Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/207

 James E. R. Hakrell 187 It was quite a sight too, when we crossed the river at St Joe, as there were 640 wagons that crossed. I was about sixteen and a half years old and I drove a wagon with three yoke of oxen from Six-mile Prairie in Iowa, clear through to The Dalles. Before we had traveled many days, we found that we would have to go in smaller trains. They elected my father's brother-in-law, William Jolly, captain of our train. Captain Chapman had been captain of the train before we divided. There were about fifty wagons in our train when we elected William Jolly cap- tain, but some wanted to travel slower, some wanted to go faster, and everybody more or less wanted to boss, so the train kept dwindling down till there were only four wagons left in our train when we got to Whitman sta- tion. The people that go across the country now in three or four days on a Pullman, think it must have been a monotonous trip to spend six months on the road from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, but it wasn't, because you never knew what was going to happen from day to day or even from hour to hour. For example, one day I let my young brother drive the oxen while I was attend- ing to something else. He could drive them pretty near as good as I could. My step-mother's brother, Captain William Jolly, thought he was too young to manage the oxen, so Jolly started to drive them. The oxen didn't know him, his voice was rather loud, because he was a preacher, so the oxen got scared, cramped the wagon and tipped it over. This happened just as they were crossing a small stream called Wolf River. Pretty near every- thing in the wagon got wet, including our corn meal. It mildewed and we had to throw it away. My father was a pretty good provider. He had laid in a supply of corn meal, flour, bacon, brown sugar, rice, beans, coffee and tea and then we had lots of antelope meat and buffalo meat, so we lived pretty well. The result of Captain Jolly tipping our wagon over and spoiling our corn meal was that we had to buy two sacks of ground wheat of