The Year of Decision 1846, page 26
That was precisely the trouble — that possible due-west line from Fort Bridger. The established trail moved from Fort Bridger to the Humboldt along two sides, northwest and southwest, of a right-angle triangle whose due-west hypotenuse stretched straight past the southern end of Great Salt Lake.… Late June at Fort Laramie, the South Pass journey still to come, and beyond it that long, laborious, and apparently senseless detour, several hundred miles long, to Fort Hall. Anyone who studied a map at Fort Laramie, intending to go to California, would look with loathing on that detour. On June 27, 1846, no map ever drawn had filled in the country between Fort Bridger and Great Salt Lake — no map showed what the Wasatch Mountains were like. And no map filled in the country between Great Salt Lake and the north bend of the Humboldt River — which included the Salt Desert.27 …
June 27. There was visiting between the trains, and no doubt Nancy Thornton was a genteel hostess again, though her linen would be dingier. No doubt Margaret Reed and Tamsen Donner botanized among the cottonwoods, Virginia Reed rode her blooded horse at a gallop for the admiration of young Minneconjou bucks, and the children gazed at hundreds of painted Indians and their dogs and lodges and herds, the marvels learned in books along the Sangamon now magically made real along the Platte. Owl Russell had his big drunk, and so did the Taos trappers, and M. Richard, the hangers-on of Fort Bernard, the dusty, tired emigrants, and the Sioux. Furniture, clothes, surplus food, were traded to the Taos men for what little they would bring, or just abandoned. Hammers rang on iron as tires were reset and shoes refitted to horses. Laundry bloomed on the cottonwoods, to dry in desert sun. The Sioux yowled and galloped and, as night came on, got drunker still, pounded their chests, counted coups, fell to quarreling, drew their knives, felt their hearts going bad. A big night in the desert, a big night at Fort Bernard.
Lines of campfires dotted the wagon trains, their flames gilding the cottonwoods and shining in the Platte. And at one fire, Jim Clyman says, “several of us continued the conversation until a late hour.” Jim had met a messmate of the Black Hawk War, James Frazier Reed, who had sat by him at other campfires, with A. Lincoln. He met some of Mr. Reed’s friends and companions. Edwin Bryant and Jessy Thornton and Governor Boggs for certain were at that fire, Owl Russell probably, and by inference George and Jacob Donner — the responsible minds of the two trains. He and his companions met a good many other emigrants, and told them all the same story.
For Jim and the others felt a heavy responsibility. Some of them tried to modify the emigrants’ vision of the golden shore, speaking of sparse rain and ruined crops, speaking of the low quality of Americans resident there. Bryant grunted in disgust. He was for California, and it was clear to him that these trail-stained travelers, Clyman in particular, were lying, for some reason not on the surface. He was not credulous enough to believe plain liars but he perceived that many of his associates were. Thornton, who was for Oregon anyway, was detached and believed them.
The wagon train grew quiet but this one fire was kept blazing — a carmine splash against the blue-velvet night, the desert stars near above it, the white bow of a wagon top behind, and, farther away, the singing of drunken Missourians at the fort and the screaming of drunken Sioux. Clyman talked on. He knew Hastings’ plans, he knew what Hastings would tell these innocents near South Pass. And he had just crossed — with Hastings — from the bend of the Humboldt to Fort Bridger by way of the Salt Desert, Great Salt Lake, and the Wasatch Mountains. A Sioux yipped, the barking of coyotes ringed the sleeping caravan, and Jim told his listeners: take the familiar trail, the regular, established trail by way of Soda Springs and Fort Hall. Do not try a cutoff, do not try anything but the known, proved way. “It is barely possible to get through [before the snows] if you follow it — and it may be impossible if you don’t.” Shock and alarm struck the travelers and made them angry, who were still far short of South Pass, whose minds could map that weary angle from Fort Bridger to Fort Hall and back again to the Humboldt. Tense and bellicose, Reed spoke up (Jim records his words), “There is a nigher route, and it is no use to take so much of a roundabout course.” Reference to Lansford Hastings’ book, Jacob Donner’s copy bought at Springfield, back in the States, now scanned by firelight at Fort Bernard, a well-thumbed passage marked with lines. The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, page 137: “The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the bay of San Francisco.…” Proved. And someone would spit into the fire.
(When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage he had never seen the Humboldt, or Great Salt Lake, or the Wasatch Mountains, or the Salt Desert; neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate man who wanted to be President or mortgagee of California.)
Yes. But Jim has just traveled that route, and if they would save their skins, they will not take it, they will go by way of Fort Hall. “I … told him about the great desert and the roughness of the Sierras, and that a straight route might turn out to be impracticable.” Told him about the glare of the salt plain under sun and without water. Told him about the Diggers lurking outside the camps to kill the stock. Told him about the chaos of the Wasatch canyons which Jim Clyman and Lansford Hastings, who were on horseback and had no wagons and so no need of a road, had barely got through.
