The Year of Decision 1846, page 67
No Westerner, however, would begin the history of his region with spectacle. For the history of the West is the history of such people as we have seen here living out their lives in the new country, and watching their children and grandchildren grow up with that country. It is not a spectacular but a laborious history. One who once thought of writing it would have written it in terms of alkali, sagebrush, wind, and water — in terms of making a dead land bring forth life — and in terms of the mortgage held on it by other sections where a man’s labor was permitted to secure his old age, since he gave value to the land he settled on, as the West was not permitted to do. It could not possibly be a spectacular story. But, whatever it might have turned out to be, that book not to be written would have begun where this one ends, with the internal empire of the United States achieved.
* * *
There remains one paragraph of this history. In 1861, following Mr. Lincoln’s appeal to his countrymen, the Civil War went into its military phase. Yesterday would not yield to the future without appealing beyond Mr. Lincoln and human intelligence to arms.
It was Yesterday, of course, and the greatest tragedy of the war it fought was that that war was fought for an anachronism. The low-energy economy and the chattel slavery it consisted in had been slain by such men as Eli Whitney, William Kelly, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel Colt, Elias Howe, the gunsmiths who made machine tools, the proprietors of the National Fair, the city of Lowell, the Naugatuck Valley, Pittsburgh, the railroads, the telegraph lines, the turbines. These — but in collaboration with men who went West and made the nation a continent. It had become a nation which inclosed a journey from Baltimore to San Diego, or Charleston to San Francisco, or Richmond to Oregon City, that crossed no frontier and kept always within a common texture of experience and feeling. They had stretched out that commonalty to the Pacific, making the empire, and New Bedford sold its goods to Santa Fe through the entrepot of St. Louis from within, or Monterey sent its sons to the college at Cambridge still from within. In this continental nation the habit and expectation of thought had already realized the empire. Since that had happened, the expectation of the seceded states was already obsolete when they met in Montgomery to make a nation against Tomorrow.
What was done at Montgomery was to file a last Bill of Review against reality and, when the nation dismissed it, to appeal from the dismissal to the final court. That appeal might have succeeded, one remembers, working in virtual motions, in history’s if’s. At least, in the course of human history such bills of review have sometimes been granted, the future has not always won when the past attacked it. This time the future won, Yesterday was overturned and rejected. Of those who have thought about that decision in our own time, a certain curious, gentle set of literary people have fallen in with their spiritual ancestor, Calhoun, and regretted the event, feeling that the past would have been better for us all. History is not properly concerned with them and could only call them fools; they had best be left to literary criticism, which may call them poets. At any rate, Yesterday lost out. On June 18, 1865, Edmund Ruffin, rising once more to the surface of events, acknowledged that A. Lincoln had been right on March 4, 1861. The admission made, he killed himself. In history’s if’s that sacrificial acknowledgment need not, perhaps, have been made. Except that some people went west in ’46, and so sentenced Edmund Ruffin to death.
* * *
Outline of American history, final chapter.
On Christmas Day, 1848, Jim Clyman sat down in Napa Valley, where he had spent the winter when we first met him, to write to a friend back in Wisconsin, whither he was returning when he left our narrative. “We left the west of Missouri on the 1st of May and arrived here on the 5th of September without accident or interruption of any kind worthy of notice,” Jim said. “Matters and things here are strangely and curiously altered since I left this country.”
For the waters of Manitou had worked their spell once more and Jim had crossed to California in ’48. He had signed on to guide some emigrators west, the Mecombs from Indiana. He was fifty-six and he was going back to the golden shore. All the West was in his memory, and it was a mountain man who found nothing worthy of notice in that crossing. We must take his word, however, since there is no record. But Jim Clyman found at least one notable element in the passage west. She was Hannah Mecomb and on August 22, ’49, she married him at Napa. The mountain man would now settle down. He farmed in various places and finally bought a ranch at Napa in 1855. Children were born to him. Some of them died. He and his wife adopted other children. He worked his land. He died on December 27, 1881. Grandchildren are working his land now. (Outline of Western History.)
When Clyman wrote in December, ’48, that “matters and things” were curiously altered since he had left California in ’46, he was alluding to the sequel of an event which he had heard of on his way west. It was an event which one would think “worthy of note.” In August, ’48, the Mecomb train was coming westward along the Truckee River. It may be that Jim was telling his greenhorns about the emigrators of ’46 who had traveled this very stretch too late to cross the pass ahead, when they met a party who had just come down from that pass. God knows how often in his time Jim had halted on a trail to exchange information with a party met in the wilderness and traveling the trail the other way. But this was like no other meeting.
