supper.

The people huddled into the tents and wagons, half hungry, more than
half wet, and uncomfortable altogether. With the exception of one or
two cots, the bedding was spread on the ground in the tents, and all
turned in--but not for long. Some one said, "water is running under my
bed." Then another and another made the same complaint. Soon we
learned the deplorable fact that the large tent had been pitched in a
basin-like place, and that the water, as the rain increased, was
coming in from all sides, the volume growing rapidly greater.

We succeeded then in lighting one lantern, when the water was found to
be something like two inches deep over nearly all parts of the large
tent's floor. The beds were taken up and placed in soaked heaps, on
camp stools and boxes; and the rain continued pouring in steady,
relentless disregard of our misery. Except where lighted by the single
lantern the darkness was, of course, absolute. Relief was impossible.
There appearing to be nothing else to do, everybody abandoned the
tents and huddled in the wagons; the lantern was blown out, and there
was little sleep, while we waited and wished for daylight.

Some of the days were warm and some hot. Some were very hot.
Discomforts were common; and yet not much was said, and apparently
little thought, of them. Having become inured to the conditions as we
found them from time to time, discomforts, such as under other
circumstances would have been considered intolerable, were passed
without comment. There were times and situations in which hardships
were unavoidable, some of them almost unendurable; but these, having
been anticipated, were perhaps less poignant in the enduring than in
the expectation.

Let us for a moment raise the curtain of more than half a
century, while we look back on one of those ox-drawn trains of
"prairie-schooners," as it appeared to an observer on the ground at
the time; about the middle of August, and beyond the middle of the
journey. Permit the imagination to place the scene alongside that of
the present-day modes of traversing the same territory, when the
distance is covered in a less number of days than it required of
months then. Perhaps such a comparison may help to form some faint
conception of what the overland pioneers did, and what they felt, and
saw, and were.

There they are as we see them, on a long stretch of sage-brush
plateau. The surface of the plain is only sand and gravel, as far as
the ey