Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/409

Rh Devil's Gate, a beautiful stretch of road lay before us. All at once the teams broke into a run something started them, no one seemed to know what. It was a regular stampede as to our team. Father and mother were walking; I was walking also, and some of the children were in the wagon. Away the team went, the hardest and the wildest running I ever saw. When they stopped and we caught up with them, we found the children w r ere not hurt, but the two wheelers were down and one of them dead. It took our team a long time to get over the scare."

There was still another condition in which the spirit of the buffalo made the pioneer show deference to it. This happened when a great horde of buffalo was on a stampede bearing down upon an emigrant train that happened to be passing across its trail. The moment was almost enough to bring dismay to the pioneer. Either the teams of the train were urged into something of a stampede to get out of line of the horde's advance, or a corral was formed and volleys fired into the impending mass to divide it so as to leave the corral a safe island between a destructive flood rolling by on either hand.

Distressing accidents must almost of necessity befall them from their carrying their loaded guns commingled with household goods on their wagons. It is not strange that at least half of the journals should have records of fatalities thus caused. Under the law of mathematical probabilities, with the frequent occasion there was to remove gun or blanket thus intermixed, while the members of the family were standing around the wagon, accidents must occur. The small boy of the family during this four or five months' trip had very many occasions to clamber out of and into the wagon while it was in motion. He, too, would come to grief