The Year of Decision 1846, page 1
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
New Preface to the Year 2000 Edition
Calendar
Map
Invocation
I: Build Thee More Stately Mansions
II: The Mountain Man
III: Pillar of Cloud
IV: Equinox
V: Spring Freshet
Interlude: Doo-Dah Day
VI: Oh Susanna!
VII: “Cain, Where Are Thy Brothers?”
Interlude: World of Tomorrow
VIII: Solstice
IX: The Image on the Sun
X: Sonorous Metal
XI: Continental Divide
Interlude: Friday, October 16
XII: Atomization
XIII: Trail’s End
XIV: Anabasis in Homespun
XV: Down from the Sierra
XVI: Whether It Be Fat or Lean: Canaan
XVII: Bill of Review—Dismissed
Statement of Bibliography
Index
Books by Bernard DeVoto
Copyright
DEDICATION
Dear Kate:
While I was writing this book you sometimes asked me what it was about. Reading it now, you will see that, though it is about a good many things, one theme that recurs is the basic courage and honor in the face of adversity which we call gallantry. It is always good to remember human gallantry, and it is especially good in times like the present. So I want to dedicate a book about the American past written in a time of national danger to a very gallant woman,
TO
KATHARINE GRANT STERNE
Yours,
Benny
Acknowledgments
THE writing of history is a co-operative enterprise. Many people have helped me write this book by providing information, by directing me to the sources of information, by answering my questions, by discussing matters with me, by clearing up ambiguities, by finding ways through difficulties that had delayed me. It is impossible for me to thank them individually or even to make a full list of them. I want, however, to express my obligation to a number of them whose help has gone beyond the ordinary courtesy of the republic of letters.
Five people in particular have given me extraordinary aid. Therefore, first of all, my thanks to: —
Charles L. Camp and Dale L. Morgan, specialists, who have patiently answered innumerable questions, put their knowledge at my disposal, empowered me to publish results of their work, and made special searches for me that encroached upon their leisure time and proper interests.
Madeline Reeder, who found a way for me through a barrier that had stopped me cold and read my manuscript with critical attention to detail.
Rosamond Chapman, who began working with me on the material of this book in 1935, and has ever since been the custodian of my accuracies and my handy guide to research in the West.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who toured the West with me in the summer of 1940 and argued out most of the book with me before it was written, who has put his own researches at my disposal, has shaped or modified many of my ideas, has critically read my manuscript, and has saved me from making a good many errors I should certainly have made except for him.
If a number of my friends who are professional historians read the book I have so insistently talked over with them, they will probably experience something halfway between shock and horror. I formally absolve them from all responsibility for anything printed in it but must insist that, by boring them for many years with talk about the West, I have formed my own ideas through friction with theirs. To Paul Buck, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., Frederick Merk, Perry Miller, and Kenneth Murdock: thanks, this is in part your book, and you will see in it a part I was to build of a structure we planned together as a common job, a long time ago when I was a colleague of yours.
My thanks for help freely given to: Garrett Mattingly, Donald Born, Samuel E. Morison, Randolph G. Adams, Lewis Gannett, Franklin J. Meine, Mary Brazier, Wallace Stegner, Eleanor Chilton, Elaine Breed, Henry Canby, Edward Eberstadt, Charles P. Everitt, Mason Wade, George Stewart, Elmer Davis, Dr. Henry R. Viets, Dr. George R. Minot, Dr. William G. Barrett, Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, Dr. Robert S. Schwab, George Stout; to the officers and employes of the Harvard College Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Missouri Historical Society, the Bancroft Library, and the State Library of Illinois; also to many local librarians in the West and to many Westerners whose names I do not even know, who made a summer tour fruitful in the study of history.
Quotations from James Clyman: American Frontiersman are by permission of Charles L. Camp and the California Historical Society.
