Each summer, I think about those men and women who crossed the Great American Desert by wagon train in the 1840s and 1850s. This is the first of a series of threads about the Oregon-California Trail. The primary source is Bernard Devoto's book The Year of Decision, 1846. I was trying to put things into my own words, but if I am honest a lot of what follows might well be excerpts from the book. The story of the men and women who went west in 1846 serves as a prologue to the Mormon pioneers of 1847.
The first "violent shock" for the emigrant going west was Independence, Missouri, the starting point for emigration by wagon train. There were other towns, of course, to challenge Independence for priority in the Western trade. Westport, some ten miles away (and now part of Kansas City), St. Joseph where a few wagon trains left from in 1846, Council Bluffs in Iowa, the departure point for the Mormons, and other towns that would spring up such as Leavenworth, Atchison, and Plattsmouth. But Independence was the traditional "jumping-off place, the beginning alike of New Mexico and Oregon and romance, fully as important in history as it has become in legend."
"Quite properly," wrote Bernard DeVoto in his book Year of Decision, 1846, "a son of Daniel Boone was the first white man to visit it. He named it Eden as was later confirmed by inspiration." He referred, of course, to Joseph Smith declaration that God had revealed Missouri to be the new zion in the western hemisphere. The Mormons ran into plenty of trouble in Independence, and in the rest of Missouri before evacuating to Illinois.
Independence provided a violent shock "of the strangeness which was a primary condition of the emigration. From now on the habits within whose net a man lives would be twisted apart and disrupted, and the most powerful tension of pioneering began here at the jumping-off. Here was a confusion of tongues, a multitude of strange businesses, a horde of strangers -- and beyond was the unknown hazard. For all their exuberance and expectation, doubt of that unknown fermented in the movers and they were already bewildered. They moved gaping from wheelwright's to blacksmith's, from tavern to outfitter's, harassed by drovers and merchants trying to sell them equipment, derided by freighters, oppressed by rumors of Indians and hostile Mormons, oppressed by homesickness, drinking too much forty-rod, forming combinations and breaking them up, fighting a good deal, raging at the rain and spongy earth, most of them depressed, some of them giving up and going ingloriously home."
Independence had built six miles of macadam roads to the Missouri River by 1846, in order to keep up commerce, but had not graded its own streets. It often rained in early May, bogging down wagons to the hubs, and causing people to wade through knee-deep red Missouri clay mud.
Francis Parkman in 1846 found it all to be rather strange. The Mexican language was outlandish to Parkman, the "high Tennessee whine" left him with intense distaste, the nasal Illinoisan, the Missouri cottonmouth drawl, the slurred syllables and the bad grammar, the idioms and slang of "uncouth dialects." The emigrants were loud and rowdy, carelessly dressed, and "unmistakably without breeding. They waited for no introduction before accosting a grandson of a China merchant and his cousin whose triply perfumed name was Quincy Adams Shaw -- slapping them on the back, prying into their lives and intentions. 'How are ye, boys? Are ye headed for Oregon or California?' None of their damned business: would not have been on Beacon Hill and certainly was not since they were coarse, sallow, unkempt, and dressed in homespun, which all too obviously had been tailored for them by their wives. 'New England sends but a small proportion but they are better furnished than the rest,' he wrote in his notebook -- and in his book set down that the movers were 'totally devoid of any sense of delicacy or propriety.' They would not do."
Parkman was from Boston, and in 1846 he traveled west on a hunting expedition, where he spent a number of weeks living with the Sioux tribe. The following year his book The Oregon Trail was published. Parkman is one of several that DeVoto follows in their travels west.
Parkman was perplexed by "this strange migration" and wondered whether it really was just "restlessness" that prompted it. Or was it "a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society," or "an insane hope of a better condition of life." But that is where Parkman's interest in these emigrants stopped. "Manifest Destiny was taking flesh under his eyes," wrote Devoto, "his countrymen were pulling the map into accord with the logic of geography, but they were of the wrong caste and the historian wanted to see some Indians." Parkman could not suffer "the Pukes or the Suckers", so he joined with three Englishmen whom he had met in St. Louis, preparing for a summer on the plains, and who also "wanted no truck with the 'Kentucky fellows.'"
