Heading West

The average so-called "western" movie or television series only very rarely gives a true idea of what it must have been like to take to the emigrant trail in the 1840ies and 50ies. Most westerns are set in a time-period from the end of the Civil war to about 1885, an overwhelming proportion have a cattle-ranch setting, sometimes a setting in the wild and woolly mining camps. The popular culture vision of the "old west" tends to warp our imagining of the 19th century in general, in that it puts in place people and technologies that were just not there until well after the Civil War. The latter part of that century was already looking forward to what would become the twentieth, and to extend what we commonly accept as a given about the late 19th century backwards to previous decades is give a short shift to the vision and sheer stubborn courage of the 1840ies wagon train emigrants, and to underestimate considerably the challenges they would have faced.

In 1840, there is no telegraph system in the West, and would not be for a decade or so, for the system itself was still under development. Ocean-going vessels are powered by the force of wind in their sails. News and the mail travels at the speed of a horse, a canal boat, or maybe a steam boat on the navigable rivers, although there have been some limited rail beds built, and serviced by steam locomotives for about ten years. But all those are back east. There are factories, of course-  most of them powered by watermills. Other than that, power is supplied by animals, or the backs of humans. The first half of the century for most Americans is more like the century before, than the century afterwards.

There are no vast cattle ranches in that West, other than in far California - and ranches that are run to produce hides, rather than beef for the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Gold will not be discovered until the end of the decade. What wealth came out of the West in the early decades of that century came in the form of beaver pelts- but the fashions have changed, and by 1840 there is no demand for them. There is no mail service; messages travel erratically. There is hardly anything representing the Federal government west of the Mississippi, only the occasional Army-authorized exploring party, and an American consul in such outposts as Yerba Buena. It is a six-month long sea-voyage around the Horn to reach the western coast of the continent. There are a scattering of trading posts and Mexican pueblos between the Mississippi-Missouri and the Sierra Nevada, served by enterprising merchants and fur-trading combines. Great caravans leave every year, but they are commercial enterprises, and their trail lies across mostly open and mostly level country. Little that they know and practice can be made use of by an emigrant outfitting a wagon to follow the trail towards the Oregon settlements or to fabled California.

Before the deluge of the Gold Rush, most of the emigrants bound for California tended to be farmers and small-town folk, who may have already possessed the basic equipment required; that is, a suitable wagon, and at least some of the stock necessary to pull it. They were accustomed to and familiar with the ordinary light wagons which were commonly used on the emigrant trail, much in the way that most Americans today are used to using automobiles. The rough country, frequent streams and rivers, and steep slopes along that way brutally eliminated any possibility of utilizing the larger wagons used on the Santa Fe trail, and to haul freight on the established roads -  and in any case, the large numbers of team animals necessary were usually not able to pull effectively under such conditions.

So, picture a small wagon; on the farm it would have been pulled by a pair of horses, but once on the trail, by three to four pair of oxen. The box or freight-bed part of it would be about eight or ten feet long, and four feet wide, with sides roughly two feet high, and a clearance off the ground of about two and a half feet. There are no springs, or brakes, and the moving parts -  mainly the wheels and kingbolt, is lubricated from a tar-bucket hung underneath the rear axel, containing a mixture or tar, resin, tallow, rendered fat or whatever can be scrounged to add to it along the way. Essential points are reinforced by iron, but not too many, as that would make the wagon heavier and a greater burden to the oxen who pull it. Five or six thin bows of bent hickory-wood slotted into brackets along the sides of the box supported a tent-like canvas cover, waterproofed with paint or linseed oil. The canvas cover was closed with drawstrings, and flaps, the whole forming a tiny room. Many emigrants built a false-floor, for storage of goods and supplies underneath. There might be room enough for two adults, or a couple of small children to sleep inside the wagon, but emigrants usually brought along tents and lengths of canvas for additional sleeping space. Only an occasional special-built wagon like James Reed (of the Donner-Reed party, of 1846) might contain such luxuries as a built-in small stove, and a little side door and stairway, but a behemoth such as that needed six yoke of oxen to pull, and came to grief in the desert between the Humboldt Sink and the Truckee River anyway.

Such a wagon sat high enough off the ground as to be able to ford small streams, as long as there is not more than a couple of feet of water and mud combined. The wagon box can be raised on blocks for slightly deeper streams, or even disassembled, waterproofed and floated over those which are deeper yet, but at a great cost in labor. With a high center of gravity, such a wagon could tip over all too easily. Traversing a steep slope is treacherous; going straight up or straight down is usually favored, since teams can be doubled or tripled going up, and wheels can be locked with chains or a tree branch thrust through the wheels going down. Wagons can even be lowered on ropes down a steep slope -  or emptied of contents and hauled upwards.

And that sense of practical daring, of taking your wagon, and your family, and all that you posessed, to one of the jumping-off places, at Council Bluffs, or Rockport or Independence, and looking out at the waving grass covering an endless and trackless prairie - that is more typically American than any generic 'western' ever put to pulp pages or B-western film. I wish there were a bit more of this in popular culture - this appreciation for the courage and enterprise of our metaphorical or actual ancestors,

Ah, well, I'm doing my bit, anyway.

Scenic Wonders of the Trail

In some not inconsiderable ways, heading west along the Platte River trails might have been seen as a kind of working holiday for emigrants. While there was a lot of brute physical work involved in moving the wagons or the mule-train the requisite twelve or fifteen miles farther west each day, the charm of camping under canvas every night, and preparing meals over an open campfire twice or three times daily must have worn very thin… it may have been not much more onerous then the daily round of chores attendant on an 19th century farmstead. Add in camaraderie among the party, the fairly easy going on the first third of the trail to California or Oregon, opportunities to hunt and explore new horizons, horizons that were unimaginably wider than what they had been used to, back in Ohio or Missouri, sights that were strange and rare to ordinary farm folk.

The Platte River Valley itself was one of those striking vistas; often called the “Coast of Nebraska; it so resembled a flat, shimmering ocean, edged with sand dunes. It appeared to be somewhat below the level of the prairies they would have been crossing, since departing from Independence, St. Joe or Council Bluffs. To some emigrants it appeared like a vast, golden inland sea, stretching to the farthest horizon. But it was the highway towards the mountains beyond Fort Laramie, a month or so of fairly easy traveling… even if the river water was murky with silt, the mosquitoes a veritable plague and wood for campfires very rare.

The Coast of Nebraska offered another awe-inspiring vista; that of vast herds of buffalo. The Platte Valley was their grazing ground and watering hole. Emigrants were astounded equally by the size of the individual buffalo— which could weigh up to 2,000 pounds— and the sheer numbers. Witnesses to stampedes of buffalo herds at various times and places along the Platte noted how the very ground shook, and the sound of it was like a heavy railroad train passing close by. This was heady stuff, to someone who had spent most of their life before this, farming in Ohio, or in Missouri. But more was yet to come.

In the vicinity of Ash Hollow, a deep draw— a wooded canyon near the present-day town of Lewellen, the widest and deepest of all those canyons descending to the Platte— emigrants found abundant wood for their fires, and springs of fresh, clean-tasting water. The river water was full of sand and “wigglers”, or other barely visible contaminants. Perhaps the affinity for coffee saved a certain number of lives, since water was boiled thoroughly in its preparation. There were emigrant graves at Ash Hollow, one of them being the last melancholy resting place of an aptly named Mr. Shotwell, of the 1841 Bidwell-Bartleson Party, accidentally killed by a gun. It discharged as he took it out of a wagon, by misfortune having turned the muzzle of it in his direction. The Sioux and the Pawnee fought a desperate battle there, sometime in the winter of 1835, where the Pawnee were so overwhelmingly thrashed that they withdrew towards the east and did not return unless in a strong war party. An emigrant passing through some eight years later noted bones and skulls scattered nearby.

Westerly from Ash Hollow was the first of a remarkable series of bluffs; some saw it as a spectacular ruined fortress… a solitary castle, floating slightly above the level plain. But most saw it as resembling a courthouse; a great square edifice with a dome. Many curious travelers turned aside from the emigrant road to pay a visit, thinking it were only a mile or two away, deceived by the clear air… or as is more likely by the lack of anything man-made close by to compare it to, and their own inexperience at judging distances in the vastness of the trans-Mississippi west. But there was more…Courthouse or Castle Rock was only the prelude to a landmark dubbed by many emigrants as the eighth wonder of the world… Chimney Rock.

