The girl Sara came west with the Roberts family out of Potawotamie County. She was hired to care for the children and do the wash and help cook on the long journey. Mrs Roberts thought the girl looked tubercular, but a lot of girls that age did.
By the time they got to Fort Hall they were exhausted. They knew they could not go back so they pressed on, leaving the Oregon Trail and heading for California across rough desert country. What with fights breaking out and thieving Indians, and horses and oxen dropping dead in the traces, what with drownings and fallings and shootings and childbirth the going was rough. Fevers raced through the train and even those who weren't sick didn't feel too good.
The girl Sara slept under the wagon in a pile of rags. One day she wouldn't get up. Mrs Roberts had no sympathy. ``I paid you to help out, not be another millstone around my neck,'' she said.
The oldest Roberts boy liked Sara. He scraped sugar off the loaf in back of the wagon and he soaked the sugar in laudenum syrup and fed it to Sara. She slept long. When she awoke she ate a little corn cake and drank four cups of weak sagebrush tea and revived.
They were in the mountains, struggling to the pass. When at last they looked down into the green chaos below they thought that their journey was over. They had made it to the promised land. They cleared the brush to form a dancing place and the old fiddles came out of the wagons. There was much joy. Old people and young danced a fandango in the flickering firelight and a boy named Branch who was visiting from another train a few miles back danced all night with Sara. ``We're there!'' The people sang out and Branch and Sara twirled until the fiddlers fell silent and the flames subsided.
They were wrong, those people on Fandango Pass that night. Much hardship and many hard miles still lay ahead.