The Texans won the battle in just eighteen minutes. And they did remember the Alamo and Goliad—maybe too well. It took Houston’s officers a while to get the Texans to stop killing Mexican soldiers. When it was all over, nearly six hundred Mexicans were dead, compared with only nine Texans.
Texas soldiers caught Santa Anna (he was trying to escape disguised as a Mexican private), and the Mexican leader agreed to pull his troops out of Texas. So that was that—Texas had its independence. Some Texans were hoping to join the United States, but for now Texas was an independent country. We’ll keep an eye on the situation.
Meanwhile, since we’re speaking of land that was not yet part of the United States …
Honeymoon in Oregon
It was a busy week for Narcissa Prentiss. This young schoolteacher from a small New York town got married on February 18, 1836. The next day, she and her husband, Marcus Whitman, set out for their new home in the Oregon Country—on the other side of the continent.
The Oregon Country (the area that now makes up Oregon, Washington, and Idaho) was a huge section of land claimed by both Great Britain and the United States. Both basically said, I saw it first! But aside from a few mountain men, no one from Britain or the United States was actually living there. The Whitmans were about to help change that. Their plan was to settle in Oregon and work as missionaries, teaching Christianity to the Walla Walla, Spokane, Nez Perce, and other Native Americans of the region.
In her journal Narcissa called the trip to Oregon “an unheard of journey for females.” She was right. No American woman had ever made this 2,400-mile trek across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains.
As if it were not going to be difficult enough, Narcissa found out at the last second that she and her husband would be traveling with two other missionaries: Henry Spalding and his new wife, Eliza. Henry had asked Narcissa to marry him a few years before, and she had turned him down. He was still bitter about it. So Narcissa knew there would be some awkward moments as the two couples shared a tent for months on their way west.
Luckily, the challenges of the trip kept everyone pretty busy. Buzzing clouds of mosquitoes and fleas surrounded the couples as their wagons bounced across the plains. There were no trees, which meant no shade from the burning sun, and no wood to make fires. In a letter to her sister, Harriet, and brother, Edward, Narcissa explained how they managed to cook:
“Our fuel for cooking … has been dried buffalo dung. We now find plenty of it and it answers a very good purpose, similar to the kind of coal used in Pennsylvania. I suppose Harriet will make a face at this, but if she was here she would be glad to have her supper cooked at any rate.”
Narcissa Whitman
Their food was mainly buffalo meat, which everyone got sick of after a few weeks. “I thought of Mother’s bread and butter many times,” Narcissa wrote. The only really dangerous moment came when Eliza’s horse took a wrong step. “Yesterday my horse became unmanageable in consequence of stepping into a hornets’ nest,” Eliza explained. She was thrown from the horse, but that wasn’t the worst part. “My foot remained a moment in the stirrup, and my body dragged some distance,” she said.
You had to be tough to cross the continent, and Eliza obviously was—she was back on the trail the next day.
After six long months of traveling, the Whitmans and Spaldings reached the Oregon Country. We’ll check back with them later. For now, the important thing to know is that their journey helped show Americans that women and families could travel safely to Oregon. The route they had taken became known as the Oregon Trail. And over the next few years, thousands of families set out on the trail, hoping to claim a piece of rich Oregon farmland.
Manifest Destiny Declared
By 1840 Americans knew about the Rocky Mountains from mountain men and had heard all about New Mexico from traveling merchants. Settlers in Texas and Oregon sent back letters describing land that was fertile and cheap. Many Americans began to think, Wouldn’t it be nice if all that land were ours?
Lots of them believed it should be. Some were convinced that God wanted it that way—that it was God’s plan to have the American style of democracy spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. This idea was summed up by the journalist John O’Sullivan: “The American claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”
The phrase manifest destiny soon became famous (manifest means “clear to see” or “obvious”). O’Sullivan was saying that it was clearly the destiny of the United States to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Was he right? James K. Polk thought so.
“Who Is James K. Polk?”
When leaders of the Democratic Party met to choose a presidential candidate in 1844, they couldn’t agree on anyone they really liked. So they decided to compromise on someone they sort of liked—a former Tennessee governor named James K. Polk.
The leaders of the Whig Party—the other major political party in the United States at that time—were thrilled to be running against this guy. The Whigs’ campaign motto was “Who is James K. Polk?”
He may not have been too famous, but Polk was very clear about what he would do if elected. A strong believer in manifest destiny, Polk insisted that the United States should immediately annex Texas (make it part of the United States, in other words). Then, he said, we should force Great Britain to give up its claims to Oregon. Then we’ll buy the rest of the West from Mexico.
These popular ideas helped Polk win a close election (at forty-nine, he was the youngest president to be elected up to that point). He took over as president in March 1845, getting right to work on his plans to expand the United States. In fact, he worked so quickly that in just a few days he nearly started two wars.
First the United States annexed Texas, which brought cheers from Texas and howls of anger from the Mexican capital. Many Mexicans still thought of Texas as part of their country, and they considered the American annexation a cause for war.
