The Year of Decision 1846, page 70
CHAPTER XV
1. Reproduced from Thornton. It is impossible to determine whether Thornton may have improved it to agree with his ideas of appropriate gloom. In any event, it is a strange thing to happen in the snow.
CHAPTER XVI
1. About a hundred and fifty miles up the Missouri from Omaha. The Niobrara is the Eau Qui Court of the fur trade and the Running Water of the Mormon texts.
2. Crosby and Brown went back to Mississippi for the winter. Traveling east along the Santa Fe trail, they met the Battalion coming west on September 12. Apparently the Pueblo rendezvous was arranged at that time.
3. It is extremely difficult to identify all the members of this pioneer party, although their names and their division into “tens” (some of which numbered twelve or thirteen) have been published. The 143 included three Negro slaves (Hark Lay, Oscar Crosby, and Green Flake), who belonged to Saints whose last names they bore. By doctrine, Negroes could not be members of the Church. The party also included several others — I cannot make out how many — whom all the journals speak of as not being Mormons. On one occasion Brigham Young ordered those who did not belong to the Church to behave themselves. On May 29, a journal entry of Norton Jacob’s says there were six of them; Appleton Harmon speaks of “one or two.” No Mormon historian has ever cleared up the ambiguity. I conclude that they were either Saints lately in good standing who had neglected to be re-baptized before starting or relatives of Saints in good standing who were Mormons in everything except the formal covenants. Most, possibly all, of them were baptized in Great Salt Lake a few days after the pioneers got to the valley.
4. He “bought two rifles and some tobacco [!]. He paid in deer and elk skins.” (Norton Jacob.)
5. There is a towering humor in the opinion of Howard Egan, who later became one of the best of Mormon desert runners, that “he spoke not knowing about the place.” The Mormon God taught His people this complacency.
6. Including Bridger’s doubt about the ability of the valley to grow corn. Serious Mormon historians (such as Roberts) have tried to correct an ancient absurdity, which originated in Brigham Young’s propaganda bragging. They have been unable to correct it and many Mormon writers still repeat the idiotic statement that, in effect, Bridger offered to bet Young a thousand dollars that corn could not be grown in the valley. It is in such contexts as this that the universal smugness of the Mormon mind ascends into a vainglory which a pious people can find rebuked in the Old Testament.
Clayton, the best reporter, quotes Bridger as follows: “The soil is good and likely to produce corn were it not for the excessive cold nights which he thinks would prevent the growth of corn.” Wilford Woodruff says that Jim “remarked that it would not be prudent to bring a great population to the Basin until we ascertained whether grain would grow or not.” The unpublished “Manuscript Journal,” which was always written by Young himself or under his eye, says (as quoted by Roberts — I have not had access to it): “Bridger considered it imprudent to bring a large population into the Great Basin until it was ascertained that grain could be raised; he said he would give $1000 for a bushel of corn raised in that basin.” Precisely. This was an intelligent judgment by a man who knew all there was to know about the country and understood the problems of the Mormons better than anyone outside the faith could be expected to unless he had the continental mind. It expresses a doubt that corn would grow in the valley, a hope that it would, and a caution that they had better find out.
Note that Bridger told them that, in the lands south of Utah Lake, the Indians regularly grew corn as good as any “in old Kentucky.” Finally, note that he was right about Great Salt Lake Valley. The Saints got there a month after they talked to him. At that moment the only corn growing in the valley, at Miles Goodyear’s stockade on the Weber River, had not yet eared up. Corn was not grown in the valley with much success or promise of success until hardy, specially adapted varieties were introduced there. Even so, it cannot be called a corn-growing country today.
7. The journal of Norton Jacob contains a detail which I have not found elsewhere. It quotes Bridger as saying that during the preceding winter (and I find no record of his movements then) he had “found a country the best he ever saw.” It was “bordering on the range of mountains that constitutes the southern boundary of the Great Basin.” Jacob’s description is too vague for positive identification, but this was obviously Utah’s Dixie, possibly the Parowan country.
