I’ve walked beyond the spring and turn around to find it where I hoped it wouldn’t be—at the mutilated edge of a stony square packed hard by hooves. A concrete stock tank sits there, only a little larger and deeper than a coffin, and water wells up at its center and drains into a brook crammed with more watercress than I’ve ever seen before. (Because it isn’t a native plant, the cress may have been planted here years ago by an early traveler.) A few yards north of the trough lies the spring itself, a concrete cap covering a submersible pump to deliver water to the decrepit house on the small ridge above. In 1876, Major Richard Whiting, the first ranch owner here, installed a hydraulic ram to supply the tenant house; now an electric machine does the job. Ranchers call such works improvements.
In the center of the tank, where water fairly boils up to flush it clear, I rinse my face and fill my canteen, all the time thinking about the thousands of travelers who have taken these waters since even before Stonehenge went up: from utterly unknown red people to notorious whites like Kit Carson. For nearly two centuries, the greatest peril to westering Americans was water: whether through dysentery, typhoid fever, or cholera—the black death—bad water did in more people than any other cause, and that is the reason Diamond Spring appears so often in trail history; along this route, no water between the Missouri and the mountains surpassed it in perpetually cold and clean clarity. One traveler west of here described his search to quench thirst: We found a muddy puddle from which we succeeded in getting a half bucket full, and, although black and thick, it was life for us and we guarded it with jealous eyes.
I pick a salad of watercress and take it and my canteen and timebook into the little copse just across the outflow brook and sit in a cool spot, my back to a slender elm. The brutalized earth around the spring is less evident here. I open the book.
Whites may have “discovered” the spring as early as 1804 either through Indian advice or by following animal trails that once led to it like spokes to a hub. Although Francisco de Coronado’s long circuit into the southern plains brought him within seventy-five miles of here (where a sixteenth-century Spanish sword and chain mail have been unearthed), I believe stories that he drank from the spring to be no more than possible. Its recorded history begins four years after Missourian William Becknell in 1821 laid out an amazingly direct wagon road across the upper Southwest to tap the commerce of Mexico (Santa Fe did not come under American control until 1846). Major George Sibley in 1825 wrote a comment when his trail-survey contingent camped at the spring on the eleventh of August, a day after he met with Osage chieftains at what is now Council Grove (a name he gave) under a large oak (the alleged stump still stands) and paid the tribe eight hundred dollars in goods and chits in exchange for safe passage in perpetuity (a few days later and some miles west, the Kansa accepted the same terms).
I’m sipping the cold spring water and munching the cress as if I were a muskrat, the timebook open to the first picture; I want you to look over my shoulder and visit a place through its years (wear good boots—it’s a long journey). Here’s what Sibley said when he sat within yards of where I am and made his pencil notations in a twelve-by-fourteen-inch diary:
We halted on a Small Creek where the water is Scarce & bad. The Grazing pretty good and fuel plenty. Mr. [Ben] Jones discovered a very fine Spring about 300 yards So. E. from our camp down the Creek. It is uncommonly large and beautiful, and the Water very pure & cold. I have Seldom seen so fine a Spring anywhere. After so hot a day, this fine Water was a luxury to us all. The distance from Council Grove to Jones’ Spring as measured upon our Route is 16 Miles & 32 Chains.
Two years later, Sibley began a second survey to correct details of the first. When he reached the spring he wasn’t well enough to continue, so the party turned around the next day and worked back toward the Missouri River, but the men were beset with problems, the last one a bolt of lightning that struck Sibley’s tent, filling it with smoke and splinters and leaving him temporarily deafened and numbed. In 1839 he wrote a letter giving a longer accost than does the diary of his first afternoon here:
The spring gushes out from the head of a hollow in the prairie, and runs boldly among the stones into Otter creek, a short distance. It is very large, perfectly accessible, and furnishes the greatest abundance of most excellent, clear, cold water—enough to supply an army.
There is a fountain, inferior to this, in the Arabian Desert, known as “The Diamond of the Desert.” This magnificent spring may, with at least equal propriety, be called “The Diamond of the Plain.” We found it a most excellent camping place. A fine elm tree grows near to and overhangs the spring.
On the 10th and nth of June, 1827, I encamped here with my party. During our stay I made requisition of “Big John” [Walker] and his carving implements once more to inscribe on the stooping elm, “Diamond of the Plain,” which was promptly done. The tree has since been cut away, I believe. The fountain is now generally known as “Diamond Spring.”
Captain Philip St. George Cooke, a few years later, said it was a Pearl of the Prairie—were pearls but as transparent as its cold and crystal waters! Sibley’s words put the lie to one local notion that the spring takes its name from a diamond stickpin found at its edge. Otter Creek, by the way, is now Diamond Creek.
