It was hope undid them. Hope, and the certainty that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They'd lost so much already along the trail--children, healers, leaders, all taken--surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared--clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind--they had said to each other: This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it's only the first week of October. Maybe we'll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we'll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows.

On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, though they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as any black midnight.

Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.

Hope was small now; and smaller by the day. Of the eighty-three optimistic souls who had departed Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848 (this sum swelled by six births along the way), thirty-one remained alive. During the first three months of the journey, through Kansas, into Nebraska, then across 487 miles of Wyoming, there had been only six fatalities. Three lost in a drowning accident; two wandered off and believed killed by Indians; one hanged by her own hand from a tree. But with the heat of summer, sicknesses abounded, and the trials of the journey began to take their toll. The very young and the very old had perished first, sickened by bad water or bad meat. Men and women who had been in the prime of their lives five or six months before, hardy, brave, and ripe, became withered and wretched as the food stocks dwindled, and the land, which they had been told would supply them with all manner of game and fruit, failed to provide the promised bounty. Men would leave the wagon train for days at a time in search of food, only to return hollow-eyed and empty-handed. It was therefore in an already much weakened state that the travelers faced the cold, and its effect had proved calamitous. Forty-seven individuals had perished in the space of three weeks, dispatched by frost, snow, exhaustion, starvation, and hopelessness.

It had fallen to Herman Deale, who was the closest the survivors had to a physician since the death of Doc Hodder, to keep an account of these deaths. When they reached Oregon, the glad land in the West, he had told the survivors they would together pray for the departed, and pay due respects to each and every soul whose passing he had set down in his journal. Until that happy time, the living were not to concern themselves overmuch with the dead....

It was hope undid them. Hope, and the certainty that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They'd lost so much already along the trail--children, healers, leaders, all taken--surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared--clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind--they had said to each other: This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it's only the first week of October. Maybe we'll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we'll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows.

On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, though they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as any black midnight.

Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.

Hope was small now; and smaller by the day. Of the eighty-three optimistic souls who had departed Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848 (this sum swelled by six births along the way), thirty-one remained alive. During the first three months of the journey, through Kansas, into Nebraska, then across 487 miles of Wyoming, there had been only six fatalities. Three lost in a drowning accident; two wandered off and believed killed by Indians; one hanged by her own hand from a tree. But with the heat of summer, sicknesses abounded, and the trials of the journey began to take their toll. The very young and the very old had perished first, sickened by bad water or bad meat. Men and women who had been in the prime of their lives five or six months before, hardy, brave, and ripe, became withered and wretched as the food stocks dwindled, and the land, which they had been told would supply them with all manner of game and fruit, failed to provide the promised bounty. Men would leave the wagon train for days at a time in search of food, only to return hollow-eyed and empty-handed. It was therefore in an already much weakened state that the travelers faced the cold, and its effect had proved calamitous. Forty-seven individuals had perished in the space of three weeks, dispatched by frost, snow, exhaustion, starvation, and hopelessness.

It had fallen to Herman Deale, who was the closest the survivors had to a physician since the death of Doc Hodder, to keep an account of these deaths. When they reached Oregon, the glad land in the West, he had told the survivors they would together pray for the departed, and pay due respects to each and every soul whose passing he had set down in his journal. Until that happy time, the living were not to concern themselves overmuch with the dead....