The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  The first white emigrants, tiny in number and intent on Oregon or California, had done comparatively little damage to the Indians whose territory they passed through. But the gold-seekers and those who followed close behind would destroy the buffalo herds, strip the grass, foul the water, and bring disease. “The locusts of Egypt could scarce be a greater scourge than these great caravans,” wrote one stunned ’49er, “as grass and whatever else is green must disappear before them.”

  In July, 1849, a U.S. Army captain on his way to an assignment in Utah stopped to visit a Sioux camp along the Platte. He walked into a village of the dead. “We found the bodies of nine Sioux, laid out upon the ground, wrapped in their robes of buffalo-skin, with their saddles, spears, camp-kettles and all of their accoutrements.” All had died of cholera, from drinking water that emigrant trains had contaminated. In a tepee lay the body of a dead girl about sixteen years old. She wore her finest outfit, embroidered buffalo robes adorned with porcupine quills, scarlet leggings, and new moccasins. Not far off were two more Sioux encampments, the larger numbering around 250. Cholera had struck there, too, the captain wrote, and those who remained alive were “fearfully alarmed by this, to them, novel and terrible disease.”

  Most of the emigrants had been following the south bank of the Platte River, traveling on a nearly straight east-to-west path. The route had been smooth and more or less level, at least compared with what lay ahead. Now, after several hundred miles following the Platte upstream, the emigrants had reached the junction where the South Fork and the North Fork met to form the Platte proper. The two forks formed a V lying on its side, with the junction toward the east; the emigrants found themselves on the south side of the South Fork. From here almost to the Continental Divide, they knew from their guidebooks, the trail followed the North Fork. The only way to get there was to cross the South Fork. That was trouble.

  All river crossings were dangerous. Men had drowned trying to cross the Missouri, at the very start of their westward journey. More would perish at every river they came to, drowning in a parched and arid landscape where dying of thirst seemed a likelier fate. Travelers seldom tried crossing the Platte, which had a reputation as “the worst river to ford in the west.” A river as strange in the emigrants’ eyes as the prairie itself, the Platte spread into countless braids as it meandered over a nearly horizontal landscape. (French fur trappers had named the river Platte, for “flat.”) A mile or more wide but rarely more than waist- or chest-deep, it posed a hard choice to anyone who would take it on—the swift current and quicksand bottom made the river dangerous to cross in a wagon or on horseback, and its countless sandbars and channels made it unsuitable for ferries.

  The forks of the Platte were narrower than the Platte itself, but they were challenge enough. In a landscape prone to sudden storms, a river might surge and tumble one day and mosey the next. At any instant the bottom could give way, and a horse or a man who had been stepping confidently could suddenly find himself swimming for his life. The South Platte was “fearful to look at,” recalled the gold-seeker Margaret Frink, “rushing and boiling and yellow with mud, a mile wide and in many places of unknown depth.” Everywhere you turned you saw teams of mules or oxen plunging into the water, or men on foot, struggling ahead, falling, tumbling. Animals bellowed, men shouted and cursed. One moment the water reached only to the men’s knees, the next they were neck-deep and fighting the current.

  It looked fairly calm on the day Luzena and Mason Wilson prepared to cross. The Wilsons and their companions tinkered with the wagons, improvising wooden risers to lift the bed a foot or so higher than usual, and then pushed their way into the water. Some men perched on the oxen’s backs. Others waded. The river swept into the wagons and carried away some of their contents, but the Wilsons made it across. Luzena looked back. The oxen in the team behind her were in midstream, stuck fast.

  “The frantic driver shouted, whipped, belabored the stubborn animals in vain, and the treacherous sand gave way under their feet. They sank slowly, gradually, but surely. They went out of sight inch by inch, and the water rose over the moaning beasts. Without a struggle they disappeared beneath the surface. In a little while the broad South Platte swept on its way, sunny, sparkling, placid, without a ripple to mark where a lonely man parted with all his fortune.”

