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Give those oxen a break. Let’s roll the dice and deal with the river crossings.
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May 18, 2019 06:54
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| # ? May 29, 2024 22:13 |
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3 Crossings
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May 18, 2019 09:18
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Sand gets everywhere, sod that. Three crossings.
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May 18, 2019 09:33
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Easier to deal with possibly losing things than having to abandon an entire wagon due to cow-death. Also, may still be able to pay to cross.
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May 18, 2019 09:53
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Rather deal with water then sand. Three Crossings.
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May 18, 2019 12:08
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Sand beach fun
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May 18, 2019 12:29
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Three crossings.
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May 18, 2019 13:16
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Let's go for the XXX action at Three Crossings.
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May 18, 2019 13:51
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Triple the flavor, triple the fun! Let's hit the Three Crossings, son!
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May 18, 2019 13:56
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Three crossings? More like three fordings.
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May 18, 2019 14:48
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We need to make up for lost time RE: fording opportunities. Three Rivers
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May 18, 2019 17:11
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.png) .png) .png) Beyond all expectations, we ford the river three times and avoid any accidents! .png) The Ice Slough was a novelty on the trail that many emigrants didn't believe existed until they came across it. There's a small tributary of the river below the surface that flows into this marsh, above which a patchwork of plant life grows. The resulting layer of peat insulates the water when it freezes in the winter, allowing it to remain frozen all the way into the early summer. Digging just 8 to 10 inches under the ground will pull up ice even in June, in addition to some already melted (albeit undrinkable) water. Travelers would often fill buckets with ice to cool their drinks or try to make ice cream. Unfortunately, this wouldn't last. Constant grazing and trampling by passing animals steadily reduced the amount of insulating peat and the water was poisonous, until by the 1860s it was a sandy hole surrounded by animal carcasses. .png) Rocky Ridge is a good deal tougher than the first hill we crossed. This is a rugged, boulder-strewn path that climbs about 700 feet in two miles (about 1 foot of elevation for every 15 feet forward).
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May 18, 2019 17:17
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I'm learning things! I'd never heard of the Ice Slough. I've seen it in this game before but never took the time to look it up and find out why it was called that. Double-team to climb the steep hill?
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May 18, 2019 17:39
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chitoryu12 posted:
Seems like a good opportunity to double-team it.
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May 18, 2019 17:40
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Double-team and continue. Also push the oxen if it doesn't work.chitoryu12 posted:Unfortunately, this wouldn't last. Constant grazing and trampling by passing animals steadily reduced the amount of insulating peat and the water was poisonous, until by the 1860s it was a sandy hole surrounded by animal carcasses. 
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May 18, 2019 17:44
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Double team!
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May 18, 2019 18:31
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Roll up our sleeves and double-team those oxen
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May 18, 2019 18:40
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Whup, missed a page there. Double-team that load.
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May 18, 2019 19:40
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Poil posted:Double-team and continue. Also push the oxen if it doesn't work. 
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May 18, 2019 23:13
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Yeah, Double-team it up that hill.
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May 19, 2019 03:00
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Double-teaming works and we're up the hill!.png) One last crossing of the river. Fording is no trouble. .png) We cross through a mountain pass in Wyoming, which is the perfect time to be interrupted by the Montgomerys! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk8EJhl0RTI  Jim Bridger was the descendant of early English colonists. He was a contemporary of many early Western explorers, including the infamous General Custer. He may or may not have been one of the people responsible for the ordeal suffered by Hugh Glass that would become dramatized in The Revenant: he (or an unknown man named "Bridges" depending on the account) and John Fitzgerald mistakenly thought Glass was dead after he was attacked by a bear and buried him, only for Glass to wake up and spend 6 weeks crawling his way 200 miles to safety. He sought out the two who abandoned him for revenge, but changed his mind and didn't kill either of them. Glass himself would be killed 10 years later in 1833 by an Arikara attack. Bridger quickly became a major figure on the Oregon Trail. Fort Bridger, where the Donner Party took the Hastings Cutoff, was grown from a trading post he helped found there. The colorful mountain man was notorious for his tall tales that he clearly exaggerated for the purposes of humor and died in 1881 at the age of 77. .png) An account from Patrick McLeod in 1849 says that far from isolated wagon trains, Pacific Springs was so full of travelers on his journey that he could barely find a place to camp. These springs are so named because they're actually the first water we encounter on our journey that meets up with the Pacific Ocean! .png) Take a look at those conditions. At this point in our journey, the water is going to be bad for a while. We have no water containers as far as I recall, so we'll just have to make do with what we gathered beforehand and hope we don't get into trouble before the next fresh water or trading post. .png) The trail splits again here. The trail on the left leads to Fort Bridger and a small colony of Mormon pioneers petitioning to have Congress recognize the State of Deseret on the Great Salt Lake. The trail on the right is the Sublette Cutoff to Fort Hall, which saves about 46 miles by crossing an empty desert without water and limited plants to gather. So do we go to Fort Bridger or take the Sublette Cutoff?