8. Norton Jacob: “Bro. Brannan fell in with a company of emigrants who by quarreling and fighting among themselves delayed time until they got caught in the snows on the mountains last fall and could not extricate themselves. The snows were much deeper in all this region than was ever known before. There sufferings were incredible. Many of them perished with cold and hunger. All their cattle died and they were compelled to eat the flesh of those that died among them. In fact they killed some and among the rest a mormon by the name of Murphy who formerly lived in Nauvoo. These people are in a wretched condition. [Note that Jacob understands they are still in the mountains.] There teams all gone and they cannot get away until assistance can be sent from Oregon. Quarreling is a common complaing [sic] among these emigrants until they all divide and subdivide into small parties. They can’t agree to travel together in peace which fulfills Joseph Smith’s prophesy, that peace is taken from the earth. These are the men who have mobed and killed the saints.” Jacob had badly hashed Brannan’s information but he made sure that a Mormon had been persecuted, drew an unctuous moral, and found that this, like all the tongues and testimonies of the earth, bore witness that Joseph was a prophet.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Who, when he saw Frémont in California, admired the costuming but was not stirred by the act. See his memoirs.
2. He also tried to suspend Kearny from command of the Dragoons. See the Proceedings of the court-martial, page 117.
3. At this point the situation becomes pie for Hubert Howe Bancroft: three American military men at odds with one another. In his satisfaction he is led to a grotesque judgment. Stockton was wrong, Bancroft decides, but Frémont was right in siding with him. For there must be honor among filibusters!
4. When the time came to make claim for their pay, they decided that they had certainly wanted to be, or at least certainly ought to have wanted to be.
5. Both Jones and Tyler record that, at a camp between the Stanislaus and the Sacramento, they were visited by a Mormon named “Rhodes,” a Missourian who, they both say, had come to California the previous October. This was the father of John and Daniel Rhoads of the Donner reliefs. Their notation is important for there are exceedingly few records of the undetermined, necessarily very small number of Mormons who traveled overland with Gentile trains in the summer of ’46. Several historians have said that the thirteen members of the Mormon Battalion were serving as an escort or guard of Frémont’s party. Jones’s diary makes quite clear that this is not so. Frémont’s party was only occasionally in touch with Kearny’s after both parties left Sutter’s, and the Mormons were always with Kearny.
6. “To see the Bodys of our fillow beings Laying without Burial & their Bones bleaching in the Sun Beames is truly shocking to my feelings” — Robert S. Bliss. “We found what we took to be a woman’s hand, it was nearly whole, it had partly been burned, the little finger on it was not burnt but the flesh on it was completely dried” — Henry W. Bigler.
7. Bancroft believes that Caleb Greenwood was their guide. If so, Stockton’s yarn was even more absurd. But he was, of course, a seafaring man, not a prairie traveler.
8. Brigham’s letter says that “some few have passed by a new route to California called Hastings cut-off … but it is not a safe route.” This is phrased clumsily; he must have meant Miles Goodyear and his horse herd, traveling east.
9. Senate Executive Documents, No. 33, 30th Congress, 1st Session, The proceedings of the court martial in the trial of Lieutenant Colonel Frémont. This is by far the most important source for Frémont’s career in late ’46 and ’47. Recent treatments of Frémont have consulted but not studied it.… It is only fair to add that much of Frémont’s reputation today issues from the campaign biographies of 1856.
Statement on Bibliography
A list of the books, monographs, periodicals, and manuscripts read or consulted in the preparation of this book would run to several thousand items and would be useless alike to the critic and to the student. Adequate bibliographies for most of the subjects treated here either exist already or can easily be assembled by any student. In view of these facts, I have chosen not to print a bibliography but to make a statement describing my use of sources and accounting to the reader for my principal debts to secondary authorities.
