1846

 

Sioux and Blackfeet warriors in battle.

__________ 

“The United States was facing the possibility of two wars – with Great Britain and with Mexico.” 

Bernard DeVoto

__________

 

January: The Niles Register runs a series of headlines throughout the month. One: “Are We to Have Peace or War?” 

The fear, DeVoto notes, is a war with Great Britain. 

President Polk has been elected on a promise to seize control of all of Oregon, up to the line of 54° 40'. The slogan, “54° 40', or fight,” resonates. The U.S. also faces trouble to the south. The border between Texas, newly added as a state, and Mexico, remains in dispute. Mexico says the border runs along the Nueces River. The Texans (and now the Americans) claim all the land north of the Rio Grande. 

DeVoto says of Polk that his mind was “rigid, narrow, obstinate, far from first-rate.” He adds, “He was pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains.” 

But if his mind was narrow it was also powerful and he had guts. If he was orthodox, his integrity was absolute and he could not be scared, manipulated, or brought to heel. No one bluffed him, no one moved him with direct or oblique pressure. Furthermore, he knew how to get things done, which is the first necessity of government, and he knew what he wanted done, which is the second. … He was to be the only “strong” President between Jackson and Lincoln. (5/7-8)

 

The Brook Farm people were already warning: 

There can be no doubt of the design being entertained by the leaders and instigators of this infamous business, to extend the “area of freedom” to the shores of California, by robbing Mexico of another large mass of her territory; and the people are prepared to execute it to the letter. (5/10)

 

There was real fear that the British might seize California and a dim realization that the U.S. army was in poor shape. 

Dispersed in squads and platoons over half a continent, it had two jobs: to transfer Indians to worse lands when the frontier wanted their homesteads, which it usually contrived to do, and to defeat them when they went on the warpath, which it could seldom do without the help of militia. (5/14)

 

The mountain man Jim Clyman has ended up in California. There he finds the Indians in terrible shape, “kept in a state of Slavery having or Receiving no compensation for their labour except a scanty allowance of subsistence…and perhaps a cotton Shirt and wool sufficient to make a coarse Blanket.” (5/43) 

Clyman had been with Jedediah Smith and Tom Fitzpatrick when they discovered South Pass, the “one opening through which the wagons could cross the mountains, the door to Oregon and California, the true Northwest Passage.” (5/53) 

Stories of California have stirred the imagination of people back East. As DeVoto explains, a young man in frozen Maine or enduring an Ohio winter has heard the tales: 

Mr. Hastings [who wrote a guidebook for travelers on the Oregon Trail] has seen oats half an inch thick through the stalk and eight feet high, thousands of acres at a stretch. Clover grows to five feet, covering the hills with natural hay. A single stalk of wheat forms seven heads and the grain runs four pounds to the bushel heavier than any the [people back East] know. Seventy bushels to the acre, often up to a hundred and twenty bushels – and next year sixty-one bushels spontaneously, with no sowing at all. Also two crops in one twelvemonth, and up to sixty bushels of corn per acre, and wild flax waves as far as the eye can see, and the soil grows everything, tobacco, rice, cotton, crabapples, plums, strawberries the largest and most delicious in the world, peaches blossoming in January, such grapes as you cannot believe in. (5/45)

 

There were between six and seven thousand Americans in Oregon, but only eight hundred scattered across California. 

Daniel Webster gave speeches about a future “sister republic somewhere in the Great American Desert.” (5/49)

Who owned the land shaded in darker yellow?
That was the question.

 

* 

February 19: Sister Eliza Snow, a Mormon mother, notes in her diary that she and many of the Latter Day Saints are camped on the west bank of the Mississippi, waiting to start off for the “Promised Land.” 

She pens a poem: 

The Camp, the Camp – its  number swell –

Shout! Shout! Oh Camp of Israel.

The King, the Lord of Hosts is near,

His armies guard our front and rear. 

Chorus 

Though we fly from vile aggression,

We’ll maintain our pure profession,

Seek a peaceable possession

Far from the Gentiles and oppression.              (5/89-90)

 

The moment of decision for the Latter Day Saints has come. They have determined, as a body, that they can never live under American rule. They must find a new home, beyond the reach of U.S. law.  

The climax has come in 1846, and that climax “had been preceded by two years of terrorism, arson, and gang warfare. It cannot be justified or palliated. But it has to be explained.” (5/76) 

Joseph Smith had been murdered in June 1844. Four months later, “it was possible for an invitation to circulate through the surrounding countries, summoning fanciers to a wolf hunt. Wolf hunt meant burning the Mormons’ houses, running off their stock, and killing a good many of them.” 

Violence has continued ever since.

 

* 

March 1: The first detachment of Mormons, about 500 wagons, sets off, with other trains following every few days, “till by late spring about fifteen thousand Saints,” as they called themselves, “were on the march.” 

They were a full two months ahead of the time when, as the mountain men and the Santa Fe traders knew, it was safe for caravans to cross the prairies. Apart from sudden whirlwinds of sleet out of the north the snows were over now, but the rains had come. Rain nearly every day for about eight weeks – a chill, monotonous downpour that soaked everything and brought out mildew in the center of packed crates. It saturated the prairies; after saturation, it turned them into a universal shallow lake. Through that slough the horses and oxen, gaunt after the winter, had to haul the unwieldy wagons, frequently with men and women helping at the wheels. The season was significantly known on the prairies as “between hay and grass.” Prairie craft forbade you to travel before the grass came, but Israel had to travel and so the stock grew weak. A wagon would mire to the hubs or deeper. Then neighbors must help out, double or triple teaming, perhaps hitching on a couple of the family cows. If there was brush at hand, it could be cut and spread under the wheels. The wagons would be sucked out to a somewhat firmer stretch, the extra teams unyoked, the slow, sodden progress resumed. Babies howled under drenched blankets. Everyone who could walk slithered through the mud, “shoe-mouth deep,” boot-top deep sometimes, clinging in five-pound masses to each foot.

 

Six miles was a big day, one mile a not uncommon one. Prairie creeks that would be five feet wide in July were now five rods wide, bottomless, swift, and impassable. Reaching one, a “fifty” – or a whole caravan – would have to camp beside it till it should subside or a ford be found, which might be two weeks. If there were no timber, then there might be no fires for two weeks, no cooked food, no dry clothes or bedding except as the sun might come out for an hour or two. No brush, either, to spread a bed on or to build a hut for an obstetrical ward. The historian Tullidge has a tableau: blankets stretched to poles and roofed over with bark, a woman in labor within, and intent sisters holding tin pans to catch the rain that leaked through the bark.

 

Supplies were scanty, though this first group was better off than any that followed it. They were feeding the stock on cottonwood bark, when they could get it, and they themselves were living on what they had amassed in Nauvoo [their city back in Illinois]. Hunters ranged the prairies for deer, turkeys, grouse, but the season was too early. Terror, winter, rain, and malnutrition now assessed their tax and the Saints sickened. Frostbitten feet could become gangrenous, knees and shoulders stiffened with rheumatism, last autumn’s agues [malaria] were renewed. William Clayton’s legs pained him so that he could hardly walk; he tried to restore their function by jumping and wrestling but made himself sicker and had to go to bed. Heber C. Kimball, one of the Apostles, caught a fever and took to the swaying wagon, where a sick wife and two sick children, one of them only a few days old, were alternately shaking and burning; an older child could work a little but was too weak to carry a two-quart pail.

 

Sister Anne Richard’s husband, who had already served five missions in the United States, was called to a mission in England. He had to leave his family a few miles from Sugar Creek and go “without purse or scrip” to bear his testimony overseas. This was Franklin D. Richards, a nephew of apostle William Richards who had been with the prophet Joseph when he was killed in Carthage jail. A brother of Franklin’s had been killed by the Missourians at the Haun’s Mill massacre, and another one would die on the march of the Mormon Battalion. He had married sister Anne four years before, had been sealed to her in the temple in the everlasting covenant, just this January, and a week later had taken sister Elizabeth McFate as his second wife. Sister Anne had her two year old daughter, Wealthy Lovisa, with her in the wagon – and Sister Anne was big with another child and her hour was near. There was no suitable food for her or Wealthy Lovisa. Many days they could not have a fire, either because night overtook them in the open prairie or because, if they got one started, the rain put it out. But sometimes they managed to keep one going and then Sister Anne could brew a pinch of tea from the pound which a neighbor had given her before she left Nauvoo. The Word of Wisdom [Mormon rules for eating, drinking and smoking] forbade it but she could warm her body and cheer her mind with it, and “through sickness and great suffering [it] was about all the sustenance I had for some time.”

 

Twenty days out from Sugar Creek her term was full. The wagon stopped and a midwife was summoned, a Gentile whom the Saints had heard about. The hag demanded a fee in advance; Sister Anne had no money; a woolen bedspread would do, and “I might as well take it, for you’ll never live to need it.” Little Isaac was born, and he died at once. The priesthood anointed the small body and buried it; the wagons got started again. Little Wealthy Lovisa had been sick when they left Sugar Creek, and week by week her strength failed. Presently she was altogether listless on a roll of blankets in the wagon, and could not be induced to eat. Once, however, they passed a prairie farm and Wealthy revived enough to ask for some potato soup. Her grandmother went to the house, but the farm wife had heard the stories. “I wouldn’t sell or give one of you Mormons a potato to save your life,” she said, and set the dog on the grandmother. Wealthy lived till they got to the Missouri River, and then died. (5/90-92)

 

Some Mormon families crossed the Great Plains, pulling handcarts.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Coffee and tea and caffeinated drinks are forbidden to Mormons. DeVoto mentions “fifties.” The Mormons had organized men into troops of ten and fifty men to protect themselves from attack. Joseph Smith, the original prophet, had been murdered at Carthage in 1844. The town of Nauvoo, on the east bank of the Mississippi River, in Illinois, had grown to great size, but the Latter Day Saints had many enemies, and they were finally driven out. 

They had also tried settling in Missouri some years earlier, but the Missourians had fought to keep them out. (See: Year 1838, for details on the Huan’s Mill Massacre.

 

* 

DeVoto says the Pawnees were powerful in this era, “before whiskey and smallpox had tamed them.” 

