Listen to the AudioBook: The land beyond the mist by Ernest Haycox

The Land Beyond the Mist

By Ernest Haycox

To keep out the misery of the eternal Oregon rain, Tom Cameron sang.

The heavens leaked with a persistence beyond the experience of the emigrant train. In seven days there had been no sun or sky above the tops of the fir trees. A heavy rolling mist hung over the line of wagons, shutting them out from the rest of the world as effectually as if they were in a fog bank at sea. Through this dark, lowering curtain came the steady deluge, soaking into the canvas schooner tops, wetting clothes, bedding, penetrating the food—reaching every fabric and every article. There was not an ounce nor an inch of anything dry in the whole weary column.

Cameron’s pony walked as if he were a twenty-year-old nag. His flanks steamed and twitched, his hoofs were weighted down with huge lumps of gummy clay, his mane hung in separate twisted hanks. The animal was in no worse shape than his master, whose blanket capote dripped water like a colander sieve. Rivulets ran from the man’s beaver cap across his wet face to a yellow mustache; fell from either side of this, like twin waterfalls, to the capote and thence streamed down the buckskin breeches in an ever-growing course, falling finally to the sodden, mud-sunken road in a tiny cascade.

“I’d be a danged sight more dry if I turned this hyar shirt inside out,” muttered Tom, wringing his mustache free from its accumulation of water. Then he fell again to the song.

“Oh, Kernel Doniphan-o----”

It was in the late fall of ’48, and these twenty wagons were traversing the Barlow Road over the Cascades to the valley of the Wallamet. The trail ended for them after a long, long journey. They had started from Independence, Missouri in April and it was now November. In the beginning, it had been a hundred wagons trekking across the vast prairie lands, following the plainly marked, deeply rutted Oregon Trail. At Fort Hall many months later the greater part of the caravan turned south for California and gold while the rest followed the older road to the Columbia and the old Wish-Ram villages at the Balles. Here they split again, part rafting down the bitter-cold river to Fort Vancouver, the rest coming over the new Barlow Road.

The patient oxen pulled at the traces, slipping and sliding in the muck. The bull whips whistled and cracked. Somewhere ahead of Tom Cameron the lead wagon groped in the mist seeking the road through the everlasting, dismal firs. The cattle herd was equally lost in the mist behind. It was all a confusion of noises, overborn by the clack and clatter of vehicles and the incessant pattering of the rain. The wailing of infants came up to him from many a direction, mingling with the shouts and epithets of the drivers. A brave pioneer woman in some distant schooner was singing a hymn:

“Bless’d be the land of plenty----”

It was a stirring tune and an inspiring thought, yet the woman’s voice cracked in the middle of the verse and went down a-wailing. Ah, it was weary and heart-breaking, this last stage of the trip! Where was the promised land, the lush meadows free for the preempting, the bountiful game, the smiling sun? Had they come so far to find so poor a welcome? Better by far the fever and ague of Missouri, infinitely better the crowded, dearer land of Iowa.

Off to the right boomed the turbulent Clackamas. Tom Cameron wrung his mustache again and pulled a little aside to allow another horseman passage room. It was “Old Man” Follett, holding a dripping hand to a Websterian brow. The elder’s face formed an incongruous appearance. A bulging upper part harbored a pair of sweet, candid blue eyes, complemented by an undershot bull-dog jaw covered with stubble.

“By Godfrey, Tom, ain’t there any sun in this cussed land?” A linsey woolsey coat hung like a meal sack from his shoulders. “My fambly’s all got chills. I ain’t been dry fer a week. Ef we don’t find Oregon City mighty soon thar’ll be some buryin’ to do.”

“What’s Captain Bell say?”

“Shucks, Tom, he ain’t no wiser nor you and me. Dang, sometimes I wish I was back in old Illinois. Ef I don’t find good land here I reckon the missis won’t ever look me in the face again.”

A lank Missourian shouted from his wagon seat. “Land o’ plenty, hey? Thunder, I’m ready fer the turn around! I’d like to git aholt of the alligator who guv me the idea of leavin’ St. Louis! I’d put his haid in a tub o’ water an’ see how he liked drownin’. Got a chaw?”

Old Man Follett moved on. “No, I ain’t. Ain’t been up to our wagon for a couple days, Tom. Another scrap with Susie? Waal, I reckon I wouldn’t blame anybody fer quarrelin’ this weather.” He was lost the next minute in the fog, leaving the younger man silent. There was no longer any savor in singing the song about Colonel Doniphan. The misery of the dank, skin-creeping atmosphere worked on his nerve. A draggled sight he made, but no sorrier than any other of the train. There was no laughter throughout the whole caravan; the flame of anger and personal grievance had burst out continuously in the past week. Elders were bickering over directions; young men going at it rough-and-tumble fashion behind the cattle herd where there was no hindrance to gouging or heel and toe. The Emory boys bullied all the rest. Tom Cameron pulled at his mustache and was warmed by a persistent anger.

The horse started and wheeled, plunging against the Missourian’s wagon. Cameron brought up and turned to see the dripping face of an Indian buck poke through the vine maple, stare a moment, and disappear. He spurred the horse in pursuit, but the underbrush was too heavy and, recollecting a clearing a short distance back which seemed to promise entrance into the soaked woods, he swung around and galloped down the line of schooners. The coast tribes, he had heard, were not openly hostile. It paid, however, always to keep on the alert. One Indian might mean a whole band of warriors waiting at some convenient ambush.

So thinking, he edged between bushes and wagons, the horse sliding in the mire. Of a sudden the brush dropped back into the mist and a bare foreground loomed up ahead. Turning, horse and rider were immediately isolated from the column. The grind and clatter advanced out of the haze, witness to the proximity of people; a driver spoke to his oxen in tones that boomed up to Cameron like a gun shot; and yet there was not a

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