“We have a fair wind blowing, Eudora?” he asked the woman with a smile.
“She’ll puff the mainsails and move us right along, Captain,” the tall and handsome woman replied, also with a smile on her lips in the predawn hours.
“Be you excited, Eudora?”
“I’d be telling a big whacker if I said no.”
“I’ll set an easy pace for the next two days. That’ll work the kinks out and settle everybody in. I don’t figure to make more than twenty miles ’fore we stop for some rifle and pistol practice. That close to the fort, I don’t expect any Injun trouble. But you just never know.” He rode on, pausing every now and then to stop and talk to the ladies on the wagon seats.
Faith Crump was riding with Gayle Hawkins and a lady named Wallis.
“It’s a barbaric hour,” Faith complained. “Why, the sun isn’t even up.”
“It’ll rise,” Preacher told her. “It always does.” He smiled at Gayle and rode on.
Over the past few days Preacher had learned from the president’s man that Faith came from a very wealthy family—her father owned ships, railroads, newspapers, banks, and the like—and that Faith was known as a very head-strong, opinionated, and outspoken young lady (Preacher had already known that), and that her father had agreed to her coming on this trip just to get her out of the house and give him some relief. Faith had started her own monthly magazine back East and was very strong in the women’s right-to-vote movement. She and many of her friends and coworkers had been arrested several times for bellying up to the bar and demanding service in various saloons in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. Faith had also been arrested once for telling the mayor of New York City to “Go suck an egg!”
“Lash that canvas down tighter on the left side and secure it, Maude,” Preacher told a lady. “They’s winds out on the plains that you just won’t believe.”
“You can’t drive oxen sittin’ on the damn wagon seat, Orabella,” he told another lady. “Get out here and walk. You know better.”
As the first faint rays of light began streaking the eastern skies, Preacher rode back to the head of the column. “Scouts out?” he asked Charlie.
“Snake and Blackjack left an hour ago, Preach. The local gospel shouter is here to say a prayer for us.”
“Good. We need all the help we can get.”
A minister intoned a short prayer for their safety and then stepped aside.
Preacher nodded his head. “I guess we got it to do,” he muttered. He twisted in the saddle and shouted, “Stretch ’em out, ladies. Let’s go!”
Preacher sat his saddle on the south side of the train and watched it slowly rumble past. Because of the mixture of oxen and mules, he figured on any good day of doing no more than twelve miles. Mules could do twenty, but oxen averaged fifteen. So he split the difference. When conditions worsened, either on the trail or because of bad weather, they’d be lucky to do eight in a day. It was a nearly two-thousand-mile, five-and-a-half-month trip any way you wanted to cut it.
These wagons were called prairie schooners—they were not Conestogas. The Conestogas—which weighed one and a half tons, empty, were developed by Germans in Pennsylvania and used primarily on developed eastern roads, which could be graded from time to time, taking six to eight mules to pull the loaded wagons. They were far too heavy for the early roadless west.
When the last wagon had passed and the livestock had been driven by where Preacher sat, the lights of the town on the Missouri border could no longer be seen by Eudora in the lead wagon.
“Get up there, now. Haw!” Eudora hollered to her team of mules, then muttered, “We have done it now, ladies. May God smile on this venture.”
For two days the wagons rolled, from first light to one hour before the sun set. Preacher set an easy pace and, at the end of the second day, figured they had covered about twenty-five miles. They had seen no other human beings except their companions on the wagon train. He let the women sleep late the next morning, until 7:00 A.M., and then Preacher rolled them out.
After breakfast, he pointed to a wagon he’d had pulled in close. “Men’s britches, men’s shirts, and men’s hats,” he told them. “From this point on, half of you are gonna be dressed like men.
“Hot damn!” Eudora shouted. “We’re throwing convention to the wind and to hell with what other people think.”
“That’s for me!” Faith said.
Preacher had expected a tremendous hue and cry of outrage from the ladies. He got none.
“Well, I’ll just be damned,” Preacher said to Snake. “How do a man ever figure a woman?”
“You don’t,” Charlie told him. “Don’t ever try to second-guess no female person. It can’t be done. My daddy tole me that right before I left home, and he shore was right.”
Eudora took charge and began assigning clothes to the ladies. None of them argued with her, and Preacher knew he’d made a wise choice in naming her wagon boss.
“Captain,” Eudora called to Preacher; she would call him nothing else, for the moment. After a few months on the trail, they all would be calling him many things, usually under their breath.
“Wagon boss,” Preacher said, walking up to her.
“We can’t have the make-believe men having long curls. How about we whack them off? It’ll all grow back, time we get to the blue waters.”
“Good idea. But save the curls and tie them to the barrels of your rifles so’s the Injuns will think it’s scalps.”
“I do like the way you think, Captain,” Eudora said with a smile. “If I wasn’t bespoken for, you’d be in trouble.”
“You right sure that feller a-waitin’ for you is man enough to handle you?”
“If he isn’t, you better keep a sharp eye out on the seas behind you, Captain.”
The women all roared at that and Preacher laughed and walked away.
It got deadly serious in a few hours, when Preacher lined them all up for weapons’ practice. It turned out that about half of the women had come from towns and cities and had no idea how to handle any type of weapon.
“I think we’re gonna be here longer than we furst thought,” Blackjack opined. “Some of them gals don’t even know which end the ball comes out of.”
“But ain’t they attractive in them men’s britches?” Ned said.
“Well, we brung more than ample shot and powder,” Preacher replied. “Let’s get to it. But for God’s sake, let’s don’t have no one blowin’ somebody else’s head off accidental.”
The wagon train stayed where it was for three days, the rolling, seemingly empty, and constantly windblown sea of grass reverberating with the roaring and cracking sounds of gunfire. Some of the ladies took to the guns like they was born to it, others, even after three days of practice, couldn’t hit a barn if they was standin’ inside it.
Preacher and the other men decided that just about a third of the women would handle the guns; the rest would reload and stand by to put out fires caused by fire-arrows and tend to the kids, livestock, and, in case of Indian attack, the wounded, which, the mountain men knew, would need help somewhere up the line. Eudora, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be a crack shot. Faith couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.
“There ain’t no point in wastin’ no more shot and powder,” Preacher said. “We pull out in the mornin’.” A dozen or so women had gathered around him, and Preacher squatted down and brushed a grassless area clean with his hand. With a stick, he started a rough map. “Lookie here, ladies. A couple more days on the trail, and we head northwest. We’ll cross the Kansas and keep headin’ north by northwest until we reach the Platte. We’ll follow that, on the south side of it, until we reach the South Platte. We’ll cross that, and follow the North Platte until we reach this tradin’ post here”—he jabbed at the earth—“that some has taken to callin’ Fort Laramie. From there, we follow the Sweetwater to South Pass, then south to another tradin’ post. From there, we cross the Tetons up to a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Snake. Next stop is a tradin’ post up here on the Boise—providin’ the Injuns ain’t killed everybody and burned the damn place down. Which they had done more than once. Then we head north through the Blues up to the Whitman Mission. Then west followin’ the Columbia over to the Dalles. Past that, we’re home free and y’all can hitch up with your men and live happy ever after.” He smiled up at them. “Looks easy, don’t it?”