The records of the migrations give ample corroboration to the truth of the adage, “Uneasy lies the head, etc.,” and yet these privately penned diaries disclose comparatively little bickering or unwholesome feeling, notwithstanding the severe strain human nature was under in the conditions of this four, five, and sometimes six months’ passage. Whenever conditions developed making advisable a division of the body into two or more, the division was made, and all was smooth again. The documentary material printed in this number of the Quarterly throws light on this phase of their experience and depicts the unique proceedings of the pioneers of 1843 in effecting an organization. The type of the transcontinental pioneer changed materially after the gold-seeker was in the majority. From 1849 on the diarist’s account is not devoid of the tragical. “These plains try and tell all the dark spots in men,” says Rev. Jesse Moreland in his journal of the trip from Tennessee to Oregon in 1852. He describes evidence of three executions for murder by hanging. He says: “As they had nothing to make a gallows out of, they took two wagon tongues, put them point to point and set a chair in the middle, and the man stood on the chair till the rope was tied, and then the chair was taken from under him. This is the third we have heard of being hanged.” Before 1849, while the Oregon movement still constituted the great part of the transcontinental travel, and a fierce commercial spirit was not yet dominant, the humanity of the pioneers seemed to stand remarkably well the strain incident to the experiences on the plains. Their journals do not reveal half the irritation and demoralization that the accounts of Parkman and of Coke do in companies that had vastly better outfits and were passing over the same routes. The average company of immigrants in pulling through the miry sloughs of the Missouri bottom lands in early spring, with only partly broken ox teams, would break a wagon tongue, an axle tree, or a wheel, and suffer more or less exasperating delay. The fierce spring storms of rain and hail would play havoc with their tent coverings, and drench and pelt all who must stand outside to prevent the teams and stock from stampeding. These freshets would make impassable, for the time being, the numerous streams of the Kansas and Nebraska prairies. With the feeling that they must not over-exert their teams mere trifles even were allowed to delay them during the first four or five hundred miles of the journey. Except they had some one like a Doctor Whitman with them to persistently urge them to “travel, travel,” as the only condition of getting through, there would be too much loitering in the early stages of the journey. Those who entered upon the trip in later years had more nearly an adequate sense of the vastness of the distance they must cover, and wasted no time in the initial stages. [Illustration: 12.—Gap just south of Devil’s Gate—used for the Trail. ]