The Year of Decision 1846, page 46
Not a bad achievement for soldiers taken from barracks duty to build a state — and another way in which this conquest was strange to a much conquered people. One day while Hall worked in his low-ceilinged room, Colonel Doniphan came in with news that the folks back home had elected Hall to Congress. His discharge from the army followed, but he had no taste for abandoning a job. He attached himself to Philip St. George Cooke as an unofficial aide and went on to California with the Mormon Battalion.
The New Mexican sun gentled with September. In the high peaks willows and popple put on the bright yellow of autumn. The fierce colors of the mesas grew fiercer in leached air, the nights sharpened, and the aromatic smoke of piñons hung above the town. The army had learned to like the grapes and melons and even the outlandish breads and stews. It was badly fed by its government, which had as yet got no paymaster this far and was unable to keep supplies coming in. The horseguards — up in the hills where there was grass — got scurvy. They, the outlying patrols, and the garrison all howled a healthy complaint continuously. Lacking money, the army found its brass buttons worth from ten cents to two bits as currency and used them, having long since exhausted its credit with the sutlers. (It could not commandeer supplies from the New Mexicans. They were Americans now and must be paid in coin. No coin was sent but only Treasury checks which no one would honor. Part of the expedition was financed by a loan from La Tules, the faro dealer, whom Captain Johnston squired prodigiously at a fandango.)
They had lost their contempt of the ingratiating, poor folk whom they had invaded. Six weeks proved enough to reconcile them to the furriners, though they would never understand Catholicism and the frontier plenty they were accustomed to blinded them to the simple fact that a universal poverty had organized this way of life. They had come to like the furriners, who liked them in turn and would have gone on liking the gringo conquerors if Price’s troops had behaved as well as Kearny’s. When Price entered Santa Fe he fired a wonderful artillery salute, which broke most of the few windowpanes in town. It furnished a good symbol of what was to come.
Kearny’s last business in New Mexico was to do something about the Indians. The Navajo had been raiding the frontier settlements and almost up to Santa Fe. The Apache, too far away to be handily admonished, had not interrupted their vocational theft and murder. Both tribes professed to understand that the American war on New Mexico had sanctioned their destruction of a common enemy. Both sent representatives to look over the Long Knives in Santa Fe. Kearny warned them and sent out a force to bring in the Ute, who were accustomed to raid from the north. He told them to behave themselves and sent them home. But the Indian problem had to be left to Doniphan.
For Kearny had to go on to the other conquest required of him. He named a civil government of New Mexico, with Charles Bent as governor and young Frank Blair attorney general. Then on September 25, with three hundred of his Dragoons and with Tom Fitzpatrick for guide, he took the lower trail to California.
The next day, September 26, hundreds of miles away, General Wool’s army left San Antonio to begin Mr. Polk’s map-calculated conquest of Chihuahua. It was this invasion that Kearny ordered Doniphan to converge on at the city of Chihuahua.
Doniphan, Kearny’s order read, was to turn over the command of Santa Fe to Price, as soon as the Second Missouri should arrive. But first he must clean up the unfinished business. He must round up the Indians, exhort them, and make treaties with them. It sounded simple enough: he was just to pacify the overlords of New Mexico.
The Army of the West had finished its holiday. The farm boys would now do some campaigning.
INTERLUDE
Friday, October 16
UNDER the Bulfinch dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the young gentlemen of the Harvard Medical School shuffled their feet, wondering what was up and why it didn’t happen. It was certainly important, for the biggest men in their profession were gathered round the professor of surgery, Dr. John Collins Warren. Here were Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, Dr. J. Mason Warren, Dr. Samuel Parkman, Dr. Gould, Dr. Hayward, and Dr. Townsend, all dressed in the morning coats proper to the practice of their profession. Dr. Warren looked angry, kept glancing at his watch, and muttered something to Dr. Haywood and Dr. Bigelow. He was saying waspishly that since Dr. Morton had not arrived it must be presumed that he was otherwise engaged. But the young gentlemen in the amphitheater seats could not hear that and went on discussing the array of notables. They paid no particular attention to the patient who had been prepared for operation, a young man named Gilbert Abbott who was in the red plush chair with a sheet thrown over it, his arms and legs strapped down. It was just any operation, apparently. The young gentlemen had seen many before it in this well-lighted room with its ancient mummy case and its white cast of Apollo.
