Classic Poem

Across the prairie where I dwell,
Stretches away, from swell to swell,
A road that might a story tell.

The track is wide and deeply cut
By wheels of heavy wagons, but
The rank grass grows in seam and rut.

'Tis the old trail of “Forty-Nine;”—
Thus history, in graven line,

Has stamped this prairie home of mine.

The years have passed with snow and rain,
And mighty frosts upheaved—in vain—
For still this track shows clear and plain.

Tracing it where it winds away,
There comes to me at twilight gray,
A vision of another day.

I see the covered wagons go,
Across the prairie toiling slow,
Through the dreary storm, through summer glow.

I see them with their human freight—
Hearts throbbing high with hope elate—
Pass onward to a doubtful fate.

Months pass: a weary, jaded train,
Worn with fatigue, disease and pain,
Creeps slowly o'er a desert plain.

Above, a cloudless, burning sky;
Below, naught greets the weary eye,
Save wastes of sand and alkali.

No rain descends, no water flows:
No cool trees bend, no green thing grows;
Yet still that sad train onward goes.

Fatigue and thirst! No tongue can tell
The victim's anguish, fierce and fell—
His fondest dream a bubbling well.

And some go mad and wildly rave;
Some find what, at the last, they crave,
The silence of a desert grave.

The living speak in husky tones;
The poor brutes drop with piteous moans;
The track is paved with bleaching bones.

Still onward—slower and more slow—
Dogged nightly by a stealthy foe,
Toward mountain passes chocked with snow.

One sleeps, to dream of home and wife;
He wakes, at call to midnight strife
With tomahawk and scalping knife.


Past perils, miseries untold,
Past desert heat, past mountains cold,
What waits them in the land of gold?

Go, search a checkered history
Of soon-got hoards, as soon to flee,
Of princely wealth and poverty.

Dark tales of crime, of murders fell,
Of drunken brawl, of gambling hell—
Good chroniclers have told them well.

Go, search them all, through every line—
Yet deign to read this tale of mine,
Of the old trail of “Forty-Nine.”