Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/398

362 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