Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “But have you ever been to Oregon?” Mercy repeated.

  “And they taught me just one thing. Don’t never try to reach Oregon with horses draggin’ your wagon.” He turned to Seccombe and asked, “Which one is Zendt?” When Oliver pointed him out, the old guide came up to Levi and growled, “Sonny, no horses travel with this mountain man. Sell ’em and get oxen.”

  This was an order, delivered by Sam Purchas. “Anybody got any whiskey?” he asked, and when this was provided he reviewed his plans for getting the party to Oregon: “The whole trick is timin’. We leave St. Joe as soon as these rains stop, allowin’ the rivers to fall. But not before there’s plenty of grass for the oxen. Too soon, your oxen starve in Kansas. Too late, you freeze to death in Oregon snow.”

  As he spoke Elly could not take her eyes from his nose. She very much wanted to ask what had happened, but that would be impolite, so she listened as he droned on: “I want every man to have two rifles, two pistols, an ax, two knives, a penknife, a hatchet and twenty pounds of lead.”

  Captain Mercy protested, “That’s enough ammunition to fight your way inch by inch,” whereupon Purchas looked at him condescendingly and said, “Soldier boy, that’s just what we may have to do.”

  Mercy retorted, “The officers at Fort Leavenworth assured me the Arapaho and the Cheyenne were peaceful this year,” and Purchas snapped, “I wish they’d give me the same assurance about the Oglala Sioux, the Crow, the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventres. Because they’re the ones we have to deal with.”

  Captain Mercy said he still thought the armament too heavy, and Purchas lost patience: “Sonny, I been with ’em all. Kit Carson, Sublette ...” He went through his litany of recommendations, adding a few names like Bridger and Jackson, and ending, “And they taught me just one thing. Carry plenty of guns. Me, I carry four rifles, two pistols and this little beauty.” He placed on the table one of the newfangled revolvers. “Without reloading, I can kill six Indians.”

  He told them he had been born in Fauquier County, on a farm owned by General Washington: “Of course I seen him, many times. We paid him the rent, didn’t we?” He had wandered out to Ohio, where he had shot deer to feed the surveying crew of Alexander Hamilton’s son, “Colonel William S., and a fine man he was.” From there he had drifted on to Indiana Territory, where General William Henry Harrison had served as representative in Congress: “He musta been thinkin’ then of goin’ into politics, because he plastered every home with free books sent out from Washington, and that’s how I got hold of Lewis and Clark’s report on their trip to Oregon, and I was lost.”

  “You ever been to Oregon?” Mercy asked again, but before Purchas could reply, Sergeant Lykes asked, “What happened to your nose?”

  Purchas pinched his half-nose with his right thumb and forefinger and grinned at the sergeant. “Sonny, I could tell you that I lost it in one of them river-boat gougin’ battles they write about in the St. Louis newspapers—Say, speakin’ of newspapers, you might like to see this,” and from a deerskin wallet he produced a clipping from the New Orleans Picayune.

  “Strong as a lion, fearless as a tiger, keen-eyed as an eagle and quick as a panther, Samuel Purchas, greatest of the mountain men and frontiersman extraordinary, departed our city on Thursday last week leading a party of merchants on an exploratory trip to the forts of the Upper Missouri Sylvestre O’Fallon told this journal, ‘It’s a very dangerous journey, but since we are in the hands of Sam Purchas, we have no fear.’ We trust that the redoubtable Purchas will get his charges safely home again, for they are among the ornaments of this city.”

  “That sort of tells you who I am, don’t it?” he asked proudly.

  Early next morning he brought in a farmer from a settlement downriver, and when Elly awoke she heard Purchas selling their horses. “Levi,” she called, shaking him, “get up! They’re taking your horses.”

  Levi ran out to find Purchas trotting the big grays before a man who obviously was eager to get them. “Deal’s set,” Purchas said brusquely. “He’ll take your horses for five hundred dollars each. Wants the mares to start a line. And he’ll sell you eight of the best oxen at fifteen dollars each. My commission is fifty dollars, so it’s done.”