Quotations from the unpublished notebooks of Francis Parkman are by the courtesy of Mason Wade and the permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Finally, I acknowledge that I could not possibly have written the book if I had not had periodic assistance from Mr. John August.
B. DV.
Preface
THE purpose of this book as stated in the opening pages is a literary purpose: to realize the pre-Civil War, Far Western frontier as personal experience. It is, however, considerably longer than it would have been if fulfilling that purpose had not proved to involve a second job. I found that my friends and betters, the professional historians, had let me down. One who wanted to study the Far West at the moment when it became nationally important and to study it in its matrix could turn to no book that would help him very much. His only recourse was Paxson’s encyclopedic treatment of the whole frontier from 1763 to 1893. Since Turner’s great beginning the frontier has been a favorite subject of the profession and yet there is no unified study of the area in which this book is set in relation to its era. There are a great many specialized studies and a vast accumulation of monograph material — both of which, however, have left wholly untouched a number of matters treated herein which I have had to settle for myself. But there is no synthesis of them. The profession, in short, has broken up this phase of our history into parts; it has carefully studied most but by no means all of the parts; it has not tried to fit the parts together. And the stories I wanted to tell could not be told intelligently unless their national orientation was made clear. So perforce I have had to add to my primary job another job which it was reasonable to expect the historians would have done for me.
My hope is that, in combining the two jobs, I have not bungled both. I write for the nonexistent person called the general reader. He is here promised that, once it gets under way, my text does not long depart from actual events in the lives of actual men and women. In getting it under way I have chosen the stern but kinder way of throwing at him a first chapter of grievous weight. If he survives that, he will find things happening from then on.
By the end of the first chapter, also, the method of the book will be clear. The actual narrative is always rigorously chronological, and the parts of the book are kept as close to a chronological order as the multiplicity of stories will permit. In passages designed to illustrate or interpret the narrative, however, I range forward and backward in time as far as the end in view requires. Thus the narrative of my first chapter covers the month of January, 1846, but some of the quotations from Walt Whitman belong to 1847 and some of those from Thoreau date back to 1843 and forward to 1849. Similarly, I not only allude to the Presidential campaign of 1844 but follow some of its issues back to La Salle and on to 1942. Usually such departures from chronology are immediately self-apparent; where they are not, I have called attention to them.
Acknowledgments and a statement about bibliography are made separately.
BERNARD DEVOTO
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
February 12, 1942
New Preface to the Year 2000 Edition
BERNARD DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846, published in 1943, was the first of what eventually became three large-scale books on the discovery and opening of the American West. My father actually wrote them in reverse historical sequence: The third volume, The Course of Empire (1952), begins with Christopher Columbus and continental exploration; Across the Wide Missouri (1947) covers the fur trade of the 1830s; while The Year of Decision brings the complex and manifold historical narrative up to a climax in 1846. Except for brief periods, all three volumes, as well as their companion, DeVoto’s popular edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, have been in print ever since first publication. The present St. Martin’s Griffin edition of The Year of Decision marks the first appearance in more than a decade of a handsome, inexpensive, and easily portable paperback version.
DeVoto first conceived of a trilogy with an overarching title of “Empire” beginning around 1933, while he was still teaching at Harvard. His frenzied schedule of teaching and writing (which yielded one published novel and several abandoned attempts, a monthly column for Harper’s, and numerous short stories, pulp serials, and reviews) kept him from beginning the major historical achievement of his career. His move in 1936 to New York, where he took over the editorship of the struggling Saturday Review of Literature
Kate Sterne, a twenty-four-year-old tuberculosis patient, had written a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto in 1933. They never met in person, but his subsequent correspondence with her, for eleven years until her death, grew to some 800 letters. It sustained Sterne throughout her lonely and enfeebled years in the sanitarium; just as much, it provided necessary and catalytic encouragement to my father’s work on The Year of Decision. On August 5, 1940, he wrote to her that he had at last begun to write the book, and he enclosed the first page of a draft, handwritten in ink. He sent the last page to her on February 14, 1942, and on May 17, a galley proof of the dedication which read: “It is always good to remember human gallantry, and it is especially good in times like the present”—significant words when the book was published in the bleakest years of World War II, and still valid for the new millennium. Now in the year 2000, with geographic frontiers having vanished all around the world, The Year of Decision: 1846 still shows all the vigor of its portrayal of the men and women, the ideas and the idealism, that went west.
