Sarah and her many siblings traveled variously in the different wagons, on foot, or on saddle horses. Mostly they walked, to spare the horses and the oxen on whose strength and endurance their success would eventually depend. Sarah’s closest sister, nineteen-year-old Mary Ann, was widely reputed to be a notable beauty, with dark, wavy hair and a broad white smile. Her oldest brother, Billy, seventeen, was a gangly teenager, built much like his father, already pushing past six feet in height. The younger children were Eleanor, thirteen; Lovina, eleven; Nancy, who would turn eight on April 26; Jonathan, seven; Franklin Ward Jr., five; and the baby of the family, Elizabeth, only about nine months old.
The first green of the spring prairie grass had begun to emerge from beneath the old, dry, butterscotch-colored grass of the previous year. As they drove over the wide-open countryside of southern Iowa, the dead grass whispered continuously around their wagons, stirred by the ceaseless prairie wind. Other than that and the muffled footfall of the oxen on the wet earth, they moved through a largely silent world.
As they turned south into Missouri, the terrain began to change, the amplitude of the hills—the distance from the lowest points of the bottoms to the crests of the hills—began to diminish, and the intervals between the crest of one hill and the crest of the next began to increase, the land still far from flat, but moving in that direction. The weather grew mixed, sometimes wet and sometimes fair, but the cold gradually began to moderate, and the wet wind began to carry hints of spring. Sarah and her siblings were in high spirits. As they walked or rode alongside the wagons, they spent hours imagining and chatting about the wonders that lay before them in California and the adventures they would have on the way there.
None of her siblings’ hearts, though, could have been as light as Sarah’s. In the 1840s it was customary for fashionable brides to take some form of what was variously termed a “wedding journey” or “bridal tour,” often in the company of friends or family. The word “honey-moon” had been in use long before the 1840s but referred more generally to a period of presumed marital bliss following the nuptials rather than to a journey. The brides of successful New Yorkers might expect to make a wedding journey upstate to Niagara Falls. Brahmin girls from Boston’s Beacon Hill might make extended tours of Europe. Country brides like Sarah, though, were seldom able to afford any sort of celebratory journey at all. If she and Jay had stayed in Steuben Township, the most she might reasonably have hoped for was a twenty-mile trip down the river to spend a night or two in Peoria. But instead here she was, embarking on an epic journey to a fabled land. Ahead of her lay not only the prospect of a home and a farmstead of her own in a rich land with a benign climate but also the opportunity to see and experience things she had only read of or imagined before now—surf pounding on a sandy beach, the smell of salt air, ocean fog filtering through dark forests, odd beasts such as antelope and sea lions, dusky-skinned “Spaniards” (as the emigrants often called Mexican Californians), and magnificent mountains. Mountains of any kind would be a novelty, but Sarah knew that ahead of her lay mountains that were reputed to rival the Swiss Alps, picturesque peaks capped by granite crags and draped with deep drifts of snow.
And so they moved slowly and blithely toward St. Joe. But even as they contemplated the prosperity that lay ahead of them, people were in motion and events were unfolding in faraway places—people and events that were as yet unknown to them but that in time would come together to profoundly alter the world they were about to enter and ensnare them in a deadly web.
On May 12 a party of emigrants bound for California departed from Independence, Missouri, south of St. Joe. One of the organizers of the party was forty-five-year-old James Frazier Reed, a businessman from Springfield, Illinois. Reed was relatively affluent and, according to many who were with him that spring, rather full of himself. Though not officially the captain of the group, he seems to have regarded himself as its natural leader from the outset. Traveling with him was his thirty-two-year-old wife, Margret, who suffered greatly from migraines, or “sick headaches” as they were then called, and was generally frail—so frail, in fact, that she had lain in bed at her wedding, with her husband standing by holding her hand. The couple hoped the climate in California would cure her. The Reeds had in tow their children and stepchildren; Margret Reed’s seventy-year-old mother, Sarah Keyes; a cook; a personal servant; and several teamsters whom Reed had hired to drive wagons and handle his livestock.