The historian of the Platte River road, Merrill Mattes calculated that 95% of the journals and guidebooks of the trail, as wells as accounts of a journey along that stretch of the emigrant road made note of Chimney Rock. It was in sight for at least three or four days of travel along the trails on either side of the Platte, dancing like a mirage along the horizon at first, a slim column or obelisk, looking— as most observers agreed— like a shot-tower or a factory chimney. A scattering of travelers with a bent for scientific observation noted that it was composed of the same sort of materiel as the Courthouse rock, and rose to the same height as a nearby line of bluffs, concluding that the intervening materiel had eroded away. Many emigrants reported carving their name into the soft rock, competing to climb higher above their companions to place their own name… but the names carved there wore away within a few years.

If Chimney Rock was a curiosity and a wonder, most travelers spent the two days in which they passed by Scott’s Bluffs… a tall but oft-broken wall, which invited comparisons to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or a vast walled Alhambra, with the river at its very foot, and turrets and buttresses towering into the sky. They were also moved by the sad story of the man it was named after; Hiram Scott, of William Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Brigade. Around about 1828, returning from a supply rendezvous in the mountains, Scott fell ill and was unable to travel any farther. He may have been abandoned there by his companions, or urged them to leave him behind— stories varied.

There are, and would be other spectacular features of nature, along the trail towards Oregon, and California; but it was an irony of the trail that these and other lesser spots were encountered in roughly the first third of the journey, and where… unknown to most… the travel would be by far the easiest. Eventually, the emigrants would be too hungry and exhausted, desperate to get over that last barrier to stop and admire such places, in the same leisurely way they had appreciated Scott’s Bluffs and Courthouse rock.

The Fort at La Ramie

Once upon a time in the west, there was a pleasant piece of land, of open meadows broken by stands of trees on the headwaters of the North Platte River by the foot of a range of dark hills, in the present state of Wyoming. A creek flowed into the North Platte, just there, where in the very early days of the North American fur trade a French-Canadian trapper named Jaques La Ramee was supposed to have been killed by hostile natives and his body thrown into it. So the little stream and the place where it joined the Platte became known as the Laramie River, and the confluence as the Laramie Fork, or in the alternate spelling of the era “Laremais’ Point”.

Those streams drained a rich and profitable area for trappers, and many of the mountain men, as the hunters and trappers of beaver pelts were called in the early 19th century were issued licenses to trap in the uplands and to trade their takings there. In 1834 a stockade fort built of logs was established there, by William Sublette… he and two other men in the founding party had the first name of William, and so the place was dubbed “Fort William”. It had not escaped Sublette’s attention that not only was the location on the route into the rich fur-trapping lands in the western mountains, but also on the trail south to Taos. A year later the interest in the newly-established trading post passed into the hands of the American Fur Company, later Pierre Chouteau & Co. Ft. William was described several years later as a quadrangle with block houses at diagonal corners, where Indians camped in great numbers, bringing animal skins to trade for cloth, tobacco, beads and alcohol… and where the whole enterprise came under the sniffy disapproval of various missionaries, even as what sketchy hospitality available was welcomed, somewhat grudgingly, I fancy.

Early in the 1840ies a rival trading establishment, Ft. Platte was constructed close by, and the competition in combination with the rotting of Ft. William’s stockade walls inspired Chouteau’s company to build a new adobe fort on higher ground, which the explorer John Fremont described as having more the air of a military construction: it was whitewashed adobe brick, with fifteen-foot tall walls, which formed a quadrangle entirely lined with houses. There were two entrances, the main one guarded by square towers loop-holed with firing positions. Most of the residents of the fort were described as French traders and their Sioux wives, for the Sioux tribes came to Laramie to trade and socialize. It was originally called Ft. John, but became known as Ft Laramie. Ft. Platte was described by Francis Parkman as being deserted in 1846, for by then the glory days of the fur brigades were over, and the days of the emigrant trains had begun with the Bidwell-Bartleson Party five years previous.

Every year after 1841, the wagons of emigrants on the Oregon Trail, and those who chose to take the turn-off to California at Fort. Hall, roughly three hundred miles or so farther west passed by the frontier trading station, coming thicker and faster. Every year there were more and more white-topped wagons splashing through the North Platte on the road from Council Bluffs which ran north of the Platte, or coming up the road that followed the south bank of the Platte from Ft. Kearny, from St. Joe, from Independence and Westport and the other “jumping-off” places along the Missouri River, until the tide of 49ers, seeking gold in the placer mines of California swept all the remnants of the sleepy-nine-months-of-the-year fur-trading station. It was bought by the Army in 1849. The adobe trader post, called “The Old Fort” formed the south edge of the fort parade ground, until demolition and replacement by officers’ quarters in 1870.

But until the deluge of the Gold Rush, it was a welcome outpost, marking one-third of the journey to the golden lands of California, or the rich farm country of Oregon, the gateway between the easy travel along the Platte, to the harsher challenge over the backbone of the Rockies, and the South Pass. Given the timetable of the seasons and the trail, an emigrant company should have reached the confluence of South Platte and Laramie Creek in late June, and might have, in earlier years camped among the skin lodges of the Sioux tribes among the cottonwoods and willow thickets below the whitewashed walls of Old Laramie, in uneasy amity with the Tribes. They might have expected to trade there, for pemmican and dried buffalo meat, for baskets and moccasins and Indian ponies, to look with expressions of pious horror, or genuine intellectual curiosity on Indian graves, air-buried on scaffolds in the trees, to meet and trade with the “Other” and then to continue on their own way, with a lot of mutual incomprehension; two wildly different tribes sliding past each other on the grease of commerce.

The Jumping-Off Places

These were the places where the trails all began: the trails that lead to Oregon, to the Mormon colonies in Utah, to California, and before them, into the fur-trapping wildernesses in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, and the commercial trade to Santa Fe.

Five towns, all along a 200-mile stretch of the Missouri River; many of which have long-since outgrown their original footprint as a river-boat landing on the edge between civilization and wilderness, leaving only the smallest traces here and there among a century and a half of building up and sprawling outwards. The modern towns of Kansas City, Weston-Leavenworth, St. Joseph, Nebraska City and Council Bluffs-Omaha, were the places where the journey began. They were once rowdy, muddy, enormously crowded in those months when the emigrant, exploring, or trading parties were preparing to set out. Primitive, bursting with excitement, overrun with emigrants and stock pens, the crossroads where merchants sold everything necessary for the great journey, the very crossroads of the west; Indians and mountain men, Santa Fe merchants and soldiers, emigrants, missionaries and foreigners passed each other in the spaces between buildings that did duty as streets. They were the inland coast, from which the emigrants looked out upon the sea of grass and made preparations.

Greater Kansas City encompasses no less than four locations from which these voyages into the wilderness were launched: Ft. Osage, established by the US government in 1808 was the oldest. The fur-trading Chouteau Brothers, of St. Louis established a trading post at the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas River. Known variously as Chouteau’s Landing, Kanzasmouth or Westport Landing, it is now somewhere underneath the business district of Kansas City. Captain Bonneville launched his three-year exploration from the successor to Ft.Osage. Sublette and Fremont’s expeditions in the 1830ies and 1840ies departed from Westport Landing. In turn, they were overshadowed by Independence, the springboard for the growing Santa Fe trade, which served in turn the Oregon migration in the 40ies, and was swamped by the ’40 Gold Rush Argonauts. An arrival in that year noted the presence of a daguerreotype gallery… and the appalling noise of teams and animals. There were but two public houses in the city, crammed to capacity, with everyone else having to board with local residents or camp out in their wagons. The last was Westport, a little south and a little way down the Santa Fe Trail; started as a mission and trading post for the Indians. Francis Parkman passed through Westport in 1846.

