by H. W. Brands
The sun sank low in the west. The first wagons reached the place where the pilot waited, and where he directed the forming of the nighttime circle. Everyone knew the routine by now. “The leading wagons follow him so nearly around the circle that but a wagon length separates them. Each wagon follows its track, the rear closing on the front, until its tongue and ox-chains will perfectly reach from one to the other, and so accurate the measure and perfect the practice that the hindmost wagon of the train always precisely closes the gateway, as each wagon is brought into position.” The circling took but ten minutes.
Dinner fires were kindled. Families settled in for the night. But as the sun touched the horizon many eyes looked back along the trail for the wagon left behind. In the waning light it appeared. “The absent wagon rolls into camp, the bright, speaking face and cheery look of the doctor, who rides in advance, declare without words that all is well, and both mother and child”—the latter, newborn, the cause of the halt—“are comfortable.”
The evening routine unfolded. Dinner completed, the men gathered to smoke their pipes, the women to talk of the child born that day, the children to play inside the circle of the wagons. “Before a tent near the river a violin makes lively music, and some youths and maidens have improvised a dance upon the green; in another quarter a flute gives its mellow and melancholy notes to the still night air, which, as they float away over the quiet river, seem a lament for the past rather than a hope for the future.” The day has been a good one: twenty miles traveled, and a life added to this moving village.
“Time passes; the watch is set for the night; the council of old men has been broken up and each has returned to his own quarter; the flute has whispered its last lament to the deepening night; the violin is silent, and the dancers have dispersed; enamored youth have whispered a tender good-night in the ear of blushing maidens.” The last fires were banked, and the firefly glow of the pipes winked out. Silence settled upon the weary travelers.
Camp on the Oregon Trail. This is a stylized version of part of the daily routine. The women and children must be elsewhere.
IN MID-JULY THE TRAIN REACHED FORT LARAMIE. SOME OF the members reprovisioned, at a steep cost. Coffee sold for $1.50 a pint, and brown sugar the same. Rough flour ran 25 cents a pound and lead 75 cents. Complaints at the high prices were greeted with shrugs and a warning that prices would only mount the farther the emigrants got from civilization.
The party met a band of Cheyennes at Fort Laramie, headed by an impressive chief. “He was a tall, trim, noble-looking Indian, aged about thirty,” Peter Burnett remarked. “He went alone very freely among our people, and I happened to meet him at one of our camps, where there was a foolish, rash young man, who wantonly insulted the chief. Though the chief did not understand the insulting words, he clearly comprehended the insulting tone and gestures.” Burnett watched him carefully, fearing the worst. “He made no reply in words, but walked away slowly, and when some twenty feet from the man who had insulted him, he turned around and solemnly and slowly shook the forefinger of his right hand at the young man several times, as much as to say, ‘I will attend to your case.’”
Burnett would prove to be an able politician when he reached the West; now he showed some of the skills that would serve him then. “I saw there was trouble coming, and I followed the chief, and by kind earnest gestures made him understand at last that this young man was considered by us all as a half-witted fool, unworthy of the notice of any sensible man; and that we never paid attention to what he said, as we hardly considered him responsible for his language.” Burnett was relieved to discover that his diplomacy was working. “The moment the chief comprehended my meaning I saw a change come over his countenance, and he went away perfectly satisfied. He was a clear-headed man; and, though unlettered, he understood human nature.”
Other Indians occasioned worry. A party of several dozen Kansas and Osage warriors looked fearsome. “They were all mounted on horses, had their faces painted red, and had with them one Pawnee scalp, with the ears to it, and with the wampum in them.” They also looked hungry. The party’s paid guide, John Gantt, counseled the emigrants to give the Indians some provisions as a gesture of goodwill. Otherwise they would steal the cattle they wanted. Burnett and the others accepted the recommendation. “We deemed this not only good advice but good humanity, and furnished the starving warriors with enough provisions to satisfy their hunger.”
