The Comanche apparently went on at some length about what happened on the fateful afternoon, which Austin related in a letter to their father shortly afterward and which was later released for publication by a nephew. Among the ways a man could die on the Santa Fe Trail was something as simple as going to look for water.
“He [Jedediah] had dismounted while his horse was drinking, to quench his own thirst, and then remounted. Twenty Comanche, who were in hiding, waiting for buffalo to come to the water, came out.”
Smith tried to get them to go back to the wagon train and trade, but the medicine man suddenly approached Smith and was warned away. Then the Indians managed to frighten Smith’s horse, and when it turned they fired arrows at Smith, one wounding him in the arm.
“He instantly turned and shot the chief dead, and, drawing his pistols, killed an Indian with each.d Then, grasping his ax, he dashed in among them, dealing death at every blow. Slashed with knife cuts and pierced with a lance thrust, he sank down from loss of blood. The Indians approached to scalp him, when he suddenly rose and stabbed three with his knife, and dropped dead. But he was not alone; there were thirteen of his enemies stretched dead on the ground. The Comanche concluded that he had been more than mortal, and that it would be better to propitiate his spirit, so they did not mutilate his body, but later gave it the same funeral rites they gave its chief.”
So said Jedediah Smith’s nephew, presumably relying on Jedediah’s brother’s account to his father. Fanciful or not, horrifying things could happen, very quickly, out on the plains.
Most of the time, of course, things didn’t turn out that way, but it was always a good idea to travel in as large a caravan as possible—and if trail travel ever had an ideal model, certainly linking up with an entire United States Army expedition was as close to it as could be got. At least that’s the way eighteen-year-old Susan Magoffin saw it as the big prairie schooners prepared to roll out of Leavenworth down the rough and rutted track toward God knew what.
She was a member of an old and wealthy Kentucky family, and the lively and intelligent newly wedded bride of Samuel Magoffin, twenty-seven years her senior and, with his brother James, an old hand at Santa Fe trading. She was also pregnant. This was meant to be a sort of honeymoon trip, an American safari, as it were, complete with all the dangers. The Magoffins had wanted to get a last haul of goods down the trail before the much rumored war with Mexico broke out, and now that it had broken out the matter was all the more urgent. Magoffin had fitted out his caravansary in expansive style, including a large conical tent “made in Philadelphia by a regular tent maker,” dressing table, carpet, folding chairs, and a “fully equipped bed.”
And so it was with a hopeful air that Susan Magoffin set out from Fort Leavenworth that bright summer morning in a fancy carriage pulled by mules, along with fourteen big wagonse of goods, each pulled by twelve oxen, an assortment of supply wagons, another carriage for Susan’s maid and attendant, twenty teamsters, drivers, outriders, a dozen horses and mules, two hundred spare oxen, and “last but not least our dog, Ring,” a thoroughbred greyhound.
Everything was exciting and fresh to the young beauty raised in the sophistication of My Old Kentucky Home—the stark prairie skies, the “bracing weather, cool and fine.”
She exulted, “Oh, this is a life I would not exchange for a good deal. There is such independence, so much free, uncontaminated air, which impregnates the mind with purity.”
Just as she was absorbing all of this purity, the teamsters began their job of hitching up the hundred or so mules and oxen, another novel sight, accompanied by “the cracking of whips, the lowing of cattle, braying of mules, and hallowing of the men,” simultaneously the clear wholesome atmosphere of the Kansas plains suddenly erupted in a blue cloudburst of horrible profanity, which is the lingua franca of muleskinners everywhere but certainly not anything the refined Mrs. Magoffin might have heard back in antebellum Kentucky. Neither history nor her diary record the depths of her scandalization, other than that she found the swearing “disagreeable.”
“The animals are unruly, tis true,” she wrote, “and worries the drivers’ patience, but I scarcely think they need to be so profane.” And with that pronouncement, amid the marching columns of General Kearny’s Army of the West, the Magoffin party saddled up and lurched westward onto the undulating prairies.