Early May was the time to start the journey, for it was a long one, and certain mountain passes had to be reached before the snows closed them. Mormons could leave later because their Journey was shorter, ending in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Even those leaving early in May could run into trouble in the mountains, if they took a bad cutoff, such as did the Donner-Reed Party.
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It was two thousand miles from Independence to Oregon City. Emigrants leaving the several departure places met near Fort Kearny, 325 miles from Independence. When the movement to Oregon began there were no military posts beyond Fort Leavenworth, but in 1848 the Army built For Kearny on the Platte near Grand Island to protect travelers from the Pawnees. The following year the government bought the American Fur Company post of Fort Laramie and sent troops to garrison it and to patrol the trail along the Platte. One farmer noted that the river Platte was too thick to drink and too wet to plow.
On the 335-mile journey from Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie, emigrants saw several prominent landmarks. Many carved their names on Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, or Scott's Bluff. They usually rested for a day or two at Fort Laramie to wash clothes and make repairs before heading toward the mountains, where travel was slower and more difficult
Near Independence Rock the trail met and then followed the Sweetwater River. Here the going got rougher. Alkali in the water poisoned the cattle and the river had to be crosses and then recrossed -- occasionally, several times in one day. South Pass was a rather unspectacular place, except that now the streams flowed westward, and the emigrants realized they had crossed the Continental Divide.
It was near Fort Bridger that the Mormons -- and the Donner-Reed Party -- would turn off to head for the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake. Near Fort Hall (just north of present day Pocatello, Idaho) the California-bound emigrants left the trail and headed south.
The mountains and valleys of the Snake, Green, and Bear rivers exhausted the teams and caused many of the wagons to break down. Some emigrants used rafts for the last part of the trip down the Columbia River to Oregon City.
In time the Oregon trail developed numerous cutoffs, feeders, and outlets. In many places the trail might be fifteen or twenty miles wide, as wagon trains detoured to avoid the ruts and dust of the wagons ahead of them. In other places deep ruts are still visible today where travel was limited to a single-file route through a mountain pass or a river crossing. Lakes and swamps were skirted, but rivers and steep mountains had to be crossed, and they proved a challenge to the emigrant's courage and ingenuity.
The trip to Oregon by wagon took four or five months. To avoid delays on the trail the welfare of the animals was paramount. As one traveler put it, "Our lives depend on our animals." Forage was the main consideration in selecting camp sites. One emigrant told of staying at places without wood --which meant a cold supper -- if forage and water were available. "Our practice is first to look for a good place for the cattle, and then think of our own convenience." A popular expression of the day was, "Care for your draft animals rather than your men, for men can always take care of themselves."
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Francis Parkman described the land west of Independence as the Great American Desert. However, at least in May, there was much rain. It buffeted Parkman, the Mormons, the Sante Fe traders, and the emigrants with a violent succession of deluges, thunderstorms, northers, freezes, and heat waves. 1846 would be a drought summer, but it sure didn't start that way.
Oxen might die of heat beside streams made impassable by yesterday's rain, while their owners sniffed with the colds produced by the norther the day before yesterday. Sudden gales blowing out of nowhere flattened the tents, barrages of thunder that lasted for many hours might stampede the stock, and Parkman remarked that his bed was soft for he sank into it. Nevertheless, the life was enchanting at once. It was wild, free and rewarding. Parkman quickly learned the knacks of prairie travel, pitching camp, hitching a pack, finding wood or water, tracking a strayed horse, extricating a cart mired in mud.
