"The following Spring, which was 1838, I went by steamer up to Independence, Missouri, which is just above where Kansas City was located later. It was the Eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, while eight hundred miles away, Santa Fe was the Western terminus. At Independence, all the outfitting was done for the great overland freighting business, which at that early period had assumed important proportions. I joined a train, consisting of one hundred wagons and one hundred and twenty men. There were five yoke of oxen to each wagon, which made one thousand oxen; then there were a large number of extra oxen along to rest those that got sick or sore footed. By following close after each other, our wagon train stretched out about three miles. I was still on behind driving the cavy-yard, which was the name given to the sore-footed oxen. When we got to the Arkansas River where the trail crossed, which was very swift, we made boats out of two of the prairie schooners; calked them so they wouldn't leak, and loaded into these two boats all the loads that were on the rest of the wagons. A prairie schooner is a long deep wagon bed with flaring sides, about eight feet high and twenty feet long. The oxen swam across; then we chained all the empty wagons together, one behind the other, and hitched the oxen to a chain that reached back across the river to the wagons, pulled the wagons into the stream and on to the other side, where, as fast as one reached the bank, it was unchained from the rest, run up on the dry land, and the work of reloading began. It took four days to get all our outfit across. Our wagons were loaded mostly with merchandise for the stores to sell to the Mexicans, and with mining machinery. The wagons would carry on an average about seventy-five hundred pounds and the price of freight for the eight hundred miles from Independence to Santa Fe was generally eight dollars per hundred-weight, so the cost to the shippers of that trainload of freight run into the thousands. It would take from ten to sixteen weeks to cross the plains, owing to storms and the condition of the roads. We would shoe our own oxen and some of them had to be shod every morning. We would rope them and throw them for that purpose. It was not like a horseshoe, for the hoof of the ox is split and it requires a piece for each half of the hoof. We would make from fifteen to twenty miles a day. The dust was so great, that we traveled in a cloud of it all the time and the teams and drivers would change off; those who were ahead to-day, were behind to-morrow, all but me; I never got to go ahead with my cavy-yard, and I have never forgotten those weeks of frightful dust. They wouldn't let me stay back far, for fear the Indians would pick me off and run the cattle away.