by Jon E. Lewis
The men and women who went there were determined to take it. They inclined to play hard and drink hard, and displayed a fondness for settling arguments with fists, knives and guns. The social rank of the opponent hardly mattered. Sam Houston was challenged to no fewer than 24 duels during his two terms as Texas president. Much of the future lawlessness of the West would ride north from Texas.
Yet if most Texans saw themselves as a breed apart, they also considered themselves Americans. Under Sam Houston several attempts were made to secure annexation by the United States, but these were thrown out by Congress at the instigation of abolitionists who charged that the Texan revolution had been a “slaveocracy conspiracy” by Southerners. But by 1845 the mood of Congress had relented. European states were urging Texas to a dangerous sovereignty, and President Polk had just been elected US President on an expansionist ticket. On 29 December of that year James K. Polk signed the proclamation making Texas the 21st state of the Union.
2. The Pioneers’ West
Pioneers Across the Plains
“Millions are marching at once towards the same horizon. Their language, their religion, their manners differ; their object is the same. Fortune has been promised them somewhere in the West, and to the West they go to find it.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America
Reaching for the Pacific
In 1846 the frontier burst asunder as America sought to fulfil its “Manifest Destiny” The flow of emigrants westward grew from a trickle to a flood. Within only a handful of years, the number of White Americans living beyond the Mississippi River would exceed the 350,000 Indians who made the far West their home or their last refuge. The most tumultuous period in American history had begun.
While some pioneers had been gazing longingly across the Sabine River towards Texas, others had cast their eyes further westwards, to California, and to Oregon, the delights of which had been discovered by Yankee sea captains, who had traded along the Pacific coast since the late eighteenth century. But a home in either place would have only been a gleam in the pioneer’s eye if it had not been for some myth-shattering by an intrepid – or perhaps foolhardy – few.
The Pacific was believed to be unreachable by land for ordinary mortals. It was 2,000 gruelling miles from the edge of settlement. There were treeless plains, scoured by alkali dust, and guarded by Indians. And then there were the Rockies, the prevailing opinion of which was summed up in a Congressional report: “Nature has fixed limits to our nation; she has kindly interposed as our Western barrier, mountains almost inaccessible . . . This barrier our population can never pass.” A mountain man might make it through to the shining sea, but not a mass of people.
The people took no notice. They just went, prompted by whips of information from traders and trappers. In 1830 the fur company of Smith, Jackson and Sublette showed that the plains could be crossed by wagons when they took a train to a rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. Accompanying the 12-wagon train were 13 beeves. Water and grass proved easy to find. “The wagons,” the company noted, “could easily have crossed the Rocky Mountains over the South Pass.” Two years later, in 1832, Hall Jackson Kelley, an acid-natured New Englander who believed himself the American Moses, led a handful of followers to Oregon Country. The journey, by an incomprehensibly roundabout route which included New Orleans and Mexico City, took two years. Along the way, all Kelley’s disciples were dismissed. Though the venture failed, it gave others hope. Among them was the ice-manufacturer Nathaniel Wyeth, who formed a joint stock company to exploit Oregon’s bounty. Departing from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1832 Wyeth and his companions travelled with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to its annual rendezvous at the foot of the Shining Mountains. From there they were guided to Fort Vancouver by trapper Milton Sublette, brother of the more famous William. They were the first party of White Americans to travel what would become the Oregon Trail.
More followed in Wyeth’s still warm tracks, several Methodist missionaries among them. Once in the promised land of Oregon, it struck the reverend men that the place was replete with earthly delights. The climate was gentle, the soil tillable and good, the Willamette Valley a sort of farming heaven. Jason Lee, the nephew of Wyeth, was the most prominent of the Oregon proselytizers. To secure more American colonizers for Oregon – a region outside Louisiana and viewed proprietorially by the British – Lee retook the journey over the Rockies and the plains, but eastwards this time, to spread the good word about Oregon. Thomas Jefferson Farnham heard it in the farm town of Peoria, organized an emigration society, the “Oregon Dragoons”, and had his wife sew them a flag with the legend OREGON OR THE GRAVE. Nineteen Dragoons set out for the Far West. None of them had adequate supplies or any real knowledge of wilderness frontiering. Yet some of them, including Farnham, made it to the Willamette. Afterwards, he wrote a no-truth-spared account of his westering experience, which did not fail to mention that he passed more than one night “more to the apparent satisfaction of vermin than for ourselves.”
