The Busy Life of Eighty-Five Years of Ezra Meeker: Ventures and adventures; sixty-three years of pioneer life in the old Oregon country; an account of the author's trip across the plains with an ox team; return trip, 1906-7; his cruise on Puget Sound, 1853; trip through the Natchess pass, 1854; over the Chilcoot pass; flat-boating on the Yukon, 1898. The Oregon trail.Meeker, Ezra
History
The Busy Life of Eighty-Five Years of Ezra Meeker: Ventures and adventures; sixty-three years of pioneer life in the old Oregon country; an account of the author's trip across the plains with an ox team; return trip, 1906-7; his cruise on Puget Sound, 1853; trip through the Natchess pass, 1854; over the Chilcoot pass; flat-boating on the Yukon, 1898. The Oregon trail.
Meeker, Ezra
Alaska -- Description and travel; Frontier and pioneer life -- Northwest, Pacific; Overland journeys to the Pacific; Washington (State) -- Description and travel
There did seem instances that would convert the most skeptical to the
Presbyterian doctrine of total depravity, so brutal and selfish were
the actions of some men; brutal to men and women alike; to dumb brutes,
and in fact to themselves. And, yet, it is a pleasure to record that
there were numerous instances of noble self-sacrifice, of helpfulness,
of unselfishness, to the point of imperiling their own lives. It became
a common saying to know one's neighbors, they must be seen on the
Plains.
The army of loose stock that accompanied this huge caravan, a column,
we may almost say, of five hundred miles long without break, added
greatly to the discomfort of all. Of course, the number of cattle and
horses will never be known, but their number was legion compared to
those that labored under the yoke, or in the harness. A conservative
estimate would be not less than six animals to the wagon, and surely
there were three loose animals to each one in the teams. By this it
would appear that as sixteen hundred wagons passed while we tarried
four days, nearly ten thousand beasts of burden and thirty thousand
loose stock accompanied them. As to the number of persons, certainly
there were five to the wagon, perhaps more, but calling it five, eight
thousand people, men, women and children, passed on during those four
days—many to their graves not afar off.
We know by the inscribed dates found on Independence Rock and elsewhere
that there were wagons full three hundred miles ahead of us. The throng
had continued to pass the river more than a month after we had crossed,
so that it does not require a stretch of the imagination to say the
column was five hundred miles long, and like Sherman's march through
Georgia, fifty thousand strong.
Of the casualties in that mighty army I scarcely dare guess. It is
certain that history gives no record of such great numbers migrating
so long a distance as that of the Pioneers of the Plains, where, as we
have seen, the dead lay in rows of fifties and groups of seventies.
Shall we say ten per cent fell by the wayside? Many will exclaim
that estimate is too low. Ten per cent would give us five thousand
sacrifices of lives laid down even in one year to aid in the peopling
of the Pacific Coast states. The roll call was never made, and we know
not how many there were. The list of mortalities is unknown, and so
we are lost in conjecture, and now we only know that the unknown and
unmarked graves have gone into oblivion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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