Sarah

It had been three weeks since Thomas and Abigail Miles and their daughter crossed the Missouri River at Nebraska City, purchased a wagon and three yoke of oxen, and joined a small wagon train bound for Oregon.

In April of the previous year the couple lost their 12-year-old son Robert to diphtheria, diagnosed as “billious fever” by a physician in their hometown of Howesville, Indiana. The crushing grief that followed nearly cost Thomas his small farm; for weeks after the boy’s death he found himself unable to muster the strength to plow or plant, nor could he perform the simplest chores.

Abigail fared no better. In the days following the funeral she awakened hours before sunrise. Without combing her hair or washing her face she would descend the stairs in her nightgown while Thomas slept, light a fire in the kitchen stove, brew a pot of coffee and drink it at the kitchen table, alone in the orange glow of a small oil lamp. It was the only task she could manage; she no longer cooked nor cleaned, nor washed the family’s laundry. When the kindling box was empty she stopped making coffee. When the lamp ran out of oil she sat in the dark.

In the quiet evenings the three of them ate in silence at the kitchen table. As gravy congealed on their dishes they listened to the empty tick of the mantel clock until Thomas shoved his chair back and walked out into the darkening yard, ostensibly to check the stock, but always stopping before he reached the barn to stand quietly by himself.

If it hadn’t been for 14-year-old daughter Sarah, the family might have gone under.
While her parents struggled Sarah did the cooking and basic farm chores. She washed their clothes and fed the chickens, collected eggs, and churned butter to sell at the local grocery. The money paid household expenses, but by the first snowfall creditors began to demand payment for implements and seed her father had purchased before her brother’s death.

Sarah quietly arranged to have the implements repossessed after a friend of her father met her one cold, gray afternoon outside the grocery. The man told her he had been asked by several of the town’s businessmen to talk to Thomas, but he wasn’t able to persuade her father to agree to terms; in fact, he told Sarah, he felt neither her father nor her mother were capable of handling their affairs at the present. The farm, he said, stomping his chilled feet, was too much for them, and Sarah might be the only person who could make the decisions that needed to be made now.

But the truth was those decisions were already made. Two months after the death of his son Thomas had decided to move the family to Oregon, free from the memories that were slowly smothering his family. And although he could not predict the effect this would have on his beloved wife, he was certain its outcome would do no more harm than the daily witness of Robert’s empty chair at the supper table.

And so it happened that with the first leafing in Spring Thomas sold the farm and nearly all of their household possessions, and on a warm April evening the Miles family boarded a train at Terra Haute. They rode west into the gloaming, through the soil-perfumed plowed fields and the whitewashed glow of clapboard and log farm houses, away from the howling silence of a child’s grave.

There was something about traveling across the prairie Sarah found soothing. Mile after mile of empty sky and distant horizons made the world seem predictable and even-tempered. The slow movement of the oxen was reassuring, and she grew to enjoy walking beside them, watching their tails and ears twitch, their heavy heads bob from side to side.

Even Abigail seemed refreshed. She began cooking again, and performed the dreariest camp chores with quiet relish, humming to herself as she carried water and unpacked bedrolls.

Thomas paid special attention to the changing landscape; the growing scarcity of timber and water and the broad plain of short grass put him ill at ease for days until he accepted the necessity: without a prairie passage there was no likelihood of arrival in Oregon.

Their fellow travelers consisted of a dozen families, mostly from Indiana and Ohio, together since a ferry crossing on the Illinois River. Though tightly knit, these pilgrims readily accepted the Miles family at Nebraska City; a family that could afford a new conestoga and three yoke, a family without additional elderly members or very young children would strengthen the company. That the Miles family possessed a Bible, too, was important, for Mormons and other heretics crowded the trails on either side of the Overland.

At Nebraska City the train had retained the services of Amasee Chambers as scout and guide. Chambers came highly recommended. By 1854 he had lived on the Plains for more than decade, serving as a hunter, trail guide and teamster on a number of expeditions, including a stint as chief scout for Major Anderson and the First Nebraska Volunteer Cavalry at Fort Kearny on the Platte. His reputation included a thorough knowledge of the country’s trails and inhabitants, and it was said he was fluent in the Sioux and Pawnee dialects and skilled in sign language.

This pilgrim train -- fourteen wagons and ninety head of mules, oxen and horses, including the possessions and personages of nearly four score and ten souls -- slowly wound its way out onto the plains.
The first week passed without incident. Halfway through the second a 62-year-old widow traveling with her daughter and son-in-law suffered a stroke and lost her ability to walk and speak. Two days later the woman known by everyone on the train as Auntie Trapp was dead, buried in her best dress on the crest of a hill overlooking the trail, her grave unmarked and concealed as well as possible, lest it suffer discovery by savages or wolves.

Twelve miles a day, every day except Sunday. Position in line rotated among the wagons so everyone ate the same amount of dust; the hindmost travelers always evident by day’s end, frosted brown head to foot, spitting and wiping away muddy sweat, slapping clouds from pant legs, hats, shirts and petticoats.

The ennui of Plains travel wore upon the senses of the pilgrims, conditioned as they were to neatly sectioned farmsteads with zigzag rail fences, ponds, and billowing stands of timber. Once the train reached the Platte the cottonwoods along the river’s ribboned channels provided some interruption of the clear, mile after mile sightlines, unbroken but for wagon wheel ruts and occasional avenues of trampled soil where herds of bison crossed the Platte. But even here previous trains had harvested much of the wood around their campsites, leaving gray, dismembered and burned tree skeletons scattered about in long stretches, like bones on an ancient battleground. These places emphasized a melancholy view of the country, and the slow, muddy flow of the Platte doubled that effect, along with the grit it added to the morning coffee.

Then came a morning with more to see.