Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The train met a small band of Indians; the experienced captain convinced the travelers to pay a toll—a bribe—lest the Indians steal the train’s cattle. A second, larger band got no bribe but an armed display of determination by the men of the train; the captain reckoned that their price would have been too high. The Indians suddenly acted friendly. “Indians are generally cowards,” Thornton wrote dismissively. “They will seldom fight without a decided advantage in numbers, weapons, or position.”

  Thornton witnessed a wedding of two young lovers among the emigrants. He heard the moans of a woman in childbirth and the first cries of the newborn. He assisted in the amputation of the gangrenous leg of a young man who scarcely flinched while the amateur surgeon hacked at flesh and bone with a butcher knife. He helped bury the brave lad when the loss of blood carried him off.

  Just west of South Pass, he bade farewell to the Donners and the rest of their California-bound party. The party had heard from a man named Hastings about a shortcut that would speed their journey and get them across the Sierra Nevada before the winter’s snow set in. Most were delighted at the news, but George Donner’s wife had misgivings. “She was gloomy, sad, and dispirited, in view of the fact her husband and others could think for a moment of leaving the old road and confide in the statement of a man of whom they knew nothing, but who was probably some selfish adventurer,” Thornton observed. Yet Mrs. Donner’s doubts were overruled, and the Donners marched off to the southwest.

  FEW OF THE EMIGRANTS WERE WHOLLY IMMUNE TO THE allure of faster, surer routes to their destination. By 1846 the most difficult stretch of the trail to Oregon—the section of the journey that broke the most hearts and claimed the most lives—was the final two hundred miles. Getting wagons to the Columbia was by now almost mundane, if still wearisome; but getting wagons down the Columbia was as dangerous as ever. Some of the emigrants didn’t even try, instead leaving their wagons above the Dalles and packing their goods on boats that risked the falls and rapids. Some removed the wheels from their wagons and placed the wagon boxes aboard rafts that tried the descent. The emigrants themselves typically walked around the biggest drops, but many rode partway through the swift water, and a dismaying number drowned in the attempt.

  Quinn Thornton had heard about the perils of the Columbia, and consequently he listened to Jesse Applegate describe a route that circumvented the river. Applegate had reached the Willamette Valley with the emigrants of 1843 and become a leader among the small but growing community there. Most recalled with shudders their experience of the Columbia and asked how others might be spared. Most, too, wished to ensure that the new emigrants reach the Willamette Valley and bolster the community there, enhancing business opportunities, raising property values and generally rewarding the first settlers for their pioneering efforts. American nationalism entered the reckoning as well. Many of the settlers resented the continuing influence of John McLoughlin and the Hudson’s Bay Company; by diverting new emigrants from the Columbia River and hence Fort Vancouver, the settlers could keep the emigrants out of McLoughlin’s clutches.

  Prompted by such motives, the Willamette men sent Jesse Applegate and several comrades to blaze a new trail to the Willamette Valley. Applegate and the others proceeded backward—that is, they started in the Willamette Valley and worked toward the Oregon Trail east of its intersection with the Columbia. The Applegate party headed south, up the Willamette, before crossing the Cascade Mountains and eventually striking Ogden’s River, as the modern Humboldt River was often called. They ascended Ogden’s River in a northeasterly direction and then crossed into the watershed of the Snake River. In early August 1846 they reached Fort Hall, where they met the Thornton train.

  Applegate pitched his route as an appealing alternative to the Columbia River. “Applegate affirmed the following things, among others,” Thornton recorded. “1. That the distance to Oregon, via the Dalles Mission, was from 800 to 850 miles. 2. That the distance by his cut-off was estimated by him to be at least 200 miles less than that route. 3. That the party who had explored the new route with him estimated it at even 300 miles nearer. 4. That the whole distance was better supplied with water and grass than the old road. 5. That it was not more than 190 or 200 miles to the point at which his cut-off left Ogden’s River. 6. That the road was generally smooth and, with the exception of a dry drive of thirty miles, well-supplied with an abundance of good water, grass, and fuel.”