Dr. Warren put up his watch again, decisively this time. But another gentleman, whom some recognized as Dr. William Morton, a dentist, came in hastily and murmured an apology to Dr. Warren. Dr. Morton was carrying a piece of philosophical apparatus, which he explained in low tones to Dr. Warren. The young gentlemen saw it as a glass globe with projecting tubes or arms. It was about half full of a colorless liquid.
Dr. Warren came forward and addressed the medical students. He said that there was a gentleman present who claimed to have made a discovery which would produce insensibility to pain during surgical operations. As the class knew, Dr. Warren had always regarded that condition as an important desideratum in operative surgery. Therefore he had decided to permit the experiment they were about to witness.
The patient, Dr. Warren explained, was suffering from a vascular tumor of the neck on the left side, occupying the spaces from the edge of the jaw downward to the larynx and from the angle of the jaw to the median line. They could see it and diagnose it from where they sat.
Dr. Morton, the experimenter, put the long tube of his apparatus in the patient’s mouth, told him to inhale, and asked one of the notables to hold his nostrils shut. Tension came into the airy room. The doctors bent forward; the students felt their muscles getting tight; Dr. Morton crouched before the patient, watching him closely. In between four and five minutes the patient, after some heaving and struggling, seemed to go to sleep. “Dr. Warren, your patient is ready,” Dr. Morton said, and withdrew the apparatus. Dr. Warren made an incision about three inches long over the center of the tumor, through the skin and subcutaneous cellular tissue, and removed a layer of fascia which covered the enlarged blood vessels. He then passed a curved needle, with ligature, under and around the tumor and exerted considerable pressure. The growth came out and Dr. Warren closed the incision.
The patient appeared to be sleeping quietly, but just before the operation was completed moved and twitched a little and muttered indistinctly. Presently he awoke. He was asked if he had suffered any pain. No, he said, but he had felt a dim sensation, as if his neck were being scraped with a blunt instrument.
The class sat back and flexed their muscles. “Gentlemen,” Dr. Warren said, “this is no humbug.”
XII
Atomization
THE power of religion and the fascination of psychology are that they try to explain character. What gives men standards of responsibility, called honor? What is it that, in extremity, forces some men to betray those standards in the hope of escaping death, and what forces other men to hold by them, let death come? Why does danger paralyze the will and intelligence of some men, and why does it vitalize the will and make purposive the intelligence of others? Why, when death must be faced, do some personalities disintegrate whereas others abide by the qualities of resolution, fortitude, and courage which have persuaded the human race that it has dignity? Why, at the inexorable test, do some men yield to the suddenly loosed primordial terror that is our inheritance, whereas some are able to hold the monsters in check and act as their God has promised them they will? What are self-command, hardihood, gallantry, audacity, and valor?
It would be helpful to know the answers to such questions when we look at a train of twenty emigrant wagons parked near the crossing of the Weber River on the evening of August 11, when James Frazier Reed gets back to them from Great Salt Lake, not accompanied by Lansford Hastings. For the long, inexorable testing begins here.
There is no point in devoting to the Donner party the space it receives in this book except as it provides one of the varieties of frontier experience. It has been a favorite story of historians and novelists because it is concentrated, because the horror composes a drama. But the reader of this book will understand that the disaster which overtook the Donner party was part of the trail’s if, one factor in the equation of chance under which emigration across the mountains and desert traveled. The fate of the Donners or its equivalent was, as a hazard, part of the equipment packed in every white-top that pulled up the slope beyond Fort Laramie, this year, the years before it, and for some years still to come. Whether the risk was to be taken successfully or unsuccessfully depended on chance, weather, skill, intelligence, and character — all inscrutable.
