Although these streams were rather small, it was worth a dime a wagon to use a bridge during the spring rains. Another entry was made by Moorman in his journaclass="underline"
We made an early start and made but one mile in an hour and a half; one of those difficult and muddy little creeks crossing our road, at which Patterson and Henkle's wagon turned over making a smash of the bows and throwing many of the contents into the water…. Two other streams were crossed by fastening a rope to the aft of the wagon and holding it back off the heels of the mules…. To ascend the opposite bank, teams were doubled, and the rope… was tied to the end of the wagon tongue and all hands laid hold with might and main… to draw it up, the bank being so slippery as to make it difficult for the mules to keep their feet.
The early wagon trains, before 1849, depended on securing plenty of fresh buffalo meat along the trail as far as South Pass, but they dried very little meat, depending on their bacon for a reserve. There was always great excitement when the first buffalo were sighted, an excitement shared by the horses and cattle. Loose stock often had a great urge to run off with the buffalo, never to be seen again. Occasionally one would be recaptured later, by lucky accident. Alexander Henry, out hunting near Pembina, had such luck one day. He found a black horse that had been lost a month earlier and had been feeding with the buffalo ever since.
Kit Carson was once thrown by his horse during a buffalo hunt. The horse managed to scramble to its feet and run away before Carson could catch his breath. A comrade pursued the horse and was about to shoot it in order to rescue the fine Spanish bridle, but was able to catch the runaway instead.
Mules also tried to escape. John Frémont reported that "one of our mules took a freak into his head, and joined a neighboring band of buffalo today. As we were not in condition to lose horses, I sent several of the men in pursuit… but we did not see him again."
At times, Frémont wrote, the buffalo reversed the procedure: "There were seven or eight buffaloes seen coming up with our oxen… they seemed to form an attachment for each other."
One day Frémont and his men stopped to cut some meat from a buffalo they had killed after quite a chase. "We neglected to secure our horses, thinking it an unnecessary precaution in their fatigued condition; but our mule took it into his head to start, and away he went, followed at full speed by the pack horse…. They were recovered and brought back, after a chase of a mile."
In Kansas a caravan forced to march until midnight found the buffalo along the trail a problem. Obadiah Oakley, bound for Oregon in 1839, recorded this incident:
At night their progress was greatly retarded by the herds of buffalo which lined the road and covered the plain. They were as thick as sheep were ever seen in a field, and moved not until the caravan was within ten feet of them. They would then rise and flee at random, greatly affrighted, and snorting and bellowing to the equal alarm of the horses and mules.
If the herds were moving at night instead of resting, they could be a serious problem to any camp in their path. While this account by Frémont comes from Dakota, well to the north of the Oregon Trail, it illustrates the problem:
Toward nightfall we found near the shore good water and made there our camp on open ground. Nothing disturbed our rest for several hours, when we were aroused by a confused, heavy trampling and the usual grunting sounds which announce the buffalo. We had barely time to get our animals close in, and to throw on dry wood and stir up the fire, before the herd was upon us. They were coming in to the lake for water, and the near ones being crowded forward by those in the rear and disregarding us, they were nigh going directly over us. By shouting and firing our pieces, we succeeded in getting them to make a little space, in which they kept us as they crowded down to the lake. The brackish, salty water is what these animals like, and to turn the course of such a herd from water at night would be impossible.
At times along the Platte, women with the wagons shouted and waved their aprons to keep the buffalo away from their cooking fires while their men folk were out on the hills dashing madly over the rough country hoping to get a shot at one of the animals. Men new to the plains were heedless and reckless in the heat of the chase. One train captain, Bruff, had this comment on the hunting his men did:
The casualties of buffalo hunting are very common. Men charg'd by wounded bulls, unhorsed, and many badly hurtthe horses generally running off with the band of buffaloes, for the Indians to pick up hereafter. Lots of rifles and pistols lost, as well as horses; and many a poor fellow, after a hard day's hunt, on an empty stomach, unhorsed some distance from camp, has a long and tiresome walk, after night, to his own, or the nearest camp he can make.
Each year the wagon trains moved up the Platte Valley, hemmed in between the low bluffs and the river. For a month or more they plodded along from Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie, and each year their numbers grew. The trail became rutted, the remains of campfires marked the middle of large bare patches of ground where the hungry draft animals had cropped the grasses to their roots. The buffalo herds moved away to the south, leaving the river valley empty for most of May and June. The herds that did come down to the river for water during that period were usually stampeded by the mad rush of excited men anxious to kill them.
As the wagons rolled along the valley floor, bands of warriors Pawnee, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho watched from the hills, or approached to demand food and tobacco or to steal any stock carelessly guarded. The Indians did not seem to be deeply disturbed by the invasion, perhaps because none of the whites tried to settle along the trail.
Then came the spring of 1849, and the Indians recoiled aghast at the mad rush of wild-eyed gold seekers bound for California. For several weeks the trail was filled from one end of the valley to the other with an almost unbroken line of canvas-topped wagons during the day, while hundreds of campfires dotted the river bank each night. From the east they came, in a seemingly endless flood 40,000 people, 50,000 draft animals, 12,000 wagons, mixed with a few individuals or small groups leading pack animals.
The vanguard of the marching columns started from the west bank of the Missouri in early May, as soon as the new grass had sprouted on the prairies, and the last stragglers brought up the rear at Fort Laramie in early July. The swarming horde left the valley one vast waste of rutted trails, littered camp sites, broken wagons, discarded goods, and carcasses of oxen and horses fallen by the wayside. Fortunately for the draft animals, the rains were abundant that year, making for very good pasture, but even so, hardly a blade of grass was left from the river to the crest of the hills. Draft animals from some of the later trains were herded as much as eight miles from the trail, there to feed and rest for a few days, building strength against the rugged terrain and scanty pasture ahead.
Buffalo and antelope fled from the valley. In other summers the herds had moved just beyond the crest of the hills, but this summer the hunters often had to ride twenty miles or more to the south in search of fresh meat. No longer could the travelers depend on the herds for a freshly killed animal every day or so on the 400 miles of trail along the Platte. Once in a while a small herd did wander into the valley in search of water, but left hastily when the hunters swarmed out in pursuit. Even after the last of the wagons had passed and the trail lay open under the summer sun, the wide, barren strip had little appeal for grazing animals.