For many of the emigrants, St. Joe was a last chance to see a doctor before leaving the United States behind, a vitally important consideration for people who soon might find themselves a thousand miles from the nearest doctor. According to the local “card of rates” agreed upon by the physicians of St. Joe the previous year, one could have an abscess opened for fifty cents. For a dollar one could obtain medical advice or receive an enema. A troublesome tooth could be extracted for fifty cents, troublesome toes or fingers amputated for five dollars each, arms for ten dollars, legs for twenty. If an emigrant woman were to find herself in a delicate condition, she might choose to linger in St. Joe long enough to have her baby professionally delivered for five dollars, but there would be no volume discounts—twins would set her back ten.
In the midst of all this activity, Sarah and Jay faced the task of making sure that they were well provisioned for the journey ahead. Some of what they needed they had brought from home, but this was the last and best chance to stock up on any remaining essentials. Selecting the right items and the right quantities was critical to their success—more critical, as it would turn out, than they could yet begin to imagine. Too much in the way of food and gear would weigh them down and tire their oxen, possibly even kill the oxen when the going got tough. Too little would raise the possibility of hunger or even starvation for the family if anything went wrong along the way. The guidebooks, including Lansford Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide, gave specific recommendations for the quantity of certain staples that each adult traveler ought to procure: “at least two hundred pounds of flour, or meal; one hundred and fifty pounds of bacon; ten pounds of coffee; twenty pounds of sugar; and ten pounds of salt….”
But there were many hard decisions to be made beyond figuring out the required quantities of staples, and for the first time in her life, as the mistress of her own household, it was largely Sarah’s responsibility to make these decisions. For one thing, as all frontier women knew, not all flour was created equal.* Sarah had to choose among three basic types that had long been known as “shorts,” “middlings,” and “superfine.” Shorts contained mostly bran and very little of the actual endosperm, the white, starchy portion of the wheat kernel. It was coarse, gritty stuff, often contaminated by dirt, wheat chaff, and insects. Middlings were hardly any better, a mixture of bran and wheat germ, often blended with cornmeal or rye to stretch it. Middlings generally needed further refining to be useful in baking. Superfine flour was stone-ground and passed through sieves. It resembled what we know as whole wheat flour, but it was expensive and beyond the reach of most emigrant families.
Sugar raised another set of issues. It could take the form of molasses in kegs or barrels; sticky, hat-shaped loaves of brown-and-white sugar; lumps of gooey unrefined brown sugar; or “Havana,” a lumpy crushed white sugar that required still more crushing and sifting to be useful in baking cakes or pastries. Because they were relatively inexpensive and portable, the hat-shaped loaves were what most of the emigrant cooks carried, hanging them by strings within their wagons. Most also carried loose-leaf tea and coffee, the latter in the form of green beans that would have to be roasted in a pan over a campfire and then ground in a portable coffee grinder before it could be brewed.
To raise their bread, they took “saleratus,” as they called baking powder, a commodity that they would later, to their delight, find occurring naturally around soda springs in the West, where they could scoop up as much of it as they wanted for free. For the many days when they would not have time or inclination to bake bread, they took hardtack or crackers. Most took a tub of clear suet to substitute for butter, though those who brought along a milk cow could simply hang a bucket of cream inside a wagon and let the bouncing and jouncing of the wagon churn fresh butter for them. Almost everyone brought vinegar, which was useful not only to lend flavor to their food but also as a cleaning agent and, they believed, as a medicine for both their own maladies and those of their livestock. Most also brought whiskey or brandy for the same purposes, and for celebrating special occasions like the Fourth of July.
They brought hard candy, hard cheeses, figs, raisins, flavored syrups—lemon and peppermint being particular favorites—salted codfish, pickled herring, and jellies, jams, and preserves packed in stoneware crocks. Some of the items they crammed into their provision boxes carried brand names that you or I might still find on our own kitchen shelves—Underwood’s deviled ham for one, and Baker’s chocolate with which to flavor a sweet cake or make hot chocolate at the campfire.
