Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/178

162 a little I see by a bend in the road I can save some distance by driving straight across the bend, scatteringly set with sage brush. The leaders see the road ahead, and I am idly swinging my whip, w^hen my eye catches sight of a hare (sacriligiously called a jackrabbit) covering its form in the shade of a sage brush. I never stopped the motion of my whip, but put more strength into it, and brought the lash across the head, back of the long ears, and the game little animal is quivering in death. The grand landscape is out of mind as quick as a pistol shot, and I am glowing with interest in my own feat. It is not far below the skin of any youth to where the man that kills other animals for a living, still is. I put my game into the wagon to be dressed for supper, but when we got to the camping place which Captain Morrison had selected, found he had there a full-grown wild mutton and my dead hare was not thought of, but was left for the wolves next morning.

August 26 we drive from the drainage of the Sweetwater, leaving at last the waters of the Mississippi drainage, and camp late at Pacific Springs, which belong to those of the Green River. We also saw the day before the last buffalo, as we rose rapidly out of the Sweetwater Valley—some dozen or more came from the north and passed between the wagons of the train, seeming to have been chased.

At Pacific Springs I placed the last guard, and the last person I appealed to was a young man named J. S. Smith. He had reached our company that morning as we passed Colonel Ford's company. He plead inability to perform the service on account of sickness, and his appearance fully justified his statement. I was to see him again as sail maker, teacher, preacher, merchant, hotel keeper, lawyer, member of congress, and first lay