Those of the earlier arrivals who passed by his well-organized camp of forty-odd wagons from the Sangamon country of Illinois said that Wingate seemed to know the business of the trail.

His affairs ran smoothly, he was well equipped and seemed a man of means.
Some said he had three thousand in gold at the bottom of his cargo.
Moreover--and this appeared important among the Northern element, at that time predominant in the rendezvous--he was not a Calhoun Secesh, or even a Benton Democrat, but an out and out, antislavery, free-soil man.
And the provisional constitution of Oregon, devised by thinking men of two great nations, had said that Oregon should be free soil forever.
Already there were mutterings in 1848 of the coming conflict which a certain lank young lawyer of Springfield, in the Sangamon country--Lincoln, his name was--two years ago among his personal friends had predicted as inevitable.

In a personnel made up of bold souls from both sides the Ohio, politics could not be avoided even on the trail; nor were these men the sort to avoid politics.

Sometimes at their camp fire, after the caravan election, Wingate and his wife, their son Jed, would compare notes, in a day when personal politics and national geography meant more than they do to-day.
"Listen, son," Wingate one time concluded.

"All that talk of a railroad across this country to Oregon is silly, of course.