No part of the tragedy is unique. There is more horror in the Mountain Meadows massacre of September, 1857. An armed band of Mormons led by John D. Lee, and under the superior command of William Dame and Isaac Haight, murdered one hundred and twenty men, women, and children. (In the entire history of the West no massacre by Indians was so large-scale or so complete.) Equal folly and suffering, and equal heroism, can be found in the story of the “Jayhawkers” and the Bennett-Arcane party who, in the autumn of 1849, tried to find another shorter way to California. Jefferson Hunt, of the Mormon Battalion, was guiding them by a safe route which had been blazed to escape the Salt Desert where the Donners foundered, but they left him and wandered off to disaster in the region which, because of them, has ever since been known as Death Valley. The Donners were not the only emigrants who disintegrated in panic, and the fact which the public chiefly remembers about them, their cannibalism, was no novelty in the West. It had occurred along the route they traveled, and when, in the last days of 1848, Frémont’s fourth expedition stalled in the San Juan snows, Bill Williams’ detachment probably killed and certainly ate one of their companions. Kit Carson remarked of Bill Williams that in starving times no man should walk ahead of him on the trail, and old Bill shared that reputation with numerous others. In fact, the last resource of starving men is a commonplace.
It is as the commonplace or typical just distorted that the Donners must be seen. Beyond Fort Laramie every stretch of the trail they traveled, at some time during the history of emigration, saw one or another party just escaping disaster, and a number of stretches saw some parties not altogether escaping it. Just west of the Salt Desert the Donners crossed the trail of the Bartleson party of 1841 (mentioned earlier in a footnote), who had no trail at all across the Sierra, wandered lost for weeks in the mountains, starving, and just contrived to live till they could reach the universal succorer, John Augustus Sutter. The cabin which some of the Donner party camped in at the foot of Truckee Lake had been built two years before, in November, 1844, by the Stevens-Murphy party in the fear that they might have to spend the winter in the snow. One member of that party, Moses Schallenberger, did in fact spend the winter in that cabin alone. The others got across the divide which the Donners could not cross only because they had a master mountain man with them. Old Caleb Greenwood got them over by a heroic feat of will, intelligence, and ingenuity. And we have seen how close the Harlan-Young party, under Hastings’ personal direction, came to disaster in the Salt Desert.… Finally, there is not much difference between dying of starvation in the snow and dying of exhaustion, as some of their former companions had done before they reached Truckee Lake, or dying of pneumonia in the Oregon rains, as others of their former companions did a month after the Donners turned back from the divide. Death on the trail was a hazard of emigration. You took your chances. Our concern with the Donners comes from the fact that the common chance turned against them.
* * *
The Wasatch are one of the most beautiful of Rocky Mountain ranges, but not among the highest. Characteristic of them are small, narrow, twisting canyons which have no logic except the laws of flowing water. These canyons are adventurous for mountain climbers but their discouraging attribute for those who travel them seriously is the way they lead into one another. The Union Pacific Railroad takes the one direct pass through the north and south main chain of the Wasatch, Weber Canyon, which we have seen Bryant and the Harlan-Young party traveling — but takes it by virtue of dynamite. All other passages of the Wasatch are circuitous, by small canyons which lead into other small canyons, sometimes widen into circular valleys off which a number of canyons lead (only one of which will be the right way onward), and by degrees take their streams westward round cliffs, the base of peaks, and the jutting ends of spinal ledges. Modern highways cross the Wasatch by such oblique routes now. The Donner party had to find such a route when, on the morning of August 12, they started out from their five-day encampment a little west of the mouth of Echo Canyon.
Fifteen days later, on August 27, they reached Salt Lake Valley, having covered a distance estimated, but probably underestimated, as thirty-six miles. In the meantime, Stanton and McCutchen, who had not been able to keep up with Reed, had rejoined the party, and the Graves family, thirteen altogether, with three wagons, had caught up with them from the east.
