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Updated: June 4, 2025
The pay was good, and the sooner earned the sooner would the wedding be, and Trotter received the answer he expected. The stage line was another of the Western enterprises projected by Russell, Majors & Waddell. When gold was discovered on Pike's Peak there was no method of traversing the great Western plain except by plodding ox-team, mule-pack, or stagecoach.
One rainy April afternoon, when the smoky gray distances began to take a tinge of green, and through the drip and rustle of the rain the call of the robins sounded, Friend Barton sat in the door of the barn, oiling the road-harness. The old chaise had been wheeled out and greased, and its cushions beaten and dusted. An ox-team with a load of grain creaked up the hill and stopped at the mill door.
We begin with a tent and an ox-team, and end, in spite of countless obstacles, with a big brick homestead and a railroad or an automobile. Men of the Lansing type follow the same course consistently, even when their interests are not concerned. Once get an idea into their minds, convince them that it's right, and they'll transform it into determined action.
So the goods were landed on the dock at Scrapplehead, and Mr. Downs undertook to find an ox-team to draw them across the causeway at low tide. Getting oxen was not an easy matter at that season of the year, but Mr. Downs, who had taken a fancy to his lodgers, bestirred himself, and at last found some one willing to let his yoke go in consideration of a dollar and a quarter.
Half a mile back of the spot where the accident occurred she found a more gradual descent into the ravine, and here, by swinging herself from bush to bush she managed at length with the utmost difficulty and danger to reach the bottom of the ravine, but could find there no trace either of her husband or of the ox-team.
One of the women drove an ox-team; she had a large and powerful whip, with which, and a surprising strength, she belaboured and tugged the unwieldy team with great dexterity. The other woman had five children, and assisted in loading the wood; the younger, about sixteen years of age, had one child, and appeared to do nothing. The women, it seemed to me, worked harder than the men.
This is the route over which Ezra Meeker traveled by ox-team in 1906 and on which many monuments have been erected to commemorate the pioneers of the 1840's and '50's. THE ox is passing in fact, has passed. The old-time spinning wheel and the hand loom, the quaint old cobbler's bench with its handmade lasts and shoe pegs, the heavy iron mush pot on the crane in the chimney corner, all have gone.
Our indulgent father took my brother and myself and a neighbor's daughter to see the "great instructive exhibition." It took our ox-team three hours to make the seven miles, and the elephant's footprints by the bridges, and other impedimenta of the great show, which we passed, carried our excitement, which had been cruelly growing for three weeks, well-nigh up to an exploding climax.
Curtis preferred to sit in the carriage, which she could easily do as the hostler stood at the horses' heads. The children were chatting gayly when a loud geeing was heard; and presently an ox-team was seen slowly approaching from the direction of the granite quarry. "Oh, mamma!" said Bertie greatly excited, "there's Mr. Cahart. I do hope he will stop and speak to me.
I took the gun from his cart, put a bundle on the end of it, placed it on his shoulder, and started him out with his little boy, twelve years old. His wife and two daughters, older than the boy, took the cart along finely after reaching the summit. "We travelled along with the ox-team and overtook others, all so laden with the sick and helpless that they moved very slowly.
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