Because they came from a homestead, Sarah and her family probably brought along sides of bacon from their own hogs back home, but if not, they could buy as much smoked, salted bacon as they wanted in St. Joe. Except for whatever game they might kill along the way or as many of their cattle as they might choose to slaughter, the bacon would be the only meat they could count on until they reached California.
Because they did not yet know in whose company they would be traveling, nor how events might separate them from others, every family needed to be capable of basic self-sufficiency all the way to California. This meant that if they hadn’t brought them from home, before leaving St. Joe each family needed to procure all the requisite tools for maintaining and repairing their wagons, preparing their meals, tending to their livestock, providing shelter at night and during storms, crossing flooded streams, and defending themselves from the Indian attacks that they viewed as exceedingly likely and that they feared above nearly all else.* As a result, despite the burden it placed on their mules and oxen and the compromises it imposed on them in terms of what else they could bring along, they had to carry a great many very heavy items—hammers, chisels, augers, axes, bolts, screws, shovels, tents, frying pans, Dutch ovens, coffeepots, additional cooking utensils, bullets or the lead for making them, iron shoes for their oxen and horses, kegs of black powder, and large numbers of guns.
The guns were of two basic types—older flintlocks, which depended on a hammer striking a piece of flint to create a spark that, with luck, ignited a charge of black powder, or the more recent percussion guns. The latter, in place of the flint, depended on a small copper capsule called a “cap.” The cap contained a small amount of highly explosive fulminate of mercury painted on the inside of one end and covered with a drop of varnish. When struck and crushed by the hammer, the cap exploded, igniting a charge of powder and thus discharging the weapon. By 1846 most newer guns, both muskets and pistols, were percussion weapons, which were considerably less likely to mis-fire as a result of damp powder, faulty flints, or wayward sparks. But many of the emigrants, including Franklin Graves, held to the old ways. Along with their percussion guns, they carried flintlocks that dated back to the American Revolution or earlier, guns their fathers and grandfathers had handed down to them and with which they had hunted game ranging from squirrels to bears all their lives.
By the time Sarah and Jay had fully stocked the wagon that Jay drove for Franklin, it likely weighed as much as three thousand pounds. It was a heavy load, and they knew that it would take a toll on their oxen, but with the things they carried, they believed they were well prepared for what they expected would be at most five or six months on the trail. By the time the first frosts settled on the Sacramento Valley—if such a thing as frost even existed in California—they would be building a new home among golden hills.
There was one other commodity that the emigrants passing through St. Joe that spring tried to stock up on. Advice. Even the best of the guidebooks, they knew, could not substitute for the firsthand and timely knowledge of those who had recently been to the West and returned. The trappers and traders who roamed the streets of St. Joe had detailed knowledge of what lay ahead—the best routes, the best places to ford a river, which of the natives to befriend and which to be wary of, when to expect what kind of weather, how earlier parties had fared—and so the emigrants listened eagerly to what they had to say.
One bit of news that was just working its way back across th
e plains that May concerned a large party of emigrants who had left St. Joe the previous spring, bound for Oregon.
They had left St. Joe provisioned much as Sarah and her family now were. All had gone well until, in modern-day Idaho, they began to hear rumors that the Walla Walla Indians, through whose territory the road to Oregon’s Willamette Valley lay, were hostile to whites and that they should be prepared for a fight ahead. On August 24 a trapper and guide named Stephen Meek overtook them. Having just escorted a train of emigrants from St. Louis to Fort Hall, and traveling now with his recent bride, Elizabeth, Meek was anxious to find new employment. He had traveled through Oregon a number of times before, including an 1843 expedition on which he had briefly served as a guide for none other than Lansford Hastings. On hearing the emigrants’ concerns about the Walla Wallas, he proposed to guide them on a shortcut that would steer them safely to the south of any Indian trouble. He assured them that the shortcut would follow old trappers’ trails that he knew well and that it would save them perhaps 150 miles off the old road to boot, delivering them to a settlement at The Dalles on the Columbia River. From there they could travel by water down to the mouth of the Willamette River. And he’d do it, he said, for five dollars per wagon.