Of the Comanches he says, “they had organized marauding on a larger scale than any other tribe, and they were not only professional marauders and murderers, they were also practicing sadists.” Their raiding parties roamed over hundreds of miles and they 

did a profitable business in white captives, Mexican, Texan, and American, whom they brought back by the score from their raids. They were held for ransom or sold into slavery; when they could not turn a profit on them, they enjoyed themselves. No one has ever exaggerated the Comanche tortures. The authenticated accounts fill thousands of pages, and some are altogether unreadable for men with normal nerves. … Their herds prospered, they got many women to rape in gangs and many children who could be entertainingly dismembered. (5/244-245)

 

* 

The Colt revolver, first manufactured in 1838, was spreading west. “They had proved themselves the first effective firearm for mounted men, and had given the Texans and other frontier runners the first weapon which enabled white men to fight with Plains Indians on equal or superior terms.” Nearly every writer who discussed outfits for emigrants on the Oregon Trail recommended them. (5/215)

 

* 

Pawnees, poison ivy, and pneumonia. 

Danger on the trail: The dangers and discomforts travelers faced on the Oregon Trail, and similar routes – some even worse – were many. 

In one passage, DeVoto mentions the experiences of Edwin Bryant, who had owned a newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, before he decided to move West. Jessy  Thornton, 35,  traveling with the same party and a lawyer by trade, was in bad health, but hoped mountain air would cure him. DeVoto describes him as “something of a hypochondriac.” His wife was even worse off. 

Of the travelers, he writes, 

Many of them were sick. The Thornton’s uncertain health failed periodically, Nancy languishing in the wagon and Jessy’s asthma sometimes so bad that he could not drive. Northers and the rains gave many colds, bronchitis, even pneumonia. Others found the ague that lingered in their blood unseasonably awakened. Their diet was bad and some of them got scurvy. Epidemics of diarrhea raged repeatedly. Some of this dysentery was the result of dirty utensils, some was amoebic, more was the natural result of bad cooking and poorly kept food, more still was an endless physicking by drinking water impregnated with Epsom and Glauber’s salts. The sun was an additional strain both constitutional and nervous. And as they got into thinner air they encountered a new malady, a prostrating seizure of nausea and violent headaches, frequently complicated by still another kind of dysentery. Bryant who was stricken with it, attributed it to excessive drinking of milk from cows which had been made unhealthy by overwork and had drunk alkali water and eaten noxious weeds. But it was really “mountain fever,” a process of adjustment to diminished oxygen which most people repeat today when they go to high altitudes.

 

On another occasion, Thornton was approached by three men who had ridden back from a wagon train twenty-five miles ahead. They asked him to help amputate the leg of a nine-year-old boy who had fallen under a wagon nine days before, and had it crushed. 

Thornton rode over to the train and saw that the boy was dying. The wound was a compound fracture and gangrene had set in. A Canadian drover who had been a hospital servant was whetting butcher knives for the operation; they were giving the boy laudanum without effect and had bound him to a packing case. Thornton directed them to wait for Bryant. Getting there, Bryant saw that an operation would be wasted agony and refused to perform one, telling the frantic mother that her child should be permitted as painless a death as possible. She rejected his advice and the drover began to operate. Someone held camphor to the boy’s nostrils and an incision below the knee freed a gush of pus. The drover started again, above the knee this time, and hacked through the bone with a common handsaw. After an hour and three-quarters of bloody effort, he was starting to close the wound with a flap with [sic] the child died.

 

Bryant did prescribe medicines for several sick travelers. Then he and Thornton stayed to see a wedding: Mary Laird to Riley Septimus Mootrey. 

The women had got out their finery, had found candles and made a wedding cake. Thornton could not much approve this marrying on the trail. “It looks so much like making a hop, skip and jump into matrimony” – and like a licensing of human desire. But after all it was an occasion of sentiment and he found the bride fair, said some of the younger women “were dressed with a tolerable degree of taste and even elegance,” and could praise the males for having shaved and changed to clean pantaloons. Village mores under desert stars.

 

The guests formed a procession behind a fiddler and conducted Mr. and Mrs. Mootrey to the nuptial tent. A mile away they saw faint sparks moving by twos and another procession, torches lighting the dead boy’s body to its desert grave. A mile or so in the opposite direction still a third train was camped, and there at that same moment a dozen desert-worn women were ministering to one of their sisters who writhed and screamed under a dusty wagon cover. They did for her what centuries of old wives’ wisdom prescribed for those in travail, and in due time her child was born.

 

Painting: The Madonna of the Trail.

(Emigrant wagons were likely to be brightly painted – for the first few days. The canvas tops were sometimes blue, green, or red as well as white, and frequently had slogans painted on them.) 

DeVoto writes of various discomforts and disasters on the trail. “They were in the sagebrush and alkali country now… In a country that grew increasingly to look like Hell.” 

The never ending wind of the plains blew up dust from the wheels in twisting columns that merged and overspread the whole column in a fog and canopy that moved with it. It “filled the lungs, mouth, nose, ears, and hair, and so cover the face that it was sometimes difficult to recognize each other, and we suffered from this almost insupportable flying sand or dust for weeks if not for months together.”

 

Thornton had neglected to provide himself with a set of goggles, which back home he could have been had for 37 ½ cents. At Independence Rock, he said he would have paid $50 for a pair. 

Devoto explained that “The immense sun, the endless wind, and the gritty, smothering, inescapable dust reddened and swelled the eyes, granulated the lids, inflamed the sockets.” Heat waves caused mirages – and made distant sage brush look like charging Indians. 

Even the natives suffered in such harsh lands. 

Tracoma was endemic among the Indians, a number of emigrants went blind, and few came through this country without eye trouble of some sort. The medicine chests held solutions of zinc sulphate, which was proper, but simple boric would have been better for it with alkali that made the dust corrosive. It was also driven into the skin by the daily wind. Most of the movers were burned black now; the rest were burned a less comfortable, fiery red; their cheeks peeled and their lips were deeply cracked by what is, after all, simple lye. … When you read of Cowboys buying canned tomatoes and laving their cheeks with juice, you observe an elementary reaction in household chemistry.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Students might relate to this example. DeVoto mentions one traveler out for a hunt, who, without realizing, slept in poison ivy at night. His “limbs swelled so badly” that he had to give up the hunt.

This was a drought year, too, which made everything worse. The  Pawnees broke up one train, ran off much of the stock, and the travelers had to abandon half their possessions and combine what was left of their teams. DeVoto speaks of “bickering and atomization” as nerves frayed. The “captain” of one wagon train was forced to resign, although he was allowed to save face and say he was stepping down because his ague had returned. When two families began arguing about ownership of a yoke of oxen, one traveler chased the others through camp with a Colt patent five-shooter and reclaimed his property. 

The grade was steep now, and once they were in the badlands the trail narrowed and was frequently precipitous. Crazy gullies and canyons cut every which way, and whoever gave up in anger and tried to find better going elsewhere only found worse troubles. The ropes came out and wagons had to be lowered by manpower down a steep pitch or hauled up over the vertical side of a gully or between immense boulders – while those not working sat and swore in level dust and intolerable sun, far from water. When they moved, the dry axles added a torturing shriek to the split-reed soprano of the wheels and the scrape of tires on stone or rubble. Dry air had shrunk the wheels, too, and without warning tires rolled off or spokes pulled out and the wagon stalled. The same brittleness might make a wagon tongue break, which was disastrous unless a spare pole had been slung beneath the bed…Sometimes the ropes broke at a cliff or pulled off the snubbing post, and a wagon crashed, or crazed oxen capsized one, or defective workmanship or cheap material could stand no more and the thing went to pieces like the one-hoss shay. Sometimes half a wrecked wagon could be converted by desert blacksmithing into a cart; sometimes a sound wagon had to be so converted because some of the oxen had died.

 

The travelers still had hundreds of miles to go, but as animals, humans and transportation all broke down they had to throw out ancient claw-foot tables, “well waxed and rubbed” and massive bureaus of carved oak, which Francis Parkman, also heading up the Oregon Trail that summer, began to see littering the way. As DeVoto now explained, “The owners were in the grip of necessity. The desert beat triphammer blows, an overmastering realism, on one’s soul…” 

In the sun and the dust they went on, the daily distance shortening and no end to the country ahead. They were not yet to South Pass, not yet halfway to the Pacific! Horses and oxen bloated from foul water; many of them died. Their hooves swelled and festered. Even the soundest grew gaunt as the grass diminished: sparse along the upper Platte at any time, it had failed quickly in the drouth summer and many trains had cropped it before our travelers. Men got as gaunt as their stock, in this country, and alkali water was just as bad for them. They saw suddenly that food was limited, and there was an anxious computation of the days ahead, with Hasting’s or Fremont’s or Parker’s mile-by-mile itineraries reckoned over and over. Add to the increasing strain the altitude making the nerves tauter. Though the violent sun was hot and the dust pall breathless, there were sudden viciously cold days too and all nights were cold. Water froze in the pails – and you remembered how early snow fell in the mountains that were still so far ahead. … It was the triphammer, the test itself. You stood it. You went on. (5/157-164)

 

* 

April 17: Writing from California, William L. Todd, a nephew of Mary Todd Lincoln, notes that the Mexican government there is “tyrannical,” but the climate “beautiful.” 

The Mexicans talk every spring and fall of driving the foreigners out of the country. They must do it this year or they can never do it. There will be a revolution before long and probably the country will be annexed to the United States. If there, I will take a hand in it. (5/122)

 

* 

April 19: General Zachary Taylor has built what DeVoto calls a textbook fort, Fort Brown, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, in a location that almost invited attack. “All that prevented its capture now and hereafter was a Mexican incompetence as resplendent as Taylor’s own.” (5/128) 

Colonel Truman Cross, an assistant quartermaster, had gone out for a ride and not returned. A patrol was sent out to look for him, ran into Mexican foragers, and Lt. Porter, in command, was killed. 

General Ampudia warned Taylor to withdraw his forces beyond the Nueces, within twenty-four hours. Taylor responded, “the instructions under which I am acting will not permit me to retrograde from the position I now occupy.” Nothing happened. So, on April 19, Taylor blockaded the mouth of the Rio Grande, to cut off Mexican supplies. This, Ampudia said, was an act of war. 

Taylor called it “a simple defensive precaution.” (5/130)

Gen. Taylor.

 

* 

“A most unholy and unrighteous proceeding.” 

April 25: Mexican and American troops clash on disputed land, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. These will be the first official shots fired in what will become the Mexican War. 

