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“How Little We Thought What Was Before Us”

Oh the Good time has come at last,

We need no more complain, Sir,

The rich can live in luxury

And the poor can do the same, Sir,

For the Good time has come at last,

And as we all are told, Sir,

We shall be rich at once now,

With California Gold, Sir.

Campfire song, 1840s

If a belief in Providence sustained Olive and Mary Ann in captivity, it was also what had propelled them into the hands of Yavapais in the first place. The Oatmans were Mormons who had joined a wagon train headed to the mouth of the Colorado River to settle in the “land of Bashan,” which they believed would be a Mormon paradise. They were Brewsterites, a splinter sect started in 1837 after eleven-year-old James Colin Brewster claimed to have had divine revelations that Mormon founder Joseph Smith deemed phony. With the help of his father, Brewster published his translation of the writings of Esdras, a figure he alleged was an ancient Hebrew prophet who had predicted the world’s end in 1878 as well as the reorganization of the church under the boy “revelator” himself.

Smith was unimpressed by the vision and irked by the boy’s challenge to his authority. Mormon doctrine stipulated that only Smith could channel God, and Brewster’s strong objection to polygamy didn’t endear him to Smith, who had dozens of wives.¹ The church condemned Brewster in its newspaper, Times and Seasons, declaring in 1842, “We have lately seen a pamphlet, written and published by James C. Brewster; purporting it to be one of the lost books of Esdras; and to be written by the gift and power of God. We consider it to be perfect humbug.”²

MAP 1. The Oatman route west, 1850–51. California gained its statehood in the fall of 1850 while the Oatmans, on the Santa Fe Trail, were arguing with Brewster about whether to continue to California or settle in Socorro, New Mexico.

Brewster subsequently claimed to have found a passage in Esdras designating the mouth of the Colorado River — fertile, wooded, and temperate, as he mistakenly believed it was — a promised land for Brewsterites. Unlike Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith in 1844 and led the Mormons to the Great Basin in 1847 specifically because its extreme climate would repel his enemies, Brewster sought genuine paradise.³ In the January 1849 issue of his monthly newspaper, the Olive Branch, or, Herald of Peace and Truth to All Saints, he announced plans for his road trip to Shangri-la. But Brewster was clearly as misinformed about Southwest Indians as he was about the desert geography of Bashan. He quoted, for his followers, a passage from an 1846 travelogue called Scenes in the Colorado Mountains, and in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas and the Grand Prairies, written by Rufus B. Sage, a man who had never ventured south of Taos, New Mexico: “The bottoms of the Colorado and the Gila, with their tributaries, are broad, rich and well timbered. Every thing in the shape of vegetation attains a lusty size, amply evincing the exuberant fecundity of the soil producing it. There are many sweet spots in the vicinity of both these streams, well deserving the name of earthly Eden. Man here might fare sumptuously, with one continual feast spread before him. … The natives, for the most part, may be considered friendly, or at least not dangerous.”⁴

The 1830 Book of Mormon painted a more menacing picture of Indians. It posited two warring tribes that emigrated to North America from Israel around 600 BC: the humble Nephites, “white and exceedingly fair and delightsome,” and the Lamanites, “dark and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” Godless and “bloodthirsty,” the Lamanites lived in tents, shaved their heads, wore leather loincloths, and captured women and children. Once white, they’d been cursed with dark skin for their faithlessness. Mormon scripture held that when they were converted, the Lamanites’ skin would turn white and they would be “numbered among the Nephites” — a revealing parable about the nineteenth-century white man’s assimilationist vision of Indians.⁵

In the Olive Branch, Brewster promised that the “saints” (the Mormon term for followers) who followed him would “receive their inheritances” in the valleys of the Gila and the Colorado rivers. He envisioned a refuge where “none shall be poor, neither shall there be any that are rich.” If he had pulled it off, his would have been one of California’s first utopian experiments, built on a foundation of collectivism. One convert wrote, “We are all brethren, and one is not above the other. … Some of the brethren may get more teams than they need, others a greater amount of breadstuffs or dry goods, in exchange for their property; in such cases, let all aspire to deeds of charity among their more unfortunate brethren, by giving or lending them of their substance.”⁶

Throughout 1849 the Olive Branch called for saints to send in their names and occupations, asked them to state how much money they had and how soon they could leave, and laid plans for the new nation. “The form of government is to be Republican, in the strictest sense of the word,” wrote Brewster. People would elect their own governors, capital punishment would be forbidden, and liquor would be banned, as would, interestingly, “construction of military works and all warlike preparations.” There would be taxes. And though Brewster had conceived Bashan as a new nation, he specified that “we are not required to violate any of the laws of our country.” That included strict adherence to monogamy, a principle that set him apart from Brigham Young.

