The Year of Decision 1846

BY BERNARD DEVOTO

CHAPTERS XII-XVIII

DESTINY IN THE MAKING

The Early Events

In 1846 the United States was moving to occupy the West. A feeling which found for itself the name Manifest Destiny was awakening across America. Americans knew little about the West, but it was a dream deep in their traditions and deep in their blood, and now the logic of geography had somehow become imperative. There was a quickening, an expectation, and as part of it some twentyfive hundred Americans were preparing to make, in the summer of 1846, the emigration across the great unknown that took our national frontier to the Pacific Ocean in one gigantic stride.

In the White House was President James K. Polk. He entered office facing a crisis in foreign relations which involved the possibility of two wars. Texas, whose independence Mexico had never recognized, had just been annexed to the United States. Polk’s platform required him to settle the Oregon Question — and to settle it by rejecting British claims to any part of Oregon. Polk believed — and rightly — that his election signified the desire of his countrymen to acquire all the remaining territory west of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, the vast spaces known as California and New Mexico, which belonged to Mexico.

Though he was willing to fight both Mexico and Great Britain if necessary, Polk believed that he could avoid both wars. He terminated the joint occupation of Oregon and began a negotiation which finally allayed the war passions of both nations and compromised the dispute by establishing the present boundary. He had taken a firm stand toward Great Britain and he took a firmer one toward Mexico, hoping by a show of force to settle the Texas question and the longunpaid American claims in the happiest way — the American acquisition, by purchase, of California and New Mexico. He ordered an army under Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande (in territory claimed by both Texas and Mexico). He sent secret instructions to Commodore Sloat of the Pacific Squadron, to occupy the California ports if war should break out. He sent John Slidell to Mexico, to present the American proposals. And he intrigued secretly with Santa Anna, who might become President of Mexico again and who assured Polk that he favored the American demands.

Great events were preparing in California. Captain John Charles Frémont was there on his third exploring expedition, boiling with ambition and eager to take part in any war or revolution that might break out. Meanwhile another American in California, also aware that the province was ripe for the plucking, was preparing to travel east, meet this year’s emigrants, and turn as many as possible of them to California—to assist annexation, revolution, or perhaps merely speculation in real estate. This was Lansford Hastings, a petty adventurer who had written a highly undependable guide for emigrants. With Hastings traveled James Clyman, a master mountain man, one of the honorable company who had explored this vast and almost unknown area, who knew its ways and its dangers — as the movers did not.

The emigrants hold our attention. For they, with the events mentioned here, made the year 1846 a decisive turning point in our history. They fixed the mold of the future.

THE YEAR OF DECISION

1846

by BERNARD DEVOTO

12

THOUGH it was to be a drouth summer throughout the West, the prairies had one of their wettest springs. The citizenry of Independence had built six miles of macadam road to the Missouri in order to keep their commerce, but had omitted grading their own streets. It was still raining in early May, wagons bogged to the hubs, and one waded to Colonel Noland’s tavern or Robert Weston’s blacksmith shop through a knee-deep solution of red Missouri clay. Either was worth the miring, however; Weston’s was the most celebrated of the frontier’s smithies, though only one of a dozen or more in Independence, all overburdened with this spring’s preparations; Smallwood Noland’s inn was even more famous, the westermost hotel in all America, the last one this side of the Sandwich Islands, with accommodations for up to four hundred guests if they didn’t mind sleeping two or more in a bed.

Independence was the traditional jumping-off place. Quite properly, a son of Daniel Boone was the first white man to visit it. He named it Eden and was later confirmed by inspiration. “The land of Missouri,” God revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith in 1831, “is the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the Saints. Wherefore this is the land of promise and the place for the city of Zion. . . . Behold, the place which is now called Independence is the center place [of the earth and of the starry universe as well] and a spot for the temple is lying westward upon a lot which is not far from the court house.” Round that courthouse and that still vacant temple lot the Saints were to gather when the Latter Days should become the Last Days, and they are still to gather there when prophecy shall be fulfilled. But though Joseph acquired his most industrious murderer at Independence, Porter Rockwell, Israel’s enemies prevailed and the Saints were driven from their gathering place to the less sanctified lands of Clay County.

But in ‘46 all conditions of mankind poured through Independence in all costumes: Shawnee and Kansa from the Territory, and wanderers of other tribes, blanketed, painted, wearing their Presidential medals; Mexicans in bells, slashed pantaloons, and primary colors, speaking a strange tongue and smoking shuck-rolled cigarettes; mountain men in buckskins, preparing for the summer trade or offering their services to the emigrant trains; the casehardened bullwhackers of the Santa Fe Trail in boots and bowie knives, coming in after wintering at the other end or preparing to go out; rivermen and roustabouts, Negro stevedores, soldiers from Fort Leavenworth, a miscellany of transients whose only motive was to see the elephant wherever the elephant might be. Freight poured in from the steamboat landings, the great wagons careened through the streets, day by day the freshet of movers came in from the Last, the lowing of herds pullulated over the town, the smithies and wagon shops rang with iron, whooping riders galloped their ponies through the mud, the groggeries were one long aria, and out from town the little clusters of tents grew and grew.

The most powerful tension of pioneering began here at the jumping-off. Here was a confusion of tongues, a multitude of strange businesses, a horde of strangers — and beyond was the unknown hazard. For all their exuberance and expectation, doubt of that unknown fermented in the movers and they were already bewildered. They moved, gaping, from wheelwright’s to blacksmith’s, from tavern to outfitter’s, harassed by drovers and merchants trying to sell them equipment, derided by the freighters, oppressed by rumors of Indians and hostile Mormons, oppressed by homesickness, drinking too much forty-rod, forming combinations and breaking them up, fighting a good deal, raging at the rain and spongy earth, most of them depressed, some of them giving up and going ingloriously home.

They in turn were passing strange to Francis Parkman. He thought the Mexicans’ tongue outlandish and he heard with an intense distaste the high Tennessee whine, the Illinois nasals, the cottonmouth Missouri drawl, the slurred syllables, the bad grammar, the idioms and slang of uncouth dialects. The movers were loud, rowdy, carelessly dressed, and unmistakably without breeding. They waited for no introduction before accosting a grandson of a China merchant and his cousin whose triply perfumed name was Quincy Adams Shaw — slapping them on the back, prying into their lives and intentions. “How are ye, boys? Are ye for Oregon or California?” None of their damned business: would not have been on beacon Hill and certainly was not since they were coarse, sallow, unkempt, and dressed in homespun which all too obviously had been tailored for them by their wives. “New England sends but a small proportion but they are better furnished than the rest,” he wrote in his notebook — and in his book set down that the movers were “totally devoid of any sense of delicacy or propriety.” They would not do. He was perplexed by “this strange migration” and wondered whether mere restlessness went into it, or “a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society,” or “an insane hope of a better condition of life.”

