The Year of Decision 1846, page 25
However, for a moment Parkman almost felt the emigration and again one aches for the book that might have been added to our literature if God had a little thawed the Brahmin snobberies. He saw the “perplexity and indecision” of the families — always at its worst at this pause in the trail — and rightly interpreted it. They were bred, he says, to the forest; in the high, dry country they were out of their element. They were right to be suspicious of the fort, for it unmercifully fleeced them, and their perturbed state of mind could not be cowardice for they were of the same stock as the volunteers for Mexico. He pondered. Though his journal shows that he himself had several times been “hipped” — sunk in depression — he had no premonition of the Angst, akin to the emigrants’ anxiety, that would shadow his middle years with the fear of insanity.… The moment’s sympathy lapsed. The movers were rude and ignorant, they pried into privacies, and there is an exquisite climax when he reproaches them for knowing nothing of the country and for — looking on Francis Parkman with suspicion. The historian succumbed to a parochialism of his class and we lost a great book.
But he could love the Oglala and every day withdrew from the coarse pioneers to Old Smoke’s lodge. He sedulously practised the Indian amenities, made himself a bottomless inquiry, and filled his journal with notes on Indian ways, beliefs, and traditions. He observed the cuisine, the games, the jurisdictions and authorities, the old men talking, the young men at their courting. Shaw treated cases of inflamed eyes. The warriors postured, the squaws gabbled, the lodges etched unforgettable patterns against the sunset. And finally he established citizenship: one of Old Smoke’s squaws gave a dog feast, he was able to belch his satisfaction, and he can no longer be called a greenhorn.
He stayed for six days (on one of which the dim-brained Englishmen passed westward), smoking out the plans for war. The scalp that hung in his apartment had belonged to the son of a minor “chief,” whom Parkman calls the Whirlwind. With nine others it had been taken in the buffalo country by the Shoshoni, the preceding summer. Parkman says that, scared by their own rashness, the Shoshoni had thereupon asked Vasquez to intercede for them with the Whirlwind and to propitiate him had left his son’s scalp at Fort Laramie.25 The Whirlwind, however, would not be appeased, and this summer he had stirred up most of the Teton Sioux to take the warpath. They would avenge this wrong on the Shoshoni, and incidentally could clean up any Crow hunting parties they might meet. Many villages of them were to rendezvous farther west, where La Bonte Creek flows into the Platte, and by a happy coincidence Henry Chatillon had a squaw and children in the Whirlwind’s village.
Parkman rejoiced. The history he had set himself to write required him to understand the Indian character, and now he could see most of a nation gathered together, their “vices and virtues … their innate character … their government, their superstitions, and their domestic situation.” He planned to travel with Old Smoke’s village to the rendezvous at La Bonte Creek, but an impressive young buck rode into the fort with word that, at the Whirlwind’s village, Henry Chatillon’s squaw was very sick. Parkman decided to ride straight to that village so that Henry might see her. He hired another voyageur, a numbskull named Raymond; and one Reynal, a trader, joined the party with his squaw and some of her relatives. On June 20 they rode out to find the Whirlwind.
Before he reached Fort Laramie Parkman had had a mild dysentery. At the fort that curse of prairie travel struck him in earnest, prostrating him. He had taken six grains of opium without arresting it, and was so feeble that he could hardly sit his saddle. But his Puritan heritage forbade him to be deterred by a weakness of the flesh. Giddy, frequently doubled up in agony, he went out to find his Indians. From then on for a long time there were periods when a quality of nightmare colored his mind, distorting the day.
They could not find the Whirlwind and so camped on Laramie Creek at the mouth of the Chugwater, a site which the Indians would probably pass on their way to the rendezvous. Chatillon sent the messenger back to tell his squaw to come to meet him. They stayed here for a week. They fished, smoked, talked, Parkman lying on a robe trying to recruit his strength. It would have been a charming, lazy interlude — except that Parkman’s illness would not abate. One night they were saved from a marauding band of Crows only because a mist came up in time. Henry’s squaw did not come in, and, worst of all, there was no sign of the Sioux.
Parkman chafed and fretted. Was he, on the brink of satisfaction, to lose his chance? One evening the messenger came back. The Whirlwind’s village, he said, was moving slowly and would not arrive for a week — and Chatillon’s squaw was dying. The news was intolerable. The next morning, leaving the Reynal family to guard the camp, Shaw rode out with Chatillon to find his squaw, and Parkman, to prevent cafard, rode back to Fort Laramie. It was June 27th.
So here is Francis Parkman, a Brahmin snob and our greatest historian, his strength undermined by a dangerous illness, riding toward history through the Bessemer heat of a June morning in the Wyoming badlands, some miles to the southwest of Fort Laramie. There are cottonwoods along Laramie Creek, the tree of the barrens; wherever a minute stream slinks for a few miles through desolation, their twisting scrawl of green rises against the dead land to refresh his heart. Cottonwoods: the desert-born remember them, needing only to see the movement of their leaves on a movie screen to be drawn back again to childhood, blue shade cool on parched skin, and the smell of water. For the rest there is only olive-dun sage in the long thrust toward the foothills, heated by the sun and a stench in Parkman’s nostrils. West of him the ridge of the Laramie Mountains (then called the Black Hills) is notched unevenly below the flattened pyramid-top of Laramie Peak. Northward a scroll of cottonwoods loops along the base of jagged buttes beyond the Platte. The badlands close in round him, open out, are regrouped as he rides, upthrust fingers, elbows, domes, flying buttresses, haystacks, human breasts, some yellow or red, some gray or white or brown, some black with cedar, but mostly the nameless desert color. They flicker and change under the twitching membrane of heat mirage, and a hot wind driving hot alkali into the skin comes out of them from the west. The sky has turned from blue to powdered gray, which burns the color of steel in the sun’s quarter. Where the sage has a dot of shadow round its roots, that shade has a queer, flat tinge of smoke in it and a transparent, unreal brown. There is no perspective; the assaulted eyes can hardly tell whether an object at a distance moves or holds still, whether it is half a mile away and small or ten miles away and gigantic. There is no way for the eye to turn, no way for the mind to turn, but inward.… Summer morning in the desert, June 27, 1846.
