The Gold Rush Girls by Craig Moody

Author:Craig Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vivid Imagery Publishing via Indie Author Project
Published: 2020-02-17T15:08:14+00:00

South Pass

The search party never found the baby, nor did they find the coyotes who took it. The wagon train moved on the next morning. The woman screamed and wailed for hours. The sun had long set when she finally depleted her voice of sound.

The incident haunted me for days. My heart broke for the poor mother. A part of me wanted to locate her and try to comfort her, but I knew it was best for me to stay with my own wagon. The woman wept every night. A week after the disappearance of her infant, I had grown accustomed to the sound of her wailing. Then, one night, her crying ceased altogether. I never heard her make another sound. The man from the wagon in front of us later told me that the mother had died a few days prior. She was buried, like so many others, alongside the rugged, worn pathway of the trail. They said she had shown no signs of illness. It was assumed she simply died of an overly broken heart.

***

The summer was slowly inching into autumn. The nights were colder and the landscape drier and more desolate. The wavy grass plains we had ventured through for months were slowly becoming vast desert beds and towering clay-like mountains. Trees had become fewer in number, so the sun pelted us with its relentless heat and shine for most of the day.

The boys had begun to chatter about our eventual break with the train. From the information they had gathered, this train was taking one of four splits in the trail that would take them directly to the California gold mines. The boys wanted to veer to the southernmost trail, the one that would take us into northern Deseret. One of the men from a wagon much further up the wagon train promised he would notify the boys the night before the train would come to the bypass. He promised that the back half of the train would stall for a few minutes to ensure our safety onto the alternate trail. I started to worry about that day. I had grown used to the mass of wagons ahead of us, so many wagons that I could never see the front of the train, even when the convoy turned and wove along the winding trail. To suddenly lose that sense of community would be frightening, despite the many months I had spent in just three- or two-wagon trains.

There was a mention of a place called South Pass, and the boys started to plan our departure. Sometime around midday the following day, the wagons ahead of us halted, and we pulled our two wagons from behind them and onto a southern turn. I sat on the backside of our rear wagon, staring as the few stalled wagons watched us trek along our new path for a bit before eventually moving forward to rejoin the rest of their massive convoy. The feeling of the missing companions—most of whom I had never met, even those in the wagons closest to our own—was immense and striking.

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