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May 19, 2019 17:42
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Are we able to look at our inventory and see how much water we have? Seems to me we should take the cutoff if we have enough water, go to Bridger and try to trade for some if we don't.
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May 19, 2019 17:47
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Yeah, we've been making good time so far. Better safe than sorry with the water supplies. And since we're heading to California, I get the sneaking suspicion we're going to need as much water as we can fit in the wagon.
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May 19, 2019 17:48
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Firearms on the Trail In 1850 the most common firearm lock (or action) for a settler is a flintlock. The weapon is loaded with loose gunpowder, a lead ball, and some paper wadding or a leather patch to keep everything tight in there. A little bit of powder is poured into a pan, which is then covered with an L-shaped piece of steel called the frizzen. When you pull the trigger, a spring-loaded cock holding a piece of flint like a vice springs forward and scrapes across the frizzen, simultaneously pushing it open and creating a shower of sparks that land on the powder in the pan. This burning powder passes through a touchhole into the barrel, igniting the main charge. The other common lock is the percussion cap, or caplock. This uses a tiny copper cap full of fulminate of mercury or a similar impact explosive, which sits on a hollow tube called a nipple (don't laugh). A hammer strikes this cap, creating a flash that passes through the nipple into the barrel. This is far more reliable in wet weather and tends to have no delay between pulling the trigger and the gun firing, but this does require you to have a supply of caps that can easily be dropped and lost in the brush. While the US military has moved on to percussion cap muskets by this point with the Springfield M1842 and has slowly been trying to convert their old flintlocks, there's still tons of flintlocks in service and the older style is preferred out in the wilderness for the ease with which extra flints can be carried or found. Barrels can either be smoothbore or rifled. Rifles have a set of spiral grooves that grip the bullet and spin it, providing gyroscopic stabilization. Rifles are far more accurate (well-made guns like this 1792 Contract Rifle here are accurate against man-sized targets out to 300 yards or more in the hands of an experienced shooter with proper ammunition) but need to be scrupulously kept clean, as black powder burns very inefficiently and creates a ton of soot that fouls the barrel until you can't even get the bullet down the barrel. You might ask yourself "Why don't you buy something that loads from the breech?" Breechloading guns were actually extremely rare and basically experimental at this time as technology had not yet caught up. You need very tight tolerances to create a seal against any hot burning gas leaking out the back and firearms manufacturers simply couldn't reliably produce that kind of seal on a large scale. The solution in the form of metallic cartridges that could provide that seal wouldn't enter mass production until 1857. The military got around this by issuing undersized bullets; the Brown Bess musket used in the Revolution was nominally .75 caliber, but it was issued with a .69 caliber ball. This windage (the gap between the bullet and the barrel) made it easy to repeatedly shove bullets down a filthy bore that had fired a dozen or more rounds at the cost of extremely poor accuracy; these muskets only had a simple bead on the end of the barrel for a sight and could barely hit a man at 100 yards.  There was no real standardized pattern for what a settler's rifle would look like, as gunsmithing was still primarily a cottage industry practiced by individual makers who sold directly to the public. The rifle above is a .50 caliber Hawken rifle, which was handmade by the Hawken Brothers and their descendants from 1823 until 1884. They were made with accouterments like double-set triggers (pulling one trigger pre-cocks the mainspring to give you an extremely light trigger pull before firing) and actual sights that were useful for accurate shooting. Despite their expense, these rifles and similar short, high-caliber ones were the preferred weapons of mountain men.  Because most military weapons in 1850 are still smoothbore and old muskets are still in use on the frontier, the only real difference between a shotgun and a musket is that shotguns tend to be shorter and often have two barrels. Shotguns are meant to be loaded with shot, a handful of pellets of varying size. This is excellent for taking out small game and birds but nowhere near as good against larger game like deer and may as well be useless against buffalo except at dangerously close range.   Colt has been producing revolvers since 1836 when Samuel Colt designed the first successful mass produced revolver, often called the Colt Paterson. The .44 caliber Dragoon is the latest model of large combat revolver intended for military service, while the .31 caliber Model 1849 Pocket Revolver is the latest intended for civilian concealed carry or police use and is the best selling revolver in Colt's inventory so far. For a pioneer, they can only hunt small game and birds with accurate shooting. Their bigger purpose would be self-defense against two-legged threats. Revolvers in this time are "cap & ball" guns, which use loose powder and ball in the chamber and a percussion cap on the nipple on the back of the chamber. A loading lever under the barrel is used to ram the bullet and powder down before a cap is mounted, making reloading a slow process. Paper cartridges that hold the powder and bullet in a cone of nitrated paper can be used to speed loading, but it's still going to take at least 5 seconds to load each chamber in the best of times. Most people who plan on relying on revolvers carry multiple.
