Day after day, Polly told me, they travelled westward to the setting sun.  They left the orchards and shady woods of Ohio and Indiana far behind them, and crossed the wide prairies of Illinois and Missouri also.  When they came to rivers they drove through shallow fording-places, where Polly and the children used to laugh to see the little fishes swimming round the wagon wheels.  Sometimes the rivers were deep, and the wagons were ferried over on a flatboat that was fastened to a wire rope, while oxen and horses swam through the water behind them.  If it did not rain, the children and all were happy, and it did seem like a picnic.  But Polly says she never hears the rain pouring nowadays as it did then, and that there were many times when they were wet and cold and miserable, and because the wood and ground were wet they could not even have a fire.

At night the teams were unhitched and the wagons left in a circle round a big camp-fire, where supper was cooked.  Polly says her mother used to bake biscuits in an iron spider with red-hot coals heaped on its iron cover, and these biscuits with fried bacon and tea made their meal.  They always cooked a big potful of corn-meal mush for the children, and this, with Daisy’s milk and a little maple sugar or molasses, was supper and breakfast too.  Then the women and children cuddled up in the wagons for the night, while men slept, wrapped in blankets, around the camp-fire or under the wagons, with one always on guard against danger from prowling Indians or wolves.

Every man or boy carried a rifle or shotgun, and killed plenty of game.  Deer and antelope were always in sight after they crossed the Missouri River, and the meat was broiled or roasted over the coals of their campfire.  Wild turkeys and prairie-chicken tasted much better than bacon, Polly said, and she learned to cook them herself.

When the emigrants reached Nebraska, they were in the “buffalo country,” and great herds of big, shaggy, brown or black buffaloes were feeding on the grassy plains.  The animals were larger than oxen, and the Indians depended upon the flesh for food and the thick, warm skins for robes or blankets.  The emigrants shot thousands of buffalo cows and calves, and what meat could not be eaten at once was cut into long strips and hung in the sun or over the fire to dry.  This was called “jerking” the meat.  On jerked buffalo or venison and flour pancakes many emigrants lived all the way across.  Game was so plenty and so easy to shoot, that by stopping a few days, a good stock of meat could be laid in while the oxen were resting.  So they travelled through Nebraska, and for weeks and weeks saw nothing but long grass waving in the summer winds, and yellow sunflowers—­miles and miles of sunflowers.  Polly grew very tired of the hot sun blazing down on the close-covered wagon, and of the dust raised by the long wagon-train.