Somehow the conversation got around to Hastings and his cutoff and Clyman, a man of few words, spoke to the subject, his voice rising against the inebriated whooping and yipping of the Sioux who were enjoying their own bonfire across the way. Clyman wasn’t exactly sure what Hastings was up to, but it appeared he was determined to organize a large party of settlers that would give him hegemony when they reached California. That wasn’t a word Clyman would have used, or even known, but he got the thought across. Hastings wanted to be some kind of empire builder, dreaming of the conquest of California, with himself as headman, like Sam Houston had been in Texas, and get rich off it—again, Clyman had his own way of saying it but the others got the drift.
Lansford Hastings, Clyman told them, had somehow decided that California was in play, that time was short, and he had a faster trail to get there, but don’t believe him, Clyman said. De Voto has called the route Hastings was pitching “the ghastliest country in the United States,” and Clyman felt duty bound to warn them. “Take the regular wagon track [via Fort Hall] and never leave it,” he cautioned. “It is barely possible to get through [before the snows] and it may be impossible if you don’t.”
James Reed remained unconvinced, for he had read Hastings’s book. Books spoke truth back then, and it is hard to change the mind of a man who has just read truth from a book. “There is a nigher route,” Reed said to Clyman, “and there is no use to take so much of a roundabout course,” referring to the Fort Hall trail.
Clyman tried to dissuade them—Reed and the Donners—but he might as well have talked to the fire. He had known Jim Reed and his stubbornness from the Black Hawk War when they’d served in the same infantry company.‡ “I told him about the great desert and the roughness of the Sierras, and that a straight route might turn out to be impracticable,” Clyman said.
Professor De Voto extrapolates, probably correctly, that Clyman continued in this way: “Told them about the glare of the salt plain under the sun and without water. Told them about the Diggers lurking outside the camps to kill the stock. Told about the chaos of the Wasatch canyons … which [he] and Hastings had just barely got through.”
Clyman might have saved his breath. Among those who did not believe him was journalist Edwin Bryant, who that very day had decided to trade his wagons and oxen for a string of pack mules and get on toward California while the getting was good—meaning before the snow began to fall. Bryant and Owl Russell, who had turned the wagon train over to the former governor Lilburn Boggs, were going it with a half dozen others, with just their pack animals, hoping to make thirty or forty miles a day instead of the wagons’ usual fifteen or twenty. They were riding ahead of the main train, but they were going to California come hell or high water. After listening to Clyman, Bryant lamented that many of the emigrants were ill-disposed to believe him. But Bryant said, “It was easy to perceive that [Clyman] had a motive for his conduct more powerful than his regard to truth.” James Reed and the Donners agreed with Bryant. Clyman was a crank. The fire had died out, just the embers left. Even the Sioux had gone to sleep. Next morning they decided to make for the Hastings Cutoff.
There was one more chance.
Two weeks later, Bryant and his party on pack mules greeted a strange sight on the trail, a lone man riding a horse and leading a mule. He had come by himself all the way from Oregon—almost unheard-of—traveling by night and sleeping by day in brush and canebrakes to avoid Indians. His name was Wales B. Bonney and he carried an open letter from Lansford Hastings, who was at Fort Bridger with a large wagon train. “Come on quick!”, the letter advised. It said there may be “trouble” with the Mexicans and it is best to arrive in a large group. It touted the Hastings Cutoff “that will save 350–400 miles,” according to James Reed, later. The letter promised that Hastings would wait at Fort Bridger for the emigrant wagons and lead them through the wilderness Moses-like. But come on quick.
A week later Bryant and his party arrived at Fort Bridger, well ahead of the main wagon train. After talking with the fabled mountain man and his partner, a man named Louis Vásquez, Bryant decided to go the Hastings way. Bridger drew a glowing picture of the shortcut: plenty of grass for the stock to feed on and abundant water, except for one stretch of desert near the Great Salt Lake.
From what he’d learned, however, Bryant was apprehensive about the shortcut, especially for wagons and families. “We determined this morning to take the new route, with the South end of the Great Salt Lake.” But he added, “I wrote several letters to my friends advising them not to take this route, but to keep to the old trail via Fort Hall. Our situation was different from theirs.” And later in his journal he says, “We could afford to hazard experiments, and make explorations. They could not.”
James Reed was one of the intended recipients, since Bryant knew he had contemplated using the Hastings Cutoff. Bryant gave the letters to Jim Bridger’s partner, Vásquez, whom he supposed was an honorable man and who had promised to deliver them when the parties arrived at the fort. Vásquez put them in his pocket.
He knew, and Bridger knew, that the commerce of the fort depended in large part on the emigrant trains passing through. If the pilgrims began taking the Fort Hall route, Fort Bridger would wither and die. On July 26, the Reed-Donner company arrived at the fort to find that Hastings and the large train had gone already, anxious to beat the autumn snows in the Sierra passes. But, Reed wrote later, “Mr. Bridger informs me that the route we design to take [the cutoff] is a fine level road, with plenty of water and grass, with the exception before stated [the Great Salt Lake Desert]. It is estimated that 700 miles will take us to Capt. Sutter’s fort, which we hope to make in seven weeks from today.”