In the tents or in the wagons Tamsen and Elizabeth Donner and Margaret Reed fell asleep. The children slept. All the women and children and most of the men of these two trains were asleep by now, all the men who were not listening to the argument or helping make the noise that sometimes surged through the darkness from Fort Bernard. A tired, strained, bewildered company hemmed in by desolation, the shade and waters of their homes almost forgotten, the dream become more real than memory. Islanded in mountain night, islanded in awe and the unknown, ringed round by drunken Sioux. The cottonwoods rustling, the night cold.
Clyman talked on, repeating his warnings and threats — the mountain man, the man who knew, the master of this wilderness, pleading with the tenderfeet. Till there was no more to say, the fire was only embers shimmering in the dark, and they separated, to lie awake while the coyotes mourned and the Sioux screamed — and think it over. In the desert, where Laramie Creek empties into the Platte: a moment of decision.
Next morning they had made up their minds. Bryant was not deterred. He would take the way he had decided on, and rightly so, for he would travel by pack train and could travel fast. The unappreciated orator Owl Russell would go with him, and the eight original volunteers were steadfast. (Though a few days later Clyman’s words seemed sound sense to Mr. Kirkendall, and he rejoined the Oregon train — to soften Thornton’s troubles and suffer hardship on another cutoff.) Governor Boggs and Judge Morin, however, had been convinced. They sought out Clyman, before he moved on, and told him they would follow his advice — would go to Oregon by way of Fort Hall. Not Reed and the Donners. Their impatience had not been scotched. They would go on their determined way, and if any cared to join them, they would be welcome.
So be it. Jim repeated his warnings, but he had his own trail to follow and late in the morning he led his party eastward.
Another chapter in the outline of American history, which now had only a few more to go before the peace and satisfaction of its last years. Eastward, in the direction of Scott’s Bluff, with Chimney Rock to come, and Ash Hollow, and the crossing to the South Platte. But American history in the person of Jim Clyman had told the Donner party not to take the Hastings Cutoff from the California trail.
VII
“Cain, Where Are Thy Brothers?”
ON May 1, meeting at Petersburg, Menard County, the Whig Convention nominated A. Lincoln to represent the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois, thirty-seven years old, “a good Whig, a good man, an able speaker, and richly deserves the confidence of Whigs in District and State.” His Democratic opponent was to be the middle border’s mightiest man of God, Peter Cartwright, presiding elder of the Methodist Church, the greatest of the circuit riders. For nearly forty years Elder Cartwright had fought the devil through the prairies, bearing on his own shoulders unnumbered thousands of souls back from the pit that flamed at the foot of his pulpit, pricking uncounted frenzies of guilt to release in barking, yipping, jerking and rolling on the ground toward the peace that passeth understanding, cursing liquor and jewelry and gambling and profane swearing and pride and fornication in a brazen voice that clanged across the sacred grove and silenced the roistering of the ungodly at the groggeries beyond. He and A. Lincoln were to campaign till August but little of their oratory has come down to us. Both respected the policy of that wayward summer: to say nothing about slavery, to avoid the war but to praise it when it could not be dodged, and to keep silent on all issues that either would have to face in Congress. Mr. Cartwright appears to have attacked Mr. Lincoln as an infidel and a slave of the liquor interests. But this was no camp meeting and when the votes were counted the infidel had the largest majority on record in Illinois and was the one Whig his state sent to the Thirtieth Congress. And the man of God carried a grudge all the rest of his life.
He was still older in 1859 when his grandson, Peachy Harrison, was tried at Springfield for the murder of Greek Grafton, who had been a law student with the firm of Lincoln & Herndon. Mr. Lincoln had grown in reputation when he took Peachy’s case but there was arrayed against him a bouquet of lawyers whose fame made a greater sum than his, and the Court was biased. So biased that Mr. Lincoln got mad. “Mad all over,” Herndon says, “terrible, furious, eloquent,” like the Reverend Mr. Cartwright battling with the devil, and “the scoring he gave that Court … was terrible, blasting, crushing, I shall never forget the scene.” No use. So Mr. Lincoln called to the witness box the prisoner’s grandfather, whom he had defeated for Congress thirteen years before. He had Cartwright tell the jury how he, who had prayed above so many sinners as they died, had bent down to hear the last words of Greek Grafton. Sandburg quotes them: “I am dying; I will soon part with all I love on earth and I want you to say to my slayer that I forgive him, I want to leave this earth with a forgiveness of all who have in any way injured me.” Following that testimony, A. Lincoln need only speak a quiet phrase to the jury, some intimation of malice toward none and charity for all, and the boy was free.
* * *
The Washington press heard that our troops on the Rio Grande were well supplied, chiefly by the Mexicans, and were safe. That there would be no collision with the Mexicans. That desertions had been ended by Taylor’s firmness (which looked like cruelty to Congress). But sometimes, depending on which mails were in, it heard some of the rumors that the army itself had heard, exchanges from Texas promised that there were skirmishes, and the opposition editors speculated about the chance of a border incident.