Bashan would be laid out on a grid and divided into blocks a mile square. A hundred blocks would form a township, and a town would occupy a square mile in every township. Ten blocks would be set aside for churches and schools. Beating Congress by mere months to the idea of luring pioneers west with free property (the September 1850 Donation Land Claim Act allotted homesteaders in the Pacific Northwest free acreage), Brewster promised the remaining blocks would be divided into farms, and though the land was not his to give, he planned to parcel it out.⁷

If his sense of community planning was arbitrary, Brewster’s instructions about how to pack for the westward journey were quite specific: the wagons, he emphasized, should be two-horse wagons suitable also for oxen; provisions should last at least six months and ideally a year. Travelers should bring enough summer and winter clothing for a year, farming utensils for two years. Flour, rice, and beans (a pound per day, per person) were recommended; meat was not. A good rifle and five hundred rounds would ensure that game would be on the menu. Boxes and chests, he said, should all be the same height to allow beds to be laid on them, and each family needed a twelve-foot tent that could sleep eight. Brethren were urged to bring “good books,” which meant nonfiction, ideally pertaining to science or history.⁸

Though it served both as an outlet for Brewster’s overheated sermons and as a platform for his utopian visions, the Olive Branch was tinged with anxiety. In it the boy prophet, now barely a man, compared Bashan favorably — if defensively — to Salt Lake City (“more than 500 miles from any navigable water communicating with the ocean”) but wrestled publicly with the troubling knowledge that the Salt Lake Mormons, misguided though he felt they were, were thriving.⁹ The Olive Branch published letters from Brewsterites who had recruited new converts or dissuaded other Mormons from following Brigham Young to Utah and answered potential converts who wanted to know precisely how Brewster knew the Truth.

In February of 1850 Royce Oatman announced, through the Olive Branch, his interest in securing a ticket to paradise. He spent the month traveling around Iowa and Illinois preaching and, he claimed, healing people. In Davenport, Iowa, he reported, “the Lord confirmed the word spoken by healing the sick,” and in Muscatine County, “the sick were healed, and I left some who were ready to commence in the great work of the Lord.”¹⁰ He would sell his farm, close his business, and go west.

Born in Vermont in 1809 and raised in western New York by parents of Dutch ancestry, Royce had moved to La Harpe, Illinois, at age nineteen, where his parents ran a hotel, and where he met Mary Ann, nee Sperry. Like him, she came from a moderately wealthy and well-educated family — one into which three Oatmans married (two of her brothers married Royce’s sisters). The couple spent two years farming in La Harpe, then Royce launched a dry-goods business that prospered until the notorious 1842 run on the banks caused a crash that ruined him. After spending a year in Chicago, the family moved to a farm in Fulton, Illinois. Mary Ann’s sister and her husband, Sarah and Asa Abbott, followed in 1847, buying an adjoining property, and Asa’s parents followed them.

The Oatmans lived less than a mile south of what in 1912 would become the first coast-to-coast highway in the country: U.S. Route 30, or the Lincoln Highway, about 120 miles north of Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith had moved his church in 1839, attracting thousands of followers and organizing a militia that was almost a fourth the size of the U.S. Army.¹¹ On land — flat and featureless — said to have been farmed originally by Fox and Sauk Indians, they first occupied a cellar then built a wooden house over the cellar; this was the home in which their youngest children, Charity Ann and Roland, were born.

