On May 29, James Reed’s seventy-year-old mother-in-law, Sarah Keyes, died, necessitating a funeral and a delay in working on the ferry. Keyes’s granddaughter Virginia, who had turned thirteen the day before, wrote her cousin back home about the funeral.
We buried her verry decent. We made a nete coffin and buried her under a tree we had a head stone and had her name cut on it and the date and yere verry nice, and at the head of the grave was a tree we cut some letters on it the young men soded it all ofer and put Flores on it We miss her very much every time we come into the Wagon we look at the bed for her.
On May 30 they completed work on the ferry. On the thirty-first, after working from dawn until 10:00 P.M., struggling with the heavy ferry in the swift current and a drenching rain, they finally got the last of the wagons across. But the work was brutal, wet, and cold, and that night a fight broke out in their camp. Tensions had arisen between some of the California-bound emigrants and those bound for Oregon. Knives were pulled out but then put away. Nerves were beginning to fray, and they were not yet out of modern-day Kansas.
By June 7 the weather across the central prairies had finally begun to warm up and dry out, the thunderstorms growing less frequent and the turgid rivers finally falling. Still well to the east of the Russell Party, Sarah and her family—along with the Tuckers, the Ritchies, the Starks, and the other emigrants out of St. Joe—were making steady if slow progress, traveling at the speed of plodding oxen, working their way across Kansas just south of the present Nebraska line. Then, turning northwest, they descended into the Platte River Valley and intercepted the Great Platte River Road, the 1840s version of an interstate freeway, near Fort Kearny in Nebraska.
The daily routine had become monotonous, and the novelty of camping out had worn thin, but, for the most part, Sarah and her siblings were still in high spirits. By day they rode or walked through waist-deep, verdant grass. Meadowlarks, clinging to the tall blue stems of grass or to shrubs, chortled and sang, bobbling on their perches in the ceaseless wind. Grasshoppers rattled away from under their feet, flashing flame red or canary yellow underwings. Orange and white and yellow butterflies drifted above the grass. Metallic green and blue dragonflies darted and dodged over the white canopies of the wagons.
On warm evenings, after the livestock were all taken care of and the aftermath of dinner had been cleared up and the guards had been posted, the young people gravitated toward one another, congregating near one campfire or another. Sometimes they just sat in the dark and listened to the night sounds—crickets singing out in the grass, frogs shrilling along a creek, prairie wolves howling and coyotes yapping off in the distance. Usually, though, they talked about the day’s events, about the novelty of the scenery or the wild animals they had seen that day, or about what California was going to be like when they finally got there. They were, by and large, still getting to know one another, and all of them were conscious of a fundamental fact that was at once both sobering and thrilling for those among them who were not yet married: They had entered into a very small world, a world where a substantial portion of the young men and women that they would encounter in the future, even after they reached Oregon or California, were sitting here at the campfire with them. Many of them were likely to marry one another, either by choice or by necessity, and they knew it.
So they would chat nervously, watching out of the corners of their eyes to see who was sitting close to whom that night. Then Jay Fosdick, or another of the young men, would get out his fiddle, and somebody else would get out a guitar or a banjo. They would begin to reel off some tunes—“The Arkansas Traveler,” “Money Musk,” and the popular “Virginia Reel.” The Graveses’ teamster, John Snyder, big and handsome, would drop the rear gate on one of the wagons, climb up onto it, and dance a wild jig while the girls laughed at his antics and the boys clapped time. Two by two, boys and girls would get up and pull off their boots and begin to dance, circling and wheeling around the fire, their bare feet kicking up dust, their warm hands holding other warm hands, or lying lightly on broad shoulders, or pressing against the delicate hollow at the small of a slender back.