James K. Polk?
British leaders, meanwhile, refused Polk’s demands that they give up claims to Oregon. The British government started making threats and preparing to fight.
Polk’s reply? He was ready to fight both countries at once.
Exploring with the Blockheads
But even the threat of war didn’t stop Americans from heading west. If it was the United States’ manifest destiny to own the West, American leaders figured they might as well find out what was there. Up to that point, there were no accurate maps of most of the West. The powerful senator Thomas Hart Benton gave the job of making new maps to a young man named John Frémont (whose main qualification for mapping the West was that he was Benton’s son-in-law).
Frémont put together a team of explorers, including a German mapmaker named Charles Preuss. Preuss was not what you would call an outdoorsman. The moment the crew set out from St. Louis, he began whining about the aches in his body from riding on horses and sleeping on hard ground. Some of his early journal entries tell of other complaints:
“Weather good. Food bad.”
“I wish I were in Washington with my old girl.”
“I wish I had a drink.”
When the men killed an ox for food, Preuss wrote these entries in his journal:
June 12: Some of the men tried to eat the liver raw. I was
satisfied with bread and coffee; I am not yet so hungry that
I would gulp down very fresh meat, which is repulsive to me.
Tomorrow, to be sure, it will taste excellent.
June 13: It did not taste excellent.
And speaking of food, Preuss noted, when they did get some decent meat, the cook always ruined it. “That fool had packed neither sugar nor salt nor pepper,” wrote Pruess. “What good is the best food stuff if one cannot prepare it properly?”
As they headed farther west that summer, it got unbearably hot and buggy. T
hen there were endless and exhausting climbs into the Rocky Mountains. “No supper, no breakfast, little or no sleep,” Preuss wrote. “Who can enjoy climbing a mountain under these circumstances?”
He was particularly annoyed that Frémont kept stopping to collect samples of rocks and plants. “That fellow knows nothing about mineralogy or botany,” wrote Preuss. “Yet he collects every trifle … . Let him collect as much as he wants—if he would only not make us wait for our meal … . Oh, you American blockheads!”
Preuss’s only kind words were for a small group of Indians who saved him when he got lost in the desert and was dying of hunger. “I walked straight up to them, sat down among them, and gave them to understand that I was hungry,” he wrote. “They immediately served me acorns, some of which I ate, and others I put in my pocket. When they saw this, they themselves filled both my pockets.”
He may have been miserable, but Preuss was a very good mapmaker (and he needed the job to support his family). Suffering through three long journeys across the West in the 1840s, Preuss produced the most accurate maps yet of the region. The maps were published along with Frémont’s journals—which Frémont’s wife, Jesse, rewrote for him when he got home.
These maps and journals became huge best sellers. They got Americans even more interested in all that land to the west.
Oregon Fever Rages
The idea of moving to Oregon was especially exciting. “The Oregon fever is raging in almost every part of the union,” reported one newspaper.
It was hard for easterners to resist the fever when they heard tales of Oregon’s mild climate and fertile soil. One farmer listened to a land promoter trying to persuade people to move to Oregon:
“They do say, gentlemen, they do say that out in Oregon the pigs are running about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry.”
No one really believed that (let’s hope), but thousands of families were convinced that they could build a better life in Oregon. Actually, by reading diaries from that time, we see that it was almost always the husbands who made the decision to move west. Wives were often more reluctant to leave their friends and family behind, knowing they would probably never see each other again. “Dr. Wilson has determined to go,” wrote a young woman named Margaret Wilson. “I am going with him, as there is no other alternative.”
Once the decision was made, the next step was to pack up a wagon and head to Missouri, where the Oregon Trail began. There you could stock up on important supplies like flour, bacon, sugar, coffee, and barrels of water. And you could team up with other families and hire a guide, usually an out-of-work mountain man. Mountain men had killed off most of the beavers in the West, but now they found new careers guiding families along the Oregon Trail.
Are We There Yet?
Even with an expert guide, this was an exhausting and dangerous 2,400-mile trip. Dragged forward by oxen, wagons rocked along at a top speed of two miles an hour. Men kept busy herding the families’ farm animals, repairing the wagons, and hunting for dinner. Women worked even harder, getting up at four a.m. to start breakfast, then working all day and late into the night—cooking, cleaning, washing and mending clothes, taking care of young children …
Bigger kids walked alongside the wagon, lightening the load a little for the poor oxen. As they walked, children had the key job of collecting buffalo chips, which were used for cooking fuel. The chips burned quickly, so they had to gather huge piles of them for every meal.
Once they were out on what seemed like the endless Great Plains, many families started wishing they had packed a bit lighter. They wondered, Do we really need this heavy kitchen table? Wouldn’t we move a bit faster without these extra chairs? Desperate to speed up their journey, they started tossing stuff out the backs of their wagons, littering the road to Oregon with a trail of furniture, mirrors, tools, stoves, beds, and clothing.
