The strains of travel had long begun to tell on the travelers. Drenched blankets, cold breakfasts after rainy nights, long hours without water, exhaustion from the labor of double-teaming through a swamp or across quicksands or up a slope, from ferrying a swollen river until midnight, from being roused to chase a strayed ox across the prairie two hours before dawn, and from constant shifting of the load to make the going better. Add the ordinary hazards of the day's march like a sick ox, a balky mule, the snapping of a wagon tongue, capsizing at a ford or overturning on a slope, and the endless necessity of helping others who had fallen into the pits which by intelligence or luck others had avoided.
Add the endless apprehension about the stock, the ox which might die, every day's threat that the animals on which your travel depended might by killed by disease or accident or Indians, leaving you stranded in the middle of nowhere. These things worked constantly on the nerves, and even God seemed hostile when a storm piled on.
Even the sunniest grew surly and any pinprick could be a mortal insult. The enforced companionship of the trail began to breed the hatred that is commonplace in the barracks. A fellow traveler's drawl, or even an innocent tic suddenly became intolerable.
Beyond even this, was the strangeness. This was not the pastureland they had known. The very width and openness of the country brought a certain anxiety. It had no bound; the long heave of the continent never found a limit, and in the middle of nowhere the strongest personality diminished. There was no place to hide in, and always there was sun to hide from, further shrinking the cowering soul. Consciousness was reduced to the little line of wagons.
The trail bred a genuine pathology, a true Angst, and proper material for psychiatry to explore. The elements of human personality were under pressure to come undone. There was a drive to phobia or compulsion or fugue or dissociation. Some survived it unchanged or strengthened in their identity; others suffered from it, inflicting it on their families, for the rest of their lives. And it grew as the trip went on. Worse country lay ahead and the drained mind was less able to meet it.
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As the strain began to tell, the emigrants entered the sagebrush and alkali country. Jessy Thornton observed "a remarkable peculiarity in the atmosphere, which made it impossible for me to judge with any tolerable degree of accuracy as to the distance of objects."
The sun and the thin air made distances deceptive. Thornton wrote about the "white efflorescence of salts," but did not mention how it makes a person squint, how it glares like snowfields under the sun, how it glimmers and quivers in the snaky heat waves and fills the plain with lakes that quench no thirst. The sage smelled like turpentine to Thornton; but he might have mentioned its rich, aromatic perfume in the dawn wind, the pungency it gives to campfires, and the tang that grilled meat picks up from it. Mirages flickered across the plain in that terrible sun. They were another strangeness in a country that grew increasingly to look like Hell. On the horizon they thrust up peaks or pinewoods or blue New England ponds, where there were no mountains and no lakes or forests, either.
For some time now the emigrants had been making their fires with Buffalo chips. The children ranged out from the plodding train to collect it in gunnysacks, and it made red coals for cooking in long, shallow pits. Moreover, they were well into the arid country, and for those traveling in 1846, it was drier than usual. The never-ending wind of the plains blew up dust from the wheels in twisting columns that merged and overspread the whole column in a fog and canopy that moved with it. It "filled the lungs, mouth, nose, ears, and hair, and so covered the face that it was sometimes difficult to recognize each other," and "we suffered from this almost insupportable flying sand or dust for weeks if not for months together."
Thornton had neglected to supply himself with goggles which "can be purchased in the United States for thirty-seven and a half cents"; near Independence Rock he would have paid fifty dollars for a pair. The tortured eyes tortured the brain. The immense sun, the endless wind, and the gritty, smothering, inescapable dust reddened and swelled the eyes, granulated the lids, inflamed the sockets.
The excited nerves make horrible shadows and produce illusions of color and shape. The illusions are no less disturbing in that the heat mirage distorts size and pattern so that a healthy eye may see a jack rabbit as a buffalo at a hundred yards or a clump of sage at half a mile as mounted Indians charging. Trachoma was endemic among the Indians, a number of emigrants went blind, and few came through this country without eye trouble of some sort. The medicine chests held solutions of zinc sulphate, which was good, but simple boric would have been better for it was alkali that made the dust corrosive. It was also driven into the skin by the daily wind. Most of the emigrants were burned black; the rest were burned a less comfortable, fiery red; their cheeks peeled and their lips were deeply cracked by what is, after all, simple lye.
The hundredth meridian of west longitude, a geographer's symbol of the true beginning of the West -- meaning the point beyond which the annual rainfall is less than twenty inches -- strikes the Platte near the present town of Cozad, Nebraska, well east of the Forks. The trail up the North Platte moved mainly west or a little north of west to a point opposite the present town of Ogallala, Nebraska, where it took the due northwest bearing it would maintain for hundreds of miles. And between the sites of the present towns of Broadwater and Bridgeport, Nebraska, it struck the Wildcat Range. Here the scattered buttes and bluffs which had been growing common place for a considerable distance became a true badlands.
The scenery was spectacular, but spectacle was only a momentary solace to the emigrants, who had now reached truly tough going -- with cumulative fatigue, anxiety, and mental conflict piling up. In early June, the desert still had the miraculous brief carpeting of flowers that delights travelers to this day, but it was late June when the emigrants got there, a wholly different season, and 1846 was a drought year.
The slow pitch of the continent which they had been climbing toward the ridgepole so slowly that they seldom felt the grade here lost its monotony. The gentle hills that bordered the valley of the Platte, known as the Coast of the Nebraska, suddenly became eroded monstrosities. Jail Rock, Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluff, were individual items in creation's slag heap that had got named, but the whole formation was fantastic. Thornton called it Tadmor of the Desert and sketched a gift-book description of ruined cities, defeated armies, and ancient peoples put to the sword. But then, opposite Chimney Rock, one of his hubs locked for want of grease and he had to interrupt his poetry.
