ons crawling down the valley and then the long,
bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the
occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire. In '43 came the first
great emigration, when 1,000 people went to Oregon. The Indians, awed
and uneasy, watched the white line of wagon tops. "Were there so many
pale faces as this in the Great Father's country?" one of the chiefs
asked.

Four years later the Mormons emigrated. It was like the moving of a
nation, an exodus of angry fanatics, sullen, determined men burning
with rage at the murder of their prophet, cursing his enemies and
quoting his texts. The faces of women and children peered from the
wagons, the dust of moving flocks and herds rose like a column at the
end of the caravan. Their camps at night were like the camps of the
patriarchs, many women to work for each man, thousands of cattle
grazing in the grass. From the hills above the Indians watched the red
circle of their fires and in the gray dawn saw the tents struck and the
trains "roll out." There were more people from the Great Father's
country, more people each year, till the great year, '49, when the cry
of gold went forth across the land like a trumpet call.

Then the faces on the Emigrant Trail were as the faces on the populous
streets of cities. The trains of wagons were unbroken, one behind the
other, straight to the sunset. A cloud of dust moved with them, showed
their coming far away as they wheeled downward at Grand Island, hid
their departure as they doubled up for the fording of the Platte. All
the faces were set westward, all the eyes were strained to that distant
goal where the rivers flowed over golden beds and the flakes lay yellow
in the prospector's pan.

The Indians watched them, cold at the heart, for the people in the
Great Father's Country were numerous as the sands of the sea, terrible
as an army with banners.

CHAPTER II

The days were very hot. Brilliant, dewless mornings, blinding middays,
afternoons held breathless in the remorseless torrent of light. The
caravan crawled along the river's edge at a footspace, the early
shadows shooting far ahead of it, then dwindling to a blot beneath each
moving body, then slanting out behind. There was speech in the morning
which died as the day advanced, all thought sinking into torpor in the
monotonous glare. In the late afternoon the sun, slipping down the
sky, peered through each wagon's puckered canvas o