Meek, while not well known himself, was the brother of a renowned trapper, Joseph Meek. There seemed no particular reason to doubt his knowledge of the country. So over the course of the next few days, August 25–27, the party split up. Most continued on the old road, but nearly two hundred wagons, four thousand head of livestock, and nearly a thousand emigrants—turned off the main Oregon Trail and followed Meek up the Malheur River into the Blue Mountains. The river had been given its name by French trappers after Indians stole some of their beaver pelts, malheur meaning literally “the bad hour,” but more generally “misfortune.” The Meek Party was about to find that the trappers had named the river aptly.
At first the route seemed tolerable, but within a few days things began to go bad. The country was dry and dusty, and grass for the livestock began to grow sparse. By August 30 one of the emigrants, Samuel Parker—whose wife and child would die as a result of what was about to happen—was already growing disgusted. In his journal he wrote, “Rock all day—pore grass—more swaring then you ever heard.” When they got to higher terrain, up on the bluffs above the river, they found less dust, but the ground was littered with particularly hard, sharp, angular rocks that lacerated the feet of their oxen and horses. Within a few days, the livestock were marking the trail with blood dried to black slicks on the hot rocks. Soon some of the oxen began to give out. Each day a few more lay down in the road and died. By the seventh day, nearly everyone was complaining about Meek and his cutoff. The terrain grew even rougher, the rocks larger. Wagons began to break down, necessitating long delays to make repairs. By now the party was strung out so far along the trail that Meek was a day or more ahead of some of them. He began leaving notes telling them where they were and where to go next, but the notes soon became confused and contradictory, and it slowly dawned on all of them that Meek was entirely lost. On the tenth day out, one of the party, John Herren, wrote, “We cannot get along fast, and we are rather doubtful that our pilot is lost…. Some talk of stoning, and others say hang him.”
Then things got even worse. They emerged from the Blue Mountains, crossed over the Stinking Water Mountains, and came out into the bleak high-desert country of central Oregon. Water began to become an issue, and the midday heat was now searing. On the fourteenth day, they made it to a large, shallow lake, Lake Malheur, only to find that its water was alkaline, foul-smelling, and undrinkable. They wandered on across the sterile desert for days, often traveling both day and night now, having to settle for whatever water was offered up by the occasional meager and muddy spring. Even when they found sufficient water for all the people, there often wasn’t enough for the livestock. Food began to run out in many of the wagons, and the emigrants were reduced to eating what they called “poor beef,” the emaciated and sometimes rancid flesh of their dead oxen.
Living conditions deteriorated rapidly, sanitation suffered, and soon a ravaging fever began to spread through the camps. A woman named Sarah Chambers had succumbed to it just a few days out. Now children began to die, then increasing numbers of adults. Soon the evening burial rituals varied only in the number of corpses interred, sometimes just one or two, other times as many as six. Each time, though, on the following morning another family faced the brutal necessity of turning their backs and walking away, leaving the body of a loved one behind in a lonely grave in a desolate landscape to which they knew they would never return. It was an experience that was all too common on the overland trail that summer and in the summers to come. For some the pain and sorrow were eased by the deep Christian faith that many of the emigrants held. But not all of them were religious by any means, and even those who were often found themselves haunted years later by the memory of those forlorn graves scratched out of gravelly soil under a pine tree and then immediately abandoned forever.
Some of the survivors of the Meek Party later referred to the malady that afflicted them as “camp fever,” which suggests that the culprit was an epidemic form of typhus caused by a species of Rickettsia bacteria. Transmitted primarily by lice and fleas, epidemic typhus is typically found where large numbers of people are living in unsanitary conditions, as in ships and military and refugee camps. In the absence of treatment with antibiotics, the mortality rate for epidemic typhus runs as high as 60 percent. Death is generally preceded by headaches, high fevers, rashes, severe muscle pain, sensitivity to light, and sometimes delirium.*
By now virtually all of the emigrants had given up on Meek, who for the most part was still riding a day or so ahead of the main party with his wife and a small group of friends, perhaps as much to avoid a lynching as to find a way out of the nightmare he had led the others into. On occasions when he had to be in camp, his few remaining friends concealed him in their wagons.
