Dedicated to the boys and girls who can never hear my mother tells these stories.
Foreward
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The most delightful stories we knew as children were those our mother told us of "crossing the plains." Over and over and yet again, she told those tales. I grew to feel that it was I who had made that journey. I knew the long wagon train as it slowly changed from gleaming white to dingy gray. I loved the horses as they lost their sleek roundness under the strain of drawing the big wagons steadily twenty miles a day for four long months. Slow as that speed seems today, it was a very rapid journey in 1864. Though as a child my eyes had known only green-clad clustering hills, through Mother's stories I knew the flat, treeless prairies and the bleak lava deserts; I saw the brown-bodied Indians on their half-wild ponies, and admired the well-dressed handsome scout who guarded and guided the train so carefully. I knew something of a day that will not be seen again.
It was near the close of my mother's life that I decided those stories must not be lost; they must be kept as best they might be for Mother's grandchildren, all of them too young to know and remember the stories. With her help I collected and arranged them in proper sequence, then wrote the story, reading it to her, page by page and story by story, for her criticism, writing and rewriting again and again until finally the tale was as she wished it to be. Each incident related is a true one, true in detail. Sixty-four years after the journey was ended, we had recaptured as best we could a bit of the life and spirit of an earlier day. I wish the children who read this story might know her happiness in leaving to this bit of history.
A.D.C.