After a rugged day on the trail, the evening campfire was often the occasion for yarn-swapping and sentimental songs, like _Oh, Susanna!_ It can be imagined that these campfire scenes were commonplace at Scotts Bluff, and the tale of Hiram Scott’s tragic death was doubtless repeated with endless variations. The prevailing mood was not always gay. The haunting mystery of Scotts Bluff struck a fittingly somber note for the Forty-miners. Before the epic drama of the gold-rush was played out a few years later, 20,000 of these adventurous emigrants had died and lined the California Road with their graves. Asiatic cholera was the greatest killer. Ships docking at New Orleans brought infected people who carried the dread disease by steamboat up the Mississippi to St. Louis. There, the disease spread by contagion to people in the Missouri River outfitting towns. As the tired Argonauts struggled across the unfamiliar Nebraska landscape, the disease raced like wildfire among them, decimating their number. Children were orphaned. The husband who buried his wife might himself be dead the next day. Numerous diaries record inscriptions on the crude headboards of the hastily dug shallow graves. Hundreds of burials took place in the North Platte Valley between Ash Hollow and Fort Laramie. Several have been identified at Scotts Bluff. Many of those who escaped the cholera plague were confronted with other killers—the rugged terrain, inexperience, carelessness, exhaustion. Some dropped by the wayside from sheer fatigue. Others died of pneumonia, or were drowned at the river crossings, or shot themselves with unfamiliar firearms, got run over by the big lumbering wagon wheels, or were gored by unruly oxen. Another menace was the buffalo, which was hunted as a fine source of food. Unless approached gingerly, big herds of these creatures would sometimes stampede, making the earth tremble, trampling to death the unwary hunter. In the desert of the Great Basin, more of the travelers were killed by the intense heat, alkali dust, and parching thirst. The trek of the Forty-niners was not for long a gay escapade; it became a grim survival of the fittest. Contrary to popular impression, the number of emigrants who died at the hands of marauding Indians was negligible. The Diggers along the Humboldt River in Nevada accounted for some stragglers; the Plains Indians were a bit thievish but peaceful—for a time, at least. True, at nights the wagons were arranged in a circular compound and guards were posted; but an Indian attack on the emigrants Hollywood style, was a rarity.