In most minds the sight of countless wagons all streaming in the same direction made the spectacle all the more exciting. The emigrants reveled in their numbers, early on, like revved-up fans today pouring into a football stadium or a concert. It looked “as if a mighty army was on its march,” Alonzo Delano noted proudly, “and in a few moments we took our station in the line.… Although we were strangers, yet there was a fellow-feeling in having one pursuit in common, and we drove merrily along.” At night, around the campfire, the gold-seekers picked out tunes on their banjos and sawed away at violins or smacked tambourines and danced a step or two. Some had even more energy. “Love is hotter here than anywhere that I have seen,” one emigrant confided to his diary. “When they love here they love with all thare mite & some times a little harder.”
Most emigrants found, as Luzena Wilson had, that the Indians who had loomed so large in their nightmares proved less frightening in the flesh. Now letters home made studiedly casual mentions of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors with guns, bows and arrows, and bloody scalps dangling from their saddles (from raids on other tribes). The tone implied that such sights were all in a day’s work. “Many a Green ’un trembled with fear,” noted one correspondent, himself a proud veteran of several weeks on the road.
Even the landscape seemed to grow less forbidding. Israel Lord, of all people, felt moved to praise the scenery. “We passed over the most beautiful prairie I ever saw,” he noted about sixty or eighty miles after crossing the Missouri, though he hastened to point out that there was “sometimes no timber in sight and scarcely any elevation worthy the name of hill.”
Cheerier souls than Lord waxed positively effusive. “To see it and feel it in all its beauty,” wrote Eleazer Ingalls, a forty-year-old emigrant from Illinois, “one must be hundreds of miles from civilization, out on those great ocean-like prairies… where the sight of a tree is as welcome to the traveler as the sight of a sail to the mariner when he has been for a long time traversing an unknown sea. He must be there on a balmy sunset eve, after a long and wearisome march over arid plains, destitute of water, and suffocated with the dust. Then when he can find a camping ground combining all the blessings of grass, good water and beautiful groves… no description would give a life-like picture of such a scene.”
Day after day the emigrants plodded on, cursing the wind and dust, clambering down gullies and across creeks, totting up the miles they had covered. (They relied on odometers, store-bought or jury-rigged, that estimated distance by counting wheel revolutions.) Now the weather revealed a new trick. Sudden and furious hailstorms added to the miseries of gusting wind and pounding rain.
On the treeless plains, the wagon trains were more vulnerable than mobile homes today. “All the storms which I ever before experienced were as nothing compared with the one we endured this day,” one traveler wrote on June 8, 1849, in Nebraska. “The rain fell in torrents accompanied by a whirlwind and by hail the size of hickory nuts. Two of our carriages were overset by the gale and one of them crushed to atoms. Mules and loose stock were stampeded and ran for hours.” When the barrage ended, the ground lay buried under three inches of hail.
Caught by surprise in a storm the same week, Israel Lord could do little but try to ride it out. No one had managed to tie up the cattle in time. Panicky, bellowing, still yoked to their wagons and threatening to capsize them at any moment, the spooked animals only added to the bedlam. “The thunder and lightning were continuous for at least an hour,” wrote Lord, “and the hailstones as large as an ounce bullet, or larger.” The next time a storm blew up, Lord noted, the first priority should be securing the cattle.
Lord had begun learning the basics, like Alonzo Delano and all the other greenhorns, but he was by nature less sunny than Delano, and the more he learned, the more he worried. Delano would have seen the question “What could possibly go wrong?” as reassuring. Lord would have made a list.
“It is necessary to rouse every man as soon as it is light enough to see to work,” he warned in his journal on June 2, “else we get a late start.… We have already passed a considerable number of teams which have not the remotest chance of reaching the mountains by November even, and those who are thus belated must either remain in the plains or perish in the mountains.” The most common problem, he went on, was “too heavy loads” in the wagons. Wooden chests and boxes were “worse than useless,” because they weighed too much. Cloth sacks were far better. “Many of the wagons look much as though they put in all they could think of, and hung everything else on the outside.” Newspaper cartoons had tried to convey the absurdity of these overburdened travelers, Lord snapped, but the reality was worse than any drawing.
