Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

“I wonder where Cope will go this summer?” Marsh said, as if thinking aloud.
Johnson said nothing.
“I wonder where Cope will go?” Marsh said again.
“Very good question,” Johnson said.
“I doubt that he, like us, is going to Colorado.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Johnson was beginning to tire of this game, and allowed himself to stare
directly into Marsh’s eyes, holding his gaze.
“Of course not,” Marsh said quickly. “Of course not.”
They crossed the Missouri in early evening at Council Bluffs, the terminus for the Chicago and North
Western Railway. Across the bridge, on the Omaha side, the Union Pacific Railroad took over and
continued all the way to San Francisco. The Union Pacific depot was a great open shed, and it was
packed with travelers of the rudest sort. Here were rugged men, painted women, border ruffians,
pickpockets, soldiers, crying children, food vendors, barking dogs, thieves, grandparents, gunfighters
—a great confused mass of humanity, all fairly glowing with the fever of speculation.
“Black Hillers,” Marsh explained. “They outfit here before they go to Cheyenne and Fort Laramie,
and from there travel northward to the Black Hills in search for gold.”
The students, impatient for a taste of the “real West,” were delighted, and imagined that they, too,
had become more real themselves.
But despite the fevered excitement, Johnson found the sight sad. In his journal he recorded, “The
hopes of humanity for wealth and fame, or at least for creature comfort, can delude them so easily!
For surely only a handful of the people here will find what they are seeking. And the rest will meet
with disappointment, hardship, sickness, and perhaps death from starvation, Indians, or marauding
robbers who prey on the hopeful, questing pioneers.”
And he added the ironic note: “I am most heartily glad that I am not going to the dangerous and
uncertain Black Hills.”