Kearny’s march, in fact, was strung out over nearly a hundred miles, with various elements released several days apart, for the simple reason that so many men and animals on the trail back to back would create a nightmare of logistics and backups. At many places there would be bodies of water to cross and mountains to navigate, and it would have been foolish to allow the entire army to get bunched up waiting behind a few stalled wagons trying to negotiate some obstruction.
It didn’t take long for the voyagers to discover the stark strangeness and beauty of the Great Plains, which until recently, as noted, was referred to as the Great American Desert and was so recorded on most maps, believed by most to consist of an empty wasteland.
Along a branch of the Kansas River, reported Lieutenant William H. Emory, a topographical engineer, “a seam of bituminous coal crops out; this is worked by the Indians, one of whom we saw coming towards us, driving an oxcart loaded with coal. For the most part the soil is sandy loam, covered with rich vegetable deposits, the whole based upon a stratum of clay and limestone.”
Emory was an explorer and skilled cartographer. It was his duty, as Senator Benton had put it, “to ascertain whether or not the Southwest was worth taking by force and, if so, whether or not it was worth keeping!” A thirty-five-year-old Maryland aristocrat raised on an Eastern Shore plantation, Emory had married a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin and considered himself more a warrior than a scientist or geographer.
Nevertheless, he made careful observations: “Trees are to be seen only along the margins of the streams, and the general appearance of the country is that of vast, rolling fields, enclosed with colossal hedges.” For the first few weeks of the journey, he wrote, the grass was “luxuriant,” and the trees were mainly “ash, burnt oak, black walnut, chestnut oak, black oak, long-leaved willow, sycamore, buckeye, American elm, pig-nut hickory, hack-berry, and sumack.” But, he said, “towards the west, as you approach the 99th meridian of longitude, the growth is almost exclusively cottonwood, and westward past that point, “the country changes almost imperceptibly, until it merges into the arid, barren wastes … with the occurrence of cacti and other spinose plants.”
The barometric readings he took each day showed they were on an almost indiscernible but steady climb, as their height above sea level rose from a thousand feet, to two thousand, to three, until they were traveling along barren plains three-quarters of a mile in the air. It was there that they saw their first buffalo.
At first only a small band of the beasts appeared, and they killed two of them for food, “at the expense of a couple of fine horses, which never recovered from the chase.f The next day,” Emory reported, “immense herds of the buffalo were seen. Except for the buffalo, game is very scarce, and cannot be depended upon to support a party of men, however small their number.” The buffalo, however, “where they range, may be relied upon to support a column of many thousand men, but their range is very uncertain.”g
The emptiness of the plains posed another problem, as Lieutenant Emory noted in his diary—the newfound absence of trees—in which “not one of these is seen in an entire day’s journey,” which in turn left buffalo dung (more palatably known to French explorers as bois de vache) as the only remaining fuel for cooking and warmth.
While this inspired a certain amount of gratitude among some—as opposed to having nothing whatsoever to cook with—it did not sit well with many, including George Rutledge Gibson, an erstwhile lawyer and newspaper publisher in Independence, who had been elected second lieutenant after volunteering in the Missouri regiment under Colonel Doniphan.
“Tonight we had to cook
with buffalo manure for the first time,” he recorded, adding that “the smell of the smoke is not agreeable, and some, rather than use it, went without cooking.” But after some days, he said, “we became used to it, except our cook, who preferred wood.”
For Gibson, and most of the others, it was not all some holiday excursion. Mile after mile they trudged, often covering twenty-five miles a day and more, as Kearny relentlessly pushed them to reach Santa Fe before it was reinforced by the authorities in Mexico City. One evening after a twenty-seven-mile forced march, Gibson’s feet were so swollen he had to cut his boots off. Many times they went without water for long periods, and their tongues swelled, and lips cracked, and mouths became “slimy.”