A singular irony of the Oatman saga occurred in 1846, just before Olive’s grandparents (Mary Ann’s Mormon parents) left La Harpe on their own westward exodus. Royce and Mary Ann spent a week visiting with them in La Harpe before the Sperrys’ departure, during which Royce argued with his father-in-law, Joy Sperry, about who should lead the Mormon Church until a worthy successor to Joseph Smith was found. At the time, Royce supported the theologian Sidney Rigdon, Smith’s running mate in his 1844 campaign for president, an antipolygamist who was organizing his own church in Pittsburgh. Sperry had chosen to follow Rigdon’s rival, Brigham Young, and join sixteen thousand other believers in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah, where they would soon build their capital.¹²

On the last day of the visit, the men bickered at the breakfast table. As Mary Ann’s brother Charles remembered it in his diary, “Finally Oatman said, ‘I see Father Sperry it is no use to talk to you. I prophesy in the name of the Lord, that if you go west with your family, your children will go hungry and some will starve to death. Your throats will be cut from ear to ear by the Indians.’ My father replied, ‘Be careful how you prophesy in the name of the Lord.’ Strange to say, that particular prophesy was fulfilled …not on my father’s family, but upon [Oatman] and his family. It took place on the Gila River in Arizona.”¹³

For their part, the Sperrys and their son Aaron died of illness and exposure before they even left Iowa; their two other sons made it to Salt Lake City. Later that year Royce and his family visited Rigdon on his Pennsylvania farm and, possibly turned off by Rigdon’s penchant for fainting spells and panic attacks, decided to follow Brewster.¹⁴

In late 1849, after months of preparation and correspondence with the other members of the expedition, Royce sold the farm and his belongings for fifteen hundred dollars — just enough to buy cattle and wagons for the westward journey. Now, three years after losing her parents, Sarah Sperry Abbott bade her sister what would be a last good-bye, bearing a gift: a lilac bush she planted in Mary Ann’s yard. The bush still blooms on the old Oatman property.

The Oatmans left Whiteside County on May 6, 1850, took a ferry across the Mississippi, and collected church elder George Mateer and his family in West Buffalo, Iowa, then the Ira Thompson family in Moscow. In late June they arrived in Independence, Missouri, on a stretch of the Missouri River known for its “jumping-off places” — settlements where emigrants met traveling companions or killed time until their parties arrived, before heading west. Especially after 1848, when news spread that gold had been found in California, Independence had become a springboard for westward emigrants (dubbed forty-niners a year later) from Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and sometimes New York and New Hampshire. Over the next few weeks the Oatmans and Thompsons bought supplies and coordinated with the other families in the outfit. Their food, most of which had been prepared during the previous spring, was stored with clothes and bedding beneath the wagon floor. Guns, ammunition, water kegs, churning barrels, lanterns, fabric, and farm tools were packed above it. The wagons would be drawn by oxen and horses, and trailed by milk cows and supplemental teams.

In mid-July the Brewsters arrived late from Springfield, having left first a cat then a wagon behind, returning each time to get them and forcing the others to wait for two weeks. “We are all tanned very bad indeed,” wrote one frustrated pioneer eager to get moving, “and if we continue growing black as fast as we have done, we shall be as black as the Indians.”¹⁵ It was now perilously late in the season to be embarking on a cross-country journey — most parties left in May or June to ensure the grass was deep enough for cattle grazing en route and to avoid bad weather in the fall. But when the Brewsterites were finally assembled, they discovered they didn’t have enough communal supplies to make it to Bashan and were forced to stock up in Independence, where, like modern-day airport vendors, suppliers took advantage of their captive consumers.¹⁶ On July 15 the group elected Jackson Goodale, a recent convert to Brewsterism, captain of the train, which consisted of more than a dozen families and a handful of bachelors — in total, between eighty-five and ninety-three people, including Brewster, his parents, and his five siblings.¹⁷ A week later they moved their camp to a point twenty miles west of Independence, where one family complained about sharing provisions with others and one pioneer, suspected of being a Salt Lake Mormon sent to cause trouble among the Brewsterites, turned back. Though the journey had hardly begun, Brewster wrote in the Olive Branch, “during the past two weeks, all that the power of Satan and the iniquity of the ungodly could accomplish has been done to produce discord and division among us.”¹⁸ Not just discordant and divided but now a month behind schedule, the party pulled out on Friday, August 5.

