Transcript

...Castle Gardens. We stayed there for two or three days and then started across the continent by rail. We had a short trip on water also, and after a few days were landed bag and baggage on the shore of the Missouri River.

There were six hundred of us with no shelter but a storm cellar. There was not a thing in this cellar and the people made their beds on the dirt floor.

We camped there nine weeks and there was thunder storms nearly every day. The place was called Wyoming and was six miles north of where Nebraska City is now. Some of the men went to Omaha to by [buy] oxen, cows, and wagons for the company to use. This was what took so long. When we were ready to start mother bought each of us a shaker (a kind of sunbonnet) and mine blew off the first day and was lost. We did not come to a store so I crossed the 1,000 miles of plains bareheaded. We did not see an Indian on the trip, but one night just as we were going to camp we were told not too [to] as Indians had made a raid on a Danish camp the night before and had stolen a woman. They shot seven arrows into the husband who was trying to rescue her. This man lived and came on to Salt Lake City, but he never saw his wife again.

This happened on the platt[e] river only three miles from Fort Laramie, but the soldiers could not get there in time to do any good.

We arrived in Salt Lake on November 7^th.