For the most part the Indians were content to keep their distance from the train. “They must have been impressed with a due sense of our power,” Burnett wrote. “Our long line of wagons, teams, cattle, and men, on the smooth plains and under the clear skies of the Platte, made a most grand appearance. They had never before seen any spectacle like it.”
THEY GOT TO FORT HALL IN LATE AUGUST. BURNETT BEGAN to wonder that anyone had ever thought the journey to Oregon difficult. “Up to this point the route over which we passed was perhaps the finest natural road, of the same length, to be found anywhere in the world,” he wrote.
He was assured that things would change. Marcus Whitman had been traveling with the group but not leading it; at Fort Hall he assumed charge from John Gantt, who hadn’t intended to proceed farther. Whitman informed the emigrants that the road grew more difficult to the west.
They took the lesson almost too much to heart. “We had many misgivings as to our ultimate success in making our way with our wagons, teams, and families,” Burnett recalled. “We had yet to accomplish the untried and most difficult portion of our long and exhaustive journey. We could not anticipate at what moment we might be compelled to abandon our wagons in the mountains, pack our scant supplies upon our poor oxen, and make our way on foot through this terribly rough country as best we could.”
Whitman now bucked them up. “Dr. Whitman assured us that we could succeed, and encouraged and aided us with every means in his power.” Burnett sought a second opinion. He asked Richard Grant, the Hudson’s Bay Company trader at Fort Hall, what he thought. Could wagons get through to the Columbia?
Grant was circumspectly discouraging. “He replied that, while he would not say it was impossible for us Americans to make the trip with our wagons, he could not himself see how it could be done. He had only traveled the pack-trail, and certainly no wagon could follow that route; but there might be a practical road found by leaving the trail at certain points.”
Some of the party, young men without families, preemptively ditched their wagons in favor of pack animals and forged ahead of the main group. Burnett and the rest lightened the loads in their own wagons and pressed on. “The road was rocky and rough,” Burnett recalled of the track across the Snake Valley. Where it wasn’t rocky it was covered with thickets of sage or wormwood, three feet high and a nuisance for the lead wagons to get through. The lead wagons beat down the sage bushes but also pulverized the soil. “It was very soft on the surface and easily worked up into a most disagreeable dust, as fine as ashes or flour.” Fortunately the dry climate rendered the sage less sturdy than bushes that grew in the East. “Had the sage been as stout and hard as other shrubbery of the same size, we should have been compelled to cut our wagonway through it and could never have passed over it as we did, crushing it beneath the feet of our oxen and the wheels of our wagons.”
THEY REACHED FORT BOISE ON SEPTEMBER 20. THE SEASON was late and they didn’t tarry. They forded the Snake River where the water was worrisomely deep but not swift; they got over without mishap. An incident on the Powder River, at a place called Lone Pine, oddly deflated Burnett. “This noble tree stood in the center of a most lovely valley, about ten miles from any other timber,” he wrote. “It could be seen at the distance of many miles, rearing its majestic form above the surrounding plain, and constituted a beautiful landmark for the guidance of the traveler. Many teams had passed on before me; and at intervals, as I drove along, I would raise my head and look at that beautiful green pine.” Burnett drove farther, his mind wandering. Then he looked again toward th
e tree and had a shock. “The tree was gone. I was perplexed for the moment to know whether I was going in the right direction.” The wagon tracks said he was, and he kept on until he discovered the cause of the disappearance. “That brave old pine, which had withstood the storms and snows of centuries, had fallen at last by vandal hands of men. Some of our inconsiderate people had cut it down for fuel.” But the wood was too green to burn, and the vandals availed nothing by their crime. “It was a useless and most unfortunate act.”
The Blue Mountains were a trial that contained a treasure. “On October 1st we came into and through the Grande Ronde, one of the most beautiful valleys in the world,” Burnett wrote. “It was generally rich prairie, covered with luxuriant grass and having numerous beautiful streams passing through it, most of which rise from springs at the foot of the mountains bordering the valley.” The Nez Perce gathered camas root in the valley, and they were willing to share. “We purchased some from them, and found it quite palatable to our keen appetites.”
