Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Walking the 2,000 miles or so from Independence or the other frontier settlements to the Columbia was cheaper, even though everything but the walking cost cash.

  Bernard De Voto estimated that the average family “outfit”—wagon, draft animals, tools, food, and supplies—was worth from $700 to $1,500, the money deriving from selling a farm, liquidating a small business, borrowing, pooling, scraping together. The really poor man with nothing to liquidate had to hire out as a laborer, camp helper, hunter, or teamster, carrying his kit on his back and working for his meals. Many men, and some families, started out on foot with no wagon or even a horse, toting survival essentials and hoping to attach themselves to an emigrant train. One man became an Oregon Trail celebrity of sorts as he made his way west pushing a wheelbarrow containing a few tools, some spare clothing, and food.

  For the farm-seller and family with the money to invest, the immediate matters to attend to, before or after reaching Saint Louis, involved wagons, what to put in them, and the animals to pull them.

  By 1843 there were guidebooks, memoirs, and advice aplenty from those who had made the journey (and a great deal of advice from those who hadn’t). All these authorities were in general agreement on the ideal of a light load in a light wagon drawn by strong, healthy animals. Like all ideals, this one was easily stated and difficult to practice. Of course dependable authority Marcus Whitman, despite his own failure to take one beyond Fort Hall, believed that wagons were essential for families to reach the Columbia River valley.

  Wagon wisdom, refined over the years since the Whitmans and the Spaldings made their overland journey in 1836, drifted toward the ideal. Few of the Oregon Trail wagons of the 1840s resembled the ponderous, big-wheeled, boat-curved Conestogas used by freighting outfits. Whether set aside when farms were sold, or custom built (at a cost of $60–$100), the typical overland wagon was generally light, made of hickory or maple as often as oak, springless and straight-bedded, the wagon box ten to twelve feet long, four feet wide, and two deep. The box, generally overloaded at the start of the journey with 3,000 pounds or more of goods and belongings, was packed four feet deep with a narrow passage down the middle. At the bottom were the big, heavy items, like plows, bedsteads, stoves, chests, and bags of seeds; then a layer of kitchen utensils and clothing; and on top the immediate necessities: water kegs, cooking pots, axes, firearms, bags of flour, salt and coffee beans, blankets, and the like. False bottoms provided extra storage for spare wagon parts, and a jockey box up front or mounted on the side of the bed held tools for repairs.

  Wagon wheels were complex structures of carefully fitted components: curved oaken or bois d’arc felloes pegged or clamped together on which the iron tires were bolted; heavy spokes socketed into the felloes; massive hubs; all, excepting the tires, bolts, and supporting strap iron, fashioned of wood, since metal was too heavy and too difficult to repair in the wilderness. The rear wheels were commonly five to six feet in diameter and the front ones smaller, four feet or so, to permit sharp turns and to prevent them from jamming against the wagon box. The wheels were dished outward for stabilization and removed by cranking up the bed with a jack.

  The wagon undercarriage was a cunning arrangement keyed to a kingpin, the main front pivot, running through a wooden “box bolster,” a support on which the wagon box rested. Brakes consisted of hardwood blocks levered against the rear wheels. The running gear was greased from a bucket suspended from the rear axle.

  Wagon covers were made of double thicknesses of canvas (often made of hemp, an important cash crop in Missouri and the deep South), drill, or sailcloth, waterproofed with paint or linseed oil and fixed to hickory bows and puckered with ropes rove through their hems. The grimy white covers, billowing and popping in the wind as the wagons crawled across the grasslands, inspired the image of the “prairie schooner,” but the name took on a decidedly unromantic meaning at certain river crossings where timber was unavailable for raft building. On such occasions the wagon boxes were caulked and sheathed in rawhide or tarpaulin coated with oakum and tallow, the running gear removed and placed inside the box, and the box floated across swollen waterways with cursing, sputtering men handling the guide ropes.

  On the downhill side of steep mountain slopes, the wheels had to be locked in place by chains threaded through the spokes and fastened to the bed, the wagon then skidded downhill with curved iron shoes attached to the motionless wheels to prevent them from developing flat spots.

  People walked alongside their wagons, occasionally taking a rest on a “lazy board,” a seat projecting from the side of the box, or on horseback or mule-back. In camp in bad weather a family would sleep on top of the load under the canvas; otherwise, they lived outside the wagon and walked alongside it.