Tune after tune would fly off the fiddles—fast, hot tunes that swirled through the night air and made you want to get up and stomp your feet. Older folks clutching tin mugs full of coffee would drift toward the fire to watch and then set down the coffee and join in, flinging out their arms and legs like drunken chickens as the screeching of the fiddle and the twang of the banjo stole into their souls and rattled their bones. Somebody would start singing, and a chorus would join in, all of them sharing in songs that had come down to them from their grandparents in Scotland or Ireland or the hills of Virginia or New England—boisterous sea chanteys, sweet love songs, uplifting spirituals, funny songs about foolish lovers or clueless dandies, and many, many sad songs about the folks left back home.
When they had worn themselves out with singing and dancing, the older people would drift away toward their tents or wagons. But the young would linger, sitting around the fire again, staring into it, enjoying the feel of its heat on their faces as the prairie night began to grow chilly, throwing a few more sticks onto it, listening to them pop and hiss. They would talk again, more quietly now that people were trying to sleep nearby, the boys joking and boasting, the girls giggling at them or ignoring them, depending on the signals they wanted to send. Hearts began to grow fond. Some later said that Mary Ann Graves and John Snyder had begun to take particular notice of each other.
Romance was blooming on the road out ahead of them as well. In light of the tension between the Oregon-bound emigrants and the California-bound, the Russell Party had split into two groups on June 2, the Oregonians traveling a few miles out ahead of the Californians under their own captain, Rice Dunbar. On June 12 a member of the California contingent, thirty-five-year-old Charles T. Stanton, a bachelor from Chicago, wrote about the effect of the split on the younger people in a letter to his brother.
In their party there were many young ladies—in ours mostly young men. Friendships and attachments had been formed which were hard to break; for ever since, our company is nearly deserted by the young men riding out, riding on horseback, pretending to hunt, but instead of pursuing the bounding deer or fleet antelope, they are generally found among the fair Oregon girls! Thus they go, every day, making love by the road-side, in the midst of the wildest and most beautiful scenery….
And indeed, within the next few weeks, three of the Oregon girls were married and two more engaged.
In the same letter, Stanton—who though he stood only five feet five would in the fullness of time turn out to be among the biggest of the big men of the 1846 emigration—also wrote about something more ominous that had befallen the Oregon contingent a few days earlier.
This little party, one day before they reached the Platte were surprised by a band of 20 or 30 Pawnees, drawn up in battle array, coming down full sweep to attack them; but they were no sooner seen than the men formed in order of battle to meet them. The cunning Pawnees, seeing this little band drawn out, and fearing the deadly rifle, immediately turned their war party into a visit—shaking hands, hugging men, and attempting to embrace the women.
The Pawnees had a bad reputation among many of the emigrants of 1846. Rumors about them abounded on the trail, and J. M. Shively, author of one of the most popular of the trail guides, had singled them out as a particular threat.
Not everyone in the loose assemblage of wagon trains spread out between the Big Blue and the forks of the Platte River in the middle of June was worried about the Pawnees, though. On June 16, Tamzene Donner wrote to a friend back in Springfield that aside from all the cooking she had to do, she was thoroughly enjoying herself—reading the collection of books she had brought along, taking in the novel scenery, and particularly botanizing. The prairie was in full bloom now, and she was enthusiastically sketching and preserving dozens of species of wildflowers—lupine, “ear drop,” larkspur, poppy mallow, wild hollyhock, and ma
ny others she could not name. As for the Indians, she reported that some local chiefs had taken breakfast with the Donners at their tent that morning and that “we have no fear of Indians. Our cattle graze quietly around our encampment unmolested. Two or three men will go hunting twenty miles from camp; and last night two of our men lay out in the wilderness rather than ride their horses after a hard chase.” Then she summed up her state of mind in words that would eventually grow monumentally ironic and chilling: “Indeed if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”
Part Two
THE BARREN EARTH
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover for our bones.
—William Shakespeare,
King Richard II
4
DUST
As Sarah and her family made their way up the Platte River in June, James K. Polk’s plan for California was unfolding nicely out west.
