazed as yet unafraid among the rolling, well-wooded hills of eastern Kansas.

Barring a few common hindrances, they went well and reached the higher and hotter plains in midsummer; they were out of the sight of hills and trees––just one weary, eternal, unchangeable vista day after day. Mrs. Johnson had not been well, and after a few weeks that promised more for the future than they fulfilled, she began gradually to lose strength.

But she was made of the uncomplaining material pioneers are wrought of, the ones who so lived, loved, and labored that the hard-earned sweets of civilization grew to highest perfection about their graves, and proved the most enduring monument to their memory. She never murmured other than to ask occasionally: “Father, how much farther? Isn’t it a wonderfully long way to Oregon?”

“Just over that next range of hills, I think, from what the trappers told me,” was the reply, after they had come to the toes of the foothills that terminate the long-lying limbs of the giant Rockies. But he did not know the stealth of the mountains nor the fantastic pranks the caÑony ranges can play upon the stranger. A snowy-haired peak, brother to Father Time, wearing a fringe of evergreens for his neckruff, would play hide-and-seek with them for days, dodging behind this eminence and hiding away back of that hill, only to reappear apparently as far off as ever, and sometimes in a different direction from where he last seemed to be.

After a few more days: “Father, how many more miles do you think?”

“O, not many now, I am sure!” cheerily and optimistically would come the answer.

As they climbed, and climbed, and climbed, the ripening service-berry, blackened by weeks of attention by the unclouded sun, and the pine-hen and the speckled beauties from the noisy trout-streams, added to their comforts, and for a little while appeared to enliven the tired and fading woman. A frosty night or two, a peak newly whitened with early snow, put an invigorating thrill and pulse into the blood of the man and the boy, but she crept just a little nearer to the camp fire of evenings and found herself more and more languid in responding to the call of the day that returned all too soon for her. At last, rolling out on the Wahsatch side of the continental backbone, they encountered very warm but shortening days, while the nights grew chillier. Having passed to the north of Salt Lake by the trail so well and faithfully marked by Mr. Ezra Meeker in recent years, they began to realize that they were with the waters that flow to the west.

One evening, after the tin plates, iron forks and knives, and the pewter spoons had been washed and returned to their box, and as they were getting ready for their nightly rest, Mrs. Johnson said, wearily: “Father, it just seems to me I would be glad if I never would waken again. It seems I would enjoy never again hearing the everlasting squeech, squeech of the wheels in the sand, and see the sun go down day after day so red and so far away over those new mountains. O, I am so tired!”

“Never mind, mother, we are not far from our new home now;” and moving over to her side as she sat leaning against the wagon-tongue, the man slipped his own tired arm about her shoulders and let her rest against him, for he was indeed weary, and the trail was wonderfully long.

The following morning he purposely lay still just a little longer than was his custom, although he was most prudently desirous of making as much speed as he could while the weather continued so good; he knew the rains might soon set in and make travel over unmade roads much worse than it already was.

When he arose he noiselessly crept away from her side and quietly called the boy to go and bring up the horses and the cow, cautioning him to take off the horse-bell and carry it so as not to arouse the mother when he came to camp. Quietly as possible he made the fire and prepared their breakfast of fare that was daily becoming scantier. Then, when all was ready, he tiptoed through the sand to where she lay under the spreading arms of a little desert juniper, such as are occasionally found in the deserts, and where she had said the night before she wished she could sleep forever. She looked so calm and restful he hesitated to wake her; it seemed like robbery to take from her one moment of the longed-for and hard-earned rest. Yet it was time they were on their road, and the day was fine; so after a few minutes he called, gently, “Mother, you’re getting a nice rest, aren’t you?”

She did not stir. He then stooped to kiss the languid lips––they were cold. She was dead. They had been seeking a home by the shores of the sunset sea; she had found the sunrise land.

It is a sad, solemn, and sacred thing to be with our dead, but to be alone, hundreds of miles from the face of any friend, in such an hour, is an experience few ever have to meet. Pioneer-like, the father scans the horizon, locating all the prominent features of the landscape. He makes a rude map, not forgetting the juniper. As best he can he prepares the body for the burying. And such a burying! No lumber with which to make even a rough box; nothing but their daily clothing and nightly bedding was to be had. The unlined grave was more than usually forbidding. The desert demon had trailed that brave body and was now swallowing it up. They made the grave by the juniper where she last slept, and, sorrowing, the father and the son went on, firm in the resolve that the loved one should not always lie in a desert grave.

Forty years later a man past middle-age, riding a horse and leading another, to whose packsaddle was fastened a box, went slowly along that old trail in Southern Idaho, now almost obliterated by many-footed Progress. He was scanning the hills and consulting a piece of age-yellowed 28 paper, broken at all its ancient creases. It was the son obeying the dying request of the old father––going to find, if possible, the spot where the tired mother went to sleep so long ago, and bring all that remained to rest by his side.

It was no easy task. Fertile fields, whose irrigated areas now presented billowy breasts of ripening grain; mighty ditches like younger and better-behaved rivers; a railway following the general direction of the old trail; ranch-houses and fat haystacks indenting the sky-line once so bare of all except clumps of sagebrush––these all conspired to make the task next to impossible.

Man may scratch the hillsides, but cannot mar the majesty of the mountains; they were unchanged. The map he carried was the one his father made on the spot more than a generation before. It had been well made and the specifications were minute. After a long while, carefully measuring and comparing, he found the spot to him so sacred. The juniper tree, so rare in that section, had not been disturbed by the new owner of the land, and 29 as the precious burden, secured at last, was borne away, it still stood on guard––as if lonely now. Like father, like son. Both were faithfully bound by the strongest tie in the universe––love!