In leaving Independence, the Oatmans joined a migration unparalleled in modern history. Between 1849 and 1853 a quarter of a million Americans went west to settle on free land in Oregon and California, to mine gold and silver, or, in the case of the Mormons, to find Zion.¹⁹ Royce’s initial religious commitment seemed clear from the letters he wrote to the Olive Branch; whether it survived his trip west is questionable. Certainly, not everyone joined Brewster’s party for strictly religious reasons. Seventeen-year-old Susan Thompson, who became fast friends with Lucy Oatman, later recalled, “Father was the first in our part of the country [Muscatina, Iowa] to decide upon the westward journey after the news of the finding of gold in California had reached us.”²⁰

The trip began on the Santa Fe Trail, the biggest trade and government supply route linking Independence to Santa Fe until the railroad reached Santa Fe in 1880. It had also been the main artery between the United States and Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. Thompson remembered “the excitement as we formed into long columns, traveling in parallel lines according to the way the government parties had found to be most safe. There were about thirty of the great canvas-topped wagons, each drawn by three yoke of oxen and saddle horses. We were divided into companies and each band was governed by a captain. Royce Oatman was the man from whom we received directions and counsel.” For the children, worries were few and fears — of Indians, disease, or exposure — were minimal. “We were a happy, carefree lot of young people and the dangers and hardships found no resting place on our shoulders,” said Thompson. “It was a continuous picnic and excitement was plentiful.” In a masterstroke of understatement, Olive later wrote, “How little we thought what was before us.”²¹

There was no way these families could know what was in store for them. Guidebooks of the day said the trip would take just three or four months. Typically, though, it took closer to six or eight months, by which time the cattle were often gaunt and depleted and the weather was turning. One book merrily assured readers, “As nothing is required upon this route but such teams and provisions as the farmer must necessarily have at home, it may truly be said that it costs him nothing but his time.”²² Often, because no one in the outfit had previously traveled west, it was impossible to predict whether the roads would be passable or when supplies would give out.

Settlers rolled along in covered wagons that heated up to 110 degrees, slept in crowded tents, and herded cattle across rivers and streams. Mosquitoes could be relentless, and a good storm could drench the tents and bedding, leaving them soggy for days and sending women and children to sleep on muddy makeshift beds under wagons. The same water was used for washing, waste, and drinking, creating Petri dishes for disease. Measles could strike at any time; in 1850 alone, cholera killed an estimated five thousand people who had left on wagon trains from Independence. Gravesites littered the roadsides, sometimes a dozen or two at a pass, with multiple bodies piled into a single grave. Discarded beds and clothes along the road also marked a death — by illness, snakebite, or childbirth — a risky prospect in those years even for women who weren’t bouncing along in wagon trains. Women’s voluminous skirts often got caught in wheel spokes and pulled them to their deaths.²³

Finally, Apache Indians, inflamed by white incursions into their land, were terrorizing people up and down the Rio Grande. Known for their horsemanship and guerilla tactics, they had lately begun to unleash their fury on the U.S. Army and the emigrants it protected, and they were formidable foes. For two hundred years they had thwarted Spanish and Mexican efforts to develop the Southwest, acting as well-organized robber barons who demanded food or livestock in return for safe passage through their lands, which spanned parts of New Mexico, northern Mexico, and Arizona. The newly arrived whites were no exception, but the stakes were raised when the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua placed bounties on Apache scalps and white mountain men began trading these “hairy banknotes,” commanding two hundred dollars for the scalp of a warrior and one hundred dollars for that of a woman or child, sometimes killing whole villages to get them.²⁴ If the westward migration hadn’t fully enraged the Apaches in the region, bounty hunting did.

The Oatmans’ first few weeks were uneventful and, by Susan Thompson’s account, delightful. Every few days the group stopped to allow the women to bake and the men to hunt for antelope, buffalo, rabbit, or pheasant. When they camped near water, the men fished and the women washed clothes and bedding. “Often,” wrote Thompson, “during the daytime halts, we ran races or made swings.”²⁵ The drivers rested in the shade of the wagons, their hats pulled over their faces, and the mules, freed from the weight of the wagons, grazed and rolled around in the grass.

At night, the wagons were drawn into a circle and ropes were tied between them to corral the animals. Cooking was back-straining work done over an open fire — one for each family; it required stooping over a pot strung up on a pole balanced on two stakes pounded into the ground. But there was one time-saving advantage to the bumpy wagon ride of the day: each morning, cream was poured into a pot hung from crossbeams of the wagon, and by evening the butter was effortlessly churned. After dinner, the women unpacked the tents, made the beds, prepared the next day’s food, and — to prevent mildew — cleaned out the wagons so that they could air overnight. The children played games and told stories around the campfire or made music and danced in the glow of lard-burning lanterns. If they had time, the adults also socialized, circulating from wagon to wagon.

