Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The Platte River valley offered a variety of other game for the hunters, and for a time cookpots and skillets steamed and sizzled not only with the customary daily fare of bacon, cornmeal johnnycakes, stewed apples, and coffee, but with the meat of pronghorn antelope, sage hens, rabbits, plover, pigeons, marsh quails, snipe, and even black bears near the Platte forks. There were also edible greens to be gathered, including onions, which were good for protection against scurvy, and berries—goose, black, blue, serviceberries, purple and black chokeberries—to add to the diet.

  On the Oregon Trail, as at home, women carried as much of the workload as the men—and sometimes more. They not only gathered fuel, picked greens and fruit, cooked, and tended the children, but they also helped herd the animals and often marched alongside their wagons with bullwhip at the ready. To perform such work, womenfolk discovered early that the trail required modification of their clothing. Their long cotton or linsey-woolsey skirts dragged on the ground, became tattered by brush and rock, were rendered drab by soaking rains and river crossings, and were scorched by cookfires. Some wives wore their husbands’ spare trousers,1 flannel shirts, brogans, and floppy wide-brimmed hats, but most were guided by the admonition in Deuteronomy 22:5: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man.” (But apparently not by 22:11: “Thou shall not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together”.) They pinched the wings of their sunbonnets together, sewed rocks along hemlines to keep skirts down in the wind, and went about their never-ending work.

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  To the emigrant family or individual starting out on the Oregon Trail, everything seemed conquerable except Indians and disease. Storms and bugs (mosquitoes, buffalo gnats, grasshoppers, flies, something called a “black gallinipper”) were hated, but injuries, sickness, and Indians (the latter the subject of the direst warnings in the overland “guides” read so assiduously in the 1840s, of overheated columns in eastern newspapers, and of word-of-mouth horror stories told in the Missouri camps) were truly feared.

  But in reality the Indian scare, perhaps the deepest dread of overland families in the early years of the migration west, turned out to be the least worrisome. The Indians of the plains and mountain country of the Trail had been warring against one another since before recorded history, and fur traders—often the source of the bloodiest of camp-told Indian tales—had battled with many tribes, bands, and horse-stealing parties on the Missouri, Platte, Snake, Columbia, and virtually in every nook and cranny between. Most emigrants, however, saw the Indians as beggers, not warriors, coming to the camps trading trinkets and looking for food, occasionally helping in river fordings and other labors, and stealing some horses and cattle at night—the Pawnee were particularly adept at this. The emigrant trains were always overarmed for Indian threats; the Indians almost never approached an emigrant caravan with hostility.

  While the overlanders learned that they would probably not have to combat Indians, they fought injuries and disease—often before they departed the Missouri border. An estimated 20,000 people died on the Oregon Trail in the decade of 1841–50, most by accidents and Asiatic cholera. This strain of the cholera reached epidemic proportions during the California gold rush years, in 1848 to 1850, but it struck western Missouri camps and emigrant trains moving along the Kansas-Nebraska prairies in the early 1840s, the fatal bacteria thriving in garbage and in springs polluted by latrines built too near them.

  Occasionally the cholera-stricken miraculously survived. An emigrant named M. L. Wisner wrote in his diary that he “passed a man by the side of the road who had been attacked by cholera, when his company, panic struck, inhumanly left him to die one hundred and fifty miles from any house. He had a sack of provisions by his side, and lying on the ground, could hardly speak.… He could not be moved.… All I could do for him was to bring him one of my pint tin cups of water.… We learned by a man on horseback the next day, that he had recovered.”

  But such cases were rare, and as a rule no clyster, poultice, or dose of laudanum helped.