It eventually dawned on emigrants for Oregon and California, that going farther north along the Missouri shortened the distance they need travel towards the Platte, that great river road to the west. Ft. Leavenworth was established in the 1820ies, with an eye towards intimidating the Indians, and it became the locus for a number of ’49 Argonauts. They looked to avoid congestion at Independence and St. Joseph, farther upstream, and departed from the town of Weston, the ‘ville (established by a veteran of Army service at Ft. Leavenworth) across the river from it. Weston was built on a series of steep hills; Argonauts coming from Central Europe called it “Little Switzerland”. John Bidwell, of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841 claimed to have organized the first wagon party for California from Weston. (They arrived safely for the most, but without their wagons.) It was necessary to ferry wagons and emigrants across the river at Weston, and the town thrived for a number of years, until being sidelined by the railroad boom in the 1860ies.

The fur-trader, Joseph Robidoux saw into the future; he saw that more and more settlers would come. A trail that began two more days farther up the river by steamboat would save two weeks on the journey to the Platte River. He called his little planned city after his patron saint, Saint Joseph, but mostly they called it Saint Joe, or Robidoux’ s Landing. By 1844, according to a west-ward bound emigrant that year, it had two or three stores and one hotel. Five years later, it was the major jumping-off point for the Gold Rush; two ferries ran, day and night, and the town was crowded to bursting with emigrants that outnumbered residents four or five times over. The Pony Express ran its 10-day service from St Joseph to Sacramento for one glorious year, starting in 1860, the brain-child of the Russell, Majors and Waddell freighting service, which already held contracts to deliver to military establishments in that era.

There were a number of minor crossings between Saint Joe and the Council Bluffs area, most of them utilized during the years of extreme congestion following the Gold Rush. One of the popular crossings was near the site of Old Fort Kearney, on the Missouri. A town, Nebraska City rose on the site of the old fort, and boomed in the 1850ies, supplying the Army, and those seeking riches in later gold and silver rushes; to Pike’s Peak and Virginia City.

Finally, there was Council Bluffs, the name given by Lewis and Clark to the site of their parley with the Tribes in 1804. This was the name for the general district, which covered a number of smaller communities in existence at various times in the neighborhood of present-day Omaha, beginning with a small fort which became a mission under the direction of Father DeSmet, and ministered to the Potawatomi, until 1841. Five years later, Mormon refugees from Illinois arrived nearby. They crossed the river, and established the Winter Camp, the staging area for the great migration to Salt Lake. The area was popular with emigrants from the northern states; Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. It fed emigrant traffic into the so-called Mormon Trail along the northern side of the Platte River. Prior to the Gold Rush and the Mormon exodus, other Oregon and California-bound parties departed from Council Bluffs, notably the Stephens-Townsend party of 1844.

Construction of the Union Pacific railroad began at Omaha in 1864, foreshadowing the end of the jumping-off places for emigrants and wagon trains, departing from along the Missouri River. After the coming of the railroads to the West, venturing into it would no longer mean a journey of six months, dependent solely on the travelers’ own resources, and the strength and good health of their team animals. And that meant the end of a long and adventurous era. For within the space of a few years, a journey into the west meant a much less perilous journey - a prospect hardly to believed by those who first looked out from those jumping-off places, during those first decades of the 19th century.

The Things They Carried

There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture: an upholstered wing chair, a spinning wheel, a very elaborate trunk fitted out with a number of smaller drawers for silverware: the trunk is open, displaying a fine mid-Victorian assembly of knives and silverware. There are a couple of inlaid boxes— portable desks or sewing tables, what appears to be the head and footboard to a Jenny Lind bed, a butter churn and a lighted kerosene lantern hanging from the center, mid-peak of the inside.

The series of hoops holding up the canvas cover is reinforced with a pair of horizontal lathes along the sides of the wagon, from which hang an number of articles of clothing; some dresses, a shirt, a baby’s dress and a couple of sunbonnets. This may be a wagon in which a family lived during their journey, late in the days of the emigrant trail. In this wagon interior, there is very little glimpse of what a typical emigrant wagon would have had to have carried in the opening days of the trails to Oregon and California, when the only possible means of re-supply along the way, other than hunting and gathering, were at Ft. Laramie and Ft. Hall.

Bidwell Bartleson, 1841

The westward movement of Americans rolled west of the Appalachians and hung up for a decade or two on the barrier of the Mississippi-Missouri. It was almost an interior sea-coast, the barrier between the settled lands, and the un-peopled and tree-less desert beyond, populated by wild Indians. To be sure, there were scattered enclaves, as far-distant as the stars in the age of “shanks’ mare” and team animals hitched to wagons, or led in a pack-train: far California, equally distant Oregon, the pueblos of Santa Fe, and Texas. And men in exploring parties, or on trade had ventured out to the ends of the known continent… and by the winter of 1840 there were reports of what had been found. Letters, rumor, common talk among the newspapers, and meeting-places had put the temptation and the possibility in peoples’ minds, to the point where an emigrating society had been formed over that winter. The members had pledged to meet, all suitably outfitted and supplied on the 9th of May, 1841 at a rendezvous twenty miles west of Independence, on the first leg of the Santa Fe Trail, intent for California, although none of them had at the time any clear idea of where to go, in order to get there.

 A handful of wagons, two or three at a time straggled into the meeting place, at Sapling Grove, in the early weeks of May, until there were about thirty-five men, which was considered a suitable size of the party.  There were, in addition to the men, ten children and five women: three wives, the widowed sister of one of them, and a single unmarried woman, and it would appear that none of them had been into the far West before. They had a vague notion of the latitude of San Francisco Bay, and perhaps were dithering for some days over whether to follow the long- established Santa Fe Trail, or the slight track which wandered off in the direction of the fur-trading post at Fort Laramie and from there on to Oregon. While they were still making up their minds,  a small party of Jesuit missionaries led by the legendary Father Pierre De Smet and bound for Ft. Hall, in the Oregon territory arrived. The Jesuits had hired the equally legendary mountain man,  Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick as their guide, and the California party attached themselves to this party, no doubt with a certain amount of relief. Sufficient to the days’ travel were the evils thereof, and the Jesuits and “Broken Hand” would accompany them for the first thousand miles.

 They left on the 12th of May, after electing one John Bartleson as nominal captain… but like the Stephens-Townsend Party of three years later, seemed to have functioned more or less as a company of equals. They moved slowly for the first few days, having gotten word that another wagon and a small party of men was trying to catch up to them; ten days later, they did so. Among the late-comers was Joseph Chiles, who would eventually cross and recross the California trail many times over the following fifteen years. Another three days later, the party was joined by a single elderly horseman, traveling alone, penniless and without weapons, trusting in the protection of   the God he served, the Methodist Rev. Joseph Williams. The Reverend Williams had taken it into his head to go forth and minister to the heathen Indians. Arriving at Sapling Grove to find the party already gone, he had ridden alone through the wilderness to join them. Whether this was an act of jaw-dropping naivety, or saintliness is a matter of opinion..

 Under the stern direction of Fitzpatrick, the party reached Fort Laramie after 42 days of hard travel. The party traveled in a mixture of conveyances and teams: the Jesuits in four mule-drawn carts and a single small wagon, then eight emigrant wagons drawn by horse and mule teams, then a half-dozen drawn by ox teams. The cracking pace set by the mule carts meant many exhausting hours in harness for the slower oxen, which a single day of rest at Ft. Laramie did nothing to make up for. And supplies were already running short. They hunted for buffalo along the valley of the Sweetwater, and met up with a party of 60 trappers on the Green River, who told them flat-out that it was impossible to take wagons over the mountains and desert and mountains again to California. At that point a small group of seven men packed it in and headed back to Missouri, and all but thirty one men and Mrs. Nancy Kelsey decided to carry on with the trail towards Ft. Hall and Oregon.

 Their further adventures are well-documented, as first-hand accounts still exist. A fair proportion of these bold adventurers became successful and pillars of their respective communities in later life, although one of them, Talbot Greene later turned out to be an embezzler escaping the authorities. He was pleasant, well-liked and trusted by the others, serving as their doctor, and carried with him to California a large chunk of lead. No one could fathom why he needed quite so much of this commodity, but even then, it was considered bad from to pry too much into personal affairs.