By June 6, Lord’s company had traveled some two hundred and fifty miles, following a river called the Big Blue as it wandered westward across Nebraska. They topped a hill and spotted the Platte River, which they would cling to for the next five weeks and five hundred miles. So far, so good, but Lord did not let down his guard. On June 8, he noted that “our cattle have been lame with cracks in the hoof.”
But of the thousands of travelers on the road, few shared Lord’s foresight.
The very first words in Israel Lord’s journal had sounded a dark, foreboding note, as if spoken by a nineteenth-century Philip Marlowe: “May 6, 1849. We left a dead man by the name of Middleton on the levee at St. Louis, and thought that we had left all the cholera with him.”
They had not. As he traveled westward, Lord took to copying down the inscriptions carved into roadside grave markers. On a single day, May 27, he recorded ten names.
On June 2, Lord’s company happened on a man lying on the ground near a dry gulch, still alive but alone and helpless. His head rested on a bag stuffed with clothes. Nearby lay a hunk of bread and a battered tin cup. The sick man gasped out his story in a couple of dozen words. “He called himself T. R. Waring from Andrew, Iowa,” Lord wrote. “He had the cholera and was abandoned by his company.” For two days Waring had been hoping that an eastbound company would come along and bring him home. Lord and his companions did their best to make the sick man comfortable, but they could not truly help. We “filled his cup with coffee,” Lord wrote sadly, “and went on our way.”
For the emigrants, such encounters were doubly horrifying. Cholera was a gruesome disease, which was bad in itself, and now it seemed to be stalking them as they traveled, which was worse. “Every steamer was impregnated” with the disease, wrote a gold-seeker named George Thissell, who set out from Ohio on March 16, 1849. “We had scarcely steamed a hundred miles when we landed at Louisville, Kentucky, and put off four of our dead.… No pen can describe the scenes on board the steamer for the next twenty-four hours. The dead and dying were in every berth. When within twenty miles of St. Louis, in the night, we landed and put off nine more dead. All were buried in one large grave. Not even a stake was driven into the ground to mark their last resting place.”
The emigrants thought of cholera as a disease of cities, crowds, and poverty rather than of open, sprawling vistas. Once in the sparsely settled West, they had felt sure they would be safe. That faith arose from what seemed indisputable fact. Everyone knew—no one could help knowing—that cholera preyed on cities, and on the filthiest, most squalid sections of those cities above all. Why that was, no one knew. Was cholera a judgment of God, who was fed up with the sinful, self-indulgent ways of slum dwellers? Was it caused by some poison in the air seeping out of the muddy, slimy earth? For anyone in the mid-1800s to suggest that the disease was caused by organisms invisible to the naked eye would have been dismissed as superstition, a throwback to outmoded doctrines of possession and evil spirits.
The wealthy leapt to embrace the notion that the poor had brought the disease on themselves. As soon as cholera had burned through “the scum of the city,” one well-to-do New York merchant assured his daughter, it would die out for lack of fuel. Not until 1883 would the disease be fully understood. The poor were indeed killed out of all proportion to their numb
ers, it turned out, but morality and character had nothing to do with it. Neither did the foul air and sickening stink of the cities, plausible though that theory was. Instead, the culprit was a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae found in sewage-contaminated drinking water or on dirty, uncooked fruit or vegetables.
In this same year of 1849, an English doctor named John Snow published an article in the London Medical Gazette. Snow rejected the leading theory of cholera’s origin—that it was a “miasmatic” disease caused by poisonous vapors in the air—and proposed a new explanation: cholera came about when a person drank water that had been contaminated by sewage. Snow did not know about “germs” and bacteria. No one did, in 1849, but he showed how his theory explained a number of long-mysterious observations. How could it be, for instance, that a doctor could treat a cholera patient and never fall ill himself, while the patient’s whole family sickened and died? Snow’s work on cholera would eventually make him one of the great figures in the history of medicine. At the time, no one paid any attention.