  Joseph Bruff saw a wagon caught in a similar predicament, and this one contained a sick man. The trapped man was only fifty yards from shore but marooned. One good samaritan did his best to help. “It looked queer to see a man wading downstream, waist deep in the rapid river,” Bruff wrote, “with a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of bread and meat in the other, going to the wagon, to the relief of his comrade.” Bruff, who had a weakness for dogs, took note of “a pointer dog, at the water’s edge, howling for his lost master.” The story had a happy ending, with the stranded man’s companions eventually able to harness a dozen mules to the trapped wagon and drag it to land.

  Safely across, Bruff took the time to climb a hill overlooking the forks of the Platte. He admired the “beautiful prospect” and noted down the inscriptions on two graves. For weeks now, scarcely a day had passed without a grave marker—on many days, scarcely an hour had passed—and Bruff had copied down the message on every one. He would continue, grave after grave, to journey’s end.

  Few sights struck the emigrants as sadder than a hasty burial in a makeshift grave. “No loved one near, no tolling of the church bell, no marble slab to mark his last resting place,” lamented twenty-four-year-old George Thissell, as he watched the burial of a friend who had been shot to death by accident. Even in a devout age, it was hard to find consolation in thoughts of eternal rest. In a land without wood, there would be no coffins, and the emigrants had learned that wolves and coyotes could dig up a body regardless of how many rocks and stones were piled on top of it. “It was not an uncommon thing,” Thissell wrote, “to see a leg or arm dragged from the grave.”

  Best not to dwell on such things. Callow young men and grumpy old-timers alike squeezed back a tear or two, at first, but death quickly came to be part of the daily routine. Within weeks many emigrants deemed it hardly worth mentioning. The tone of one young emigrant’s letter home, written on June 5, 1849, captured the prevailing mood. “Another of our company died at 12 o’clock of the Cholera he belonged to Monroes mess and was at the point of death when they joined our company we buried him while nooning I will give you a description of our daily life which is pretty much the same all of the time.”

  Was this indifference? More likely, it had less to do with callousness than with a kind of resignation —what is there to say? Even kindhearted Joseph Bruff, despite recording every grave inscription he passed, quickly grew matter-of-fact about death on the trail. On July 12, still fairly early in the trip, his journal entry included a curt sentence: “Passed a camp of 5 wagons, one of the party was in a tent dying of Cholera.” In the next line Bruff recorded the day’s weather. “Clear & very warm.”

  “What can’t be cured must be endured,” the proverb had it, and the emigrants had no choice but to be stoical. Like cops or emergency room doctors today, they witnessed a relentless parade of grim sights. As a matter of self-protection, they could not weep over every tragedy. “Custom made us regard the most unnatural events as usual,” Luzena Wilson would recall many years later. “I remember even yet with a shiver the first time I saw a man buried without the formality of a funeral and the ceremony of coffining.” She did not bother to spell out the melancholy truth that many such unnatural events had followed that first one.

  On the burial morning, Wilson had been eating breakfast by the campfire, idly watching two men dig in the ground. Until they retreated into a tent and emerged with a body wrapped in a blanket, she’d had no idea why they were digging. Ten minutes later the men covered the grave over. Half an hour later they rode on, “leaving the lonely stranger asleep in the silent wilderness, with only the winds, the owls, and the coyotes to chant a dirge.” None of h
is friends had written the dead man’s name on a piece of wood or even left a stone to mark his grave. “There was not time,” wrote Wilson, “for anything but the ceaseless march for gold.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LET US GLORY IN OUR MAGNIFICENCE

  ALMOST AS SOON AS they staggered ashore on the far side of the South Platte, the emigrants confronted new obstacles. They were still traversing the plains, with hundreds of miles to go before they reached the mountains, but now deep gullies and steep bluffs cut across their path. “The worst hills this side of the Missouri,” Israel Lord noted on June 17, and this was an understatement. At a spot later named Windlass Hill, the gold-seekers had to unhitch the animals from their wagons, attach ropes to the rear axle, and then lower the wagons down the bluff inch by lurching inch. This was a precarious business, roughly akin to easing a piano down a ski slope. A team of men at the front of each wagon tried to maneuver around the rocks in the way. Higher up the hillside, another sweating, cursing team clung to the ropes, fighting the wagons’ weight and playing out slack a few inches at a time.