The men of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, who had,  against all advice and counsel, decided to continue on for California had much in common. They were all young, most under the age of thirty.  None of them had been into the Far West until this journey, although one of them was a relative by marriage to the Sublette fur-trading family. The Kelsey brothers, Andrew and Benjamin were rough Kentucky backwoodsmen. Two of them had been schoolteachers, but all had grown up on farms, were accustomed to firearms and hunting…and hard work, of which the unknown trail would offer plenty. Three of the four diaries kept during the journey are still in existence. The diarists themselves narrated a zesty and optimistic tale of their adventures, taking some of the edge off of the desperation that must have been felt as they blundered farther and farther into the trackless wilderness. They set off with nine wagons in the middle of August, following the Bear River towards the Great Salt Lake. They had seen a map which showed two rivers flowing west from this lake, but it seemed that was a mere fantasy on the part of the map-maker. After a week or so, they camped north of the Lake and sent two men to Fort Hall seeking additional supplies and guidance. In both they were disappointed; there were no supplies to be spared from the fort stores, and there was no guide to be hired. The only advice they could get from Fort Hall was not to go too far north, into a bandlands of steep canyons, or too far south into the sandy desert. But away to the west there was a river flowing towards the south-west. That was called then Mary’s or Ogden’s River (now the Humboldt). If they could find and follow it, it would guide them on long way.

 On such sketchy advice, they continued westwards; a dry stretch around the north of the lake, until despairing, they turned north and camped at the foot of a mountain range. There was grass and water there, as they would come to know if they had not worked that out already. They traded gunpowder and bullets for some berries from friendly Indians camped nearby. At this point, they may have realized it would be better to send out scouts ahead, and party captain Bartleson and another man named Hopper rode out on a scout to look for Mary’s River. They did not return for some days, during which the party abandoned one wagon and moved gradually westward. They were probably following the tracks left by the two scouts, who did not return until eleven days were passed and they had been despaired of. Owners of two wagons hired Indian guides and went south on their own, covering two days journey, until Bartleson and Hopper returned to the reminder  with word they had found a small stream that seemed to lead into the Mary’s River.

 They all headed southwards across the desert, southwards again after camping at a place called Rabbit Creek. By mischance, they had missed the headwaters of a creek that emptied into the river they were searching for, and in another couple of days, the team animals began to fail. The Kelsey brothers abandoned their wagons, packing their remaining supplies onto the backs of their mules and saddle horses, and the party continued with increasing desperation, south and west, and to the north-west again, until it became clear that the wagons were a useless, dragging burden. In the middle of September the wagons were abandoned, about where present-day US Highway 40 crosses the Pequop Summit. They made packs for the mules… they tried to make packs for the oxen, who promptly bucked them off again. They set off again, giving much of what they couldn’t take to friendly Indians, and operating mostly by chance at this point, found and followed the Humboldt River. They supplied themselves by hunting, and gradually and one by one, butchering their draft oxen. Nancy Kelsey, the indomitable wife of Benjamin was reduced to carrying her year-old daughter, herself barefoot… and yet, as one of their comrades recollected later, “she bore the fatigues of the journey with so much heroism, patience and kindness…” She had embarked on the journey, declaring that she would rather endure hardships with her husband, than anxieties over his absence.

 Gradually, as historian George Stewart put it, “their journey became one of those starvation marches so common in the history of the West”. They soldiered on through the desert, eventually finding their way over the Sierra at the Sonora Pass, only to be caught in the wilderness canyons at the headwaters of the Stanislaus River. They did not eat well until they reached the lower stretches of the gentle San Joaquin valley where the men--- still well supplied with powder and shot--- bagged enough deer for a feast. They arrived at a ranch nearby early in November of 1841.

 They were the first party of emigrants to arrive overland, although with scarcely more than they wore on their backs, or carried. Among their numbers were included the future first  mayor of San Jose, the founder of the city of Stockton, and the founder of Chico, a delegate to the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln, and two or three who were merely quietly prosperous. The very last living member of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party died in 1903 at the age of 83. Given their hairs-breadth adventures on the emigrant trail, I imagine that he, like  most of his comrades would have been pleasantly surprised at having the words  “natural causes” or “old age”  appear anywhere in their obituaries.

