Where the Trail Ends: American Tapestries Read Online Free PDF

her. She had to think about something, anything, besides water.
    Their company had left behind the Snake River three days ago. Thank God, she’d found Micah in the midst of the chaos, clutching Boaz’s fur behind a rock. But not all of them had survived the stampede. Titus Morrison lost his wife along with his wagon when their oxen ran off a cliff and into the canyon.
    Gerty had been twenty-four years old.
    There had been no time to stop and grieve his loss—their loss.
    They’d all started this journey back in Missouri as strangers, but after almost five months of travel, their party had become like afamily—laughing, bickering, and overlooking flaws that had rubbed them raw the first few weeks of travel. Over the hundreds of miles, they’d learned that even if they might not like every person in the caravan, they needed one another. Desperately.
    Whenever someone died along the trail, the captain said they “met the elephant.” Unfortunately, “the elephant” had visited their company three times now since they’d set out from Independence, Missouri, leaving the United States behind them. Samantha prayed it was the last time. She didn’t know if she could bear losing another member of their community.
    The company also lost seven oxen in the stampede, including one of the Waldrons’ three. The men butchered the animals that didn’t go over the cliffs; the women dried the meat under the hot western sun. The meat would help sustain them, but losing an ox was devastating for all of them. They had all brought extra oxen in case one died, but it meant they wouldn’t be able to carry their entire load over the Blue Mountains. Later they would have to decide what to leave behind.
    Later...
    A dog barked from inside their tight circle of sixteen wagons, and she forced her eyes closed and tried to sleep. Papa slept most nights under the wagon box while she and Micah slept in a canvas tent. Boaz was leashed on a rawhide strip between the wagon and their tent.
    Once they arrived at their new home, she would no longer be sleeping in a tent. Instead, she might be resting on a newly carved bed beside Jack Doyle.
    She rolled over, punching the lumpy pillow under her head. She wished she could muster more excitement at the thought.
    Jack had been married before, when he was twenty-two, but his wife had died less than a year into their marriage. That was five years ago. Jack had told Samantha that he hadn’t considered remarrying until he met her. She figured that was pretty close to a proposal.
    She hadn’t been sure she’d ever marry, and certainly not this soon. Before they left Ohio, Grandma Emma fretted that Samantha would not find an honorable bachelor in all of Oregon Country. Grandma wanted her to marry Reginald Poole, a man who’d once clerked in Papa’s office, but the man was terribly dull. When he became an attorney, he became irritable, as well, no longer smiling at her many attempts to amuse him when he came for supper or to sit on their front porch and sip lemonade.
    Lemonade.
    She shook her head, trying to erase the longing for a sweet, cool drink.
    Reginald would never take a wagon out to Oregon—or at least that was what he’d said when Papa asked him to consider coming on this journey. She now laughed at the thought of Reginald fording a river on horseback or killing a buffalo. His idea of a grand adventure was to stand on the sidelines, watching a parade march by during the holidays.
    Samantha never liked watching parades. She’d always wanted to be in them.
    Now she had paraded for more than thirteen hundred miles. When they arrived in the Willamette, she wasn’t sure she’d ever want to walk anywhere again.
    She’d met Jack the morning before they left Missouri. He was the charming farmer from Terre Haute, one of the two bachelors in their party if she didn’t include Papa. The other, Lesley Duncan, made it perfectly clear that he was seeking wealth in the West, not a wife.
    Jack hadn’t