Aside from John Sutter, about whom Vallejo fretted a good deal, Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was the undisputed ruler of the Mexican province of Alta California in 1846. The official military governor of the province and owner of more than 175,000 acres of the finest agricultural land in the world, he was estimated to have an income of ninety-six thousand dollars a year, an enormous figure in the mid-nineteenth century. His empire was centered in a fortified compound and a two-story adobe house he called Casa Grande in the sleepy town of Sonoma north of San Francisco Bay. There he maintained a handful of Mexican troops, equipped with nine brass cannons, 250 muskets, and a hundred pounds of gunpowder, everything that the Mexican government considered necessary for the defense of the province.
Born in 1807 in Monterey, California, Vallejo was thoroughly Mexican, but in recent years he had watched in frustration as a series of revolutions had racked Mexico and the resulting succession of governments had left California to drift aimlessly. Increasingly, Vallejo, like many Californians of his generation, had begun to wonder whether the province might be better served if it were entirely free from Mexican governmental control. He was on good terms with many of the American settlers who had arrived in his neighborhood in the previous few years, and the idea that California might become an independent American protectorate had begun to intrigue him.
So it was with some considerable astonishment, but also some sense of inevitability, and perhaps even some relief, that Vallejo awoke just after dawn on June 14 to the sound of men banging pistol butts on the main door of Casa Grande. Vallejo and his wife, Doña Francisca, peered out of an upstairs window. In the large, dusty courtyard below, a motley assemblage of men with rifles and pistols were shaking their fists and shouting curses and threats in English. Vallejo hurriedly pulled on his dress uniform and went downstairs. Doña Francisca urged him to flee out a back door, but Vallejo instead went to the front door and flung it open.
The men who stormed into the elegant great room of Casa Grande were dressed in ragged buckskins, torn blue breeches, coyote-skin hats, and greasy red bandannas. A few were bare-chested. Some wore muddy boots; others were barefoot. They smelled of horse sweat. Tomahawks and pistols dangled from their belts, notched to show how many men they had killed. Their apparent leader, one Ezekiel Merritt, wore a long beard stained dark brown with tobacco juice. They were freelance revolutionaries, loosely and unofficially associated with a U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont, who was now encamped just outside of Sutter’s Fort in the Sacramento Valley.
Vallejo addressed them formally: “To what happy circumstance shall I attribute the visit of so many exalted personages?” The exalted personages chewed for a moment on their tobacco and then told Vallejo, somewhat less formally, that they had come to arrest him, to secure the surrender of Sonoma, and to declare California an independent republic. Vallejo nodded and ordered someone to bring out his best wine and his best brandy. Then he invited the surprised revolutionaries to sit down for a drink.
Together they began to draft a document formalizing Vallejo’s surrender and California’s declaration of independence. By 8:30 A.M., the wine and brandy had mellowed everyone out considerably. The proceedings inside Casa Grande took on the atmosphere of a party. The revolutionaries were hungry, so Vallejo had a young steer butchered, and breakfast preparations were begun. By 11:00 A.M., the document was complete, and California was a republic—at least in the eyes of the revolutionaries. Vallejo went to his room and fetched a ceremonial sword and handed it over to the men in buckskin, but nobody could figure out what to do with it, so Vallejo returned it to his room. Finally Vallejo was ushered out of his house to be taken under guard to meet Frémont at Sutter’s Fort.
Out in the courtyard, William Todd, a nephew of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, sat down on the ground by the flagpole with several of his fellow revolutionaries, a piece of unbleached cotton, some scraps of red flannel, and some homemade ink made of linseed oil and ferric oxide. If this were to be a republic, they figured it ought to have a flag. They emblazoned the cotton with the words “California Republic.” Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power.