At Fort Laramie Parkman learned of a ball the emigrants had given. “Such belles!” he wrote in his notebook. But “one woman, of more than suspected chastity [be sure that the Sioux maidens, those of good family at least, were chaste] is left at the Fort and Bordeaux is fool enough to receive her.” He met Paul Dorion, to whom he had traded Pontiac, a week before, for a little mare whom he named Pauline. This was the son of the half-breed Pierre Dorion who, for a brief space, had assisted the labors of Sacajawea on the Lewis and Clark expedition and later, with his Iowa squaw Marie, had shared the long privation of the Astorians’ trip west under Wilson Hunt. (Marie Aioe is remembered with only less respect for courage and kindness than Sacajawea herself. The child she bore on the trail was Paul Dorion’s brother.) Parkman had read about the Dorions in Irving’s book, had talked with Paul in a mixture of French and English, had found him a complete Indian and so respected him. The Sioux at Fort Laramie had not made up their airy minds. Dorion said that another great band had arrived at Fort Bernard, where there were also many new emigrants. He wanted to trade Pontiac there. So Parkman rode on with him.
Well, there proved to be only a few Sioux as yet at Fort Bernard, they were 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 Russell, 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 bowie-knife displayed openly at their sides.” The chinked-log, unfinished fort resounded with a clamor offensive to well-born ears, and he had never looked on such a miscellany of casehardened men. Men filthy with dust, smelling for want of soap, bearded, their homespun or 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. On one forearm and crooked elbow, thumb through the handle, he cradled a whiskey jug which was empty now but which from time to time he swung to his mouth with the immemorial deftness. The other hand made stately passages while the oration boomed its periods over the fort’s uproar. 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.
Parkman reached Fort Laramie just after Bordeau had been defied by one of his own men. The rebel, one Perrault, shouted insults at his scared bourgeois, then in disgust packed up his possibles and started off alone through the Sioux for Fort Union. Just an incident in the mountain trade.26 Parkman spent the night there — the night of June 27 — and the next morning found that the Whirlwind, the focus of his desire, had come to Fort Laramie.
At once things looked bad. For Bordeau, the bourgeois, had been trying to turn the Whirlwind’s heart from the warpath, since fighting would have a bad effect on the trade — and on the emigration. To Parkman’s alarm, he had made serious headway, and a newly arrived trader reported that six other villages were now talking of going to the La Bonte rendezvous only on the ominous condition that there should be buffalo there, which was unlikely at this season. Worse still, an Indian rode in from Fort Bernard and revealed that the emigrants’ whiskey and the traders’ Taos Lightning had debauched the Minneconjou, whose villages had arrived after Parkman left. Like Owl Russell they had made a big drunk — and it had done the job. They had shrieked and howled all night, had fallen to quarreling, had worked up a typical Indian contention, beaten and stabbed one another, and losing their purpose had called off their splendid military parade. Racked by hangover, they had abandoned the warpath and were now, at this moment, working back homeward to the Missouri. No Shoshoni scalps for the Minneconjou Sioux.
Pretty serious. (Parkman did not realize that so large a body of Indians could not possibly have held to any purpose, least of all a warlike one.) He understood that the abandonment of the warpath might mean that his life had been saved, but what counted more was that, if it should spread to the Oglala, as the Whirlwind’s growing timidity threatened, he would lose his chance. Was he not to see the Indian “under his most fearful and characteristic aspect” after all this travel? Grave and foreboding, he saddled Pauline and started back to his camp at the mouth of the Chugwater. He must wait there for Shaw and Chatillon and hope for the Oglala. As he left the fort, a trapper told him that word had come of the murder of two mountain men, Boot and May, by the Arapaho. As he rode up Laramie Creek, two emigrants shouted at him, suggesting that he keep his eye peeled.
* * *
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 (vice Colonel Russell, deposed, who now determined to go with Bryant) — 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 (at this stage, captained by Rice Dunbar) 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. You had to follow the Platte north and northwest to Casper because a more direct route west would have had to cross the waterless desert between the Platte and the Medicine Bow National Forest of today. It would also have had to cross the Medicine Bow Mountains. Beyond Casper (a little west of which you would leave the Platte at last), you had to strike for the one opening through the continental divide by which wagons could be crossed, the South Pass which Jim Clyman and Jed Smith and Tom Fitzpatrick had first used. But you could not go straight west of Casper or even southwest: the desert and mountains (the Rattlesnake Range) of the present Natrona County and the still trackless desert of eastern Fremont County forbade. So the trail took the western half of our recumbent S, bent sharply south of southwest, moved by Fremont’s Island and Independence Rock to Devil’s Slide and the Sweetwater River, and then up the Sweetwater to South Pass.
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. We have observed how at Fort Laramie one suddenly realized that time was getting short. The realization 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. (By ’46 there were several routes, used only occasionally, which crossed to the south of Fort Hall, going west by Soda Springs, by Raft River, or by Bear Lake — but they all made for the established route and reached it before it struck the Humboldt.) 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.
