Each wagon had its six mules; each ambulance had also its quota of six.
At the foot of one of these steep places, the wagons would halt, the teamsters would inspect the road, and calculate the possibilities of reaching the top; then, furiously cracking their whips, and pouring forth volley upon volley of oaths, they would start the team.

Each mule got its share of dreadful curses.

I had never heard or conceived of any oaths like those.

They made my blood fairly curdle, and I am not speaking figuratively.

The shivers ran up and down my back, and I half expected to see those teamsters struck down by the hand of the Almighty.
For although the anathemas hurled at my innocent head, during the impressionable years of girlhood, by the pale and determined Congregational ministers with gold-bowed spectacles, who held forth in the meeting-house of my maternal ancestry (all honor to their sincerity), had taken little hold upon my mind, still, the vital drop of the Puritan was in my blood, and the fear of a personal God and His wrath still existed, away back in the hidden recesses of my heart.
This swearing and lashing went on until the heavily-loaded prairie-schooner, swaying, swinging, and swerving to the edge of the cut, and back again to the perpendicular wall of the mountain, would finally reach the top, and pass on around the bend; then another would do the same.