On the day that Sarah, Jay, and the rest of the Graves clan stepped aboard the ferry at Parrott’s Landing, May Day was already more than three weeks in the past.
3
GRASS
When she disembarked from the ferry on the western side of the Missouri, Sarah found a movable village assembling itself in the woods. Perhaps 150 of her fellow emigrants were bustling around among tents and wagons, busily making their final preparations for the journey ahead. Men were shoeing horses and oxen, packing and repacking supplies, sharpening knives and axes, cleaning guns, gathering in small groups to study maps and consult guidebooks, talking politics, swearing, starting to get to know one another, sizing one another up. Women, too, were beginning to make acquaintances, edging up to one another and introducing themselves, gathering around smoky campfires to share folk remedies and recipes and gossip, trading small items and bits of advice. Some of them, like many of the men, smoked tobacco in long-stemmed white clay pipes as they talked.
Older children helped their parents with their various chores; younger children played in wagons or down along the river, skipping stones, exploring, looking for treasure, watching out for Indians—dangerous ones now that they had crossed the river. On the fringes of the camp, adolescent boys and girls eyed one another from afar and tended to livestock, talking to horses as they led them about, shouting at mules and oxen, snapping willow switches at their hindquarters to make them move. Here and there someone sat in the shade of a tree reading a Bible or a book of verse or writing a first excited and optimistic letter from Indian Territory to someone back home. A few plucked at banjos or sawed softly at fiddles, trying out tunes. From time to time, people stopped what they were doing for a moment to swat at the mosquitoes and horseflies that pestered them. Dogs ran to and fro, yapping and making acquaintances of their own, bounding down to the river and throwing themselves into the water for the sheer joy of it, then racing back ashore and shaking off the water, then bounding back into the river again. The smells of wood smoke, of frying bacon, of coffee, and of baking pies melded together and drifted among the wagons.
Franklin Graves led his family into this temporary village by the river and found a spot to park their wagons and pasture their cattle. Except for themselves, almost all of these families were bound for Oregon, or thought they were. That meant that at some point along the trail, at least by the time they reached Fort Hall, where the Oregon and California trails diverged, they would need to find new traveling companions. But that was months in the future, so for now they climbed down from their wagons and began to mingle, starting to forge their own friendships.
Among these friendships, those that would prove the most important, in unexpected ways far down the line, involved several families headed up by particularly large men—men who were outsize not only physically but, as it would turn out, also in the quality of their character and the quantity of their courage.
One of them was Colonel Matthew Dill Ritchie. Born in Pennsylvania in 1805, Ritchie, like Franklin Graves, had made a series of westward moves with his wife, Caroline, and an expanding brood of children. Like Franklin Graves, Ritchie had fought in the Black Hawk Indian War more than a decade earlier, and it was in that bloody event that he had acquired the title of colonel. Among Ritchie’s children were two teenagers with whom the older Graves children could interact and find much in common as they traveled across the plains—fourteen-year-old Harriet and nineteen-year-old William Dill. Another of Ritchie’s offspring, Mary Jane, was married to the largest of the large men in the camp—a twenty-eight-year-old giant named John Schull Stark. From an old Kentucky family, Stark was a distant relation of Daniel Boone. Powerfully built and weighing 220 pounds, he was said to have the strength of two men.
Yet another set of friendships that the Graves family began to develop in that first encampment by the Missouri revolved around Reason Penelope Tucker and his sons. Like Franklin Graves, M. D. Ritchie, and John Stark, Reason Tucker was a large-framed man. Gentle and soft-spoken, he wore his beard, as was popular at the time, in a fringe around his clean-shaven face. A Virginian born of Scottish parents, he had been married and widowed once already, and he now found himself a bachelor again as his second wife refused to follow him west. Traveling with him, though, were his three oldest boys—John Wesley, Stephen, and George Washington.
All three of these families—the Tuckers, the Ritchies, and the Starks—and most of the others that gathered by the Missouri that third week in May had much in common with the Graves family and with one another. Whether their ancestors first stepped ashore on the rich tidelands of Virginia or the stony shores of New England, they were almost all the children and grandchildren of men who had fought in the American Revolution. Many of them carried in their hands weapons that had been used in that conflict, and they carried deep in their hearts an absolute devotion to the idea that their liberty was the most valuable thing they owned. They commonly and solemnly referred to the fourth day of July as “the Glorious Fourth,” without the slightest hint of irony or embarrassment. They named their sons Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Lafayette, or Adams, lest those sons forget where they came from and how they had gained their unique and sacred freedoms. For the most part, they despised what they called “the trammels of civilization” and preferred to stay close to the frontier, even as it moved relentlessly westward. They believed deeply that they were destined to spread the light of liberty across the continent—to create, in fact, as Thomas Paine had put it, “the birthday of a new world” in the West. They tended to be forthright, plain-speaking, earnest, friendly, and trustworthy. They took a man at his word, unless they had good reason not to. And above all they were fiercely self-reliant, unflinchingly independent. In the trying weeks and savage months ahead, though, they would find that one man’s freedoms could become another man’s fetters.