Men began dying. Some drowned crossing streams or from other mishaps, but most from illnesses that today would be routinely treated and easily cured. They were buried in their uniforms, most of them, wrapped in a winding sheet and left on the prairies with crude wood crosses carved with their names to mark the spot, their graves often covered by their friends with such stones as could be found to discourage digging by wolves and other creatures.
They were often plagued by swarms of gnats and grasshoppers—the former maddening with their singing whine, the latter repulsive as they were crunched and squashed under tramping feet—but the mosquitoes arrived as a biblical scourge.
One night, as darkness came, Susan Magoffin reported the mules and horses first became restive, then edgy, then frantic, as a perfect cloud of mosquitoes descended upon the caravan. The animals tore at their harnesses and many bolted. Susan herself recorded: “I found my feet covered with stings, and my dress full where they had gotten on me … millions upon millions were swarming around me, and their knocking against the carriage reminded me of a hard rain. It was equal to any of the plagues of Egypt.”
As she lay “in a stupor,” sick from the stings, her husband, who had tied up his head and neck with handkerchiefs, told her to “run if I could, with my shawl, bonnet and shoes on (and without opening my mouth—so as not to inhale them) … into the tent.” Once inside “they pushed me straight in under the mosquito bar” and “There I sat in my cage, like an imprisoned creature frightened half to death.”
By this time the summer heat was often close to a hundred degrees. Horses died by the scores. Jacob S. Robinson was a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, journalist who had found himself in St. Louis when war broke out and, apparently having nothing better to do, volunteered as a foot soldier in Doniphan’s regiment. About five weeks out, on the fourth of August, he reported that his company had traveled thirty miles from dawn to dusk. “This has been a trying day,” he wrote, “heat intense. A water mirage appears, but no water, and worst the dreaded Sirocco or hot wind blows, which burns us even through our clothes. Five horses died.” And two days later: “No grass was to be had; and eleven horses died.”
Practically everyone reported the mirages. Susan Magoffin tried to describe the sensation in her charming, schoolgirlish prose: “And for the first time I have seen the ‘Mirages’ or false-ponds. It is so deceiving to the eye, that the thirsty traveler often breaks from his party with anxious eyes to gain the long wished for luxury, but ere he reaches the brink it vanishes from his sight.” She was under the impression that the mirages were caused by “a surcharge of carbonic acid precipitated upon the flats and sinks of the plains, by the action of the sun.”
Lieutenant J. Henry Carleton, riding these same prairies, had a different theory: “The day being very hot and there not being a breath of wind, a mirage rose from the dry and sterile prairie which produced a crinkling motion of the air near the surface of the ground, similar in appearance to that arising from a heated stove. The line of sight being tremendously refracted by it,” he wrote, “every far off object had neither definite place or certain proportion. Every remote depression of the surface of the ground … seems to be covered with water … and the intervening elevations rising out of them like islands … a positive Polynesia in miniature—and not an illusion which the first shower or high wind might dissipate in a moment, and leave in its stead nothing but an arid and uneven waste.”
The men found Kearny a stern taskmaster but, in his favor, as a creature of the regular army, the general was sometimes nonplussed by the cavalier military bearing of the Missouri Volunteers. On one scorching July afternoon he confronted Private Robinson’s commanding officer, a Captain John Reid, while riding inspection.
“Captain, have your men no jackets?”
“Some have, some have not,” Reid said.
“Make your men put their jackets on, or I will dismiss them from the service,” Kearny rejoined.
“My men,” said the captain, loftily, “came here not to dress but to fight.”
Faced with this sensible response, Kearny wisely backed off. Still, his discipline could be harsh, as Robinson recorded: “Five men were tried by court-martial for insubordination, and sentenced each to carry forty pounds of sand every two alternate hours during the day.”
There was one thing everyone agreed on, however—the snakes. Once the wagons had gotten down the trail a few hundred miles from Fort Leavenworth, somewhere in the vicinity of Pawnee Rock, where the terrain became arid and the prairie dog towns began to appear, the countryside was crawling with rattlesnakes. Practically everyone who kept a journal mentions an encounter. Jacob Robinson, for instance, had found a beehive and he and his companions “were furnishing ourselves with honey,” when “one of our company, named Ferguson, was bitten by a rattle-snake.”
