The Year of Decision 1846, page 36
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On July 4 most of the Army of the West was still behind the Magoffins. It was the hottest day they had had so far. Back at Fort Leavenworth the anniversary was commemorated in fitting military style, with parade and formal guard mount, the bands playing and everyone given liberty at noon. That day the artillery, farthest to the rear, were only a few miles out, competing with the baggage train in the still mugginess of the fords. Captain Fischer’s Germans were all thumbs, so helpless that Kearny’s staff had to explain how to water horses. Camping at Elm Grove, they were able to buy some liquor from the sutlers but were too tired to have much fun. The infantry, caught between two streams, had to march after dark, many were prostrated by the heat, and they were straggling in for hours after camp was made thirty miles from last night’s bivouac. They hardly remembered it was the glorious Fourth, and the Laclede Rangers, who had chosen this torrid day to lose the road, were also done in. Farther ahead Company C of Doniphan’s regiment labored toward Council Grove. John T. Hughes, the bachelor of arts, who had already jotted down the parallel with Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, faced another classical obligation. “Our bosoms,” he says, “swelled with the same quenchless love of freedom which animated the breasts of our ancestors of ’76 and caught inspiration from the memory of their achievements. Ever and anon the enthusiastic shout, the loud huzza, and the animating Yankee Doodle were heard.” The huzzas were mostly oaths, probably, and only the advance guard under Captain Waldo, which was hurrying to join Moore at Pawnee Fork, had a reasonably good time. Waldo had brought a keg of whiskey with him. He issued it at breakfast, “each man drank his fill,” and the twenty-five miles they covered that day were not troublesome. But rations had to be reduced a third and Private Robinson of Company D, though he liked the whiskey, wrote lugubriously that “if we cannot overtake the commissary wagons we shall have nothing to eat but our own horses.”
In the conquered town of Matamoros, Taylor’s army had a better time. There were oratory and salutes, the cantinas were gay, no one went hungry or thirsty on Independence Day. The Mexicans made an admirable conquered people, amiable and polite, and their cookery, religious observations, and social customs had the Americans agape. The army enjoyed itself while Taylor called for reinforcements and wondered what to do. The volunteers kept coming in from the north and the staff exhausted itself trying to improve communications and supply. The correspondents, who had no new battle, went on inflating Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. They filled their space with atrocities, all Mexican, and heroisms, universally American. The hated foemen stripped and mutilated the American dead, lanced the wounded, fired on their captors after surrendering, and were running at the first fire so commonly that there was trouble describing the battles as famous victories. They were, however, and the folks back home read how Lieutenant McIntosh had stopped midway of a charge to fix a tourniquet on the arm of a dying soldier before hurrying on, how Kirby Smith had straddled a captured cannon and held off a counterattack with his sword, how Private Dudley had taken two prisoners barehanded, how Lieutenant Dobbins had split a perfidious Mexican’s head with one blow of his bowie knife. And so on. But Old Rough and Ready was getting mad. The administration had made him a major general but no official thanks for the victories had reached him. Must be politics.
In the harbor of Monterey, California, the flagship Savannah, which had arrived on July 2, greeted Independence Day with the salute prescribed. So did Cyane and Levant, anchored in line with her. Commodore Sloat had sailed from Mazatlán on receipt of news that war had begun. He was afraid that the English squadron, which had the same news, might get there first, and his orders were to seize the port. But, arriving well ahead of the British, he began to fall apart from internal conflicts. He was old, sick, and a navy fussbudget, and the responsibility of seizing a foreign province was a heavy one — the heavier in that it had had an unfortunate dress rehearsal. Four years before, Commodore Ap Catesby Jones, in harbor at Callao, had heard rumors of war and seen a British ship acting suspiciously, and had hurried off to Monterey and run up the flag. The Secretary of the Navy had had to disavow the act and relieve Jones of his command. Sloat had that embarrassment to think of and here was Consul Larkin, horrified by the Bear Flag uprising, passionately arguing that his orders were to conciliate the Californians and could still be obeyed. It was not till July 7 that the discreet desperation of his subordinates prodded Sloat to land 250 men, plant the flag on the customhouse, and announce that the town was occupied by the United States. The natives were bewildered but politely acquiescent.