Anticipating the rigors of the journey ahead, James Reed had gone to extra lengths to prepare at least one wagon that would have in it some of the amenities of home for his wife, children, and aging mother-in-law. His stepdaughter, Virginia, described it in considerable detail.
The entrance was on the side, like that of an old-fashioned stagecoach, and one stepped into a small room, as it were, in the center of the wagon. At the right and left were spring seats with comfortable high backs, where one could sit and ride with as much ease as on the seats of a Concord coach. In this room was placed a tiny sheet-iron stove, whose pipe, running through the top of the wagon, was prevented by a circle of tin from setting fire to the canvas cover. A board about a foot wide extended over the wheels on either side the full length of the wagon, thus forming the foundation for a large and roomy second story in which were placed our beds….
It was, perhaps, not quite the ponderous “palace car” that later mythology would make it out to be, but apparently it was substantially more elaborate and comfortable than the simple, roughly four-by-nine-foot farm wagons that most of the emigrants drove.
Traveling with the Reeds were two brothers, also from the Springfield area—George and Jacob Donner—and their families. George Donner, in his early sixties, was among the older emigrants setting out for California that spring. A prosperous farmer, he was comfortable in his own circumstances, but he hoped to relocate his five daughters to a place where they would find more favorable prospects than in Illinois. Like so many of the emigrants of 1846, he was a large man physically and the son of a Revolutionary War veteran. He had been married three times before. His present wife, Tamzene, was at forty-four a small woman with gray-blue eyes, dark hair, and, according to one source, a “not pretty” face. But she was an accomplished woman. She had twice been a schoolteacher, she spoke French, and she was an enthusiastic amateur botanist. She also had been married before, in North Carolina, but in the course of less than a year she had lost her entire family—a daughter, born prematurely, as well as her husband and her son to illness. Jacob Donner, George’s brother, thought to be about fifty-six, was a slight man and not in robust health. He and his wife, Elizabeth, forty-five, had between them seven children. Like the Reeds, the Donner brothers and their families had brought along a number of hired teamsters to handle the livestock and drive two of their extra wagons.
Events that would affect Sarah and her family, the Reeds, the Donners, and everyone else setting out for California that spring were also unfolding far to the east, in Washington, D.C. On May 13, President James K. Polk signed a bill declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and Mexico.
Polk had wanted this war—or at least the booty it would yield—from his first days in office. Though the war was ostensibly fought over a border clash between Mexican troops and U.S. troops in the newly independent but disputed Republic of Texas, the real prize was California. California at the time included not only the modern state we know today but also all of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of Colorado and Wyoming—nearly half of Mexico’s territory at the time. Polk had earlier tried to buy California on the cheap, but that having failed, he had resolved simply to take it. The dispute over Texas had given him the opening he wanted, and it dovetailed nicely with a carefully choreographed campaign of presidential deception that would find a disconcerting parallel early in the twenty-first century.
Many in the Congress, and some in Polk’s own cabinet, thought that the outright seizure of California would be unjustified
and immoral. But Polk was determined to defend and expand his executive powers against any congressional interference. He was also at times stubborn and narrow-minded. Historian Bernard DeVoto said of him that he was “pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains.” And apparently he counted anyone who disagreed with him about Mexico and California as primary among the spooks and villains. When he sent his war bill to Congress on May 11 and the members of Congress decided that perhaps they should debate the issue before acting on it, Polk was outraged, taking their failure to act immediately to be nothing less than treasonous.
After months of jingoistic rhetoric emanating from Washington about the natural right of Americans to fulfill their manifest destiny and the obvious moral depravity of Mexico and Mexicans, the mood of the country was largely behind Polk. The urge to expand the nation’s territory was almost universal, and it seemed self-evident to most Americans that they had a natural right to as much of the continent as they desired. The administration had crafted its rhetoric carefully, advertising the impending conflict as a defensive war, not as the war of conquest that it in fact would be.