Even such prosy diarists as Joel Palmer and Overton Johnson were startled into rhetoric. The realistic Edwin Bryant saw Scott's Bluff against the green and purple murk of an oncoming storm and wrote phrases like "ruins of some vast city erected by a race of giants, contemporaries of the Megatherii and the Icthyosaurii." Trail marker and future politician and general John C. Fremont composed a resounding passage about "The City of the Desert."
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The grade was steep now, and once they were in the badlands the trail narrowed and was frequently precipitous. Crazy gullies and canyons cut every which way, and whoever gave up in anger and tried to find better going elsewhere only found worse troubles. The ropes came out and wagons had to be lowered by manpower down a steep pitch or hauled up over the vertical side of a gully or between immense boulders -- while those not working sat and swore in level dust and intolerable sun, far from water.
When they moved, the dry axles added a torturing shriek to the split-reed soprano of the wheels and the scrapes of tires on stone or rubble. Dry air had shrunk the wheels, too, and without warning tires rolled off or spokes pulled out and the wagon stalled. The same brittleness might make a wagon tongue break, which was disastrous unless a spare pole had been slung beneath the bed, and the violent stresses sometimes snapped the metal hounds, the side bars which connected tongue and fore-carriage. Sometimes the ropes broke at a cliff or pulled off the snubbing post, and a wagon crashed. Or crazed oxen capsized one, or defective workmanship or cheap material could stand no more and the thing went to pieces.
Sometimes half a wrecked wagon could be converted by desert blacksmithing into a cart; sometimes a sound wagon had to be converted because some of the oxen had died. In any event, here was where abandoned furniture and other belongings began to litter the trail.
Allocating the abandoned household goods was another stress of desert travel, for something of personality and spiritual heritage died when they had to go. Their owners were in the grip of necessity. The desert beat hammer blows, an overmastering realism, on one's soul, and something permanent came from that forging, the old confirmed forever or the new, frequently the lesser, formed forever.
In the sun and dust they went on, the daily distance shortening and no end to the country ahead. They were not yet to South Pass, not yet halfway to the Pacific! Horses and oxen bloated from foul water; many of them died. Their hooves swelled and festered. Even the soundest grew gaunt as the grass diminished. Sparse along the upper Platte in normal times, it failed quickly in the drought of 1846, and many travelers found it cropped by those who had preceded them up the trail.
Men became as gaunt as their stock, the alkali water being just as bad for them. They saw suddenly that food was limited, and there was an anxious computation of the days ahead, with the itineraries of the guidebooks to be reckoned with. Add to this the altitude which made the nerves tauter. Though the sun was hot and the dust pall breathless, there were suddenly viciously cold days too and all nights were cold. Water froze in the pails -- and the memory recalled how early snow fell in the mountains that were still so far ahead.
Edwin Bryant's mind strained toward California and chafed as the train fell steadily farther behind the schedules printed in the books. He talked it over with some friends and they decided that on reaching Fort Laramie, they would trade their wagons for a mule pack-outfit and press on by this more rapid means.
At Horse Creek the drought was broken by a short, torrential downpour which saturated their outfit and left them to a freezing night. A cold mist hung over the valley the next morning, but they got a fire going and managed coffee and bacon for breakfast. They hurried on up the Platte, narrowed by the badlands, and at about 2:00 that afternoon sighted the first building they had seen since they left Missouri. It was the half-finished trading post maintained by the Richard Brothers, in a loose association with Pratte, Cabanne & Company. Fort Laramie was just six or eight miles away.
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The American Fur Company's Fort Laramie stood on the flat ground where Laramie Creek empties into the Platte. It was a welcome site for the pioneers -- the first sign of civilization in at least six weeks, and a unique respite from the endless wilderness. Bryant made it 642 miles from Independence, Missouri.
Fort Laramie marked the gateway to the Rocky Mountains. The emigrants were now one-third of the way to Oregon City. (For the Mormons, it was the halfway point to the Salt Lake Valley.) Here, they rested and regrouped. Some would give up the dream, turn around and go home, but most made the decision to push ahead.
The fort had humble beginnings. In 1834, fur trader William Sublette built a wooden fortification here and called it Fort William. There was no emigrant traffic then -- Sublette's goal was trade with the local tribes. He offered alcohol and tobacco in return for buffalo robes.
The fort was soon sold to the American Fur Company, and they rebuilt it as an adobe structure in 1841. The fur trade was in decline by then and fur traders would be gone from Ft. Laramie by 1849, when the army bought them out and embarked on a major expansion.
There was only one building at Fort Laramie that warranted a visit by the Oregon/California-bound emigrants -- the post trader's store. It was the only reliable post office within 300 miles. Supplies could be purchased here, too, although prices were outrageously high. Tobacco, for instance, that could be had for a nickel in St. Louis, cost a dollar here.
Luckily, only a few of the emigrants needed to purchase supplies at Ft. Laramie; most wanted to sell their excess. Their overloaded wagons had become a greater and greater burden, but most held on until Fort Laramie -- in hopes they could earn some money for their extra supplies. But the fort trader wasn't buying.
So here the emigrants underwent wholesale dumping. The Trail near Fort Laramie was littered with heirloom furniture, stoves and food. One emigrant saw ten tons of bacon by the side of the Trail. Despite the temptation, the emigrants did not pick up this valuable litter because weight was the great enemy of their wagon
Source: DeVoto, B. (1943) The Year of Decision: 1846. Little, Brown: Boston.