FIG. 2. The first night of the journey, from Captivity of the Oatman Girls.

At first, there was no travel on Sunday, and the families worshiped every night. “I fancied we were God’s Israel journeying to the promised land,” Olive wrote.²⁶ While the drivers slept beneath the wagons, women and children slept in tents, with two men guarding the camp through the night while coyotes howled in the distance. In the morning, Olive, Lucy, little Mary Ann, and their mother pulled their gingham dresses over their heads, buttoning each other from behind, and emerged to bank the fire and prepare breakfast — pancakes or fried bread, reheated beans, fried meat, and tea or coffee — with the younger children at their feet, while Royce, Lorenzo, and Royce Jr. tended to the stock. After breakfast, the mules were hitched, the children were counted, and the crack of a bullwhip sent the creaking wagons rolling back down the trail.

The countryside was magnificent. A pioneer named Marian Russell described what it was like to travel the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s: “I remember so clearly the beauty of the earth, and how, as we bore westward, the deer and the antelope bounded away from us. There were miles and miles of buffalo grass, blue lagoons, and blood-red sunsets and, once in a while, a little sod house on the lonely prairie — home of some hunter or trapper.”²⁷ Children delighted in coaxing long-legged tarantulas from holes in the ground and stomping on them, or chasing lizards and road runners.

Where wood was scarce, women collected pieces of dried dung, called “buffalo chips,” for fuel. “I would stand back and kick them,” wrote Russell, “then reach down and gather them carefully, for under them lived big spiders and centipedes. Sometimes scorpions ran from beneath them. I would fill my long dress skirt with the evening’s fuel and take it back to mother.” Buffalo trails cut across the open country, running north and south in corridors that led to water that flowed east out of the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes the animals themselves could be seen walking single file along the rutted trails.

The emigrant families, most of whom had never met before the westward journey, got to know each other well. Thompson recalled how one night she and Lucy Oatman forgot to fill the water buckets for the next day and stole down to the river in the dark, in hopes of avoiding a scolding:

We were just starting back with our dripping pails when we heard someone coming. We clutched each other in terror, remembering all too late the warnings we had heard of the fearful Apaches.

In a moment we were reassured by the sight of a boy who was the worst tease in the company. He, too, had forgotten his pail of water. A time for revenge for many practical jokes had come and with a great crashing of underbrush we rushed at him through the darkness. There was a banging of water buckets, a flying of heels, and a volley of blood curdling yells, “The Apaches are coming! The Apaches are coming!”²⁸

Though Indians were the pioneers’ greatest concern, the party’s biggest problem, even at that point, was itself. A hundred miles into the journey, the squabbling began, and Olive noted that even “the most enthusiastic of the party were subdued …& the brightest countenance was soon changed to sadness and reflection.”²⁹ Some wearied of the monotony of travel or worried obsessively about Indians. Others argued about religious correctness, including whether one member had been rightfully ordained to serve in the church. Brewster himself proved to be a contentious and unlikable zealot.³⁰ On a bluff at Pawnee Rock in what became Kansas, he found a stone he claimed was inscribed with hieroglyphics (more likely they were Indian pictographs), and translated them, à la Joseph Smith, into Mormon revelation about the “armies of Kish” and “people of Gerad” who had sojourned in the region centuries earlier.³¹ To complicate matters, along the way he had a new revelation that the promised land described in the Book of Esdras was not near the Colorado River but rather on the banks of the Rio Grande, near Socorro, New Mexico — conveniently closer by more than six hundred miles. When he proposed settling there, some of the others — Royce among them — objected.

A traveler named Max Greene would be the only outsider to describe the Brewster party, having jumped aboard mid-journey “on the lookout for novelty.” He identified Royce as a key troublemaker, characterizing him as “a fine fellow enough in most respects, but sinfully reckless, and …a most dangerous companion on the Grand Prairie.” According to Greene, Royce simply wouldn’t compromise his private wishes for the benefit of the group. “Could we, therefore, have exchanged him for the small-pox,” he said, “the measure would have had a majority vote.”

