Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/401

Rh they must cover, and wasted no time in the initial stages.

Especially the migration of 1849, and to some degree those of .1850 and 1852, were in deepest dismay over the presence among them of the dreadful scourge of cholera. The trail was lined in places along the south side of the Platte through the width of rods with mounds of freshly made graves after these migrations had passed. The Hon. F. A. Chenoweth, in his "Occasional Address' before the Oregon Pioneer Association, in 1882, gives the following account of the ravages of the cholera among the trains of 1849:

"But the incidents of hardship which I have noticed were the merest trifles compared to the terrible calamity that marked with sadness and trailed in deep desolation over that ill-fated emigration. Very soon after the assembled throng took up its march over the plains the terrible wave of cholera struck them in a way to carry utmost terror and dismay into all parts of the moving mass.

The number of fatally stricken, after the smoke and dust were cleared away, was not numerically so frightful as appeared to those who were in the midst of it. But the name "cholera' in a multitude unorganized and unnumbered is like a leak in the bottom of a ship whose decks are thronged with passengers. The disturbed waters of the ocean, the angry elements of nature, when aroused to fury, are but faint illustrations of the terrorstricken mass of humanity, when in their midst are falling with great rapidity their comrades the strong, the young and the old the strength and vigor of youth melting away before an unseen foe. All this filled our ranks with the utmost terror and gloom. This terrible malady seemed to spend its most deadly force on the flat prairie east of and about Fort Laramie.

One of the appalling effects of this disease was to