Into the West - Truckee's Trail Part One

Hardly anyone has ever heard of this particular party of men, women and children. They crossed the continent in 1844, and  blazed a trail in the wilderness, being the first to bring wagons all the way to California.  They  walked nearly two thousand miles, across plain and desert,  finally hauling their wagons up a sheer mountain cliff. They set out into country unknown to most, all for a gamble that life at the other end of the trail would be better. They are a footnote in the history books,  and  go by several different names, because no one was ever entirely sure afterwards who their leader was, or if they managed their epic trek by committee. There was a diarist, but nothing of his account of the journey has never been found, and there would never be a tireless letter-writer or professional memoirist among them. There are no extensive first-hand contemporary accounts, for they were fairly ordinary people. It was their journey which was extraordinary.   In the year 1844, for all intents and purposes these United States, , extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi/Missouri River. West of the rivers, two-thirds of the continental territories theoretically American were an unknown quantity. Desert, high plains, mountains, rivers… only a bare handful of explorers, missionaries and fur trappers had ever seen for sure what lay beyond the jumping-off point at Council Bluffs, Independence, St. Joseph. There was a slender and perilous established overland trail to Santa Fe, and beyond that to the thinly-populated enclave of Spanish and then Mexican territories in California. That trail wound through the scrub and deserts of the Southwest, traveled mostly by professional traders and merchants, heavily armed and escorting great lumbering Conestoga wagons packed with profitable trade goods: fabrics and glass, gunpowder and tools, for the markets in Santa Fe, and the outlaying pueblos. They were businessmen, with little interest in lingering in the inhospitable deserts along most of their way.   There was another trail, also— a northern track which followed along the Platte River, through deserts and mountains, and eventually terminated in Oregon. Lewis and Clarke, the fur-trapping brigades… all had gone that way, by boat, on horseback and on foot. By the 1840s, hearing of the rich lands in the Pacific Northwest, farmers and small tradesmen had also begun to follow the siren call. An agricultural depression, epidemics of malaria and yellow-fever, a bit of manifest destiny, ambition and just plain restlessness no doubt played a part. Families across what is now the middle-west sold off land and assets;. This was not a journey for the impoverished, or the reckless. Aside from a wagon, and stock to pull it, these adventurers would have to bring along supplies,  tools, clothes, bedding and cooking gear, spare parts for the wagon, perhaps seeds and roots to plant a new garden in the Willamette Valley, or by Sutter’s Fort in far California. There might be some little space in the wagon for some books, and china and other small treasures, for the wagons were small, and food took up most of the space. The larger wagons, purpose-built for the trail were about four feet wide, ten to twelve feet long, covered with waterproofed canvas stretched over four or five arched hickory bows, although many families made do with ordinary farm wagons, fitted out with a cover. The draft animal of choice was not the horse, as many would think. Horses were expensive, and the road was rough, too rough in the early days for even the toughest horse in dray harness. Mules made a good showing on the southern trail, but they were expensive. Most emigrants could better afford ox teams; four to six pair to a wagon, patient and plodding, guided by a driver who walked by the lead team and shouted verbal commands.   The wagons rolled on metal-tired wheels; there was no suspension system, no springs. Most emigrants walked, by choice, rather than endure jolting along in a wagon. It would take six months, easily… and in the early days there was no known road, and only two or three outposts all along that way to buy additional supplies, or to mail a letter. The pioneers looked out from the noisy clamor of St. Joseph, and Independence, and Council Bluffs, at last years tracks and ruts, overgrown with the new grass that would feed their ox teams on the first part of the journey, as soon as it was grown tall enough… at wilderness. They would step off the safe perch, on the riverbank at the edge of civilization, and swing out like a trapeze artist across the vast, emptiness, guided by their own good sense, and hard work, faith and hope and no little amount of luck.   Late in of May, 1844 such a party of emigrants stepped off from Council Bluffs, in company with a larger party bound for Oregon. Ten families, with as many (or a few more) wagons, with all their stock and worldly goods had elected an ex-trapper and blacksmith named Elisha Stephens as their own leader. Daringly, they  intended to strike off the established trail for Oregon at Fort Hall, and head for California.   Stephen’s party of fifty souls included eight women and fifteen children. A little under half of them were an extended clan of Irish immigrants;  Martin Murphy, and his three sons, with their wives and children. Martin Murphy had moved by degrees from Ireland, to Canada, and then to Missouri. His wife and three grandchildren had died in a malaria epidemic;. The clan sought a healthier climate, and Martin Murphy thought all the better of California— still held by Mexico— for it being nominally a Catholic country. Dr. John Townsend, very possibly the most educated person in the party, also looked to a healthier climate; his wife, Elizabeth was supposed to be in frail health. Elizabeth Townsend’s orphaned younger brother, Moses Schallenberger, counted as a man for this journey, at the age of 17. The teenaged half-Indian sons of Caleb Greenwood probably also counted as men. Caleb Greenwood had roamed all over the Rockies as a fur-trapper, twenty years before. Greenwood was thought to be in his eighties, but still hale and vigorous. Another old mountain-man, Isaac Hitchcock also felt the lure of the west, traveling with his oldest daughter and her children.   None of these men; Stephens, Greenwood or Hitchcock had been all along the route they intended to followl to California, although there is some evidence that Hitchock had been in California some twenty years before, and it is thought that Stephens may have had experience as a wagon-master on the Santa Fe Trail. Stephens seems also to have been enormously respected by the other men of the California bound element. There were none of the bitter divisions that fractured other parties, under the stress of moving the heavy-laden wagons an inexorable fifteen miles a day, and chivvying the stock herd, finding water and safe pasturage, of being dusty and exhausted and hungry, day after grinding day, and knowing that the hardest part of the journey was at the end of it.   Fifteen miles a day, more or less; this is the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must accomplish this before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on, perhaps with fatal consequences. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water and the men going to hunt for meat, that when dried over the fire and stored away might mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.   All accounts of the emigrant trail agree, some of them very lyrically, that the first weeks out on the trail are the most pleasant, an adventure and an extended picnic. Dr. Townsend’s journal, as he was nominated the secretary from the Stephens Party, is long gone but many others remain. The prairie grass is lush and green, the land gently rolling. The oxen are healthy and rested, the burden of travel not onerous. Elderly men and women in San Jose, or Portland, penning their memoirs early in the 20th century will look back on it as the most marvelous adventure of their childhood; running barefoot in the green grass, the white canvas wagon-top silhouetted at the top of a gentle rise against a blue, blue sky, meals around a campfire, and sleeping under the stars. They will remember seeing herds of buffalo, a sea of brown woolly backs as far as the horizon goes, the trick of scrambling up from the ground over a slow-moving wagon-wheel, and how the wagon jolted over every little rock and rut. They will remember the look of the Platte River, wide and shallow— and inch thick and a mile wide, so it was said and how they also said it was too thick to drink and too thin to plough. For small children, alive in the immediate day to day present, and innocently trusting their parents as all-wise, all-capable beings, those first weeks on the trail could only be a grand adventure, an endless picnic excursion, with something new and wonderful always around the next bend.   Their mothers probably did not have quite such a sunny memory, for the  picnic would be well stocked with ants, and dust and the endless chore of cooking over an open fire, of setting up camp every night, and unrolling the bedding, or carrying buckets of fresh water… and that after an exhausting day of either walking alongside the wagon or riding in it. Women’s work on a farm in the 19th century was grueling enough by our standards, but in the settled lands they had left there was a community, family, friends, an orderly routine. These eight women, and the older girls would have formed their own little community; discovering again that a bucket of milk hung from the wagon-box in the morning would have churned itself into a small lump of butter at the end of the days’ journey, and dried beans left to soak overnight in the dying heat of the evening campfire would be ready to cook the next morning. There would have been the challenge of how to contrive meals out of cornmeal and flour, dried beans, dried fruit, salt-pork, how to do at least a minimal laundry along the trail, how to glean edible greens and wild plums from the thickets in the creek bottoms. The presence of Dr. Townsend, with his medical expertise, and small range of surgical kit must have also been very reassuring, most especially as the party reached the landmark of Independence Rock, shortly before July 4th. There, Mrs. James Miller gave birth to a baby daughter, named Ellen Independence Miller. When the party moved on towards the distant Rocky Mountains and Fort Hall (in what is now Idaho), it was on a shortcut of Isaac Greenwood’s suggesting. It would later be called “Sublette’s Cutoff” and it saved them five days of travel.   The westbound trail split at Fort Hall. From then on, the Murphys, the Townsends, the Millers and their infant daughter, Old Hitchcock and his daughter and all the others would be on their own, finding their own trail in the faintest of traces left from a small party of wagon-train emigrants  who attempted the California route the summer before.

