Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/140



130 S. H. TAYLOR

June 7. We have a prospect of crossing the Loup today. There are about 100 wagons here now but few coming in. We see many cattle trains of from 100 to 500 head probably about 1500 head now here. Many wagons have gone up to the fords, one of which is 35 and the other 70 miles above. Fords on this stream are essentially dangerous. Its waters are a mere mass of quicksand, rushing along with the velocity of a mountain stream. In fording our cattle they sink right down into the sand, and the farther they sink the faster they sink, while the current is so swift that even ferriage is attended with some hazard.

I had intended to write more freely, but we just learn that we can cross the river inst (inter, and so I close for the present.

Yours, &c.,

S. H. TAYLOR. [Watertown Chronicle, September 14, 1853]

Wood Creek, June 12, '53.

Friend Hadley I wrote you last Tuesday from the crossing of the Loup Fork but the men keeping a whisky supply at this point are gone and we shall probably see no one again going east until we reach Fort Laramie. We are now spending the Sabbath on Wood Creek, 170 and odd miles from Kanesville, and on what may well be called "the plains." We are on a flat, safely above the streams, of almost perfectly even surface and to appearance boundless in extent. It is the "Platte bot- toms." On the north, directly abreast, is to be seen, in a good atmosphere, a dim trace of highlands, fading away immediately at the right and left, so far away is it and at the south, three miles off, is the Platte, indicated by its dark cottonwood groves, and between them you look on in that direction, and there, as forward and back of us, the vast plain stretches away, we know not how far, for it is beyond the reach of our vision. Yesterday, at one time, our road was supposed to be 12 miles from the Platte, and yet, landward, the level flat extended probably 12 miles farther.

These flats are the great range on which the buffalo have