During our detention among the upper settlements, before starting out, a constant source of interest to us was the gathering of people bound to Oregon. One Sunday morning, about the usual church hour in a larger place, five or six wagons passed through the town of Westport, and one old man with silver hair was with the party. Women and children were walking, fathers and brothers were driving loose cattle or managing the heavy teams, and keen-eyed youngsters, with their chins yet smooth and rifles on their shoulders, kept in advance of the wagons with long strides, looking as if they were already watching around the corners of the streets for game. There was one striking feature about the party which leads us to name it more particularly. Though traveling on the Sabbath and through the little town that was all quiet and resting from business in reverence of the day, there was that in the appearance of the people that banished at once even the remotest idea of profanation. They were all clean, and evidently appareled in their best Sunday gear. Their countenances were sedate, and the women wore that mild composure of visage—so pleasantly resigned, so eloquent of a calm spirit, so ready to kindle up into smiles—that is seen more often among churchgoers, perhaps, than in ballroom or boudoir. Some of the women carried books, and the prettiest girl carried hers open before her as she stepped a little coquettishly through the dust of the road. Whether she was reading, or trying, or pretending to read, was hard to tell, but the action had a naive effect, and as she passed she was, no doubt, much astonished at a strange young gentleman who audibly addressed her with, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.” Many other small bodies of these adventurous travelers crossed our notice at Independence, Westport, and at encampments made in the vicinity of these and other towns, but in their largest force we saw them just after crossing the Kansas River about the first of June. The Oregonians were assembled here to the number of six or eight hundred, and when we passed their encampment they were engaged in the business of electing officers to regulate and conduct their proceedings. It was a curious and unaccountable spectacle to us as we approached. We saw a large body of men wheeling and marching about the prairie, describing evolutions neither recognizable as savage, civic or military. We soon knew they were not Indians, and were not long in setting them down for the emigrants, but what in the name of mystery they were about our best guessing could not reduce to anything in the shape of a mathematical probability.