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Page: of 436
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI
stack of trunks, using the topmost for his desk, and others were similarly
engaged. Said Niles, “I write a sentence, then stop to keep up my end in
joking.” He pictured camp life somewhat differently for Cornelia’s eyes:
The day has been spent in breaking in upwards of 100 mules. . . every
animal was caught by the lasso and choked down, then harnessed and
placed before the wagons, there to perform more antics than all the
dancing ponys in the world combined. The whole day has been thus
consumed, and now the baggage train is moving off, sometimes rocket
like, and sometimes snail like across the broad, undulating prairie, while
we, the passengers, the gentlemen, the gold diggers, the sportsmen, are crouched together beneath a small tent % full of baggage,
where we are endeavoring to cheer up the disconsolate by telling them
of the hardships to come..
The novelty of our situation tickles some of us almost to death and
frightens others as bad. Of course, . am among the frightened—yet for
the life of me I can’t help but laugh . . . all is glorious confusion.
Three men from Ann Arbor, Michigan, joined Niles and Charley to
form the nucleus of Mess 17. Two were in their early twenties, both
named Charles, to add further confusion. Charles C. Cranson was the
son of a retired farmer and Charles M. Sinclair had been helping his older
brother operate a dry goods store. The third Ann Arbor recruit was fifty
years old—David T. McCollum was a bookkeeper and “‘conveyancer,”
had served two terms as county register of deeds, and was a merchant.
McCollum was an abolitionist and a member of the Sons of Temperance. Once he had signed an agreement with a business partner in which
he promised not to speak evil of the Congregational Church if the other
man. would refrain from denouncing Methodists. Soon after arriving at
Independence, McCollum came down with “‘bilious fever” and still was
weak from the effects of it. His younger companions wondered how such
an old and infirm man would make it across the plains.
One “old” man didn’t even start the trip, and his loss came to be
sorely felt by all the others, even though few had met or even heard of
him. His name was Moses “Black” Harris and he was supposed to have
guided the Pioneer Line over the trail to California. Twenty-three years
earlier, Harris and a fellow Kentuckian, Bill Sublette, came out of the
Rocky Mountains on snowshoes to guide General William H. Ashley to
the 1826 rendezvous of hunters and trappers at Bear River.
Harris had once offered to lead a filibustering expedition north to the
Columbia River hunting grounds to wipe out the Hudson’s Bay Company, and on another occasion he was with the Bible-toting Jedediah
Smith and had to climb a high peak in order to ascertain their location. It
184