Faced with this kind of popular support, the Congress passed the war bill 42–2. At a cabinet meeting that evening, Polk’s secretary of state, James Buchanan, still had his doubts. He suggested that perhaps the administration should make clear to foreign governments that the United States’ argument with Mexico concerned only Texas and that the United States had no designs on California, New Mexico, or any other part of Mexico’s territory in the West. The president’s angry reaction was to proclaim that certainly he would take California if he could, that he would “acquire California or any other part of Mexican territory which we desire.”
On May 16 the headline for the Illinois Gazette back in Lacon read “WAR! WAR!” Two days later the Republican candidate for Congress in the Seventh District of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, arrived unannounced in Lacon, campaigning for the congressional seat he would soon use to denounce the war with Mexico.
On May 19 the Donner and Reed families, having crossed both the Missouri and the Kansas rivers, fell in with a much larger party led by a Kentuckian, Colonel William Russell, near a Kaw Indian settlement known as Fool Chief’s Village. The Russell Party, glad to have the addition of more men—particularly well-regarded, relatively educated, and affluent men like James Reed and the Donner brothers—voted them into their party unanimously.
Out in the middle of the desert sage-lands of present-day Nevada, Lansford Hastings was also in motion. On May 20 he had arrived at a crucial juncture in his mission to intercept the westbound emigrants and direct them toward Suttersville. Since leaving the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, he had struggled with horses and pack mules, floundering through deep drifts of snow while crossing the mountains, then making his way down through the basalt canyons of the eastern foothills and out onto the arid plains of western Nevada. By happenstance he was traveling in the company of James Clyman, among the greatest of the generation of mountain men who traveled the American West between the 1820s and the 1850s. Born in 1792 on a farm belonging to George Washington, whom he had seen in the flesh, Clyman had traveled widely in the far West as early as 1823, and it’s unlikely that anyone within a thousand miles knew the lay of the land better than he did.
Clyman and Hastings camped that night on the spot where the established emigrant route northeast to Fort Laramie intersected the theoretical shortcut that Hastings had promoted in his book. Now Hastings wanted to take that shortcut, to see it himself for the first time and to reach the emigrants before they could have a chance to take the road to Oregon rather than California. Clyman thought that the proposed shortcut saved little distance and promised much harder traveling than the proven route. They sat by a campfire in the sagebrush that night and argued about it. In the morning they argued some more. But Hastings would not be deterred, and so they left the established road and struck out across the desert. Ahead of them lay the searing salt flats of Utah and the almost entirely unexplored tangle of mountains and canyons known as the Wasatch.
Crossing Iowa and Missouri, Sarah and her family fell into a basic and comfortable routine that varied little from day to day. They arose early and built campfires. Franklin and Billy Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder rounded up the family’s loose livestock and yoked up the teams. Sarah and her mother and Mary Ann took out long knives and cut thick slabs of bacon from the hams hanging ponderously in their wagons and fried them up in cast-iron skillets. They brewed strong coffee or tea, and then they sat on the grass or on wagon gates eating the bacon, sopping up the grease with pieces of bread they had baked the night before.
Then they threw the last few items into the wagons and got under way. At midday they stopped for an hour or two—“nooning,” as they called it—to rest the teams, let the cattle graze, and take another quick meal themselves. Then they continued on again until four or five in the afternoon. When they found a good spot near clean water and with ample grass for the livestock, they combined their wagons with those of other families and drew them into a square or a circle and turned the animals out to graze while they prepared campfires, prepared dinner, set up tents, ate, and gathered around the fires to socialize a bit before turning in. If they felt that Indians were about, they drove the livestock into the enclosure formed by the wagons and set guards out for the night.
