The Alliance Entered Into, We Left Them To Complete Their
Arrangements, While We Pushed Our Own To All Convenient Speed.
The
emigrants for whom our friends professed such contempt were encamped
on the prairie about eight or ten miles distant, to the number of a
thousand or more, and new parties were constantly passing out from
Independence to join them.
They were in great confusion, holding
meetings, passing resolutions, and drawing up regulations, but unable
to unite in the choice of leaders to conduct them across the prairie.
Being at leisure one day, I rode over to Independence. The town was
crowded. A multitude of shops had sprung up to furnish the emigrants
and Santa Fe traders with necessaries for their journey; and there
was an incessant hammering and banging from a dozen blacksmiths'
sheds, where the heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and
oxen shod. The streets were thronged with men, horses, and mules.
While I was in the town, a train of emigrant wagons from Illinois
passed through, to join the camp on the prairie, and stopped in the
principal street. A multitude of healthy children's faces were
peeping out from under the covers of the wagons. Here and there a
buxom damsel was seated on horseback, holding over her sunburnt face
an old umbrella or a parasol, once gaudy enough but now miserably
faded. The men, very sober-looking countrymen, stood about their
oxen; and as I passed I noticed three old fellows, who, with their
long whips in their hands, were zealously discussing the doctrine of
regeneration.
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Words from 1583 to 1845
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