But there was one glorious Fourth on the golden shore. The one-village California Republic still lived. Captain Frémont got back after being outwitted by de la Torre and storming the empty fortress of San Joaquin. So there were salutes to the flag and to the blended petticoats as well, and that night there was a fandango. The music of guitars drifted through the purple dark, to the continuing bewilderment of the Californians. Next day Frémont went on organizing his men and the forces of the Republic for further service. On July 9 Lieutenant Revere of the Portsmouth arrived, on Sloat’s order, and took possession of Sonoma in the name of the United States. Thus the great Republic went down, passing from light opera into history.
Francis Parkman was still in camp at the mouth of the Chugwater, yearning for the Sioux, who still delayed their rendezvous at La Bonte’s. Riding back from Fort Laramie on June 28, he had found Shaw and Chatillon returned and Chatillon’s squaw dead. Some mountain men arrived and pitched camp with them and Parkman lay in the shade, weakened by dysentery, and listened to the epic of their wars and wanderings. “I defy the annals of chivalry to furnish the record of a life more wild and perilous than those of a Rocky Mountain trapper.” On July 4 three Indians came into camp bringing with them on a mule a wretched Negro who had strayed from Richard’s camp on Horse Creek thirty-three days ago, “and had been wandering in circles and starving ever since, without gun, knife, moccasins, or any knowledge of the country or its productions. We seated him in the midst of a circle of trappers, squaws, and children — the wretch could scarcely speak. The men considered his escape almost miraculous.” On the same day Parkman noted that “the squaws [they were the wives of the trappers and traders] are constantly laughing. It is astonishing what abominable indecencies the best of the Indians will utter in presence of the women, who laugh heartily.”
A couple of days later Parkman and his party started out at last for the rendezvous at La Bonte’s. There was suspense, for the fickle Indians appeared not to be keeping their appointment. But at last they came, the Whirlwind’s village still smoking hot for war. Chatillon’s brother-in-law, the Bull Bear, got Parkman entree to the most select circles, his notebook filled with jottings, and in the corresponding passage The Oregon Trail attains its first ecstasy. For here he was, at last a resident of an Indian village, they were rehearsing war, and they were the real thing.
Dysentery prostrated him again. He suffered “the extremity of languor and exhaustion.” Sometimes he could not move off his blanket. Opium accomplished nothing; he seemed to improve on a diet of one ship’s biscuit a day, then collapsed again. Swooning, he studied the Oglala, for while he still lived he must think of the books he had planned.… And the Indians let him down. They whooped and charged in belligerent, sham exercises, but also they maintained the interminable ceremonies that made tribal life a blend of a sewing circle and a high-school debating club. So suddenly the caprice changed and they weren’t going to La Bonte’s, they weren’t going to take the warpath against the Shoshoni, they were going hunting. They boiled off toward the Laramie Mountains and, impaled on his disappointment, Parkman had no recourse but to accompany them. Spoonfuls of whiskey swallowed at intervals enabled him to sit his horse.
The next day a trapper caught up with them dispatched from Fort Laramie by Bisonette, a mountain man, with word that not all the Sioux had abandoned the warpath. Ten or twelve villages would keep the rendezvous at La Bonte’s and Bisonette would meet Parkman on the way there. Hope revived and he led his little company away from the Whirlwind’s village. In great pain, he rode toward La Bonte’s across a “dreary monotony of sun-scorched plains, where no living thing appeared save here and there an antelope flying before us like the wind.” They reached Horse Shoe Creek at noon, green-banked, beautifully timbered, and there they camped. “I was thoroughly exhausted and flung myself on the ground, scarcely able to move. All that afternoon I lay in the shade by the side of the stream, and those bright woods and sparkling waters are associated in my mind with recollections of lassitude and utter prostration. When night came I sat down by the fire, longing with an intensity of which at this moment I can hardly conceive for some powerful stimulant.”