Van Loon has his take on the matter: 

Here is a simple little problem in historical arithmetic.

 

If country A has fifty million acres for which it has not any use and country B, which is situated next to country A, has great need of fifty million additional acres, and if country A is weak and country B is strong, how long will it take before country B has country A’s fifty 50 million acres?

 

For an answer read the story of the Mexican War. (124/331)

 

Van Loon also speaks of the attitude of Americans of the Western states in that period, that they had developed: 

…a feeling of strength and independence which made them ready (and I’m afraid somewhat eager) to fight anybody who dared to interfere with the sacred duty of all good Americans to carry their beneficent rules and principles to the furthermost corners of the continent, or in vulgar language, to take whatever they wanted.

 

He compares the references to “manifest destiny” to the words of the Germans, a few years later, “with their dreary chant about ‘a place in the sun.’ But at bottom they were both talking about the same thing – they hoped to get something that really belonged to someone else.” 

The difference, and the good fortune of the Americans, however, was that they had “a large geographic vacuum which clamored to be filled.” (124/328-329) 

Not everyone is enthusiastic. Lt. Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock writes, “It looks as if the government sent a small force [down to the Rio Grande] on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as possible; for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico.” 

He added, “my heart is not in this business; I am against it from the bottom of my soul as a most unholy and unrighteous proceeding.” (5/107)

 

* 

May 3: Mexican forces bombard Fort Brown. DeVoto notes that on that day, “a young .lieutenant of the 4th Infantry heard the cannonade and knew that the war which he regarded as a conspiracy of slaveholders had begun. ‘I felt sorry,’ Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant wrote, ‘that I had enlisted.’” (5/188) 

DeVoto is generally unimpressed with Zachary Taylor, but does say: 

he had no patience with textbook soldiers… Well, what did he have? A sound principle: attack. A less valuable one which was to serve him just as well in this war: never retreat. Total ignorance of the art of war. And an instinct, if not for command, at least for leadership. (5/189)

 

* 

Spring: In 1846, Nauvoo, Illinois, the center of Mormon settlement, was a thriving city. But the Saints had been attacked repeatedly – had come to the decision to abandon Nauvoo. To head West. When it became clear that the Mormons were leaving, the “mobbers” grew bolder, and the “Burnings” commenced. DeVoto quotes another writer, explaining how the Mormons were driven out: 

[The mobbers] worked quietly and methodically. They would call upon a farmer, state the object of their visit and would then assist the family in removing their household effects to a safe distance. They would then set the torch to the house and, watching it until it burned, they would leave behind them a bed of glowing embers, a jag of furniture, and a weeping family with broken hearts. It was then easy to convince the family that it was time for them to leave Illinois.

 

“So mob rule, terrorism, expropriation, and occasional murder went on in the soundly American state of Illinois. And precisely the same thing had happened to the Saints twice before in Missouri.”

 

DeVoto is generally sympathetic to the Mormons. “At all times the generality of Saints have been sincere, kindly God-fearing, hard-working people,” he writes. “But from the beginning they have had the complete smugness of a people on whom a monopoly of truth and virtue was conferred by Almighty God.” 

The Church of the Latter Day Saints was designed to function as a communal system. Communism, if you will. 

In its earliest hours the church instituted the United Order. A practical working communism (theocratic model) which was to hold the property and the labor of the Saints in common. Like the Shakers, like Zoar, Oneida, and others. It failed at once – because it was wholly unadaptable to the place and time and people, and for the further reason that Brigham Young had not come to take charge of it. Nevertheless by commandment of God it remained Israel’s goal. Theoretically, though the practice was suspended, every Saint lived (and still lives) in the United Order, his labor and property at the disposition of the Trustee [the Mormon elders], and some day the Order will spread across the world. And though it failed in Missouri it accelerated the developing control of a united people by an oligarchy. Under the priesthood the church acted far more like a co-operating unit than anything the middle border had ever seen. (5/81)

 

There were two main problems. The practice of polygamy was considered an abomination by good Christian folk, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Catholics, and others. There was doubt whether or not the Latter Day Saints even classified as Christians, which was a surprise to the Saints. According to DeVoto, a second problem, the matter of political power, was an more serious issue. 

Finally, the greatest offense of the Mormon system was its political cohesion. The frontier took its democratic elections with the greatest possible seriousness – and Joseph Smith voted his church for whomever would pay most for the vote. The Church was a block that could turn the balance of power. It was the foolish use of this power in Illinois – quite as foolishly purchased by both Democrats and Whigs in turn – that finally exploded the dynamite which the other peculiarities of the Saints had heaped up. … It was at least as powerful an irritant as polygamy in the conflict between Utah and the national government down to statehood. (5-82)

 

When opposition to polygamy grew in Nauvoo, and Mormon dissenters published their own newspaper, Smith struck back. Their paper printed only a single issue. Smith’s supporters “pied its type and pounded its press to pieces in the street. The rebels fled.” Enemies of the Mormons – and those who sincerely cherished the freedom of the press – now rose up against Smith. 

Illinois had had enough of the Mormons, the mob rose, and in June 1844, Joseph had been killed.” (5/85) 

By 1846, it was clear the Mormons were no longer safe in Illinois. They would have to move West. They would have to find “a place where the migrating Americans would not be tempted to settle.” 

The Great Basin of Utah was that place. 

Meanwhile, “Everything they had that could not be used on the journey was offered for sale, and the Gentiles picked up excellent bargains in land, houses, furniture, farm implements, and stock. They kept the prices good by means of the Burnings.” (5/86) 

That is, they escalated their attacks. 

The Saints, however, had a plan and prepared with almost military precision for the trip west, 

At Richardson’s Point, 55 miles from Nauvoo, they built a permanent camp, which would always have a garrison. Companies coming in from the east would find wood, supplies, blacksmithing tools, experienced help – and the priesthood making sure that they “accepted counsel,” obeyed, kept discipline, and lived their religion. (5/93)

 

Mormon scouts went ahead and even planted crops – which later travelers could harvest. But traveling West, in those days, was never easy. “The prairie mosquitos settled in solid layers on men and oxen. The prairie rattlesnakes terrified everyone and killed many cattle.” (5/94) 

From June until November 27, the Mormons could be seen crossing the Iowa prairies, when the last party reached Council Bluffs. 

It was a vast movement: 

Between fifteen and twenty thousand people uprooted from their land and seeking a new land. Thousands of wagons, tens of thousands of oxen, horses, mules, milch cattle, beef cattle, neat cattle, sheep, goats. Chickens, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks, pigeons, parrots, love birds, canaries. Seedlings with their roots bound in sacking, slips from the shrubbery back home, seeds for the harvest to come, the disassembled machinery of flour mills and sawmills, a college, the mysteries of Heaven, the keys to eternity, the Dispensation of the Fullness of Time. Through sleet and rain, through drouth and prairie summer, half-starved and half-sick, dispossessed, believing, and faithful unto the last, Israel traveled to the unknown, toward the land of Canaan, in God’s faith and for His glory under the shadow of His outstretched hand, to build Zion and inherit the earth. (5/97)

 

According to DeVoto, the ”Great Migration” of 1843 or 1845, whichever year historians preferred, “made Oregon American soil no matter what might be said in Congress or Downing Street. Yet the migration of ’46 was the decisive one – this was the year of decision – and though Parkman failed to understand it, he was right in calling it great.” (5/115-116)

 

* 

May 8: General Zachary Taylor defeats a Mexican army in the Battle of Palo Alto.

 

* 

May 9: The next day, Taylor triumphs again in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma, and again forces enemy troops to retreat. At one point in the fight, Mexican artillery succeeded in holding off American attacks. Sadlier tells the story: 

During the battle of Resaca de la Palma, the Mexican guns were splendidly served, and the success of the Americans depended upon their capture. Taylor accordingly rode forward to his dragoons, and shouted to their leader, “Captain May, you must take that battery!” “I will do it, sir,” was the gallant reply. Placing himself at the head of his command, May dashed forward through a fire that cost him half his men, leaped over the cannon, sabered the gunners, and captured their commander, General La Vega, as he was in the act of firing a gun. (19/285)

 

* 

May 9 and after: Fremont is camped near Klamath Lake (in Oregon) when he hears a messenger is on the way to meet him – with dispatches dated October 1845. Fremont will say later that he had received information that a state of war now existed between the United States and Mexico. 

DeVoto is blunt: “Fremont was lying.” (5/194) 

The Pathfinder reached a decision while he sat by the dying fire after all the others were asleep. To go back to California and do a great deed, for honor and glory. To seize California for the United States and wrap Old Glory round him, to give a deed to the greatness in him. To seize the hour, take fortune at the full, and make his cast. To trust that the war which was certain to come would transform an act of brigandage into an act of patriotism, would transform the actor from a military adventurer, a free booter, a filibuster, into a hero.

 

He was a hero from that moment on until he died, but always with the lines just out of drawing. Time, circumstance, and destiny always cooperated with him for a while, and always betrayed him in the end.

 

He went to bed at last and his course was determined. In the excitement he had neglected to post a guard. You must not, in Indian country, neglect to post a guard. And excitement had bemused Kit Carson, who not only did not remind his commander but went to sleep with his rifle unloaded. So the Hot Creek Modoc, who had been hanging on Gillespie’s trail, crept into camp and woke them all by tomahawking Basil Lajeunesse and the half-breed Denny. There was a swift, short struggle, one of Fremont’s Delawares [Indian scouts] was killed, the Modoc chief was killed, and both parties took cover to shoot at each other through the rest of the night. The whites were in a savage mood, the next morning, and when the rest of Fremont’s party joined him they all went hunting Modoc, Klamath, and any of their neighbors who might be found. They hunted them violently for several days, killing a good many, burning a village, and riding down whatever skulkers they could find. (5/196-197)

 

Fremont would now march rapidly south, and do his part to win California for the United States.

 

* 

“Fools they are, or traitors they must be.” 

May 11: President Polk calls on Congress to declare war, telling lawmakers that “the cup of forbearance had been exhausted.” He insisted Mexico had “passed the boundary of the United States,” had “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.” He continued, “As war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by act of Mexico herself… I invoke the prompt action of Congress to recognize the existence of the war.” (5/186)

 

* 

May 13: Congress formally acts on the president request, and declares war. Protests were heard, especially in the North. Horace Greely calls U.S. behavior “unjust and rapacious,” and warns the decision to go to war will be “a curse and a source of infinite calamities.” 

