The Year of Decision 1846, page 22
The Oregon and California Trails
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 did impose a military order of march. On the southern trail wagons moved in something like order; in single file where 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. Brigham Young had a disciplined people and the considerable advantage that his orders rested on the authority of Almighty God — and even so, among a submissive and believing people on the march, he had constantly to deal with quarrels, dissension, rebellions, complaints, and ineffectiveness. Among the emigrants there was no such authority as God’s or Brigham’s. A captain who wanted to camp here rather than there had to make his point by parliamentary procedure and the art of oratory. 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. They formed the corral badly, with too great labor and loss of time, or not at all. They quarreled over place and precedence that did not matter. They postponed decisions in order to debate and air the minority view, when they should have accepted any decision that could be acted on. 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 free. At Scott’s Bluff, for instance, some clung to the riverbank but others, like Thornton, detoured several miles to the south in hope of less precipitous going. 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 Waukarusa 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 or near 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. The valley was an oasis in what seemed to be truly the Great American Desert, the scenery got more alarming as the going got dryer, and the river was one of the most preposterous in the world, a bottomland through which a mile-wide trickle of water you had to chew made its way among cottonwoods and quicksands. 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 on 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.
Some ten days before our emigrants reached their country, in fact, the Pawnee had macerated a train. They swept down on the herd and drove it off, netting something over a hundred horses and oxen. Some of the movers quit right there and hurried back to the States. Others kept going — and kept splitting up into smaller groups. They also kept trying to recover their stock. So they lost some more of it. And one day four of them, armed only with black-snake whips, set out to retrieve some animals which the Pawnee had driven off the night before. The Pawnee killed two of them and took over their riding horses and would have killed the other two except that help arrived.… The second moral was, don’t leave camp unarmed. If they had carried rifles they would probably not have been attacked.… In their little fragments, these movers kept going, though some of them turned back still later. The Graves family, who joined the Donners in the Wasatch Mountains, had started out with this train and one of their companions, a man named Trimble, was one of those killed by the Pawnee.
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. The pressure that was forcing the Sioux southwest was forcing them toward this country but it was still a kind of Indian no man’s land, a hunting ground not dominated or even claimed by any particular tribe. The Sioux, the Crows, the Arapaho, and the Cheyenne all bordered on it, the Shoshoni (Snakes) regularly came into it from the west, and a good many other tribes might occasionally be encountered there. But of these, all but the Arapaho were still well disposed, and the Arapaho (whom Parkman took the greatest care to avoid) saw no profit in raiding well-armed trains.10 Year by year the increasing emigration narrowed the buffalo range and eroded the economy of the tribes who had to live on it; year by year the Indian danger got greater. Finally the Sioux and the Cheyenne rose as nations and made the trail terrible, but there was no premonition of that in the summer of ’46. The risks now were that stragglers might be killed for their arms and equipment, that venturesome young bucks might raid the horse herd for glory, or that the antic Indian humor might stampede the oxen. Indians did not covet the ungainly tamed buffalo that drew the white-tops, but it was fun to see them run, especially with some arrows sticking in them.
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. When Parkman met the great war parties at Fort Laramie they were swelling with an almost Teutonic brag, beating their chests in the stateliest of furies and telling everybody that they were going to destroy all the whites who had invaded their Lebensraum. 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.11
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At first the country was lush and fragrant, almost overpoweringly beautiful as the rains ended and the prairie spring came on. 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 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 wildflowers. They were more vividly colored than those to the eastward, their perfume hung in the morning air, and Thornton, who had edited James’s Rocky Mountain Plants, was dazzled to see its sketches realized before his eyes. On his word, Nancy was “an ardent lover of nature.” Her journal filled with a noticeably amorous prose and she botanized furiously. So did Tamsen Donner, that staunch New England schoolmarm 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. Such birds, too! — and, seeing two hummingbirds kissing each other, Thornton is almost blasphemous in praise of the Creator’s forethought, who had given him an exquisite soul. Flowers, birds, sky, clouds, rivers, willows, cottonwoods, zephyrs — the Thorntons were enraptured and Jessy almost forgot the bundle of sermons he had got from the American Tract Society to distribute among the emigrants. So far he had conferred them only on a Kansa squaw, the wife of the ferryman at the first crossing.
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. An incurable Yankeeness extemporized debates, political forums, and lectures on the flora of the new country or the manifest destiny of the American nation. Oratory pulsed against the prairie sky. Be sure that nature was served also and the matrons who distrusted the unmarried girls had cause. This was the village on wheels, and the mind and habit of the village inclosed it, beside those carmine fires which Hollywood need only show us against white canvas to awaken our past. The fires lapsed, the oxen came grumping into the inclosure, and one fell asleep hearing the wolves in endless space.… 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. Bryant saw women weeping at the parting, after only three weeks’ association. From now on the two divisions, though they kept on fragmenting and regrouping, traveled more or less on this basis, and the women’s tears were premature. They were seldom more than a day’s journey apart and visited one another freely.
This division had more behind it than difference of destination, debate over methods, and personal rivalry. It had been preceded by a fist fight between two ordinarily peaceful men, and they drew knives before they could be separated. They were parted when the train split, but immediately there were fist fights and brandished knives and pistols in both halves. From now on the companions of the trail would quarrel violently on the minutest provocation.… 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, and God Himself seemed hostile when there was added to them a bad storm or some neighbor’s obstinacy that reacted to the common loss. The sunniest grew surly and any pinprick could be a mortal insult. The enforced companionship of the trail began to breed the hatred that is a commonplace of barracks. Your best friend’s drawl or innocent tic was suddenly intolerable.
Beyond this, which could be understood, was the unseen, steady seepage of the life you had been bred to. The tax of strangeness grew heavier. This was not your known pastureland. 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. The trail bred a genuine pathology, a true Angst, proper material for psychiatry to work on. The elements of human personality were under pressure to come out of equilibrium. There was a drive to phobia or compulsion or fugue or dissociation. Some survived it unchanged or strengthened in their identity; some suffered from it, inflicting it on their families, for the rest of their lives. And it grew as the trip went on. Worse country lay ahead and the drained mind was less able to meet it.