James Josiah Webb, a twenty-six-year-old who had just joined a freighting train of 23 wagons, 40 mules, 80 yoke of oxen, and 40 men, came into the West for the first time in late August of 1844, and he said:
[Council Grove] being the last place where we could procure hard wood for repairs of wagons, one day was spent in cutting and slinging timbers under the wagons and preparing for an early start the next morning. As soon as possible after daylight we “catched up” and drove out, every person in camp in good health and spirits, and we greenhorns hoping we should see the Indians.
Passed Diamond spring, where we partook of mint juleps and passed a vote of thanks to the public benefactors who some years before had transported and set out some mint roots at the spring which by this time had increased to a bountiful supply for all trains passing.
Two years later, in June of 1846, Susan Shelby Magoffin, not yet nineteen and just married to a well-to-do freighter, came through. That she was the first white woman to travel the entire trail, as she claimed, may be true—no one has yet disproved her—but that she was the first woman to write an account of her journey is certain. Her husband, Samuel, twenty-six years her senior, pampered his bride on the trail with a maid, two servants, a private carriage, a big carpeted tent, and a feather-mattress bed (people commonly slept on the ground in the open or under a wagon). Susan said, It is the life of a wandering princess, mine. She was one of the few travelers who did not comment on the water; perhaps, camped up on the slope as she was and with servants to fetch, she never saw the fountain. Her diary entry of leaving the place the next morning and arriving at Lost Spring, thirteen miles west, is more evocative of her travel:
Ouch, what a day this is! We started in the rain, came in the rain, and stoped in the rain. Last night was a very cold night, and about day-light it commenced raining. We started at 9 o’clock having had difficulty yoking the oxen. After travelling only a mile or two the wagons stuck at the crossing of a small creek and we were detained some time, but finally got off, and arrived here by 4 o’clock. . . .
I closed a letter to Papa. It was a hurried affair, for I had only a few minutes to do it in [to give to an eastward-bound traveler], and then the wind and rain were blowing in my face, blotting my paper, and shaking me so I scarcely knew what I wrote.
This is certainly one of the “varieties of life” as well as of traveling. To be shut up in a carriage all day with a buffalo robe rolled around you, and with the rain pouring down at ten knots an hour. And at the close of this to be quietly without any trouble to one’s self, into the middle of a bed in a nice dry tent, with writing materials around you and full privillege to write anything and every thing that may chance to enter one’s head whether foolishness,
as this is, or wisdom. We have rainy days any place and they are not more disagreeable on the plains than in N. Y. I have books, writing implements, sewing, kniting, somebody to talk with, a house that does not leak and I am satisfied, although this is a juicy day en el campo!
A few days after Susan Magoffin passed through, contingents of soldiers began reaching the spring on their way to join Colonel Alexander Doniphan and General Stephen Watts Kearny to fight the Mexicans, a war that would bring New Mexico, Arizona, and California into the Union. Of several soldiers’ accounts, that of Colonel John Hughes is the most self-conscious:
Advancing about sixteen miles further, over high, rolling prairies, we encamped near the Diamond springs. The heat was oppressive. The most enchanting spots ever depicted by the pen of the eastern romancer possess no more charms for the youthful imagination than do the groves and the fine, gushing, transparent Diamond springs, for the thirsty, wayworn traveler on the plains. These crystal fountains derive their name from the limpidness of their waters.
Frank Edwards, a member of the Missouri legislature, organized a cavalry regiment to join Doniphan. Going to war is not—even then—a usual way of regaining health, especially for politicians; Edwards wrote some time later of his night near the spring:
Oh, the breath of the prairies! When the breeze, which always rises at sundown, fans your cheek after a hot day’s ride, you sink quietly to sleep, feeling that that soft delicious air is bringing health and strength to your weary body. How much I felt this can only be known to myself One of my reasons for going on this expedition was to obtain the restoration of my health, which had been, for some time, very much impaired; and when I bade adieu to St. Louis, I hardly expected to get across the prairies alive. But I had not been a week upon them before I felt that my whole being was changed, and ere I reached the settlements, I was one of the most robust of the whole company.