  Thornton had doubts, starting with the military titles Applegate and the others had conferred upon themselves. “The affair had an altogether too warlike aspect; here was Colonel Ford and Major Goff, and Major Harris, and Captain Applegate, and Captain Scott, in addition to majors, captains, and colonels that I may have forgotten.” And there was something about Applegate himself. “I know not how it was, but, without being able to assign a very definite reason for my opinion, beyond having its origin in the expression of the man’s countenance, I did not confide in his statements. I suspected that he was influenced by some motive purely selfish.”

  Yet others in the train found Applegate persuasive, and the thought of avoiding the Columbia, while saving hundreds of miles in the bargain, was more than they could resist. They voted to take the Applegate cutoff, and Thornton acceded to the group’s decision.

  “We resumed our journey, the most of our party being greatly elated with the prospect of good roads, fine grass, excellent water, and of having a road at least 200 miles shorter than the old one,” Thornton wrote. Again and again he heard his fellow emigrants express thanks for their good luck in meeting Applegate and being able to benefit from his selfless enterprise.

  ALL WENT WELL AT FIRST. “WATER AND GRASS GOOD; DRY willows sufficiently abundant for fuel,” Thornton wrote on August 12. One of the travelers died the next day, but the death did little to detract from the hopefulness of the train.

  The days grew hotter and the vegetation thinner. Sage and cactus supplanted less hardy flora. Some of the travelers had second thoughts and reverted to the main trail. “We were thus reduced to seven wagons,” Thornton wrote. The route, dusty and smooth till now, was filled with boulders. “We passed over a portion of road so rocky and rough that I did not believe it possible to get the wagons over without dashing them to pieces.”

  Another man died, leaving a wife and three children. The death inspired reflections in Thornton he hadn’t experienced at previous deaths. “This man had been my fellow-traveler upon the road,” he observed. “And it was with an unusual interest that I now halted my team and pondered the question as to whether he had safely and prosperously terminated his weary pilgrimage.” Thornton couldn’t say, and he soon drove on.

  The Indians along Ogden’s River were the same Paiutes, or Diggers, who had evoked Joe Meek’s lethal scorn. Thornton thought no better of them. “The Indians along the whole length of this river are very troublesome,” he recorded. “They steal the cattle and conceal themselves behind the rocks and bushes, from which they assail the emigrant and his stock with their poisoned arrows.” A clash occurred in which a number of the Indians were killed and several emigrants wounded. Thornton watched one of the latter die most painfully as the poison of an arrow worked through his system.

  The route by Ogden’s River stretched farther than Applegate had promised. Applegate himself was nowhere to be seen, having ridden ahead to clear the road. Thornton and others of the party thought they must have missed a northward turn. Yet they pressed on, reluctant to retreat and yield ground they had already traversed. After a few more days one of Applegate’s comrades, David Goff, appeared from the west and said they were on the right course and he would guide them the rest of the way. The relief of Thornton and the others at this news was tempered by the knowledge that they had already gone much farther than the two hundred miles Applegate had said was the distance from Fort Hall to the turn. Thornton wondered what else Applegate had misrepresented.

  He soon found out. Applegate had spoken of a thirty-mile desert just north of the
turnoff and said this was the only dry march they would encounter. Thornton and the others filled their water kegs at the river and headed across the barren stretch. They traveled all one long day over a landscape more forbidding than anything Thornton had ever seen. “The earth appeared to be as destitute of moisture as if a drop of rain or dew had never fallen upon it from the brazen heavens above.” The hours ticked painfully by, with humans and animals growing ever thirstier. They camped after about thirty miles at the base of a mountain where Thornton found a tiny spring; with a shovel he excavated a miniature reservoir that filled with agonizing slowness. The humans scooped enough for tea; each of the animals slurped half a pint.