To those who doubted the wisdom of overland migration such words were a welcome confirmation. Despite the fact of successful land crossings they jibed and railed at the migrants. The editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, usually held to be an unrestrained enthusiast for westward migration, warned one party setting off for Oregon that the route “wore an aspect of insanity” and asserted that “we do not believe that nine-tenths of them will ever reach Columbia alive.” Yet there was more and more evidence that the overlanders could make it across. In 1842 flamboyant explorer and Western expansionist John Charles Frémont, guided by scout Kit Carson, made an accurate map of the Oregon Trail, detailing such things as campsites and estimates of possible daily travel. Frémont then published the report of the expedition, done up as a colourful adventure story, which became an instant bestseller. With the path marked, more and more people came to believe that they could, God willing, make the Pacific coast overland.
And there was more and more need for poor men and women to do so. The Great Panic of 1837 had dispossessed and impoverished many farmers of the East and Mid-West. They were cheered on by the expansionist-minded so-called “boosters”, who wished to see Oregon as part of the United States.
Then, in the spring of 1843, 1,000 pioneers stepped off into the wilderness at Independence, Missouri, bound for Oregon and California. Their vast train of wagons was guided by Marcus Whitman, a religious-minded physician who was one of Oregon’s leading propagandists. The pioneers made it to the Pacific. With their wagons. The doubts were dispelled. Americans had come to the Pacific coast to stay.
By 1846 thousands of pioneers were surging westwards. On the move too, in “The Year of Decision” as historian Bernard De Voto termed it, were the Mormons, leaving their Illinois base at Nauvoo, heading towards the setting sun. The trails west were becoming so well trodden that, in places, they were highways a mile or more wide.
Not that it was ever an easy road to the promised land. Most emigrants followed a route that began at one of the towns on the Missouri River, such as Independence, Council Bluffs or St Joseph. From there they proceeded up the Platte to Fort Laramie and over the continental divide at South Pass. At Black’s Fork of the Green River in southwest Wyoming, the trapper Jim Bridger had built, in an astute piece of entrepreneurship, a trading post where the emigrants could rest and buy supplies – at a dismayingly high price. Up to this point, the going was pretty easy, for the kids a glorious lark. After Fort Bridger the trail divided, the northern route going to Oregon, the southern to California. The terrain on both routes grew progressively rougher. The Oregon-bound travellers followed a tortuous track along the banks of the Snake, then headed across 150 miles of barren desert. To get the wagons up the Blue Mountains required ropes and pulleys.
The trail to California went south to the Humboldt River, and then along that disappearing waterway until it sank into the dry sands of the Nevada desert. Then it was 50 dry miles of alkaline waste, which sent u
p billowing clouds of ash, covering people, wagons and beasts. Men and women went mad, and animals died of heat and thirst. One chronicler counted the bodies of 350 horses, 280 oxen and 150 mules in a single 15-mile stretch of the wasteland. Animals would stampede when they smelled the saving water of the Carson River. After the Carson there came a final steep climb up the Sierra Nevada, and through the mountains it was downhill to journey’s end in the Sacramento Valley.
The favoured means of travel was a canvas-covered wagon or Prairie Schooner, destined to become the enduring symbol of the Old West. Derived from the heavier Conestoga wagon of the Pennsylvania Germans, the schooner was superbly appropriate for the job of transporting pioneers’ families. The heavy-duty canvas top kept off the elements, while the big wooden wheels (the rear pair were up to six feet in diameter) with their wide, iron-covered rims rolled easily over bumps and dips and soft ground or sand. The wagon’s 10 by 3½ feet body could take a ton and a half in weight, though the prudent traveller would keep the load lighter.
