Prentice: Chapter 7

Prentice: Chapter 7 There was a bounty on their heads, but so what? Seven Conestoga wagons set forth from New Hampshire, led by Franklin Prentice, seven families of English stock, descended from early colonialists. The horse-drawn wagons poked along, bounced side-to-side, buffeted by a trail rutted by rain and by previous wagon trains, a deer path glorified. Prentice and his followers were the latest to venture west. From summits, mountain men could peer down and scoff at the soft folk meandering through turf that rugged men had blazed. The mountain men were also of English stock, but they weren't clan people, they were loners. And they'd adopted many of the native ways. They dressed in leather, not cloth. And if they deigned to take a bride, she was often a squaw.