  Thornton hoped that Applegate’s thirty-mile desert was now behind them. But the next day yielded more of the same. They marched the whole day, halting just before sunset to rest the animals. This time, though, they didn’t stop for the night, as the oxen were wild-eyed with hunger and thirst. After an hour they resumed the march, and in the dwindling light Thornton could see a desert still more forbidding than that which they had already crossed. “Nothing presented itself to the eye but a broad expanse of a uniform dead-level plain, which conveyed to the mind the idea that it had been the muddy and sandy bottom of a former lake, and that after the water had suddenly sunk through the fissures, leaving the bottom in a state of muddy fusion, streams of gas had broken out in ten thousand places and had thrown up sand and mud, so as to form cones, rising from a common plane and ranging some three to twenty feet in height. It seemed to be the River of Death dried up, and having its muddy bottom jetted into cones by the force of the fires of perdition.”

  Cattle staggered and fell, never to rise. The train moved on, desperate to discover water on the far side of this hellish region, if far side there was. Applegate had called this stretch the Black Rock Desert, and at the end of the second day the train reached the Black Rock. There they found water—but water so hot it scalded those who came close. Only with the greatest patience did the travelers let it cool enough for them to drink, and then they discovered that it turned the stomach, so laced was it with minerals. Yet it was better than nothing, and they choked it down.

  After resting for two days they trudged on, through a landscape that grew more surreal with each mile. The trail passed beside a range of naked bluffs. “The tops of these bluffs or high hills appeared to be covered with volcanic scoria, or a substance resembling the slag formed in iron furnaces,” Thornton wrote. “Their sides presented a great variety and blending of colors, including almost all those of the rainbow. These had evidently been produced by the action of intense heat, which had left different colors in different places, according to the degree of heat applied and the temperature of the atmosphere into which the masses had been suddenly projected while thus heated. Indeed, without attempting to account accurately for the phenomenon, the hills appeared to have been in some way scathed and blasted by subterranean fires.”

  The fires burned even yet. Sulfurous steam billowed from gashes in the earth; boiling water filled potholes beside the trail. Thornton inquisitively tested the depth of one pothole, a mere ten inches in diameter, lowering a weighted cord two hundred feet into the bubbling liquid without finding bottom. Another, much larger spring was aptly called the Great Boiling Spring. The spring itself was some thirty feet in diameter and filled the bottom of a basin or crater several hundred feet around. One of the emigrant women accidently stepped into the stream that drained the scalding water; leaping out, she pulled off her stocking and, with the stocking, a layer of skin.

  Still they marched. They emerged from the desert and the volcanic zone into a broad valley. In the distance they spied a wide lake, named for the Klamath Indians. The animals revived on the fresh water and abundant grass of the valley; the spirits of the travelers were buoyed as well. Yet the humans, unable to survive on grass, measured their dwindling provisions and wondered how far they were from the Willamette Valley. David Goff tendered reassurance, but at this point no one in the train believed him.

  They entered a forest of pine trees. “They were the first we had seen in many a weary league, through many a weary week, that could with propriety be said to be trees,” Thornton recounted. “And now that we saw them it was like meeting old and much-loved friends.” Yet the forest cloaked a mountain—called Siskiyou by Applegate—that grew formidable. The trail probed ravines over which the branches of the trees formed a gloomy canopy. The way steepened, taxing the long-suffering oxen to the limit. The emigrants were far past the point where they wished they had never heard of Jesse Applegate; now they cursed him with every second breath. “All that we knew of the mountain was vague and uncertain. Applegate had mentioned it by name, indeed, and had spoken of the ascent as being short and easy. But this—like almost every thing he had said of the road—we learned, by sad and painful experience, to be untrue. We only knew that many fierce savages prowled among its rugged recesses, and we only wished that they had prevented Applegate from passing through it.”

  The oxen could find no food in the forest, and more of them began to die. The larders of the emigrants were all but empty. They had budgeted provisions to last till the first of October, and it was now the final week of October. They felt the clutch of starvation. But there was nothing to do but press on. “We continued to hurry forward over this rough mountain-ridge, as though we were sensible that the Angel of Death was close behind us.”