  While cholera killed more overlanders than all other diseases combined, others also took a toll: measles, typhoid, whooping cough, smallpox, chickenpox, diphtheria (called “Putrid Sore Throat”), grippe, rheumatism, scurvy, malaria and many nameless “mountain fevers,” “slough fevers,” and agues. Emigrant diaries are filled with mysterious “bilious complaints,” “inflammation of the bowels,” “congestion of the brain,” “intestinal inertia,” “excessive vomiting,” “childbed fever,” “lung fever,” and “bloody flux.” These homemade diagnoses covered everything from cholera to ulcers, blocked bowels, food poisoning, puerperal fever, peritonitis, strokes, appendicitis, tuberculosis, pneumonia (common from sleeping in wet bedding, enduring freezing winds and sudden temperature changes), and dysentery, which killed the weak and malnourished.

  There were also references to hydrophobia (rabies, always fatal), vertigo, “died of exertion” (probably heart attack), trachoma (endemic among the Indians), alkali poisoning, delirium tremens, and gangrene.

  After disease, accidents and mishaps of every description took the most lives on the Trail. Drownings were commonplace, as were broken bones and mashed flesh, and frostbite turned gangrenous. There were accidental (and occasionally purposeful) gunshots; a few homicides;2 countless falls from heights, horses, and wagons with attendant broken spines and necks; snakebites; lacerations; infections; blood poisoning; and shock from field amputations.

  Edwin Bryant, a Kentucky newspaperman who ventured west on the Oregon Trail in 1846, wrote of a boy who developed gangrene from a compound leg fracture. A drover with the boy’s party had been a hospital orderly, and after whetting some butcher knives served as surgeon. The boy was dosed with laudanum and camphor held to his nose as the incision was made above the knee. A gush of foul-smelling pus burst from the swollen flesh and the drover cut the bone through with a common handsaw. The boy died as the stump was cauterized and the flap sewn shut.

  The emigrant medicine chest, even the sophisticated ones carried by physicians, were filled with nostrums and dubious “cures” mixed with genuinely useful substances: “physicking pills,” rum and peppermint “essences,” hartshorn, tartar emetic, belladonna, zinc sulphate, Peruna, beef tonics, turpentine, sulphur, camphor, calomel, cayenne pepper, tincture of rhubarb, tamarack syrup, bitters, asafetida, ipecac, Seidlitz and Dover’s Powders, Jayne’s Car-minitive Balsam, Ayer’s Pain-Killer, and Epsom and Glauber’s Salts.

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  In a Christian journal review of Reverend Samuel Parker’s Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains, the writer called the Oregon Trail a road “excavated by the finger of God,” the Indians called it “the White Man’s Medicine Road,” and those who made the journey and survived it had good reason to think they had accomplished something epic, even biblical, in its testing of human will and endurance. In an 1885 address to the annual reunion of the Oregon Pioneers Association in Salem, Oregon, a Trail veteran named E. L. Eastham said:

  Where else in the history of man, civilized or not, do you read the story of a 2,500-mile march through hostile country, over unexplored desert and mountain? The host led by Moses and Aaron wandered for years, but only accomplished a direct journey of a few hundred miles. Xenophon in his famous retreat from the Euphrates had a less distance to go before he reached safe harbor at home. No crusade ever extended over so great a distance, and most of the way through Christian and friendly countries. Napoleon on his disastrous trip to Moscow only essayed a march of 1,500 miles.

  The Trail, which started at Saint Louis for those east of the Mississippi, began again in the camps around Independence, Westport Landing, Saint Joseph, and even farther north, at Council Bluffs, Iowa, or Omaha, Nebraska. What had been a trappers’ path and road to Astoria carried only small numbers of emigrants and missionaries up to 1841, when the sixty-nine-member Bartleson-Bidwell company followed it from Sapling Grove to Soda Springs in Idaho, and there split up, half heading on to
Oregon, half to California. In 1842, when Frémont and his first expedition were examining South Pass, close to 200 people were trudging along the Trail, and upwards of 1,000 made the trek the next year, during the “Great Migration.” In the twenty-five busiest years of its history, when it had evolved into a true route—actually a series of routes—to the Pacific, the Oregon Trail was the longest thoroughfare in America. And until 1846, when the United States and Great Britain settled the Oregon boundary, its travelers defined the word emigrant—people traveling out of their native country into a foreign land—as surely as those sailing from Europe to America.