In Ghost Map, his brilliant account of Snow’s achievement, the writer Steven Johnson explains just how the micro-organisms undo their host. Once a person has swallowed contaminated water or food, Johnson writes, Vibrio cholerae “converts the human body into a factory for multiplying itself a millionfold.” The cholera victim expels those millions of bacteria in a foul, watery gush. If some of that tainted liquid happens to seep into a well or a river that other people depend on for drinking water—perhaps when someone rinses dirty clothes or bedsheets, or when a cesspool leaks, or a sewage pipe discharges too near an intake pipe—the disease will claim new victims, who in turn will spread it to others.
This is one reason that the threat of cholera did not soar until fairly recent times, when people first crowded into enormous, teeming cities. By good fortune, Vibrio cholerae organisms cannot make people sick unless they swallow them; it is impossible to inhale cholera germs or to “catch” them by touching a sick person’s skin. Nor can animals carry cholera from place to place, as rats and fleas carry plague. Vibrio cholerae can travel only inside a human host. (It can live contentedly in contaminated water, but unless a person comes along to drink, it is stuck in place.)
So cholera needs large numbers of people if it is to explode into a full-fledged epidemic. In particular, it needs people who live crowded together and drink one another’s contaminated water. Early in human history, when people lived in small, scattered bands, cholera remained merely a local threat. With the rise of giant, filthy, slum-infested cities pouring tons of sewage into rivers and streams, it roared to life.
And now the gold-seekers, gathering by the thousands, had created a traveling slum. “The gold rush was to cholera,” one medical historian observes, “like wind to fire.”
Travelers’ accounts from the 1800s routinely talk about the water supply in a way that makes a modern reader cringe.* The effect is akin to overhearing someone in lion country remark, “Such a lovely evening. Who’s for a stroll?” Gold-seekers knew instinctively not to drink filthy water, of course, but they had no way of knowing that an innocuous-looking dipper of water might teem with toxins.
In any case, Americans in the nineteenth century were accustomed to drawing water directly from rivers and wells, and they had never heard of such things as filtration and chlorination. On steamboats, for instance, buckets were used both to throw slops over the side and to draw up drinking water. A woman named Eliza Steele, on a pleasure cruise along the Ohio River in 1840, saw that her glass of water had half an inch of mud in the bottom, and put it aside. A companion complained that the water was not muddy enough, and took a swallow from her own glass. “Dear me! What insipid water! It has been standing too long. I like it right thick.” Whereupon, Eliza Steele continued, the woman called a chambermaid over and ordered her to “Get me some water fresh out of the river, with the true Mississippi relish.”
If James Marshall had spotted his glint of gold a few years later, cholera might not have done in so many of the emigrants. They might, at least, have boiled their drinking water. Certainly they would have been better off than in 1849, when one gold rush physician could give no better anticholera advice to his patients than to protect themselves with a diet of bacon covered in cayenne pepper and washed down in whiskey. But the gold rush fell just on the wrong side of the divide that marked the beginning of the modern age of medicine.
John Snow’s breakthrough came too late for “J. J. Hardy, Winchester, Ill., age 33,” whose name Isaac Lord copied down from a marker stuck in the ground. “Have passed a great many graves,” Lord noted solemnly on June 10, 1849. “The cholera is only a few days ahead of us.”
A race for riches during an epidemic was a strange thing, like a scavenger hunt in a graveyard, and the gold-seekers’ moods veered erratically. “Passed a number of graves as indeed we do every day,” Lord wrote on June 30, but now the travelers had begun to encounter new, exciting sights as well. Lord tasted antelope for the first time. “The meat is better than venison, something like lamb. They are the size of a small deer.” Even prairie dogs rated an enthusiastic mention. “One of the oddest little creatures we found in our journey of two thousand miles was the prairie dog, about as large as the poodle dog,” wrote one emigrant (without the aid of any nearby poodles, apparently, to provide scale). “As they sat up on their hind legs, all over the prairie, they resembled a miniature kangaroo.”