Outraged by the decision to go to war, supported by lawmakers from his own state, Charles Sumner stormed: “Blood! Blood! is on the hands of representatives from Boston. Not all great Neptune’s ocean can wash them clean.” He calls the declaration “unquestionably the most wicked act in our history.” 

Rev. Theodore Parker preaches against it in church: 

I maintain that aggressive war is a sin; that it is a national infidelity, a denial of Christianity and of God. … Treason against the people, against mankind, against God, is a great sin, not lightly to be spoken of. The political authors of the war on this continent, and at this day, are either utterly incapable of a statesman’s work, or else guilty of that sin. Fools they are, or traitors they must be. … Considering how we acquired Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, I cannot forbear thinking that this people will possess the whole of this continent before many years, perhaps before the century ends. … Is it not better to acquire it by the schoolmaster than the cannon, by peddling cloth, tin, anything rather than bullets? … It would be a gain to mankind if we could spread over that country the Idea of America – that all men are born free and equal in rights, and establish there political, social, and individual freedom. But to do that we must first make real those ideas at home.

 

Now the government and its Congress would throw the blame on the innocent and say war exists “by the act of Mexico!” If a lie was ever told, I think this is one.

 

I am not at all astonished that northern representatives voted for all this work of crime. They are no better than the southern representatives, scarcely less in favor of slavery and not half so open. They say: Let the North make money and you may do what you please with the nation… for though we are descended from the Puritans we have but one article in our creed we never flinch from following, and that is – to make money, honestly if we can, if not as we can! … How tamely the people yield their necks – and say “Take our sons for war – we care not, right or wrong.”

 

Henry David Thoreau stormed at the injustice, saying that not just the politicians, but ordinary merchants and farmers, were “more interested in commerce and agriculture than in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.” 

He continued: 

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be a refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by [our] foreign army and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s warning was prophetic. The United States will conquer Mexico, he said, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” (5/204-210) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: That line, that the argument over slavery in the lands we took from Mexico, would lead to Civil War, always seemed to resonate with my students.

 

* 

An army had to gathered to go and fight the Mexicans, and DeVoto describes what the raw materials for that army were like. Volunteer troops, he says, were raw and hard to manage. On one occasion, a regiment from Maryland and another from Ohio quarreled in camp, and both sides “went for their muskets” before officers could intervene. 

Lt. George Gordon Meade described the volunteers when they first entered Mexican territory: 

They have killed five or six innocent people walking in the streets, for no other object than their own amusement; to be sure they are always drunk, and are in a measure irresponsible for their conduct. They rob and steal the cattle and corn of the poor farmers, and in fact act more like a body of hostile Indians than of civilized whites.

 

Another young officer, George B. McClellan, described the “cursed volunteers:” “from the general down to the dirtiest rascal of the filthy crew” they would be “scared out of their wits (if they had any).”  

Meade again:

They are a set of Goths and Vandals, without discipline, laying waste to the country wherever we go, making us a terror to innocent people, and if there is any spirit or energy in the Mexicans, will finally raise the people against us, who now are perfectly neutral. … They cannot take care of themselves; the hospitals are crowded with them, they die like sheep; they waste their provisions, requiring twice as much to supply them as regulars do. They plunder the poor inhabitants of everything they can lay their hands on, and shoot them when they remonstrate, and if one of their number happens to get into a drunken brawl and is killed, they run over the country, killing all the poor innocent people they find in their way, to avenge, as they say, the murder of their brother. (5/231-232) 

General Taylor was receiving volunteers who had signed for three months – and had to go home almost as soon as they arrived. “The army, which had come to fight, found itself going to the hospital instead.” (5/281)

 

* 

Summer: The Donner Party is also on the trail. George Donner has moved often before: from North Carolina, where he was born, to Kentucky, to Indiana, to Illinois, to Texas, and back to Illinois. George and his family had three wagons. One was full of trade goods, to set up business in California. One was full of supplies for the trip. The third they lived in. Tamsen, his third wife, was bringing “apparatus for preserving botanical specimens, watercolors and oil paints, books and school supplies...for use in the young lady’s seminary which she hoped to establish in California.” 

She sewed $10,000 in bank notes into a quilt. 

George was 62, his brother Jacob, 65. Two daughters from his second marriage were coming west, ages fourteen and twelve, and three children with Tamsen, six, four and three. Elizabeth, Jacob’s wife, had also been married before. She was traveling with two sons from her first marriage, also fourteen and twelve, and a daughter by her marriage with Jacob, aged seven, and four boys, ages nine, five, four and three. 

James Reed was carrying wine and brandies in one of his three wagons. One large beast, double-decked, was fitted out with bunks and a stove. He is also carrying credentials attesting to his character and position, signed by Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois. Margaret, his wife, is 32. Their children are Martha (Patty), eight, James, five, Thomas, three, and Margaret’s daughter, Virginia Backenstoe, thirteen, from a previous marriage (almost always referred to as “Virginia Reed”). Margaret’s mother, Sarah Keyes, is with them, but old and feeble. 

Four teamsters also worked for the Donner families: John Denton, Noah James, Hiram Miller, and Samuel Shoemaker. Denton was a gunsmith – born in Sheffield, England. (5/119-121) 

Patrick Breen, by way of Keokuk, Iowa, and Ireland, also joined them. His wife was Peggy, and they had six sons, John, Edward, Patrick, Simon, Peter, and James, the oldest fourteen, the youngest four, and a daughter Isabella, just a year old. Breen’s friend went with him, Patrick Dolan, a bachelor, also from Keokuk and Ireland. The Breens started from Independence with three wagons, plus a sizeable herd of horses and cattle besides their oxen. (5/121) 

Several employees were also involved. “Servants” – or drivers – hands – “hired companions,” DeVoto calls them: Bayliss Williams, his sister Eliza, Milt Elliott, James Smith, Walter Herron – the last three drivers for Reed. 

Reed had served in the same company, during the Black Hawk War, as James Clyman and Abraham Lincoln. 

On the trail, Susan Reed found 

the mosquitoes were worse than ever. They maddened the mules,  when Susan stepped out into the grass her dress filled with them, at night they sounded like rain on the roof, and she was made sick by the stings. Oxen were dying from heat and had to be driven at night; Susan never felt refreshed till after dark. But there was fresh buffalo and she contrived a miracle of cuisine. Supper one night was boiled chicken (from the noisy crate lashed to the baggage wagon), soup, rice, and “a dessert of wine and goosberry tart.”

 

The Donner Party also included Lewis Keseberg, of Westphalia, Germany, his wife Philippine, and two children. Luke Halloran joined along the trail – a youth suffering from tuberculosis, who roused Tamsen Donner’s pity. Hardkoop, too, was born in Germany, and joined by way of Cincinnati. Lavinia Murphy was a widow from Tennessee, traveling with her four unmarried children, as well as two married daughters, and their families: Sarah Murphy Foster and William Foster and one child; Harriet Murphy Pike and husband William, and two children. There were 26 men and 12 women over age 18, six boys and four girls, aged 12-17, six boys and three girls, aged 6-11, and seventeen children, five years and under. Another party of thirteen joined them in the Wasatch Mountains, bringing the wagon train to 87. This new party had already lost one member in an attack by Pawnees. No less an authority than Jim Bridger told them the trail to the south end of the Great Salt Lake was open and easy and better than the Fort Hall road.

 

* 

DeVoto discounts the idea that poor Americans could head West easily, and start life anew, bettering their lot. 

The migration was drawn from the stable elements of society, if only because the stable alone could afford it. A customary family outfit had a value of from seven to fifteen hundred dollars. The only way in which a really poor man could make the passage was to hire out as a drive or helper. Most trains had a number of such young men (and sometimes as with the Donners, young women) who were working their passage, but the bulk were, at least in a moderate degree, men of property and therefore substantial citizens. A certain fraction, of course, if not “squatters” (generically, “poor whites”) were of the butcher-knife type, and the fraction increased as travel cheapened. (5/144)

 

Bryant heard a rumor that a party of five Englishmen were on the trail, too, inciting all Indians “to attack [the] trains, rob, murder, and annihilate them.” (5/145) 

Parkman noted the dangers that might result if the wagon trains encountered the Mormons. “No one could predict what would be the result when large armed bodies of these fanatics should encounter the most impetuous and reckless of their old enemies on the prairie.” (5/146) 

The trains, DeVoto says, were not cohesive. He notes that the travelers often “dallied, strolling afield to fish or see the country, stopping to stage a debate or a fistfight,” or just wandered about like they were on vacation. 

“They strung out along the trail aimlessly, at senseless intervals and over as wide as space as the country permitted. So they traveled fewer miles in any day than they might have, traveled them with greater difficulty than they needed to, and wore themselves and the stock down more than was wise.” (5/150-151)

 

In 1846, DeVoto says, no train was attacked by Indians, though individual travelers were picked off. 

Year by year the increasing emigration narrowed the buffalo range and eroded the economy of the tribes who had to live on it; year by year the Indian danger got greater. Finally the Sioux and the Cheyenne rose as nations and made the trail terrible, but there was no premonition of that in the summer of ’46. (5/153-154)

 

True, the Sioux were feeling very great indeed this summer. When Parkman met the great war parties at Fort Laramie they were swelling with an almost Teutonic brag, beating their chests in the stateliest of furies and telling everybody that they were going to destroy all the whites who had invaded their Lebensraum. But the Sioux were merely making a play for greater blackmail and in fact were genial, inquisitive, and hungry for gifts. They still looked on the movers as a kind of circus parade, rich with goods but fundamentally comic. (5/154)

 

Another time, Parkman watches White Shield, a Sioux, clamor for warriors to join him in a war party to avenge a wrong done by the Shoshoni. Then his nerve fails, and he starts to make excuses for why he can’t go, after all. 