The purpose of the book is twice stated in my text. I have investigated the subjects it deals with so far as I thought necessary in order to fulfill that purpose. As the book leaves my hands, I am aware of no errors in it. Since I am acquainted with the usual fruits of industry, however, I am assured that there are many small errors of statement and interpretation, perhaps a great many. I have this to say of them: they do not issue from a failure to consult the material a mastery of which would have prevented error.
My preference is for the eyewitness, for an intelligent eyewitness if he can be found but for any kind of eyewitness if intelligent ones are lacking. When eyewitnesses cannot be found, and in order to supplement them when they can be, I like the accounts of experts contemporary with the events, official reports, and the accounts of contemporary newspapers. All the principal stories of my text and all the principal discussions and analyses are based on eyewitness accounts or accounts by intelligent contemporaries who set out to learn the facts. They are buttressed by government reports, by contemporary newspapers, and by a considerable miscellany of other contemporary material. I have submitted them to the criticism of all relevant works by modern historians. When my account differs from the accounts made by such historians, the difference is deliberate and for cause. And there are a good many places where no qualified modern historian has treated the material which I use.
In short, where facts are important, I have got them at the sources, and where judgment is called for I have tried to give my judgment authority by adequate research. In the use of unimportant facts, however, and in certain other passages where judgment is not called for, I frequently rely on secondary authority. Thus in, for instance, the history of California before my period, it would have been a waste of time to qualify myself in the sources. Everything I say about it (except in relation to the fur trade) rests on authority. Likewise, there are portions of the diplomatic and political background which I have explored no farther than modern histories, though I have gone to the sources for everything that bears directly on my purpose. Finally, in purely connective passages, I have used my own research or the treatments of secondary authorities as best suited my convenience.
Students who are acquainted with the field will find that some of my dates differ from those given by standard authorities. Well, one object of my book was to suggest, so far as possible, the simultaneity of various actions in it. I therefore prepared a careful, extremely detailed itinerary and time schedule of every journey described in the book. I then found that I had a master timetable of the West in 1846, and that its cross references allowed me to check dates and provided information or clues to information which allowed me to correct some of them. Mr. Mason Wade’s discovery of Francis Parkman’s notebooks, which he generously put at my disposal, was particularly helpful. All the dates which I use in connection with Parkman come from the notebooks.
So much in general. Several specific statements must be made.
Any agreement in judgment between what I say herein and what Justin Smith says in The War with Mexico either means a judgment too well supported for anyone to doubt or else is coincidental. The research behind Professor Smith’s book is certainly one of the most exhaustive ever made by an American historian, and if it came to an issue of fact I should perforce have to disregard my own findings and accept his. But it is frequently — very frequently — altogether impossible to understand how Smith’s conclusions could exist in the presence of facts which he himself presents. If there is a more consistently wrongheaded book in our history, or one which so freely cites facts in support of judgments which those facts controvert, I have not encountered it. Since the Mexican War was a master condition of my book, I consequently had to make an independent study of its politics, diplomacy, campaigns, and personalities. Frequently a few sentences about Taylor, Scott, Marcy, Trist, secondary commanders, miscellaneous figures, or leading events issue from a prolonged study of official reports, newspaper correspondence, journals, memoirs, and biographies which there is no occasion to mention in the text. Nevertheless, I rely on Smith in passages where unimportant facts could not be verified elsewhere without disproportionate labor. I gladly acknowledge that I lean heavily on Major Charles Winslow Elliott’s Winfield Scott.
My portrait of Frémont rests on a laborious analysis of what he said, did, and wrote; on many eyewitness accounts; on many letters, journals, and memoirs; on the testimony, much of it sworn testimony, of those who were associated with him; and on later accounts by people who were qualified by position or intelligence to write factually. But also I have had at hand such treatments as those by Royce, Bancroft, Goodwin, Sabin, and Nevins, and I have not scrupled to let them decide matters which were unimportant to my purpose and had not come within the scope of my own inquiry.