Our emigrant trains had been traveling close together since leaving Fort Laramie and were now plodding up the last marches along the Platte, through a writhen, volcanic desert that was a warning of worse ones just ahead. Laramie Peak was behind them now and the trail hugged the twisting river, here narrow and swift. The country was a succession of great bowls brimming with vacancy, the scale increasing, the buttes and obelisks bigger, the hills deeply gullied, the skyline toothed and jagged, the distance sometimes purple and white with glimpses of the Wind River Mountains. It got greener for a space near where the city of Casper, Wyoming, now stands, and the trains camped there within sight of each other on the night of July 3. Now Bryant and Russell came riding in, having been stopped, up ahead, by the need to replace Mr. Kirkendall, who had pondered Jim Clyman’s warning and decided to go by way of Fort Hall. Thornton had the last watch that night and “fired my rifle and revolving pistol at the dawn of day, in honor of the Declaration of American Independence. The pulsations of my heart were quickened as I heard the morning gun and saw the banner of my country run up to the top of the staff and thought of the rejoicings of the nation.”
They were a long way from the rejoicing cannon that woke Mr. Polk to a rainy dawn, that day, the crowd that filled the White House for his noon reception, and the two processions of Methodist Sunday Schools that upset his afternoon. They were far from the lush pleasures of Matamoros, but they were hardly more than sixty miles from Francis Parkman, weak on his buffalo robe at the mouth of the Chugwater. The two trains joined for a celebration. The ladies did their best for a “collation.” There were sentimental and patriotic songs, a volley of musketry for each toast, and, after a procession, a reading of the Declaration and — inevitably — an oration by Colonel Russell. That gorgeous voice boomed in the emptiness under the white-hot sun, and then the Oregon train moved on. The good-byes had been said and these friends would never be all together again. But the California wagons lingered awhile and James Frazier Reed produced some fine wines and liquors which he had brought from Springfield for just such an occasion. They pledged one another, the Reeds, the Donners, Boggs, Bryant, Russell, in a moment of fellowship deep in the badlands. They shook hands. Bryant and Russell rode off through the stench of hot sagebrush, taking Hiram Miller with them, who had been a teamster for George Donner. Bryant noted the yellow cactus flowers. He would hear no more of the Donners till word of their extremity should reach him in circumstances now altogether beyond imagining. At last the California train yoked up and the shrill clamor of the wheels began again. Red Butte and Independence Rock were ahead of them, the Sweetwater, and the long plane rising toward South Pass.
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In the opinion of the First Missouri, this country would be hard to farm, if not impossible: there was no timber. The army had said so in eastern Kansas and repeated the judgment with emphasis as they neared and crossed the hundredth meridian and pushed on through increasing aridity. At Pawnee Rock, Captain Reid’s column was scattered by buffalo, which charged through it and scared the horses into a stampede. The army blazed away at them, killed a few, and scared the horses still worse. From there on, small or large herds were frequently in sight. Some of the troops acquired a superficial connoisseurship in buffalo meat. Also they now heard rumors of the Comanche but they met none — fortunately, for not even fear of the Comanche could discipline their marching.
Grouchy and hungry, they reached the Arkansas at its great bend. There was water in the river, which was by no means a constant condition. In these parts it is a muddy and rather odorous stream which runs in trickles through a wide bottom choked with cottonwoods and brush. Under its opaque water and between the rivulets quicksands are common, and in summer some stretches are almost dusty.* Farther west it narrows to a more certain bed, like the Platte, and as it gets nearer the mountains has more water in it. The trail followed its general direction, touching its crazy course at the nodes, and the freighters were accustomed to camp on certain timbered islands as a defense against the Indians.
