He withstood their anger. They could not understand. They served no cause except their own. He was different. He had been chosen, and no man or woman or child would stand between him and his splendid undertaking.
It was his mission to bring fruit trees to the West and he would do it. True, apple and pear trees were already burgeoning in the orchards of Fort Vancouver, but he would bring American trees. American settlers would buy from him and establish sweet orchards around their new homes.
The important thing was to keep the little trees damp. They could not be allowed to dry out. True it was hard to deprive the thirsty children on the wagon train. To deny them water he had so painstakingly brought up from the Platte river to nourish his little trees. In the eyes of God he was right. He knew that. There was a greater good to serve.
Leaving the Barber family at the Green River was hard, certainly. The father dead. Mother and children too fever ridden to travel. But that was harsh country indeed, and his trees were beginning to die.
``We must move on,'' he said, ``the trees are dying.''
The boy Ephraim Barber gazed at him with glassy, hate filled eyes.
``Do not meet your Maker with your heart filled with hate,'' he told the boy.
He left them some supplies he could ill afford and traveled on. It was late in the season but surely there were other trains behind them yet. There would be others to help the Barbers. Or bury them.
It was sixty miles from Fort Hall where his wife Mary, a quiet woman, sat herself down on the harsh dry ground and began to howl. She howled all night and three Shoshone boys sat their horses close by and watched her in wonder and he waited for the evil spirit to leave her but it wouldn't leave her so he went on alone. Without her it was hard. She had managed the oxen so well. It was she who rotated the trees from top to bottom in the wagon. In truth she had carried the water buckets endlessly back and forth from the river. Now she was sitting on the ground talking sign to three Shoshone boys on spotted horses. And he was alone.
At Fort Hall he wept. The roughest journey still ahead and half his trees dead.
Then he himself was dead on the endless sagebrush close to the falls of the Snake River.
His wife Mary watched him die. She was sitting on high ground not half a mile away.
When the circling buzzards dropped down she came and took the wagon and brought it in safely to Wailatpu where Dr Whitman bought the few remaining trees.