He could not suffer the Pukes or the Suckers, So he joined three Englishmen whom he had met at St. Louis, preparing for a summer on the plains, and who also wanted no truck with the “ Kentucky fellows.” They were three of God’s innocents, and one of them had high ranking among God’s bores. Captain Chandler had retired from Her Majesty’s Army on a competence; he had his brother with him and a Mr. Romaine. This last was a faintly literary gentleman who bossed everything, knew nothing, was inept in all things, expressed his type at the very beginning by leading them off the trail for a full week. Yet he had to be accorded a certain authority since he had been on — and survived — a mountain expedition in 1841. Parkman had hired a mountain man, Henry Chatillon, and a humble Canadian pork-eater named Delorier; the Britishers had three engagés. Ten strong altogether, with twenty-three horses and mules, they fled the movers into the prairies, where there would be no worse affliction than the Pawnee. They intended to travel a long way — the Englishmen to the Pacific and Parkman as far as need be to find the noble savage in his unspoiled state. One supposes that Henry Chatillon assumed they must soon join a wagon train; otherwise, to take so small a party West was folly.

The Britishers dressed in the fearful costumes of their kind and were equipped with expensive sporting arms. Parkman and Shaw wore the prairie uniforms supplied by correct outfitters and had the conventional weapons. They packed their miniature train and were off. At Fort Leavenworth, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny of the First Dragoons (he was clearly a gentleman) had no hint of what the summer was preparing for him, talked of steeplechases and buffalo hunting, and pledged them with a bottle of Madeira. And so westward — if, as a result of British confidence, at first not on the trail.

Alone of the year’s travelers who described their journeying, Parkman called this lush country the Great American Desert. He observed at once, however, that “the clouds in this region are afflicted with incontinence of water.” The phrase was a trifle high, and what survived in his book was a remark that the climate made New England’s seem “mild and equable.” He was right. It buffeted him, the Mormons, the Santa Fe traders, and the emigrants with a violent succession of deluges, thunderstorms, northers, freezes, and heat waves. Oxen might die of heat beside streams made impassable by yesterday’s rain while their owners sniffled with the colds produced by day before yesterday’s norther. Sudden gales blowing out of nowhere flattened the tents, barrages of thunder that lasted for many hours might stampede the stock, and Parkman remarked that his bed was soft, for he sank into it. Nevertheless the life was enchanting at once: this was a camping trip many times enlarged. He equally accepted the rains, the continual miring and occasional breakdown of the cart, the deadly mosquitoes, the dor bugs, and the ineptitudes of the British. It was wild, free, and rewarding, an intensification of the tramps and canoe trips through upper New England that had laid the ground plans of the books he would write. He quickly learned the knacks of prairie travel, could pitch camp, hitch a pack, find wood or water, track a strayed horse, extricate the mired cart.

The rains ended, though there was a vicious sleet storm in June. Vegetation grew sparse, the land sloped and broke up. Traveling grew monotonous but had a pleasant languor. Parkman had some symptoms of illness but did not realize how ominous they were. His notebook says occasionally that he was “hipped,” meaning the fits of depression that were to grow stronger and darker in his middle years.

Then they met the buffalo, and the fantasy of all American boys was fulfilled. Parkman’s horse, which he had duly named Pontiac, was not broken to buffalo running, but his rider made a frenzied and ecstatic chase. Drenched with sweat, his heart pounding, armed only with a saddle pistol, he missed his first one and nearly got lost in the prairie sea to boot, but before long he was a veteran. By June 10 he and Shaw had had all they could stand of British fumbling and bumbling. “The folly of Romaine — the old womanism of the Capt. combine to disgust us” is one notebook entry. They decided to go it alone. There would be only four of them, — and they were now at the Lower California Crossing of the Platte, — but that would be all right. Pretty soon they would find some Indians.

And pretty soon they did. Something was coming down a butte on the horizon and Parkman took it to be a file of buffalo. But Henry Chatillon shouted that it was Old Smoke’s village of Sioux. Shortly a young buck in robe and moccasins, with bow and quiver, an eagle-bone whistle thrust in his topknot, gorgeously rode up and Parkman had a foretaste of his desire. The visitor rode on with them. The village was camped at Horse Creek, and here was Old Smoke in person, and Old Smoke’s youngest squaw was a beauty in fringed and beaded white deerskin, her cheeks vermilioned. Here were other chiefs in a tableau of savage dignity, formally posed, their robes thrown over their shoulders like Roman knights. Squaws and children boiled about, hundreds of dogs were howling, and the old women, “ugly as Macbeth’s witches,” worked feverishly and added a high screaming to the mingled noises that made Parkman’s heart run over. He had reached the threshold of adventure. He had found what he had come to find.

He noted an emigrant train, “dragging their slow, heavy procession” across Horse Creek at that moment. The thought struck him that these people and their descendants would finish the Western Indians in the course of a century.

He gave a noon feast for some chiefs and camped on the Platte that night, within sight of the Sioux. The next day, June 15, he hurried on to Fort Laramie and began to make arrangements. Leave him there for a while.

13

The emigration moved beside Parkman, ahead of him, and behind him. We will follow it in the experiences of an enormous wagon train which formed in early May at Indian Creek, a few miles out from Independence. This particular train was nearer the eastern than the western end of the long line of wagons that stretched in its entirety for several hundreds of miles, making from the Missouri to the Pacific in this summer of ‘46. It was not to be a unit for very long, and the units that formed of its components were themselves to shift, interchange, break up, and reunite. Ahead of it moved at least twenty trains that had left Independence, Westport, and St. Joseph as units, and these too underwent similar fractures and transformations. Behind it were an undetermined but smaller number of similar trains.

There was Mr. Edwin Bryant, born a Yankee but lately a newspaper editor at Louisville, traveling with two Kentucky friends. There was Lillburn W. Boggs, formerly governor of Missouri and hated by the Mormons (and once shot by one of them) for his official persecutions, a frontier merchant and trader to Santa Fe, once brother-in-law of the Bents, who were the masters of the Southwestern Indian trade, now married to a grand-daughter of Daniel Boone — and three of her brothers traveled West with him. There was Mr. Jessy Quinn Thornton of Quincy, Illinois, and his wife Nancy. Thornton was thirty-five, a traveled and educated man, a correspondent of Horace Greeley’s, a friend of Stephen Douglas. The Thorntons were a perfect flowering of the bourgeoisie that had risen on the Middle Border. Set off against them a mint specimen of the Kentucky Colonel, William Henry Russell, tall, affable, a hell-roaring frontier orator certain to be chosen captain of this wagon train. Some called him Owl Russell. The story ran that once he heard owls who-whooing from the woods and, mistaking the lament for an inquiry, stood up and roared into the dark, “ Colonel William H. Russell of Kentucky, a bosom friend of Henry Clay.”

They will do as samples: a Kentucky Colonel, a monument of Illinois respectability, a Yankee editor, and a grandson-in-law of Daniel Boone. But certain others must be introduced, since the West was preparing a special destiny for them.

There was James Frazier Reed, forty-six years old, lately of Sangamon County, Illinois. Noble Polish blood mingled in his veins with that of log-cabin pioneers; he was well-to-do, he had three wagons and a luxurious outfit, and bore credentials of character and position signed by the governor of Illinois. His wife Margaret went with him, and their three children, and Margaret’s mother, and her thirteen-year-old daughter by an earlier marriage. Mrs. Sarah Keyes, Margaret Reed’s mother, was feeble and failing but resolved to live till she might meet her son Caddan, who had gone to Oregon the year before and was supposed to be coming back along the trail this year. Reed also had five employees — four young men and the sister of one of them.