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  The first few miles of the journey followed the Santa Fé Trail into Kansas, the caravans following the Little Blue River into Nebraska until it made a southward bend, then making their way across the prairie to a ridge of sandhills from which the Platte River, their conduit for the next 600 miles, could be seen.

  Among rivers, Bernard De Voto said, the Platte was “one of the most preposterous in the world,” for its width, a mile or more, and its frivolous nature. In spring rains and with plenty of snowmelt from the mountains to the west, the river ran high and crashed and tumbled about its braid of islands; but it was most often little more than a mile-wide trickle so muddy it was said to flow from the bottom up, its quicksand so deep it could swallow a wagon and the ox team pulling it.

  After a week following the south bank of the river the caravans had to ford the south branch to follow the North Platte drainage, a crossing that often occupied four or more toilsome days of fashioning bull boats from green buffalo hides stretched over willow frames, dismantling the wagons, and ferrying them and countless tons of goods, people, and animals across.

  Once across, the wagons were scaled up a rise called California Hill to a wide, high benchland that dropped off to the North Platte valley. Another twenty miles or so from the fording lay Windlass Hill, where the teams had to be unhitched, the animals led down a forty-five-degree grade, and the wagons with their brakes locked scooted down at the end of guy-ropes into Ash Hollow, which lay 500 miles out and was the first shady place the pioneers had seen in weeks. Of the descent one emigrant wrote, “I cannot say at what angle we descend but … some go as far as to say, ‘the road hangs a little past the perpendicular!’”

  The nights were growing colder as the trains followed the packed-sand riverbanks into higher altitudes and began encountering celebrated Oregon Trail landmarks: Ancient Bluff Ruins; Courthouse Rock, a tall volcanic mound said to resemble a municipal building in Saint Louis; Jail House Rock, four miles off the main trail but so interesting that many rode or hiked to it and climbed to its summit to catch a glimpse of yet another odd formation, a great inverted funnel on the western horizon fourteen miles away. This was the 500-foot-high Chimney Rock, mentioned in pioneer diaries more often than any other site on the Medicine Road. A Dr. A. H. Thomasson (his doctorate clearly not in English composition) saw it in 1850 and noted in his journal, “We went up it about 4 hundred feet then it became so steep they was feet holts cut in so we could clime up about 25 feet further then we could see where some had cut noches and drove little sticks to clime abot 20 feet further but did not venture up that. I suppose that there is not less than 2 thousand names riten in difrin plases.”

  Thirty-five miles west of Chimney Rock lay Scotts Bluff, another of the Platte’s geological curiosities, a Nebraskan Gibraltar looming over the western horizon and hugging the river so closely that wagons had to detour to the south over what became known as Robidoux Pass. Journalist Edwin Bryant, who saw the formation in the mid-1940s, described it as the “ruins of some vast city erected by a race of giants, contemporaries of the Megatherii and the Icthyosaurii.” Nile explorer and traveler Richard Burton called it “a massive medieval city … round a colossal fortress.”

  The caravans now entered Wyoming and, ideally in mid-July, reached Fort Laramie, 650 miles from the Missouri border and a point where one overland guide informed his charges, “It is discouraging to tell you that you have not yet travelled one-third of the long road to Oregon.”

  The fort lay at the junction of the Laramie River with the North Platte, and had been named for an early French-Canadian trapper, Jacques LaRamee, said to have been killed by Indians on the site and his corpse thrown into the river. A hollow square of whitewashed adobe walls six feet thick, fifteen feet high, and about 130 feet on each side, the fort had blockhouses at opposite corners and inside were apartments, storage rooms, corrals, a trading post where supplies were sold at outrageous prices, a blacksmith shop, and even a post office. An old trapper named James Bordeaux, a veteran of the Upper Missouri trade who was married to a Brulé Sioux woman, ran the place and kept peace with the Indians. Laramie was located in prime buffalo country, and there were often as many as 600 Oglala and Brulé lodges—and 2,000 Indians—in the vicinity. A green meadow east of Laramie served as a favorite wagon campsite and there the journeyers rested, mingled with the Indians, reshod their animals, and bought needed supplies. There, too, the travelers, especially those heading for California by the roundabout detours west of South Pass, became mindful of falling behind schedule and being shut out of the mountain passes by winter snows.

