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"Bevins, you gave us a good chase," I said, as we rode up. "Yes," he returned calmly, "and if I'd had fifteen minutes' more start and got across the Platte you'd never have caught me." Bevins's flight was the most remarkable feat of its kind I have ever heard of. A man who could run barefooted in the snow through a prickly-pear patch was surely a "tough one."
They passed and repassed long links of a broad shallow river which the maps showed to be the Platte, and which seemed to be made of two-thirds sand to one-third water. Now and again mounted horsemen appeared in the distance whom Mr. Dayton said were "cow-boys;" but no cows were visible, and the rapidly moving figures were neither as picturesque nor as formidable as they had expected them to be.
Fremont came up the North Platte and the Sweetwater branch, crossing from that stream by the South Pass thirty-four years after Andrew Henry had first traversed it, over to the headwaters of the Colorado. The ascent to South Pass is very gradual, and there is no gorge or defile. The total width is about twenty miles.
This point was rightly regarded as one of the most important on the whole overland route; for near it passed the favourite highway of the Indians on their yearly migrations north and south, in the wake of the strange elliptical march of the buffalo far beyond the Platte, and back to the sunny knolls of the Canadian.
They are as follows: In April, 1837, accompanied by his two youngest wives, at a trading-house at the mouth of the Platte, he indulged in one of his most violent fits of drunkenness, and in this condition, on a dark and inclement night, drove his wives out of doors. Two men of his tribe, who witnessed these circumstances, persuaded the women to fly in their company.
The sledge, shortening this route, took a chord of the arc described by the railway. Mudge was not afraid of being stopped by the Platte River, because it was frozen. The road, then, was quite clear of obstacles, and Phileas Fogg had but two things to fear an accident to the sledge, and a change or calm in the wind.
The South Platte was a muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each other, on either side.
We looked carefully over the summits of the hills before exposing ourselves to observation from the front. At last we made out the village, encamped in the sandhills south of the South Platte River at Summit Springs. Here I left the Pawnees to watch, while I rode back to the command and informed General Carr that the Indians were in sight.
It was to such a population and under such a condition of things that Senator Atchison went to his home in Platte County in the summer of 1854 to preach his pro-slavery crusade against Kansas. His personal convictions, his party faith, his senatorial reflection, and his financial fortunes, were all involved in the scheme.
On leaving Omaha, it passes along the left bank of the Platte Rivet as far as the junction of its northern branch, follows its southern branch, crosses the Laramie territory and the Wahsatch Mountains, turns the Great Salt Lake, and reaches Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital, plunges into the Tuilla Valley, across the American Desert, Cedar and Humboldt Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and descends, via Sacramento, to the Pacific its grade, even on the Rocky Mountains, never exceeding one hundred and twelve feet to the mile.
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