Pillar of Light

by Gerald N. Lund

  “Why?” Brannan asked.

  “He said it would take us two months to get over the pass.”

  The other two nodded. This was only their second day since leaving the fort, and they had come all the way from Bear Valley in just over fourteen hours.

  “I know we’re tired,” their guide continued, “but I think we need to keep going, all night if necessary, and get out of the mountains.”

  “Agreed,” Brannan said.

  Smith laughed again. “If you figure another eight to ten hours to get down, that means we will have crossed the pass in under thirty hours. I’d like to rub Sutter’s nose in that a little.”

  With a nod, Peter and Brannan fell into line behind him. As they started eastward again, Peter did not turn and look back, not even once.

  Kathryn Ingalls stopped for a moment, leaning heavily on her cane, and looked back into the room. It was empty now except for the plain wooden table and three stools that Derek couldn’t fit into the wagon. For a moment, there was a twinge of sadness. Last spring when she and Peter had started out with the Reed family from Springfield, Illinois, who could have guessed that by fall she would be teaching school on the Arkansas River at a little place in the middle of nowhere called Fort Pueblo? But she was glad. Here she had taught as many as twenty-one pupils. Some spoke with the deep twang of Mississippi; others chattered away in Spanish. Some were fair skinned and blue-eyed. Others had eyes as black as a beetle’s belly and either the olive skin of the Mexicans or the copper skin that spoke of white fathers and Indian mothers.

  Here also she had given birth to little Nicole. Here they had spent a lonely Christmas far from their families. Here she had spent many an hour on her knees praying for Peter’s safety. Now they were leaving and would never see it again.

  The little cabin wouldn’t stay empty for long. There were only seventeen of them heading north this early. The rest of the nearly two hundred and fifty people here now would wait for this lead group to send word back if they had found the Latter-day Saints before they came on. So one of the families from Mississippi would move in here before they had been gone an hour. At Fort Pueblo, housing was too limited for a dwelling to sit empty for very long.

  She turned as Rebecca came into the cabin to stand beside her. “Is Nicole still asleep?” Kathryn asked.

  “Yes. Christopher is watching both her and Leah.” Rebecca looked more closely at her sister-in-law. “Does it make you sad to leave?” she asked.

  Kathryn instantly shook her head. “No. We were happy here, but I am so ready to leave.”

  Rebecca slipped her arm around Kathryn’s waist and squeezed her. “Me too. In fact, I am so excited, I barely slept a wink last night.”

  “A wink?” Kathryn asked in mock surprise. “That would be a very long time compared to how long I slept.”

  Rebecca laughed.

  They stood in silence for a time, and then Kathryn straightened. “If we’re so happy to be leaving, how come we’re still standing here?”

  “Good question,” Rebecca said, taking her arm. “I think everyone’s ready. Let’s go.”

  They came outside to where the five wagons were waiting. The last one was theirs, one Derek had gotten in trade for working most of the winter for one of the traders at Fort Pueblo. Robert and Elizabeth Crow and their extended family would have the three lead wagons. George Therlkill, a son-in-law of the Crows, had one for him and some of his own immediate family, and the Ingallses had one for their three adults and four children.

  As the women came up, Derek was talking with Brother Crow. He stopped and smiled. “Are you ready?”

  “More ready than I have ever been for anything else in my life,” Kathryn said eagerly.

  Robert Crow laughed softly. “We feel exactly the same, Kathryn. So let’s mount up and get this party on the road.”

  It was their twenty-fifth day out of Johnson’s Ranch, and their twenty-third since coming out of the Sierra. Once again the endless monotony of the landscape left Peter feeling depressed and despondent. He had been especially melancholy since they had passed the sandy hill where he and Milt Elliott and James Reed had tried to take Reed’s wagon up and around John Snyder’s wagon. The memory of that instantaneous flash of anger that left John Snyder dead came back as vividly as if it were happening again. Against his will, his eyes searched the ground for the dark stain where John Snyder had fallen, but thankfully, there was nothing now in the sand but the eroded marks of the wagon tracks.