Traveling with Reed from the Sangamon country were portions of the patriarchal tribes of two brothers: George Donner who was sixty-two and Jacob Donner who was sixty-five. Tamsen was George Donner’s third wife. None of the children of his first marriage, who were now mature and settled for themselves, went with him. Two daughters of his second marriage, however, accompanied him, and his three daughters by Tamsen. With Jacob Donner were his wife Elizabeth, a daughter and four sons, and two sons of Elizabeth’s by an earlier marriage. Each Donner brother had three wagons and much extra stock, and four teamsters traveled with them—one an English gunsmith named John Denton, who had come all the way from Sheffield.

The Donners were going to California to live out their days in a winterless country. The younger children would grow up in a softer, more abundant life — and their gentility should not be impaired. Tamsen took with her “apparatus for preserving botanical specimens, water colors and oil paints, books and school supplies . . . for use in the young ladies’ seminary which she hoped to establish in California.” Touch of the invincible New England aspiration: Tamsen, a Yankee, was a schoolteacher and something of a writer for the ladies’ press, and made notes as she traveled. (She also sewed ten thousand dollars in bank notes in a quilt, and that was by no means all the reserve cash that went with the Donners.) Their wagons, and Reed’s, were packed not only with the necessities but with a rich and dangerous bulk of comforts, luxuries, and indulgences.

We must mention another family who joined the Donners at Independence, after they had met Jessy Quinn Thornton and accepted his advice to hurry on and join the train that was forming under Owl Russell. This was the family of Patrick Breen, from Ireland by way of Keokuk, and his wife Peggy. They had six sons, ranging from fourteen to four years old, and a year-old daughter. Breen, like Weed and the Donners, started from Independence with three wagons, plus a sizable herd of horses and milch cattle besides his oxen.

Parkman’s judgment on these people, that of a Tory and a Brahmin, has been quoted. Thornton, who was a Virginian by origin, something of a cosmopolite, and as genteel as possible, did not agree. “The majority were plain, honest, substantial, intelligent, enterprising, and virtuous,” he says. “They were indeed much superior to those who usually settle in a new country.” Both halves of his judgment are unquestionably correct. A frontier that could be reached only by eighteen hundred miles of hard travel was not an easy recourse for brush-dwellers, squatters, and butcher-knife boys. This migration was drawn from the stable elements of society, if only because the stable alone could afford it. A customary family outfit had a value of from seven to fifteen hundred dollars. The only way in which a really poor man could make the passage was to hire out as driver or helper. A good many had the Big Bear of Arkansaw exuberance that distressed Parkman, but even they were likely to be farmers who had sold their farms at a profit. Farmers predominated, but it was a heterogeneous mass. The train we are following included lawyers, journalists, students, teachers, day laborers, two ministers of the gospel, a carriage maker, a cabinetmaker, a stonemason, a jeweler, a gunsmith, and several blacksmiths. It had Germans, Hollanders, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, but was native American in the overwhelming majority.

The stock had exhausted the near-by grass and Owl Russell got his unwieldy train in motion — somehow, by sections mostly — and the start was made. It was too big, and it had a fundamental inner conflict in that some of the Osnaburg wagon-covers had “California” painted on them and others “Oregon,” “The Whole or None,” or “54° 40'.”They waddled through the mire, the oxen unused to the routine and stubborn and stupid, the horses alert to slip away and turn back to the settlements. No order of camp life was yet established, and the movers were rebellious, vociferous, and bewildered by the strangeness of the country.

As they started, rumor raised up sizable dangers. The Kansa were supposed to be mobilized beside the trail, waiting to slaughter the emigration— a degenerate tribe fluent at theft but no longer hardy enough to make trouble. Bryant heard that a party of five Englishmen was moving down the trail on Her Majesty’s business, to incite all Indians between here and the Pacific “to attack [the] trains, rob, murder, and annihilate them.” This was the passage of Francis Parkman among the half-barbarous. More immediate was the threat of the Mormons, who were now loose beyond the frontier, five or ten or twenty thousand of them, with “ten brass field pieces” and every man “armed with a rifle, a bowie knife, and a brace of large revolving pistols.” Their homes having been burned behind them, it seemed likely that they intended slaughter, and neither mob nor police would head them off. Here were many Illini and more Missourians. And here, specifically, was Lillburn Boggs, who had ordered his militia to exterminate them, who was responsible for the massacre of their relatives, who had sought the death of their prophet, and who had his share in producing that martyrdom by keeping alive the prosecution of Porter Rockwell, the Destroying Angel who had filled him with buckshot in his own home. The worst seemed exceedingly likely. The emigrants kept their rifles primed and their suspicions at halfcock — and sent an express to Colonel Kearny at Fort Leavenworth, asking his advice and protection. Kearny answered that they need fear no trouble if they behaved themselves. But the emigrants were not reassured till the border was far behind them, and whenever Parkman approached a train hard characters with their rifles cocked were apt to ride out on the chance that this descendant of John Cotton and son of the pastor of the New North Church might be a Mormon. Parkman suffered no greater indignity anywhere in the West.

As soon as Colonel Russell got his train moving, the Reverend Mr. Dunleavy was dissatisfied, and turned back to await more congenial companions. Five days later, Mr. Gordon decided that the going was too slow for him and persuaded a total of thirteen wagons to strike out ahead. Four days after that, Governor Boggs, Reed, George Donner, Bryant, and Thornton (probably the best minds in the train) convened beside the swollen Big Blue to take counsel on disorder and delay. So the next morning (perhaps further exasperated by the tumultuous storm of the same night) one hearty democrat who had aspired to office and been defeated assailed Russell and his lieutenant with violent language. All other activity stopped while the protestant demanded that the whole corps of officers be tried for misfeasance and malfeasance. The officers submitted their resignations. Voted to accept. Debate followed, and second thoughts. Voted to reinstate the officers.

Already there had been absorbing incidents. On May 19, several wagons stayed behind, so it was delicately explained, to “hunt cattle.” Dr. Rupert of Independence, who had ridden out for a last few days with a consumptive brother traveling to California for his health, stayed with them and presently delivered Mrs. Hall of twin boys.

And on May 16 they got the last news from the States that they would hear until they reached the Pacific. A horseman hurrying to catch up with a train ahead of them brought a copy of the St. Louis Republican containing word of hostilities in Mexico. On the Rio Grande a Captain Thornton of the Dragoons had been attacked and his command had been captured after a great loss of life, and the situation of Zachary Taylor was said to be extremely perilous. Excitement stirred among those who were bound to California, — and the success of Lansford Hastings was now assured, — but Bryant noted that no one thought of giving up the emigration.

14

These people were greenhorns: what the West came to call tenderfeet. Most of them were schooled in the culture that had served American pioneering up to now. The unfitness for the West of that experience shows at the beginning of the journey. The Oregon and California emigrants had a much harder time of it than they would have had if they had understood the conditions. They did not have to face the cholera that made the gold rush and certain later passages hazardous, or the Indian troubles that began in the fifties and lasted as long as there were Indians along the trail. But they experienced hardships, disease, great strain, and aimless suffering of which the greater part was quite unnecessary. The mountain men avoided it almost altogether.

