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Prayers & Poisoned Water. Forty-Niners (first published in 1931) is the work of the late Professor Archer Hulbert of Colorado College, who gathered the materials for it while mapping the great trails across continental U.S. Hulbert imagined a "typical" wagon train—16 wagons, with four mules to each wagon and three spares, 125 Ibs. of flour for each man, as well as 50 Ibs. of ham, 50 Ibs. of bacon, 30 Ibs. of sugar, 6 Ibs. of coffee. He tells what the emigrants talked about, what songs they sang, their feasts and prayer meetings, the condition of the road and the weather, the imagined hazards (Indians and Mormons) and the real ones—fleas, whiskey, mules' hind legs, cholera, poisoned water. Fear, worry, loneliness and monotony took a toll, too. A man suddenly began to run in circles, declaring that Providence had decreed that he was to be buried in that circle (he was soundly trussed up and placed in a wagon). A woman suddenly began to set fire to anything that would burn. Halfway from the Missouri to the goldfields, the number of abandoned wagons increased noticeably. Some of the outfits began to shoot their dogs —the barking caused too many of the travelers' cattle to stampede. But the caravans kept coming.
Word at the Forks. A strange unreality lies over the world visualized in these two books. Much of the Overland Trail had been well traveled long before these emigrants started, yet they still had the hardships of pioneers. The Indians were like stage Indians, no longer menacing, but certainly not safe. At the forks in the road there were travelers with word of how much better some other route was or could be, and at the river crossings there always seemed to be someone to overcharge them for ferrying each wagon and each mule.
There was something synthetic about the advertisements and appeals, the rumors and reports of gigantic nuggets, that set them on their way, and in Author Hulbert's account they seem to be half-aware of it. They persisted nevertheless.
The result is a study of people responding to something they do not quite believe in, arming themselves against imaginary dangers, moving forward irresistibly to a titanic disappointment, and yet overcoming, on the way, so many hardships that their effort became heroic in spite of themselves.