Student Question
Why does Mr. Oakhurst believe camping en route to Sandy Bar in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" is unwise?
Quick answer:
Mr. Oakhurst believes camping en route to Sandy Bar is unwise due to the harsh winter conditions and the group's lack of preparation. The journey involves crossing the Sierra Nevada, a challenging trek even under ideal circumstances. As a gambler, Oakhurst assesses the risks and recognizes the dangers, especially since the group is not fully provisioned and has been drinking. His caution is justified when Uncle Billy steals their supplies, leaving them stranded.
Mr. Oakhurst thinks that making camp on the way to Sandy Bar is a bad idea because their exodus from Poker Flat is made at an inopportune time, in the stare of winter. For, the journey to Sandy Bar is long, it is late in the season, and they must cross a steep mountain range, the Sierra Nevadas, a crossing that is, at best, "a day's severe travel." Naturally, as a gambler, he would calculate the odds of any decision.
Mr. Oakhurst, whose name suggests strength, is "philosophic" and he firmly believes in fate. In addition, he possesses what the others lack: a "calm equanimity." After the others, who lack his wisdom and have been drinking, insist upon stopping, Oakhurst looks up at
...the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into...
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shadow.
His profession makes Oakhurst cautious and always alert to changes around
him since danger can easily make its stealthy way to him. He know that stopping
is a mistake.
Certainly, he has acquired a wisdom that the others such as the complaining and
selfish Duchess and the reprobate Uncle Billy clearly do not possess. Instead,
this opportunistic scoundrel makes off with all the provisions in the night. It
is then as they are stranded in the snow without animals or food that the
gambler Oakhurst realizes all the odds are against them, just as he feared
earlier.
Why does Mr. Oakhurst think camping before reaching Sandy Bar is a bad idea?
Mr. Oakhurst is the leader of the party from the beginning. In fact, he is the only sober one in the party of four, and he advises them that Sandy Bar is "distant a day’s severe travel" from Poker Flat. He also reports when they stop that "scarcely half the journey to Sandy Bar was accomplished, and the party were not equipped or provisioned for delay." Of course, they ignore him as they have already had quite a bit of alcohol by that point. As the group leaves Poker Flat, in fact, they travel from "the moist, temperate regions of the foot-hills into the dry, cold, bracing air of the Sierras," indicating that there could be trouble ahead in terms of cold and snow if they stop.