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May 19, 2019 18:12
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Oddly enough, Gun Jesus doesn't have videos on these guns. Wow, did his KS explode  Follow the safe path
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May 19, 2019 18:43
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Also kind of worth noting, for this run our protagonist has gunsmith as his occupation, so he or she makes at least one of those kinds of guns in that post. Coming late to the Gold Rush, they're probably intending to get rich selling guns to the new settlers in the boomtowns.
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May 19, 2019 18:46
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Take the cutoff. We’re making good time, sure, but we could be making it even better.
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May 19, 2019 20:26
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Fort Bridger so we don't miss any terrible cutscenes.
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May 19, 2019 20:53
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Well we've already been told what a great idea it is to take shortcuts across deserts. But it would mean not dealing with more mormons. Touch choice. Eh, screw it: Go for the fort.
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May 19, 2019 20:58
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Poil posted:Well we've already been told what a great idea it is to take shortcuts across deserts. But it would mean not dealing with more mormons. Touch choice. Eh, screw it: Bridger or Hall?
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May 19, 2019 22:16
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We're not gonna find any good water at a salt lake, so let's take the shortcut!
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May 19, 2019 23:04
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chitoryu12 posted:Bridger or Hall? 
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May 19, 2019 23:05
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Fort Bridger, please.
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May 20, 2019 00:03
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Lets not run out of water in the middle of desert. Head for Fort Bridger.
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May 20, 2019 01:13
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Kind of belated, but Indpendence Rock was called Independence Rock because trail talk said you had to by July 4th if you wanted to get through the mountains before the snows.
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May 20, 2019 01:44
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Let's head to Fort Bridger and buy up all their water.Cythereal posted:Also kind of worth noting, for this run our protagonist has gunsmith as his occupation, so he or she makes at least one of those kinds of guns in that post. Coming late to the Gold Rush, they're probably intending to get rich selling guns to the new settlers in the boomtowns.
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May 20, 2019 02:46
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Black Robe posted:Are we able to look at our inventory and see how much water we have? Seems to me we should take the cutoff if we have enough water, go to Bridger and try to trade for some if we don't. The inventory updates would show water canteens or barrels. Unfortunately we neglected to buy any so all the water we have is what we can gather locally. This means we could suffer dehydration if we don't buy any before encounter a rough patch.
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May 20, 2019 04:47
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.png) Again! We administer peppermint, since it seems to have worked last time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do75WYlqas8 I'm really interested in how Jed was "once married" to a Shoshone. It, uh, doesn't make him sound too good considering her possible fates. .png) .png) In addition to paying $5 for a ferry, we also now have the option of giving a local Indian all 89 pounds of our remaining fresh buffalo meat to help us across. I can haggle, but too much haggling will get us a worse deal.
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May 20, 2019 04:58
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Shoot him.
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May 20, 2019 05:03
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| # ? May 29, 2024 22:13 |
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That buffalo meat will go bad soon enough Agree
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May 20, 2019 05:05
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