But it was buffalo, the emblem of the plains, that all the emigrants had dreamed of since before they left home. They had strained their eyes for weeks, transforming every dark spot on the horizon into a wild creature they could gallop after. Buffalo herds in late spring were smaller than they would be in another month or two, but even now a group might number in the hundreds or thousands. A single animal, in that vast assembly, might stand six feet at the shoulder and weigh close to a ton. Soon now, very soon, the gold-seekers boasted, they would dine not on beans and bacon but on delicious slabs of buffalo steak, sputtering straight from the fire.
Israel Lord saw his first buffalo on the morning of June 13, 1849. “In a moment all was excitement. Sixty wagons were in full view, and when the word Buffalo! was passed, the men seized their guns and started hot footed for the scene of action, or for some more elevated ground to get a better sight.” Soon two hundred men had gathered along a low hill, their eyes fastened on two hunters in pursuit of a single buffalo. “There he turns… and now he comes. How black he seems. Harder and closer they press him, and now he turns directly back and towards us. Hurrah! Hurrah!” More men joined the chase, riding and whooping. Half a dozen were in at the kill, but when another buffalo suddenly appeared, they abandoned their first prize and raced to bring down another.
The Plains Indians had long since mastered the buffalo hunt in all its varieties, from the stealthy, ever-so-slow slither along the ground to the heart-pounding dash on horseback into the midst of a racing, ground-shaking herd. Most of the emigrants had more trouble. A ’49er from Massachusetts, a young carpenter named Reuben Shaw, wrote a detailed account of his first buffalo hunt. He and some companions spotted a large herd of buffalo grazing quietly. They rode in pursuit but the buffalo saw them, or smelled them, and scattered. Soon the hunters had lost sight of the hundreds upon hundreds of immense, hairy beasts, who were somewhere in the sandy hills, and they’d lost track of one another as well. Shaw wandered lost in a cloud of dust.
Suddenly, to his astonishment, part of the herd materialized not more than twenty yards away. In a frenzy of excitement, Shaw picked out a victim, aimed, and fired. His horse, as unaccustomed to gunfire as was his rider, reared up, and Shaw crashed to the ground. The buffalo ignored the commotion. Shaw limped back to camp, body aching, clothes torn, canteen crushed. His horse had made it back before him, and so had two other hunters, also newly horseless and newly bruised. No buffalo were injured.
Many hunters fared even worse. “The casualties of buffalo hunting are very common,” Joseph Bruff noted in his diary
, at nearly the same time. “Men charg’d by wounded bulls, unhorsed & many badly hurt—the horses generally running off with the band of buffaloes, for the Indians to pick up hereafter.”
But with emigrants streaming west by the tens of thousands, all of them armed, all of them intent on buffalo, this was a contest certain to end badly for the animals. Badly, too, for the Plains Indians, whose way of life depended on the presence of herds that for centuries had numbered in the millions and turned the prairie black. The Indians relied on buffalo meat for food; they made clothing and moccasins and tepees from its hide, cord from its sinews, soap from its fat, and fuel from its dung.
The end would come a generation later, when railroads crossed the plains and professional hunters could send thousands of hides and tons of meat to distant markets. But already, in this first gold rush year of 1849, one emigrant remarked that “the valley of the Platte for two hundred miles presents the aspect of the vicinity of a slaughter yard, dotted all over with skeletons of buffalos.” Careless and in a hurry, the emigrants killed their prizes, cut off a steak or two, and left the rest. “We frequently see half-eaten corpses by the road side,” Isaac Lord wrote on June 17.
For the Indians, the gold rush sped up a story that already seemed headed toward a dark end. One side held all the power, and the other stood in its way. The white population of the United States was enormous, ever-growing, hungry for land, and disdainful of “savages” who stood in the way of progress. And white settlers and traders brought devastating diseases, like smallpox, that feasted on populations who had never confronted such killers. Lacking all immunity, Indians died by the thousands.
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