_Outré_, red-shirted, big-booted, brigand-looking ruffians, with the inseparable bowie-knife and revolver buckled around their waists, they swung and cracked their great whips like fiends, and beat their poor oxen along, as if they had no faith in the law of kindness here, nor belief in a place of punishment hereafter. And when they came to a really bad place--in crossing a stream, or when they struck a stump or foundered in a mud-hole--it is hard to say whether their prodigious, multiplied, and many-headed oaths were more grotesque or horrible. To say "they swore till all was blue," would be but a feeble comparison; the whole Mountains corruscated with sulphur! Some few of the trains consisted only of horse and mule teams; but ox-teams seemed most in favor, and slow as they were, we took quite a fancy to them--they appeared so reliable. When the roads were good, they averaged ten or twelve miles per day, and subsisted by grazing; when they became bad, they managed to flounder through any how--some way or other. At extra bad places, the teams were doubled or trebled up, and then the wagon was bound to come, if the wood and iron only held together. Twenty or thirty yoke of oxen straining to the chains, with the "bull-whackers" all pounding and yelling like mad, their huge whip-lashes thick as one's wrist cracking like pistols, was a sight to see--"muscular," indeed, in all its parts. The noise and confusion, the oaths and thwacks and splashing of the mud, made it indeed the very hell of animals; but, for all that, the wagon was sure to reach _terra firma_ at last, no matter how heavily loaded, or pull to pieces. We had great sympathy for the patient, faithful oxen, and wished for Mr. Henry Bergh and his Cruelty-Prevention Society many a time that day. Here, indeed, was some explanation of the high rates of freight from the Columbia to Boisè; and Idaho would find it to her interest to improve such routes of transportation forthwith.