Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/410

368 with a broken leg. Any ordinary fracture, however, even though there were no surgeon at hand, would be attended to, so that no deformity resulted. If the case was one seeming to require an amputation "a butcher knife and an old dull hand saw r ' were improvised as surgical instruments. But I have not found that a patient survived such an operation and got well. The other great epochal events of family life, marriages and births, were not infrequent on the trail, and seemed to cause little distraction.

The experiences of the pioneers in crossing the rivers in the line of the trail were very diverse. It is reported of one of the migrations that they were not compelled to ferry until they reached the Des Chutes in Oregon. But the migration of 1844 had a serious time even with the Black Vermillion and Big Blue, tributaries of the Kansas. Where logs were available they were hollowed out and catamaran rafts made so as to fit the wheels of a wagon. Sometimes the best wagon boxes would be selected and caulked and used as flatboats. Where buffalo skins were plentiful they would be stretched around the wagon box to make it water-tight. In later stages of the journey, after their teams were more reliable, it was a common practice to raise the wagon beds several inches above the bolsters, if the depth of the stream required it, couple several teams into a train with the most reliable in front on a lead-rope, and drivers along the down-stream side of the other teams. They would then ford as trains. After the rush in 1849 ferries were established at the more important crossings, whose owners reaped rich harvests.

Their route had no rich diversity of scenic grandeur. There are most impressive natural features along the line of it, but with their slow mode of travel one phase became exceedingly monotonous before another was