MARK DEVOTO
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
April 25, 2000
Calendar for the Tears
1846–1847
[1846]
JANUARY
5
Resolution to terminate joint occupation introduced in Senate.
7–10
Frémont at Sutter’s Fort.
12
Word received of Slidell’s rejection by Mexico.
13
Taylor ordered to the Rio Grande.
24–27
Frémont to Monterey.
FEBRUARY
3
Taylor receives orders.
4
Mormons begin crossing the Mississippi.
13
Polk’s interview with Atocha.
22
Frémont starts for the coast.
22
Gillespie embarks at Mazatlán.
MARCH
1
First Mormon wagons start across Iowa.
3
Burning of the Phalanstery at Brook Farm.
5–9
Frémont at Gavilán Peak.
8–11
Taylor starts for Rio Grande.
20
Slidell notified of Mexico’s refusal to negotiate.
21
Frémont reaches Sutter’s Fort.
28
Taylor reaches the Rio Grande.
30
Frémont reaches Lassen’s ranch.
APRIL
7
Polk learns Slidell will not be received.
5–11
Frémont to Mt. Shasta and return.
17
Clyman meets Hastings.
17
Gillespie reaches Monterey.
19
Taylor orders the Rio Grande blockaded.
23
“Termination” passes Congress.
24
Frémont starts for Oregon.
25
First hostilities on the Rio Grande.
29
Hastings-Clyman party starts over the Sierra.
MAY
8
Battle of Palo Alto.
9
Battle of Resaca de la Palma.
9
News of hostilities reaches Washington.
9
Gillespie overtakes Frémont.
13
Polk signs resolution that a state of war exists.
15
Boggs and Thornton parties reach the rendezvous.
18
Taylor occupies Matamoros.
22
National Fair opens.
24
Frémont reaches Lassen’s ranch on way south.
31
Clyman and Hastings reach Great Salt Lake.
JUNE
7
Clyman and Hastings reach Fort Bridger.
10
Bear Flaggers capture Castro’s horses.
11
Susan Magoffin sets out from Independence.
12
Congress votes to accept 49th parallel.
14
Attack on Sonoma and birth of the “California Republic.”
14
First Mormons reach the Missouri.
15
Parkman reaches Fort Laramie.
16–29
Army of the West leaves Fort Leavenworth for Santa Fe.
18
Clyman reaches South Pass.
25
Frémont arrives at Sonoma.
26
Russell-Reed-Donner-Boggs train reaches Fort Bernard.
27
Thornton, Clyman and Parkman reach Fort Bernard.
JULY
2
Sloat arrives at Monterey.
2
Clyman meets the Mississippi Mormons.
6
Taylor starts up the Rio Grande.
9
Sonoma taken over by the United States.
16
Parkman rejoins the Oglala village.
17
Bryant reaches Fort Bridger.
18
Thornton crosses continental divide.
19
Frémont marches into Monterey.
20
Bryant and Hudspeth leave Fort Bridger.
21–22
Mormon Battalion starts for Fort Leavenworth.
26
Susan Magoffin reaches Bent’s Fort.
26
Frémont dispatched to San Diego.
26
Bryant reaches Great Salt Lake Valley.
28
Donners reach Fort Bridger.
28–30
Army of the West reaches Bent’s Fort.
29
Frémont raises flag at San Diego.
31
Taylor takes Camargo.
31
Donners leave Fort Bridger.
AUGUST
1
Mormon Battalion reaches Fort Leavenworth.
