d of you is the Humboldt Desert.
There's no good wagon road over the mountains if you get that far. The
road down Mary's River is a real gamble with death. Men can go through
and make roads--yes; but where are the women and the children to stay?
Think twice, men, and more than twice!" Wingate spoke solemnly.

"Roll out! Roll out!" mocked the man who had abandoned his plow. "This
way for Californy!"

The council ended in turmoil, where hitherto had been no more than a
sedate daily system. Routine, become custom, gave way to restless
movement, excited argument. Of all these hundreds now encamped on the
sandy sagebrush plain in the high desert there was not an individual who
was not affected in one way or another by the news from California, and
in most cases it required some sort of a personal decision, made
practically upon the moment. Men argued with their wives heatedly; women
gathered in groups, talking, weeping. The stoic calm of the trail was
swept away in a sort of hysteria which seemed to upset all their world
and all its old values.

Whether for Oregon or California, a revolution in prices was worked
overnight for every purchase of supplies. Flour, horses, tools,
everything merchantable, doubled and more than doubled. Some fifty
wagons in all now formed train for California, which, in addition to the
long line of pack animals, left the Sangamon caravan, so called, at best
little more than half what it had been the day before. The men without
families made up most of the California train.

The agents for California, by force of habit, still went among the
wagons and urged the old arguments against Oregon--the savage tribes on
ahead, the forbidding desolation of the land, the vast and dangerous
rivers, the certainty of starvation on the way, the risk of arriving
after winter had set in on the Cascade Range--all matters of which they
themselves spoke by hearsay. All the great West was then unknown.
Moreover, Fort Hall was a natural division point, as quite often a third
of the wagons of a train might be bound for California even before the
discovery of gold. But Wingate and his associates felt that the Oregon
immigration for that year, even handicapped as now, ultimately would run
into thousands.

It was mid-morning of the next blazing day when he beckoned his men to
him.

"Lets pull out," he said. "Why wait for the Californians to move? Bridger
will go with us across the Snake. 'Twill only be the worse the l