June brought routine travel, exciting only as climate. They got through the Pawnee country without the pillage to which their defenselessness exposed them. There was little game at first, but the prairies were populous. They met parties on their way back from the mountains, trappers with furs. Nearly everyday there were companies of emigrants. Parkman still viewed them with distaste, except for one group that came from "one of the least barbarous of the frontier counties" and were "fine looking fellows with an air of frankness, generosity and even courtesy." Soon Parkman would accept the presence of a small band of emigrants who joined his party -- four wagons, ten men, one woman, and a child. The group traveled with or just ahead of them for two weeks, and though Parkman fumed he spent part of the night with one of them on guard duty and found him not too bad.
Good fun, good food, the nightly ritual of camp and fire. The rains ended, though there was a vicious sleet storm in June. Vegetation grew sparse, the land sloped and broke up. Traveling became monotonous but had a pleasant languor. Parkman had some symptoms of illness but did not realize how ominous they were.
By June 10 Parkman and Quincy Shaw had all they could stand of the British. "The folly of Romaine -- the old womanism of the Capt. combine to disgust us," wrote Parkman. So he and Shaw decided to go it alone. They were now at the Lower California Crossing of the Platte. Pretty soon they would find some Indians.
The emigration moved beside Parkman, ahead of him, and behind him. Edwin Bryant left Independence with two companions on May 5. They had hired a sub-mountain-man named Brownell to drive for them, had bought and outfitted an emigrant wagon, and had provided it with three yoke of oxen at $21.67 per span. Jessy Quinn Thornton had been "nominated a colonel, probably because he used such beautiful language," when he left Independence with his wife Nancy and two hired drivers on May 12. He would join the party of Lilburn Bogg's -- who as governor of Missouri almost ten years earlier had signed the extermination order against the Mormons -- and increased the party to 72 wagons, 130 men, 65 women, and 125 children.
Not long after May 15, James Reed and George Donner came up. They had been joined by the populous Breen party. The Reeds were probably the most luxuriously equipped emigrants on the plains that summer, and an undercurrent of resentment had already taken root. One of Reed's wagons was not only outsized, but had been filled with bunks, cushions, a stove, and other contrivances for comfort. Virginia Reed's blooded riding mare was envied. The Donners had three spare yoke of oxen, more milk cows than seemed necessary, some yearlings for beef, and five saddle horses. But they had nothing on J. Baker and David Butterfield who undertook to make the trip with a heard of 140 cattle. After a few days they were required to leave the Bogg party on the formal verdict that so large a herd would be a danger when they reached desert country, but more likely because they refused to butcher their calves.
Thornton, originally from Virginia, would describe those he saw traveling west that year. "The majority were plain, honest, substantial, intelligent, enterprising, and virtuous," he said. "They were indeed much superior to those who usually settle in a new country."
Nearly a century later, DeVoto would conclude that Thornton's judgement was unquestionably correct. "A frontier that could be reached only by eighteen hundred miles of hard travel was not an easy recourse for brush dwellers, squatters, and butcher-knife boys. From the Connecticut and Kenawha on to the Missouri the 'new country' had always offered opportunities to the shiftless and the shifty, but this was different. The migration was drawn from the stable elements of society, if only because the stable alone could afford it. A customary family outfit had a value of from seven to fifteen hundred dollars. The only way in which a really poor man could make the passage was to hire out as a driver or helper. Most trains had a number of such young men (and sometimes, as with the Donners, young women) who were working their passage, but the bulk were, at least in a moderate degree, men of property and therefore substantial citizens. A certain fraction, of course, if not 'squatters' (generically, 'poor whites') were of the butcher-knife type, and the fraction increased as travel cheapened."
The enlarged Bogg party included lawyers, journalists, students, teachers, day laborers, two ministers, a carriage maker, a cabinet maker, a stonemason, a jeweler, a gunsmith, and several blacksmiths. It had Germans, Dutch, French and English, but was native American in the overwhelming majority.