The last leg to the Columbia, descending the Blue Mountains, was the most difficult. “These hills were terrible,” Burnett recalled. A snowstorm on October 5 made the bad situation worse. “We had great difficulty in finding our cattle, and the road was very rough.” Again the natives helped out. “From the Indians were purchased Indian corn, peas, and Irish potatoes in any desired quantity. I have never tasted a greater luxury than the potatoes we ate on this occasion.” Burnett didn’t comment on the fact that the potatoes he so enjoyed weren’t part of the Indians’ traditional cuisine; rather, they and the corn and peas were products of the agricultural techniques learned from Whitman and his fellow missionaries. But the Nez Perce had long been traders, and they had integrated the new goods into their stock-in-trade. Burnett was glad they did. “We gave the Indians, in exchange, some articles of clothing, which they were most anxious to purchase. When two parties are both as anxious to barter as were the Indians and ourselves, it is very easy to strike a bargain.”
They reached Waiilatpu on October 10 weary and still hungry but whole. Burnett remembered with embarrassment that some of his party did not behave well toward their recent guide and current host. “The exhausting tedium of such a trip and the attendant vexations have a great effect upon the majority of men, especially upon those of weak minds. Men, under such circumstances, become childish, petulant, and obstinate. I remember that while we were at the mission of Dr. Whitman, who had performed much hard labor for us and was deserving of our warmest gratitude, he was most ungenerously accused by some of our people of selfish motives in conducting us past his establishment, where we could procure fresh supplies of flour and potatoes. This foolish, false, and ungrateful charge was based upon the fact that he asked us a dollar a bushel for wheat and forty cents for potatoes.” The emigrants, before leaving home, had been used to receiving half that for their produce. “They thought the prices demanded by the Doctor amounted to something like extortion, not reflecting that he had to pay at least twice as much for his own supplies of merchandise and could not afford to sell his produce as low as they did theirs at home.” Burnett felt personally the cost of his fellow travelers’ outrage. “So obstinate were some of our people that they would not purchase of the Doctor. I remember one case particularly, where an intimate friend of mine, whose supplies were nearly exhausted, refused to purchase, though urged to do so by me, until the wheat was all sold. The consequence was that I had to divide provisions with him before we reached the end of our journey.”
23
THE BUSINESS OF THE TRAIL
OF THE CAUSES PROPELLING EMIGRANTS TO OREGON, THE most commonly mentioned was the desire to regain lost health. The Mississippi Valley, the source of the bulk of the emigration, was notorious for the toll it took on the health of the men and women who lived there. Winters were often cold and snowy, and for farmers, whose work required them to spend hours outdoors every day, the cold triggered or aggravated ailments of the lungs, joints and muscles. Summers were worse, with sweltering heat, oppressive humidity, and malaria, cholera, typhoid fever and other diseases transmitted by insects or carried by water. In an era of medical ignorance and misinformation, doctors could do little besides alleviate symptoms and often couldn’t do that. People of means traveled to spas, which afforded temporary relief to the few. Oregon, by contrast, promised relief to the many. To be sure, getting to Oregon was a challenge, but once there, the health-seekers hoped, the equable climate, the salubrious winds off the Pacific and the dearth of endemic diseases would do what nostrums and medical men couldn’t.
“The health of Mrs. Thornton and myself caused us to determine upon a residence in Oregon, with the hope that its pure and invigorating climate would restore this inestimable blessing we had long lost,” Quinn Thornton wrote of their decision to strike west. “Having completed the necessary preparations, we departed from Quincy, Illinois, April 18, 1846. In due time we arrived at Independence, Missouri, the place of rendezvous.” Thornton was a lawyer and erstwhile editor who knew Thomas Benton, the Missouri champion of Oregon. Benton had set Thornton thinking about Oregon, and when Thornton and his wife, Nancy, couldn’t shake the ailments that nagged them in Quincy, they headed west.