The group discussed splitting up, and during a halt one rainy day a young Pennsylvania printer made a speech in which he described the dire things that would happen if they divided. “It was a hopeless, singular spectacle,” Greene later recalled, “that slender youth earnestly talking to a hundred bearded, uncouth wranglers, encamped in the wilderness, four hundred miles from civilized habitation.” The printer persuaded the women — but not the men — to stay together, and was subsequently fired at, while reclining in the grass, by someone who mistook him for an antelope. Later, another “accidental” shot whistled through his empty wagon bunk before he’d retired for the evening.³²

Though they couldn’t agree on where they were going, the outfit stayed together for protection from Indians, who were particularly predatory on the western half of the Santa Fe Trail, where Texas settlers had driven many Kiowas and Comanches out of the state. Disaster helped to sustain the group’s fragile sense of unity. Early in the journey Roland fell off the wagon — a common accident for emigrant children — and nearly died after a wheel ran over his neck. Still invested in his identity as a preacher, Royce claimed to have saved his son: “I took him up, and saw that he was about to depart this life,” he wrote in the Olive Branch. “But not feeling willing to part with him, I administered to the child according to the law and order of the gospel, and the Lord Blessed him, and he soon recovered, and is now hearty and well.”³³

On September 16, nineteen-year-old Mary Lane died of tuberculosis, and for lack of timber on the prairie, each family donated a board from their wagons to form a casket. Susan Thompson described how “a kind of terror of the plains came over me as in the dusk of the evening we left the grave on a little hillside and heard the howling of the wolves drawing nearer and nearer.”³⁴ The group’s fear of Indians was fueled by increasing reports of raids. A year earlier, nearly one hundred Apaches had killed six travelers in northern New Mexico and captured a woman, her servant, and her daughter. Months later, the mother was located, but as the search party pursuing her approached, the Indians dispensed with her by shooting an arrow into her heart. Her servant and daughter were never found.³⁵ Brewster recorded the mileage the group logged, and his table of distances included notes about Indian encounters. “Party of thirty or forty Indians remained in camp about two hours and then went away peaceably,” he wrote about a stop along the Arkansas River. A little farther west he wrote, “Ten well-armed men guarding Santa Fe mail were chased into camp by Hostiles.” And more than one hundred miles farther: “During three days encampment Indians were sighted looking down upon emigrant camp from surrounding cliffs.”³⁶

Imagined Indian threats could be as heart-stopping as real ones. One day during a halt, two men in the party set out to hunt antelope in the hills, lost their sense of direction, and routed their prey directly toward the wagon train. Several children ran up from behind a nearby hill to try to scare the animals back toward the hunters. The hunters mistook the children for Indians and panicked. Thinking an attack was imminent, the older man, Ira Thompson, turned to his hunting partner and said, “Charles, let us pray.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll pray; let us run,” Charles answered and took off.

When Thompson outran him, Charles begged him not to abandon him to the Indians. Together they sprinted back to the camp, where they discovered, to the hilarity of the party, that they had been running from their own children.³⁷

As the wagon train trundled along the north bank of the Arkansas River, the weather was perfect and the party’s troubles subsided until early October, when the settlers crossed the river and entered the New Mexico Territory. But in the village of Mora, about one hundred miles north of Santa Fe, order began to break down. For unknown reasons, Ira Thompson and Royce wanted Goodale removed as captain and simply stopped heeding his instructions. Then Brewster charged Goodale with being “guilty of a transgression of the Law of God” and demoted him.³⁸ Royce was chosen to replace him, but before long he and Brewster were tussling about directions and their dispute fractured the party once and for all.

Brewster was determined to take a side trip to Santa Fe to retrieve his mail, even though the road was said to be sandy and difficult. Royce preferred the quicker, newly blazed southern route. The men bickered then took their grievances to the mayor of the local town and agreed to part ways, but not before Oatman offered to share his food and made a last, unsuccessful effort to convince the others to go with him. Nonetheless, Max Greene called Royce “the nucleus of our troubles.” He was not malicious, said Greene, “but simply a facetious quarreler.” Of Royce’s decision to go it alone, he reflected without sentiment, “He paid the penalty of his temerity.”³⁹