A caravan of mountain men passing this way was an efficient organization. The duties of every member were stated — and attended to in an awareness that both safety and comfort depended on their being done right. The fur caravan was a coöperative unit, the emigrant train an uncohesive assemblage of individualists. The mountain men had mastered the craft of living off the country, finding grass and water, managing the stock, making camp, reading buffalo sign and Indian sign. All such matters were hidden from the emigrants, who besides were tired men at the end of any day and prone to let someone else do the needful tasks. So their wagons were not kept up, horses and oxen strayed, and many hours, counting up to many days, were squandered. This added to the delay and we have already seen them moving much too slowly even at the beginning of the trip. The passage must be made with the greatest possible speed consonant with the good condition of the animals but the movers dallied, strolling afield to fish or see the country, stopping to stage a debate or a fist fight, or just wandering like vacationists. It was necessary to press forward, not only because the hardest going of the whole journey was toward the western end and would be far worse if they did not pass the mountains before the earliest snowfall, but also because every day diminished the food in the wagons, wore down the oxen by so much more, and laid a further increment of strain on man and beast. They lingered. And also, expert as they might be at living healthfully in the oak openings, they did not know how to take care of themselves here.

The train is moving along the Oregon Trail. But the movement must not be thought of as the orderly, almost military procession of spaced wagons in spaced platoons that Hollywood shows us, and the trail must not be thought of as a fixed avenue through the wilds. The better discipline of the freight caravans on the Santa Fe Trail imposed a military order of march. On that trail, wagons moved in something like order: in single file when the route was narrow, in columns of twos or fours when there was room for such a formation and it was needed for quick formation of the corral in case of Indian attack. Every night they were parked in a square or circle, the stock was driven inside after feeding, guard duty was enforced on everyone in his turn. Wagons which had led a file on one day (and so escaped the dust) dropped back to the end on the next day and worked their way up again. Regular messes were appointed, with specified duties for everyone. Wood, water, herding, hunting, cooking, and all the routine of travel and camp were systematized and the system was enforced. But that was the profit motive; men with an eye on business returns managed it. And they had no problems of family travel and few of cliques.

Every emigrant train that ever left the settlements expected to conduct itself according to this tested system. None except the Mormons ever did. It remained the precious right of a free American who could always quit his job if he didn’t like the boss, to camp somewhere else at his whim or pleasure — and to establish his priority with his fists if some other freeborn American happened to like the cottonwood where he had parked his wagon. Moreover, why should anyone take his appointed dust when he could turn off the trail? Why should he stand guard on the herd of loose cattle, if he had no cattle in it?

. . . They combined readily but with little cohesiveness, and subdued themselves to the necessities of travel only after disasters had schooled them. They strung out along the trail aimlessly, at senseless intervals and over as wide a space as the country permitted. So they traveled fewer miles in any day than they might have, traveled them with greater difficulty than they needed to, and wore themselves and the stock down more than was wise. Ready enough to help one another through any emergency or difficulty, they were unwilling to discipline themselves to an orderly and sensible routine.

The trail, in long stretches, was more a region than an avenue, especially in those earlier portions. Where the prairie was open and the streams easily fordable, it might be many miles wide and a train would fan out at the individual’s judgment or whim. Farther west, it narrowed at the dictation of hills, rivers, and grass, though there were alternative crossings, fords, and passages through badlands. The valley of the Platte varies from five to fifteen miles in width and there are many places where choice was tree. Wherever there were steep hills or mountains, the trail contracted still more, and these are the places where it was worn in a few parallel pairs of ruts, or a single pair, so deeply that it can still be followed today.

In general, the route from Independence lay along the Santa Fe Trail some forty miles, to the present site of Gardner, Kansas, where the famous sign pointed its finger northwest with the legend, “Road to Oregon.” It crossed to the Wakarusa and then to the Kansas, which it forded near the present Topeka and followed some miles farther before striking overland to the Little Vermillion and then the Vermillion. On to the Big Blue, the Little Blue, and so to the Platte, which was usually reached at Grand Island. Here was the great conduit to the West, and for many days the wagons groaned up the long slope which became increasingly arid. Where the river forked, the trail struck up the South Platte, then crossed to the North Platte by several alternative routes. The Lower California Crossing was near the modern town of Brule, Nebraska,

and trains which crossed there usually reached the North Platte at the famous Ash Hollow. The Upper California Crossing was thirty-five miles farther up the South Platte. Once it reached the North Platte, the trail followed it to well beyond Fort Laramie, then left it for good and struck out for the Sweetwater. Before this happens, however, geography will become important to our narrative and will be treated in detail.

The menace of Indians remains to be mentioned. The earliest stretches of the trail ran through the country of the missionized Shawnee and the decayed Kansa (Kaw); potential thieves and persistent beggars, they made trouble for no one who kept an eye on his property. It then passed into the country of the Pawnee — and they were different. They had been a formidable tribe till recently, and later the government would recruit some of its best scouts, or scabs, from among them; now they were expert thieves, cattle raiders, and banditti who tried to levy blackmail on all passers-by. They got a steady harvest of strayed and stampeded cattle from the emigrant trains, they demanded tribute and usually got it, and they robbed and sometimes murdered stragglers. It was of the first importance not to wander alone in the Pawnee country.

It was exceedingly intelligent not to straggle from the train at any place on the trail, though the danger lessened beyond South Pass, but the train itself, in spite of the movers’ anxiety, was always safe. No train was attacked during the period we are dealing with. On the Santa Fe Trail the Comanche would take on anybody when the mood was on them: during the first half of this summer they were raiding Texas and Northern Mexico and solemnly meeting with United States commissioners to assert their purity, but they got back in time to plunder the Quartermaster Corps. But the emigrants faced no actual danger once they were beyond the Pawnee.

Fear of Indians was chronic with every train that went West this summer, and with most of them it sometimes grew acute — a frantic corralling of wagons when dust swirled up on the horizon, or a frantic assembly of the men by night when a guard fired at a bush or the echo of his own footstep. All of them blended with their anxiety a compound of rumors, legendry, and the desperate loneliness of the wilds. But the alarms were not justified. True, not even the Crows, who had a long record of friendship with the whites, were trustworthy when someone strayed. True, the Sioux were feeling very great indeed this summer. But the Sioux were merely making a play for greater blackmail and in fact were genial, inquisitive, and hungry for gifts. They still looked on the movers as a kind of circus parade, rich with goods but fundamentally comic.

15

At first the country was lush and fragrant, almost overpoweringly beautiful as the rains ended and spring came on. Edwin Bryant traveled it in amazement. He thought the soil the richest in the world, and the scenery — on a scale not imaginable in the settlements—the most magnificent he had ever seen. His fantasy reared great cities here, and farms richer than any others in the world, and a race living gorgeously in this electric air. The Thorntons oozed a single, uninterrupted exclamation. The high grass was frequently crowded down by wild flowers. Nancy’s journal filled with a noticeably amorous prose and she botanized furiously. So did Tamsen Donner, that staunch New England schoolma’am who was writing a book, and a good many other ladies of the train, wandering through the grass at nooning or after camp was made, to get these gorgeous blooms and press them for their albums. Flowers, birds, sky, clouds, rivers, willows, cottonwoods, zephyrs — the Thorntons were enraptured.

