les of Siberia, and sought
consolation in earnest prayers for the spring.

The spring came at last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country,
still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were
following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought
its own share of troubles with it. The months with which it opened
proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.

The snow and sleet and rain which fell, as it appeared to them, without
intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as
one vast bog of heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the horses
and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this
way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves
and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or a half a mile
from the place they left in the morning. The heavy rains raised all the
watercourses; the most trifling streams were impassable. Wood, fit for
bridging, was often not to be had, and in such cases the only resource
was to halt for the freshets to subside--a matter in the case of the
headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.

These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy
murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose
heroic spirits had been proof against the severest cold, confessed their
tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer. They
complained too that the health of their children suffered more. It was
the fact that the damp winds of March and April brought with them more
mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.

The frequent burials discouraged and depressed the hardiest spirits; but
the general hopefulness of human nature was well illustrated by the fact
that even the most provident were found unfurnished with burial
necessaries, and as a result they were often driven to the most
melancholy makeshifts.

The usual expedient adopted was to cut a log of some eight or nine feet
long, and slitting the bark longitudinally, strip it off in two
half-cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased and bound
firmly together with withs made of alburnum, formed a rough sort of
tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a little
show of black crape, could follow to the hole or bit of ditch dug to
receive it in the wet ground of the prairie. The name of the deceased,
his a