t, and they were
thin in flesh; his wagons were apparently light and as frail as the
teams. But I soon found that his outfit, like ours, carried no extra
weight, and he knew how to care for a team. He was, besides, an obliging
neighbor, which was fully demonstrated on many trying occasions, as we
traveled in company for more than a thousand miles, until his road to
California parted from ours at the big bend of the Bear River.

Of the trip through Iowa little remains to be said further than that the
grass was thin and washy, the roads muddy and slippery, and the weather
execrable, although May had been ushered in long before we reached the
little Mormon town of Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), a few miles
above the place where we were to cross the Missouri River. Here my
brother Oliver joined us, having come from Indianapolis with old-time
comrades and friends. Now, with the McAuleys and Oliver's party, we
mustered a train of five wagons.

[Illustration: A yoke of oxen.]

It was here at Kanesville that the last purchases were made, the last
letter sent back to anxious friends. Once across the Missouri and headed
westward, we should have to cross the Rocky Mountains to find a town
again.

We had now come to the beginning of the second stage of our long
journey. We had reached the Missouri River. From the western bank of the
river we should strike out across the Plains, through what is now
Nebraska and Wyoming, to the crest of the continent. We should follow
the ox-team trail along the north bank of the Platte, and then up the
north fork of the Platte to the mountains. But first we must get across
the Missouri.

"What on earth is that?" exclaimed one of the women, as we approached
the landing for the ferry which crossed the river to a point a few miles
below where Omaha now stands.

"It looks for all the world like a big white flatiron," answered
another.

[Illustration: On this page and the following are shown the main trails
that stretched across the continent, west of the Missouri, in the years
before the building of railroads. The Oregon Trail from Kanesville to
Portland is marked with the heaviest line. The lighter line from
Huntsville to Kanesville shows Ezra Meeker's early travels; this marks
not a trail but a main-traveled road. People starting out from St. Louis
for the Oregon Country went by way of the Santa Fe Trail about as far as
Fort Leavenworth, then northwest to Fort Kearney on the Platte River,