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The year 1846 was full of rumors. The Kansa -- also spelled Konza or Kanza, also called Kaw -- were supposed to be mobilized beside the trail, waiting to slaughter the emigration -- a degenerate tribe fluent at theft but no longer hardy enough to make trouble. Edwin Bryant heard that a party of five Englishmen were moving down the trail on Her Majesty's business, to incite all Indians between the Missouri and the Pacific "to attack [the] trains, rob, murder, and annihilate them." Other than the Brits Francis Parkman had started his journey with, their was a surprising number of British Army officers out to hunt buffalo or commune with the prairie gods while Oregon and California hung in the balance.
More immediate was the "threat" of the Mormons who were now "loose" beyond the frontier, five or ten or twenty thousand of them, with "ten brass field pieces" and every man "armed with a rifle, a bowie knife, and a brace of large revolving pistols." Their homes had been burned behind them, it seemed likely that they intended slaughter and neither mob nor police could head them off. "No one," Parkman wrote, "could predict what would be the result when large armed bodies of these fanatics would encounter the most impetuous and reckless of their old enemies on the prairie." And there were many Illini and even more Missourians. And there was Lilburn Boggs, their old tormentor.
But while Parkman and Boggs traveled west, the Mormons were stuck in the Iowa mud. Their passage across the Great American Desert would not begin for another year. Still, the emigrants kept their guns primed and their suspicions half cocked.
On May 16, the Boggs party got the last news from the States that they would hear until they reached the Pacific. A horsemen hurrying to catch up with a train ahead of them brought a copy of of the St. Louis Republican containing word of hostilities in Mexico. They next day, Mr. Webb, the editor of an Independence newspaper, rode into camp to confirm the story. On the Rio Grande a Captain Thornton of the Dragoons had been attacked and his command had been captured. The situation of Zachary Taylor was said to be extremely perilous. Excitement stirred among those bound for California, but Bryant noted that no one thought of giving up the emigration.
The emigrants were greenhorns: what the West came to call tenderfeet. Most of them were schooled in the culture that had served American pioneering up to now. But the Oregon and California emigrants had a much harder time of it than they would have if they had understood the conditions. They experienced hardships, disease, great strain, and aimless suffering of which the greater part was quite unnecessary. The mountain men had avoided it almost altogether. They had learned to live off the land, finding grass or water, managing the stock, making camp, reading buffalo sign and Indian sign. These things were a mystery to the emigrants who, tired at the end of they day, were prone to let someone else do the needful tasks. So their wagons were not kept up, horses and oxen strayed, and many hours, counting up to many days, were squandered. This added to the delay, something they could ill afford.
The passage needed to be made with the greatest possible speed in harmony with the good condition of the animals -- but the emigrants dallied, strolling afield to fish or see the country, stopping to stage a debate or a fist fight, or just wandering like vacationers. It was necessary to press forward, not only because the hardest going of the whole journey was toward the western end and would be far worse if they did not pass the mountains before the snow came, but also because every day diminished the food in the wagons, wore down the oxen by so much more and laid a further increment of strain on man and beast.
As expert as they might have been at healthy living back east, they did not know how to take care of themselves on the trail. From the first days on, the emigrants were preyed upon by colds, malaria, and dysentery, and it was their own fault. All this had its part in the stresses of emigration.
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The Boggs party, with the Donner-Reeds and the Bryants, moved along the Oregon Trail. But the movement, argued Devoto, "must not be thought of as the orderly, almost military procession of spaced wagons in spaced platoons that Hollywood shows us, and the trail must not be thought of as a fixed avenue through the wilds. The better discipline of the freight caravans on the Sante Fe Trail did impose a military order of march. On the southern trail wagons moved in something like order; in single file where the route was narrow, in columns of twos or fours when there was room for such a formation and it was needed for quick formation of the corral in case of Indian attack. Every night they were parked in a square or circle, the stock was driven inside after feeding, guard duty was enforced on everyone in his turn. Wagons which had led a file on one day (and so escaped the dust) dropped back to the end on the next day and worked their way up again. Regular messes were appointed, with specified duties for everyone. Wood, water, herding, hunting, cooking, and all the routine of travel and camp were systematized and the system was enforced. But that was the profit motive; men with an eye on business returns managed it. And they had no problems of family travel and few of cliques.