Congress passed this year’s pension bill for veterans of the Revolution in the sum of $1,400,200, and began to debate the appropriation for the Military Academy at West Point. The Academy was annually charged with “abuses,” and this year, as every year, there were proposals to abolish it. For could a democracy tolerate a body of professional officers? George III still threatened the Congress of the United States, and had not George III maintained mercenaries? Was not an officer caste repugnant to our institutions? Who knew but that the officers might some day make a coup d’état? Moreover, was not the expenditure of public moneys on West Point an unjustifiable waste? Was it not known that Morgan’s Rifles and the Minute Men of Middlesex would spring to arms at need?
On May 1, Vice President Dallas told President Polk that he was for 49°. Unhandsome of a subordinate, but a warning. On May 3 Senator Benton at last said that he would not claim beyond 49°, and moreover he thought it wise to get the Oregon question settled before taking up Mexico, with whom, he made it clear, he wanted no war. Mr. Polk wanted no war but was preparing “an historical statement of our causes of complaint against Mexico,” which he would transmit to Congress. On May 5, the Cabinet discussed a possible collision between Taylor and the Mexicans but had no word from the General later than April 5. The next day Taylor’s dispatch of April 15 arrived but had no news in it, but on May 8, Mr. Slidell was back from Mexico at last with the opinion that we must take the “redress of the wrongs and injuries” into our own hands and “act with promptness and energy.” Possibly Mr. Slidell meant something other than war by that, and so possibly did Mr. Polk when he agreed and promised to communicate Mr. Slidell’s frustrations to Congress. The next day, May 9, the Cabinet agreed that Polk must recommend war if the Mexicans should commit any hostility against Taylor — and that did not go far enough. For Polk went on to poll them on the question whether, in the message he was now preparing for Congress, he ought not to recommend war anyway. Mr. Buchanan said that he would be better satisfied if we had a hostile act to go on but felt that we had ample cause without one and would recommend war. So would all the others except Mr. Bancroft, who held out for that hostile act.
Very well. Mr. Polk would ask Congress for war, and Mr. Buchanan would please prepare the supporting documents. So the President sat down to write a war message. He could talk about the unpaid American claims, the failure of Mexico to acknowledge the true boundaries of Texas, its refusal to receive Mr. Slidell, and quantities of bellicose, rhetorical defiance. It would have needed a strong bellows to blow that up to war size, but Polk seems to have been confident of its acceptance by a Congress where the opposition had now succeeded in disciplining itself and the majority was breaking up in factions. However, he did not need to make the trial.
He was arranging his characteristic, precise formalities in a request for war when, about six in the evening, the Adjutant General came to the White House and told him that the Southern mail had just arrived, bringing a new dispatch from General Taylor. The Mexicans, Taylor reported, had crossed the Rio Grande on April 25, and had killed or captured all of two companies of Dragoons under Captain Thornton. So he would not complete the subterfuges of his message. He called the Cabinet for half-past seven, Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Bancroft would help him draft a real war message, and the word had got round Washington fast, for here were Senators and Representatives crowding into the White House, “greatly excited.” He wrote hard the next day, though he had to take time out to go to church (in a city that had begun to run a fever) and to temporize with the first Congressmen who aspired to high military command, Haralson of Georgia and A. Lincoln’s closest friend, Edward D. Baker of Illinois. There was a furious note-sending to committee chairmen and majority leaders, and all the secretaries copied documents late into the night. “It was a day of great anxiety to me.” So was May 11 — not least anxious in that Benton, summoned to the White House as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, though he assured the President that he would vote the required men and dollars, reminded him that he had not favored sending the army to the Rio Grande and would not favor aggressive war.
At noon he sent his message to the Congress. After an assertion that the Rio Grande was “an exposed frontier” and a recital of events up to April 25, “the cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier of the Del Norte [Rio Grande]. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.”
Wherefore, “As war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself … I invoke the prompt action of Congress to recognize the existence of the war.” And to provide the arms and money to prosecute it.
The message found the Senate still debating whether to abolish West Point. It put that dilemma aside for the moment and took up the President’s bill authorizing and financing an army, but did not pass it on May 11. Such unpatriotic delay convinced Polk that his personal opponents in the Democracy had joined the Whigs in order to discredit him, and from that moment on he saw the war with Mexico as primarily a factional contention in the Democratic Party. He had always regarded a difference of opinion as a political attack on him; from now on he regarded one, quite honestly, as a species of treason. The last Southern politician of the second period was outlining the Southern politician of the third period.… But they were sounder men in the House. After listening for an hour and a half to the supporting documents that accompanied the message (and contained the evidence), they dispensed with the remainder and voted Mr. Polk his men and money in thirty minutes, 173 to 14.
