while we pushed our own to all convenient speed. The emigrants for whom
our friends professed such contempt were encamped on the prairie about
eight or ten miles distant, to the number of a thousand or more, and new
parties were constantly passing out from Independence to join them.
They were in great confusion, holding meetings, passing resolutions, and
drawing up regulations, but unable to unite in the choice of leaders to
conduct them across the prairie. Being at leisure one day, I rode over
to Independence. The town was crowded. A multitude of shops had sprung
up to furnish the emigrants and Santa Fe traders with necessaries for
their journey; and there was an incessant hammering and banging from a
dozen blacksmiths' sheds, where the heavy wagons were being repaired,
and the horses and oxen shod. The streets were thronged with men,
horses, and mules. While I was in the town, a train of emigrant wagons
from Illinois passed through, to join the camp on the prairie, and
stopped in the principal street. A multitude of healthy children's faces
were peeping out from under the covers of the wagons. Here and there a
buxom damsel was seated on horseback, holding over her sunburnt face an
old umbrella or a parasol, once gaudy enough but now miserably faded.
The men, very sober-looking countrymen, stood about their oxen; and as I
passed I noticed three old fellows, who, with their long whips in their
hands, were zealously discussing the doctrine of regeneration. The
emigrants, however, are not all of this stamp. Among them are some of
the vilest outcasts in the country. I have often perplexed myself to
divine the various motives that give impulse to this strange migration;
but whatever they may be, whether an insane hope of a better condition
in life, or a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society, or
mere restlessness, certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent the
journey, and after they have reached the land of promise are happy
enough to escape from it.

In the course of seven or eight days we had brought our preparations
near to a close. Meanwhile our friends had completed theirs, and
becoming tired of Westport, they told us that they would set out in
advance and wait at the crossing of the Kansas till we should come up.
Accordingly R. and the muleteers went forward with the wagon and tent,
while the captain and his brother, together with Sorel, and a trapper
named Boisverd, who had joined them, followed wit