  The farmer had the cash, more than Levi had seen at one time before, and he had brought with him the eight oxen, big lumbering beasts without a shred of beauty—six for pulling the Conestoga, two for replacements. Purchas knew that Zendt would not want to see his horses go, so he put his arm about him and drew him away, but when Levi actually heard the stranger speak to his horses and start them across the field, he broke loose and ran to them and bade each goodbye, patting their sleek rumps and fighting back tears as they moved eastward.

  In a kind of daze he returned to Elly. “I had to sell them,” he said. She brushed by him and ran into the field in time to see those splendid gray animals disappear over the hill. As she stood there, the morning wind blowing her hair, Levi came to her side and whispered, “Now we really are alone. Now we can never go back,” and in that moment the Zendts knew what moving west meant—the awful loneliness, the burden of rifles, the strange rivers flowing swift with mud, the unknown Indians lurking, the long, long trails with no homes and no lights at dusk. They had barely started; over half the continent lay ahead, and their courage might have waned, except that Captain Mercy, aware that their grief could be diverted only by new tasks, warned them: “You’ll have to study fast and learn all you can about oxen. These look like good ones.”

  When it came time to pack, Levi experienced a stubborn sense of satisfaction in telling Elly, “They all said, ‘Get rid of the Conestoga,’ but now everybody says, ‘Can we fit this into your Conestoga?’ You’d think we were plannin’ to open a store.” Captain Mercy, Oliver Seccombe and Sam Purchas had each brought oddments to be tucked in “out of the way,” they said, until a man with lesser good will might have told them all, “Go to hell.” But Levi shrugged his shoulders and said, “Tuck ’em in somewheres,” and the Conestoga creaked.

  Friday afternoon Sam Purchas appeared with two heavy wagons drawn by oxen and occupied by two of the dourest-looking families central Missouri had so far produced. “The Fishers and the Fraziers want to join us,” he said by way of introduction, and four lean people stepped forward to shake hands, withdrawing their fingers grudgingly, as if to count them. Mrs. Frazier established the tone of the meeting by asking Purchas, “That young one? She married?”

  “Claims to be,” the mountain man replied.

  “I doubt it,” Mrs. Frazier said, and off she went to report her suspicions to the other three.

  “They’ll be intolerable,” Seccombe predicted, but Purchas silenced him by pointing out, “We got to have at least three wagons—for defense and to stand the night watches.” So the Fishers and the Fraziers were accepted.

  On Saturday morning, May 25, 1844, Sam Purchas chewed his cud, spat in the road and handed down his judgment: “Time to move out.” But as the three wagons drew up in line, Levi saw with some distress that Purchas, Mercy and Lykes each rode a horse and led two. “You made me sell my horses, but you kept yours,” he protested.

  “We ain’t haulin’ wagons,” Purchas growled.

  The procession wound slowly along the riverbank till it came to a pitiful ferry, which took them aboard, one wagon at a time, for a perilous journey across the Missouri. By noon the party had assembled in Kansas and that afternoon covered the first six miles of the trip west. The oxen moved so slowly that Levi could not hide his impatience, but Purchas reassured him, “They start slow, but God, how they keep movin’.”

  The first crisis on the trip occurred next morning. It was Sunday and the Zendts had their wagon harnessed early. Sergeant Lykes had his mules shaped up, and Captain Mercy was ready, but the two wagons from Missouri showed no signs of life. “Get the Fishers and the Fraziers up and going,” the captain told his sergeant, but when Lykes went to the wagons and shook them, a voice protested, “This is Sunday.”

&n
bsp; After a long delay, Mr. Fisher and Mr. Frazier climbed out of their wagons to explain that under no circumstances could they travel on the Sabbath. God had ordained this to be a day of rest, and it would be an offense to Him and to their animals if they did any work on Sunday. Captain Mercy replied, “We have only so many days to get west, and we need the Sundays,” but Fisher and Frazier argued, “A day of rest will strengthen our animals, and they will progress better than if we violated God’s law.” Captain Mercy snapped, “We’ve been resting six months. Now we move.”