Robinson and the others “gave him rattle-snake’s master [apparently some kind of antidote, or perhaps a totem] and a quart of whiskey, which seemed to have little or no effect as to producing inebriation but soon relieved the pain of the bite and—’amazingly’—the man quickly recovered.”
As they passed through prairie dog country, Robinson noted that most of the prairie dog burrows were occupied by an owl and a rattlesnake in addition to the prairie dog. How and why these unlikely creatures kept house together was anybody’s guess.
Lieutenant Gibson reported on July 9: “After we got up this morning, we found a rattlesnake in our blankets. It had slept between the first lieutenant and myself, and near the captain’s face.”
On July 20: “We passed two large rattlesnakes in the road, killed by some person who preceded us.”
And on July 23: “We killed several rattlesnakes in our camp this evening, but none were found in our blankets this morning as anticipated.”
Susan Magoffin had taken “a little stroll” around camp with her maid one evening after dinner when she almost stepped on a large snake. She screamed and both took off, one from the other, the snake apparently frightened by being screamed at. Later she came back, timidly curious, to look for it, “but it had gone. I can’t tell where.” (Which probably made it worse.)
Aside from snakes, mosquitoes, hostile Indians, and drought, the trail was fraught with other perils. As the caravan approached Pawnee Rock, a little less than halfway to Santa Fe, they found themselves in what was—then as now—the tornado capital of the world. Pawnee Rock is (and likely was) statistically 158 percent more likely to see a tornado than the rest of the country. More than one of those keeping journals recorded that on the banks of the Arkansas River, where trees grew, a great many were knocked down and others had their tops blown out.
It was also nearby here that yet another travel hazard was discovered—a company of Missouri Volunteers on the march had been attacked, and routed, by a herd of buffalo.
Pawnee Rock was then a large, blufflike promontory where it was said that Indians, principally Pawnee, would gather to look out across the plains for buffalo herds (or encroaching enemy tribes or other trouble).h There was also a legend that a meager band of Pawnee had once fought to the last man there against an entire tribe of Comanche, in much the same fashion as a handful of Greek Spartans had conducted one of history’s most famous last stands during the Persian wars.
In any e
vent, Private Robinson and some of his comrades climbed the heights of Pawnee Rock to see what they could see, and “in this vicinity we saw the first great herd of buffaloes that we had met with. From the top I witnessed one of the grandest sights ever beheld. Far over the plain to the west and north was one vast herd of buffaloes; some in column, marching in their trails, others carelessly grazing. Every acre was covered, until in the dim distance the prairie became one black mass, from which there was no opening, and extended to the horizon.
“Every man was astonished,” Robinson wrote. “We had heard of the large numbers frequently seen, but had no idea such an innumerable herd could be gathered together. Most of them were traveling south, (probably for water) so as to come across our path.
“Their front ranks,” Robinson recounted, “very obligingly made way for us for about two miles,” and the men assumed the buffalo would behave like a herd of cattle. But instead: “As the main body moved on they could be kept off no longer. They rushed through our ranks, throwing us into complete confusion; stopped further progress of our wagons; and though an hundred shots were fired at them, we could not drive them away until the crowd passed.”
Thoroughly shaken, the soldiers called it a day and sat down to supper. “We killed 40 of them—cooking our meat with buffalo-dung, which burns as well as charcoal.”
In the meanwhile, Kearny had taken ill, from what we do not know, as was so frequently the case in those times. We do know that on July 20 he was able to ride only eight miles before having to dismount. Next day he requisitioned a ride in Lieutenant Emory’s wagon, which had been equipped with springs to protect his delicate scientific instruments; this allowed him to proceed with his army. They were then halfway to Santa Fe and whatever lay in store for them there.
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