They broke camp and moved out on May 23, climbing up out of the Missouri bottomlands, following the course of a stream called Clear Creek. When they reached the top of the bluff, they got their first full view of what lay to the west. The blue-green prairie grass was knee-high now, still pushing up through the taller, dry, dead grass of the previous year. Gently rolling hills extended to the horizon, and the swell of those hills, along with the grass billowing in the wind, created the overwhelming impression—shared by nearly all who saw it—that they were about to set forth on a great, windswept sea.
In the first fifty miles, they had to cross a series of muddy creeks, some of them running in gullies etched as deep as twenty feet into the surrounding prairie. At many of them, they had to fill the stream with brush and then pull the wagons across with ropes. At Mission Creek they came across the last sign of American civilization that they would see until they reached Fort Kearney in present-day Nebraska—a thirty-seven-room, three-story brick Presbyterian Indian mission just being constructed that spring to replace an older log structure. West of the mission, they moved out into flatter, wide-open country.
For the first time, they started to see what many of the men in the party, and many of the women as well, had been looking forward to since leaving home, an astonishing quantity of wild game—turkeys, prairie hens, wild geese, elk, deer, and occasionally pronghorns—or “antelope,” as they called them. They had not yet come to the buffalo herds, which everyone eagerly anticipated, but this was the beginning of an extended hunting excursion that many of them had dreamed of all through the preceding winter. There were no vegetarians among them. They were serious meat eaters all, and as they made camp each evening, they could now look forward to feasting on roast fowl, grilled steaks, rich stews, and pot roasts.*
On the fourth night out, Sarah’s seventeen-year-old brother, Billy, took his turn standing guard on the perimeter of the camp, along with several other young men. It was a dark night, with only a thin crescent moon hanging low in the western sky. At about nine, Billy noticed that a grass fire had erupted in an arid patch of prairie about a half a mile north of the camp. The
flames, pushed along by a dry west wind, streaked by well to the north of the camp and seemed to pose no threat to it or to the livestock. Within a few minutes, though, he was surprised to see a young man running toward him full tilt. Billy called out, “Who comes there?”
“Friend!”
Billy recognized the man as one of his fellow guards but decided he’d best follow protocol.
“Friend, advance and give the countersign!”
“Don’t talk so loud. Hain’t you seen them?” the young man croaked.
“Seen what?”
“Why, the Indians. They are setting the prairie on fire and are going to surround us and kill us and take our stock.”
“Where…?”
“Why, there, running along by the fire. There are hundreds of them.”
The young man pointed at the flames. Seriously scared now, trembling in fact, as he later admitted, Billy turned and looked at the fire again. He was ready to bolt for the camp, but then he looked one more time.
In silhouette against the flicker of the flames, he saw the form of hundreds of what the emigrants called “resin weeds” bobbing and wavering in the wind.* With the flames streaking past them, the tall weeds did appear to be human forms.
Billy laughed and pointed out the error, and the young man sheepishly extracted from him a promise not to tell the others about his mistake. But even as they chuckled about it, they heard a commotion in the camp. Dozens of men were rushing about, clutching guns, shouting, giving orders. Two other guards on the far side of the cattle had also seen the phantom Indians and rushed into camp to sound the alarm. For days thereafter much of each evening’s entertainment centered on tormenting those other two guards about their hasty retreat in the face of marauding resin weeds. Billy and his companion sat smugly by and watched.
Anxiety about Indian attacks pervaded all the emigrant parties that headed west that spring. To a large extent, the fear was exaggerated and misplaced. Most of the Plains Indians that Sarah and her family would encounter along the way were not predisposed to attack the emigrants. They had little reason to hazard their own lives in order to take those of the emigrants, though that would change in the years ahead with the wholesale destruction of the buffalo herds and the utter destitution that the tribes began to experience as a result. For now, while they were often intensely curious about the various exotic foods and gadgets the white strangers carried with them, and sometimes coveted them, the Indians generally tried to obtain them through barter rather than the use of force. Some of the young men among them, however, were quite willing to make off with the emigrants’ fat beef cattle and horses if given sufficient opportunity.
Most of the emigrants had developed very hard attitudes and deep prejudices well before they first encountered what they regarded as the “wild Indians” of the plains. For Sarah’s family, as for many of those traveling with them, those hard feelings went back to the bloody sequence of events that they had experienced firsthand shortly after arriving in Illinois—the Black Hawk War.
In April of 1832, about a thousand Fox, Sauk, and Kickapoo Indians—men, women, and children—had crossed the Mississippi and entered Illinois bent on returning to their ancestral lands, territory that they regarded as sacred but had lost in a disputed treaty in 1804. A sixty-five-year-old Sauk warrior named Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, led them. Black Hawk had hoped to avoid conflict, but his entry into Illinois set off widespread panic among the white settlers. Within days a makeshift assemblage of U.S. Army troops, Illinois volunteer militiamen, and Sioux and Menominee mercenaries was pursuing him. The militia, called out by the governor of Illinois, consisted of virtually all the healthy adult white males in Illinois. Throughout April and May of that year, small, detached bands of Native Americans, some of them only loosely allied with Black Hawk, fought a series of battles and skirmishes against the whites and their Native American allies.