They had had to make a road for wagons, by a route which no wagon had ever taken before. With two of the able-bodied men absent and at least four other men disqualified by age or sickness, they had had to chop through aspen and popple and cottonwoods (and the underbrush that is just as bad) which choked the small canyons. They had to dig tracks and fell trees and level off centers high up on mountainsides, pry boulders out of their course, riprap swampy patches, sometimes bridge brooks that could not be crossed otherwise, grunt and strain and curse while the oxen heaved the wagons up inclines, over ridges, and around spurs of rock. Every ridge they topped showed a haze of further ridges beyond it. Every canyon that opened out closed in again. Every canyon that might be the last one ended in another one that might also be the last. Three times they found that they could go no farther, had to go back over part of the road they had built, and, abandoning it as wasted, try again, chopping and shoveling a new road. When they camped at the end of the fifteenth day they were almost out of the last canyon, the narrow defile which the Mormons were to call Parley’s Canyon. The next morning they decided that they could not get through a tortuous place where the canyon walls almost met and the notch between was choked with loose rock. So they retraced their way up Parley’s Canyon and the gulch by which they had entered it, and took the wagons straight up a mountain, over the ridge, and down into what is now called Emigration Canyon, and out, at last, into the valley of the lake.1
Edwin Bryant, who left Fort Bridger on July 20, reached the valley of Great Salt Lake on July 26. The Donner party, leaving Fort Bridger on July 31, reached the valley on August 27. That difference in traveling time states the first circumstance of their disaster but does not reveal all that had happened to them in the Wasatch. Their morale had begun to break. The morale of any emigrant train can be judged by its success in solving a fundamental conflict. On one hand there is any American frontiersman’s impulse to go his own way, make his own choices, reap the rewards of his own intelligence and skill, and pay the penalties for his own mistakes. On the other is the co-operation enforced by the wilderness, which requires choices to be made in the common interest, assesses against the group penalties for every mistake made by individuals, and pools intelligence and skill for the use of everyone. We have seen the wagon trains breaking up and re-forming. Every new grouping was an attempt to establish a small social system which would function effectively; a successful passage along the trail meant the creation of a group spirit.
The feeling of being members one of another cracked in the Wasatch. They had to have a scapegoat and Hastings was not enough. James Frazier Reed began to be the focus of blame. He was responsible, or could be thought responsible, for the route they took; also, Stewart points out, he was now being paid back for his superior wealth and his aristocratic bearing. Furthermore, in fourteen days of heartbreaking labor some had begun to resent the weakness of companions who could not do their full share, and some had refused to do their share, accepting the common labor without putting into it all they had. The membrane that incloses the primordial inheritance was thus wearing through, and an even more dangerous pressure had been put on it. They had thought that Big Mountain was the last ridge that they must cross, but Stanton and McCutchen rejoined them just as they got down from it and told them that it was not. Then, Eliza Donner Houghton says, “Sudden fear of being lost in the trackless mountains almost precipitated a panic, and it was with difficulty that my father [George Donner] and other coolheaded persons kept excited families from scattering rashly into greater dangers.” They had at last realized the danger they were in, and the realization was centrifugal, tending to drive them apart. It would dominate them from now on.
Overstrained and fearful but less exhausted than their stock, with the wagons jolted and shaken into a universal brittleness, they headed for the south end of Great Salt Lake and the Salt Desert beyond. One of George Donner’s wagons stopped in blistering sun, and Luke Halloran, the consumptive, died, his head in Tamsen’s lap.2 They examined his possessions, which he had bequeathed to George Donner, and found $1500 in gold coin and the insignia of Masonry. The other Masons in the party convened a lodge and tossed the symbolic evergreen in a grave dug in salt mud. It was not far from the grave of Hargrave of the Harlan-Young party, and the Land of Canaan had claimed its second life from the emigration of ’46.