A man of whom I’ve spoken, Lieutenant John James Abert of the Topographical Engineers, a twenty-five-year-old West Point graduate, kept both a field journal and a sketchbook during his tour with the Army of the West. On the front and back covers of his field book he printed large: PRIVATE. Inside, his careful sentences and sensible observations, put down under the terms of hard travel, contain quotations from Pythagoras, Vergil, Horace (many trail journals suggest that soldiers were of a different cut then). He was a capable quick-sketch watercolorist, but he did not paint Diamond Spring. He wrote:
Shortly before reaching Council Grove we passed a grave of a white man who was killed some time ago by an Osage Indian. A circular pile of rough stones marks this unpretending grave; from the crevices the ivy has shot forth. Over the whole a bent stick is leaning mournfully. When I viewed this simple grave my mind turned to the proud monuments which we see built up by the wealthy in our great cities and which are daily leveled with the ground to give place to some improvement. Here on the wild prairie the Indian and the rude hunters pass by this spot and not for the world would they remove one stone. Who now shall we call the rude man? the wild man?
Continuing our march we travelled over a distance of about 20 miles, when we reached Diamond Spring. This spring is several feet across and the water makes one’s hands feel extremely cold. The temperature of the spring is 54° while that of the air, the thermometer in the shade, is 87°. I procured at this place a beautiful white thistle which is of delicious fragrance. We saw a great many nighthawks and plovers. They let us approach very nigh them. We also noticed some grouse and several herds of deer.
When Regimental Adjutant Abraham Johnston came through on the eighth of July, he spoke of the abundant flow of water but added, The horses of those who had gone in advance of us had tramped it up very much. George Gibson, a soldier traveling with Johnston, wrote:
Hereafter it will be necessary to be cautious how we leave the company, as we might fall in with some of the wild and savage Indians of the plains. [Diamond Spring] is an important point, as after this no timber can be found on the route to repair anything broken.
Of his night at the spring and the evening following he wrote:
After we got up this morning, we found a small rattlesnake in our blankets. It had slept between the first lieutenant and myself and near the captain’s face. It was soon dispatched for its intrusion, and we thought but little more about it. . . . Last night all we wanted to complete our happiness was one of foe’s best juleps, a long straw, and well feet. In the morning the men were tolerably well. But it commenced raining soon after we left camp and continued throughout the day, and we were wet to the skin and did not reach camp until after night, in a severe thunderstorm. The company was very much crippled up by the long march in such bad weather, and all had to lie down and sleep in their wet clothes without a mouthful to eat, as it was not possible to start a fire with green cottonwood in such weather or to cook with rain pouring down in torrents. My feet were so swollen I had to cut my boots off, and the night was very stormy, but we were soon sound asleep. There would have been no temperance men in camp tonight if they had had spirits.
The next year, 1847, enlisted man Philip Gooch Ferguson, a twenty-three-year-old printer, gave his explanation of the name of the spring:
When we were ready to start, the captain made us another war-speech, again warning us to be on the alert, as we were now in the enemy’s country. Mitchell and myself were sent ahead today as spies. We rode considerably in advance and stopped at the Diamond spring until the company came up and camped. This is a most delicious fountain, rising clear and perfectly transparent, the water being icy cold. The name of this spring, I presume, was taken from the diamond shape of the surface of the ground, at the corner of which rises the spring.
H. M. T. Powell, a crotchety English-born shopkeeper, arrived at the site on his way to the California goldfields in 1849. Fearing a shortage of grass on the more common Oregon-California Trail to the north, his group chose the much longer southern route through Santa Fe. The small, moralizing Victorian (a Missourian said his initials stood for His Majesty’s Twerp) squabbled with his fellow gold seekers and, in the long tradition of the English traveler, groused about much that he encountered. Four days before he reached Diamond Spring, Powell came down with diarrhea from bad water and asked a fellow traveler, a physician, to help him, and Dr. Burchard gave him a concoction made from white oak bark; Powell was recovering when he reached the spring, but he still noted that Burchard was a coarse bully, an evil tempered man. Powell carried along a trunk of books he hoped to use in starting a school but he found no one interested. The English immigrant kept one of the best of the Santa Fe Trail journals, full of unexpected details and self-revelations, and he was also a highly capable draftsman: among his pencil drawings of California towns is the earliest extant picture of Los Angeles. But, seeing Diamond Spring after a rainy spell in May, he wrote only:
Scoggins much better and the girl in the Missouri Company better; self quite sick last night, but better this morning. Still very cold bleak weather. Got to “Diamond Spring” about 3 o’clock. . . . Why it would be called “Diamond Spring,” I cannot tell. There is very little that sparkles about it. It boils up about the size of my arm with some force, bringing with it a considerable quantity of heavy black sand. I dipped up a pail full, where it wells up, and there was at least a quart of sand settled at the bottom, and the water itself is turbid. We moved on from Diamond Spring and passed along a Prairie of entirely different character from any we have yet seen; flat, with a gradual ascent along the line of the road, so that for the first time we could see a long distance ahead.