On October 9 nearly half the party, about thirty-two people, followed Brewster toward Santa Fe en route to Socorro, near which they purchased land and began building a new settlement called Colonia, named for a prophet in the writings of Esdras. The others, about fifty people, including the Thompson and Mateer families, elected Royce captain and continued west. Olive had just turned fourteen. “These,” she wrote, “were the beginnings of our sorrow. … Inclemen[t] weather, swollen streams, hostile tribes, scarcity of provisions & failing teams; were among the difficulties we began to meet with.” The party, she said, now smaller by half, “seemed somewhat discouraged.”⁴⁰

In mid-October, just before they reached the Rio Grande, two of the Oatman horses were stolen (because of “poor guarding,” one member claimed) and later seen among Mexicans, who said they’d bought them from Indians who raided emigrant trains and sold the spoils in Mexican settlements.⁴¹ Possibly in response to the theft, Norman C. Brimhall replaced Oatman as captain, and Ira Thompson became company secretary.

For nine days in early November the Oatman party stopped in Socorro, where their reencounter with the lost half of the Brewster party was chilly. Brewster took a final swipe at the mutineers in the Olive Branch, reporting that “by their bad conduct,” Oatman’s company “gained the reputation of being the most dishonest men that had ever been in the country,” without specifying why.⁴² Oatman and his allies used the opportunity to make some fast cash by cutting and gathering hay at a nearby army post, then they left the Brewsterites behind. Over a year later the Republican Compiler of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, reported on the Brewster party, saying, “Sickness, starvation, and the savages have about used up the balance of these misguided people. The few left would return to the states if they had the means to get back.”⁴³

With money in their pockets and meat, produce, and grain in their wagons, Oatman’s group followed Col. Philip St. George Cooke’s 1846 route, which would become the main overland route through the Southwest to southern California during the second half of the nineteenth century. It ran from Santa Fe to San Diego, heading south through New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley and cutting west into the future Arizona, where it hugged the Gila River (which then marked the U.S.-Mexico boundary), and turning northwest across the Colorado at Yuma Crossing to the Pacific, where it merged with the Gila Trail.⁴⁴ November was not a good month to be braving this landscape, especially where the road passed through the mountains of northern Mexico, more than five thousand feet above sea level. The rugged terrain reduced them to a quarter of their normal speed and forced them to tie fallen trees to the back of the wagon to serve as brakes during downhill travel.

In late November, Asa Lane, like his daughter Mary, died, probably of tuberculosis. He was, said Olive, “a man of stern integrity, appreciated and loved by us all, and his death was an irreparable loss.” By now they couldn’t afford to collaborate on a coffin, so the body was covered with a blanket and buried in a grave strewn with wildflowers and marked by a crude wooden stake bearing his name. “I remember,” said Susan Thompson, “how even the faces of the roughest men showed pity when …we made [a] grave for Mr. Lane and attempted to console the daughter, Isabel, who was now the only member of the little family that had hoped to find health and fortune on the great western road.”⁴⁵

Days later, the party awoke to three inches of snow. They had had no water for twenty-four hours and trudged for a full day through the mounting snowdrifts in search of a stream they spotted about four miles away; there they found not only water but also timber and game. If not for the firewood they discovered there, they would have had to use pieces of their wagons for kindling. The mountain was filled with turkey, deer, antelope, and wild sheep. The group spent a week hunting, fishing, and feasting on wild meat cooked over coals in pans inside the wagons.

“It was rather cold weather to live in a wagon and cook out of doors,” recalled Mrs. Wilder, who wrapped herself and her baby in blankets and kept a pan of coals burning inside the wagon. “I baked bread to last some time while we tarried. [Husband] Willard would make the coffee. So we lived without any actual suffering. We fared better than those with more children.”⁴⁶ Royce, his seven children, and Mary Ann, now seven months pregnant, were all crowded into two wagons. They surely dreamed of Bashan’s “temperate” valleys, aware, possibly, that in September, California had become the thirty-first state.

Indians approached the camp almost daily, and the women appeased them by cooking pots of beans for them and sending them away. When they failed to appear one day, the pioneers sensed trouble. The next morning three Apaches entered the camp and made friendly overtures but acted suspiciously. The party managed to deflect them, but that night the dogs barked incessantly, running back and forth between their masters and the woods. Royce and the other men put out their fires, took up their guns, and kept watch. The next day Indian tracks ringed the campsite, and a dozen animals were missing. The men tracked the cows, oxen, and a horse into the mountains for awhile then gave up on what was clearly a pointless and dangerous pursuit. When the group finally departed, the Oatmans, with no cattle to tow it, were forced to leave a wagon — and its contents — behind.

