For three days and three nights, the bitter salt basin echoed with the glorious, ringing clatter of honest labor. The dust town was no longer a place of waiting and dying. It was a huge, bustling wagon shipyard preparing for the greatest overland migration in the province’s history.
Three hundred and twenty freight wagons were inspected, repaired, and loaded. In six open-air blacksmith trenches, fires roared day and night as smiths and wagon drivers heated iron tires, beating them onto seasoned elm felloes with sledgehammers, then cooling them with hissings of water to shrink the iron tight against the wood.
Twelve barrels of sheep fat and pine tar, requisitioned from the Trade group storehouses, were boiled into thick, golden axle grease. Every wagon spindle was jacked up with timber levers, scraped clean of skin-burning bitter salt grit, and packed with fresh grease until the hubs spun as smooth and silent as watch gears.
Six hundred and forty heavy draft oxen were fitted with fresh leather yokes and iron trace chains. The fifty-two captured cavalry geldings, powerful and well-fed, were harnessed in four-horse hitches to the heaviest grain wains, their sleek coats contrasting with the scarred hides of the veteran oxen.