  Eight miles west of Fort Laramie the trail passed a tall sandstone-and-white-chalk bank called Register Cliff, which required only a nail or knifepoint to inscribe a name and date on it, and for several miles beyond it the wagons left tracks in the sandstone hills that so deepened over the years they would be visible a century and a half afterward.

  The steeper westward tilt of the continent toward the Rockies tried man and beast, and the heavy cargo items—anvils, chiffoniers, sheet-iron stoves, and the like—became daily roadside casualties as the wagons rejoined the North Platte near Casper, heading due west, fording the river again near where Brigham Young’s Mormons would build a ferry in 1847. The Trail took them over Emigrant Gap, past Poison Springs, identifiable from the animal carcasses surrounding it, to Willow Springs, an excellent campsite with good water, and on to Independence Rock overlooking the Sweetwater. This landmark, named by fur traders who discovered it on July 4, 1824, and called it the “Register of the Desert,” was an oval-shaped granite boulder 128 feet high. Messages were scratched or painted on it, and names and dates, by nearly all who reached it. Some indicated their relief that they were “half-way” to the Pacific when in fact they were but 815 miles out from Independence and had 1,200 miles or more to travel.

  After passing Independence Rock, the caravans made the first of no less than nine crossings of the maddeningly meandering Sweetwater, bypassed the awesome 400-foot gash through the rocks known as Devil’s Gate, reached “Three Crossings,” where the wagons thrice crossed the Sweetwater in a gate-like canyon, and came upon Ice Slough. Here water collected beneath an insulating layer of peat moss and froze in the harsh winters, remaining frozen through the summer when travelers could dig it out and use slabs of ice to cool water barrels.

  The wagons negotiated South Pass, 914 miles out, with little effort, the grassy gap in the Wind River Range at the Continental Divide sloping so gently “that the traveler would scarcely perceive that he was ascending were it not for the great change in the atmosphere,” one traveler wrote. The air continued thinning to its summit at 7,412 feet, the Trail then emerging into Oregon Country near Little Sandy Creek and continuing on through desert country to Pacific Springs, a memorable place in that it was the first water the pioneers encountered that flowed toward the western ocean.

  Upon reaching the Green River there was a choice of routes to follow. Some took the Sublette Cutoff, named for one of the fur-trading brothers, which cut straight across a fifty-mile alkaline lake bed and grassless, gravelly benchland with the only water available at its far western side. This scary path was eighty-five miles shorter than the drop southeast to Fort Bridger, the trading post on the Green built by mountain immortal Jim Bridger and his partner Lewis Vasquez in 1843, but most were unwilling to chance the Sublette
and took the detour, with its ample water and grass.

  Joel Palmer, an Indiana legislator who joined an 1844 wagon train to Oregon, described Bridger’s post as “a shabby concern built of poles and daubed with mud,” but it was a place where a few supplies could be purchased and where “recruited” oxen, ones whose health and strength had been restored by rest and good pasturage, could be obtained by trading in footsore and weary ones and paying a fee.

  It was at Fort Bridger, a thousand miles out of Independence, that the Mormons following the Oregon Trail veered off to the southwest into Utah.

  From Bridger, the Trail returned northwest to Soda Springs, one of a series of iron-laden carbonated waters, which some travelers said tasted like small beer and made an excellent lemonade when mixed with citrus syrup and sugar. Fifty-five miles beyond the springs lay Fort Hall, the Hudson’s Bay post originally built by Nathaniel Wyeth in 1834. Here many wagons had been abandoned over the years and were cannibalized to repair the ones now heading toward Oregon and California.