  * * *

  The enduring debate among outfitters, teamsters, and overland travelers had to do with the critical matter of the best animals to pull the wagon. Horses were seldom a part of the argument. They were needed by outriders and hunters, but were not practical as draft animals. They were too expensive ($200 for a good one), they did not forage well on the dry grass of the plains so their feed had to be supplemented by grain carried along in the train, they were prone to distemper from drinking alkaline water, too easily plagued by flies and mosquitoes, and they lacked the strength required to pull a heavy wagon.

  Both mules and oxen had strong adherents. Oxen covered less ground in a day but were “easy keepers” and cost less: forty to sixty-five dollars for an ox three to five years old, ninety or a hundred dollars for a five-year-old Missouri mule. The ox required no expensive harness, collars, or trees, only a double hickory yoke about four feet long with up-and-over curves at each end, holes bored in it to receive the ends of the oxbow, and a croquet wicket–shaped loop that ran under the animal’s neck, kept in place by wooden “keys,” wedges, or cotter pins. A swinging iron ring carried the wagon pole.

  Oxen worked in pairs, or yokes, with a minimum of two but usually three yokes for each wagon, plus a spare or two. The biggest animals would be yoked just ahead of the wagon for the hardest work.

  Some emigrants with enough pooled money hired teamsters, but most managed their wagons on their own. Oxen trained to the yoke as calves were driven by a bullwhacker walking alongside them with an eighteen-foot braided rawhide whip with a “popper” at the end. The bullwhip was held by its two-foot-long handle, and was swung backward, then in a circle over the driver’s head, then forward to crack over the animals’ ears. Goads, long sticks with a spike at the end, were also used, but sparingly—no good teamster injured his animals with whip or goad—and occasionally the lead ox would have a rope hooked over his horns and jerked to get his attention.

  Oxen were controlled with the standard shouts of “Gee!”, “Haw!”, and “Whoa!” but they were often unresponsive to such orders. A familiar Oregon Trail tableau was that of ox teams straining against their yokes, heads low, snorting and blowing the dust and burned-over prairie grass from their nostrils, heaving their overloaded wagons forward with chains rattling, axles shrieking, and whips popping loud as pistol shots—all this as the grimy, sun-scoured drivers cursed above the din.

  Oxen had disadvantages: They tended to recklessness when thirsty or overheated and would sometimes stampede to a water hole or stream. On such occasions nothing could be done to stop them until they were sated and bogged down in mud. In this characteristic they differed from the other animals in the train, including the humans, only in their bulk and corresponding water requirements and capacity.

  The greatest problem oxen presented as draft animals was the tendency for their hooves to wear and split on rocky ground. Cracked hooves were “cured” by drawing a string soaked in hot tar through the split. They were shod with small parenthesis-shaped iron shoes nailed on each side of the cloven hoof, but the average ox was uncooperative in this operation and when his hooves needed examining often lay down with his feet tucked under him. Ox-shoeing was a difficult procedure even in a blacksmith’s sho
p, where the animal had to be driven headfirst into a timbered stall, canvas slings placed under its belly so the beast could be hoisted by a windlass, and its feet tied to a rail for shoeing. On the prairie, the whole thing was hellish: A trench was dug and the terrified ox wrestled into it upside down, the kicking feet lashed together and held while the shoes were tacked on. If spare shoes had been used up between outposts on the trail pieces of thick leather were used as substitutes, or the hooves were smeared with tar and grease and buffalo-hide booties fastened on. Some teamsters were able to rope, tie, and shoe the animals without the trench method, but it was a dangerous business either way.

  An emigrant wagon required a minimum of six mules to draw 2,000 pounds and in addition to costing more per animal and requiring relatively expensive harness, they had to be driven, meaning relays of men had to sit on the jouncing wagon for hours on end. Mules were faster than oxen and endured the heat better, but they were sulkier too, shying at sudden noises, and even at shadows, and bolting for no apparent reason—“much given to mayhem,” in Merrill J. Mattes’ felicitous phrase. Mules were tough and durable, and if a wagon broke down beyond repair mules became pack animals, which oxen did not; on the other hand, Indians would steal a mule but not an ox, and a dead ox made better eating than a dead mule.

  Peter Burnett of Indiana, who made his Oregon Trail journey in 1843, said, “The ox is the most noble animal, patient, thrifty, durable, gentle. Those who come to this country will be in love with their oxen by the time they get here.”

