Personal Narrative: My Messenger Train

My wagon train is now in Alcove Springs, we have been here for only a day. It is time to just have fun since we have had supper and all, so I decided to write during this time because I really don't have a lot of time to write throughout the trail, but I try. When we left Independence, a wagon train right in front of us had a family who was from a big city and could not control their animals, so their animals were out of control and knocked over their wagon. It took them a couple hours to pick everything up and get their animals under control, so everyone behind them, including us, were a couple hours behind on the trail. It was very hard to get into a daily routine for not only our whole wagon train, but especially our family. Lucy absolutely
does not like to walk on her own, at all. The only time she will walk is if her friend from the Brown family is with her. She is easily getting blisters on her little feet, so that is the main reason that she won’t walk, so a lot of the time she rides the horse or rides in the back of the wagon because Larry and I can not carry her. We can not carry her because we also have blisters on our feet, but we have to deal with it because we are going for a, hopefully, better life.
Lucy gets very tired, very fast, we all do. It is really hard to get sleep at night with animals, Indians, the weather and whatnot. Since she is little, when she is riding in the wagon, she does a lot of sleeping. We had to wait in a long line to ride in a raft for one dollar across the Kansas River to get to the other side for more land. We crossed the river safely with no problems, which is a relief because I thought maybe Lucy would be very scared and cry leading to something bad happening. By now we have a daily routine and have gotten used to it. We usually wake up around 7 a.m. and eat a small breakfast before getting ready to head out on the trail again. We leave for the trail between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. and ride along until about 1 p.m. At 1, we have our small lunch. All of our meals are small because we need to save food and money throughout the trip. Usually for lunch, we eat the food that is probably going to spoil soon. We quickly eat lunch and head out by 2 p.m. We continuously walk until around 6 or 7 p.m. and eat dinner and find a good spot for our wagon trains to sit and for our animals to stay during
the night. It was hard to adapt to the schedule because it had to be the exact same for us to go about 15 miles each day. The day before arriving in Alcove Springs we had to dump our extra 30 pounds of flour we had because the oxen were having troubles pulling it. I was very mad about it because for one, we now have to buy flour throughout the trip and for two, we wasted our money.
When we arrived in Alcove Springs, it was absolutely beautiful. It has clean water, bright colored flowers, bright green grass, and gorgeous little waterfalls. We filled our water barrels with the clean water that is provided here and we are definitely taking advantage of the water while we are here. We have been here for only a day and the mosquitoes are very bad. The mosquitoes are all over our food and bodies. When they get into our food, if it is food that we cook, we cook it and since the mosquitoes do not leave, we simply eat them. We will be here for one more day and then we will be leaving. I like staying here because it is nice here and is keeping us from the Indians. At night we all dance, sing, our kids play tag, we skip rocks and have a contest to see who can get the most skips, and tonight for my entertainment, I decided to write. I now have to call for Lucy to come back to our wagon and head to bed.