About 1850, Max Greene, a journalist gathering information he would turn into an immigrant’s guide called The Kansas Region (with a fifty-six-word subtitle), visited the spring and left a report unparalleled in Latinate diction:
The next place on the route, of any interest, is Diamond Spring—worthy of its translucent baptism. That spot has been squatted upon some time ago. On every knoll around it, I have an air-castle and horse-stable as tan
gible as Pacific Railway stock. My land patent is in sympathetic ink; but as the soil here is of poorer quality than it is a few miles eastward, and the Kaw claim is not extinguished, it may be presumed that my title to a few acres is valid—until some sensible emigrant sees them. I have no objection to good neighbors, educated in Sunday school and addicted to the chase; provided they leave me the spring, and all the stately elms that cluster along its clear-flowing rivulet.
Aside from natural beauties, Diamond Spring has special charms for me since I came near losing the lid of my head there. Which sans circumlocution, thus: As usual in serene weather, I was out “solitary and alone.” The day was sultry; and I thirsty. Momently in the hope of arriving at the spring, I was grudging along patiently; when, thinking only of information to be obtained, I was pleased to espy a squad of Indians hastening over the prairie by a lateral path which intersected our trail. They were a couple of Mishquawkie hunters and a squaw, mounted on ponies, hung around with quaint drapery of dried buffalo meat; and from the panoply of knives, tomahawks, bows and full quivers, it was apparent they were returning from a successful foray upon the “prairie cattle.” In single file they loped up to my side, and came to halt with an emphatic “hi!” I returned their salute with gruff suavity; and in response to the demand for tobacco, proferred them money (in small sums) to conduct me to water. My proposal and the purse were accepted; when the squaw, who was a facetious creature, lifting up one of the bunches of buffalo tags with which her palfrey was caparisoned, produced a gourd, and extracting the corn-cob from its neck, signified that I should drink therefrom. Desperately dry and ripe for rash experiment, I put the vessel to my lips, and—took it away again; but not till I had decanted a mouthful of warm oily liquid—which was recanted. Expostulating with my red interlocutor, it was insisted that he should inform me where water came from under ground and was above suspicion. To the reasonableness of this he assented, and his explanations not being intelligible, at length offered to conduct me to a spring near the path by which they had come. Thinking they ought to know if a spring really was there, and judging from “the lay of the land” that there was, I accompanied them—to an old buffalo wallow, which, in the showery season, had been a mud puddle. Here they jerked short their ponies, and holding up both hands expressed profound surprise at the miracle of the fountain which had suddenly vanished. This was too palpable a gull, and in a cross-jaw of vernacular and Choctaw, I intimated as much; the reply to which was a demand from my copper gentleman of brass for silver as the price for the next spring they were to show me. I shut down upon them with prompt denial, and refusal to negotiate; but it was too late for that—almost. During the colloquy they had closed in, with their horses so spurred together as to form a triangle with me in the middle. One of the trio leaned forward and tapped a pocket with the handle of his tomahawk to make the coins jingle, while from another pocket I had the sensation of something gliding out, and turning abruptly, detected the squaw who, having slid from her pony, was in the act of purloining my handkerchief. In an instant she sprang back into her seat, and three tomahawks were brandished over my devoted scalp-lock. It was an emergency, or bore startling resemblance to one; and I did the best could be done under the circumstances—laughed (sardonically). It took. The weapons were dropped, and my late-found acquaintances joining in an audible smile, affected to treat the affair as a capital joke—which I considered it to be—at my expense. Availing myself of the respite of good humor, I set out with them in search for the other spring—back upon the same path. Arrived in the Santa Fe trail, I squared myself, and thrust one hand into a capacious side-pocket which, for all they knew, contained a Colt’s revolver—but it didn’t. Keeping my hand clutched there, as though about to draw out something dangerous, I tried to look bullets. Whereupon my Indian, growing diabolically impertinent, ordered me to step into the lead of their file and “go on.” To have done so would have been turning my back on the enemy, and have afforded them opportunity, unobserved, to effect a perforation seriously detrimental to the healthy circulation of the blood. Not acquiescing in the programme, they waxed wroth; the veins on their temples writhed like red lizards. I remained defiant—it was all my ammunition. By a combination of gibberish and manipulations with my left hand, I proceeded to inform them that I was E pluribus unum; that there were a hundred ferocious creatures like myself coming over the next hill-top but one, and that they might be expected immediately—if not sooner. These suggestions operated. The savage game-cocks of the wilderness were ungaffed. Filing out into a side-path, they descended into a hollow. I eyed them until a grassy curve hid [them] from further scrutiny. When withdrawing my right hand, “it exchanged congratulations with the left”; and turning on my heel, I walked off fast. In ten minutes I was drinking the Diamond water more thankfully than Cleopatra ever swilled her pearls.