Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/23

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The California and Oregon Trail
13

sometimes with force enough to sting from the impact upon the face and hands."[1]

If an emigrant escaped the cholera, crossed all the rivers in safety, if he was beyond the muddy region and a fortunate shower had laid the dust for a time, still the voracious mosquitoes hovered about to prey upon him. On the Big Blue, according to one account, they sang tenor at night while the wolves accompanied them with a bloodcurdling baritone.[2] According to another they went over forty bushels to the acre in the vicinity of Fort Kearney.[3] If we are to believe an emigrant of 1850 the mosquitoes on the Humboldt were so thick and so large as to actually shut off the rays of the sun.[4] He probably could have overlooked that little inconvenience had not the creatures descended to more grievious sin. Some travelers could hardly find words to express the torment which the pests inflicted. Yet the words of one man, written near Fort Hall, speaks volumes—"Oh, God! The mosquitoes."[5]

For fuel to cook their bacon, beans and fresh meat and to bake their yellow soda biscuits or bread the emigrants used wood when available and buffalo chips, dry weeds, sage brush or the wood from deserted wagons at other times. Lack of fuel caused many a man to eat a cold meal, or to crawl to bed supperless.

Of much greater concern was the dearth of grass and good water. Much of the water along the route was highly impregnated with alkali and almost unfit for use. The comparatively small bodies of emigrants who crossed the plains and mountains prior to 1849 fared much better in securing grass than those of later years. When oxen and cattle began to follow the trail by the tens of thousands the problem of sustenance became a vital one. Those

  1. ↑ Op. cit., pp. 57-58.
  2. ↑ Kenderdine, A California Tramp and Later Footprints,, p. 21.
  3. ↑ Webster, op. cit., p. 51.
  4. ↑ Stewart, op. cit., p. 183.
  5. ↑ Prosch, op. cit., p. 56.
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