  They moved steadily eastward, making twenty to thirty miles on some days, but dropping the average to more like twenty when they had to stop to hunt or to rest their animals. When he saw the dark line that was the Ruby Mountains and watched it grow close enough to beckon them with its pine-covered slopes and snowcapped peaks, Peter began to watch more carefully the trail they were following. Finally, about two o’clock on this, their twenty-fifth day, he saw what he was looking for. It was faint, and had he not been watching they might have passed it by.

  “There it is,” he said quietly, reining in his horse.

  Sam Brannan and Charlie Smith pulled up as well. Charlie stood in his stirrups, squinting against the harsh glare of the sun off the desert floor. Then he grunted and sat down again. “I see it.”

  Brannan nodded. “I don’t understand. Why were you coming up from the south at this point?”

  “Well,” Peter responded, “that was one more little surprise that Lansford Hastings hadn’t warned us about.” He pointed toward the wall of the Ruby Mountains that stood directly east of them. “The Great Salt Desert is about straight east from here, but when we reached the other side of the Ruby Mountains there, there was no way for wagons over the mountains.”

  “That’s for sure,” Smith grunted.

  “So we turned south and went all the way around them.” He shook his head, his eyes dark with the memory. “It took us ten days. Ten days!Do you realize what that ten days would have meant to them in the Sierra?”

  Charlie was looking at the high mountains, whose top third was still snow covered. “I can see why you didn’t want to take wagons over that,” he noted, “but we could make it fine with horses and mules.”

  “No,” Peter said, more sharply than he had intended.

  Brannan shook his head too. “Peter’s right, Charlie. The Hastings Cutoff is not for us. We’ll stick to the known trail.”

  Peter was a little chagrined that he had reacted so strongly. “See how faint the tracks are here? Well, there are some places where we barely left any track at all. I’m not sure I could find the way.”

  The man who was the most experienced of the three of them finally nodded. “You’re right. We need to resupply at Fort Hall anyway.”

  “There’s nowhere else between here and Fort Bridger to do it,” Brannan said.

  “Nothing,” Peter murmured, “except one stretch of trail that even the devils in hell would stay away from.”

  Chapter Notes

  Sam Brannan, Charles C. Smith, and an “unnamed young man” left Sutter’s Fort on 26 April 1847 and headed east to find Brigham Young and the Saints. Whether Smith was a Latter-day Saint or not is not known, though it is recorded that he had been in Nauvoo previously. Later Brannan wrote: “We crossed the Snowy Mountains of California, a distance of 40 miles, . . . in one day and two hours, a thing that has never been done before in less than three days. We traveled on foot and drove our animals before us, the snow from twenty to one hundred feet deep.” (Quoted in CS,p. 87.)

  By the time the last of the Donner group were rescued, those left in the mountain camps had also been forced to begin eating their dead. Brannan’s party did stop at the camp beside the lake where most of the Donner Party had perished, and found skulls and bones scattered about in every direction. Thus, though newspaper accounts of the Donner tragedy had been sent east previously, Brannan was the first known white man to bring an eyewitness account of the tragedy out of California.

  As shown here, Brannan’s small
party elected not to take the Hastings Cutoff through the Salt Lake Valley. Instead, they took the California Trail, which joined the Hastings route about twenty-five miles west of the Ruby Mountains. The California Trail went northeastward through present-day Nevada to join the Oregon Trail at the Snake River.

  The exact date is not known that a small group of Saints from Pueblo left for Fort Laramie to intercept the main body of the Saints. It is known that they had been at Fort Laramie about two weeks when the Pioneer Company arrived there on 1 June, so the assumption is that the Pueblo group left sometime around the first of May, as depicted here.

  Chapter 39

  Matthew and Nathan Steed sat in the back of their wagon while the rain drummed softly on the canvas above them. Nathan was writing, though Matthew couldn’t tell if it was in his journal or if he was writing a letter to Lydia and the children. He sighed, knowing that he should be writing too but not feeling like making the effort. And besides, they had only one pen and ink bottle.