The country grew more severe now, the scale infinitely extended, the swell longer and the pitch steeper, the wind stronger, the sun hotter, the dust more inexhaustible, water scarcer and less drinkable. If there was little water, there were millions of flowers; if the steady wind blistered their faces and sudden torrid gusts sandblasted them with alkali, the infinitely blue sky produced cloud effects the most magnificent. They trudged through prairie-dog towns a mile wide, jack rabbits by the hundred streaked away from them, the nights were full of wolves. The horses grew weaker but the men slowly toughened. Kearny watched them and applied more pressure. They howled and lustily hated all officers, in so much that accusations of malingering and inefficiency now circulated about even the venerated Doniphan. The West Pointers did their best to make the march orderly and sometimes briefly succeeded. Moore was especially tough: anyone who broke ranks in his outfit had to march on foot for the rest of the day. The adjutant who enforced the order got well cursed, but the order stood.
The oldest trail went to Bent’s Fort and thence south over Raton Pass. The traders, however, had come to prefer the shorter though more dangerous route which left the Arkansas at the Lower Crossing (near the present Dodge City) or the Cimarron Crossing, twenty miles farther west, and struck through desert for the usually waterless bed of the Cimarron River. Most of the horror stories of the trail, especially those of thirst, belong to that stretch. The army did not take it but kept to the Arkansas in less precarious but equally dreary country. True desert, sandy, sparsely vegetated, beginning to break up into foothills, but supplied with drinking water of a sort at safe intervals.4 They crossed the river at Chouteau’s Island and, since it was here the international boundary, became an army of invasion at last, though they would cross again to American soil before they reached Bent’s Fort.
Inconceivably, the weather got hotter still, but one day a storm passed near enough to cool the air. The nights were always cold, campfires were just buffalo chips, and rations were slim and bad. Then the unpredictable country got green for a space and even produced some patches of trees and finally, at the Big Timbers, a substantial belt of them. Then more desert, more siroccos — and then the infantry came over an incline to a flat stretch and on the western horizon, thin, dark, cloudlike masses were suddenly recognizable as a culminating wonder, the Rocky Mountains. The twinned blur to the southwest was the Spanish Peaks, Wah-To-Yah which Lewis Garrard would poetically translate as The Breasts of the World. To the northwest; equally indistinct and amorphous and much farther away, was a wavering phantom under cloud and snow which the knowing told the incredulous was the monument of their story books beheld at last, Pike’s Peak. The doughboys yelled in delight and suddenly realized that they had come a long way from Missouri. A hell of a long way! They took up the march across a last stretch of parched sand and sagebrush and sometime before noon saw the walls of Bent’s Fort rising from the plain. Two miles from it they reached Moore’s detachment camped by the river, made their own camp, and started to dig a well. It was July 28 and the infantry had beaten everyone except the advance guard to the rendezvous.
Five hundred and thirty miles out from Independence, on the north bank of the Arkansas again, they had reached the first permanent settlement in what is now Colorado, Bent’s Old Fort or Fort William, at a crossroads of the West. It was on the mountain branch of the Santa Fe trail; a few miles to the southwest that trail forked, and the other fork went to Taos. Westward a trail led up the Arkansas to the Fontaine Qui Bouille and on to the trappers’ paradise, South Park. Northward stretched an immemorial Indian warpath and trade route to the Platte. Except for Fort Union, the American Fur Company’s headquarters at the mouth of the Yellowstone, Bent’s was the largest of all the trading posts, and it had perhaps the most varied and adventurous history. Its thick adobe walls made a rectangle a hundred by a hundred and fifty feet inclosing a central patio, two of them were two stories high, and there was a walled corral beyond. It was a complete factory for the Indian trade — warehouses, smithy, wagon shop, storerooms — and it had dormitories and such incredibilities as a billiard table and an ice house. Bent & St. Vrain, its owners, kept as many as a hundred and fifty men permanently employed here, many with Indian wives and families. Many mountain men wintered among its comforts; usually at least one village of Indians was camped by the river, three hundred yards away. They were usually southern Cheyenne, whose trade the firm monopolized, but might be Arapaho or Ute or even Kiowa or Comanche. The post’s daily life was an adventure story and the yarns it heard are our lost history.
