The Year of Decision 1846, page 21
Good fun, good food, the nightly ritual of camp and fire. 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 he 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.3 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, with 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 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.
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The emigration moved beside Parkman, ahead of him, and behind him. We will follow it mainly in the experiences of several persons, already introduced, who started a little after him. In early May an enormous wagon train was forming at Indian Creek, a few miles out of Independence. We are concerned with its itinerary and experience, though this narrative calls at need on the whole summer’s movement and on what is typical in the history of such travel. 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 which had a similar history.… Remember that this was a drouth year already in the mountains and would soon become one on the plains. Earlier trains had diminished the originally plentiful grass, and the trail, where it was fixed, was dusty from the wheels of those that had gone before. The prairie air was full of rumors, and there was doubt of one’s welcome in Oregon, which might be British when one arrived, or in California, which might be at war.
Edwin Bryant, the transplanted Yankee, left Independence with his two companions4 for the rendezvous on May 5. They had hired a sub-mountain-man named Brownell to drive for them, had bought and outfitted an emigrant wagon, and had provided it with three yoke of oxen at $21.67 per span.5 The asthmatic Thornton had already been nominated a colonel, probably because he used such beautiful language, when he left Independence with his Nancy and two hired drivers on May 12. He joined Governor Boggs’s party and when they reached the rendezvous, the fifteenth, they brought its census to 72 wagons, 130 men, 65 women, 125 children. For a brief space it was to be more than twice as large as that. A few days later Reed and the Donners came up, and the populous Breens had joined them. They were probably the most luxuriously equipped emigrants on the plains that summer, and an undercurrent of resentment began. One of Reed’s wagons was not only outsize but had been filled with bunks, cushions, a stove, and various contrivances for comfort. Virginia Reed’s blooded riding mare was envied. The Donners had three spare yoke of oxen, more milch cows than seemed necessary, some yearlings for beef, and five saddle horses. An even more ambitious effort was made. Messrs. J. Baker and David Butterfield undertook to make the crossing with a herd of 140 cattle.6 After a few days they were required to leave the train, on the formal verdict that so large a herd would be a danger when they should reach the desert country, but more likely because they refused to butcher their calves.
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.7 “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. From the Connecticut and the Kenawha on to the Missouri the “new country” had always offered opportunities to the shiftless and the shifty, but this was different. The 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.8 Most trains had a number of such young men (and sometimes, as with the Donners, young women) who were working their passage, but the bulk were, at least in a moderate degree, men of property and therefore substantial citizens. A certain fraction, of course, if not “squatters” (generically, “poor whites”) were of the butcher-knife type, and the fraction increased as travel cheapened. (In the last stages of the Gold Rush it got fairly large.) 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. Companions of Thornton’s alluded to in a few successive entries of his journal are named Crump, Clark, Lard, Van Bibber (Lazarus!), Mootrey, Savage, Croiyers, Dunbar, Luce, Hill, Norris, Perkins, and Burns. It is a voting list of any town from Concord to Sedalia.
They were Americans and would therefore organize. An impressive staff of officers — captain, vice captains, secretary, treasurer, judges, committees of appeal, and so forth — was proposed and these honors implied electioneering. Candidates mounted stumps or wagon boxes to confess their personal excellences and praise the patriotism of emigration. Cliques formed, votes were cast, and whoever lost began to store up resentment that would make trouble later on. The committees could meet by night and make recommendations, which one obeyed at his pleasure but was more likely to disregard. The captain’s duties were large but his authority was theoretical; everyone had the inalienable privilege of dissent and especially of criticism. Few trains ever got to South Pass, and still fewer to the Pacific, under the same officers or even the same organization they had voted in at the start. But organizing was fun and as native as a town meeting.
The election went to Owl Russell, described at this very moment as a tall man in a panama hat which had an oiled-silk cover, “courteous to all around him — how kindly he takes every man who is introduced to him by the hand, exceedingly delighted to have the privilege of meeting him.”9 He was a mighty orator and therefore a predestined captain. The stock had exhausted the near-by grass and he 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 yet established, and the movers 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 were 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, or it was mere air — though it is true that a surprising number of British Army officers went out to hunt buffalo or commune with the prairie gods while Oregon and California hung in the balance. 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. “No one,” Parkman said, “could predict what would be the result when large armed bodies of these fanatics should encounter the most impetuous and reckless of their old enemies on the prairie.” 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 half cock — 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. (He repeated the suggestion to other trains which expressed the same anxiety.) 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.
(Meanwhile, making a few weary miles a day across Iowa, a hundred miles north and a good way east of the emigration, the Mormons kept their guns loaded but hidden, in fear that, now they were beyond the settlements, the Missourians would annihilate them. They walked warily and behaved themselves, but they had bad dreams. So did the Missourians, to whom a hundred miles of prairies seemed an insufficient buffer. They kept memorializing the Adjutant General, the Secretary of War, and President Polk himself. Why, they demanded, were the Saints “armed to the teeth and supported by batteries of heavy ordnance?” Why were they without their families? — this, when the discreet Mormon Battalion was marched toward Fort Leavenworth to get its equipment. They meant no good to Missouri and had already given the neighboring Indians “a more savage bearing and more bold assurance.” They were “depredating” Missouri property and were, in the belief of the memorialists, “British emissaries, intending by insidious means to accomplish diabolical purposes.” So it was clearly the duty of the President, “in defence of ‘the brave and hardy men of the frontier’ to take the necessary measures to disarm them and expel them from our border.” In short, the brave and hardy men of the frontier had a bad conscience and a violent scare.… And not only in Missouri. As far south as Texas it was believed that the Mormons were coming with sword and firebrand, various Californians were panicky with the same expectation, even Larkin was uneasy, and dispatches were hurried eastward calling on Polk in much the same vocabulary. These representations had a part in Polk’s decision to raise a new regiment of Mounted Rifles for border duty. Also, the moment he had a war on his hands, the Camp of Israel, pitched far out in the country that was his main objective, acquired an importance that his best humanitarian rhetoric had not previously attributed to it.)
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. The Thorntons would be cooing about them for weeks to come. That day Mr. Burns got himself plentifully lost in the prairies and established a precedent that the greenhorns would act on till they learned better.
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. The next day Mr. Webb, the editor of an Independence newspaper, rode into camp to confirm the story. 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. And Jessy Thornton, experiencing an access of patriotism exactly like that which had foamed up in the States, knew what to do. He felt that Old Rough and Ready (who was about to receive that title) would come through and “add additional luster to a name already greatly endeared to his admiring countrymen.” Therefore, on the right bank of the Kansas, he nominated Zachary Taylor to be President of the United States.
* * *
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.
We have already seen them breaking up and without trail discipline. 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 co-operative 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 oxens 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 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 mountain men suffered bountifully from scalping but you seldom hear of one who is sick, and when you do he is suffering from a hangover or a decayed tooth. Whereas from the first days on, the emigrants are preyed upon by colds, agues, and dysenteries that are their own damned fault.… All this has its part in the stresses put on human personality by emigration.
