The approach to Fort Laramie was the most heavily trafficked ground on the entire trail, the confluence of multiple weeks’ worth of wagon trains funneling toward the fort’s crossing and resupply, and the ground showed it in every way ground shows sustained heavy use: bare, packed, stripped of grass to the root in a wide radius around the fort, the soil itself worked to a fine dust that the afternoon wind lifted and carried and deposited on everything within a quarter mile. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
They smelled it before they saw it, the general smell of any human settlement on the plains, which was animals and woodsmoke and the accumulated evidence of people living in a confined space. Even more pungent was the smell of dead animals and alkali and the churned, overused ground of a corridor that had been carrying fifty thousand people and their livestock through a bottleneck for three months.
The dead animals appeared first as the column descended toward the Laramie River. Three carcasses in the last mile before the river, two oxen and a mule.
Maya walked past them at Buck’s shoulder and looked at each one and said nothing and kept walking, and Thomas, who had been doing his own reading of carcasses since the North Platte, walked on the far side of the wagon and read them from that angle and said nothing either, and Nellie, tied behind the wagon, walked past them with the specific indifference of a cow that has made her peace with the world’s variety, which Nellie generally had.
The Laramie itself, a tributary of the North Platte running clear and cold out of the mountains to the south, crossed the trail at the fort’s entry. By 1850 a rough bridge served the crossing. It was a civilian toll operation, planked and functional if not elegant, charging what the traffic would bear. Cord paid the toll without grumbling and the company crossed dry-shod for the first time since before the Kaw.
The fort itself sat on the north bank of the Laramie, a short distance above the confluence with the North Platte, a collection of adobe buildings arranged around a central courtyard. It was larger than Fort Kearny. The buildings were more substantial, its walls were higher. The flag was there, snapping in the afternoon wind with the same authority it had carried at Fort Kearny.
The area around the fort was crowded in a way that made Fort Kearny’s traffic look modest. Multiple wagon companies were camped within sight of the walls in every direction. The grass within a quarter mile was already consumed, the companies that had arrived earliest occupying what remained of the good ground and the companies arriving later spreading further and further out in the search for anything edible for their animals. The smell of the accumulated camp was what it was, which was considerable.
Cord took one look at the immediate vicinity and rode further up the North Platte bank before stopping the column a mile and a half from the fort, which was further than most of the company wanted and closer to good grass than anything nearer. He set the camp there with the usual two words to Whitfield and the column arranged itself into its circle in the established, wordless way.
The animals went to the river immediately, which was cleaner than the North Platte had been—mountain water, cold and clear, running fast over a gravel bottom that was nothing like the Platte’s sand and silt. They drank with the focused thoroughness of animals that know good water when they find it and intend to take full advantage.
The road between Fort Laramie and the Sweetwater had cost the previous season’s companies approximately one in five of their working oxen to alkali poisoning and exhaustion, and that the companies now west of the fort were in worse shape than the companies approaching it, and that the next six weeks of trail were going to ask more of his company than everything since Independence combined.
