Bartleson was elected, but he had no more idea of how to get wagons and people to the Pacific coast than any of the others. This realization, and his insufferable self-importance, caused frictions among the fragile, fearful neophytes and were factors in the eventual splitting of the party at Soda Springs in Idaho. There, half the party decided to proceed to Oregon rather than accompany their captain to California.
For the present, the pressing problem was how to get to the Pacific with more specificity than following the sun. The answer fell into their laps when a horseman came into the Sapling Grove camp and announced that three Jesuit priests, five teamsters, and two French-Canadian trappers would be arriving soon in the vicinity. The messenger said the priests were headed for the Oregon Country and that they were being escorted by Thomas Fitzpatrick.
This was heaven-sent news. Broken Hand Fitzpatrick! Who had not heard of this Nimrod of the far West? And who knew the route to the Pacific better than he, who had crossed and recrossed South Pass with such peers as Jedediah Smith and Jim Bridger, who had guided the Whitmans and Spaldings to the Oregon Country?
Some in the Bartleson group “thought we could not afford to wait for a slow missionary party,” John Bidwell wrote. “But when we found that no one knew which way to go, we sobered down and waited for them to come up. And it was well that we did for otherwise probably not one of us would ever have reached California because of our inexperience.”
The three missionaries who had hired Fitzpatrick to guide them to the Oregon Country, specifically to the Bitterroot valley of Montana, were led by Father Jean-Pierre De Smet, a forty-year-old Belgian who had emigrated to the United States in 1821, entered the novitiate of the Jesuit order near Baltimore, and in 1827 was ordained. He had worked as a missionary among the Potawatomis in Iowa, and in 1840 joined a fur-trade caravan to the Green River and spent two months among the Flatheads in the Three Forks region of Montana. Now he was returning, with two fellow priests, Nicholas Point and Gregory Mengarini, to build the Jesuit Mission of Saint Mary’s among the Flathead people.
De Smet was a good-natured Friar Tuck who stood at five feet seven, weighed over 200 pounds and impressed all who met him, including the Protestant missionaries who hated “Romanism” in all its manifestations. Bidwell said, “He was genial, of fine presence, and one of the saintliest men I have ever known, and I cannot wonder that the Indians were made to believe he was divinely protected.”
This assessment was correct. De Smet and his Jesuits were to have a success among the natives of the Oregon Country that contrasted sharply with the frustrations of the Lees, Whitmans, and Spaldings. The Jesuits were genuinely sympathetic to the hardships the Indians endured and found them apt pupils, so eager to learn that when the Flatheads set out in their late-fall buffalo hunt they expressly asked for a “Black Robe” to accompany them and continue their religious instruction. This assignment De Smet delegated to Father Point, who spent six years with the Flatheads, the neighboring Coeur d’Alênes, and the dreaded Blackfeet. He followed their hunting parties, lived with them in their winter camps, made numerous converts (which some said was due to colorful Catholic symbolism, trappings, and rituals), and fought what he called “the avarice and cupidity of civilized man,” the “abominable influence of frontier vices,” and the “Apostles of Protestantism.”
De Smet had identical attitudes and successes. By 1847 he had three missions in the Oregon Country and by 1850 five Jesuit and two Oblate missions serving in the Pacific Northwest.
3
On May 10, 1841, the first emigrant train to set out from the Missouri frontier for the Pacific rolled northeasterly toward the Platte River on a route soon to bear a heavy traffic. The Bartleson-Bidwell party’s thirteen wagons followed Fitzpatrick and the Jesuits with their five two-wheeled carts drawn by mules in tandem hitches. In all, there were close to eighty people in the caravan and, as the true pioneers of what became known as the Oregon Trail, they had to work ceaselessly to make a trail out of a dim trapper’s path. Wagons1 had to be wrestled along at an agonizingly slow pace, boulders rolled away, giant sinkholes spaded over, brush chopped, and trees felled.
Father Point mirrored the relief of the whole party in having Fitzpatrick riding ahead of the caravan, directing the work and doing his share of it, and taking command of every aspect of their passage west. “In these immense solitudes it was necessary to have an experienced guide,” Point wrote. “The choice fell not on the colonel [Bartleson], who had never crossed the mountains, but on the captain Father De Smet engaged. He was a courageous Irishman known to most of the Indian tribes as Tet Blanch [White Head] or Broken Hand. He had spent fully two-thirds of his life crossing the plains.” The one dissenting voice in the praise for Fitzpatrick was that of Reverend Joseph Williams, a Methodist preacher who caught up with the caravan on May 21, riding up alone, unarmed, and uninvited and attaching himself to the party. “Our leader, Fitzpatrick,” Williams later wrote, “is a wicked, worldly man, and much opposed to missionaries going among the Indians. He has some intelligence, but is deistical in his principles.” The reverend suspected that nearly all the others in the party were “deists,” his favorite word for non-Christians, blasphemers, and those not comporting to his ideas of “Godliness.” While his attitude toward the Jesuits is unknown, he no doubt kept his distance from them and all others of Papist inclinations. Fitzpatrick’s biographer, Leroy Hafen, said that Williams’ statements “may be classed as amusing rather than important.”
Father Point recorded in his diary the daily schedule of the caravan under Broken Hand’s captaincy: He signaled the departures, ordered the line of march, selected the rest and meal stops and the camps for the night; he set the sentries (the priests did their stint along with every other adult male) and maintained discipline. When possible the camps were made in wooded areas close to water. The wagons and carts were drawn together in a hollow square, “more or less according to the nature of the terraine,” Point said, the tongue of one wagon fastened to the rear of the next, the horses, oxen, and pack animals picketed inside. No cookfires were permitted after nightfall so as to prevent alerting Indians in the camp vicinity.
Fear of “red savages” was a palpable feature of all overland emigrant parties, and while there were few instances of Indian hostility against wagon trains, two weeks after the Bartleson-Bidwell party departed Sapling Grove there was a scare that seemed to justify all the campfire qualms and cautions.
One of the young men in the party, Nicholas Dawson, rode a mule out some distance ahead of the wagons as they neared the Platte River in Nebraska. He was a hunter and hoped to find an antelope or two to bring back for the cookfires. But when he ran back to the camp afoot he told Fitzpatrick that he had been assaulted by an Indian war party and robbed of his mule, guns, and even some of his clothing. The captain immediately ordered the wagons into a square and this was completed just as about fifty Indians rode into view and, to the astonishment of the white onlookers, nonchalantly began setting up their lodge poles and making camp. Fitzpatrick and one of his men rode over cautiously for a parley. The Indians were Cheyenne and told Broken Hand that they had been forced to disarm the white boy after he saw them approach, appeared terrorized, and waved his firearms in their direction. They readily turned over the mule and guns they had confiscated.
Nicholas Dawson never heard the end of it, and the story of “Cheyenne Dawson,” festooned with elaborate exaggerations, was told around western campfires for years afterward.
* * *
Between the South Platte and Sweetwater Rivers, buffalo were in such abundance that the emigrants, few of whom had seen the great beasts before, gorged on them trapper-style, finding the tongue, hump meat, and bone marrow, thumbed out from the split bones in strips, special delicacies. “There is no better beef in the world than that of the buffalo,” Bidwell said, but he added plaintively that the animals were slaughtered randomly and needlessly by white hunters who left many untouched carcasses on the prairie for
wolves and ravens. He observed the Cheyenne, still traveling two or three miles ahead of the caravan, taking all the meat, the hide, horns, and hooves, wasting nothing.
The animals’ numbers were frightening. “I think I can truly say that I saw in that region in one day more buffaloes than I have seen of cattle in all my life,” Bidwell wrote. “They seemed to be coming northward continually from the distant plains to the Platte to get water, and would plunge in and swim across by the thousands—so numberous were they that they changed not only the color of the water, but its taste, until it was unfit to drink; but we had to use it.”
The prohibition against night fires that might attract Indians gave way in buffalo country to bonfires and men periodically firing their rifles into the night sky to prevent the herds from trampling the camp. “We could hear them thundering all night long,” Bidwell said, “the ground fairly trembled with vast approaching bands; and if they had not been diverted, wagons, animals, and emigrants would have been trodden under their feet. One cannot describe the rush and wildness of the thing.”
Perhaps second only to the scary grandeur of the buffalo herds, which were often described as an immense brown blanket on the prairie stretching to the horizon, the journeyers were awed by the sudden and spectacular lightning fireworks of the violent thunderstorms that soaked their camps, turned the trail to a muddy gumbo, sank wagon wheels to their hubs, and caused horses, mules, and oxen to bolt and scatter. The storms usually formed in the afternoon sunlight with the tops of billowing western clouds flattening, followed by light breezes popping the wagon covers and thunder rolling across the prairie. The wind then began screaming at them, frequently reaching eighty miles an hour in force, pummeling man and beast off their feet, upsetting wagons, and driving uprooted trees and brush along in dense clouds of dirt. Often the storms produced hailstones as big as turkey eggs—big enough to knock a man unconscious—and created a panicky run for cover under wagons or in whatever trees were available. Animals in the open were always injured by the plummeting stones.
The caravan forded the South Platte at what was called the Old California Crossing, near Brule, Nebraska, and followed the North Platte to Fort Laramie, arriving there on June 22. The course was now westerly and the party crossed the North Platte near Casper, Wyoming, and South Pass, descended to the Green River, thence to Soda Springs, in Idaho, at the northernmost bend of the Bear River.
By now, the Bartleson-Bidwell group, sixty-nine in number at Sapling Grove, had been reduced by five men. One man (mordantly named Shotwell) accidentally killed himself, presumably while cleaning his rifle; another left the party at Fort Laramie; and three others turned back after crossing South Pass. Those remaining divided evenly at Soda Springs. Thirty-two elected to follow Fitzpatrick and the Jesuits to Fort Hall, about forty miles distant, and move on via the Snake and Columbia to Fort Vancouver. The other thirty-two, Bartleson and Bidwell among them, plunged into the terra incognita toward California.
The California-bound remnant of the Western Emigration Society struggled across the Utah and Nevada deserts, their draft and pack animals dropping in the waterless, grassless wastes, their wagons left behind as grim sentinels for those who dared to follow. In the middle of October the travelers reached the eastern escarpments of the Sierra Nevadas. They had eaten the last of their mules and oxen and were progressing little more than ten miles in a day when they stumbled across the mountains just ahead of the worst of the killing winter snows. They walked into the San Joaquin valley ranch of an American squatter named John Marsh on November 1, 1841.
Those Oregon-bound from Fort Hall, guided by Nez Percé, also surrendered their wagons but came safely into the Willamette valley in the fall of 1841, the first organized emigrant party to travel the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. After they made a stop at Waiilatpu, Marcus Whitman, the veteran wagon wrestler, wrote, “They have left their wagons at Fort Hall, but very soon others will discover that they can bring them through to the Columbia.” He saw the newcomers heralding a great American migration to Oregon. “Lapwai and Waiilatpu will become supply stations to thousands of travellers,” he wrote, “and the objectives of the committee [the American Board of Foreign Missions] will be removed. Help can be obtained from the immigrants; a settlement can be formed and a strong Protestant influence brought to counter the efforts of the Catholics.”
Holding Romanism in check was a strong argument and one used forceably by Whitman and Spalding in their correspondence with the eastern supervisors. Above all, they said, they needed time to attain the persistently stated aspirations of the Mission Board: self-sufficiency and a record of success in Christianizing Indians. Five years in the Oregon Country was not time enough to accomplish either of these purposes. They were still building and planting, and they needed more people, more funds, more time.
In Boston, the board’s commissioners were deaf to these appeals; indeed, in the summer of 1842 they were preparing a plan to dismantle the Oregon stations and recall several missionaries. This drastic departure from the bright and hopeful days of the Macedonian Cry resulted from too-high expectations and inevitable disappointments. Their correspondence revealed that the missionaries seemed more occupied with bickering among themselves than with doing God’s work (Elkanah Walker’s wife, Mary, wrote that “None of them love one another well enough to live in peace together”); the stations were far more expensive to build and maintain than had been anticipated; and for five years there had been no optimistic word from Waiilatpu, Lapwai, or the smaller mission at Kamiah, opened in 1839 sixty miles up the Clearwater above Lapwai, that the natives were interested in learning of Jesus and the Scriptures.
No matter how loathsome the incursions being made by the Papists in Oregon, the board could not afford to continue its high-minded experiment there. They decided to close the missions at Waiilatpu, Lapwai, and Kamiah, recall the Spaldings and William Gray, and send the Whitmans to Chemakane, the station among the Spokanes operated by Cushing Eells and Elkanah Walker. With this consolidation and house-cleaning, Chemakane would become the sole Presbyterian-Congregationalist outpost in Oregon.
4
These devastating orders were to be hand-delivered to Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding by Dr. Elijah White of Tompkins County, New York. Bancroft described this singular man as having manners that “were of that obliging kind which made him popular, especially among women, but which men often called sycophantish and insincere.” He gained a reputation as a busybody, was greatly “fond of oratorical display and of society, affectedly rather than truly pious, not altogether a bad man, though a weak one. He had no talent, as Heinrich Heine would declare, but yet a character. And strange to say, the longer he dwelt upon this [the Oregon] coast, the more he became smooth and slippery like glass, and flat withal, yet he could be round and cutting on occasions, particularly when broken on the wheel of adversity.”
White, about thirty-three, had originally gone out to the Pacific coast on the brig Hamilton in 1836 among Jason Lee’s first reinforcement. The characteristics Bancroft described, and his penchant toward argumentativeness, were not found to be helpful by the volatile Lee and his Willamette flock. Inevitably, the two men clashed and White had returned home in 1840 aboard the Lausanne, the vessel that had carried Lee, his new wife, and his “Great Reinforcement” to the Columbia in 1840.
The Lausanne was commanded by Josiah Spaulding, with whom White struck up a friendship. The captain had transmuted from a merchant skipper to an Oregon specialist in his voyages. He seems to have shared his views with Dr. White, who found them so compelling he offered to assist Spaulding in writing them down for the purpose of delivering them to Congress. The lengthy document born of this collaboration was a compendium of rumor and purplish prose describing Indian depredations and massacres and, among other libels, accusations that the Hudson’s Bay Company had incited the Oregon tribes to attack American settlers and missionaries.
Spaulding’s scuttlebutt-filled report found an audience in Washington, a
s all anti-British opinions did. It was among the testimonials employed by Senator Linn of Missouri in his 1841 Oregon bill. That document proposed American military occupation of Oregon and contained a recommendation that an “agent” be appointed to monitor Indian activities in the Northwest and keep an eye on the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The bill died aborning, but the Indian-agent idea survived and Elijah White, who was in Washington and therefore handiest of the Oregon veterans, got the job, as “subagent,” at a $750 annual salary and the promise that the stipend would be doubled upon the resubmission and passage of Linn’s bill. His duties were as vaguely stated as his title, but this did not hamper Dr. White, who was quite capable of filling in the blanks. Historian David Lavender wrote that the missionary-physician believed that “Every person there [Oregon], from McLoughlin on down, would have to heed him. By the time the doctor reached the Willamette, indeed, he would consider himself vested with as many powers as a full-fledged territorial governor.”
Before departing for Independence, White, a Methodist, apparently paid a courtesy call at the Presbyterian-Congregationalist Mission Board in Boston, no doubt offering to be of service in his new role as Indian subagent in Oregon. As a result he was asked to deliver a sealed directive to Spalding at Lapwai and Whitman at Waiilatpu. White was not privy to the contents of the letter.
Since he divined that his assignment included encouraging westward emigration, when he made his way to Missouri in the spring of 1842 White launched a publicity campaign, made countless speeches, and wrote newspaper letters drumming up a party to accompany him to the Oregon Country. Over 100 people responded, better than half men over eighteen years of age stirred by his tales that the United States would soon be acting on the Oregon question and his assurance that Senator Linn’s bill, with its magnanimous land allotments, would become the law of the land.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 30
