The Year of Decision 1846, page 18
A. Lincoln attended the sessions of the Tazewell Circuit Court at Tremont, Illinois, from April 8 to 15, and when it closed went on to the Woodford Circuit at Metamora. So he was not in Springfield on April 15 when there rendezvoused there, and camped on the site of the present Statehouse, a party of thirty-two3 emigrants from Sangamon County who had spent the preceding months getting ready for California. We have already glanced at two of those who spent that April night in Springfield — anticipating the day in June when Jim Clyman is to meet James Frazier Reed near Fort Laramie and the day in July when he is to meditate beside the grave of Mrs. Sarah Keyes, who was Reed’s mother-in-law. That night in Springfield, she had just a month to live.
A family ready for the decisive break with the past. Reed, forty-six, noble Polish blood mingling in his veins with that of the log-cabin pioneers, well-to-do, luxuriously outfitted for the passage, bearing credentials of character and position signed by Thomas Ford, the governor of Illinois. His wife, Margaret, thirty-two. Their children, Martha (Patty), eight years old; James, five; Thomas, three. Margaret Reed’s daughter by an earlier marriage, Virginia Backenstoe, thirteen. Margaret’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Keyes, feeble and failing but resolved to live till she might meet her son, who had gone to Oregon two years before and was supposed to be coming back along the trail this year. And some employes — one hardly knows the right term for hired companions, since “servant” will not do. These were Baylis Williams, twenty-four years old, and his sister Eliza, twenty-five; they were young country folk going west to better their estate. There were Milt Elliott, twenty-eight; James Smith, twenty-five; Waiter Herron, twenty-five; these three, known as Reed’s teamsters, like the two Williamses came from Sangamon County, neighbors working their way to a new start on the golden shore.
The families of two friends of Reed, with employes, came to that rendezvous on April 15, to complete the party. These 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, aged fourteen and twelve, however, and Tamsen’s three daughters, aged six, four, and three, were with them. George’s second wife, the mother of the two older girls, had been a sister of Elizabeth, who was the wife of Jacob Donner. She had been Elizabeth Hook in an earlier marriage, and two sons of that marriage, fourteen and twelve, were with her now, besides her children by Jacob Donner, a seven-year-old daughter and boys of nine, five, four, and three. With the Donner families were also four teamsters working their way west: Hiram Miller; Noah James, twenty years old, from the immediate neighborhood (see how the talk of winter evenings had struck fire from the neighbors); Samuel Shoemaker, twenty-five, who had reached the Sangamon from Springfield, Ohio; and John Denton, twenty-eight, a gunsmith, who had come a longer journey to this rendezvous, all the way from Sheffield, England … and who was to die in the snow-choked valley of the Yuba toward which Jim Clyman was heading when Denton camped with his employer in A. Lincoln’s home town.
Like Reed, the Donners were well-to-do; they had already reached the happy ending of the American success story before the spring fret came over them. George Donner had broken prairie soil a few miles out of Springfield in the town’s earliest days. Before that he had moved from North Carolina, his birthplace, to Kentucky, on to Indiana, to Illinois, to Texas, and back to Illinois. There his land and his brother’s grew in value and their speculations were happy. George Donner’s older children (in three marriages he had thirteen all told) were already giving him grandchildren to make the house merry on Thanksgiving Day, and were richly established on the homesteads he had set off for them from his large holdings, reserving a hundred and ten acres for the younger ones he took to California, in case they might sometime want to come back home. They were going to California in the mood of Bill Bowen, but consciously to live out their days in the languorous, winterless country that seemed so much like the Marquesas of Herman Melville’s nostalgia. The younger children would grow up in a softer, more abundant life — and their gentility would 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 for a book 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.) The Donners had three wagons apiece, one packed with goods to set up trade and housekeeping in California, one with supplies for the journey, and one to live in; Reed also had three wagons, one of them a great, ungainly ark, double-decked and outfitted with bunks and a stove. The wagons were packed not only with the necessities but with a rich and dangerous bulk of comforts, luxuries, and indulgences. Reed, a gourmet, carried wines and brandies toward the vineyards of the province. Moreover, they had faithfully obeyed Lansford Hastings’ directions to take goods for the Indians, and were even supplied with better goods to barter for land in California.… Not a people moving west like the Mormons, but some families — who carried with them a culture, an expectation, and the warm, habitual affections of a patriarchal life.