The eastbound were former members of the Mormon Battalion on their way to Deseret, where their twenty-six months’ journey would end at last in the company of their families, the prophet Brigham, and Israel growing strong in Zion. We saw some of them, just eleven months before this meeting, turning back to Sutter’s when they received the prophet’s counsel that they might take jobs there for the winter and so ease the strain on food supplies at Great Salt Lake City. Henry Bigler had been with them then, and he was with them now, meeting the Mecombs and Jim Clyman by the Truckee. They had information to give Jim in exchange for any news about the Saints in Zion or on their way to it which he may have picked up in his long traverse. They could tell him that a former companion of his, James Marshall, a man who had come down from Oregon with him in ’45 and then gone to work for Sutter, had finally located on the American River the sawmill site that Sutter had so often wanted located there. They could tell, and show, him what Marshall had found on that site six and a half months ago, on January 24 of this year.
If John Bidwell is right, Marshall was more than a little star-crazed. At least when he started in to build that mill — on shares — he had some notion of rafting lumber down the canyons of the American River. But, on Bidwell’s word, he was a good millwright and built a good mill. Six of the Mormon Battalion, including Bigler, were working on it under his direction, besides three Gentiles and a number of Sutter’s Indians. They got the wheel set too low, and so the tail race had to be deepened. They would dig during the day, then turn the water in at night to clean it out.
On January 24, 1848, there were still nine days to go before Trist and the Mexicans could sign their treaty at Guadalupe Hidalgo. Brigham Young was at Winter Quarters again, where he had at last had himself formally “sustained” as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and was preparing the emigration of ’48. At Washington, the court-martial told Lieutenant Colonel Frémont that he might submit a written defense, and Mr. Polk wrote in his diary, in a crazy fear of an inconceivable rebellion, “The Conduct of Mr. Trist and Gen’l Scott, who seem to have entered into a conspiracy to embarrass the government gives me great anxiety. They have proved themselves [the man who won the war and the man who saved the peace] to be wholly unworthy of the positions they hold, and I most heartily wish they were both out of Mexico.” Many soldiers, scattered in detachments in many places, heartily wished themselves out of Mexico, that day. In Congress they were quarreling about the bitterly felt but not yet understood. The Comanche were licking the wounds that a campaign by William Gilpin had cost them, and were preparing this year’s slaughter. Scattered about America new Bill Bowens, not so many as in ’46 or ’47, were dreaming of spring, when they too would take to the trail.
On that Monday morning Marshall turned the water out of the tail race as usual, and toward midafternoon got down into it to see how much progress had been made. Not much, for they were down to bedrock. A few inches of water covered the granite shelf. Marshall saw something shiny under that water. He stooped to pick it up.
That was what Henry Bigler and his homing fellow Saints told Jim Clyman beside the Truckee in August, ’48.
The past was not going to win the appeal to arms, the continental nation was not going to be Balkanized, it was going to remain an empire and dominate the future.
Notes
CHAPTER II
1. The Aricara, the Assinniboin, the northern Arapaho, and most of all the Blackfeet.
2. The opinion of scholars, which has changed before this, is again that the returning Astorians learned about South Pass and traveled it — from west to east. Such descriptions as they print do not closely describe South Pass, but it is neither my business nor my interest to question them. At any rate, the Ashley party under Jedediah Smith, certainly the first white men to travel the Pass from the east, were the effective discoverers. They made it known and the rest followed — from their passage, not that of the Astorians.
3. With Markhead, La Bonte, Hatcher, and the Seventh Baronet of Grandtully in Ruxton’s Life in the Far West, 1848. This statement is tolerably arbitrary. Stewart himself published a novel called Altowan in ’46, two years before Ruxton’s book. Mike Fink and Rose had been celebrated in the magazines still earlier and various romances had introduced characters modeled on the mountain man. But genuine portraiture begins with Ruxton.
4. Stein’s words in Conrad’s Lord Jim.
CHAPTER III
1. This map reading, from Polk’s Diary for February 13, is substantially repeated on February 16 and exhibits Polk’s — but by no means Atocha’s — ignorance of the country he was trying to acquire. The Colorado, of course, flows west only through a part of Arizona; mainly it flows south. The description could be given meaning only by concluding that Atocha meant to offer Polk everything he wanted except the southern half of the present state of California.
2. For a discussion of Joseph Smith’s psychosis, see Bernard DeVoto, “The Centennial of Mormonism,” in Forays and Rebuttals, 71 ff.
3. Certainly from 1833.
4. Speculation in real estate was a strong part of Mormonism from the very beginning. Under Young in Utah fictitious land values came to be capitalized as the society developed on its strong base, and so they were a legitimate instrument of colonization. But in the earlier periods in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, the Mormon enterprises in real estate were, quite simply, a theocratic phase of the westward-marching land boom of the frontier. Remember that the promise of landownership was always the strongest appeal the Mormon missionaries had to make to Europe’s poor.