Edwin Bryant’s warning, his letters to Reed and the others, stayed in Vásquez’s pocket all the while the Reed-Donner train remained at Fort Bridger—a death warrant. It remains among the singular acts of treachery in U.S. history.
On July 31 the party shoved off into the unknown wilds in the customary haze of blue profanity from the teamsters. Seventy-four souls, their ages ranging from infants to sixty-two-year-old George Donner. It was the height of summer and the weather was fine but mornings were frosty at that altitude. Tamsen Donner, George’s forty-three-year-old wife, didn’t like it. She thought Hastings was a user and a fake and wanted to go with the others on the old tried trail. Taking off like this in the wilderness, alone, scared her.
In Santa Fe, after the American conquest, things had gone swimmingly for General Kearny, or so everyone believed. For many of the New Mexicans, Kearny was the knight in shining armor who had slain the dragon by sending fat old General Armijo and his clique tumbling down the Santa Fe Trail toward Chihuahua. In the days that followed, as promised, Kearny had sent out parties of U.S. soldiers to punish marauding Indians, something Armijo had singularly failed to do. On a promontory above the city Captain Emory and a Lieutenant J. F. Gilmer of the engineers had begun work on a fort with artillery positions that would command approaches to the entire town in case the Mexicans decided to send up an army to contest the conquest. This included nine pieces of artillery abandoned by Armijo when he fled the scene, one of them marked “Barcelona, 1778.” When completed, it would be named Fort Marcy, in honor of the U.S. secretary of war.
Santa Fe took some getting used to for the Americans, who in general looked down on the Mexican way of life, and didn’t think much of the Indians either. Emory, for example, informed his diary that “The fruits of this place, musk melon, apple, plum, are very indifferent, and would scarcely be eaten in the States.” Visiting a pueblo inhabited by Indians of the same name, Emory observed, “The women of the village all dressed alike, and ranged in treble files; they looked fat and stupid.”
He was more approving later, at a luncheon given by the padre of the pueblo, at which were served “grapes, melons and wine, with pure white napkins. We relished the wine, whatever its quality, [and] the sponge cake was irreproachable, and would have done honor to our best northern h
ousekeepers.” The women, too, at this divertismo, were a cut above the stupid fat ones Emory had encountered in the village. “The women seemed to me to drop their usual subdued look and timid wave of the eyelash for good hearty twinkles and signs of unaffected and cordial welcome. As neither party could speak the language of the other, this little exchange of artillery of the eyes was amusing enough,” he wrote.
Captain Cooke, too, soon warmed to the women of Santa Fe, although he was likely alluding to what was routinely referred to as “the higher classes,” as distinguished from the peons, who languished more or less like the untouchables of Calcutta.
After so many hard days on the trail, just-turned-nineteen-year-old Susan Magoffin was relieved to find herself “at home” in Santa Fe, in husband Samuel’s Santa Fe house, a dirt-floored four-room adobe across from the cathedral. General Kearny was in and out on various business, as were a number of the younger officers, anxious to call on the pretty young newlywed bride, who appeared to remind them of their girlfriends or wives back home. Among these were Colonel Samuel C. Owens, battalion commander in Doniphan’s regiment; Captains Abraham R. Johnston, Kearny’s aide-de-camp; Henry S. Turner, Kearny’s assistant adjutant; and Benjamin D. Moore; and Lieutenants Thomas C. Hammond, an aide to Kearny, and William H. Warner, assistant topographical engineer under Emory. With the exception of Moore, who was Hammond’s brother-in-law, they were West Pointers all. Susan was delighted by the company and attention, except with the behavior of Lieutenant Hammond, who once became drunk and disorderly in her presence and had to be taken away. Little did she suspect at the time how few of those young officers would survive the expedition.
Two weeks after Kearny’s army arrived in Santa Fe, the general gave a ball for the officers and “the citizens, generally [meaning the higher classes], at the government house; it was a political, or conciliatory affair, and we put the best face on it,” Cooke said. “The women,” he noted, “are comely—remarkable for [their] smallness of hands and feet; as usual in such states of society, they seem superior to the man; but,” he added, gratuitously, “nowhere is chastity less valued, or expected.”
The New Mexicans, Cooke said, quickly turned the ball into a fandango, their preferred type of party.
“There was an attempt at cotillions,” continued the aristocratic Virginian, “but the natives are very Germans for waltzing; their favorite, called appropriately the cuna (cradle) is peculiar; it is a waltz, but the couple stand face to face; the gentleman encircles his partner’s waist with both arms; the lady’s similarly disposed, complete the cradle, which is not bottomless, for both parties lean well back as they swing around,” said Captain Cooke.
Susan Magoffin remarked that the women “all danced and smoked cigarittos”; and the cuna, she said, “resembled the old Virginia negro shuffle.” Private Isaac George of the Missouri Volunteers had this to say: “A kind of swinging, gallopade waltz was their favorite dance. If you were to read Lord Byron’s graphic description of the Dutch waltz, and then use your imagination, a faint conception of the Mexican fandango may be formed. Such familiarity of position was repugnant to those accustomed to good society, but among the people of New Mexico nothing was considered a greater accomplishment than to pass gracefully through all the mazes of the waltz. The fandango had one republican feature in the fact that all classes rich or poor, met and intermingled on a common level.”§
The next day was a Sunday, and Kearny had instructed his officers to attend church so as to dispel the persistent rumors (started by a few priests and associates of Armijo) that Catholicism would be abolished or subjugated under U.S. rule.
