California Crossing Speech

Today we leave Fort Kearney to follow the Platte River until we reach the California Crossing. We will walk 170 miles and will take about 19 days to reach our destination. Yesterday Charles got food poisoning from eating raw meat. The Kenneth Flag family made us bacon to eat for breakfast. I thought it was odd to now just start giving us food when we're in the middle of nowhere but I didn't want to be rude and not take it. Charles was the first to eat the bacon and the first to get food poisoning. I don't know if they purposely didn't cook the bacon all the way but… hopefully he get better soon so we can start walking. It's 12:00 now and we decided to start walking even though Charles is sick. We made it to where the Platte River divides. The …show more content…
One wagon goes at a time and we wait for 45 minutes for them to get ahead. Its our turn to cross the river. James and Gabe are in the front pulling the oxen while i'm on the side keeping the wagon straight. Gace is sitting on the oxen because we don't want her to fall in the river. We finally make it across the river and we run into a steep hill we must climb. It looks about 100 degrees which is very steep. We have to dump our trunk becuase it was too heavy to carry up the hill and it would make the wagon move too fast down the hill. We took everything out of it and put the stuff in empty bins and buckets we had until we can find a new place to put it. While were walking up the hill, rocks are falling down getting underneath the wheels and causing them to not move. We had to walk slow because the move movement caused stuff to fall down. The wagon was very shaky the whole time going up and some stuff fell off the wagon. Its was hard to walk up becuase we have to hold the wonon up and keep the oxen moving and in line. Going down the hill was very difficult because all your weight in the wagon is getting pushed forward and the wagon moves fast which cause the oxen to