, a step that could not be
retraced, a launching to victory or death. Under this state of feeling
many showed the cloven foot, and tried to make trouble, but in any
emergency good and honest men seemed always in the majority, and those
who had thoughts or desires of evil were compelled to submit to
honorable and just conclusions.

There were some strange developments of character among these travelers.
Some who had in long attendance at school and church, listened all their
lives to teachings of morality and justice, and at home seemed to be
fairly wedded to ideas of even rights between man and man, seemed to
experience a change of character as they neared the Pacific Coast.
Amiable dispositions became soured, moral ideas sadly blunted, and their
whole make-up seemed changed, while others who at home seemed to be of
rougher mould, developed principles of justice and humanity, affection
almost unbounded, and were true men in every trial and in all places. A
majority of all were thus fair-minded and true.

Men from every state from New Hampshire to Texas gathered on the banks
of the Missouri to set out together across the plains. These men reared
in different climates, amid different ways and customs, taught by
different teachers in schools of religion and politics, made up a
strange mass when thus thrown together; but the good and true came to
the surface, and the turbulent and bad were always in a hopeless
minority. Laws seemed to grow out of the very circumstances, and though
not in print, flagrant violations would be surely punished.

Some left civilization with all the luxuries money could buy--fine,
well-equipped trains of their own, and riding a fat and prancing steed,
which they guided with gloved hands, and seemed to think that water and
grass and pleasant camping places would always be found wherever they
wished to stop for rest, and that the great El Dorado would be a grand
pleasure excursion, ending in a pile of gold large enough to fill their
big leather purse. But the sleek, fat horse grew poor; the gloves with
embroidered gauntlet wrists were cast aside; the trains grew small, and
the luxuries vanished, and perhaps the plucky owner made the last few
hundred miles on foot, with blistered soles and scanty pack, almost
alone. Many of these gay trains never reached California, and many a
pioneer who started with high hopes died upon the way, some rudely
buried, some left where they fell upon the sands or rock