Page 64 of the album continues the story of the wagon train - you’ll need to start reading from the first post for this to make sense!
How did these pioneers of the West travel? Was it comfortable? Was it well organized? Was it very slow? In the first place, no family, or even two or three families, would be wise to travel alone. They waited until sufficient emigrants had gathered at Independence, St. Joseph or Council Bluffs on the Missouri river, then they organized themselves into companies until a great wagon train was made up, maybe of a hundred or more wagons and as many families. True there were smaller trains, but the bigger ones were safer.
Then, in due course, everything would be arranged. Each member of the wagon train would pay an agreed amount into the treasury. In the case of the Charleston Company, one of the best-planned treks across the continent, the amount was three hundred dollars. With this money stores were purchased, guides and scouts engaged and other necessities paid for.
My post about modern day wagons yesterday led me last night to hunt down my copy of a recent book on the great migration west by covered wagon: Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails
Frank McLynn’s story of the quarter of a million American pioneers who trekked from Missouri to the American West between 1840 and 1849 is simply fantastic to read and makes you realise that modern day adventurers have it easy with their back-up crews, GPS navigation, satellite phones and modern day medical kits!
The story of pioneer life was celebrated in the 1950s and 60s on the classic Western television series ‘Wagon Train‘ which starred Ward Bond and Robert Horton.
It proved so popular - #1 in the Nielsen Ratings for the 1961-1962 television season according to Wikipedia - that it’s said Gene Roddenberry sold his Star Trek TV show to the American networks as “a Wagon Train to the stars.”
I picked up a 1961-issue Daily Mirror kids comic-style album last year in a junk shop that idolises the show. It’s a fab read and I want to share the artwork so am going to post the cartoons for the ‘Wagon Train’ story over the next week or two. The first one is below - the caption reads:
“Gold! Gold for the picking up!” The thrilling message came winging its way out of the West, and the forty-niners, the 25,000 men, women and children who travelled clear across a continent to search for untold wealth in the earth, joined the hundres of thousands of others who had already crossed from east to west by covered wagon drawn by teams of oxen or horses.
If only there was gold in them there hills today, now that the US national debt is running at more than $10 trillion!. If you want to take your mind off the state of the stockmarket you can buy a few episodes of the Wagon Train TV show on Amazon.co.uk
I had to buy a copy of Andy Riley’s book of cartoons after stumbling across his take on the truth behind the Wild West:
I love the limited set of characters squeezed into a ‘Wild West’ only 80 square feet in size! Could you re-enact most western movies with that lot? The saloon certainly looks like it’d be a squeeze.