It was one of the great American experiences, this first stage of the trail in the prairie May. It formed the symbols we have inherited. The ladies knitted or sewed patchwork quilts. They extemporized bake ovens for bread, made spiced pickles of the ” prairie peas” and experimented with probably edible roots, gathered wild strawberries to serve with fresh cream. They shook down into little cliques, with a chatter of sewing circles, missionary talk, and no charity for any nubile wench who might catch a son’s eye. Tamsen Donner wrote home — there was a pause for letter writing whenever someone moving eastward was encountered — that linsey proved the best wear for children. They put a strain on clothes — this was a fairy tale for children, the absorbing train, the more absorbing country, bluffs to scale, coyote pups to catch and tame, the fabulous prairie dogs, the rich, exciting strangeness of a new life with school dismissed. The sight of the twisting file of white-tops from any hill realized all the dreams of last winter along the Sangamon, and the night camp was a deeper gratification still. The wagons formed their clumsy circle, within reach of wood and water. Children whooped out to the creek or the nearest hill. The squealing oxen were watered in an oath-filled chaos, then herded out to graze. Tents went up outside the wagons, and fires blazed beside them — the campfire that has ritual significance to Americans. The children crowded back to stand in the perfume of broiling meat. The most Methody of them were singing hymns — Parkman walked into a search party who were settling the question of regeneration while they hunted their oxen. Glee clubs sang profaner songs, sometimes organized by the most meticulous choirmasters. . . . This is what the grandfathers remembered when they told us stories.

Nevertheless, already something too subtle to be understood was working a ferment. We have seen Mr. Dunleavy’s and Mr. Gordon’s groups slip off. The train had both grown and lessened since then (at one time it had numbered almost three hundred wagons), and now a dissension that had simmered from the first, boiled over. The train split in halves. The Oregon wagons formed their own train — Thornton belonged to it — and the others, including Bryant, Boggs, the Boone grandsons, and the Donner party, were for California.

Cumulative shock. The strains of travel were bad enough. Drenched blankets, cold breakfasts after rainy nights, long hours without water, exhaustion from the labor of double-teaming through a swamp or across quicksands or up a slope, from ferrying a swollen river till midnight, from being roused to chase a strayed ox across the prairie two hours before dawn, from constant shifting of the load to make the going better. Add the ordinary hazards of the day’s march: a sick ox, a balky mule, the snapping of a wagon tongue, capsizing at a ford or overturning on a slope, the endless necessity of helping others who had fallen into the pits which your intelligence or good luck had enabled you to avoid. Add the endless apprehension about your stock, the ox which might die, every day’s threat that the animals on which your travel depended might be killed by disease or accident or Indians, leaving you stranded in the waste. Such things worked a constant attrition on the nerves.

Beyond this, which could be understood, was the unseen, steady seepage of the life you had been bred to. This was not your known pasture land. The very width and openness of the country was an anxiety. It had no bound; the long heave of the continent never found a limit, and in that waste, that empty and untenanted and lonely waste, the strongest personality diminished. There was no place to hide in, and always there was the sun to hide from, further shrinking the cowering soul. Consciousness dwindled to a point: the little line of wagons was pygmy motion in immensity, the mind became a speck. A speck always quivering with an unidentified dread which few could face and which the weaker ones could not control. Some survived it unchanged or strengthened in their identity; some suffered from it, inflicting it on their families, for the rest of their lives.

Moreover, the trail had begun to collect its toll. The unfit oxen sold to greenhorns at Independence were dying of heat. But not only the oxen. Parkman passed a plank set up in the prairie and crudely lettered: “Mary Ellis. Died May 7th, 1845. Aged two months.” Surprisingly, it was legible after a year. One night Bryant noted the death of Judge Bowlin’s child in a train ahead. Thornton passed the graves of two other children. And Mrs. Sarah Keyes, the mother-in-law of James Frazier Reed, endured just over two weeks of travel, dying on May 29, when they reached the Big Blue. They dug a grave under an oak some sixty yards off the trail. The Reverend Mr. Cornwall prayed over it in prairie sunlight and in the Western silence, and John Denton, the young Englishman who was traveling with the Donners, cut the stone that Clyman read. Denton also was to die before journey’s end.

Many of them were sick. Northers and the rains gave many colds, bronchitis, even pneumonia. Others found the ague that lingered in their blood unseasonably awakened. Their diet was bad and some of them got scurvy. Epidemics of diarrhea raged repeatedly. The sun was an additional strain both constitutional and nervous. And as they got to thinner air they encountered a new malady, a prostrating seizure of nausea and violent headaches, frequently complicated by still another kind of dysentery. It was really “mountain fever,” a process of adjustment to diminished oxygen which most people repeat today when they go to high altitudes.

Bryant had studied medicine before taking up journalism. Anxious men frequently rode in for miles to implore him to attend someone who had been stricken. Thus, on June 14, moving up the South Platte, he met three men who had come from a train some twenty-five miles ahead to ask him to amputate the leg of a nineyear-old boy who had fallen under a wagon nine days before. Thornton’s train had camped near theirs to spend the Sabbath resting, and on their way they made the same request of Thornton, presumably because he used good English. Forgoing his pleasure in hearing Mr. Cornwall preach a sermon, Thornton rode over to the train and saw that the boy was dying. The wound was a compound fracture and gangrene had set in. A Canadian drover who had been a hospital servant was whetting butcher knives for the operation; they were giving the boy laudanum without effect and had bound him to a packing case. Thornton directed them to wait for Bryant. Getting there, Bryant saw that an operation would be wasted agony and refused to perform one, telling the frantic mother that her child should be permitted as painless a death as possible. She rejected his advice and the drover began to operate. Someone held camphor to the boy’s nostrils, and an incision below the knee freed a gush of pus. The drover started again, above the knee this time, and hacked through the bone with a common hand-saw. After an hour and three-quarters of bloody effort, he was starting to close the wound with a flap when the child died.

Bryant stepped past the bereaved mother to diagnose her husband, who had lain for four weeks in the jolting wagon, prostrated by rheumatic fever. Bryant left him some attenuated solutions and enjoined him to take them as they were, for “the propensity of those afflicted with disease on this journey is, frequently, to devour medicines as they would food, under the delusion that large quantities will more speedily and effectually produce a cure.” He visited and prescribed for “some four or five other persons” who were less seriously ill, and then accepted Thornton’s invitation to visit his former companions at their camp.

Reunion on the trail. They were glad to see him, and Nancy (“a lady of education and polished manners,” he remarked) spread her white linen tablecloth on the grass. Old friends gathered to tell stories, and toward nine o’clock the Sabbath had a fitting climax, after rest and general wash-day. The emigrants gathered at the tent of Mr. Lard, where the Reverend Mr. Cornwall married Mr. Lard’s daughter Mary to young Mr. Riley Septimus Mootrey. The women had got out their finery, had found candles and made a wedding cake. Thornton could not much approve this marrying on the trail. “It looks so much like making a hop, skip and jump into matrimony” — and like a licensing of human desire. But after all it was an occasion of sentiment and he found the bride fair, said some of the younger women were “dressed with a tolerable degree of taste and even elegance,” and could praise the males for having shaved and changed to clean pantaloons. Village mores under desert stars.

The guests formed a procession behind a fiddler and conducted Mr. and Mrs. Mootrey to the nuptial tent. A mile away they saw faint sparks moving by twos in another procession, torches lighting the dead boy’s body to its desert grave. A mile or so in the opposite direction still a third train was camped, and there at that same moment a dozen desert-worn women were ministering to one of their sisterhood who writhed and screamed under a dusty wagon-cover. They did for her what centuries of old wives’ wisdom prescribed for those in travail, and in due time her child was born.