This is not the roster of “the Donner party,” as that title comes down in history. Others were added along the trail, who will be noted later on. But, to exhibit one more specimen of the migration, we must mention another family who joined them at Independence on May 11 or 12, after they had encountered Jessy Quinn Thornton and had accepted his advice to hurry on and join the wagon train that was forming under the command of Colonel William Henry Russell, the friend of Henry Clay. This was the family of Patrick Breen, from Ireland by way of Keokuk, and his wife Peggy. They had six sons, John, Edward, Patrick, Simon, Peter, and James, ranging from fourteen years to four, and a daughter, Isabella, just a year old. Patrick Breen’s friend went with him, Patrick Dolan, a bachelor who was also from Keokuk and Ireland. They were successful farmers and Breen, like Reed and the Donners, started from Independence with three wagons, plus a sizable herd of horses and milch cattle besides his oxen.
But they had not heard of the Breens when they camped at Springfield — nor of Jessy Quinn Thornton, Edwin Bryant, or Colonel Russell. Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Governor Tom Ford, and ex-Congressman Hardin were familiar names to them; doubtless they had listened to them all, may have known, some of them personally. The story of Joseph Smith was common talk among them, and they had their own ideas about Brigham Young and probably about Lillburn Boggs, who would eventually be their captain. They knew that the Mormons were moving west and heard that they would massacre as many Gentiles as they could on the way. They did not know about the maneuvers of Taylor’s army at the Rio Grande and did not guess what was said of it in Polk’s Cabinet meetings. Sam Houston was a shining name to them. Possibly they had heard about Slidell, but certainly not about Atocha or, since the Alamo and San Jacinto, about Santa Anna. They had read Frémont and Lansford Hastings. Reed knew Jim Clyman but had heard nothing about him since they had been in the same company with A. Lincoln in the Black Hawk War fourteen years ago.
On the morning of April 16, they yoked up the oxen to nine wagons and made their start — for the West. That day Jim Clyman reached Lansford Hastings on Bear Creek and was welcomed under a spreading oak in “a warm and Polite manner” … the Bear Creek they were to be brought down to — some of them — from the snows. There were thirty-two in the combined parties that left Springfield that morning. One of them was to leave the party just beyond Fort Laramie and Mrs. Keyes was to die when Colonel Russell’s wagon train reached the Big Blue, at the beginning of the journey. Of the thirty others, thirteen were to die this side of Bear Creek because they trusted the publicity man, Lansford Hastings, who as April ended would start east to meet them and make sure of their fate.
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On the day after they left Springfield, an American who had crossed the plains the year before sat down in California to write a letter to the folks back home in Springfield. This was William L. Todd, son of the high-born Dr. Todd and nephew of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, and the Journal would publish his letter in early August. What young Todd had to say on April 17 is exceedingly interesting.
… If there are any persons in Sangamon who speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains to this country, tell them my advice is to stay at home. There you are well off. You can enjoy all the comforts of life — live under a good government and have peace and plenty around you — a country whose soil is not surpassed by any in the world, having good seasons and yielding timely crops. Here everything is on the other extreme: the government is tyrannical, the weather unseasonable, poor crops, and the necessaries of life not to be had except at the most extortionate prices, and frequently not then.…
I do not, however, believe there was ever a more beautiful climate than we have in this country. During the whole winter we have delightful weather except when it rains.… Most all day long we could be seen in winter with our coats off, walking in the neighborhood of our cabin, except when we were off hunting for a term of four or six days.