When it came time to bed down, they crawled into the backs of wagons or into tents. We do not know where Sarah and Jay slept. Tents were expensive items, and it was common among the emigrants for whole extended families, meaning children, seniors, men, women, and couples—including newlyweds—to share a single large tent. In chilly nights on the plains, and later in the mountains of the West, it was the simplest and most effective way for everyone to stay reasonably warm. But Sarah and Jay might well have chosen to sleep in the relative privacy afforded by the farm wagon they drove.
In the middle of May, they approached St. Joe. They traveled now alternately through open prairies on the uplands and through virgin woods in the valleys. This was rich, fecund land, country that an aging John James Audubon had prowled just three years earlier, making observations and collecting specimens for his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a follow-up to Birds of America. The ancient, massive trees of the woods had leafed out, and as the Graves family descended into the Missouri River Valley, they entered a world that was a deep, dense, and somber green, but explosive with flashes of brighter colors. Sky blue irises rose in ranks out of the mossy ground. Scarlet tanagers, orange orioles, and yellow warblers drifted through the canopies of tulip poplar and black locust trees. Deer and gray wolves slipped away silently into the understory. Passenger pigeons, with their slate blue backs and wine red breasts, sometimes nearly filled the sky overhead and at other times draped the enormous trees, weighing down the limbs. Along the river, white pelicans plunged out of the sky Icarus-like, piercing the water with hardly a ripple. Blue-winged teals, green-winged teals, and cinnamon teals gabbled and bobbed in the water with hosts of other ducks. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds clung to reeds along the shores, chortling and chattering among themselves and scolding passersby.
As they emerged from the woods and made their way into the rough-and-tumble town that stretched along a big bend in the river, Sarah and Jay found themselves part of a small flood of emigrants converging on St. Joe that spring. The local newspaper, the Gazette, marveled at the number of wagons that appeared and at the attitude their occupants displayed.
From every quarter they seem to come—prepared and unprepared to meet every emergency. We look out upon them and are astonished to see such careless ease and joyousness manifested in the countenances of almost all—the old, the young, the strong and feeble—the sprightly boy and the romping girl, all plod along as if the jaunt were only for a few miles instead of a thousand—as if a week’s troubles were to terminate their vexations and annoyances forever
. What an idea it gives us, and what an insight into human nature—HOPE, the bright, beaming star is ascendant in their sky, alluring them on….
St. Joe that spring was a vortex of commercial activity—a swirling confusion of horse traders, wagon builders, ferrymen, outfitters, Indians, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and entrepreneurs of every stripe. Steamboats trailing black clouds of smoke clawed their way up the notoriously shallow and therefore dangerous Missouri River and tied up along the waterfront. Slaves labored to unload the boats, carrying bales and barrels of goods on bare, sweat-slicked backs. Along the riverside on the south end of town, more slaves tended fields of hemp, a crop grown not for its intoxicating qualities but because it was the source of valuable fibers. Flat-bottomed scows, pressed into service as ferries, struggled back and forth across the river carrying white-topped emigrant wagons, the men at their long sweeps fighting the current all the way. Pottawatomie and Kaw Indians walked bare-chested through the streets hawking vegetables and fish and game. Trappers and mountain men dressed in buckskin breeches, fringed jackets, and bear or coonskin hats mingled with emigrants in broad-brimmed hats and sunbonnets, dispensing advice and tall tales in exchange for liquor and tobacco. Stern-eyed Christian missionaries browsed the mercantile stores for cheap trade goods that might appeal to the heathen out west. Merchants come upriver from St. Louis inspected stacks of furs and made cash-on-the-barrel head offers. Brass whistles on the steamboats shrieked. Hammers and anvils in the blacksmith shops rang out rhythmically in point and counterpoint. Oxen bellowed. Dogs barked. Hogs squealed as they trotted toward the slaughterhouse and their doom. The river stank of raw sewage and pig offal. The streets reeked of manure and horse piss. But bakeries also perfumed the sour air with the aroma of fresh-baked bread.