to sting the face and hands.

Sometimes we had trying storms that would wet us to the skin in no time.
One such I remember well, being caught in it while out on watch. The
cattle traveled so fast that it was difficult to keep up with them. I
could do nothing but follow, as it would have been impossible to turn
them. I have always thought of this storm as a cloudburst. Anyhow, in an
incredibly short time there was not a dry thread left on me. My boots
were as full of water as if I had been wading over boot-top depth, and
the water ran through my hat as though it were a sieve. I was almost
blinded in the fury of the wind and water. Many tents were leveled by
this storm. One of our neighboring trains suffered great loss by the
sheets of water on the ground floating away camp equipage, ox yokes, and
all loose articles; and they narrowly escaped having a wagon engulfed in
the raging torrent that came so unexpectedly upon them.

Fording a river was usually tiresome, and sometimes dangerous. I
remember fording the Loup fork of the Platte with a large number of
wagons fastened together with ropes or chains, so that if a wagon got
into trouble the teams in front would help to pull it out. The quicksand
would cease to sustain the wheels so suddenly that the wagon would drop
a few inches with a jolt, and up again the wheel would come as new sand
was struck; then down again it would go, up and down, precisely as if
the wagons were passing over a rough corduroy road that "nearly jolted
the life out of us," as the women folks said after it was over, and no
wonder, for the river at this point was half a mile wide.

Many of the pioneers crossed rivers in their wagon boxes and very few
lost their lives in doing so. The difference between one of these
prairie-schooner wagon boxes and that of a scow-shaped, flat-bottomed
boat is that the wagon box has the ribs on the outside, while in a boat
they are on the inside.

The number of casualties in that army of emigrants I hesitate to guess
at. Shall we say that ten per cent fell on the way? Many old plainsmen
would think that estimate too low; yet ten per cent would give us five
thousand lives as one year's toll paid for the peopling of the Oregon
Country. Mrs. Cecilia McMillen Adams, late of Hillsboro, Oregon, kept a
painstaking diary when she crossed the Plains in 1852. She counted the
graves passed and noted down the number. In this diary, published in
full by the Oregon Pioneer Associa