  The problem was that Matthew was just plain bored. Today was . . . he had to stop and think for a moment. It was the twenty-ninth of May, which meant it was almost two months now since they had left Winter Quarters. For the most part, each of those almost sixty days had been much the same. That was bad enough, but this was the second day that the rain had been heavy enough that they couldn’t move forward. Here it was half past nine and they were still sitting in place.

  That really frustrated him. They were now within fifty miles of Fort Laramie, just two or three days’ journey from here. Everyone was looking forward with great anticipation to that milestone on their journey. Since they had left the Elkhorn more than six weeks ago they had not passed a single community, not a village, not a farm, not a way station of any kind. Fort Laramie couldn’t be much of a splash of civilization this far from nowhere, but after what they had seen in the last month and a half, it couldn’t be anything less than wonderful.

  He turned his head. “Letter or journal?”

  Nathan looked up. “Letter.”

  Matthew grunted, not surprised. They had started to meet up with people moving east now. Near Ash Hollow a trapper had ridden across the river and volunteered to take mail east, but he was in a hurry and couldn’t wait. Matthew had finished a letter and sent it with him. Nathan had planned to get one done, but hadn’t and so missed the opportunity. At Fort Laramie they would almost certainly find someone to take mail east for them.

  “How many miles did William Clayton say we’ve come?” Nathan asked, looking up.

  “Well, at Scotts Bluff, which was two days ago, it was almost an even five hundred miles from Winter Quarters.”

  “So what now do you think? About five hundred and a quarter?”

  Matthew hooted. “Are you kidding? At the rate we’re moving, I’ll bet we’ve not come fifteen miles since Scotts Bluff.”

  Nathan nodded absently and returned to his writing.

  Matthew lay back and closed his eyes. Five hundred miles. In some ways it seemed like a thousand, as if they had been traveling in this wagon from the time of his birth. The whole experience had been huge stretches of tedious monotony broken only by an occasional burst of interest. And even new things had a way of turning monotonous as well.

  He thought of the first day they had seen buffalo. The whole camp was in a high state of excitement. That had been the first of May. He remembered the date because they ended up calling it their “May Day hunt.” The hunt went on for almost three hours as the wagons moved along slowly, stopping to watch the hunters when the action was close enough to see. That night the whole camp had exulted over the opportunity to have fresh meat and to taste buffalo for the first time.

  But in a few days buffalo had become so commonplace that one hardly glanced up at the sight of them anymore. There were whole days when the prairie on both sides of the river was black with buffalo. William Clayton, ever the one to count things, one day estimated that there were at least fifty thousand head in view.

  As he let his mind go back, he was suddenly struck by the irony of the things which stood out in his memory. Their very insignificance was proof of how deeply the tedium was affecting them all. He thought of anthills which sparkled with brightly colored Indian beads. Evidently, after Indians had camped in the vicinity, the ants found the colored “pebbles” fascinating and carried them to their hills. When they were first sighted, grown men would call for their companions to come and see this unique phenomenon. But after a week, that too became commonplace and they barely glanced at them as they passed.

  There was the day that Brigham Young lost his telescope as they rode hard to stop some cattle from mingling with the buffalo. Brigham was not a happy man after that. The glass had cost forty dollars and was a favorite of his. The man who should have been watching the cattle got a tongue-lashing, and for the rest of that night the company got a taste of a very grumpy President Young. The next day it was decided that there was not much sense in moving on with their president in such a mood, so a search party went back. Finally, late in the day the glass was found—miraculously undamaged by the buffalo that had passed all around it—and the mood of the camp and Brother Brigham cheered considerably.