  Levi and Elly Zendt voted with Mercy and Lykes, but to everyone’s surprise, Sam Purchas sided with the Missourians. “A day’s rest in seven don’t do no harm,” he said. “I seen plenty of parties that galloped the first half and bleached their bones the second.”

  So it was agreed that Captain Mercy’s party would travel six days and rest the seventh, but trouble again brewed that afternoon when Mrs. Fisher and Mrs. Frazier, two gaunt women who feared the trip west, came to Captain Mercy to lodge a formal protest: “Mrs. Zendt ain’t restin’.” Captain Mercy looked toward the Conestoga and could see no untimely work on Elly’s part. She was sitting quietly, her back to them.

  “She’s scribblin’,” Mrs. Fisher said, and Mrs. Frazier nodded. Then Captain Mercy looked closer and saw that Elly had a pad in her lap and was writing. “God don’t hold with scribblin’ on His Sabbath,” Mrs. Fisher whined, “nor mendin’ harness, either,” and she pointed at Levi.

  “We’ll have to let them observe Sabbath as they see fit,” Mercy said, but the women were not satisfied.

  “You must order them to stop,” they insisted. “They will bring God’s wrath upon this venture.”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Zendt is writing out her Sunday prayers,” Captain Mercy said, and this seemed to mollify the protectors.

  Actually, Elly was writing the first of those many letters she would send back to her friend Laura Lou Booker. Often it had been Laura Lou’s unquenchable optimism that had kept alive Elly’s courage. Now Elly would repay that kindness by sending her an account of what she was doing and seeing on the Oregon Trail. Laura Lou preserved the letters, and many years later they were printed and widely read into dry history they breathed the living reality of adventures as witnessed by a seventeen-year-old scrawny Pennsylvania Dutch girl who realized during every moment of that arduous trip that she was heading for a new life:

  May 26, Sunday ... The funniest thing about our trip is Sergeant Lykes and his mules. He fancies himself a great expert in handling them, but I think they handle him. He has eight of them and says that each is ornerier than the other, which makes a circle. He makes them obey not by pleading, which they ignore, and not by hitting them, which merely makes them more stubborn, but by what he calls his mule persuader. This is a stout wooden pole with a heavy leather cord tied in a circle at one end. He slips the circle over the snout of the mule, then twists the pole ever tighter until you’d think the mule’s nose would fall off, and then, as he says, the mule realizes a message is coming. With the mule’s head twisted at an impossible angle, Sergeant Lykes gently pats him on the rump and says, “Now we go this way,” and the mule obeys. Sergeant Lykes told me, “There must be an easier way to handle mules, but I haven’t found it.”

  The following days were painful for Levi Zendt. Travelers with horses attached to their wagons moved ahead, throwing dust in his face and disappearing over rises in the road, while his plodding oxen lumbered on, swaying from side to side like ships at sea. Each time he looked at their ungraceful rumps he thought of his gray horses and groaned, but Sam Purchas fell back and reassured him: “Sonny, come two weeks, we’re gonna pass them horse-folks like they was hitched to the ground.”

  Three days out from St. Joseph the emigrants arrived at the last organized community they would see before they reached Oregon—the Presbyterian mission to the Sac and Fox Indians—and it was here that Oliver Seccombe’s frustration began. He had left England after graduating from Oxford with one determination: to see for himself the noble Indian as he lived in a state of nature before being defiled by the white man. He was assured, by his reading in Rousseau and the romantic philosophers, that this nobility did exist and he wanted to describe it for European readers before it vanished. He had begun his trip to Santa Fe with the most exalted expectations, but his experiences had proved confusing. The first untamed Indians he encountered were the Comanche, and as he rode forward to greet them they unleashed a parabola of arrows, one of which killed the horse of the man riding next to him and several of which came close to killing him. He explained away this unfortunate beginning as a result of regrettable behavior on the part of white Americans, who did not understand the Comanche, but when his party reached the Apache and found them even more murderous, he decided that the noble savage of his dreams lived not in the south but in the freer, colder north.