  That nobility struck many a westering family on the Oregon Trail as with rags soaked in camphor clapped to their noses they passed the rotting carcasses of hundreds of oxen that had been shot for food or perished from hunger, thirst, and overwork. One such witness wrote, “There ought to be a Heaven for all ox that perish under the yoke, where they could roam in the fields of sweet clover and timothy.”

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  Early travelers on the Oregon Trail offered valuable advice to the emigrants moving out from the rendezvous places around Independence: For families with children, take a milk cow (and hang a bucket of milk from the wagon undercarriage—it’ll bounce and make butter); take a few head of cattle if possible, and maybe some chickens in a coop lashed to the tailgate. They can be let out in camp to forage on bugs and worms and kids can be given the chore of chicken-wrangler to gather them up before the dawn departure. Above all, take spares and extras: spare horse; spare draft animals; extra shoes, yokes, chains and harness; and wagon parts—axles, tongues, wheels, spokes, oxbows, kingbolts and tongue-bolts. Take good water kegs and plenty of rope, light for picketing animals and general chores, heavy for lowering wagons down slopes and towing wagon boxes across water. Take whiskey for dosing animals poisoned by bad water, and a medicine chest for sick humans; take rifles and shotguns, powder, lead and bullet molds, lanterns, extra boots and socks. Take duck trousers, flannel shirts and woolen long johns; ladies take gingham and sunbonnets.

  As to provender, experience said to go light on rice and beans—they take too long to cook—and heavy on cornmeal, for johnnycakes, biscuits, and the like. Take flour, dried fruit and vegetables (anti-scorbutics), hardtack, salt, coffee, tea, sugar, molasses, vinegar, saleratus (baking soda), wrapped bacon sunk in a barrel of bran or cornmeal to keep it from spoiling, eggs treated the same way. Take matches sealed in corked bottles and gutta-percha or painted canvas cloths for sleeping on wet ground. Follow Doctor Marcus Whitman’s dictum—“Nothing is wise that does not help you along; nothing is good for you that causes a moment’s delay” —and take nothing except what is absolutely essential to getting to your destination.

  Randolph Barnes Marcy of Greenwich, Massachusetts, an army officer who led emigrant caravans to California in gold rush years, listed in his popular Prairie Traveller the minimum “allowance of provisions for each grown person” heading to the Pacific from Missouri, good for four months: 150 pounds of flour or its equivalent in hard bread (hardtack); twenty-five pounds of bacon or pork, and “enough fresh beef to be driven on the hoof to make up the meat component of the ration,” fifteen pounds of coffee, twenty-five pounds of sugar, “plus saleratus or yeast powders for making bread, and salt and pepper.”

  No matter the advice and voices of experience, the wagons crawling west were packed to the sideboards and four or more feet deep with the very superfluities Doctor Whitman and Marcy warned against. Some of these, such as the tools of a farmer’s trade—plows, axes, hoes, hammers, kegs of nails, bucksaws, spades, augurs, and whetstones—seemed absolute essentials for one expecting to build a cabin and cultivate a subsistence crop in the wilderness. Other things were carried along because they brought a remnant of civilized life to a savage land: claw-footed tables, heirloom chiffoniers, cast-iron skillets and cookpots, “thunder mugs” (chamber pots), washbowls, rocking chairs, books, churns, bedsteads, feather mattresses, quilts, and bundled clothing.

  The opening shake-down miles of the journey determined what the real necessities were and what had to be sacrificed as the ox and mule teams reached rough country and the first serious water crossings. The jettisoning process began a few miles out from the Missouri frontier, took a serious turn near the head of Grand Island, Nebraska, and became more serious by the time Fort Laramie was reached. All along the Oregon Trail load-lightening relics were strewn among the carcasses of oxen and mules: stacks of bacon rotting in the sun—as much as a half-ton in some places—trunks, mattresses, carpenter tools, saddles, sawmill equipment, mining augurs, anvils, bellows, crowbars, scythes, gold washers, plows, grindstones, baking ovens, harness, kegs and barrels, books and furniture, and fatally broken wagons.

  Passersby scavaged among these pickings, finding needed wagon parts, tools, and miscellaneous treasures. One posted sign urged HELP YOURSELF, and one pioneer wrote home: “Don’t bother to bring cooking stoves. I could pick up one anywhere.”