Aside from simply being sick of traveling, families had another reason for wanting to move quickly. “During the entire trip Indians were a source of anxiety, we being never sure of their friendship,” explained one traveler. It was a relief to discover that Native Americans were much more interested in trading with travelers than attacking them. The two main causes of death for early Oregon Trail travelers might surprise you. Number one: gun accidents. Number two: drowning while trying to cross rivers.
As more and more travelers crowded the trail, a new problem became clear—to both eyes and noses. The route was dotted with countless mounds of human waste. “The stench is sometimes almost unendurable,” said a traveler named Charlotte Pengra. These stinky piles polluted water supplies, helping to spread deadly diseases. Disease soon became the deadliest danger on the Oregon Trail. Just ask Catherine Sager.
The Sad Sager Saga
Catherine Sager was nine years old when she and her father, pregnant mother, and five brothers and sisters set out on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1844. Soon after starting, her mother gave birth to a baby girl. Then they got right back on the road.
Catherine was expecting a tough journey, but she was surprised by the first major problem the family faced: seasickness. “The motion of the wagon made us all sick,” she remembered. “It was weeks before we got used to the seasick motion.”
Once they got used to the bouncing, the Sager kids came up with travel games, like jumping in and out of the wagon while it was moving. It was lots of fun—until one day in August:
“When performing this feat that afternoon my dress caught … and I was thrown under the wagon wheels, both of which passed over me, badly crushing the left leg, before father could stop the oxen.”
Catherine Sager
Catherine’s father leaped down and scooped up his daughter. “My dear child,” he cried, “your leg is broken all to pieces!” A doctor from another wagon put her leg in a cast. Then they got right back on the road.
From then on Catherine rode in the wagon, or walked alongside on crutches (that shows you how slow the oxen were—she could keep up on crutches!). Anyway, this turned out to be the good part of the trip. Catherine’s father soon caught a fever, grew weaker and weaker, and died. He was buried along the trail. Less than a month later, her mother got sick (she had never fully recovered from a difficult childbirth). She died and was also buried by the trail.
“So in twenty-six days we became orphans,” Catherine wrote. “Seven children of us, the oldest fourteen and the youngest a babe.” Too far west to turn back, they had no choice but to get back in their wagon and continue on to Oregon. Other families on the trail helped the Sager children prepare food and take care of their baby sister. All seven Sager kids made it to Oregon, where they were dropped off at the home of Narcissa and Marcus Whitman—the missionaries who had traveled to Oregon almost ten years before.
“She spoke kindly to us as she came up,” Catherine said of her first meeting with Narcissa Whitman. “But like frightened things we ran behind the cart, peeping shyly around at her.”
Whitman asked the boys why they were crying. They told her.
“Poor boys, no wonder you weep!” she said.
The Whitmans took in all seven Sagers. The children found Narcissa Whitman kind and generous, though very strict. Catherine’s sister Matilda explained how Narcissa ran her house: “She would point to one of us, then point to the dishes or the broom, and we would instantly get busy.”
Which Way to California?
Americans continued moving west for all the usual reasons—the desire for land, the hunger for adventure, the need to find work or escape debt. A twenty-one-year-old teacher named John Bidwell had a slightly stranger motive. When he came home to his Missouri farm after summer vacation, some other guy was living there! The guy claimed the farm was his now—and did so while pointing a shotgun at Bidwell’s chest.
That’s when Bidwell decided to move west.
He knew about Oregon, of course, but he had a
lso heard interesting stories of California, a vast land of mountains and grassy valleys in northern Mexico. There was only one problem. “Our ignorance of the route was complete,” Bidwell confessed. “We knew that California lay west, and that was the extent of our knowledge.”
He was right about the west part. California stretched along the western coast of North America for eight hundred miles. Growing up in California in the early 1800s, Guadalupe Vallejo spent his childhood riding the open spaces between ranches and towns. “We traveled as much as possible on horseback,” he said. “Every one seemed to live outdoors.”
“We were the pioneers of the Pacific coast, building towns and missions while General Washington was carrying on the war of the Revolution.”
Guadalupe Vallejo
Vallejo’s history was correct: the Spanish had founded San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the late 1700s. Vallejo lived near San Francisco Bay, enjoying parties, dances, feasts, bullfights, and rodeos. He even liked the grizzly bears. “The young Spanish gentlemen often rode out on moonlit nights to lasso these bears,” Vallejo said, “and then they would drag them through the village street, and past the houses of their friends.”
Of course, there’s always another side to the story. The reason Spanish families had so much time for fun was that they forced Native Americans to do most of the hard work of running ranches and farms.
By the 1840s California was home to about 7,000 Spanish settlers and 150,000 Native Americans—and a growing number of Americans. The American teacher John Bidwell made it to California, barely surviving tornadoes and hailstorms, flooding rivers, and torturous thirst. (At one point in the desert, the only water he could find was so muddy and smelly, he had to brew it into coffee before his horses would drink it.)
Which Way to the Wild West? Page 3