  But the trail soon eased, and then, to the gold-seekers’ delight, the scenery at last began to change. Today everyone around the world knows the austere beauty of western landscapes from countless movies, but the emigrants had no such grounding. The prairie had been new; this was wondrous. Treeless seas of grass had struck the emigrants as a mere absence. Now they found themselves entranced by the sight of cathedrals carved in stone, and towering, eroded pinnacles, and sandstone fortresses.

  “Here you saw the minarets of a castle; there the loopholes of a fort; again, the frescoes of a huge temple; then the doors, windows, chimneys, and columns of immense buildings appeared in view, with all the solemn grandeur of an ancient yet deserted city,” Alonzo Delano wrote, as he approached Scotts Bluff, in present-day western Nebraska. “It seemed as if the wand of a magician had passed over a city, and like that in the Arabian Nights had converted all living things to stone.”

  More important than the beauty of the setting was the incontrovertible proof that they had made headway on their journey. Guidebooks had listed the milestones on the route west—huge and looming Courthouse Rock and Jail Rock; beckoning Chimney Rock; Fort Laramie, where the travelers hoped to resupply themselves. Now, at last, they could begin to cross them off their list. Chimney Rock, a towering natural pinnacle visible from a distance of forty miles, quickened their steps. A pyramid more than three hundred feet tall from ground to tip, topped by a hundred-foot-plus spire, the stone formation awed even the most jaded travelers.* “No conception can be formed of the magnitude of this grand work of nature until you stand at its base & look up,” wrote an Ohio gold-seeker named Elisha Perkins. “If a man does not feel like an insect then I don’t know when he should.”

  But the great stone monuments seemed to mark milestones for grumbling and dismay, too. The emigrants’ moods lurched wildly, their spirits buoyed one moment by the majestic views and cast down the next by their endless labors. Only a few weeks before, in May, the men in Alonzo Delano’s company had been so high-spirited that at day’s end they ran footraces in camp, for the joy of it. Now, in June, the mood in the evening was often bleak. On the same night that Alonzo Delano marveled at sights worthy of Scheherazade, a storm swept in, and the rain beat down. “The evening was wet, cold, and cheerless,” Delano wrote, and the mood in camp turned so dark that even “the scenery around us could not dispel” the gloom. Morning came too soon and brought with it “the vilest oaths, and the most profane language, and frequent quarrels and feuds.”

  It was erosion that had made these landscapes, over inconceivable spans of geologic time, and now, on a human scale, erosion set in, undermining the emigrants’ spirits. Worn out by all they had already done, surly and bad-tempered at the prospect of how much still lay ahead, the emigrants began to snap at one another. “If a man has a mean streak about him half an inch long,” one of Delano’s traveling companions remarked, “I’ll be bound if it won’t come out on the plains.”

  Accidentally bump a man and spill his coffee, on what Delano called “this long, weary, and vexatious journey,” or launch once again into a too-familiar story, or whistle one more tuneless melody, and you were liable to find yourself in a shoving match or a screaming argument. “Perhaps there is no situation so trying upon the infirmities of human temper as a long trip like this,” wrote Bernard Reid, who was traveling in the supposedly luxurious and carefree Pioneer Line.*

  In Israel Lord’s company, the quarreling took the form of sulking and griping. “If I ordered a halt at 5 o’clock, they grumbled—we ought to drive till sundown,” Lord wrote to his brother. “If we drove till sundown we ought to have stopped at 4 o’clock. If we turned to the right for feed, we should have gone to the left, if to the left, nothing but the right would answer. If we went away from the road to camp I was a dam’d fool and a d—der one if I camped on the road. If I halted at noon it was a dead loss of time, if I kept on till night I should kill the cattle.”

