Chapter 2

Well, now that the war was over, what was I going to do? Along with most of the active troops, I was mustered out before the end of July, 1865. With a little fast talk, I managed to keep my Spencer and my revolvers. There was no question about my bowie knife, I had that when I was conscripted. Like most everybody else, I went home to find that there were no jobs. The few jobs that there had been were snapped up by the guys who were mustered out first, so there was nothing left by the time I got home to Mulberry Run, New Hampshire. I wasn't married, so I didn't have a wife to worry about, and my ma and pa had their general store, so they were OK. I fooled around helping at the store for a while, but all of us could see that I was really just in the way.

It was certain that I had to look elsewhere for a living. There was nothing close by that was honest and paid enough to live on, so I did like a lot of other veterans and looked to the West. The next question was how was I going to get there? I didn't have enough money for the train or the stagecoach, and there were no boats going where I wanted to go, namely, Nebraska. I had one choice: I walked!

With my army experience, I could make 30 miles a day, or even more if I wanted to, but why hurry. I figured to make enough money to eat with any sort of odd job that I could pick up in my travels. I decided to head for the Ohio River and either get a job on a flatboat going down river or build my own flatboat. No matter which one I happened to do, it was easier than walking.

Well, it was now late in the year, so I figured that the only sensible thing to do was to wait until spring. When April finally came, I started out, heading south. For no particularly good reason, I headed toward Philadelphia, planning to cut west from there.

I got almost unforgivably lucky about 12 miles south of town. I ran into a freight wagon headed to Springfield, Mass. At first, the driver thought that I was a highwayman because of all my guns, but he calmed down and offered me a ride in exchange for guarding his load of cheese. It seemed strange to me that anyone would want to steal a load of cheese, but the driver assured me that people were stealing anything nowadays. Hell, riding a freight wagon beat walking, so I took him up on the deal, especially since the deal included food, though I did get tired of cheese.

Damned if the driver wasn't right. Twice before we got to Springfield, I had to fight off thieves, but it really wasn't much of a fight either time, once the bandits saw how well I was armed. Both times, a couple of shots were enough to send them running.

That deal of guarding the freight wagon worked out so well that I looked for a similar job headed farther south. I didn't find a job as a guard, but I was offered a job driving, provided I was willing to act as a guard, too, for a total of three wagons traveling together. I grabbed the job, and away we went. This job took me as far as Hartford, Conn.

I changed my plans in Hartford, since I stumbled across a big train of wagons headed to Cleveland, and they wanted guards. This time, I was provided a horse. I was a member of a six-man guard unit protecting 20 wagons. This was a great job, because I actually got paid a living wage. On top of that, food was included as part of the package. Most of the manifest was manufactured goods, everything from guns to plows, so the loads were heavy and the motive power was oxen. We didn't make very good time, but we did get to Cleveland before bad weather set in. There were no incidents along the way to Cleveland, probably because six well armed guards were too intimidating.

I was forced to spend the winter in Cleveland. Shit, I thought I knew what winter was, but Cleveland had New Hampshire beat all hollow. It wasn't the temperature or the snow, it was the wind! Man, I got sick of it and was ready to move on as soon as the spring thaw made that possible.

Cleveland was where I got my next big break. I was in a saloon one bitter winter day when I overheard a conversation that pricked up my ears. A wagon train of immigrants headed for St. Louis was looking for guards, but all of the regular outfits had already been spoken for. I couldn't help interrupting with a offer to form a guard unit for them, provided they were paying enough. When they asked for my qualifications, I told them about guarding the wagon train from Hartford, and about my Army experience.

This was enough for them, since they were in a bad bind. I was hired on the spot and told to be ready to move by April 15^th. The roads would probably be passable by then. The train consisted of 41 wagons and 137 people. The wagonmaster would provide the food and horses for the guards, but we had to provide everything else.

I figured that I would need 15 men, including myself, so I began recruiting right away. I made a deal with the saloon keeper to let me use his place as a meeting point for my hiring efforts. He didn't charge me anything, since he figured to make money selling beer and other drinks to the people I was hiring.

I had some handbills printed up with a list of the qualifications I wanted and spread the word that I was hiring. Unemployment was bad enough that I had a full complement of guards lined up in only two weeks. We still had six weeks to go before the first scheduled day to move out, but there was a lot of work to do getting organized. One of the men I hired had spent some time as a sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps., so I put him to handling the logistics. Jess Jackson was quite competent at the job, and he took a lot of work off my shoulders.

I even ran across a cavalry sergeant I had worked with in the Army, so I made him my second in command. Sam Harley turned out to be a good choice for that job.

By the time April 15^th rolled around, we were all chomping at the bit, in a hurry to be off. John Hall, the wagonmaster, was as anxious to go as the rest of us. There was a heavy rain on the 15^th, so it was the 17^th before we actually started. John was using this relatively easy segment of the trek to shake everything down and into place. Virtually everybody in the train had his wagon overloaded, so that was the first thing to correct. A few stubborn people had insisted on using horses to pull their wagons, but they understood their error by the third day of travel, and they switched to oxen within a week. Even the people with mules had decided to switch to oxen by the fourth week of the trek.

The part that I was most interested in was how the wagons would be arranged at night. John had the wagons form into a large circle, but this had some significant disadvantages when it came to defensive fire. The next night, we formed into a square, and that was considerably better. We tried that for a week, but I still was not happy with it, because there was no fall-back position. Finally, I suggested to John that we form two squares, a smaller one inside the larger one. Normally, people could sleep in their wagons, but at times of danger, I wanted the women and children inside the inner square.

I got some shotguns for the women to use if attackers broke through the outer defenses. The shotguns did not need accurate aiming and the short killing range would protect any good guys left in the outer defensive area. At first, most of the women were reluctant to try out the shotguns until I asked them if they had rather have their children hurt or killed. That was all of the argument that I needed. The women worked very hard at learning to load and shoot the shotguns.

We were lucky, I suppose. We encountered only two bandit gangs, and both of them were beaten off with no casualties on our side. By the time we reached St. Louis, we were operating as a well-oiled machine. Winter had not set in yet, and John wanted to travel on to Independence while we still had time. The target had been set at St. Louis simply because he had thought that it would take longer to get there than it actually did. If the train went on to Independence, they would save a lot of valuable traveling time in the following year.