He has given away some war arrows, some of his young men have had bad dreams – and one morning White Shield comes down with a sore throat. He mopes round the village, sniffling, wailing, complaining, just any counting house clerk with a cold. No enemy scalps for White Shield. (5/297) 

 

DeVoto focuses on the strain the travelers on wagon trains endured: 

The strains of travel were bad enough. Drenched blankets, cold breakfasts after rainy nights, long hours without water, exhaustion from the labor of double-teaming through a swamp or across quicksands or up a slope, from ferrying a swollen river till midnight, from being roused to chase a strayed ox across the prairie two hours before dawn, from constant shifting of the load to make the going better. Add the ordinary hazards of the day’s march: a sick ox, a balky mule, the snapping of a wagon tongue, capsizing at a ford or overturning on a slope, the endlessness necessity of helping others who had fallen into the pits which your intelligence or good luck had enabled you to avoid. Add the endless apprehension about your stock, the ox which might die, every day’s threat that the animals on which your travel depended might be killed by disease or accident or Indians, leaving you stranded in the waste. Such things worked a constant attrition on the nerves, and God himself seemed hostile when there was added to them a bad storm or some neighbor’s obstinacy that reacted to the common loss. The sunniest grew surly and any pinprick could be a mortal insult. … Your best friend’s drawl or innocent tick was suddenly intolerable. (5/156)

 

* 

June 14: The first act of the “Bear Flag Revolution” in California was capture of Sonoma, “a tiny little cluster of adobe houses,” which DeVoto says “could have been captured by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.” They revolutionaries captured a sleeping Mariana Vallejo, a retired Mexican general, after surrounding his home.” Vallejo invited his captors in for a drink and discussion. 

No blood was shed, although Vallejo was arrested. 

William L. Todd, who we have already mentioned, made the first “Bear Flag Republic” flag out of a woman’s chemise, and another’s petticoat. 

Red flannel stripes across a white (or at least unbleached) field. He painted in red a crude five-pointed star in the left hand corner and, facing it, and animal standing on its hind legs, doubtless remembered in emergency from the state seal of Missouri. A realist, or he may have been an adept of symbolism, described it as a hog. But Todd meant it for a bear. Underneath in ink or pokeberry juice, he lettered in the legend: California Republic. He left the i out of the last syllable and made a blot painting it over again, but the one-village nation had the ensign that has come down to glory. (5/221)

 

* 

For the Donner Party, their first and greatest mistake was listening to travel advice provided by Lansford Hastings, who had written a guidebook. (DeVoto says he lied – touting a trail he had never seen.) 

On June 27, 1846, no map ever drawn had filled in the country between Fort Bridger and Great Salt Lake – no map showed what the Wasatch Mountains were like. And no map filled in the country between Great Salt Lake and the north bend of the Humboldt River – which included the Salt Desert. (5/179)

Author's son, c. 1991, on the Great Salt Desert.

Sevier Desert in Utah. From author's bicycle ride across the USA, 2011.

 

Near the border of Utah and Nevada.

Utah: Even today, a sign here warns: "No Services for the Next 106 Miles."

Hastings’ The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California offered this fatal suggestion: “The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the bay of San Francisco.” (5/180)

Chimney Rock, in what is now Nebraska, was one landmark the wagon trains looked for.
Native Americans called the formation the "Elk's Penis."

 

* 

“A patriotic summer while the eagles screamed.” 

June 29: General Stephen W. Kearny’s “Army of the West,” 2,500 strong, leaves Fort Leavenworth, following the Santa Fe Trail. The troops are inexperienced, but Kearny drives them hard. 

He demanded twenty miles a day, twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, sometimes thirty-two. The troops keened but took it – took it, in fact, better than the horses, which weakened on grain and developed the vicious ailments of their species. And the infantry took it best of all. Companies A and B customarily foraged ahead of the cavalry they were attached to and though they cursed the inhumanity of their officers, took pride in their mileage. Their lips parched in the prairie wind, the sun nauseated them, the wagons and ambulances were always picking up some who had not stood the pace, they were sure that Kearny was a tyrant, but they made camp some hours before the cavalry and turned out to boo them in great content when the tired beasts sagged in at twilight. Their legs swelled at the shin with a queer distemper, which turned out to be periostitis, the common splint they were accustomed to treat in plow horses. College athletes who are worked too hard are familiar with it today, and the red hot band that clamped along the shin made no holiday of the march.

 

Most of the expedition struck the Santa Fe trail at Elm Grove or Willow Springs. (The first rumor of the enemy’s approach had occurred on the Waukarusa, seven hundred miles from the nearest Mexicans.) From there on they took the hard-packed, familiar road of the traders – Council Grove, Diamond Springs, the Arkansas at Great Bend, Pawnee Rock, the Pawnee Fork, the lower crossing (which they did not make), Chouteau’s Island. After the rains the country dried out so that wagons and caissons got mired only at the streams, which dwindled and were farther apart. They left the high grass behind and timber with it, so that part of the duty of the soldier was to collect buffalo chips during the last hour of marching. This was another strangeness and some thought the fires stank abominably but others found that they gave a welcome tang to the salt pork and corned beef. So many things were strange, jack rabbits, antelopes, and especially the buffalo, the great legend now gaped at by these rural youths, who tried to hunt it and sometimes succeeded. The country was unimaginable, plains on a scale they had not dreamed of diminishing one to a dot that seemed to travel on the bottom of a bowl, the vast heave of the swells that seemed like the swells of the ocean they had read about, many miles long. Most of all the sun. Missouri sun is nothing amateurish but the sun of the plains flattened the life in you, filled your eyes with the color of blood, and baked you to the bone – with sudden overheated winds and violent dust storms making it worse. The boys kept going and began to stink.

 

There were rattlesnakes by the hundreds, killed on the march, buzzing from beside the buffalo chips you stooped to pick up, slithering into your blankets at night. There were the mosquitoes, much deadlier than the snakes. There were swarms of buffalo gnats to choke the nostrils and cluster under the eyelids of men and horses. The country began to break out in patches of “saline incrustation,” alkali. Like the emigrants [the wagon trains] to the northward, the army drank corrosive water and got violently physicked. And not only by alkali; the curse of armies, dysentery, had begun to flourish. Nor was the scummy standing-water of the buffalo wallows any better for them, when it was all they got to drink at nooning, crawling with infusoria and noisome with buffalo urine. The less fit began to break. As the oxen collapsed from heat and either died or had to be driven up by night, some of the troops found that they could go no farther. Here is a man discharged and sent home for d.t., another for bad eyes, another for general debility. As the trains fell farther behind and rations shortened, scurvy appeared. Measles traveled with them. The wagons filled with sick; some of them died. A grave had to be dug at Pawnee Rock and from there on burial parties were no novelty. They had come for a patriotic summer while the eagles screamed, but for some of them the great adventure was ending in a short agony and a shallow grave filled with such stones as could be gathered to keep the wolves away. 5/248-250)

* 

July 1: Fremont has marched south and taken charge of the Bear Flag Republic’s military forces – such as they are. Several minor skirmishes have been fought. At one point, Fremont’s men capture three men. He tells Kit Carson, “I have no room for prisoners.” So three are killed. 

Now he orders his men to gather boats, and row across San Francisco Bay, to capture the enemy forts: 

Another daring venture at midnight when graveyards yawn. On the way, Fremont resumed his outgrown role of geographer long enough to give the straight its name, the Golden Gate. They reached the far shore at dawn and stormed its defending fortress, El Castillo de San Joaquin. There was no one there: no one had been there for a generation. The cannon were rusting away into eternity but the Conqueror spiked them nevertheless – ten popguns that had been cast early in the seventeenth century to arm some Spanish galleons – and so brought to a glorious end the first phase of John Charles Fremont, military genius. He had done his first great deed. (5/225)

 

* 

August 2: General Kearny’s army marches out of Bent’s Fort, in Colorado, and heads for Santa Fe. 

Growing up, Kearny is the youngest of fifteen children in his family. 

DeVoto notes that the four Bent brothers, grandsons of Silas Bent, who led the “Indians” during the Boston Tea Party, kept 150 men employed at their fort, many with Indian wives and children. When Kearny led his forces west they entered a terrain where, for four days, they could find no grass for the horses. On August 4, a soldier remembered a rare pool of water so bad that 

one who drank it would have to shut both eyes and hold his breath until the nauseating dose was swallowed. Notwithstanding its scarcity, some men allowed their horses to tramp through it, which soon stirred it up to a thick mud; and to give it a still greater flavor, a dead snake with the flesh just dropping from his bones. (5/266) 

 

* 

August 8: Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania offers a resolution in Congress, regarding the expansion of slavery, which becomes known as the “Wilmot Proviso.” 

Provided: that as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the monies herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted. (5/290)

 

* 

August 12: Mexican forces defending Santa Fe block a narrow canyon as Kearny approaches, but their commander loses his nerve and decides all is lost. 

When several officers plead with him to fight, he threatens them with his cannon. The soldiers all went home – many of them peasants happy to avoid a fight – and their commander fled south. A British officer who ran into him on the trail described General Manuel Armijo as “a mountain of fat.” (5/270)

 

* 

August 20: Thomas J. Sloan files Patent No. 4,704. “A simple thing: a wood screw which had a gimlet point and so turned itself into the wood instead of having to have a hole bored for it,” the kind of screw almost everyone uses today. (5/214)

 

* 

By late August, the Donner Party had reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake. They were following the advice of Lansford W. Hastings – who had written a book about a new and “improved trail” to California. They spent six days traversing the Salt Desert, traveling mostly by night. Here, they began to break down. In this “white hell” some families drove their oxen hard, hoping to pass through before too late. Others plodded along, with moonlight to guide them. All were moved by the “uncomprehending agony of the children.” The Reeds had to abandon two wagons, including the “Pioneer Palace Car,” as Virginia Reed, James Reed’s stepdaughter, called it. Thirty-six oxen gave out and died. Reed distributed his extra supplies among the other families – who would later refuse to return the favor. The Donners soon ran into “Digger” Indians, a loose category of native peoples who lived in harsh lands, and dug roots for food, when hunting failed. They were a poor lot – living in caves and brush huts – and they robbed passing wagon trains if they could. Other whites had retaliated, according to DeVoto, and “massacred Diggers idly, for fun, or in punishment for theft. The Diggers remembered…if they had not, they might have succored the Donners in the snow.” 