Drawn by mules or oxen, lines of these wagons billowed across the west at the sedate pace of 15 to 20 miles a day. The journey to the Pacific took five months and began in May when the prairie was firm enough for the wagons and there was enough grass for the beasts of burden. Pioneering was a seasonal activity, only wise over the spring and summer. Late starts or slips in schedule due to misfortune could be calamitous. If the wagons failed to get across the Sierra Nevada before the snows, the settlers could become marooned. Such a fate befell the Donner Party in 1846.
For dirt-poor settlers a wagon was a luxury. Their lot was a handcart. Many simply walked to the Pacific. A number pushed wheelbarrows. At least one dog pulled his owner’s chattels across the plains. But in general pioneers were not the very poor. The destitute were too poor to move.
The pathfinders often wrote letters to their kinfolk detailing the pitfalls and perils of the overland trips. Newspapers were full of sage advice, and publishers issued “Guides” by the score for the would-be emigrant. Sometimes the advice was sound:
Obtain Illinois or Missouri Oxen, as they are more adaptable to trail forage, and less likely to be objects of Indian desire.
Every male person should have at least one gun.
Of all the places in the world, travelling in the mountains is the most apt to breed contentions and quarrels. The only way out of it is to say but little, and mind your own business exclusively.
Despite the advice, the emigrants were not always well prepared. Often the wagons were overloaded, and the non-essentials had to be thrown overboard en route. Among the more bizarre items found littering the prairie were a gothic bookcase and a diving bell. “Short-cuts” advertised by unscrupulous traders or ferryboat proprietors proved a frequent disaster for those who failed to heed the experience of others or thought they knew better.
Whatever the preparedness of the overlanders or their mode of travel, there were common hazards and fears. Deep rivers were always a tribulation. The oxen, mules and accompanying cattle had to swim for it. Wagons were converted into crude boats by a sheath of watertight rawhide or tarpaulin stretched around the body, or – if timber was plentiful – were floated across on rafts. Some rivers had to be crossed many times. The Mullan Road in Montana required that the St Regis be traversed 19 times in six miles. Accidents were common: between 1840 and 1860 around 300 overlanders died by drowning.
Water. In one way or another, it ruled the emigrants’ lives. There was either too much of it, or too little. Kansas in a wet spring bogged down hundreds of wagons. The dry stretches of the High Plains under a blazing sun caused tormenting thirst. The cholera which struck down so many hundreds of pioneers at the crowded wells of the Platte was borne by water. So too were other infectious diseases. The trails were marked by graves their length long.
Helpers, Scalpers
But the biggest fear of the overlander was not disease – it was the Indian. Yet this was a fear more imagined than real.
Initially, at least, Indians were more helpers than scalpers along the trail. Marcus Whitman’s Great Migration of 1843 was trailblazed in parts by an Indian guide. When the Stevens–Murphy party of 1844 pushed their wagons beyond the Humboldt Sink, they were following the directions of Truckee, a Paiute Chief, in whose honour the route became named. Indians were especially valued for river crossings; an 1846 guidebook penned by J. M. Shively even went as far as to state that “you must hire an Indian to pilot you at the crossings of the Snake River.” Overlanders happily placed wagons, persons, beeves and beasts in the care of the Sioux at the Platte and Laramie Rivers.
The Indians were quick to learn the White man’s pecuniary ways. And drove hard bargains. When crossing horses over the Columbia River, the Chinook were apt to stop in mid-stream to demand more payment to finish the job. The Native Americans were especially wily when it came to the selling of horseflesh. As one overlander, James Payne, put it in 1850: “Plenty of Indians and pretty ponies today; we tried to make a trade with them, but you can’t cheat them in horses.” By 1852 the Sioux were asking as much as $125 per horse. The trade was particularly profitable when the Indians had stolen the self-same horse from another overlander. Such sharp practice was common enough to merit cautions in more than one overland guide.
As payment for services rendered, Indians took money, but preferred the tangibly useful. Ammunition, guns, knives, blankets and clothes were popular. Whiskey was much sought after. One traveller, Alonzo Delano, reported that the first request of the Sioux near Ash Hollow was for “firewater”. Delano believed that the Indians would trade anything for it, even horses. Overlanders, though, tended to avoid passing the bottle over. When they did, the result, complained one disapproving emigrant, was “brawling and such a noise!”