The Mexicans talk every spring and fall of driving the foreigners out of the country. They must do it this year or they can never do it. There will be a revolution before long and probably the country will be annexed to the United States. If there, I will take a hand in it.
Mr. Todd exactly and almost completely expressed the majority beliefs of Americans in California, a month short of May. In exactly that state of mind, Jim Clyman had offered to raise filibusters for Frémont. In exactly that state of mind, John Marsh, who for years had agitated for an uprising of Americans and had assisted various native revolts, had expected a “revolution” some months before. In exactly that state of mind several hundred others felt that their hour was at hand. They believed most of the rumors that circulated in the province of anarchy, and some that were too absurd for belief they propagated as useful. Few of them understood the way of life around them, fewer respected it. The Californians were pelados, greasers: different from the Yankees and therefore contemptible, little interested in money, negligent of land, without thought of the morrow, abandoned to popish superstitions. And, of course, immoral.
A correspondent of the National Intelligencer adds an involuntary postscript, a few days later: —
Most of the inhabitants are great scamps; many not only confess they steal horses and cattle but they boast of it. I bought a horse this morning that the man is to steal for me in a day or two. You will think this strange conduct, but this same man was not only robbed but beaten by the other; and there is no law to punish them, so that he has to make himself whole in the coin of his opponent. The Spanish portion of the inhabitants are a thieving, cowardly, dancing, lewd people, and generally indolent and faithless.
Sermon on a moral text.
There is no awareness in Hastings’ book that California was not an American possession, but the realization that it was not had begun to grow acute among the resident Americans. War was at hand and California would not survive it as a province of Mexico. Whatever happened, they would be exposed to material damage. Mexico or an autonomous California could expropriate their lands, to which only a few of them had any title. Cession to or seizure by a foreign state was intolerable to their patriotism and distasteful to their sense of real estate. Under any efficient foreign government most of them would have no status. Whereas an American occupation — which, always remember, had the plain logic of the map behind it — would probably obliterate the inconveniences of the established land system. They had interpreted Frémont’s arrival in the light of their hopes and holdings. With Frémont gone and the hope withdrawn, they were again at the mercy, if not of the greasers at least of the land system — and what had they come for if not for land? (Well, some for health, some for adventure, some as deserters or fugitives, some merely as flotsam.) They ought to do something about it.
Besides, there would be glory for those who wanted glory. Also positions: something like a spoils system if not a civil service. Also, in the vision of the wooziest, a chance to repeat the heroic pattern of the Americans, free an enslaved people, set up the institutions of the eagle, and establish a gaudy if rather illiterate parody of Brook Farm.
It was the peculiar fortune of the Americans to find revolutions going on wherever they invaded Mexico. But if one is to sympathize with the Californians, it must be only a nostalgic sympathy, a respect for things past. This coming autumn Lieutenant Ruxton of the British Army would find some of the Plains Indians possessed by a stoic melancholy which issued from a conviction that their day was over and the white man could not be stayed. Similarly, California was suffused with a knowledge that there was no help for it. Its golden age had ended. No one could govern it from Mexico; no one could govern it at home. Its feudal organization, feeble at best, had broken up into cliques which lowered the standard of public honor and responsibility, enfeebled the society, and drained it alike of money and belief. An era was closing in regret; an order of mankind, a phase of society, in many ways a happy phase, was collapsing. This much the Californians knew. They felt diversely about it, as men do when the sanctions bred in them have broken. Some of them would welcome anything that would restore stability to the no longer stable — France, England, the United States — nor was it hidden from many landholders in this country of vast landholdings that real estate would be most valuable under the United States. Some dreamed of restoring the allegiance to Mexico which had never quite existed. Some dreamed, instead, of going it alone. A good many, and they likely to be the best, would do what they could, not much in any event, to hold together while the flood closed over them. After all, it was their country.