Into the West - To Truckee's Trail - Part Two

The eleven wagons led by Elisha Stephens and guided by Greenwood, the old trapper and mountain-man struck off the established trail towards Oregon, sometime  in the middle of August. They were following faint wheel tracks of a group led the previous year , the Bidwell-Bartleson Part, who had  followed the Humboldt River, a sluggish and marshy trickle which eventually petered out in a sandy desert basin well short of the mountains. They had been unable to find a pass leading up into the Sierra Nevada, had gone south and eventually abandoned their wagons near Owens Lake. They reached  California by going around the mountains entirely. This was a desperate and impractical solution for the Stephens Party.   The Murphys, the Townsends and the others all camped by the desert marsh, no doubt consulting over what they should do next. Experienced frontier hands Greenwood and Hitchcock were convinced there had to be a way up into the Sierra, more or less directly west of where they were camped. They consulted, mountain-man fashion with a curious, but seemingly friendly old Indian man who wandered into camp. The old Indian was the chief of the Piute tribe, and had made the acquaintance of the explorer John C. Fremont— traveling into California with Fremont, even. The chief made it tribal policy to be courteous and friendly to those settlers and explorers passing through Piute lands. Communication seems to have been through sign language, and pantomime. Was there a pass into the mountain-range? Greenwood or Hitchcock modeled a range of mountains in the sand at their feet and pointed at the real mountains. The old Indian looked at it thoughtfully, and carefully remodeled the sand range to show a small river running down between two. Could there be a gateway through the mountains?   He seemed quite positive there was. The next day he rode ahead towards the distant mountains with Townsend and Stephens, while the rest of the party rested and waited for their return. When they did, they brought the good news; there was a river, coming down into the desert, cutting a passable gateway. Thy also brought the bad news; it was a hard journey across barren desert, and no water at all save for a small, bad-tasting hot-spring halfway there. But the party had no choice, other than chance the unknown desert and the mountain pass which might or might not be there. Careful preparations were made; every thing that could be made water-tight was filled to the brim. They cut armfuls of green rushes and brush as fodder for the cattle and their few horses. Some accounts have them deciding to start across the desert at sundown and just to keep going, all night, the next day and into the next night. This would take advantage of the night’s cool temperatures, minimize the need for water and get them out of the desert fast. As much water as possible would be reserved for the oxen, on whose strength and pulling power survival depended. Perhaps the smallest children would be tucked up in the wagons for the grueling trek; everyone else would walk, stumbling half-asleep under a desert moon.   Dawn, morning, day… still moving. Riders led their horses to spare them; the march only paused to water the oxen, and pass around some cold biscuits and dried meat by way of food for the people. At the hot spring in the middle of the desert, the animals drink, but not with any relish. They are fed with the green rushes brought from the last camping place. The emigrants rest in the shade of their wagons for a few hours in the hottest part of the day, resuming as the heat of the day fades. Sometime early the next morning, the weary, thirsty oxen begin perking up, stepping a little faster. The wind coming down from the mountains is bringing the scent of fresh water. There is a very real danger to the wagons, if the teamsters cannot control the oxen. Hastily, the men draw the wagons together and unhitch the teams: better for them to run loose to the water they can smell, than risk damaging the wagons in a maddened stampede. In a few hours, the men return with the teams, sated and sodden with all the water they can drink from the old Indian’s river.   It is the most beautiful river anyone has ever seen, spilling down from the mountains, cold with the chill of snow-melt even in fall, even more beautiful after the desert. All the way on that first scout, the old Indian kept saying a word which sounded like “tro-kay” to Greenwood and Stephens; it actually means “all right” or “very well”, but they assumed it was his name, and baptized the river accordingly as the Truckee River. They follow it towards the looming mountains, hurrying on a little, because it is now October. By mid-month they are camped in meadowlands, just below where the canyon cuts deep through the mountains, the last but most difficult part of the journey. Snow has already fallen, remaining on  the ground, and they have come to where a creek joins Truckee’s River. The creek-bed looks to be easier for the wagons to follow farther up into the mountain pass, but the river might be more direct. The decision is made to send a small, fast-moving party along the river, six of the fittest and strongest, on horseback with enough supplies, to move quickly and bring help and additional supplies from Sutter’s Fort. Four men and two women, including Elizabeth Townsend ride out on the 14th of November, 1844.   The fast-moving horseback party followed the river south, as snow continued falling. In two days they were on the shores of Lake Tahoe, working their way around the western shore to another small creek, which led them over the summit, and down along the Rubicon River, out of the snow, although not entirely out of danger in the rough country. The eastern slope is a steep palisade, the western slope more gradual, but rough, cut with steep-banked creeks. The fast party  reached the safety of Sutter’s Fort early in December, while the remainder with their wagons and children still struggled along the promising creek route. They came at last to an alpine valley with a small ice-water lake at the foot of a canyon leading up to the final summit.   At times, the only open passage along the creek was actually in the water, which was cruelly hard on the oxen’s feet. By the time they reached the lake, there was two feet of snow on the ground and time for another hard choice; a decision to leave six of the wagons at the lake, slaughter the worst-off of the oxen for food, and cache everything but food and essentials. Three of the young men,  Allan Montgomery, Joseph Foster and Moses Schallenberger, who was barely seventeen years old, volunteered to remain. They would build a rough cabin and winter over, guarding the wagons and property at the lake and living from what they could hunt. The rest of the party pooled the remaining ox teams and moved on with five wagons, up into the canyon towards the crest of the Sierra Nevada. They encountered a slope so steep they had to empty out the contents and carry everything by hand, doubling the ox teams and pulling up the wagons one by one. A one point, a sheer vertical ledge halfway up the rocky slope blocked further progress. A desperate search revealed a small cleft through the rock, just wide enough to lead the oxen and horses up it, single file. The teams were re-yoked at the top. They hoisted up the empty wagons by ropes and chains, while men pushed from below, and the women and children labored up the narrow footpath, carrying armfuls of precious supplies. By dint of much exhausting labor, they reached the summit on November 25th, and struggled on through the snow, while the three volunteers returned to the lake. There, the two men and teenaged boy hastily built a small cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, roofed with ox-hides and settled in for the winter, not knowing that the winter would be very much harsher than back east.   The main party struggled on. Although they were over the pass, and gradually heading downhill, they were still in the high mountains. With snow falling, cutting a trail and keeping the wagons moving was a brutally laborious job. A week, ten days of it was all that exhausted men and ox teams could handle. They set up a cold camp on the South Fork of the Yuba River, and made one last, calculated gamble on survival for all. They would build another cabin, make arbors of branches and the canvas wagon tops, and butcher the remaining oxen. The women and children would stay, with two men to protect them, while the remaining husbands and fathers would take the few horses and as little food as possible, and continue on to Sutter’s Fort, returning as soon as possible with supplies and team animals. So they made the bitter decision before changing weather, and diminishing food supplies forced worse circumstances upon them. Before the men rode away, the wife of Martin Murphy’s oldest son gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Yuba Murphy. It was nearly two months before a rescue party was able to return to the survival camp on the Yuba River, just in the nick of time, for the women and children were down to eating boiled hides.   Meanwhile, twenty miles east, the snow had piled up level to the roof of the little cabin by the ice-water lake. Foster, Montgomery and Schallenberger realized that the game they had counted on being able to hunt had all retreated below the snow, far down the mountains. What they had left would not be able to feed them through the winter. From hickory wagon bows and rawhide, Montgomery and Foster contrived three sets of snowshoes and packed up what they could carry. In one day, they had climbed to the top of the pass, but the snowshoes were clumsy things and the snow was soft. Young Schallenberger was not as strong as the older men, and agonizing leg cramps left him unable to take more than a few steps. Continuing on was impossible for him, survival through the winder at the cabin impossible for all three. He returned alone, living for the next three months on the food supplies they had not been able to carry, and trapping coyotes and foxes. Fox proved almost edible, coyote meat quite vile, but he kept the frozen coyotes anyway, lest the supply of foxes ever run out. When the rescue party came to the winter camp for the women and children in late February, one of them, Dennis Martin continued on snowshoes over the pass, hoping to find young Schallenberger still alive. With a hard crust to the snow, the two of them had an easier time of it, and caught up to the main party on the Lower Bear River.   Two years later, the little cabin in which Moses Schallenberger spent most of the winter would shelter families from the Donner party who were caught by winter at about the same time of year, in the same place. A fractious, bitterly split party would meet a ghastly and protracted disaster… and yet, everyone has heard of them, and the pass through the Sierra Nevada, that the Stephens party discovered and labored successfully to bring wagons over, while increasing their strength by two born on the journey… is named for the group who lost half their number to starvation in its’ shadow.

Forting Up (Part One)

Considering all those cinematic or literary occasions in which an emigrant wagon train on the California/Oregon trail was pictured being attacked by a war-party of Indians, it actually happened as represented on very few occasions. That is, a defensive circle of wagons, with the pioneers being well-dug in while the Indians ride around on horseback, whooping and shouting to beat the band, and firing volleys of arrows at them. Very likely, more emigrants died in accidents with firearms than were ever actually killed by Indian attack. A little disconcerting for the fan of westerns to find this out; kind of like discovering that most cowboys didn't have much use for a six-shooter, and that most western towns were really rather refreshingly law-abiding places. It ruins a whole lot of plots, knowing of these inconvenient verities. But those historians who become passionately interested in the stories of the trail, the frontier, the cattle baronies; they are not terribly surprised. As with everything, the more one looks -  the more nuance appears. But of such dramatic incidents are books made, non and fiction alike.

Why does this image reoccur, in the face of considerable scholarship to the contrary? Besides the inherent drama in the stories of the westering pioneers and gold-rushers and the desire of those later telling the stories to heighten the drama, the biggest reason may be that those who took part in the great transcontinental migrations fully anticipated encounters of that sort. They had two centuries of bitter history to draw upon, of grudges and warfare and atrocities on both sides. Of two cultures colliding, of ancient grudges breaking into fresh enmity; why would it be any different west of the Mississippi than it had been east of it?

Amazingly,  for at least two decades, until well after the Civil War, the wagon-train pioneers encountered little open hostility from those various tribes whose territories they passed through. Not of the open sort described above, anyway. There was a degree of petty thievery and low-level harrassment, of oxen, horses and mules stolen or strayed at night, sniping from the badlands along the Humboldt River, and sometimes single wagons and small parties of travelers beset, robbed or murdered at any point along the way.

There are any number of reasons for this relative tranquility, some of them overlapping. In the early years, there were relatively few wagon parties venturing over the trail during the course of the trail season. They were transitory, well-armed and usually well led, and had absolutely no desire to pick a fight with warrior-tribes like the Sioux, the horse-lords of the upper plains. Other tribes along the route took the opportunity to do business with the wagon-train parties, either trading commodities or labor in helping them to cross rivers, and as historian George Steward pointed out, it must have gotten pretty boring in the winter camps in the Rockies and the upper plains. A new set of travelers passing through their lands offered at least some interest to the same old routine.

Until the Civil War there were only a handful of incidents where Indians made a concerted, sustained and ultimately effective attack on a wagon train party;  twenty members of the Ward party (including women and children) were overrun and gruesomely massacred near Ft. Hall in 1854, and 44 emigrants of Elijah Utters' company met a similar fate after being besieged near Castle Butte, Idaho in 1860. Considering the enormous numbers of emigrants and Indians wandering around, fully armed and not particularly inclined to trust each other very much, the length of the trail and the wide-open nature of the country, this is a very fortunate record indeed.

