They elected me. Why? Desperation, surely, but, to be equally sure, we weren't desperate yet. The desperation was a sense of something larger that loomed along the Plains and we clung to the Platte that it might be somehow warded off, but, no, we were not specifically desperate, though desperation stalked us as surely as the day we left Missouri.

Additionally, I had retrieved—more accurately, I had stolen back—some of Columbia's ammunition. He was not adequately armed to head back East alone and not adequately sane to bother about making such calculations. White saw me, but what could he do? I was boy enough to attempt such a brash gesture, to fly in the face of improvised authority, but I was man enough not to creep around.

The lone, backwards, death-white wagon had started East before dawn, but I overtook them and returned to the larger group before it had broken camp for the day. My arrival was much remarked upon—albeit in muted, mutinous tones. I suppose the Dog Decrees were issued soon enough after that morning that my name was on a few minds.

More practically, I was alone on a horse and I had not bothered anyone about favors or about holding onto my things. I was in a position to help and to socialize, unhindered by an immediate family. If I lacked the status of a patriarch, I was unencumbered by his responsibilities and his inherent favoritism. I was surely seen as impartial and congenial—happy to gallop about the Plains, weaving in and out of the caravan that inched along on giant wooden wheels, and make some conversation to break up the monotony. My horse was glad for the exercise and I was glad for the company.

Furthermore, and this is an easy point to miss entirely in the wake of the Gold Rush of '49, when hordes of immigrants and otherwise desperate men descended upon fair, virgin California: our wagon train was comprised mostly of the moderately well off to the outright well-to-do. Certainly, these families were looking for a new life and a new adventure, but these were families.

The hired teamsters were, indeed, mostly single men of little learning and they sought their own fortunes out West, but they were employees of respectable, successful, Christian, small-town families who had followed the Frontier for generations so blanched far less than most might at the leap to the Pacific coast. Those bachelors stayed in line, for their livelihoods depended on it.

Yet, if those families did not balk at the prospect of 2,000 miles by wagon and on foot and felt the Frontier was in their blood, they also could not simply up and go. Getting to Oregon was a costly undertaking: supplies had to last for an entire family over the course of five months; livestock had to be up to the challenge; the wagon would surely need to be repaired and it took knowledgeable, strong hands to repair it.

My Puritan blood, my childhood on the Frontier, my professional degree, and my father's standing as one of Ohio's first licensed civilian physicians lent me an air of credibility that only the vilest behavior on my part could have dispelled. To that end, I had never touched a drop of liquor in my life and there was little chance to court a lady on the wagon trail, so I stayed out of trouble entirely.