16

The never-ending wind of the plains blew up dust from the wheels in twisting columns that merged and overspread the whole column in a fog and canopy that moved with it. It “filled the lungs, mouth, nose, ears, and hair, and so covered the face that it was sometimes difficult to recognize each other,” and “we suffered from this almost insupportable flying sand or dust for weeks if not for months together.” Thornton had neglected to supply himself with goggles, which “can be purchased in the United States for thirty-seven and a half cents”; near Independence Rock he would have given fifty dollars for a pair. Right. The tortured eyes tortured the brain. The immense sun, the endless wind, and the gritty, smothering, inescapable dust reddened and swelled the eyes, granulated the lids, inflamed the sockets. The excited nerves make shadows horrible — such shadows as there are — and produce illusions of color and shape. The illusions are not less disturbing in that the heat mirage distorts size and pattern so that a healthy eye may see a jack rabbit as a buffalo at a hundred yards, or a clump of sage at half a mile as mounted Indians charging down.

The grade was steep now, and once they were in the badlands the trail narrowed and was frequently precipitous. Crazy gullies and canyons cut every which way, and whoever gave up in anger and tried to find better going elsewhere only found worse troubles. The ropes came out and wagons had to be lowered by manpower down a steep pitch or hauled up over the vertical side of a gully or between immense boulders — while those not working sat and swore in level dust and intolerable sun, far from water. When they moved, the dry axles added a torturing shriek to the split-reed soprano of the wheels and the scrape of tires on stone or rubble. Dry air had shrunk the wheels, too, and without warning tires rolled off or spokes pulled out and the wagon stalled. The same brittleness might make a wagon tongue break, which was disastrous unless a spare pole had been slung beneath the bed, and the violent stresses sometimes snapped the metal hounds, the side bars which connected tongue and forecarriage to reach and hindcarriage. Sometimes the ropes broke at a cliff or pulled off the snubbing post, and a wagon crashed. Or crazed oxen capsized one, or defective workmanship or cheap material could stand no more and the thing went to pieces like the one-hoss shay. Sometimes half a wrecked wagon could be converted by desert blacksmithing into a cart; sometimes a sound wagon had to be so converted because some of the oxen had died. In any event, here was where the “ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed” which Parkman saw began to litter the trail, along with “massive bureaus of carved oak.” Parkman speculated on these “relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time.” Allocate the abandoned household goods as another stress of desert travel, for something of personality and spiritual heritage died when they had to go. Their owners were in the grip of necessity.

In sun and dust they went on, the daily distance shortening and no end to the country ahead. They were not yet to South Pass, not yet halfway to the Pacific! Horses and oxen bloated from foul water; many of them died. Their hooves swelled and festered. Even the soundest grew gaunt as the grass diminished: sparse along the upper Platte at any time, it had failed quickly in the drouth summer and many trains had cropped it before our travelers. Men got as gaunt as their stock, in this country, and alkali water was just as bad for them. They saw suddenly that food was limited, and there was an anxious computation of the days ahead, with Hastings’s or Frémont’s or Parker’s mileby-mile itineraries reckoned over and over. Add to the increasing strain the altitude making the nerves tauter. Though the violent sun was hot and the dust pall breathless, there were sudden viciously cold days too, and all nights were cold. Water froze in the pails — and they remembered how early snow fell in the mountains that were still so far ahead. . . .

Bryant’s mind strained toward California and chafed as the train fell steadily farther behind the schedules printed in the books. He talked it over with some friends; they decided that, on reaching Fort Laramie, they would trade their wagons for a mule pack-outfit and press on by this more rapid means. Nine of them rode out ahead. At about two in the afternoon of the second day, they sighted the first building they had seen since they left the border. It was the half-finished trading post maintained by the Richard brothers, in a loose association with Pratte, Cabanne & Company, as a local opposition to the American Fur Company’s Fort Laramie, which was some six or eight miles away. It stood on the flat ground where Laramie Creek empties into the Platte, where various other short-lived forts had been located, and was called Fort Bernard. Traders from Taos were there, having recently arrived with mules and goods and Taos Lightning for the summer trade, and Bryant had a letter to Richard, the bourgeois, who invited the party to spend the night. But they hurried on to Fort Laramie. He made it 642 miles out from Independence.

Coming out of the trees that lined Laramie Creek, for their first sudden glimpse of the famous trading post, they saw that the plain beneath the bluffs and in the V between the rivers was crawling with Indians. At least six hundred lodges were pitched there. A war dance was ending when Bryant reached the Fort, and the whole Sioux nation, bucks and squaws, were working up an ecstasy. They rode whooping everywhere, they shouted their personal histories of coups, they beat skin rattles and invoked their deities for scalps. For, Bryant found, they were preparing to take to the warpath, maybe against those routine villains, the Crows, certainly against the Snakes, one of whose hunting parties had encountered a band of Sioux, last year, and cleaned it up.

Bryant was dazzled. Hundreds of yelling Indians tricked out for war and now met suddenly in the desert stunned him, and he gaped. Wild and savage as the bucks were, he found them not merely impressive but genuinely handsome too. Distaste of the squaws, who were drunk with dancing and fell into attitudes bordering on the indecent, yielded to admiration. They were graceful, their complexions were surprisingly fair — except when they were, as Bryant put it, rouged. Their limbs were seductively rounded, their feet small, their robes clean, and their beadwork beautiful. . . . He marveled, but their horses had cleaned the grass round the Fort, so he went six miles farther and camped for the night.

He came back to Fort Laramie, the next morning, among still more panoplied bucks and beautiful maidens with delicate hands riding prancing steeds — or so the yellowback novels would be saying in another year or two. There were more villages at the Fort and others were coming in. He retraced his path to Fort Bernard. It too was now crawling with Sioux on their way to the rendezvous. One party camped just outside the stockade, displaying twenty-five Pawnee scalps which they had taken on a recent foray. Two emigrant trains crawled up and formed their corrals. The Sioux settled on them like locusts, demanding a feast, which Captain Casper provided. The next day the plain filled with entertainment, both Indians and movers displaying their skills, and there was a shooting match, firearms against bows. Some of the movers had Mr. Colt’s revolvers, for which the Indians had already learned a profound respect. Meanwhile Bryant and his companions bargained with the Taos Trappers for mules. It was a realistic trade. Seven hundred miles from the border, coffee, sugar, and tobacco were a dollar a pound, whiskey a dollar a pint, flour fifty cents a pound — and those prices would worsen fast during the next few days. After prolonged talk, Bryant and his partner Jacob exchanged their wagon and oxen (still behind them with the train) for seven mules and packsaddles. Their companions made similar terms. So they settled down at Fort Bernard, in a village fair of Indians and emigrants, to wait for the wagons to come up.

17

All this time the party of Lansford Hastings, with which Jim Clyman was traveling, had been coming east. Over the Sierra on May 1, down to Truckee Lake, down the Truckee River to Humboldt Sink, up the Humboldt River to its great bend. And here, where the established trail turned northeastward to Fort Hall, avoiding the Great Salt Desert, they kept going straight east, into and across that desert. It is the ghastliest country in the United States, it had been crossed by white men only twice before them, they were following Frémont’s trail of the preceding summer— and Mr. Hastings was now seeing it for the first time. His book for the guidance of emigrants recommended this route — which no emigrants had ever taken — and he was moving eastward to recommend it to this year’s movers.