"Every emigrant train that ever left the settlements expected to conduct itself according to this tested system," continued DeVoto. "None except the Mormons ever did. Brigham Young had a disciplined people and the considerable advantage that his orders rested on the authority of Almighty God [DeVoto was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, but was not a member of the LDS Church] -- and even so, among a submissive and believing people on the march, he had constantly to deal with quarrels, dissensions, rebellions, complaints, and ineffectiveness. Among the emigrants there was no such authority as God's or Brigham's. A captain who wanted to camp here rather than there had to make his point by parliamentary procedure and the art of oratory. It remained the precious right of a free American who could always quit his job if he didn't like his boss, to camp somewhere else at his whim or pleasure -- and to establish his priority with is fists if some other freeborn American happened to like the cottonwood where he had parked his wagon.
"Moreover, why should anyone take his appointed dust when he could turn off the trail? Why should he stand guard on the herd of loose cattle, if he had no cattle in it? . . . They combined readily but with little cohesiveness and subdued themselves to the necessities of travel only after disasters had schooled them. They strung out along the trail aimlessly, at senseless intervals and over as wide a space as the country permitted. So they traveled fewer miles in any day than they might have, traveled them with greater difficulty than they needed to, and wore themselves and the stock down more than was wise. They formed the corral badly, with too great labor and loss of time, or not at all. They quarreled over place and precedence that did not matter. They postponed decisions in order to debate and air the minority view, when they should have accepted any decision that could be acted on. Ready enough to help one another through any emergency or difficulty, they were unwilling to discipline themselves to an orderly and sensible routine."
Kit Collings, in a chapter on the Oregon Trail, which was part of a book titled Pioneer Trails West published in 1985, wrote about the importance of guidebooks.
"For a nation unaware of the difficulties of the trip," said Collings, "these guidebooks were extremely helpful." That is, when they were consistently consulted. As one emigrant recalled:
"All went smoothly until we crossed Bear River Mountains, when feeling some confidence in our own judgement, we had grown somewhat careless about consulting our handbook, often selecting our camp without reference to it. One of these camps we had good reason to remember. I had gone ahead to find a camp for noon, which I did on a pretty stream with abundance of grass for our horses and cattle, which greatly surprised us, as grass had been such a scarce article in many of our camps.
"Soon after dinner we noticed some of our cattle began to lag, and seem tired, and others began to vomit. We realized with horror that our cattle had been poisoned, so we camped at the first stream we came to, which was Ham's Fork of Bear Creek River, to cure if possible our poor, sick cattle. Here we were 80 miles from Salt Lake, the nearest settlement, in such a dilemma. We looked about for relief. Bacon and grease were the only antidotes for poison that our stores contained, so we cut slices of bacon and forced it down the throats of the sick oxen, who after once tasting the bacon ate it eagerly, thereby saving their lives, as those that did not eat died the next day. The cows we could spare better than the oxen. None of our horses were sick. Had we consulted our guide book before, instead of after camping at that pretty spot, we would have been spared all this trouble, as it warned travelers of the poison existing here."
There was very little known and much misinformation about the land west of the Missouri, for only crude and inaccurate maps were available. During the 1840s a few guidebooks appeared, written by men who had already made the trip. Some books drew on the writings of explorers and others, since the writer obviously could not have traveled over all the trails described.
The weather was a problem as it changed from year to year. A recommended route might be flooded the next year, and waterless stretches were even longer during dry years. The quality and quantity of grass depended on the moisture available, as well as the number of people using the trail.
Not everything written or said about the trails could be trusted. In 1846, Lansford Hastings arrived at Fort Laramie from the west and talked about a time saving cutoff for the trip to California. He then left word that he would be at Fort Bridger waiting for any party wishing to take his route. The Donner-Reed party expressed interest in Hasting's cutoff, but he had left with another party by they time they reached Jim Bridger's fort. In what would be a fateful decision, the Donner-Reeds elected to take the new route on their own.