But there was one single incident which puts the deaths of the Ward and Utter parties into the shade, and besides which all the other incidents pale. There was indeed one particularly brutal and horrendous massacre of wagon-train emigrants which started almost exactly as outlined in all those melodramatic books and movies: the pioneers forted up in a circle of the wagons, and besieged for days while awaiting rescue by the cavalry.

This happened in 1857, when the opening of the trail season  saw a number of prosperous but restlessly ambitious emigrants taking the trail west, many of them linked by ties of kin and friendship: the Bakers of Caroll County, Arkansas, and the Huff and Fancher clans, from Benton County, were joined at some point along the long trail from the jumping-off place at the edge of the sea of grass by families with the prosaic names of Tackett, Jones, Mitchell and Prewitt. Alexander Fancher, the paterfamilias and trail-boss of the Fanchers was experienced in the ways of the emigrant trail, having gone back and forth several times. He and his kin intended to settle for good in California and to that end had bought not only their wives and children, but much of their portable property and savings, and a large herd (estimated at 800-1,000) of long-horned Texas cattle. Some of the party were Argonauts, intending to look for gold, but the Fanchers’ cattle were their gold, and intended to market them at a profit to the hungry gold miners in California. They had already registered a brand, for their new ranch and herd.

By 1857 the emigrant trail was not the long and desperate march through unsettled wilderness that it had been ten  or twelve years before. The US Army had managed to sketchily garrison and patrol the Platte River Valley, and Mormon settlements spreading out from Salt Lake City offered one last and often life-saving chance at rest and resupply, before the final calculated leap into the desert and over the sheer mountain wall of the Sierra Nevada. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the other families, numbering about a hundred and fourty men, women and children, arrived in the Salt Lake City area at the end of August. After consultation, they decided that they were too late in the season to venture the northern trail, following the Humboldt River into the desert where it sank eventually into the sand, and up the long rocky climb up the Truckee River to the mountain pass named after the emigrant party which had so famously left their own traverse too late.

Experienced and sensible, Alexander Fancher and his fellows would not chance being trapped in the snow; not with their long train of wagons, their herd of cattle and their horses. They would take the southern route, the old Spanish Trail that lead down through the Mojave Desert, through the less precipitous passes farther south. (Roughly following present-day I-15, from Salt Lake City, Los Vegas and San Bernardino) It would be a long haul through various deserts, and a couple of hard pulls through mountainous terrain, but nothing like the cruel snows which had doomed the Donner-Reed Party ten years before. By early September they had reached Cedar City, the last outpost for resupply before descent of the Virgin River George and the long desert crossing below it. They met a cold reception from the Mormon settlers there, and were not able to purchase any supplies. Doubtless shrugging it off, they moved on south and camped in a pleasant mountain valley at the foot of the Iron Mountains and adjacent the Spanish Trail.

This camping place offered generous pasturage and water, but on the morning of September 7th the emigrants began to be attacked by a large war-band of Piute Indians. Dismayingly, it soon became clear that the Indians were unusually persistent; this was no quick smash and grab ambush, a sudden screaming foray at dawn, with a handful of casualties and a few cattle or horses stolen in a few minutes. This was a deadly, concerted siege. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the others swiftly forted up, chaining their wagons together and digging hasty trenches; they held out for five days. Seven of them were killed outright, another twenty or so wounded, and dismayingly, they began to run low on ammunition, and were tormented by an inability to reach water without being repeatedly sniped at. Of two men who attempted to fetch water from the spring closest to the encampment, one was shot down, and the other escaped -  but not before seeing that the man who shot them was not an Indian.

But this was not very unusual;  there were brigands all over the west who pretended to be Indians as a cover for robbery and murder, and there were whispers of white turncoats among the various tribes. Still and all, when the cavalry appeared on the horizon, probably everyone in the besieged encampment took a deep breath of relief. Here was rescue at hand; well armed frontiersmen like themselves. Not actually the cavalry, for this was still Mormon territory; this was the local militia, their leaders advancing under a white flag, with good news for the emigrants.

They could leave, the militia leader said. They had been able to call off the Piutes and negotiate some kind of truce with them. But they would have to disarm and leave their wagons and cattle and horse herd, and walk back under escort of the militia to Cedar City. Oh, the children and the wounded could be taken in wagons, but everything else would have to be left behind. No doubt the Fanchers and the Bakers, the Prewitts and the Tacketts and their wives and older children did not like the idea much,  but they had their lives and what small valuables they could carry on them. And so they left the wagon encampment in three parties, trusting the men who had come to their rescue. First came some wagons with the wounded, some of the women with babies and small children in it, then another group of women with the older children on foot, and then the men, each of them escorted by a militiaman.

And when a prearranged signal was given by the militia leader, they turned and executed the men, and all of the women and children but for seventeen of them who were babies or assumed to be too young to ever remember what they had seen at the place called Mountain Meadows.

Forting Up (Part 2)

The execution of approximately a hundred and twenty men, women,  and yes, children also -  of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train party stands out particularly among revolting accounts of massacres in the old West, and not just for the number of victims. The most notorious 19th century massacres usually involved Indians and either settlers or soldiers in some combination, overrunning a settlement or encampment, or ambushing a military unit or a wagon-train and slaughtering all in or after a brief and bitter fight. Sometimes this was the overt intent of the aggressor, or just customary practice in the long and bitter Indian Wars; ugly deeds which can be given some fig-leaf of rationalization by attributing them to the heat of battle. But Mountain Meadows was carefully planned beforehand and committed in the coldest of cold blood. How it came to happen is a story almost unknown and incredible to modern ears; bitter fruit of the poisoned tree which had its roots in the persecutions of earlier Mormon settlements in what is now the mid-West. A recitation of the events and reasons for this would make this account several times as long. Sufficient to say as did the character of Dr. Sardius McPheeters, that the Mormons came to realize that they could only get along with their immediate neighbors if they had no neighbors, and they decamped en masse for the wilds of Utah Territory.

There they set about building their new city, on the shores of a salt lake at the foot of the Wasatch mountain range. Driven by zeal, missionaries for the Church of Latter Day Saints traveled and proselytized fearlessly and widely. Eager and hardworking converts to the new church arrived in droves, ready to build that new and shining society in the desert wilderness. It has been no mean accomplishment, outlasting all of the other 19th century social-religious-intellectual communes: Brook Farm and the Shakers, the Amana Colony and any number of ambitious and idealistic cities on the hill. Most of these places barely survived beyond the disgrace or death of their founder, and the disillusion of their membership.

That the mid 19th century Mormons did so must be credited to the iron will, organizational abilities and dynamic leadership of Brigham Young. President of the church, apostle and successor to murdered founder Joseph Smith, Young was also appointed governor of the Utah Territory by then president of the US, Millard Fillmore. Essentially, Utah and the Mormon settlements were a theocracy to a degree not seen since the very early days of the Puritan colonies. Young and his church continued to have a contentious relationship with the US government. Who would actually be in charge; the civil authorities represented by the US Government, or the religious establishment, personified by Young, in his position at the apex of LDS authority? Church-approved polygamy rattled mainstream Americans to no end, since many suspected that it was a wholly self-serving justification for the indulging of male lusts. (The Victorians generally entertained lively suspicions about male lusts, which would today not disgrace a university women's studies department.) On their side, memories among the Mormon settlers of their persecutions in Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas were still raw, even as more American settlers continued to move westwards to California and Oregon. Isolation in the far West turned out to be less absolute every year.

By 1857 rumors were flying thick and fast, shouted from every meeting place of Mormons in the Territory that an American military invasion was on the way, with the stated intention of deposing the theocracy, murdering every believing Mormon and laying waste to the settlements they had built with so much heartbreaking labor over the previous decade. And early that spring, shortly after the Bakers and the Fanchers had departed Arkansas, a popular and much-loved Mormon missionary, Parley Pratt had been murdered there by the estranged husband of one of his plural wives. As historian Will Bagley wrote in his account of the massacre, Brigham Young may have been respected -  but Parley Pratt was loved. And when there were false rumors passed around that some of his murderers were among the men in the Fancher-Baker train, there was stirred up a perfect storm of paranoia and millennial fears. Brigham Young had ordered that a number of outlaying Mormon colonies in California, Wyoming and Nevada to immediately withdraw, and for his people to stockpile supplies and steel themselves for all-out war.