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  Oregon Trail journeyers were a freewheeling lot who were apt to turn their wagons off the roadway with no notice to see the sights or take a rest from eating dust. They wore down their stock, threw up hasty camp corrals that let their animals wander, were late making camp, dallied at starting out in the morning, groused at taking their sentry-duty turn or at doing any other communal chore, argued and fought among themselves, occasionally with real violence. What discipline could be imposed came from their elected train captain and his subordinates or from their guide, but the emigrant trains never abided the rigid marching orders and military order of the Santa Fé trade trains or Brigham Young’s Mormons.

  They did work assiduously once a campground was selected by the guide, usually on the basis of water, grass, and firewood availability, all three of which were abundant in the early miles of the journey and in the first months of Oregon Trail traffic but became more precious later on.

  The Platte River had lush grass along its banks and, early on, plenty of trees on its islands. Its water, brown with suspended silt, had to be filtered through cloth or with a handful of meal in a bucket to settle the mud. Some emigrants boiled their water, not to kill bacteria, which were then unknown, but to get rid of the minnows, “wiggletails”—mosquito larvae—and whatever else was swimming in it. Francis Parkman, in his 1846 journey on the trail, wrote of dipping a tin cup in the Platte after a long ride in the scorching sun and discovering “a troop of young tadpoles sporting in the bottom of my cup.” Platte water, called a “Platte River cocktail” when taken straight, warm, brackish, and muddy, had an additional quality: One emigrant wrote home that it “partakes of the same laxative qualities of the Missouri and Mississippi.” Where water was scarce clothing could not be washed; when water was found there was great rejoicing, not only to replenish the casks but to bathe, wash clothes, and boil diapers, which in waterless days had to be scraped, dampened, dried, and reused. Unknown to the emigrants, the boiling of water helped check the spread of infectious diseases.

  Before the Platte islands were denuded of their trees, willow, popl
ar, and cottonwood were chopped and gathered by the armload. In tall-grass country, children were dispatched from camp to make twists of prairie grass, slough grass, or hay called “cats,” which burned well when dry and burned smokily when green or wet. A better fuel—hotter, slower burning, and odorless—was what the French called bois de vache, buffalo “wood,” the chips of dried dung gathered by women in their aprons and by kids in large sacks. The gatherers did not at first relish the idea of handling the dung—a trail song said,

  Look at her now with a pout on her lips

  As daintily with her fingertips

  She picks for the fire some buffalo chips

  —but the pout soon disappeared of necessity. With the rule that “three bushels make a good fire,” the chips were collected, placed in a shallow firehole, lit using dry grass as tinder, and the cookpots were then suspended over the fire. (An extra benefit: One or two smoldering chips brought inside a wagon chased mosquitoes away.)

  As the trains moved beyond the Platte to the Sweetwater and buffalo thinned and disappeared, the chips were genuinely missed, being far preferable to knotty chunks of pungent sagebrush, which burned too quickly.

  In buffalo country, along the succulent grasslands of the Platte where they thrived, where as late as 1850 emigrants were seeing them in a solid phalanx of so many thousands they took two hours or more to pass, the herds were so frighteningly immense that guns had to be fired to prevent the camp from being trampled. The signal of their advent was always a low, distant thunder-like rumbling followed by clouds of dust on the horizon. Then the ground shook as they passed, 2,000 or 10,000 at a time, so closely bunched their horns clacked and rattled against each other.

  Buffalo were easily, and therefore cruelly and wastefully, killed. Shot and wounded, lurching about with broken backs and on mangled legs, blinded by shotgun blasts, spouting blood, they were fallen on by hunters with long throat-slitting knives and often butchered before their hearts were still. Buffalo tongues, rib, and hump meat were prized by most, although not by all. Some found the meat inedible even after hours of boiling or roasting, creating an unswallowable bolus when chewed. Jerky, made by soaking strips of meat in brine and drying them over fires or in the sun, was to many the only way to eat buffalo. In truth, however it was cooked, little of the animal was eaten, usually no more than a few pounds of a beast weighing 800 to 1,200 pounds (full-grown bulls could weigh two tons and more). The rest was left to the wolves and coyotes who always haunted the herds awaiting the chance to hamstring a calf or feast on the bloating carcasses left behind by human slaughterers.