At dawn on September 17, the twenty-fourth day out, they finally struck a reliable source of water at the south fork of the Crooked River, a tributary of the Deschutes, which they knew would lead them toward the Columbia. But they were far from out of danger. Large numbers of them were now too weak to walk or even to ride on horseback, so they had to be loaded into wagons pulled by fewer and fewer oxen. And they were still many miles south of The Dalles and the Columbia River.
Traveling out ahead of the rest of the party, Meek and his wife finally staggered into a Methodist mission at The Dalles on September 29 and informed the startled settlers there that hundreds of people were in dire distress in the interior. He purchased supplies for a relief expedition but declined to make the return trip to deliver them himself, presumably fearing for his life at the hands of the emigrants. Fortunately, someone else stepped forward.
Moses Harris, one of a very few African-American guides and mountain men, was also one of the best. Called “Black Harris” or sometimes the “Black Squire” by his fellow mountaineers, he had traveled throughout the West since 1823, when he first crossed the Mississippi, probably as a freed slave. In 1844, Harris had guided a train of five hundred souls along the Oregon Trail all the way to Fort Vancouver. He had helped build Fort Laramie. He was thought by his peers to be unsurpassed in winter travel and survival skills. And now he was the only one at The Dalles who was both capable of, and willing to attempt, a rescue of Meek’s lost party.
Harris and a small group of rescuers, many of them Indians from the mission, rushed south with provisions and, just as important, with equipment for helping the emigrants surmount one last challenge. To reach The Dalles, they had to cross the Deschutes River deep in its canyon, where it ran swift and cold and deadly between sheer basalt cliffs.
But Moses Harris had anticipated that and brought block and tackle, pulleys, ropes, and axes with him. He and the emigrants, with considerable help from local Indians, who were familiar with the ways of the Deschutes and who fished from elabo
rate scaffolding that they suspended over the river, set about building a suspension bridge for those who could still walk. Then they began caulking the beds of wagons, loading the sickest of the emigrants into them, and towing them across the water. It took two weeks to get everyone across.
Even after the last of them arrived at The Dalles, the emigrants who had taken the shortcut continued to die. A few were so hungry that they bolted down half-cooked food and became ill. Some were simply too weakened from the ordeal to have any chance of recovering. In the end more than fifty of them died.
As they finished the last of their preparations in St. Joe in late May, Sarah and Jay and Sarah’s family learned that another party of Oregon-bound emigrants, the last of the season, was assembling on the far side of the Missouri just a bit to the north of town. Though he and his family were bent on California, not Oregon, Franklin Graves knew that it would be best to have company crossing the plains, so when they were fully provisioned, they drove four or five miles north of St. Joe to a crossing called Parrott’s Landing and loaded their wagons onto one of the big, flat-bottomed scows that served as ferries.
When the boat pulled away from the Missouri shore, they left the United States behind them. Everything west of here was foreign and alien. There were no inns, no stores, no farms, no reliable means of re-supply except for a couple of frontier forts hundreds of miles down the trail. But their three wagons were amply stocked, a small herd of beef cattle swam alongside the ferry, and fistfuls of silver coins were squirreled away under the cleats in their family wagon. Nobody, it must have seemed to them, could be better prepared for the journey ahead.
However, they had neglected one critical piece of advice. Of all the many tips, encouragements, admonitions, and suggestions that Lansford Hastings dispensed in The Emigrants’ Guide to California and Oregon, the best of them had to do with timing one’s departure. On this he was both honest and correct when he said that the emigrants must “enter on their journey on, or before, the first day of May; after which time they must never start, if it can possibly be avoided.” On the consequences of not doing so, he was even more pointed: “Unless you pass over the mountains early in the fall, you are very liable to be detained by impassable mountains of snow until the next spring, or perhaps forever.”