On the afternoon of May 20, things got truly ugly. A group of seventy to eighty Pottawatomie warriors, apparently not attached to Black Hawk at all, attacked a white settlement of three families at a place called Indian Creek. The whites were quickly overwhelmed, and the results were horrific. A Native American witness later recounted what transpired.
The women squeaked like geese when they were run through the body with spears or felt the sharp tomahawk entering their heads. All of the victims were carefully scalped; their bodies were mutilated and many of the children were chopped to pieces with axes; and the women tied up by the heels to the walls of the house; their clothes falling over their heads,…their naked persons exposed to the public gaze.
Fifteen settlers were killed. Fifteen-year-old Rachel Hall and her seventeen-year-old sister, Sylvia, crawled into a bed and tried to conceal themselves but were discovered and taken away as prisoners. That night they watched in horror as their mother’s scalp, among others, was scraped and stretched on a willow hoop to cure.
That same day, in Lacon, Franklin Graves answered the governor’s call and joined the militia. His neighbor John Strawn had the previous year been named a Colonel of Militia. Now Strawn, attired in a full regimental dress uniform replete with gold epaulets and a plumed helmet, stood on an open piece of ground, formed Franklin Graves and the other men of the neighborhood into a line, and addressed them with a flourish. “Ye sons of thunder! Our country is in danger, and the call is ‘To arms.’ Those willing to enroll yourselves among her defenders will step three paces forward.” Franklin Graves stepped forward and enrolled as a noncommissioned officer, the outfit’s drum major. For the next month, he and the other members of the newly constituted Fortieth Regiment of Mounted Volunteers drilled and marched up and down the Illinois River searching for hostile Indians but finding none.
As the men marched and searched, the women back home grew increasingly nervous. The first night after the men’s departure, a group of women in nearby Richland Township came together at Nancy Dever’s house to discuss how best to defend themselves if attacked. The women were not at all happy that when the men had strutted off to war, they had taken with them nearly every household gun in the township. The women decided that if they were to make it appear as if the Dever house had already been attacked and ransacked, any marauding Indians might pass it by. So they scattered an assortment of furniture and linens and other household goods haphazardly about in the yard. Then they took some food and bedding up into the cabin’s loft and lay low.
Later that evening, at dusk, more neighborhood ladies arrived at the cabin. Seeing the shambles in the yard, they concluded that the Devers had been massacred and let out ear-piercing screams of lamentation. The women in the loft, hearing the screams, took them for Indian war cries and, believing they were about to be relieved of their scalps, unloosed a salvo of answering screams. Eventually one of the women in the cabin peered outside and realized the true situation. The ladies spent the rest of the evening sheepishly hauling the Devers’ household effects back into the cabin.
Eleven days after the abduction of the Hall sisters, following some negotiations conducted via Winnebago Indian intermediaries, the girls were ransomed for a bit of money, ten horses, and some corn. Over the next several months, nearly one-third of the U.S. Army and nine thousand Illinois militiamen pursued Black Hawk and an ever-diminishing band of his supporters northward into Wisconsin. After a series of one-sided battles, Black Hawk tried to surrender on August 1, wading into the Mississippi and shouting his intentions to the Warrior, a steamboat that had been chartered by the army. No one on board could understand him, though, so they opened fire, killing two dozen of Black Hawk’s men but missing him.
The next day the troops surrounded Black Hawk and the last four hundred of his people, and what is somewhat euphemistically called the Battle of Bad Axe began on the eastern side of the Mississippi. As Black Hawk’s men fought to hold off the troops, the women tried to swim across the river, many of them with their children clinging to their backs. The men on the Warrior shot them one by one. Whe
n there was no one left to shoot in the water, the Warrior unleashed its cannons on the people clustered along the shore. Then the troops closed in. They shot nearly everyone still alive. They shot old men, women trying to surrender, children trying to flee. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of bodies scattered along the banks of the Mississippi. The troops scalped most of them. Then they cut long strips of skin from the backs of some, in order to make razor strops.
Black Hawk himself escaped, but he surrendered at Prairie du Chien on August 27. He was imprisoned for a time, but in 1833 he was returned to what remained of his people, settled now in Iowa, and he died there in 1838. However, no one who had experienced the violent events of 1832 on the Illinois frontier forgot about them, on either side.
Sarah and her family pressed on westward under mostly gray skies, following a snakelike road that wound its way along the crests of the low hills separating the drainages of the Missouri River and the Kansas River. The country was increasingly open now. Thunderstorms began to pop up, drenching the prairie, swelling the rivers, and hastening the growth of the tall, rippling, blue-green grass.
A hundred miles to the west, and slightly to the south of them, the Donners, the Reeds, and the rest of the Russell Party were stalled at a pretty spot that one of their number, Edwin Bryant, had just named “Alcove Springs” on the eastern shore of the Big Blue River. The thunderstorms had raised the river far too high to ford. For days the travelers had sat in the rain, doing laundry, watching flotsam race by at fifteen miles an hour, and waiting for the river to fall. Finally they had begun to construct a ponderous and awkward log ferry.