They reached Great Salt Lake on June 1, traveled down it to the southern end, and then crossed the Wasatch Mountains by dim, old trails of the mountain men. Mr. Hastings’s suckers must bring their wagons along this stretch, which no wagons had ever traveled and which Mr. Hastings was now seeing for the first time. On June 5 they reached the Bear River, and two days later they got to Fort Bridger. Here the party split in two. Hastings and his partner Hudspeth struck northeastward, to reach the Oregon Trail sufficiently near South Pass to be east of any “cut-offs” that might persuade emigrants toward Oregon. There they set up their service of information (false) and alarm (meretricious and pumped up). They were going to get recruits for the California revolution, if fate should provide such a revolution, and in any event they were going to get prospects for the California real-estate business.

Jim Clyman led the rest of the small party eastward along the trail. On June 18 they reached South Pass — for Jim, the completion of a great circle. Twenty-two years ago, he and his companions under Jedediah Smith had discovered this great corridor through the mountains, the true road of empire, the one route to the West that wagons could take. Now he met the westering trains. America had come out to meet him.

Next day, June 25, he went on down the Platte and, company by company, it was “all most one continual stream of Emigrants winding their long and Tedious march to Oregon and California.” From any bluff, that length of punctuated dust would come out of one horizon and twist its slow, sun-beaten course to the other while the wheels shrieked and the mirage wavered above the greasewood. And Jim had an obligation to these movers. At the night camps, and when they paused by day to exchange the wisdom of the trail, he warned them of the dangers of Lansford Hastings’s new route.

So on June 27 he came eastward along the bluffs that border the Platte and saw, far off, the whitewashed adobe walls of Fort Laramie. Between the post itself and the ridge of barren hills about two miles to the northwest, the entire plain was populous with Sioux lodges, many hundreds of them, innumerable Indian herds, a vast movement and shift of herders and riders.

On June 27 Francis Parkman also rode back to Fort Laramie, from his camp to the westward, and on to Fort Bernard.

We left him riding toward Fort Laramie from the east on June 15. He reached it — the American Fur Company’s post near the junction of Laramie Creek and the Platte, the most celebrated post in this region — and stayed there for six days. Old Smoke’s village of Oglala Sioux came in, smoking hot to take the warpath against the Shoshoni, who had killed some of their kin the preceding summer. Here was Parkman’s great opportunity: he would accompany them to war. He moved his little party westward toward the appointed rendezvous and went into camp on Laramie Creek, at the mouth of the Chugwater. The days passed and no Indians showed up. He had already suffered from dysentery, and now it prostrated him. He had taken six grains of opium without arresting it, and was so feeble that he could hardly sit his saddle. Day after day he lay on his buffalo robe, trying to recruit his strength, listening to the tales of some mountain men who camped with him, watching the activity of their Indian wives. He chafed and fretted. Was he, on the brink of satisfaction, to lose his chance? A messenger arrived with word that the Sioux would need another week and that, in their village, Chatillon’s squaw was dying. Parkman’s companion, Shaw, rode out with Chatillon to find his squaw, and Parkman, to prevent cafard, rode back to Fort Laramie. It was June 27.

At Fort Laramie he picked up the halfbreed Paul Dorion and rode on eastward, looking for Indians. There proved to be only a few Sioux as yet at Fort Bernard — Oglala like Old Smoke; but two large villages of their Minneconjou cousins were expected during the day. The emigrants were camped a little in front of the Fort. “Some fine-looking Kentucky men,” he wrote in his journal, “some of them D. Boone’s grandchildren — Ewing, Jacobs [whom he had met in St. Louis] and others with them — altogether more educated than any I have seen.” And in his book he said that the Boones had “clearly inherited the adventurous character of that prince of pioneers [their grandfather] but I saw no signs of the quiet and tranquil spirit that so remarkably distinguished him.” At Fort Bernard, no. For the camp was drunk and getting drunker. This California party — he learned it had been captained by Bussell, but was now led by Boggs — was lightening its load. It would sell what goods it could to the traders and would sell some of its whiskey to the Indians and would drink the rest. The Indians were drunk already, so were the Fort’s garrison, so were the traders and the hangers-on—“maudlin squaws . . . squalid Mexicans . . . long-haired Canadians and trappers, and American backwoodsmen in brown homespun, the well-beloved pistol and bowieknife displayed openly at their sides.” The chinked-log, unfinished fort resounded with a clamor offensive to wellborn ears, and he had never looked on such a miscellany of casehardened men. Men filthy with dust, their buckskins in tatters from the trail, some singing Injun, some shouting the frontier balladry, all making what sound they could. . . . They had come a long, hard way, some of their companions had died and more were broken, they had found the country in nothing like the quiet pastures back home, and now for a day or two beside water and within the sound of leaves they could take their ease. So they roared a little, having reached the West.

And here was “a tall, lank man with a dingy broadcloth coat,” extremely drunk — drunk as a pigeon, the notebook says — and making an oration. Richard, the bourgeois, formally presented to this personage making a big drunk the scion of John Cotton and Elias Parkman, grandson of Samuel Parkman the China merchant, son of the Reverend Francis Parkman of the New North Church, Francis Parkman II, A.B. Harvard ‘44, LL.B. Harvard ‘46. The personage in liquor recognized another personage, seized the fringe of Parkman’s buckskin shirt, and made another speech, with pauses, fist doubled and swung, affecting pathos, and hiccoughs. He had been captain of this train, sir, but a mutiny of envious small men had turned him out. Nevertheless, sir, his was the superior intelligence, instinctively recognized by all men, as all men knew Hector when he passed, sir, and he still commanded, sir, in all but name he was still chief. . . . Some threads had come together at Fort Bernard, and Francis Parkman had met Colonel William H. Russell of Kentucky, a bosom friend of Henry Clay.

The splendor was more than he could bear and, calling Dorion, he rode back to Fort Laramie. But on the way, “met a party going to the settlements, to whom Montalon had not given my letters. Sent them by that good fellow Tucker. People at the fort a set of mean swindlers, as witness my purchase of the bacon, and their treatment of the emigrants.” A slight swindle thus linked him for a moment with the coarse and ungainly, and this brief entry in his notebook ends so. But he had stopped to talk with a party going eastward to the settlements, between Fort Laramie and Fort Bernard, past midafternoon of June 27, and the entry should have had a few lines more. For Francis Parkman had met a genius of the mountains, perhaps had talked with him, had seen a greatness he was not able to recognize. . . . That was Jim Clyman’s party.

18

Fort Bernard, on the North Platte, below the mouth of Laramie Creek. Saturday, June 27, 1846.

On June 24 Edwin Bryant, his partner Mr. Jacob, and those who had decided to join their sprint by pack-train had arranged to trade their wagons to the Taos men for mules, and had determined to stay at Fort Bernard till the train should come up. It came up on June 26, under Governor Boggs — with the Donners, James Frazier Reed, and the rest. (Small fragments of the original train were several days ahead; some nearer, at Fort Laramie, where Parkman had seen them.) It was the established custom of the emigrants to pause at or near Fort Laramie to recruit their stock, repair the wagons, and lighten loads and reorganize after the desert just passed and before the desert just ahead. Word that the Sioux had used up the grass at Fort Laramie was what halted the California train here, where the bottom land along the Platte had not been grazed.

