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Show I condition. We broke camp from this place, traveled a short distance and met a small company going oast We traveled on and in the evening when we camped, one lady whose name was Wilson, and who was a widow, having two sons, was missing and could not be found among the company. Written for The Union. HANDCART EXPERIENCE. In traveling up the valley of the Platte, for hundreds of miles, in those days, there was one very peculiar feature that I never saw anywhere else to the same extent and we were oftentimes deceived by it Of course it was caused by the clearness of the atmosphere. The peculiarity was that objects many miles away would appear to be very near by. On account of the river having many long turns, the road would be 5 to 10 miles from the river, and sometimes even more, and when the road was first laid out, cut offs were resorted to in every instance possible through the Platte Valley, so that the road was shorter that the river, and we would camp at a bend in the river that came near the road and we could look straight across to the next bend with its timber and the captain would say "we camp tonight at that point yonder, and it really looked as though it was nob more than 4 or 5 miles distant, but, lo! we would travel ail day, going from 20 to 30 miles before we would reach the point that we saw in the morning, which looked so near by. Even at noon, we could look toward the river and it would seem so close thai; some would start to go and get some water to use, but if they continued on, they would see the train start and they would have to take a cut across to catch the train. The river ran east and west and we were traveling on the north side of it, and as we are now camped on the banks of the Platte, about 400 miles on our journey, let us take a look at our condition. We left Florence with 70 pounds of flour for each adult It was put up in sacks of 100 pounds each, and all the 60 carts had one of the sacks in it, and all tho carts , that had four adults to pull it, which was about half of them, had two sacks put into them, thus 90 sacks of flour were put into the carts at the start, and about the some amount was placed in the wagons, and all the flour that was in the wagons had been used and that which was in the carts had been taken out and placed into the wagons and about half of that had been used, at this time, so that we have about one fourth of our flour on hand and have only traveled 400 out of 1000 miles of our journey. Knowing thislto be the case, I knew we were in a critical |