TRAIL MIX: "THE 4400" & "THE TWILIGHT ZONE"

From Wikipedia:

ABOUT THE OREGON TRAIL
The Oregon Trail was one of the key overland migration routes on which pioneers traveled across the North American continent in wagons in order to settle new parts of the United States of America during the 19th century.

The Oregon Trail spanned over half the continent as the wagon trail proceeded 2,170 miles (3,500 kilometers) west through territories and land later to become six U.S. states (Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon).

Between 1841 and 1869, the Oregon Trail was used by settlers to the Northwest and West Coast areas of what is now the United States.

Once the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, this trail was no longer used by long-distance travelers.

The trail is marked by numerous cutoffs and shortcuts and is a hodge podge from Missouri to Oregon. The basic route follows river valleys. Starting initially in Independence/Kansas City, the trail followed the Santa Fe Trail just south of the Kansas River. At about Topeka, Kansas it crossed the Kansas River and angled to Nebraska paralleling the Little Blue River until reaching the south side of the Platte River. It followed the Platte and North Platte to the South Pass hole in the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming.

From South Pass the trail parallels the Snake River to the Columbia River before arriving at Oregon City or taking the Barlow Road to the Willamette Valley and other destinations in what are now the states of Washington and Oregon.

The Oregon Trail's designated termination point was Oregon City, at the time the proposed capital of the Oregon Territory. However, many settlers branched off or grew exhausted short of this goal and settled at convenient or promising locations along the trail.

A number of other trails followed the Oregon Trail for part of its length. These include the Mormon Trail from Illinois to Utah, and the California Trail to the gold fields of California.

ABOUT THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL
The California Trail was a major overland emigrant route across the American West from Missouri to California in the middle 19th century. It was used by 250,000 farmers and gold-seekers to reach the California gold fields and farm homesteads in California from the late 1840s until the introduction of the railroads in the late 1860s.

The original route had many branches and encompassed over 5,000 miles (8000 km) of trails. Over 1,000 miles (1600 km) of the rutted traces of the trail remain througout the Great Basin as historical evidence of the great mass migration westward.

The exact route of the trail depended on the starting point of the voyage, the final destination in California, as well as the condition of livestock and vehicles. The main branch of the trail across the Great Plains was identical to the Oregon and Mormon trails, going up the Missouri River then crossing Nebraska along the Platte and North Platte to present-day Wyoming.

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So why should all of this matter to Toobworld? Because the future faction, which absconded with 'The 4400' and then returned them all to Mt. Rainier two years ago, took Maia Rutledge Skouris a second time and then placed her in 1832. Fifteen years later, Maia died of smallpox while going cross-country on the Oregon Trail.

Also in 1847, Christian Horn was leading a wagon train through New Mexico. When his son was stricken with illness, Horn went in search of medical help just "A Hundred Yards Over The Rim" ('The Twilight Zone'). There he found himself transported forward in Time to September, 1961, where he got hold of some penicillin to cure his son. And a good thing too, because his son had a destiny to fulfill in which he would become a world-renowned physician.

It's tempting to think that those future manipulators were involved in Horn's trip through Time to insure his son's survival, but too much was left to chance. So I'll stick with my original theory as posited in the old Tubeworld Dynamic website - that Christian Horn had stumbled upon a rogue temporal wormhole which brought him forward to the year 1961 and then back again to 1847.

And where did this temporal wormhole come from? Horn was in the New Mexico territory. About one hundred and fifty years later, Dr. Sam Beckett would build his 'Quantum Leap' accelerator in the New Mexico mountains.

There was plenty of things wrong with that project, just as there had been with the Time Tunnel project underneath the Arizone desert thirty years earlier. Obviously the Quantum Leap accelerator wasn't properly shielded and temporal energy was leaking whenever Sam went leaping. It's possible that the 1961 wormhole was left over from when Sam leapt into the life of Galveston Mustangs pitcher Lester "Doc" Fuller on August 6th, 1961. ("Play Ball")

Unbeknownst to Chris Horn, that might not have been his first encounter with time travel. It will be my contention that until his wagon train veered south onto one of the cut-off shortcuts on the trail, he had been traveling with the same wagon train that was carrying Maia Rutledge.

In Toobworld, not much is ever left to coincidence.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby