Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  On May 16, 1842, White led (there was no question, at first, that he would lead) a train of 100 men, women, and children; eighteen wagons; a hundred horses and pack-mules; and a cattle herd west out of Elm Grove, twenty miles southwest of Independence.

  At first those who accompanied him suffered the numerous rules their petulant pilot cobbled together, but they soon broke them as they saw fit. They had not gone far when they booted him out as captain of the train altogether, this after he ordered all dogs to be slain lest their barking attract hostile Indians. Of this incident, Bancroft wrote, “King Herod’s edict anent the slaughter of the innocents could scarcely have called forth a louder wail of lamentation from the mothers of Judea than was evoked from the women and children of White’s party.”

  The man who replaced White as wagon master and captain, Lansford W. Hastings, a callow twenty-four-year-old out of Knox County, Ohio, did little better. What harmony remained from White’s brief regime vanished under Hastings’ guidance, so much so that the column broke into two factions, each marching separately until they reached Fort Laramie on June 23.

  With the always dependable Tom Fitzpatrick now their guide to Fort Hall, the Hastings group reached the Sweetwater River on July 13 and, though harassed by a band of Sioux who stole some of their horses, they pushed on. At Fort Hall, on Fitzpatrick’s long-standing advice, the Oregon-bound agreed to give up their wagons and trade them for flour and provisions.

  Elijah White went ahead with a group of horsemen to Fort Boisé and reached Whitman’s mission on September 20, where he delivered the notice of the American board on the mission closings. He told of the hundred emigrants toiling behind him and of the more that would come in ’43 dependent on the missions for succor. Then, after dispatching the board’s directive to Spalding, he pushed on to Fort Vancouver, with “some feeling of self-importance and exultation on returning as the first officer of the United States appointed in that country,” Bancroft said.

  * * *

  There is no record of Marcus Whitman’s reaction as he read the startling news, but one can imagine him trembling with fury at the officious lines on a sheet of foolscap. A supervisory board 3,000 miles away had expressed a blithe willingness to throw over five years of incessant work, humiliation, and frustration to establish a Christian station in the wilderness among a hateful native people. Until now, he had held out the hope that, given time and resources, the Indians would come in and that the mission would become the haven for the heathen they had envisioned when he and Narcissa first saw Waiilatpu in the winter of ’36. Did the commissioners, in the comfort of their Boston boardroom, imagine that they could perform miracles? Did they not realize that five years was a tick of the clock when compared to the centuries the Cayuse and other Northwest tribes had been mired in savage idolatry?

  The Spaldings can have felt little differently about their work with the Nez Percé or the Eells and Walkers about theirs among the Spokanes when Whitman met with them to ask their support. He planned to travel east immediately to convince the board to reverse their decision to close the missions.

  There were objections: The trip east and back would take a year and the mission would have to make do without its only physician, and it was too late in the year to undertake such a journey. But these arguments could not change Whitman’s mind, and he started out on October 3, 1842, with fast horses, a minimum of supplies, a guide, and a newcomer to Waiilatpu, A. L. Lovejoy, who had come in with Elijah White’s party. They reached Fort Hall without incident but with winter closing in, and upon learning that Sioux war parties were abroad along the Platte, they swung south into Mexican territory and in Santa Fé joined a trade caravan bound for Bent’s Fort, the outfitting oasis on the Arkansas River. The journey south was an awful ordeal in which the two men wandered lost, nearly starved, and fought snowstorms, frostbite, and and fatigue. Lovejoy gave out at Bent’s Fort and Whitman went on alone to overtake a fur brigade bound for the Missouri frontier.

  He reached the Eastern Seaboard on March 30, 1843, and paused in Washington, where he had a brief audience with President John Tyler, conferred with Secretary of State Daniel Webster on establishing emigrant supply stations along the Oregon Trail, and talked with editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.

  Whitman then proceeded to Boston, and of the Mission Board’s reaction to his unexpected visit Bancroft says it “was not cordial or even kind; it was frigid. They disapproved of his leaving his station, of the unnecessary expense of the journey, and of its object, especially as it asked for more money and missionaries.” Whitman, he wrote, spoke against closing the stations at a time when emigrant numbers were increasing by the year—the Oregon contingent of the Bartleson-Bidwell party being the latest example. He said the stations needed more than ever to be ministering to the Indians, who would be greatly affected by the increased white presence in their ancestral lands. To these arguments, even to those on the dreaded Catholic advances, the board was cold—“the savages of the inhospitable north-west were not just then in favor with the Sunday-schools,” Bancroft wrote acidly. Nevertheless, the board consented to allow the doctor to return to Waiilatpu and continue his work there, providing he was willing to do so without further support of the board, and even without board payment of his return-journey expenses. The Spaldings could stay put as well, but without board funds.

  Whitman, burdened with his failure before the commissioners and with apprehension on returning to Oregon empty-handed, resolved to make the best of it. He paid a visit to his New York home and, with a young nephew accompanying him, reached the western Missouri border on June 1, 1843. There he joined a large emigrant train and returned to what Bancroft called a “smouldering volcano” in Oregon.

  18

  Jumping Off

  “BEHOLD, THE PLACE WHICH IS NOW CALLED INDEPENDENCE.”

  1

  On April 13, 1842, at the time when Dr. Elijah White was orating across Missouri to Elm Grove where he would undertake to “lead” a party of emigrants to Oregon, the man who blazed much of the trail White would follow died in Saint Louis.

  Wilson Price Hunt, John Jacob Astor’s field marshal, had commanded the grueling and adventuresome nine-month trek of the Astor Overlanders from Saint Louis to the Columbia in 1811, and it had been adventure enough for his lifetime. He had reached home, after a detour to China, in 1816, and devoted the rest of his life, twenty-six years, to his merchant enterprises. Those who knew his history must have sought him out to recount the story of that five-year epic when he radically recast his career from that of New Jersey businessman to wilderness journeyer, leading sixty-nine other Astorians to the Pacific just a few years after Lewis and Clark’s continental crossing.

  Like his employer in New York, Hunt was a businessman and had no interest in the settlement of the Oregon Country except as it might have abetted the fur trade. Yet he lived long enough to witness the death of the fur trade and be honored as a pioneer in breaking the ground for the overland migration to the Oregon Country. Even his mishaps and failures had pointed the way. In the fall of 1811, after he and his footsore and starving party had attempted to negotiate the Snake River in dugout canoes but were battered into surrender, he found a route to the Columbia that filled in a blank: the far western segment of the Oregon Trail.

  By the time of his death there was an Oregon Trail, a maddening route of zigs and zags, detours and wanderings, but it was becoming defined through the hard-earned work of an Olympian roll call of trailbreakers: Robert Stuart (first to travel it west to east; discoverer of South Pass), Manuel Lisa, the Ashley-Henry brigades, Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Nathaniel Wyeth, Benjamin Bonneville, Jason Lee, the Whitmans and the Spaldings, the Bartleson-Bidwell party, and Elijah White.

  All of these brush cutters, boulder movers, river forders, and mountain climbers crossed the path, almost literally, that led to Wilson Hunt’s counting house in Saint Louis, and justly so: The Oregon Trail began there.

  * * *
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  In 1842, the year Hunt died, Charles Dickens, the thirty-year-old author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, and The Old Curiosity Shop, came to Saint Louis at the end of his six-month American lecture tour. He landed in New York in January with two enormous portmanteaux and a mission: to talk about the detestable habit of American publishers of pirating the work of European authors and the crying need for an international copyright law. This was not a particularly inspiring theme for the man Daniel Webster said had “done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen that Great Britain has sent into Parliament.” Dickens spoke poignantly of Sir Walter Scott, whose last days of indebtedness, the lecturer said, would have been lightened if the thieves of his work had paid a tithe of what was due him. But on his book-buccaneering exertions the Hartford Times spoke for many in editorializing, “It happens we want no advice on this subject.” This attitude convinced Dickens, as it had Alexis de Tocqueville before him, that America had far less freedom of expression than the Americans boasted. He also found too little sympathy for his privately expressed views on slavery—“that most hideous blot and foul disgrace.”

  No matter his message, Dickens was a crowd-pleaser, especially so when he gave his brilliant readings from his works, each character coming alive through the theatrical quality of his voice. Three months into his tour, in every city he visited his admirers came out in enormous levees; he shook 600 hands every day and so enthusiastic were his auditors that they grabbed at his topper and cane and pulled the fur from his coat for souvenirs. After a great ball at the Carlton Hotel in New York he was so exhausted that he spent four days in bed to gather strength to move on.

  When Dickens sailed for England in June, he had a six-month journal1 of opinions on America and Americans, much of it negative, written in a dubious, seriocomic tone giving the reader the impression that these were the memoirs of a hapless victim of circumstance on a hellish junket of discovery. In truth, he had quickly sickened of America and Americans; he was revolted by the way men bolted their food and spit tobacco; thought it fatuous that women attended so many elevating lectures (presumably including his own); saw nearly every site as dreary and monotonous. Upon returning, after a more comfortable time among Englishmen in Toronto and Montreal, he wrote a friend, “I would not condemn you to a year’s residence on this side of the Atlantic for any money,” and to another who asked about a particular American acquaintance Dickens wrote, “I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.”

  He traveled as far west as Saint Louis and as his steamer neared the Mississippi what minute traces of beauty and civilization he had seen in New England gave way to an enveloping primeval ugliness: “The trees were stunted in their growth,” he wrote, “the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log-cabins fewer in number; their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered before. No songs or birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift-passing clouds.”

  The juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi he found to be “A dismal swamp … teeming with rank, unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither droop and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it … a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise, a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it; such is this dismal Cairo.” To Dickens, the Father of Waters suffered from an appalling disease, and probably its bank-dwellers as well. He called it “an enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour … the banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs,” and said “the wretched cabins” were few and far apart, “their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitos penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything.”

  In Saint Louis he stayed at Planter’s House and observed the town’s “crazy old tenements with blinking casements, such as may be seen in Flanders.” He mentioned its wharves, warehouses, and shops, and found them wanting in comparison even to those in Cincinnati, found its heat and humidity unbearable and its vast tracts of undrained swampland giving off the vapors from which awful fevers were born.

  “No man ever admits the unhealthiness of the place he dwells in (unless he is going away from it),” he said, “and I shall therefore, I have no doubt, be at issue with the inhabitants of St. Louis in questioning the perfect salubrity of its climate, and in hinting that I think it must rather dispose to fever in the summer and autumnal seasons.”

  When Dickens saw it, Saint Louis had been incorporated as a city for only twenty years, and barely eighty years had passed since a primitive fur-trading post was raised on the site by Pierre de Laclède Liguest and named for the sainted thirteenth-century king Louis IX. From those muddy origins in 1764 and thereafter, Saint Louis was to the American fur trade what Michilimackinac, the Grand Portage, and Fort William were to the Canadian fur trade, a frontier entrepôt where trapping brigades were fitted out to venture to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, where furs were received and shipped out and supplies and goods were received.

  In Astor’s time, the decade of the Louisiana Purchase, when Saint Louis fell into the American sphere, the town was “the centre of rude bustle and business activity,” Bancroft wrote. Its original Creole population, descendants of French colonists, were mixed with “keen, trafficking New Englanders; brawny backwoodsmen of the western frontier; tall, big-boned specimens of the unwashed and untaught corn-bread-and-bacon-fed of Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri.” With these were coureurs de bois and voyageurs from Canada, Indians of many tribes and half-breeds from the prairies, and some who drifted down from the Rocky Mountains; keen traders from the Atlantic states; vagrants, shopkeepers, speculators, and extravagant, bragging boatmen as well as “lavish, loud-joking, royal American pedlers” who “were then beginning to practice their pistolings, knife exercises, and card-waxing for the forty years of commercial throat-cutting, highway blackguardism, and unique boat-racing and boiler-bursting which were to follow.”

  This motley populace, which Washington Irving said was prone to pass its time “in idleness and revelry about the trading posts or settlements; squandering their hard earnings in heedless conviviality, and rivaling their neighbors, the Indians, in indolent indulgence and an impudent disregard of the morrow,” had changed but little when Dickens’ bile rose upon visiting the town. The Canadian woods runners and canoemen had departed, but most of the others were still there, following their several bents, among these a new profession for the old trapper-explorer of the western frontier. By 1842, Bancroft’s “leathern-frocked frontiersmen” were now guiding emigrant parties out of the Saint Louis gateway and into the air and elbowroom of the far West.

  2

  Once inside the gateway to the West, commonly at Saint Louis or its environs on the west bank of the Mississippi, the typical Pacific-bound emigrant followed the Missouri River 250 miles westward to Independence, a log hamlet on a nicely timbered bluff three miles inland from the Big Muddy’s great northward bend, forty miles downstream from Fort Leavenworth, and just inside the border of the United States.

  The first cabins at Independence had been thrown up in 1827 and grew into a helter-skelter collection of low-roofed log and adobe huts, taverns, and stores. The area then became the chief staging area for trade caravans setting out on the 780-mile-long Santa Fé Trail and the departure point for fur brigades heading for the Rockies and beyond. In 1833 its main steamboat landing washed away and pilots had to find a new one a few miles upstream, at Westport Landing, and the time would come when Saint Joseph, fifty miles to the northwest, would become the favored launching place for overland caravans. But Independence had a running start, and by 1841 it had a permanent population of perhaps 800 and a transient one of 7,000 to 10,0
00 in the peak spring season. There were dry-goods stores there, and barbershops, saloons, a church or two, harness-making, wheelwright, and blacksmith shops—all booming businesses. There were even a few refined homes above the riverbank and a plain where the canvas tents of the emigrant trains gave off their lantern glow at night.

  Nathan Boone, Daniel’s youngest son, visited the town early in its history and called it “Eden,” and Joseph Smith, the founding father of Mormonism, spoke of it in 1831. God had revealed to him “The land of Missouri,” he said, “the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the Saints.” He had found the land of promise and the place for the city of Zion: “Behold, the place which is now called Independence.” (Joseph Smith was murdered in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, and Missouri turned out to be an earthly hell to Mormons. The Zion he sought became the city founded on the Great Salt Lake of Utah by his successor, Brigham Young.)

  No one who passed through Independence in the 1830s forgot its noise. Saint Louis had its din, too, but was big enough for it to thin out and even had genteel places where the loudest sounds were the click of billiard balls and the tinkling of a piano. Not so in the tiny Bedlam on the fringe of the immense solitude and stillness of the western prairies. Independence seemed to have been born in a cacophony that never let up.

  The racket began at the steamboat slips at Independence Landing, where the tall-stacked paddle wheelers offloaded their complements of traders, trappers, and emigrant parties and the encumbrances of each amid the raucous hooting of steam-whistles, clanging of bells, and slamming down of landing ramps. The trail to Independence was a pandemonium of braying mules and squawking chickens, quarreling emigrants, blaspheming stevedores and teamsters, the hiss and pop of bullwhips, gunshots announcing pack-train arrivals, the rattle of buckets and tinware hanging on creaking wagons—the din rising in volume and tempo in the town itself.