Yet White–Indian mutual aid soon gave way to hostility. The Native Americans were dismayed by the sheer numbers of Whites trekking through their lands, and felt heavily the threat posed to their way of life. The overlanders scared away or wantonly slaughtered game, especially buffalo, overgrazed the prairie, exhausted the water supply, fired grasslands by accident or design, and depleted the precious tree stocks. As compensation, from 1843 the Indians began to demand a tribute from the passing trains for safe travel through their lands. A number of tribes also erected toll bridges over streams. Most travellers viewed these Indian tributes and tolls with disgust. What irked them was not so much the money but the idea that the Red man had any rights over the White man. In such a circumstance, refusing payment and brandishing arms was a sore temptation. Violent confrontations became commonplace. The Pawnee toll at Shell Creek was a particular hotspot, with something like a battle occurring there in May 1852, after the Indians tore down their bridge in protest at toll refusals. One group of emigrants rebuilt the bridge and pushed on across, declining to make the due payment. The next day, the Pawnee demanded a toll from another party, who likewise refused to pay the 25 cents per wagon asked. The emigrants rushed the bridge in their wagons – only to find that the Pawnee had cut a hole in its centre, which they had camouflaged with brushwood. The lead wagon fell straight through to the water, and shooting started. The Pawnee had the worst of it with nine killed. They were back soon after, but with retaliation, not tolls, in mind. Subsequent overlanders paid the price in plunder for those who rushed the Pawnee bridge at Shell Creek.
Emigrants refused the toll, preferring to fight than to pay. Indians took revenge on later caravans, and indignant overlanders complained. Newspapermen scented a suitably shocking story of Indian depredations. When this was published White citizens requested military protection. The spiral of hostility was precise and unyielding in its rising. In such an atmosphere, relations between White Americans and the tribes could only become strained.
Even so, there was remarkably little White blood shed. Most of the fatalities occurred, contrary to myth, not on the plains but west of South Pass, with the Applegate route to Oregon being a particularly deadly stretch of trail. Indians hesitated to
attack well-disciplined trains (especially when drawn up in a circle), so most engagements took the form of ambushes on individuals or running skirmishes. Sizeable slaughters did occur, though. An entire train of 23 or more overlanders was wiped out at Tule Lake in 1847. Five years later, 14 emigrants were killed and mutilated at Lost River, and 22 at “Bloody Point” near Tule Lake. At midday on 20 August 1854, approximately 30 Snake Indians attacked a small five-wagon train after a dispute over a horse. Only two (who feigned death) of the 20 persons in the train, most belonging to the family of Andrew Ward, escaped. Another group of emigrants stumbled into the massacre, and lost one of their number, before retreating. When volunteers from Fort Boise rode out late to bury the bodies, they found a nightmarish scene. The emigrant children had been burned alive, the women raped, one with a piece of hot iron. Much of the tomahawk mutilation of the women had apparently been done by Snake squaws.
The tragedy caused a chorus of White rage. The editor of Portland’s Weekly Oregonian demanded that the authorities “either exterminate the race of Indians, or prevent further wholesale butcheries by these worthless races resembling human form.” When Bannock and Shoshoni Indians attacked the Otter–Van Orman train on 9 September 1860 the rage reached a crescendo. Exactly what befell the eight-wagon Otter–Van Orman train is uncertain, but it was a rare instance of Indians engaging an encircled train. After withstanding the Indians for several days, the emigrants abandoned the train during a lull in the fighting. Four discharged soldiers travelling with the train took to their horses and galloped off, leaving the rest of the party to their fate. Around 18 were cut down by Indians, including Mrs Abigail Van Orman, four of whose children were abducted. Another 18 emigrants escaped, to wander starving and lost. Jacob and Joseph Keith reached the Umatila Indian Agency on 2 October. Twelve others were found near the Owyhee River – about 90 miles from the initial attack – where they had been subsisting in part on the flesh of dead companions.