They were, of course, caught in the requirements of Mexican rhetoric and hindered by the heritage from Spain of interior dissents. This April the immemorial conflict between the north and the south, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was shaping to a crisis. There was a species of representative assembly at Los Angeles, controlled by Pico, the governor. Nominally it was the civil power. In the north there were the two Castros, prefect and comandante, who nominally represented the military power. Neither Spain nor Mexico had ever been able to fuse the two powers in this province, but the contention between them now was only a facet of collapse. Clyman saw it as a contest for control of the revenues, but it was only a contest for the titles of office, which were resounding, and the real trouble between Pico and Castro was that neither could vote the other out. Castro formed a junta at Monterey, to consider the state of the nation and the danger of conquest, calling on Pico in excellent prose to abandon partisanship and co-operate with him. But to Pico and his assembly the Monterey junta looked like a committee of revolution, and as April ended each side was raising forces against the other. Forces? Well, both sides were raising horsemen but they were several hundred miles apart, and the likelihood was that this campaign, one more installment in a long serial, would confine itself to the methods of its predecessors, pageantry and syntax.
However, one item of the routine was to lead to results which were not contemplated and had no precedent. Castro sent north for horses to equip his levies, and northward were the jittery but opportunistic Americans.
None of this escaped the observation of Thomas Larkin. He saw that political control was dying in California. He was under orders to foment a revolution and one might develop from this new strife. In two years more the society would be altogether broken down — perhaps in one year, say by the spring of ’47.… The trouble was time and events. His orders were five months old now and already obsolete. Frémont had attended to that; after the drama of Gavilán Peak Larkin would need time to persuade Castro that the United States was interested in his well-being. More time than he or Secretary Buchanan, months away by messenger, was to get.
And Frémont had been humiliated. Early in April he moved up the Sacramento from Lassen’s ranch toward the Cascades, whither he had originally been ordered. He got past Mount Shasta but spring snow fell in the peaks and Frémont — who had twice crossed the Sierra in winter — turned back again to Lassen’s, where he stayed till April 24. His father-in-law would describe to a spellbound Senate how Frémont had suffered in the harsh weather, but the truth is that he could not bring himself to leave his stage. The drama of Gavilán had come to nothing, to worse than nothing. The hero had neither conquered nor died: he had retreated. Behind him were the triumphant sneers of the Californians — and with him traveled the caustic doubts of his mountain men, who had never before seen him outfaced, and his own gnawing frustration. His image of himself had been impaired by a conflict with reality; the hero had been scaled down to life size. There was no vindication at Lassen’s, however, and ultimately there was nothing to do but go on. So he started out again on the twenty-fourth, a momentous day elsewhere, toward Oregon.
Back at Monterey, the U. S. sloop Cyane dropped anchor on April 17 and Lieutenant Gillespie repeated to Consul Larkin the instructions he had memorized at Mexico City. He had been just short of six months on his way. Larkin presented him as an invalid traveling for his health, and he rode north to Yerba Buena and the vice consul. From there he set out to overtake Frémont.
* * *
April produced the President’s triumph. Final word came from Slidell on the seventh that Paredes had refused to receive him, and the Cabinet had moved so steadily that Polk found no opposition in it to the strongest measures — to war with Mexico. However, he would not recommend them to Congress just yet, for the Oregon question was at last coming to a head. Congress must now reach a decision, and could not like the necessity. The administration drove its forces with whip, spur, and nosebag. Mr. Polk believed that he could best control the Northern members with patronage, whereas with Southerners the appeal to principle was better. But the best talent of the Whigs was opposition, Polk’s own party was half a dozen factions precariously held together, and both parties were looking not only at Oregon and Great Britain but two years ahead. Neither 49° nor 54° 40′, his diary noted in disgust, meant so much to even the Democratic Senators as ’48 and the election.
