THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL 23 rendered this impossible, as in summer. 13 According to Horace Greeley at least sixteen of the seventeen mail bags in the coach in which he rode to Salt Lake City were filled with public documents, such as Patent Of- fice reports. They were sent by the representative in Congress from Utah Territory under the franking priv- ilege^—printed and transported at public expense. 14 The mail stations were not very pretentious in appear- ance nor did they furnish the best of accommodations to the travelers. Mr. Burton describes one of them as follows: "At 12:45 p. m, traveling over the uneven bar- ren, and in a burning sirocco, we reached Lodge-Pole Station, where we made our 'noonin.' The hovel fronting the creek was built like an Irish shanty, or a Beloch hut, against a hillside to save one wall, and it presented a fresh phase of squalor and wretchedness. The mud walls were partly papered with 'Harper's Magazine,' 'Frank Leslie's', and the 'New York Illustrated News'; and the ceiling was a fine festoon-work of soot, and the floor was much like the ground outside, only not nearly so clean. In a corner stood the usual 'bunks,' a mass of mingled rags and buffalo robes; the center of the room was oc- cupied by a rickety table, and boxes, turned up on their long sides acted as chairs. The unescapable stove was there, filling the interior with the aroma of meat. As usual, the materials for ablution, a 'dipper' or cup, a dingy tin skillet of scanty size, a bit of coarse gritty soap, and a public towel, like a rag of gunny bag, were deposited upon a rickety settle outside." 15 This was not an exceptionally bad station. Along the Platte beyond Fort Laramie, Mr. Burton and his fellow travelers were forced to sleep in a barn which was "hardly fit for a decently brought-up pig." And among 12 Ibid., p . 511. 14 An Overland Journey to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, pp. 188-189. 15 Burton, of. cit., pp. 66 -67.
