Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 94

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Popular Culture Review

Indians or mother nature. As Jane Kellog wrote in 1852: “There was an epidemic
of cholera all along the Platte River. All along the road was a graveyard, most
anytime of day you could see people burying the dead.’’*^Emigrants the next year
remarked about how many graves had bones and hair protruding forth. In the sani
tized USA of today, few Americans have the opportunity to even wrinkle their
nostrils. But what you smell while biking brings home one’s mortality — as does
what you hear.
Diarists on the trail occasionally met a lone wagon moving east. More often
than not, a sudden death was the catalyst for remaining family members to head
“back home”. These accounts always remind me of an incident from a previous
crossing Td made a few years earlier to California. For nearly a week, while cut
ting across the Midwest, I kept hearing stores about a solo rider, a young woman
headed to Los Angeles, who was barely a day ahead of me. Late one afternoon,
while stopping in a small town for supplies, the counter clerk told me that early
that morning, just west of town, the elusive cyclist had been run down and killed
by a truck. When biking past the accident site, I thought about the young woman
who, in the words of an 1852 diarist, “was in that bourne from which no traveler
returns.”^
Emigrants, upon reflection at trip’s end, often wrote about the toughest sec
tion of their Journey — the region where they had been most challenged. For me
the choice is easy. Wyoming, coming and going, represented the severest test of
my patience