The year was 1848, and the wagon wheels would bounce mercilessly over every stone and root along the Oregon Trail, rattling Margaret's teeth until she thought they might shatter.
She pressed her journal against her knees and wrote by firelight, recording everything — the tick of the old pocket watch her father had wound every morning before he died, the sound that now kept her tethered to his memory across a thousand miles of wilderness.
The wagon master, a gruff man named Holloway, blamed the recent river crossing disaster on poor planning. Margaret knew differently. It was his fault entirely — he had ignored the swollen banks, dismissed the scouts' warnings, and driven them forward anyway. Three families lost their supplies. One lost more than that.
Yet not an iota of remorse crossed his weathered face as he barked orders the following dawn, as though the river had simply made a mistake in running so high.
Margaret thought of the cities growing back east, of the urbanization her schoolteacher had described — factories rising like iron forests, streets crowded with strangers moving faster than horses. She had left all that possibility behind, choosing instead this brutal, open country where survival demanded everything a person had.
She closed her journal and looked west at the dark horizon. Whatever Holloway's failures, whatever losses lay behind them, she would not stop. The land ahead cared nothing for fault or blame. It only asked whether you were willing to keep moving.
She was.