This brings up the histories of Hubert Howe Bancroft. While actually writing this book I have referred to California and Oregon innumerable times, to Utah occasionally, to others infrequently. I cannot imagine anyone’s writing about the history of the West without constantly referring to Bancroft. His prejudices are open, well known, and easily adjustable. A generation ago it was easy for historians to reject much of what he wrote; in the light of all the research since done, it is not so easy now. I have frequently departed from his reading of facts and a sizable number of the facts I use were not known to him, but I have found that you had better not decide that Bancroft was wrong until you have rigorously tested what you think you know. Throughout my treatment of California, the translation of Spanish texts is from Bancroft.
Of the private journals which are the principal source for my account of the Doniphan expedition, a number have been published by Ralph P. Bieber in the Southwest Historical Series. I am under a heavy debt to Mr. Bieber’s annotation of them, of Cooke, and of Garrard.
James Clyman’s journals, letters, and verses are published in Charles L. Camp’s James Clyman: American Frontiersman, and Susan Magoffin’s journal in Stella Drumm’s Down the Santa Fe Trail. Both books are splendidly edited and both are prime sources. I owe more to James Clyman than to any other single book. No more careful work has ever been done in Western history; Camp’s editing does almost as much as Clyman’s text to make it one of the half-dozen classics of the field. My great debt to Mr. Camp is acknowledged elsewhere.
I owe much to George R. Stewart’s Ordeal by Hunger. In order to fit the story of the Donner party into the story of the emigration as a whole, I have had to use most of Stewart’s sources independently, and my narrative is usually synthesized from Thornton, McGlashan, and Eliza Houghton, and supplemented by contemporary newspaper stories and by the journals of other emigrants of ’46 or ’47. But anyone who writes about the Donners today necessarily owes much to Stewart and necessarily uses him repeatedly. I adopt all his dates west of Fort Bridger and all but one of his spellings; I rely on him for the identification of geography from Donner Lake on to Sutter’s; and I depart only once from his statement of routes. In several places I follow Charles Kelly’s excellent Salt Desert Trails.
There are practically no trustworthy authorities about the Mormons.* My text rests on only one Mormon historian, Brigham H. Roberts, rests on him only when he quotes from official documents not open to me, and never, I believe, rests on any Gentile historian. Everything I say about the Mormons and about the Mormon Battalion derives from the sources, and in the interpretation of Mormon experience derives from Mormon sources exclusively. What I say in judgment derives from an exhaustive study of the entire field. The journal of Henry Standage is published in Golder’s March of the Mormon Battalion, and Charles Kelly has published Journals of John D. Lee. The journals of John W. Hess, Robert S. Bliss, Henry W. Bigler, and Nathaniel V. Jones have been published in the Utah Historical Quarterly. Most of the other journals quoted in my text were typed and deposited in various places, in Utah, at the Library of Congress, and in New York, by the Historical Records Survey. Material in my text from a good many other journals and autobiographies not directly quoted is also usually from the Historical Records Survey. Various other journals, quoted and not quoted, were put at my disposal by their owners.
In the emigration, I have tried to submit the individual experience to interpretation by means of the typical experience. My stories are of 1846 but the supporting material is from the entire history of emigration in the West before the railroads.
Though the actions of this book occurred nearly a century ago, some of them are still in dispute. To students who know the details of those controversies, I may say that sometimes, in the absence of evidence absolutely conclusive, I have chosen, after due consideration of all relevant material, to adopt, so far as possible, the account of the man who seemed to me the most intelligent man on the spot. Three such men are conspicuous: Jessy Quinn Thornton, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and Philip St. George Cooke. I believe that I have not followed any of them where there is good evidence against them. On the other hand, it would take exceedingly good and plentiful evidence to impugn their testimony.
