Three days after the discussion with Hastings, they ran over the remaining parts of the kid he’d outlined for them—the twelve-year-old Indian, attached to a tree.
Reed’s as was his understanding. It had been a terrible section. He and Stanton had gotten back to the gathering and, despite the alerts they passed on, the gathering had concluded in any case to forge ahead the path. Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves didn’t care for the path from the beginning and grumbled to any individual who might tune in, and soon enough Wolfinger and Spitzer and afterward the remainder of the Germans took up the abstain. Reed presumed it was partially because they essentially didn’t care for the possibility of him as chief.
In any case, he’d had barely any choice yet to move forward. The report about Lansford Hastings blew all the hot air straight out of George Donner. He had essentially looked vacantly from Reed to Stanton when they advised him, as though he hadn’t comprehended.
“We’ve committed an awful error,” Reed had said gruffly. “We were relying upon that man and he’s abandoned us. He misled us. We’ll cease to exist here . . .”
However, Donner just shook his head. “I don’t have a clue about the way to the Humboldt River from here, none of us does. Maybe we should pivot. We could take the northern course . . .”
“There’s no an ideal opportunity for that,” Reed said. “If we attempt to take the northern course at this late date, we’d need to winter over at Fort Hall.” It would be ruinous for most families. Hardly any had the means to support them over the season, not with the exorbitant costs the general stores told. A dollar fifty for a pound of flour, and a family could undoubtedly eat a pound of flour in a day. A large portion of the families would starve before spring.
Donner had gotten some distance from them, perspiring and shuddering, declining to choose. Furthermore, from that point forward, Donner hadn’t verbally expressed a word to anybody outside his family. Reed was persuaded that Donner’s breakdown was just brief and got Stanton to consent to keep mum. Jacob Donner, his sibling, had consented to keep him far away, and the story going through the cart train was that he’d become sick.
So Reed assumed liability for the course. Inside a day, the timberland tore up around them equivalent to it had done to Hastings’ gathering, and afterward the ground broke uphill strongly. On the morning of his second day as commander, one of Reed’s bulls had come up weak, setting his attitude anxious. He wound up being excessively brisk with Keseberg, some unacceptable man to incite, and they fell into a yelling match that finished when Keseberg drew a blade and must be pulled away by the arm.
The climate here and there the line immediately turned tense and jittery. Reed sent brothers by marriage William Foster and William Pike ahead to scout the way and kicked every other person off slashing down trees, alarmed in his heart that they would wind up caught in the woods like the other party. Reed recommended that everybody begin pooling and apportioning their food stocks, yet he was immediately yelled down, and a few men took steps to string him up if he at any point raised the thought once more.
A little hunting party went out after the cart train had ended for the evening, making the best of the last hour of light left before it would be too hazardous to even think about hunting. New meat was hard to find and nobody was able to butcher any domesticated animals, so every healthy man in the party with a rifle—and surprisingly some not exactly physically fit ones, like Luke Halloran—branched out to search for game.
Reed followed a little gathering, behind Milt Elliott and John Snyder ahead of the pack. His rifle weighed vigorously, his arms throbbing from swinging a hatchet the entire day. He was all the while thinking about what Snyder had revealed to him the previous evening—what he’d followed Reed into the forest to advise him.
You know what your difficulty is, Reed? You don’t comprehend them individuals by any stretch of the imagination.
Just sheep will follow you accommodating like. Most of them don’t think they need your assistance.
They’re not going to pay attention to you except if you make them.
Snyder was a quarter century old vagabond who’d done nothing more troublesome than menace and whip domesticated animals. Reed had constructed a furniture business from nothing, driven an organization of men against Sauk and Kickapoo Indians in the Black Hawk War.