One day, trouble exploded, as the travelers tried to double-team wagons up a steep ridge. There was an argument over whose wagon had the right of way. John Snyder, the driver for the Graves family, erupted in fury when Reed tried to take his wagon first. Snyder 

began to beat Reed over the head with his bull-whip, gashing him badly. Reed drew a knife and stabbed Snyder, just as another blow from the whip knocked him down. Snyder died almost at once. And at once this band of pilgrims traveling the frontier of death were atomized to armed men threatening one another. The Graveses demanded Reed’s life. Keseberg, whom Reed had once insisted on temporarily banishing from the train for rifling an Indian grave and thus risking all their lives, propped up his wagon tongue – they were sufficiently veteran to know that this was how you hanged a man on the trail. Reed, supported by Eddy and [Milt] Elliott, [driving for Reed] would not be hanged without some shooting first. When due fear of loaded guns had made itself felt above the blood lust, the party convened as a court, Reed’s wounds bandaged and his wife’s face showing the bruise where Snyder’s whip had struck her. Sentence: on promise of the others to take care of his family, Reed must hereafter travel alone. And unarmed.

 

After he left by himself, someone, Eddy, or Virginia Reed, secretly took his rifle to him, thereby giving him a chance. William Herron also agreed to go along. 

DeVoto explains: 

As the rack twists, certain of these people are seen to be more resistant than the others. In that inscrutable area of the personality which we call moral, Reed and his wife, George and Tamsen Donner, Mary Graves, [Charles T.] Stanton, [William] McCutchen, and William Eddy had a greater richness than their companions. It goes into the total sum for what it is worth. It proved to be worth much.

 

One day, a traveler named Hardkoop, first name lost, now on foot and more than sixty years old, fell behind. When he failed to come up by nightfall, Eddy, and two others offered to go back and find him, to “obey the obligations of humanity,” says the historian. “But they had no horse to ride. Those who had horses would not lend them for such an errand. Let him die. He died.” 

Soon after, the Diggers 

ran off [Franklin Ward] Graves’s horses. The next night they got eighteen oxen and a cow. The following night they playfully shot arrows into some oxen without killing them. The third night they shot twenty-one oxen, and those which were not killed were useless. … If there had been one mountain man along, the Diggers would not have struck more than once. (5/331-339)

 

By the time the Donner Party reached the Humbolt Sink, where that river sank into the sands and disappeared, they were in increasingly bad shape. Most had had to dump heavy possessions, combine wagons, get along with fewer and fewer animals to pull the wagons that remained. Wolfinger stayed behind one day to cache some of his wealth. Reinhardt and Spitzer murdered him, DeVoto says, “got his money belt if he had one,” and blamed the Indians. 

Tamsin had dreamed of founding a polite academy for girls in the never-never land of California. Now a great crate of books designed for its library was buried in the desert. They would come back and get it sometime. … Neither Eddy nor the Donners could help Mrs. Reed and her children. All of Eddy’s stock was finished and he could get none from anyone. He had smashed the lock of his rifle. No one would take his three-year old son or the year-old Peggy into a wagon. He made a pack of some powder and bullets and three pounds of sugar. His wife carried the baby, he carried the three-year-old. On the last day in the desert the children nearly died of thirst. When they came into camp, old Patrick Breen, whose casks were full, refused them water. Eddy announced that he would kill Breen if he interfered and got some water for the kids. The next day, with a borrowed gun, Eddy killed nine geese. He distributed them among the families. The Diggers killed some more oxen.                                                                                                          

 

* 

September 10: Elias Howe’s patent covers the three basic features of the first sewing machine: “a grooved needle with the eye at the point, A shuttle operating on the opposite side of the cloth from the needle to form a lock stitch, and an automatic feed.” (5/214)

 

* 

Cyrus McCormick gets 300 reapers made in 1846, and then moves to the Midwest and builds his factory.

 

* 

September 17: By late summer, only about a thousand Latter Day Saints remain in Nauvoo. On that day, “the valorous wolf-hunters of Illinois” finish their job. 

As DeVoto explains, 

By July so few remained that the mobbers felt secure. They began to fill the little newspapers with threats and indignation again. They rode by night and sometimes even by day, little gangs of armed thugs brave enough to raid outlying farms and kill a widow’s chickens under her very eyes. They had deputies arrest Saints under all the old accusations. Here and there they shot someone who didn’t have his friends with him. Finally they decided it was safe to hold the wolf hunt.

 

He adds: 

It is possible to explain the earlier mobbings of the Nauvoo Mormons: there was reason for them, they grew out of things past, they were probably inevitable. But the September climax can be even more easily explained: these mobs were just swine. It had come to be fun to torture a Mormon, so they had fun.

 

The attackers numbered as many as fifteen hundred, and they had small artillery. The defenders were outnumbered, and long range shooting left a number of people dead on both sides. Finally, the Mormons surrendered – on the promise that they would leave the town immediately. 

DeVoto continues: 

The mobbers whooped into the city and began to amuse themselves with the terrified. They stole what they wanted, broke what was breakable, converted the temple floors into latrines (and, Kane says, vomitories), yelled at children, and flourished guns at women. It was their pleasure to beat up some Saints and to baptize others in parodies of the sacred ordinances. They had an enjoyable time and the Saints hauled their sick into the brush to escape lynching, gathered what possessions they could, pleaded unavailingly for time and mercy, and got out. Some died of fright, others of shock and injury, others still in premature childbirth.

 

Stone capital from a pillar on the temple at Nauvoo.

Site of the Temple of Nauvoo, c. 1992.

Anti-Mormon mobs burned the Temple at Nauvoo.

Some parties of Mormons who had gone ahead now reversed direction to come to the aid of this last band of survivors, who numbered 647. Luman Shurtliff remembered seeing the camps these last people leaving Nauvoo tried to build. Some had nothing more than “a ragged blanket or quilt laid over a few sticks or brush [which] comprised all the house a whole family owned on earth.” Some “lay stretched on the ground either sick or dying, others perhaps a little better off had a few boards laid up on something and  [were] more sick than well. … I was not a little surprised to hear them relate the blessings of God and the deliverance from disease, death, and starvation.” (5/318-320)

 

* 

“The ministering angel.” 

September 20: The Battle of Monterrey begins. Ridpath gives a description: 

A correspondent of the Louisville Courier wrote a touching incident of this battle. He says: “In the midst of the conflict a Mexican woman was busily engaged in carrying bread and water to the wounded men of both armies. I saw the ministering angel raise the head of a wounded man, give him water and food, and then bind up the ghastly wound with a handkerchief she took from her own head. After having exhausted her supplies, she went back to her house to get more bread and water for others. As she was returning on her mission of mercy, to comfort other wounded persons, I heard the report of a gun, and the poor innocent creature fell dead. I think it was an accidental shot that struck her. I would not be willing to believe otherwise. It made me sick at heart; and, turning from the scene, I involuntarily raised my eyes toward heaven, and thought, ‘Good God! is this war?’ Passing the spot the next day I saw her body still lying there, with the bread by her side, and the broken gourd, with a few drops of water in it – emblems of her errand. We buried her; and while we were digging her grave, cannon-balls flew around us like hail.” (1219, missed page #)

* 

Fall: Lieutenant George F. Ruxton of the British Army, traveling to gather information in the West, finds, as DeVoto explains, “some of the Plains Indians possessed by a stoic melancholy which issued from a conviction that their day was over and the white man could not be stayed.” (5/124)

* 

September 20-23: DeVoto also covered the battle, which lasted several days. He was no fan of General Zachary Taylor. As the Americans approached the city, he writes, 

Taylor promptly considered his favorite maneuver, a bayonet charge, but the Mexicans opened on him with cannon and he had to stop and do some thinking.

 

To Taylor, as to many other American generals in the succeeding hundred years, a battle consisted of some preliminary work and a splendid finale in what was called cold steel. Just how he had acquired his vision is not known, since his principal campaigns had been against the Seminole, whom no bayonet ever touched. But in obedience to it he had solved the problem of inadequate transport by leaving most of his artillery behind. (5/282-283)

 

On Sunday, September 20, General William J. Worth, with a force of regulars and Texas Rangers, captured a key road. 

As at the Battle of Palo Alto, well-handled American artillery 

broke up a heavy charge of Mexican lancers so handily that the Rangers could turn it back with little loss. This cleared the road and Worth had won his battle right there, for the Mexicans in Monterrey could neither retreat to the interior nor receive reinforcements or supplies. But Worth knew war and, not content with a paper victory, began to attack the city from the rear. He formed an assaulting force under C.F. Smith, who was to live long enough to repeat this decisive action at Fort Donelson. They had to cross a river, they had to work up a hillside nearly one thousand feet high, they were under artillery and rifle fire, but they had competent officers and plenty of guts. Reaching the crest, they were able to charge the first bastion with the bayonet, though probably it was empty when they reached it. By midafternoon they had the whole ridge, at slight cost and were turning captured cannon on the next stronghold. This was another height, across the river and near the city. Worth prepared to attack it but his skirmishers had got no farther than the base of the hill when night fell. Another violent storm set in. Most of Worth’s men had not eaten since Sunday morning and none had blankets, but they had won a battle. (5/283)

 

DeVoto notes that, eyewitnesses claimed Taylor’s “courage was an inspiration. It was just as well, for his intelligence and his professional competence were not.” 

American troops stormed into the city, “where artillery from the forts promptly blew them to pieces.” 

Taylor sent in fresh troops. 

The Fourth Infantry, including Lieutenant [Ulysses S.] Grant, had a bad time and something less than half of it was left when, after a few minutes, it also had to get out again. A  brigade under Mr. Polk’s appointee, General Quitman, was still fresh, and Taylor sent it in farther to the south. Quitman also was met with decimating fire and his troops began to melt way. But the Mexicans in the forts were beginning to be discouraged by the enemy’s insistence on coming back, and their commander was scared. He withdrew some of them and others fled at the crucial moment. So Colonel Jefferson Davis of the First Mississippi Rifles, who for three happy and heartbreaking months in 1835 had been Taylor’s son-in-law, was able to waive his sword, lead his men into one of the redoubts, and so prepare the defeat of the Confederate States of America. The Mississippians took another redoubt also and withstood a concentrated fire from the other forts.

 

Taylor was trying in person farther to the north, and inspired with his courage a lot of soldiers whom the Mexican artillery, some of it served by American deserters, blew back three separate times. They could not get close enough to thrust with Old Betsy. When they got into the outskirts of the town, the Mexicans slaughtered them from the roofs. No one had thought to bring scaling or storming weapons, and they died by scores. Taylor thought that a small battery ought to advance and shoot it out with the heaviest fort but the commander sensibly refused. So, late in the afternoon, Taylor had to pull all his army out of range again except the volunteers, mostly Davis’, in the captured redoubt. He had lost about six times as many men as Worth was to lose in three days of fighting. He had taught a number of his subordinate commanders a lesson he could not learn himself. And he had so used up his army that they would do no fighting the next day, though the Mexicans withdrew by night to the center of the city.