By 1846, Independence, Missouri, had become the departure point for the westward journey, and it furnished a sight for curious eyes. “The town of Independence was at this time a great Babel upon the border of the wilderness,” Thornton remarked. “Here might be seen the African slave with his shining black face, driving his six-horse team of blood-red bays, and swaying from side to side as he sat upon the saddle and listened to the incessant tinkling of the bells.… Here might be seen the indolent dark-skinned Spaniard smoking a cigar as he leans against the sunny side of a house. He wears a sharp conical hat with a red band, a blue round-about, with little brass buttons; his duck pantaloons are open at the side as high as the knee, exhibiting his white cotton drawers between his knee and the top of his low half-boots.” Independence was a crossroads of commerce, with traders and their vehicles coming and going. Lumbering Spanish-style wagons rolled in from Santa Fe carrying as much as seven thousand pounds of cargo; their great height and the canvas covers that peaked in the front and rear made them look like ships of the prairie. The merchants of Independence bought from the Santa Fe traders and sold to the Oregon emigrants, at a markup that shocked the emigrants until they experienced prices farther west.
The adventure of westering had become an efficient business by now, and the outfitters of Independence knew what to sell to those with the means to buy. Thornton tallied the vital statistics of the train to which he and his wife attached themselves: “Wagons, 72; men, 130; women, 65; children, 125; breadstuff, 69,420 lbs.; bacon, 40,200 lbs.; powder, 1100 lbs.; lead, 2672 lbs.; guns, mostly rifles, 155; pistols, 104; cattle and horses, estimated at 710.”
Their train looked fit for the enterprise. “The wagons were generally new, strong, and well-painted,” Thornton wrote. “They were all covered with strong linen or cotton drilling; some of them being painted, so as more effectually to repel the rain.” Not everyone was going to Oregon; a minority were bound for California. The latter, including a party headed by a man named Donner, would veer southwest on the far side of the Rockies. “Some of the wagons had ‘California’ painted on the cover; some of them displayed ‘Oregon’; some added, in large letters, ‘The whole or none’; some ‘54-40.’” The last two slogans referred to the demand that the United States claim all of the Oregon country, leaving none for Britain.
The anticipation of danger had largely disappeared from the westward trek by this time. Thornton noted, instead, a festive feeling. “All persons were remarkably cheerful and happy. Many were almost boisterous in their mirth. We were nearly all strangers, and there was manifestly an effort on the part of each to make the most favorable impression he could upon every other.”
THE JOURNEY UP THE PLATTE WAS NOW PREDICTABLE, BUT it brought experiences new to the individual emigrants. Quinn Thornto
n and his train endured thunderstorms like none they had ever seen. “The early part of the day had been clear and warm, but about 12 o’clock the clouds began to gather and lower in the west,” he wrote on May 21. “In a short time, peals of thunder were heard in the distance, the intervals between them gradually diminishing and the sound as gradually becoming louder. The clouds continued to roll toward the zenith, with green edges, but dark and murky in the main body, and to sweep upward like a vast body of smoke ascending from a smoldering volcano. In a brief period the sun was obscured. A green haziness began to fill the atmosphere and the whole distance between the moving clouds and the earth, and to throw a sort of dull green disastrous twilight upon all below. The lightning, followed by sharp peals of thunder, was observed at length to leap from cloud to cloud, like the advance columns of approaching armies engaging in a sharp conflict. A murmuring sound of a somewhat extraordinary nature was heard in the west, which became each moment more distinct, as of marshaling hosts rapidly preparing for dreadful conflict. In a very few minutes, a blasting flash of lightning, and a deafening crash of thunder, seemed to give the signal for a general and terrible engagement. The wind blew a tremendous blast, which laid the weeds and grass prostrate to the earth, and immediately the air was filled with flying leaves and twigs, swept before the advancing tempest. The winds passed on, and heaven’s artillery seemed at once to open from every cloud, and immediately the earth was deluged with torrents of rain. Flash followed flash in rapid succession, casting a lurid glare upon every object; and thunder warred upon thunder, in a manner that awed every faculty and hushed every emotion and feeling but that of the sublime.”
