Day 50 Thomas’ Campsite --Mile 536
Oct. 23, 1838

The party got the remaining wagons over the Grand River by noon and headed off ten miles away from the Missouri bottomlands recording in the journal “the bottom lands of the Missouri being too flat and wet to encamp upon an hour longer than was essentially necessary. They marched three hours and camped at what they called |Thomas’ Encampment.” The only other entry of interest for this day was about food: “Subsistence beef, flour and corn.” So far on the trip they had repeatedly listed beef and flour daily but here the journal adds corn which had to date only been listed as forage for the horses. Was this a slip of the pen or did they add corn or corn meal to the Indian rations? The last week of October is too late for fresh corn. The horses were fed “corn and corn fodder” so certainly corn was plentiful in the area where their advance purchasers would round up supplied ahead of the main column.

AS FOR ME I walked this day at the end of the previous day when I felt so bothersome to the Brunswick people. I walked pondering how a town can collectively develop an attitude that a visitor can sense in six or seven contacts with people. I walked and thought about this for hours until darkness. And I outlined an interesting third section (which goes into the final book) on how local churches can become this way—busily engaged and not mean—just so busily engaged in what they do that an “outsider” feels in the way there. But that will have to wait for the final book manuscript.