with water, cured pork, and other meat for the journey west.

I climbed to the second floor, where the hayloft looked south over the rolling, mostly-treeless prairie. You could see for miles in any direction. To the south, I could make out the almost-half-mile Cimarron Cutoff that wagons had once taken. Now, some twenty years later, it was overgrown with weeds.

The barn was one of those German Scheune that my father had helped put up as a young man on the family farm back in Ohio. It was gable-roofed and measured about forty feet in width and was some seventy feet long. It stood perhaps fifty feet tall. Inside was a threshing floor, two granaries, a harness room, a small silo, a workshop, and a root bin. The largest single area was reserved for hay, which was put up in the loft.

O...

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