Back to my home place.
Story of the Crow Emigrant Train of 1865 - Section 7
Pioneers are never satisfied, no matter where they are. They always want to be somewhere else. A brother of father's who had gone to Kansas kept writing to father what a wonderful country it was. Part of the Osage Indian reservation had just been opened up for settlement. A few cattlemen had made peace with the Indians and had been living on Fall River for perhaps fifteen years. Of course, if the Indians wanted a beef the cattlemen had to let them take it and say nothing. But now this part of the reservation was being opened up for settlement. It was a new country and land could be had for nothing- merely by settling on it. Here in California land was already high and none of it that we wanted was free.
This free land appealed to father and we started back to get some in the spring of 1869. We started as early in April as we thought we could get over the snow on the mountains. We had to lay ever about a week when we reached the Summit, waiting for the snow to freeze over again after a warm spell. There was about eight miles of snow and it was still deep. When we thought it had frozen over thick enough for us to drive over it with our wagons we started. Just as our last wagon was almost across it broke through the crust and down it went. Everything had to be unloaded and carried to the end of the snow in order to get the wagon across empty.
Father had planned to drive clear through to Kansas. We were expecting when we got to Salt Lake City to join up with other emigrants and go east together through the Indian country. But there were no emigrants at all going east. The overland railroad had just been completed a few weeks before, in May, 1869, and everything was completely changed. There was nobody traveling our way at all.
We could have gone on ahead with our four wagons for a few hundred miles farther before we came into the dangerous Indian country. Father was taking seventy-five head of California horses along. He decided we better sell them in Salt Lake City and then go by train. Dad sold the whole bunch to one man for about thirty-five dollars a head.
The railroad at that time did not come through Salt Lake City. The nearest point where we could reach it was at Ogden, about forty miles north. We could also take the train at Wasatch, a hundred miles or so east. People advised us not to go by way of Ogden, as the railroad track through Echo Canyon was very bad and there bad been a number of trains wrecked there.
We took the train at Wasatch. The transcontinental railroad had just been built and the Company could charge anything they chose. And they chose plenty. It cost us four hundred dollars to get a flat car to put our four wagons on. The wagon wheels were taken off and the wagon beds securely fastened to the car. And they charged us six hundred dollars for a stock car to ship our stock in. And for ourselves they charged us seventy-two dollars a passenger for each of us. All told it cost us about eighteen hundred dollars to travel four days by train to Omaha.
We uncarred our stock once in Colorado. They side tracked us for twenty-four hours. Our stock had only this one rest and chance to eat and drink in four days. They were on the cars about two days each time. That's about as long as a horse can starve.
After we got everything off the cars at Omaha we hitched up and crossed the Missouri River over to Council Bluffs. We crossed on the same ferry boat we had come on four years before. We drove on down the river into Missouri and then over into the southern part of Kansas where we settled. We were located forty miles from nowhere. There were no wagon roads into the country. We had only horse trails to follow in getting there. Settlers were pouring into the country. There were two little saw mills on Fall River and so great was the demand for lumber that the settlers would grab the boards right away from the saw. Limits of one hundred and two hundred feet had to be set up so that everybody could get a share of the lumber.
We camped on our land in our wagons at first. It was terribly wet during July and August that year and the grass grew so rank that a man on horseback could hardly look over the top of it. A hundred yards was as far away as one could see a wagon the grass was so dense. I didn't dare get away any distance at all for fear of getting lost.
The place where we settled was called Twin Mounds at first, but later when a post office was established the name was changed to Fredonia.
The box of medicine that father had brought from Iowa had never been opened during the four years we had been in California. We still had it with us. But oh my, how those wet prairie lands in Kansas did bring on the chills and fever. Our supply of medicine was gone in no time. But we stayed and soon the whole country was settled up. It was fine land that father took up and he lived right there the rest of his life.
After I grew up I came back to California. I have lived here over forty years this last time. People think that I am a comparatively new comer. They don't know that I am really a Pioneer. Indeed there are but few people who know that I first came to California in 1865, seventy years ago.
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