I felt half desperate, as I reflected on what this might mean.

As early fall was approaching, I could expect, in view of my own lost time, to encounter the annual wagon train two or three hundred miles farther westward than the object of my pursuit naturally would have done.

As a matter of fact, my party met the wagons at a point well to the west of Fort Hall.
It was early in the morning we met them coming west,--that long, weary, dust-covered, creeping caravan, a mile long, slow serpent, crawling westward across the desert.

In time I came up to the head of the tremendous wagon train of 1845, and its leader and myself threw up our hands in the salutation of the wilderness.
The leader's command to halt was passed back from one wagon to another, over more than a mile of trail.

As we dismounted, there came hurrying up about us men and women, sunburned, lean, ragged, abandoning their wagons and crowding to hear the news from Oregon.