This brings me to the matter of Elijah White. He was your standard, middling Midwestern bureaucrat-turned-pie-oh-neeeer, nasty and mediocre as his neck-beard. He possessed the only pair of eyes in our caravan that had glimpsed Oregon prior to this journey—as a missionary in his previous occupation. Apparently, that hadn't quite gone over well: one particular native community scalped the local Christian schoolmarm after she gave them smallpox to complement their Bible Studies. So, the former Reverend White decided this next trip West would be on Uncle Sam's time and tab rather than on Jesus Christ's.

He parlayed his expertise—in a way that would not be lost on me—into obtaining a sort of charter for the journey, complete with funding for time spent advertising, personal provisions, and a government-backed promise of a plum reward for leading a group to Oregon Territory safely. What he could not parlay from the Feds was ammo—otherwise the United States Government would have been funding a military expedition unaccompanied by any actual members of the military and, more to the point, the destination of that civilian pseudo-military expedition would have been land held jointly with the British Empire. In short, a man named Columbia possessed a covered wagon which was our de facto armory.

About Columbia.

[He falls silent momentarily.]

What I did not tell my readers, Dear Reader, was that fairly early on, what we most feared and most expected came to pass: a member of our party succumbed, consumed by the land wither we were a'going.

Columbia had a little girl and his little girl, most likely, had tuberculosis. Her parents thought, perhaps, that the trip West could heal their little daughter's health. And, of course, the stress of but a month's wagon travel killed her. She succumbed.

The parents were damned fools to bring her, I remembered thinking. They were damned fools who could have endangered the whole lot of us by dragging along their sick little girl, a waif who didn't have a prayer left in this world.

[He falls silent again, about to speak, but revising what may or may not be a script before he resumes. He has a clear sense of his narrative momentum, either way.]

What I did not understand was their desperation. I'd had my own kin taken from me: my second-eldest brother, Joseph. However, I had not yet been father to three little girls and four little boys. I cast a cold and critical eye on a lunatic medical decision, rather than admiring—for better and for worse—their delusional determination to try everything and anything they could do to save her.

When that little girl had scraped her meager and bloody last breath into her tattered lungs, her parents' journey West was over. Ominously and ludicrously—two trends that tend to twin on the frontier—the father's name was, in fact, Columbia Lancaster.