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Show Page 147 own among them. A sick detachment had left the Mormon Battalion near Pueblo, Colorado, part of which floated north to Laramie in hope of encountering their leader. But most of the thousands of emigrants filamented along the route were Missourians - or Illinoisans - and the Saints felt a little ill at ease crossing the Platte at Laramie to pick up the established Oregon road. There was little trouble. For days out of Laramie they overhauled the wagons of Gentiles disorganized, weary, and burned black with the dust of Nebraska. These had no time to worry about Mormons, though, in 31 Young's words, they "curse, swear, rip and tear," a great deal. Traffic eased with distance from the fort, although a major train Oregon-bound flooded the trail with dust only a few hours ahead of the Mormons. Brigham Young dispatched outriders to the Platte ford over a hundred miles from Laramie with instructions to build skiffs for the crossing - when the Prophet's wagons pulled up to the ford, where the Oregon trail bridged the Platte for the last time, he found his outriders ferrying the big train across - for a modest fee. On a Monday morning, the camp quit the Platte for good - but it took five days to move the whole company to the west bank. From this point to the Sweetwater, a distance of forty miles, required only two. Here Orson fell into a geological transport - the massive granite of "Rock Independence," the violence of Devil's Gate and its chasm of water he described as "picturesque...serpentine." He detected five strata of scoriated rock in the cliffs, and climbed Devil's Gate with his barometer and thermometer while the others amused themselves with firing guns to hear the echo and shoving rocks down the sheer cliff just to see them burst the Sweetwater cataracts. For his part, Orson fell in love with the wild sage, or "artemesia," and wrote a paean to its "clear bright flame" |