Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/461

Rh and the prettiest girl carried hers open before her as she stepped a little coquettish ly through the dust of the road. Whether she was reading, or trying, or pretending to read, was hard to tell, but the action had a naive effect, and as she passed she was, no doubt, much astonished at a strange young gentleman who audibly addressed her with, "Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered."

Many other small bodies of these adventurous travelers crossed our notice at Independence, Westport, and at encampments made in the vicinity of these and other towns, but in their largest force we saw them just after crossing the Kansas River about the first of June. The Oregonians were assembled here to the number of six or eight hundred, and when we passed their encampment they were engaged in the business of electing officers to regulate and conduct their proceedings. It was a curious and unaccountable spectacle to us as we approached. We saw a large body of men wheeling and marching about the prairie, describing evolutions neither recognizable as savage, civic or military. We soon knew they were not Indians, and were not long in setting them down for the emigrants, but what in the name of mystery they were about our best guessing could not reduce to anything in the shape of a mathematical probability.

On arriving among them, however, we found they were only going on with their elections in a manner perhaps old enough, but very new and quizzical to us. The candidates stood up in a row behind the constituents, and at a given signal they wheeled about and marched off, while the general mass broke after them "lick-a-ty-split", each man forming in behind his favorite so that every candidate flourished a sort of a tail of his own, and the man with the longest tail was elected! These proceedings were continued until a captain and a council