a little cross,
half buried in the sand, or the tail gate of a wagon served as head
board for some ragged epitaph of some ragged man.

It was decided to cross the South Fork at the upper ford, so called.
Here was pause again for the Wingate train. The shallow and fickle
stream, fed by the June rise in the mountains, now offered a score of
channels, all treacherous. A long line of oxen, now wading and now
swimming, dragging a long rope to which a chain was rigged--the latter
to pull the wagon forward when the animals got footing on ahead--made a
constant sight for hours at a time. One wagon after another was snaked
through rapidly as possible. Once bogged down in a fast channel, the
fluent sand so rapidly filled in the spokes that the settling wagon was
held as though in a giant vise. It was new country, new work for them
all; but they were Americans of the frontier.

The men were in the water all day long, for four days, swimming, wading,
digging. Perhaps the first plow furrow west of the Kaw was cast when
some plows eased down the precipitous bank which fronted one of the
fording places. Beyond that lay no mark of any plow for more than a
thousand miles.

They now had passed the Plains, as first they crossed the Prairie. The
thin tongue of land between the two forks, known as the Highlands of the
Platte, made vestibule to the mountains. The scenery began to change, to
become rugged, semi-mountainous. They noted and held in sight for a day
the Courthouse Rock, the Chimney Rock, long known to the fur traders,
and opened up wide vistas of desert architecture new to their
experiences.

They were now amid great and varied abundance of game. A thousand
buffalo, five, ten, might be in sight at one time, and the ambition of
every man to kill his buffalo long since had been gratified.
Black-tailed deer and antelope were common, and even the mysterious
bighorn sheep of which some of them had read. Each tributary stream now
had its delicious mountain trout. The fires at night had abundance of
the best of food, cooked for the most part over the native fuel of the
_bois des vaches_.

The grass showed yet shorter, proving the late presence of the toiling
Mormon caravan on ahead. The weather of late June was hot, the glare of
the road blinding. The wagons began to fall apart in the dry, absorbent
air of the high country. And always skeletons lay along the trail. An ox
abandoned by its owners as too footsore for further travel m