  He was confirmed in this belief when he reached Santa Fe and made a side excursion to the pueblos, hoping that in these ingenious houses he would find his natural man. Instead, he found a miserable congregation of hovels, and upon his return to Santa Fe, discovered that he was infested with lice. He had to shave his head to get rid of the nits and smelled for some days of buffalo fat. His return trip through Apache and Comanche country, with running battles days on end, did little to restore his original enthusiasm, which was almost completely eradicated when the train ran into a war party of Kiowas, who killed two traders. The noble Indian of Rousseau, just and sagacious, must live in the northwestern territories, and now as he started on the Oregon Trail, he dismissed his previous encounters only as a preparation for the great adventure of seeing the unspoiled Indian.

  On May 29 he met the Sac and Fox. They came down from the mission building in a party of eleven, well dressed, well fed, speaking English and offering the travelers a selection of blankets, tomahawks and deerskin moccasins decorated with beads. Each item was priced in bits—Spanish silver dollars sawed into eight parts so that twenty-five cents was equal to two bits—and they would not allow the travelers to chivvy them down.

  “Those moccasin best quality ... one dollar two bits,” the leader of the merchants said, and he would accept no less. But while the bargaining was under way, six other Indians arrived on the scene, begging for meat, and when they got none, they stole one of Sergeant Lykes’ mules, and when he found out, there was a great to-do until Sam Purchas fired his Hawken in the air and warned the man with the moccasins, “You get that mule back here or next shot is right through your head.” The Indian believed Purchas, as well he might, for Sam was well known along the trail as a ruthless man, and the mule was recovered.

  As the party resumed its way west Seccombe explained that the Sac and Fox were prime examples of what-he was talking about: “They have been corrupted by the white man’s religion. All their inherent nobility has been eroded away by Presbyterianism, for which they were not prepared.” In his opinion they would see no real Indians until they reached the Pawnee, of whom he had received good reports.

  “Pawnee!” Purchas exploded. “They would steal Monday in order to get a chance at Tuesday.”

  For these emigrants the trail west contained an unfolding series of surprises—it almost seemed as if a superior dramatist had prepared the script best calculated to excite the imagination. Now the first hills appeared, and the travelers began to realize that the going would be difficult, yet the way was eased with excellent grass and good water, from which they could take consolation. Farmers from eastern areas saw the hickory, the oak, the plenitude of walnut and birch, and found themselves in reassuring surroundings, but suddenly at the crest of some hill they would catch a glimpse of landscape reaching to the horizon, infinitely far, with few trees and only scrub grass, and they would catch their breath at the strangeness of the land they were penetrating. The whole trip would be like this, one contrast after another.

  At the end of the first week it began to rain, not the way it did back east, but in sullen sheets of water. The ra
in fell with such intensity that it bounced back up from the earth, and Elly Zendt wrote:

  June 2, Sunday ... I am writing this at night huddled inside the Conestoga before a flickering candle. It is raining, but not like any you have seen in Lancaster. It falls in great tubfuls, drowning everything. Sometimes the wagon shakes so that I cannot control my pen, and the wind whistles so piercingly that I cannot think. Levi has put an India-rubber sheet over our wagon, but still the rain drips through. I understand how Noah felt ...

  The rains continued until the emigrants reached the first great obstacle of their course, the Big Blue River coming south out of Nebraska to join the Kansas River. Sam Purchas had warned them in advance of this dangerous crossing: “You can’t get west till you cross it, and it’s a killer. Ain’t much in October, but in May and June, it sweeps you away.”

  When they approached the steep banks through which it normally ran they could not see the sides, for the rains had thrown it into flood, and full-sized trees were roaring along the crest.

  “What do we do?” the Fishers and the Fraziers wanted to know.

  “We wait,” Purchas said. “Can’t we build a ferry?”

  “You put a ferry in that, and before you reach the other shore you wind up back in Independence.”

  So they waited. For sixteen interminable days, while late-starting parties from St. Joseph caught up with them, they waited. The only consolation Levi found was that all the horse-people, those who had passed him so blithely, were delayed and fretting the same as he. Each morning the men would go down to inspect the Big Blue, and each afternoon they would study the skies, hoping for some break in the weather. “Hell,” Purchas told one contingent camped beside the river, “I come acrost this stream last October and I didn’t even dismount. I coulda jumped it.”