When the country traversed became too sandy, or for any cause the wheeling was too heavy, the party would make a cache of a part of the provisions, to pick them up at a later date in case of need. Owing to the danger of other parties finding the cache and appropriating the goods to their own use, or destroying them, it was necessary for them to obliterate all traces of the hiding place, and trust to memory to again find the same.

One Hidden Cache

On one trip they were nearing the point where they were to go to work, and they cached away a quantity of corn and flour in a sand blowout some distance from the trail their wagons were making. They buried the provisions under several feet of sand. They then discovered that one of the sacks of corn had had a small hole in it and that an occasional kernel of corn had dropped on the way from the wagons to the cache. They picked up every kernel of corn they could find and then obliterated the burying place and the tracks to and from the wagon by smoothing the sand.

Some weeks later, on their return, they found that some of the wasted corn had not been recovered, and that there was a row of growing corn from the wagon tracks to the cache at the top of the blowout, thus clearly pointing out to any chance passerby where the provisions and feed were hidden. The cache, however, had not been disturbed.