 

On Tuesday, September 22, Taylor’s men watched their comrades, under Worth, capture the remaining high  ground west of the city. According to DeVoto, Taylor’s blunders only multiplied. 

Worth conducted this operation with spirit and intelligence – and without help or information from Taylor. His Mexican opponent received reinforcements which any attack by Taylor would have prevented, and prepared an assault. The Mexicans attacked with great élan but Worth caught them in the flank, drove the survivors headlong into the city, and concentrated the captured guns on them.

 

By Wednesday the twenty-third Taylor’s subordinates had sufficiently reorganized his battered army for him to try again. They had made plans for street fighting too, and so the troops made their way from block to block toward the grand plaza in the center of Monterrey. It was terrible work and they were cruelly shot up but they kept going. At midafternoon ammunition failed them. Lieutenant Grant, who was a quartermaster, rode frantically back to organize the supply, but Taylor, for no reason, ordered the whole force back again, all the way out of town. They went back, protesting, and the Mexicans shot them up as they went.

 

Worth had no orders from his commander. His batteries threw shell into the city and his attack was ready. When he heard the noise of Taylor’s battle he sent it in – two columns down the main streets.

 

Pause while one of history’s emblems is created. Many of Worth’s troops were Texans, and some had worked with the great herds of Texas longhorns. As, heads down against the musket fire, they pelted along those two avenues toward the first barricades, they began to shout. They produced a cry of the cattle range, a wild, unnerving sound deep in the bass which climbed to a full throated, deafening falsetto. They would go home again after the campaigns in Mexico and peace would come for a while. Then on July 21, 1861, some of them would be under arms again behind the brown stagnant water course called Bull Run Creek, facing McDowell’s army of Northerners, and would produce that screech again. It was the Rebel Yell.

 

They had almost as bad a time as Taylor’s troops, fighting from house to house, but they would not be stopped. Their engineers, chiefly Lieutenant [George Gordon] Meade, taught them to pierce adobe walls and throw grenades through the holes. They mopped up, square by square, fighting desperately, swearing like Texans, posting sharpshooters, bringing cannon up dismounted and training them down the streets. They were just one square from the plaza when night fell. Worth did not call them back.

 

He had won Taylor’s third victory. [General Pedro] Ampudia had had enough and, before fighting could begin on Thursday morning, asked for terms. Taylor proposed unconditional surrender but consented to a meeting of commissioners. As a result, Ampudia was permitted to withdraw his army intact, with six of his field pieces and all his small arms and equipment.

 

…Badly shaken as the army was – casualties amounted to twenty percent of the effectives – Taylor could have destroyed Ampudia’s army with another day of fighting. That is, Worth could have destroyed it. If he had done so, Santa Anna’s preparations to the southward would have been jeopardized or even paralyzed, but Taylor was outtalked by his opponent, knew that he had forfeited the respect of his principal subordinates, and, besides, was making an unfamiliar essay in political war. He needed at least eight weeks to restore his army – and maybe the Santa Anna intrigue, which he vaguely knew about, would mature in that time. Or, if he did not wound Mexican pride by destroying the army, maybe the northern provinces, maybe even the national government, would make peace.

 

His political thinking was as bad as his generalship.

 

… Worth and the courage of the private soldier had won the battle, but the glory was their commander’s. Nothing could keep him from the White House now, though his subordinates were to give him a fourth, dubious, unnecessary victory. With some nine hundred Americans killed or disabled in three days, the newspapers had plenty of copy. Stories of heroism went out for an exulting nation to read. The relatives of the dead could get what satisfaction they might from a bravery that accomplished nothing. For the battle of Monterrey should not have been fought and did nothing to advance the war.  (5/285-286)                              

DeVoto notes that the newspapers back home, “filled their space with atrocities, all Mexican, and heroisms, universally American.” (5/254) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Jefferson Davis’s success in this battle had disastrous consequences for the Confederacy many years later. Convinced of his own military genius, Davis would often interfere with the plans of his best generals, to the detriment of the Southern cause. General William J. Worth died in 1849, at the age of 55. (5/203) 

General Ampudia had been ordered to retreat south, rather than risk battle at Monterrey, but may have sensed glory if he could stop Taylor’s advance. So, he chose to fight.

 

* 

September 25: Kearny leads his men out of Santa Fe, and heads for California, to help take control for the United States. His force includes the “Mormon Battalion.” Brigham Young had previously made an  offer to President Polk – to help the army move supplies, and to create an entire battalion, an offer that was gladly accepted. The government would provide wagons, stock, supplies, uniforms and pay. Many of the Mormons who signed up had a hard time adjusting their thinking. Wrote Hosea Stout in his journal: “I confess I was glad to learn of war against the United States, and was in hopes that it might never end untill they were entirely destroyed for they had driven us into the wilderness & was now laughing at our calamities.” (5/240) 

East of Santa Fe, one Mormon soldier had seen what he took to be proof of the Book of Mormon when his unit passed through Pecos pueblo, the ruins of an “old Nephite city.” (5/317) 

Once, Kearny criticized some of his volunteer troops for not wearing their military coats. A volunteer officer replied that the men had “enlisted to fight for their country, not dress for it.” Kearny knew to let it go.

 

* 

Arms and legs strapped down. 

October 16: The first demonstration of “painless surgery” takes place in the operating theater of the Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Ruth E. Finley describes what operations were like before the use of ether was tried and perfected: 

Surgery theretofore was of necessity gruesomely primitive. Amputation and the lancing of abscesses were about the total of its beneficence. Operating rooms were charnel places of horror, where men and women were strapped to tables to scream their lives away in agony or die because the knife slipped in the midst of their uncontrollable struggles.

 

“The dreadful scenes in the operating theatre – for this was before the days of ether – were a great shock to my sensibilities,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes of his own medical student days.

 

Still, there were those who protested the use of ether in the fight against pain. The temperance movement was taking hold; and one of the leaders of the Washington Society, John Bartholomew Gough, a reformed drunkard, came out against its use. 

Finley writes: 

Like so many enthusiasts  of his time, he was greatly enamored of the sound of his own voice, and so spent his days rushing about the country and passionately relating his own drunken experiences as a warning against the terrors of delirium tremens. Whether Gough originated the puerile argument which combated employment of ether on the ground that it produced an insensibility akin to that of drunkenness or whether this was part of the general protest, he certainly advanced that viewpoint effectively. It is difficult now to get the connection between scientifically induced unconsciousness in an operating-room and self-induced intoxication; still…an amazing number of people were quick to condemn the use of anesthetics on precisely that comparison.

 

Ministers, varying the attack, pleaded with their congregations to remember that “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” exhorting the faithful not to deprive themselves of the sanctifying benefits of physical affliction born with grace and fortitude. Job’s God of wrath still proved his people’s loyalty by endurance tests of bodily pain. Ether was an invention of the devil. When the British accoucheur, Sir James Simpson, advocated its use to assuage the pains of child-birth, certain of the American clergy became downright hysterical, the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of Genesis serving as a text for hundreds of sermons preached up and down the land.

 

Did not the Bible say, in so many words, that woman was doomed to “bring forth children in sorrow”? (113/107-108)

 

Bernard DeVoto also tells the story. The “biggest men in their profession” were present for the test at Massachusetts General Hospital, he writes. The patient was a young man named Gilbert Abbott, seated in a red plush chair, a sheet thrown over it, his arms and legs strapped down. Dr. William Morton, a dentist, came late, but brought “a piece of philosophical apparatus, which he explained in low tones to Dr. [J. Mason] Warren. The young gentlemen [observing] saw it as a glass globe with projecting tubes or arms. It was about half full of a colorless liquid.” 

Abbott, Dr. Warren told the class of medical students, was “suffering from a vascular tumor of the neck on the left side, occupying the spaces from the edge of the jaw downward to the larynx and from the angle of the jaw to the median line. They could see it and diagnose it from where they sat.” 

Dr. Morton, the experimenter, put the long tube of his apparatus in the patient’s mouth, told him to inhale, and asked one of the notables to hold his nostrils shut. Tension came into the airy room. The doctor bent forward; the students felt their muscles getting tight; Dr. Morton crouched before the patient, watching him closely. In between four and five minutes the patient, after some heaving and struggling, seemed to go to sleep. “Dr. Warren, your patient is ready,” Dr. Morton said, and withdrew the apparatus. Dr. Warren made an incision about three inches long over the center of the tumor, through the skin and subcutaneous cellular tissue, and removed a layer of fascia which covered the enlarged blood vessels. He then passed a curved needle, with ligature, under and around the tumor and exerted considerable pressure. The growth came out and Dr. Warren closed the incision.

 

The patient appeared to be sleeping quietly, but just before the operation was completed moved and twitched a little and muttered indistinctly. Presently he awoke. He was asked if he had suffered any pain. No, he said, but he had felt a dim sensation, as if his neck were being scraped with a blunt instrument.

 

The class sat back and flexed their muscles. “Gentlemen,” Dr. Warren said, “this is no humbug.” (5/328-329)

 

* 

October 19: The Donner Party headed up Truckee Canyon. On this day, Charles Stanton, one of two men who had agreed to push ahead some weeks back, “came riding in from the west with seven pack mules and two Indians driving them.” The help had been sent by John Sutter – whose employees would discover gold on the American River in California, fifteen months later. William McCutchen, who had gone with Stanton, had given out during the crossing, and was recovering at Sutter’s Fort. “But Stanton, a bachelor, moved solely by the obligation which most of them daily refused to acknowledge, had, after reaching safety, put his life in jeopardy again and brought back over the divide the food which, for a time, saved the lives of all.” (5/341) 

He reported that Reed and Herron had made it through – eating five navy beans they found, and tallow in a discarded tar bucket. Reed puked it up. They caught up with some of the last emigrants to get through, and got food and met Stanton. If the others had had good stock, they could have made it to safety in three days. Their animals were exhausted and had to be rested before they tried the pass. William Pike handed his pistol to his brother-in-law William Foster. It went off and Pike was killed.

 

* 

October 25: Heavy snow began to fall, and in a panic, members of the Donner Party began to make the climb over Truckee Pass, in three scattered sections. The first party made camp the first night and a Digger “skewered nineteen oxen. Eddy killed him.” It was October 25, according to one historian. The travelers had lost track of days, and believed it was October 22. In the final of three parties, an axle broke on one of George Donner’s wagons. The wagon tipped over, nearly killing Georgia and Eliza. While they worked to make a new axle, Jacob’s chisel slipped and gashed George’s hand. 