  There was the day the “roadometer” was put into service. William Clayton had been charged by Brigham Young to keep an accurate record of the trail so that they could provide help to those companies that would be coming after them. Mileage covered each day was an important part of that record. At first Clayton tied a red bandanna to a spoke on a wagon wheel and counted the number of revolutions. He had calculated that exactly 360 revolutions made one mile. That was both dizzying and tedious. So one night Clayton took his problem to the man who was considered to be the most learned in the group, Elder Orson Pratt. Intrigued with the idea of creating a mechanical device to do the counting, Pratt designed a series of wooden cogs that attached to the axle and automatically counted the rotations of the wheel. Appleton Harmon, a skilled mechanic, made it, and to everyone’s amazement it worked. They called it the “roadometer.” William Clayton was as pleased as if he had just received word of the birth of a new child. That’s what monotony did to you.

  Somewhere off to his left, Matthew heard a burst of laughter and a man’s howl of protest. Another card game or perhaps some dominoes, he thought. That too was evidence of the mental state of the men. Any kind of diversion was welcomed in their attempts to beat the tedium.

  “How tall do you think Chimney Rock was?” Nathan said, again interrupting his thoughts.

  Matthew half rolled over so that he could look at his brother. “From the base, or just the chimney itself?” Now, there had been a break in the routine, he thought. After five hundred miles of prairie where a tree or two along the river were considered as stunning scenery, Chimney Rock had been a source of great excitement.

  “From the base. Well, both.”

  Matthew screwed up his mouth, trying to remember. “Brother Pratt took some sightings on it, I remember.”

  “Does two hundred sixty feet for the shaft sound right?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s about it. And it was like four hundred and fifty feet above the level plain if you counted everything.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Matthew sighed and rolled to his knees. He crawled to the end of the wagon and peeked out the crack in the canvas. He groaned. The rain was lightening up, but the ground was still covered with large puddles.

  Nathan looked up. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He came back and lay down again and closed his eyes.

  Nathan stopped writing, laying the pen down. He picked up the paper and blew on it to dry the ink. Then he carefully folded it and put pen, ink, and letter back in his trunk. When he finished he turned to Matthew. “And what have you been thinking about so hard?” he asked.

  Matthew was a little startled. He hadn’t thought Nathan was paying any attention to anything but the letter. “Boredom.”

  It came out with such disgust th
at Nathan chuckled. “Reaching Fort Laramie will help.”

  “And just how do we do that when we sit here waiting for this blasted rain to stop?”

  Nathan ignored the outburst. “They say once we leave Laramie, we’re out of prairie country. That will help. The endless prairie is part of it, I think.”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew drawled lazily, “I like getting up in the morning and being able to see three days in advance.”

  Nathan laughed, then stretched out beside his brother on their mattress. “They tell me that one of the best cures for boredom is a quick nap.”

  “Hmm,” Matthew said dryly. “Maybe that’s a theory we ought to test.”

  Shortly after ten o’clock the bugle sounded across the camp, giving the signal to hitch up the teams. Matthew leaped up immediately and opened the flap on their wagon. The sky was still overcast, but it was considerably lighter than before and the rain had stopped. He kicked Nathan on the bottom of his boot.

  “I’m awake,” he growled. “Don’t you be worrying about me.”

  Matthew sat down and began pulling on his own boots. “I hate this waiting.”

  Not until twelve o’clock were they finally ready to move out. By that point Matthew was ready to scream. Two hours to hitch the teams, pack the rest of their gear, and gather in the stock. Two hours! How did Brigham stand it? This must drive him to distraction. By now, had Matthew been in charge, he would have gone after several of the brethren with a bullwhip to see if he couldn’t spark a little life into them.

  He turned as a shout sounded over the camp. It was Heber C. Kimball. “Brethren, we’d like you to gather your teams around the boat, please.”

  Matthew gave Nathan a questioning look, but Nathan just shrugged. He was up on the wagon seat. Matthew was standing beside the team. The “boat” was Luke Johnson’s wagon, the Revenue Cutter. Since it had no top, it made a good stand from which the leaders could address the company. Matthew groaned. Not another delay! With a sigh borne of deep pain, he took the bridle of the near horse and clucked to him softly. “Okay, boys, let’s move.”