THE DIVISION The great wagon train of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter and abject confusion.

Organization there now was none.

But for Banion's work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out.

The effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion.

Sodden, wretched, miserable, chilled, their goods impaired, their cattle stampeded, all sense of gregarious self-reliance gone, two hundred wagons were no more than two hundred individual units of discontent and despair.