  Angry and impatient, the emigrants could scarcely believe that once they had thrilled at the sight of the crowds all around them. Now the constant bumping up against one’s neighbors, and the mere fact that they were always, always there, gnawed at even the mildest souls. And what was merely miserable on the plains was agonizing on shipboard, where overcrowding and lack of privacy drove the emigrants nearly mad. On the journey around Cape Horn—half a year at sea, and covering a distance more than half the globe’s circumference—the storms and waves proved scarcely more of an ordeal than the close quarters.

  “At home I saw my neighbors not oftener than two or three times a week,” lamented a passenger on the Edward Everett, out of Boston. “Now I have them about me at every hour of the day and night.” Another sea traveler, a gold-seeker from Maine who found himself trapped in what was essentially an overcrowded, down-at-heels boardinghouse, took refuge in fantasy. “One of the first things I plan to do when I get home is to take my gun and a sack of provisions and go up and camp out on the west side of Mount Baldy. I’ll stay there a month and maybe longer and if I don’t see a single human being I won’t be disappointed.”

  From here on, the emigrants’ mood would ratchet downward, each new hardship sapping their spirit as well as their strength. Eleazer Ingalls, an Illinois lawyer, noted in his journal on June 20, 1849, that he had passed the grave of a man who had killed himself. He had evidently been traveling on foot, carrying a meager store of supplies, and had finally lost hope. Somehow he had managed to cut his own throat. “Poor fellow,” wrote Ingalls. “He had become discouraged in prosecuting one long journey, and had entered upon another longer journey, with, perhaps, less preparation than upon the first.”

  The team spirit that had marked the early miles gave way under the pressure of weariness and bad weather. Some travelers used their last reserves of energy to make sure that others would suffer as they had. Alonzo Delano stopped to examine one of the heaps of abandoned cargo that gave the road to California the look of an enormous yard sale. Nearly everyone had packed too much. Iron stoves, featherbeds, pillows, quilts, chests of drawers, knives, forks, food, dress shirts, pots and pans lay in discarded heaps. To his horror, Delano found piles of sugar that had been soaked in turpentine to render it useless, heaps of flour purposely sullied with dirt, wagons chopped into pieces, clothes torn into shreds, “simply because the owners could not use it themselves, and were determined that nobody else should.”

  Not always, though. Delano did find that sometimes a generous soul had abandoned a wagon and left it intact or set out neat mounds of unadulterated bacon, flour, and sugar, with a note inviting travelers to help themselves. But these good deeds stood out, Delano noted, as “occasional honorable exceptions.”

  The route followed the North Platte river valley west across present-day Nebraska, and the emigrants trudged on, already inclined to discount the cliffs and castles that had been a novelty only days before. The next milestone, to thei
r delight, was not a natural wonder but a man-made refuge. This was Fort Laramie, in what is today eastern Wyoming, a large, square, thick-walled adobe structure of no particular distinction but, to the weary emigrants, an oasis in the desert. The fort was not merely a landmark but a place to purchase supplies (at inflated prices) or to drop off letters (though the letters seemed simply to vanish, it turned out later, rather than to make their way back east).

  For the merchants in charge, a store on a stampede route in the middle of nowhere, and without a single competitor for hundreds of miles, was itself a gold mine. Eager entrepreneurs from Saint Louis had finagled contracts to sell flour and lanterns and liquor and tobacco and almost everything else. The emigrants made easy marks. After “nothing but the huts of savages for more than 500 miles,” in one gold-seeker’s words, the fort made a welcome sight. The weary travelers squawked at the prices and then, with no choice, paid up.

  “Oh, what a treat it does seem to see buildings again,” wrote an emigrant named Lucy Cooke. “My dear husband has just been over to the store there to see if he could get anything to benefit me, and bless him, he returned loaded with good things.” When they pushed on again, Lucy had a can of preserved quinces, some chocolate, “and a big packet of nice candy sticks.”

  Soon after, the road turned bad again. Israel Lord had been admiring the scenery—“some of the hills look like a mine of Spanish brown, others rose pink, others salmon, chocolate, flesh color, cream”—but his mood darkened as the route worsened. “The road is up hill and down and down and up… and backing and whoaing and stopping, and yelling and (I am sorry to say it) cursing, from beginning to end.”