The Way West

A hundred-odd men, women, and children gathered at the rendezvous a few miles outside of Independence. They were solid, established folk, most of them, and they were leaving behind prosperous farms and businesses because they shared a dream about the rich lands in the West, where a man, his wife, and their young ones might make a better life and a new world more desirable than any Americans before them had ever known. The trip would be hard and long, but the big, high-wheeled wagons were piled with their gear, and their eyes were turned irrevocably toward the western horizon.

Lije Evans and his steady, courageous wife Rebecca were heading west because Lije had a calling to help win Oregon for the United States, and because he and Rebecca both guessed young Brownie Evans might have a bigger chance in a new world. Hank McBee and his wisp of a wife were going because they owed too much money back home. Nobody in the train could figure out how a girl as pretty as Mercy McBee came to be born of such scrub stock. Then there was Tadlock, full of hunger for power, who was to lock horns once too often with Lije Evans; and Curtis Mack, with his beautiful wife who was afraid of having a baby along the trail; the Fairmans and little Tod, for who sake, mostly, they were making the trip – and dozens more.

They might not have made it through to Oregon if they had not found Dick Summers and hired him for their guide. Dick knew the way, the miles upon miles of mountain rock and desert sand, cold, heat, hunger, and exhaustion that lay ahead. Still more important, he knew human beings, and without his wisdom they would infallibly have come to grief. For Dick it was a strange trip, his mind peopled with the ghosts of Boone Caudill and the mountain men, long gone, and the wild free days of the fur trappers.