And the Fanchers and the Bakers and all their friends and their children, their cattle herd and their wealth of wagons and property were right in the middle of it, all unknowning. They were nearly the last large emigrant party of that year. They also had the astounding ill-luck to be traveling south as tensions in the Utah settlements mounted in anticipation of an all out apocalyptic war between the Saints and the forces arrayed against them. Brigham Young had declared martial law, sealing the borders and outlawing travel through out the territory without a permit. Having already departed Salt Lake City by the time this requirement had been made public, the Fanchers and their party had no such permit, and were probably not even aware that such was required of them. They were probably aware, since they had not been able to purchase supplies from Mormon settlers, that such necessities were being stockpiled in anticipation of a war.

What they did not realize, possibly not until that last horrifying moment when the words "Do your duty!" was shouted and the men of the party were gunned down by the militiamen escorting them, was that all unknowning, they had become the enemy. Since departing from Salt Lake City, they had become identified with the advancing US Army, with the persecutors of the Saints in Missouri, and the murderers of the Prophet Joseph Smith, and with the murderer of Parley Pratt. Rumors -  most of them concocted after the fact  as justifications for the massacre - had them leaving poisoned food for the Indians, boasting of rape and murder, allowing their cattle to trample crops and numerous other offensive incivilities. It is fairly certain that the local Piutes were encouraged to steal cattle from emigrant trains by no less than Brigham Young himself, who had built strong ties between his church and the local tribes. The Indians were also encouraged to attack Americans, which appears to have baffled the tribes somewhat, since they had been discouraged from doing so before. In the mean time, an emissary from Salt Lake City George Smith visited the southern hamlets of Parowan and Cedar City, steeling those militia units for battle, and encouraging residents to resist an American invasion, and telling them that they might not be able to wait for orders - but to use their own initiative.

At this late date, and because just about every witnesses who gave testimony afterwards were up to their necks in the matter, it is impossible to deduce whose idea it was to attack the Fancher-Baker train, only that once proposed it seemed to be a course of action simultaneously agreed upon. There were meetings held by various authorities in Cedar City and Parowan; at one of those meetings on September 6th it was reported that men in the Fancher train had boasted of being among the mob that had killed Joseph Smith, and that they would wait at Mountain Meadows for the approaching Army and join in on the resulting attacks against Mormons in Utah. A messenger was sent to Salt Lake City asking for Brigham Young's advice, but it was a six-day round trip journey. Another messenger was sent to the south, where the LDS Indian Agent John D. Lee had already gone to assemble the Mormon's Indian allies. But by the next day the Piute had already begin skirmishing with the Fancher train at Mountain Meadows. Brigham Young did not even receive the message from the dispatch rider until the night of the 10th. His instructions to allow the Fancher Party to pass unmolested -  although he allowed that the Indians might do as they pleased as regards emigrant trains -  was not received until too late. Of the local authorities who had taken some part in the massacre, only John D. Lee was convicted and sentenced. He was the one who had carried a white flag into the Fancher encampment and told them that their safety had been negotiated with the attacking Indians. He was executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows in 1877, twenty years afterwards, and to the end acknowledging that he was a scapegoat for others involved.

The seventeen surviving children were retrieved from the local families who had fostered them after the murders of their parents in 1859 and returned to their kin in Arkansas. Nothing of the property and possessions of their parents was ever recovered. Several children, while they were living in the Utah settlements, observed men driving their fathers' ox-teams, and women wearing their mothers' dresses and jewelry.

A dreadful story, of murder and sanctioned looting, committed by Americans against other Americans. But within three years of it happening, the armies of the Union and the Confederacy would be doing much the same on American soil, to American citizens who were their cousins, brothers and friends, on a degree that would put what happened in a meadow in Southern Utah far into the shade.

Before the World Rushed In

Growing up in California conferred a bit of an advantage,  in that one could be aware of all the other layers behind the glitzy modern TV and Hollywood, West Coast/Left Coast, surfing safari/Haight-Ashbury layer that everyone with an awareness level above that of a mollusk knows. But peel that layer back, and there is another layer; the pre-World-War II layer, of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, of sleepy little towns buried in orange groves, Hollywood Boulevard a dirt track and Beverley Hills a wilderness; go back another couple of layers, and you arrive at a place that always seems to have had a dreaming, evanescent feel about it to me; California in the first half of the 19th century, a sleepy little backwater at the far end of the known world, a six-month to a year-long journey from practically anywhere else on the planet loosely defined as "civilization.".

In many ways, that California marked the high tide-line of the Spanish empire in the New World: when the great tide of the conquistadores washed out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century looking for gold, honor, glory and land, and roared across the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping Mexico and most of South America in consecutive mighty tides,  seeping into the trackless wastes of what is now the American Southwest. That tide  eventually lapped gently at the far northern coast, and  crested in the 18th century, dropping  a linked chain of twenty-one missions, four presidios or military garrisons* and three small pueblos**, one of which failed almost immediately. Mostly on the coast, or near to it, this was the framework on which hung the charming, but ultimately fragile society of Spanish (later Mexican) colonial society in what was called Alta, or Upper California.

It was a rural society, of enormous holdings, or ranchos, presided over by an aristocracy of landowners who had been granted their vast holdings by the king, or the civil government, who ran cattle or sheep on their holdings which were worked at by native Indians. The great holdings produced hides, wool and tallow, and their owners lived lives of comfort, if no very great luxury, and from all accounts were openhandedly generous, amazingly hospitable, devout - perhaps a little touchy about personal insult and apt to fight duels over it, but that could said of most men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The climate was a temperate and kindly one, especially in comparison with much of the rest of that continent, winters being mild, and summers fair. The missions, which in addition to the care of souls had an eye towards self-sufficiency, did a little more in the way of farming than the rancheros; with great orchards of olives and citrus, and vineyards.

Far from the eye and control of central authority, they managed a fair degree of self-sufficiency; the scattering of structures from that era which survived to the 20th century set a kind of architectural tone to the whole area. Stucco and tile, courtyards, miradors and balconies, which looked back to cathedrals in Spain and Moorish castles in Grenada were adapted in adobe and brick, copied in stucco, and hung with church bells brought with great effort from the Old Country. Richard Henry Dana's classic "Two Years Before the Mast"  is an eye-witness account of the trade in hides with the rancheros, in the 1830ies, and this novel offers an accessible description of what it looked like, in the 1840ies, as well as the difficulties involved in even traveling to such a distant fringe of the world. The immortal “Zorro” movies and TV show is set in this milieu, which is probably where most people know of this little, long-gone world.

The Spanish empire slowly lost it's grip, and independent Mexico fought a rear-guard action for a while. I think they succeeded for a fair number of years, keeping their pleasant and gracious outpost, because of it's very isolation, but other national powers waxed as Spain waned. The British had Canada to the north, and trade interests in the Pacific Northwest, the Russians had Alaska, and even a tiny foot-hold at Ft. Ross, on the coast of present-day Sonoma county, north of San Francisco. There was even a vaguely Swiss interest in Alta California, due to the presence of John Augustus Sutter, who founded an agricultural establishment where Sacramento is now -  which inadvertently brought and end to the gracious life of the rancheros. The Spanish who ransacked Mexico and South America looking for gold, even sending a fruitless expedition far into the present-day American Southwest, eventually gave up looking for gold on the fringes of their empire. I is the purest sort of irony that gold in greater quantities than they had ever dreamed of was found, initially discovered during construction of a millrace for a saw-mill that Sutter had contracted to build at Coloma in the foothills, as he needed lumber for his various entrepreneurial projects.

*San Jose, El Puebla Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles sobre El Rio Porcinuncula, and Branciforte
**San Diego, Monterray, San Francisco, Santa Barbara