The American seizure of California would not in the long run turn out to be a laughing matter, though, nor a bloodless one. A few days after Vallejo’s capitulation at Sonoma, two young American men named Cowie and Fowler were apprehended by a small Mexican force near Bodega Bay. After being kept prisoner for a day or two, Cowie and Fowler were tied to a tree and stoned. When one of them suffered a broken jaw, a cord was tied to the jaw and it was yanked out of his face. Then, slowly and deliberately, their tormentors began to slice off bits and pieces of their flesh—fingers and toes and other appendages—and stuff them down the men’s throats. Finally the two men were disemboweled and left to die.
On June 17, the day after Tamzene Donner had taken breakfast with some local Pawnee chiefs and written her buoyantly optimistic letter home, Sarah and her party arrived at the same approximate spot on the south bank of the Platte River. That night a party of Pawnees stole up to the edge of their encampment and ran off a large portion of the emigrants’ 150 head of cattle.
The loss of so much livestock could prove catastrophic later in the trip, so in the morning small groups of men fanned out across the surrounding countryside to round up as many of the cattle as they could find. As two of them—an Iowan named Edward Trimble and a Ohioan named Harrison—were driving five head of the cattle back to camp, a dozen or more Pawnees rose out of the tall prairie grass, demanding the men’s horses. Trimble refused, and the Pawnees promptly loosed a volley of arrows and rifle shot at him. Trimble tumbled from his saddle, dead. The Pawnees took Harrison prisoner and were in the process of stripping him naked when another search team arrived on the scene and charged the Pawnees, chasing them off.
Trimble left a pregnant wife, Abarilla, and four small children. Faced with the prospect of continuing across the plains pregnant, with young children in tow and without a husband, she declared that she wanted to go home to Iowa. The only eastbound travelers in the area, however, were all male. A woman could not even contemplate giving birth without the assistance of other women, so she reluctantly continued westward.
Trimble’s death, and the plight of his widow, must have abruptly changed the prevailing mood of Sarah’s party, particularly that of the women. Every wife among them was suddenly brought face-to-face with a hard reality that they generally tried not to think about but constantly feared nevertheless. To be widowed out here on the plains or in the mountains ahead was—to a large extent—to be rendered instantly dependent on the goodwill of the men around you. As good and trustworthy as those men might be—and most of the
m were both—few of them had extra time or energy to drive your cattle, to hunt game for you, to repair your wagons, to chop your firewood, or to attend to the various other heavy chores that you might require having done. Most of the men either had families of their own who had to be a first priority or were hired hands, expected to tend to the needs of their employers. Bereaved widows were sometimes incorporated into other families to some extent, and the other women in the party almost always gave them extra help. In the end, though, the amount of energy and the number of resources that any family could muster were finite, and there was a practical limit to which either could be shared. Farther down the trail, everyone knew, a shortage of either could be a matter of life or death.
Many emigrant women who found themselves in this precarious situation adapted themselves to it heroically, doing all the “masculine” chores themselves. But it was a heavy, sometimes crushing, burden to add to the traditional duties they already performed.
It was all the worse for those women who were mothers as well as wives, as most of them were. The number of ways in which their children might come to harm along the trail was staggering, and women who had to drive a team or repair a wagon were unable to devote much time to watching out for them.
Children fell under wagon wheels and were crushed to death or crippled for life. They wandered off into the tall grass and were never seen again. Occasionally they were abducted by Native Americans. Much more frequently they drowned when swept away by rivers their families were trying to ford. Drowning incidents were so common, in fact, that some mothers wrote their children’s names in indelible ink on labels and sewed the labels into their children’s clothes. It didn’t prevent them from drowning, but it sometimes allowed a grieving mother to identify a body that had been in the water too long. Children were bitten by rattlesnakes, struck by lightning, trampled by unruly oxen or horses, pummeled by hailstones as large as turkey eggs, and shot by the nearly daily accidental discharges of the guns that their fathers carried. They died of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, malaria, infected cuts, food poisoning, mumps, and smallpox. Perhaps the only break that mothers on the Platte River Road had that summer was that it wasn’t yet 1849, when Asiatic cholera would kill thousands along this same stretch of trail, the graves in some places averaging one every two hundred feet.