5. Sterling Price, who also enters the narrative later on, was in charge of them.
6. Leaving the lake after his brief exploration of it, Frémont says nothing about the country thereabout as a place of settlement but does highly recommend Bear River Valley. “The bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient; the soil good and well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to such an elevated region. A military post and a civilized settlement would be of great value here; and cattle and horses would do well where grass and salt so much abound.…” Practically everyone who had ever written about the Bear River had said the same thing, including Jim Clyman (who met the Mississippi Saints on his way east in ’46). No one, in fact, could help making that observation the moment he saw the oasis of Soda Springs. Coming back to the Great Basin the following summer, Frémont got to Utah Lake but did not go back to Great Salt Lake. His report says, “In the cove of mountains along its eastern shore the [Utah] lake is bordered by a plain where the soil is generally good, and in greater part fertile; watered by a delta of prettily timbered streams. This would be an excellent locality for stock farms; it is generally covered with good bunch grass and would abundantly produce the ordinary grains.” A couple of pages later he sums up his judgment of the entire Great Basin in a properly celebrated passage which accurately predicts its future.
A later controversy between Frémont and Brigham Young deals with an ambiguous passage (p. 273 of the report) in which Frémont seems to mistake Utah Lake for an arm of Great Salt Lake. It was certainly foolish of Frémont not to make the two-day ride which would have settled the matter. He answers Young’s accusation in Memoirs of My Life but with the same mingling of vagueness and dishonesty that characterizes so much else of that book.
7. There is no dependable evidence whatever to support the attractive speculation that the hard-headed Young did in fact send out a small exploring party to the Great Basin in ’46. I have always considered such a party one of the musts of American history, and between Young’s arrival at Council Bluffs and the closing in of winter there was plenty of time for such a party to go to Salt Lake Valley and return. In Coutant’s History of Wyoming the statement is made (and it has been repeated in newspapers and elsewhere) that such a party was in fact sent out under the guidance of two veteran mountain men, Jim Beckwith and O. P. Wiggins. Coutant’s authority was two letters by Wiggins which are now in the library of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Not one of the six Mormons whom Wiggins names as composing the party can be identified in any of the Mormon rolls open to me, however, and various students who have access to the Church library are unable to identify them there. The same students assure me that there is no allusion of any kind to such an exploration in any of the records of the Church. The idea must be dismissed as speculation. It remains true, however, that no man was ever more skillful than Young at keeping his left hand, even if that hand were the Quorum of the Twelve, from knowing what his right hand was doing. I shall not be altogether amazed if eventually it appears that someone did go to the valley in ’46, like the six whom Joshua sent into Canaan, to spy out the land. The idea is herewith tendered to those who are making novels about the Mormons a leading American industry.
8. There were many respiratory diseases. Strain and exposure made the Saints an easy prey to pneumonia. An epidemic of whooping cough traveled with them across Iowa, killing many children. The “black canker” which so many journals mention was probably sometimes scurvy, sometimes diphtheria, and sometimes septic sore throat. Scurvy and other ailments resulting from malnutrition were, of course, extremely common.
9. This is the true Council Bluffs of Lewis and Clark, fifteen miles upriver from the present Iowa city of that name.
CHAPTER IV
1. Duly adapted in the City of the Lord, which Joseph Smith, Jun., and his city planners worked out on paper.
2. The date of Frémont’s letter is in dispute. Camp concludes that it was written at this time.
CHAPTER V
1. An unfortunate vagueness in Clyman’s journal makes it uncertain just whom the party consisted of. When they were all together again on April 28, several thought it was still “impracticable to cross the mountains at this time.” Clyman says, “several of us are However verry anxious to try and assertain that fact,” and the next day he and the party he continued with started out. Mr. Charles L. Camp, Clyman’s editor, writes me that he believes that eleven or twelve men, two women, and two children stayed behind to make the later crossing (various later entries in the journal which need not be cited here support this reading), and that this party went by way of Fort Hall and is the one which will be mentioned later on. Mr. Camp believes that the seasoned old Greenwood, who was “going out to catch emigrants and was in no hurry,” was among those who stayed behind. The important thing for our purpose, however, is that Hastings and Hudspeth were in the advance party — by this reading necessarily reduced to seven or eight men, one woman, and a boy — with whom Clyman traveled.
2. Like the log cabin, the covered wagon is a classic American symbol. But, Hollywood notwithstanding, it was not standardized. In any train, even a Santa Fe freight caravan, wagons were likely to differ widely. Nevertheless, by 1846 some evolution and standardization had occurred. Think of the Santa Fe freight wagon (which had the easier passage to make) as about twice the capacity of the Oregon emigrant’s wagon, larger in all its dimensions, with longer and more massive tongue (jointed), higher wheels, wider tires, and heavier hubs and hardware. (Hubs might be sixteen inches wide, tires eight inches — or even more.) An average freight might be two and a half tons and an average team five yoke of oxen, though up to five tons or more and ten yoke or more were not unknown. It was unwise to load the lighter emigrant wagon (for which a three-yoke team was usual and a four-yoke team desirable) with more than three thousand pounds and two thousand was better. The lighter the load, the better chance of getting load, wagon, and team through to your destination. Emigrant wagons were likely to be brightly painted — for the first few days. The canvas tops were sometimes blue, green, or red as well as white, and frequently had slogans painted on them.