By most accounts the Americans were unimpressed by the sanctum and services, Captain Emory in particular: “The interior of the church was decorated with some fifty crosses, a great number of the most miserable paintings and wax figures, and looking glasses trimmed with pieces of tinsel.” Captain Cooke concurred: “With the usual wax images, it is adorned with numerous paintings—one or two of some merit.”‖
As for the Mass itself, Emory was perplexed that “not a word was uttered from the pulpit from the priest, who kept his back to the congregation the whole time, repeating prayers and incantations [while] the band, the identical one used at the fandango, and strumming the same tunes, played without intermission.”
Meanwhile, the air was still dark with rumors that Armijo had assembled a 6,000-man army to retake Santa Fe, but Kearny nevertheless was plotting his westward march, a thousand miles through broken, uncharted, hostile territory, to reach southern California as quickly as possible. He had occupied Santa Fe for more than a month and it was time to move on; accordingly, he made a number of decisions that would have significant bearing on future events in the Mexican conflict.
First, Kearny determined that as a practical matter he could take only a limited number of troops across this vast and uncharted expanse of land, with no way of knowing how to provision them. As an old hand in western exploration, the general knew that the larger the party, the more difficult the supply problem, and in this case, after a short while on the trail during which they would use up what they could carry, they would have to live off the land.
Marching with the entire Army of the West was therefore out of the question; what was called for, Kearny decided, was a large battalion-sized “party of exploration,” similar to Frémont’s group, but with three hundred men instead of sixty. The three hundred were selected from Kearny’s First Dragoons, the regulars. In addition he would take Captain Emory and his fourteen-man detachment of topographical engineers, as well as several prominent mountain men as scouts. The remainder of the First Dragoons would garrison Santa Fe against the possibility of any attempt at reconquest by the Mexicans.
Meantime, Colonel Doniphan’s 1,000-man regiment of Missouri Volunteers would rejoin the Santa Fe Trail and march southward into Chihuahua, where they were to rendezvous with and reinforce Brigadier General John E. Wool, who was marching on Chihuahua from the east with a 3,400-man division to conquer and occupy this great northern state.
Wool’s expedition was itself remarkable. The crusty sixty-two-year-old regular army officer, by authorization of the president, had personally recruited and organized ten regiments of volunteers from the Ohio Valley and, by dint of steamboats and boot leather, assembled them at San Antonio about the same time that Kearny was taking Santa Fe. From there, Wool began marching them due west, five hundred miles into Chihuahua.
The plan was thwarted, however, by a combination of terrain, political duplicity, egotism, misunderstanding, and backstabbing from Washington to Havana and from Veracruz to Monterrey, Mexico.
* Old Arab saying.
† This tale might have gotten its start when word spread around that the army was enlisting what would become the Mormon Battalion to go with Kearny’s army and got confused and hyped from there.
‡ Also serving in this company was a lawyer from Springfield, Abraham Lincoln. “We didn’t think much then about his ever being president of the United States,” Clyman wrote in his memoirs.
§ There appears to be some confusion on the part of the Americans about the Mexican class system, which was quite different from their own. When Cooke speaks of “the higher classes,” he presumably means the Creole Mexicans, as distinguished from the mestizos and Indians. When Private George speaks of “all classes, rich or poor,” he, too, excludes mestizos and Indians, whose ranking by the Mexicans was so low as to be almost nonexistent.
‖ As the scholar, author, Episcopal rector, and dedicated New Mexican Ross Calvin deliciously points out, most of these “miserable” pictures and icons have since been snapped up by savvy collectors and now hang in museums or on the walls of fashionable homes in Santa Fe and elsewhere as “notable specimens of primitive art.”
CHAPTER NINE
In Old Monterrey
In fact, General Wool never made it across the Sierras into Chihuahua; he was defeated by the mountains halfway there and recalled to join Zachary
Taylor’s depleted army, in consequence of actions devised by the Polk administration to win the war, which, by midsummer 1846, was rapidly sinking in public popularity. But this also left Colonel Doniphan and his Missourians, then entering Mexico’s largest state alone, seriously in the lurch.
The Whigs, most of whom the previous spring had voted—however reluctantly—for Polk’s declaration of war, were now repudiating their support and the Whig press was on the warpath, charging incompetence and bungling in the conduct of the war by the Polk administration, in spite of the fact that the Americans had not lost a battle. It had been anticipated, however, that the war would be short and limited; in particular that the U.S. Army’s occupation of Mexico’s northern provinces would quickly bring that dissolute nation to the bargaining table. In fact, it did no such thing. After the encouraging American victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, General Taylor ran into a whipsaw at the city of Monterrey that delivered a jolt to the widespread impression that Mexican soldiers could not, or would not, fight.