  THEN CAME THE RAINS. THEY FELL DRENCHING AND COLD, making the trail more treacherous than ever and pushing animals and humans to the brink of soaking, shivering death by exposure. Thornton taxed himself bitterly for what he had brought upon his wife. “She did not complain in words, but she looked feeble, hungry, and haggard, and appeared to be suffering severely,” he recalled. He cursed Jesse Applegate yet again.

  And still their trials grew more severe. They agonizingly scaled one side of the Umpqua Mountains only to find that the trail descending the other side through a narrow canyon was all but impassable. “The canyon, which appears to have been rent asunder by some vast convulsion of nature, is about three miles long, having the whole of its width occupied by a very swift stream of cold snow-water varying from one foot and a half to four feet in depth and running over a bottom covered with boulders from four inches to five feet in diameter,” Thornton wrote. “The rocky walls on each side are in many places perpendicular; in others they recede so as to form an angle of about forty-five degrees with the plane of the horizon.”

  They abandoned the wagons, packing what little remained of their property and possessions onto the draft animals. They stumbled and staggered down the canyon, often in the stream itself. One woman died of exhaustion and exposure. Thornton feared his wife might be next. “We each had a long stick in our hands to support ourselves, and to prevent the water from sweeping us into deep holes,” he wrote. “Mrs. Thornton, upon suddenly descending into the cold snow-water above the waist, was much chilled, and I thought at first that she would perish.” He rubbed her face and hands to revive her, and with a wan smile she indicated she could carry on.

  They felt their way another mile, in the rushing stream nearly the whole way. Again Thornton thought his wife was slipping away from him. “Mrs. Thornton began to lose all sensibility upon one side. I supported her as well as I could, but at length she complained of indistinctness of vision, and soon became totally blind.” She looked as though she were dead already. “Her lips were thin and compressed, and as white and bloodless as paper; her eyes were turned up in their sockets; her head fell back upon my arms, and every feature wore the aspect and fixedness of death.”

  Thornton began to reckon what he would do with her corpse. “I could not, for all the world, have carried her dead body out of that canyon.” But there was no place to bury her, and in the time it would have taken, he would have been fatally chilled too. The dilemma increased his suffering.

  He redoubled his efforts to revive her. “I rubbed her wrists violently, chafed her temples, sho
ok her, and called aloud to her.” After some minutes of this, she gradually stirred. Her vision partially returned, though her side remained numb. Yet she could walk, with his help.

  They stumbled down the treacherous stream once more. They felt they were racing for their lives, though Thornton realized that they were moving no faster than yards per minute. Finally the walls of the canyon fell back, and they found a bank of the stream to crawl out on.

  Ahead they saw a tent and a fire. Others in their party had preceded them and were drying and warming themselves. Thornton and his wife joined them and did the same. He rummaged in his shot-pouch for a morsel of food he still carried, and he and his wife shared it. Then they slumped to the ground before the fire and fell into the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

  Yet they weren’t finished with Canyon Creek. The trail now ran more often on the bank than in the stream, but they had to crisscross the torrent repeatedly. By Thornton’s count they waded the creek thirty-nine times before they emerged onto the open bank of the Umpqua River.

  Here Thornton learned that they might be saved. Jesse Applegate had gone far ahead to the Willamette Valley settlements, and though Thornton placed no faith in his willingness or ability to send back provisions, he hoped some of those who accompanied him would do so.

  Thornton realized that survival would be by rescue alone. They were completely spent, and on the scant food they had left they couldn’t regain strength. Thornton reflected on what they had lost, namely everything they owned but the wretched clothes they wore and a parcel of clothes he carried on his back, plus a little money in his pocket. His spirits began to fail. “I became greatly discouraged and depressed in mind, as well as reduced in my physical energies. I seemed to be approaching the eve of the breaking up of both.” He couldn’t shake his despondency, and he began to wonder if he could carry on. They had set out for Oregon with the highest hopes but now faced ruin, even assuming they survived. “A dark cloud rested upon the future and, intercepting every ray of hope, shut me up in the dark forebodings of a fearful issue.”