Severe thirst and dehydration during the plains crossing

Severe thirst and dehydration during the plains crossing turn the expedition’s search for a route west into a test of whether people and animals can keep moving at all. For William Andrews, the ordeal is not only physical: weakness and disorientation make the seemingly boundless plains feel like a place where he could be abandoned and lost. The water they eventually find offers relief, but only after the expedition and its animals have come close to failing.

The body under strain

By nightfall, the group is still moving, as Miller insists on keeping the animals going while they remain on their feet. He uses what little water is left to wet a handkerchief and moisten the horses’ mouths; when he finishes, the cloth is nearly dry. The decision to press on leaves little margin for anyone already weakened by thirst.

Andrews’s body registers the shortage in painful detail. His hands keep slipping from the saddle horn, and breathing becomes laborious: he can manage only a little air at a time, with long pauses between breaths. His mouth hangs open; his tongue presses between his teeth, and trying to close them sends a dull, dry pain across his palate. He remembers the oxen’s black, swollen, parched tongues, an image he tries to push away as he tries to escape his own bodily distress in thought.

The animals are failing alongside the men. When one ox stumbles and cannot rise, all three men must dismount and use their remaining strength to pull and urge it upright. The oxen can no longer start the wagon by themselves, so the men push at the wheel spokes while Charley Hoge cracks his whip. Only when the wagon begins moving can the animals follow it, barely able to walk. Andrews tries a mouthful of Charley Hoge’s whiskey, but most of it runs out over his lips. The episode makes plain that even a drink is difficult to take when thirst has so weakened him.

A night of disorientation

Andrews rides through most of the night in alternating delirium and intense pain. At one point he wakes alone in the dark, unsure where he is or which way the group is traveling. He looks from the immense bowl of sky to the ground beneath him, and both seem impossibly distant. The fear is immediate: he spurs his horse toward the sound of the wagon until he catches up with the others.

Miller and the others have not noticed that Andrews has fallen behind. Their failure to notice is not presented as deliberate abandonment, but the moment leaves Andrews trembling and frightened even after he rejoins them. For a long while, he watches Miller’s movements closely—not because he believes Miller can lead him to a chosen destination, but because staying near him is his only protection against being lost alone in the emptiness. Dehydration thus becomes a crisis of orientation as well as of bodily endurance: the group’s movement and Miller’s presence are the fragile signs by which Andrews can locate himself.

Water and recovery

Shortly after dawn, the expedition finds water. Andrews later remembers the first sign of it as dreamlike: Miller straightens in the saddle, raises his head, and gradually turns north, alert to something the others have not yet perceived. The horses grow tense beneath their riders, and Miller’s horse strains against the reins. Miller turns to the others with a grotesque smile, his lips dry, split, and bleeding slightly at the cuts. The change in direction, the animals’ response, and Miller’s expression make the discovery emerge through signs before the water itself becomes the focus.

At the narrow, muddy river, Charley Hoge releases the oxen, which rush toward the water. Miller warns the men not to drink too much at once. They first wet their mouths and let only a few drops run down their throats; then they lie back, allowing the cool water to spill over them, before drinking more deeply and resting again. Relief is managed in stages rather than seized all at once. The same restraint applies to the animals: the men remain by the river for the day while the horses and oxen drink freely and graze, and Miller judges that the weakened animals will need a full day to regain some strength.

The pause also restores the expedition’s ordinary routines. Charley Hoge gathers drifting branches and cooks dried beans and bacon; the men eat with the last of their hardtack and drink coffee. They sleep through the afternoon, relight the fire, eat the still-hard beans after dark, and settle around the embers in their bedrolls. Their rest takes place beside the quiet river, with the animals moving nearby. Food, sleep, and water mark a recovery, but not an escape from dependence on the landscape.

The continuing search and its meaning

The expedition sets out again before dawn the next morning, still somewhat weakened by the ordeal. Miller now leads with greater confidence. He speaks of the water as if it were a living creature that had tried to elude him, and regards finding it as a pursuit completed. That confidence proves useful: as the party continues west across monotonous ground, changing its route repeatedly, it finds water by the end of each day, often after Andrews and Fred Schneider have begun to think reaching it impossible. On the fourteenth day of travel, they see the mountains.

The crisis sharply tests Andrews’s earlier spiritual expectations of the wilderness. Before the crossing, he had understood the hunting expedition as a pretext for leaving the settled world and moving toward the freedom he sought in the plains. The thirst episode does not erase that desire; instead, it gives the wilderness a material force that cannot be reduced to a landscape for private revelation. A nearly dry handkerchief, a failing ox, and the need to follow another rider through the dark expose how precarious such freedom is when water is absent.

The book’s framing also places that ideal beside harsher judgments about what the expedition accomplishes. In his reflections on nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson supplies a language of spiritual enlargement, while J. D. McDonald later describes the hunting venture as a wasted year, with thousands of bison killed and their hides left to rot. The crossing itself does not settle that larger judgment, but its bodily facts resist any easy image of the plains as a source of effortless liberation. Finding water saves the travelers from the immediate crisis; continuing west means accepting that survival will depend, day after day, on finding it again.