“Stanton and an Indian got to the divide…and could have gone down the western slope. He came back. To help the others.” 

No one else could make it, and all retreated to their camps. Then disaster settled over them all. A blizzard struck, lasting for eight days. Little Georgia and Eliza loved the storm. “It made pictures” for them, “it gathered in a ridge beside us upon the log; it nestled in piles on our buffalo robe; and by the time our quarters were finished, it was veiling Uncle Jacob’s from view.” 

Not more than thirty miles to the west, on the far slope of the divide, Reed and McCutchen with a pack train struggled toward them ever more slowly through the same snow, and at last were stopped. They had come up from Sutter’s to Johnson’s ranch with two Indians and thirty-one horses packed with food. Ignorant of what had happened since they left the train, they expected to meet their families on the way down from the divide, doubtless very hungry but out of danger. (5/343-344)

 

In the camps, at the bottom of the pass, on the other side, Fosdick gave up his gold watch to Breen, in return for two oxen. Eddy bought a dead ox from Patrick Graves, on a promise to pay $25 when they reached safety. He later paid Graves’s heirs.

 

* 

November 12:  Thirteen men, and two women, Mary Graves and Sarah Fosdick, tried to get over the divide. Eddy and Stanton led them, of course, but they fell short of the summit by three miles and were back by midnight. 

The snow “was soft and about ten feet deep.”

 

* 

Fatal disagreement over mules. 

November 25: The snow continued to pile up. Another escape attempt was made. Eddy and Stanton led the way again, with a party of 22, including six women. 

They were weaker than they had been before and could not allow themselves even so many of the meager slices of thin beef as they had previously taken. This time, on a firmer snow crust, they actually got over the divide, where Eddy measured the snow and found it twenty-five feet deep, and started down the far side. They were barely strong enough to gather wood for fire but spent the night in the snow. And spent part of it, the two most resolute, Eddy and Stanton, fatally disagreeing. They had been using Sutter’s mules to break a trail; the mules were done in and must be abandoned. Stanton would not go on without the mules – they belonged to Sutter and the sacred rights of property required him to return them. Eddy pleaded the imminence of death, in a great gust of rage. No use. The next day they went back over the divide to camp. “Mrs. Eddy and her children were very weak but exhibited great courage and fortitude.” (5/346)

 

* 

December 6: General Kearny and his men fight a party of Californians in the Battle of San Pascual. The nature of the fight is made plain by the fact Kearny was lanced twice. Another officer was lanced three times, and his blouse torn in four places. Eighteen Americans were killed – but the Californians were driven off. 

During their march west, Kearny’s troops had met the Apache, who one soldier said, “bayed at us like their kindred wolves.” 

They crossed the lands of  the Pima and Maricopa Indians, who had learned how to raise crops in a harsh land. One officer noted that they surpassed many Christian nations in agriculture, were only a little behind in the useful arts, “and immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.” (5/352) 

Find: Joel Palmer’s Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains, which DeVoto calls a classic.

 

* 

Rations for six days. 

December 16-21: The Donner Party remained trapped. Another storm blasted the mountains, lasting a week. Every horse and oxen were dead, and buried in drifts of deep snow. The mules were dead too. Another storm piled into the mountains. It blew for five days. Finding firewood was nearly impossible. The emigrants started dying, at their two separate camps, one at Truckee Lake, the other along Alder Creek. 

Graves and Stanton began to show others how to make snowshoes. At the lake, fourteen pairs were ready, and seventeen survivors tried to get over the pass again: ten men, five women, two boys. 

They took a rifle and an axe, a blanket apiece, and minute rations which they expected to last for six days. Stanton and his Indians and William Eddy were again the dominant spirits. Uncle Billy Graves, 57 years old and the principal author of the snowshoes, went along. Mrs. McCutchen left her year old baby in the care of the invalids and joined the party. Their principal hope was Stanton and the two Indians, who knew the route. December 16 was a clear day after a night of vicious cold. They started out.

 

Two members of the party, without snowshoes, gave up; but on December 17 the others got over the divide. By this time, they were eating an ounce of food per day, and snow blindness made travel painful. DeVoto calls it “the travel of the half dead.” Stanton fell behind, but came in to the campfire at night. 

Mary Graves began to hallucinate. 

By December 20, they were far down the western side; but Stanton was done. The next day, Eddy found half a pound of bear meat his wife Eleanor had hidden in his pack, with a note saying it was meant to save him in extremity. On the morning of the 21^st, “when the others prepared to set out, Stanton sat quietly smoking a pipe. They asked him if he were coming. Yes, he said honorably, he would be along. He sat there, smoking.” For Stanton, it was the end. (5/348)

 

* 

“Mankind can be staunch.” 

December 24-25: Snow fell all day long. Eddy, “the strongest-hearted,” urged the escape party, ever after known as the “Forlorn Hope,” to keep going; but they have been out for nine days. Food is gone. Some want to try to return to camp – but that would be insane. “I told them,” Mary Graves said, “I would go to [with Eddy], for to go back and hear the cries of hunger from my little brothers and sisters was more than I could stand. I would go as far as I could, let the consequences be what they might.”

 DeVoto calls the 20-year-old “a dot of Manifest Destiny.” Legend says she was beautiful and engaged to John Snyder, before Reed killed him. That Stanton had fallen in love. DeVoto adds, 

“There is nothing remarkable about Mary Ann Graves, except that mankind can be staunch. ‘I would go as far as I could.’” (Today, we would no doubt change that formulation to “humankind.”) 

Patrick Dolan was a bachelor – he owned enough oxen back at camp to survive – he could have quit. He suggested the unthinkable. Kill someone and eat. They could draw lots. Fosdick refused. Eddy suggested two men be given revolvers and shoot it out. Also rejected. It was clear all were near death. So they would wait. “They groaned on through the snow,” says the historian. 

That night, Antoine, the Mexican herder died – his hand slumping into the fire. Eddy knew he was dead when he did not pull it back. They had laid down wood on the snow, and built a fire atop it. Around 10, blowing snow turned to a blizzard, accompanied by howling winds. All their wood had been used. At midnight, they tried to cut more, but lost their axe. Their fire sank into the snow, creating a “well.” Then it sputtered out. Uncle Billy was near death. Eddy remembered a trick from the mountain men. 

They had their blankets. Eddie spread some of them on the snow and had his companions sit on them in a circle. He tented them over with the remaining blankets and closed the circle himself. This was shelter of a kind, and presently the blizzard covered them over and they could live. But not Uncle Billy. He reminded his daughters of their mother and brothers and sisters at the lake, told them they must get through to Sutter’s for their sake, bade them eat his body, and died.

 

In that mound of snow, Graves’s corpse upholding its part of the tent, they stayed all through Christmas Day, while the blizzard howled on and made the mound bigger. That morning delirium came upon Patrick Dolan and, screaming, he broke his way through the tent and snow. Eddie went out into the blizzard and tried to bring him back but could not. He came back after a while, and they held him down till he sank into a coma. As dusk seeped through the blizzard, he died.

 

The storm kept on through Christmas night, with two corpses in the mound now, and through the morning of the next day. Eddy tried to make some kind of fire inside the blankets but blew up a powder horn and burned himself severely. Mrs. McCutchen and Mrs. Foster also were burned. In the afternoon the snow stopped. They crawled out of their mound, made tinder of the cotton lining of a mantua, struck a spark in it, and got a dead pine tree to burn. So they cut strips from the legs and arms of Patrick Dolan and roasted them. Eddy and the two Indians would not eat. Lemuel Murphy had been delirious for hours. The food could not revive him. That night he died, his head in the lap of Mrs. Foster, his sister. There was a moon. Moonrise would bring back the scene to Sarah Foster through the rest of her life. (5/386-388) 

 

Twenty-foot tall stumps. 

Back at the Alder Creek camp, Eliza Donner Houghton wrote, “Snowy Christmas brought us no glad tidings.” 

Patrick Breen, a Catholic, read from his Bible – and Virginia Reed made a vow. If God would save her family, she would join the church. (Later, she did.) 

At the lake camp, there was food still left, but Jacob Donner, Joseph Reinhardt and others died at any rate. Reinhardt confessed to George Donner that he and Spitzer had murdered Wolfinger. 

At Alder Creek they tried to find the oxen buried in the snow, using long poles, but failed. They ate field mice that crept into their cabins – singed hair off ox hides, cut the hides into strips, and boiled them for hours, to create an edible glue. They had pepper to season it. Eliza Donner, three, would later recall chewing the bark off twigs of pine to ease the pain in her stomach. One day, her mother Tamsen took her to “visit” the hut where Uncle Jacob had lived. It was now a cave in the snow. Aunt Betsy and the children came out, but they had grown thin and white, and they were filthy – and the little girl was scared. The huts at the lake had it a little better, 

in that there were more hides to make glue of, some frozen meat still, a couple of handfuls of flour from which Mrs. Murphy could make gruel for her granddaughter, the infant Catherine Pike. Catherine had been weaned when Harriet Pike went over the divide with the Forlorn Hope, weaned on spoonfuls of water a little thickened with this hoarded flour. There were, or had been, four other nursing babies at this camp. (5/389)

 

Trees cut down for firewood would later reveal 20-foot tall stumps. 

Mrs. Reed had been planning for Christmas for weeks. Now she made a stew of a cupful of white beans, half a cup of rice, a few dried apples, and a two-inch square of bacon. She added tripe she had hidden in the snow, and her excited children danced round the fire. Virginia, 13, Patty, 8, Jimmy, 5, Tommy, 3. “Children, eat slowly,” she admonished, “there is plenty for all.” (5/390)

 

* 

December 27-30: The survivors of the Forlorn Hope butchered the bodies of the dead – ate what they dared – and dried more for their journey. Eddy still refused. The two Indians finally ate. Three days later, they set out again. 

Eddy and the others started forward again on December 30, leaving “the Camp of Death.” Ten were left: William Eddy, Jay Fosdick, William Foster, Luis and Salvador, the two Indians, Sarah Murphy Foster, Sarah Graves Fosdick, Harriet Murphy Pike, Mary Ann Graves, and Amanda McCutchen.