Boggs and the California-bound reached Fort Bernard on June 26. At about noon on June 27, the Oregon train with which Thornton was traveling pulled in and camped near by. So they were neighbors again, the two largest fragments of the big train which Owl Russell had led west from Indian Creek. At midafternoon or a little later, Parkman, resentful of drunks, emigrants, and Kentucky Colonels, turned his back on Fort Bernard, riding back to Fort Laramie. A few minutes later the Minneconjou began to come in, from the northeast. A little later still a party from the West arrived, nine or ten men, two women, two children, and appropriate horses and packs — Jim Clyman keeping an appointment with destiny. . . .

We must look at the trail again — at three large detours. Make a capital cursive letter S with the curves long but shallow, and turn it on its back. This represents the trail from Fort Laramie to South Pass, with the middle curve of the S reaching its highest (northernmost) point at the present city of Casper, Wyoming. The route obeyed the inexorable conditions of geography.

Although the last stretch before Fort Laramie had been hard going, all emigrants knew that this next stretch, to South Pass, would be worse. So anxiety sharpened, especially the worry of falling behind schedule, the chance of getting caught in winter snows. The realization that time was getting short especially galled those who were going to California, because of the roundabout loops which the California Trail made west of South Pass.

The trail came out of the Pass and made due west to Little Sandy Creek (for convenience, the present town of Farson, Wyoming). All the rest of Wyoming was desert; the only possible routes, not many and not much different from one another, were determined by small streams and small patches of grass. The next objective was the famous oasis of Soda Springs, in Idaho. To reach Soda Springs you had to travel southwest from the Little Sandy at least as far as the present town of Granger. After Old Gabe built his trading post you usually went even farther to the southwest, to Fort Bridger. Here the trail made the great bend that so galled the California-bound. It struck northwest to Soda Springs and went on to Fort Hall (for convenience, the present city of Pocatello, Idaho).

. . . There was plenty of water on this stretch; the grass was usually abundant; and though there were mountains to cross, they were comparatively gentle and the canyons were open.

. . . Beyond Fort Hall, the trail to Oregon took a long westerly course along the Snake River — and here was where, traditionally, the California trains left it for good. They turned southwestward, beyond Fort Hall; and by a route sufficiently difficult with lava, alkali, sagebrush, and dry drives, but nevertheless a safe route, they reached the Humboldt River almost exactly where a line traced due west from Fort Bridger would have reached it.

That was precisely the trouble — that possible due-west line from Fort Bridger. The established trail moved from Fort Bridger to the Humboldt along two sides, northwest and southwest, of a right-angle triangle whose duewest hypotenuse stretched straight past the southern end of Great Salt Lake. . . . Late June at Fort Laramie, the South Pass journey still to come, and beyond it that long, laborious, and apparently senseless detour, several hundred miles long, to Fort Hall. Anyone who studied a map at Fort Laramie, intending to go to California, would look with loathing on that detour. On June 27, 1846, no map ever drawn had filled in the country between Fort Bridger and Great Salt Lake — no map showed what the Wasatch Mountains were like. And no map filled in the country between Great Salt Lake and the north bend of the Humboldt River — most of which was the Salt Desert. . . .

June 27. As night came on, lines of campfires dotted the wagon trains, their flames gilding the cottonwoods and shining in the Platte. And at one fire, Jim Clyman says, “several of us continued the conversation until a late hour.” Jim had met a messmate of the Black Hawk War, James Frazier Reed, who had sat by him at other campfires, with A, Lincoln. He met some of Mr. Reed’s friends and companions; Edwin Bryant and Jessy Thornton and Governor Boggs for certain were at that fire, Owl Bussell probably, and by inference George and Jacob Donner — the responsible minds of the two trains. He and his companions met a good many other emigrants, and told them all the same story.

For Jim and the others felt a heavy responsibility. Some of them tried to modify the emigrants’ vision of the golden shore, speaking of sparse rain and ruined crops, speaking of the low quality of Americans resident there. Bryant grunted in disgust. He was for California, and it was clear to him that these trail-stained travelers, Clyman in particular, were lying, for some reason not on the surface. He was not credulous enough to believe plain liars, but he perceived that many of his associates were. Thornton, who was for Oregon anyway, was detached and believed them.

The wagon train grew quiet, but this one fire was kept blazing — a carmine splash against the blue-velvet night, the desert stars near above it, the white bow of a wagon top behind, and, farther away, the singing of drunken Missourians at the Fort and the screaming of drunken Sioux. Clyman talked on. He knew Hastings’s plans, he knew what Hastings would tell these innocents near South Pass. And he had just crossed, with Hastings, from the bend of the Humboldt to Fort Bridger by way of the Salt Desert, Great Salt Lake, and the Wasatch Mountains. A Sioux yipped, the barking of coyotes ringed the sleeping caravan, and Jim told his listeners. Take the familiar trail, the regular, established trail by way of Soda Springs and Fort Hall. Do not try a cut-off, do not try anything but the known, proved way. “It is barely possible to get through [before the snows] if you follow it” — and it may be impossible if you don’t. Shock and alarm struck the travelers and made them angry, who were still far short of South Pass, whose minds could map that weary angle from Fort Bridger to Fort Hall and back again to the Humboldt. Tense and bellicose, Reed spoke up (Jim records his words), “There is a nigher route, and it is no use to take so much of a roundabout course.” Reference to Lansford Hastings’s book, .Jacob Donner’s copy bought at Springfield, back in the States, now scanned by firelight at Fort Bernard, a well-thumbed passage marked with lines. The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, page 137: “The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the bay of San Francisco . . .” Proved, And someone would spit into the fire.

(When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage he had never seen the Humboldt, or Great Salt Lake, or the Wasatch Mountains, or the Salt Desert; he had barely heard of Fort Bridger; neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate man who wanted to be President or mortgagee of California.)

Yes. But Jim has just traveled that route in company with the advertising man himself, and if they would save their skins, they will not take it, they will go by way of Fort Hall. “I . . . told him about the great desert and the roughness of the Sierras, and that a straight route might turn out to be impracticable.” Told him about the glare of the salt plain under sun and without water. Told him about the Diggers lurking outside the camps to kill the stock. Told him about the chaos of the Wasatch canyons which Jim Clyman and Lansford Hastings, who were on horseback and had no wagons and so no need of a road, had barely got through.

Clyman talked on, repeating his warnings and threats — the mountain man, the man who knew, the master of this wilderness, pleading with the tenderfeet. Till there was no more to say, the fire was only embers shimmering in the dark, and they separated, to lie awake while the coyotes mourned and the Sioux screamed — and think it over. In the desert, where Laramie Creek empties into the Platte: a moment of decision.

Next morning they had made up their minds. Bryant was not deterred. He would take the way he had decided on, and rightly so, for he would travel by pack-train and could travel fast. The unappreciated orator Owl Russell would go with him, and the eight original volunteers were steadfast. Governor Boggs and Judge Morin, however, had been convinced. They sought out Clyman, before he moved on, and told him they would follow his advice — would go to California by way of Fort Hall. Not Reed and the Donners. Their impatience had not been scotched. They would go on their determined way, and if any cared to join them, they would be welcome.

So be it. Jim repeated his warnings, but he had his own trail to follow and late in the morning he led his party eastward.

Another chapter in Jim’s personal outline of American history, which now had only a few more to go before the peace and satisfaction of his last years. Eastward, in the direction of Scott’s Bluff, with Chimney Rock to come, and Ash Hollow, and the crossing to the South Platte. But American history in the person of Jim Clyman had told the Donner party not to take the Hastings cut-off from the California trail.

(To be continued)