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Show Page 141 the revolutions of the wheel of Philo Johnson's wagon, three hundred and sixty of which constituted one mile. Thus Orson designed the first practical odometer known, pioneer ancestor of modern automobile speedo- 21 meters, first installed in May of 1847. Despite the assignment to keep the records, he did not begin his formal log of the journey until May 4 - partially because of the constant and harrowing demands on his strength. At the Loup River, one of those heavy sluggish prairie streams that feed the Platte, his carriage became dangerously mired in quicksand. The first conveyance to cross, his wheels sank and his horses broke down completely in the oozing bars. Orson had to be plucked from the carriage and his load discharged before the wagon could move. Young ordered the others to ford upstream where the sand presented fewer traps. This left Orson, Wilford Woodruff and four others alone on the far side of the Loup within the unsettling sight of a fierce band of Pawnee, some six hundred of them, encamped not far from a smoking battle ground. 22 The little group stood guard, three at a time, throughout the night. By the next evening, they had devised a way across and Orson spent a much more relaxed night observing the constellations through his telescope. He invited Clayton to look - the Englishman had never tried it and was amazed at the sight of four moons of Jupiter. Orson continued to take observations daily, clearly delighted with the precision his new instruments afforded him. Near Grand Island he found his observations differing by only a few rods from those given by Fremont in his map sketch. In other places, however, he was convinced that his own readings were more accurate than Fremont's, and so annotated his log. Barometric and longitudinal readings convinced Orson that the party had reached "the meridian of greatest cold," for his understanding of isothermal currents showed the Nebraska territory at the southern extremity of arctic winds. His own |