By the time they pulled out, the snow was melting. Flowers grew on one side of the trail and snow cascaded down the other. “These same little flowers served to break up many a cold for us,” said Thompson, “for we had learned from the Indians to use them in place of quinine.”⁴⁷ They passed Mexican shrines and pioneer graves, walked along the San Pedro River, and tried not to dwell on the roadside detritus marking other emigrants’ defeats: bleached cow bones, abandoned baggage, mining equipment, beds, and wagons. By now, Royce was frantic to get to the Colorado. “He drove so long,” Mrs. Wilder later said, “the oxen did not have time to eat and we were afraid our cattle would not be able to take us through, so we let them go ahead.”⁴⁸

Though it was a walled city protected by fifty Mexican troops, Santa Cruz was constantly assailed by Indians, and the Oatman party arrived just after both a winter drought and an Apache raid that had left the town with nothing but pumpkins to trade. The Mexicans urged them to stay for a year, hoping an infusion of whites would fortify them against Indians, who surveyed them from the nearby hills. But though the pioneers liked both the town and its residents, they declined, moving on to what they hoped would be safer havens. From there, Royce allotted each person just one and a half dry biscuits a day. The women tried to innovate by cooking hawks and other unusual fare, but not always successfully: when Susan Thompson’s mother made soup from coyote meat, she got sick.

In early January, 120 miles later, the group arrived in Tucson, where they soaked up the winter sun and witnessed the Mexicans celebrating the Feast of Epiphany, marked by dancing, feasting, and firecrackers. “Luck favored us,” said Thompson. “Almost the first day of our stay I had an opportunity to make a soap, sugar, and white of egg poultice to draw a mesquite thorn from an old Mexican’s foot. The poultice is reverenced among the superstitious people. To them, it was also a sign of my super-natural ability that I could go outside the town and call our cattle to me, as they had never heard of controlling their animals by kindness.”⁴⁹

Thompson claimed that they were the first white women to enter the village, and though they were tainted as Yankees in light of the Mexican-American War, her poultice won her the gratitude of the Mexican she healed: he offered to rent her family a house. The party spent nearly a month in Tucson then split again: five families, including the Thompsons, stayed behind to farm and await other emigrant trains who could help them. But Royce insisted on pressing on. Mary Ann said good-bye to her friend Mrs. Thompson, one of three women, including Mary Ann, who had been pregnant on the journey. Mrs. Thompson had her baby girl about a month later at the mouth of the Gila River, just before her family reached Fort Yuma.

Determined to keep moving, the Oatmans, Kellys, and Wilders traveled another forty-five miles to Maricopa Wells, a common stop on the southwest route between Texas and California, arriving February 5 to find atrocious conditions after a winter drought and about a thousand nearly starving Indians. The local Pima and Maricopa Indians spoke different languages and occupied separate villages scattered along the Gila and connected by canals that sustained the Pimas’ sophisticated farming practices. They were friendly with each other and welcoming to whites, but they lived in fear of Apache attacks. Two days after they arrived, Mrs. Wilder had a baby boy. Mary Ann was now the last of the pregnant women on the train, just weeks away from having her eighth child.

The group planned to stay for a week and urged the Oatmans to do the same. The area Royce planned to enter, especially near the Colorado River, was considered a war zone at best, a natural disaster at worst — a land so barren that the legendary scout Kit Carson had said a wolf couldn’t survive on it. It had deteriorated since 1850, when an outlaw and former scalp hunter named John Glanton and a gang of men had seized the ferry service run by Quechan (then called Yuma) Indians at the intersection of the Gila and Colorado rivers and launched a booming business, robbing and sometimes killing their passengers, who arrived every few days. The Quechans had retaliated by killing fifteen men and taking Glanton’s scalp. No one who knew better traveled the Gila Trail without a convoy.⁵⁰

Still, having come fifteen hundred miles with less than two hundred miles to go, Royce refused to wait. He had consulted with LeConte, the entomologist who had traveled from Fort Yuma to Maricopa Wells, reporting no trouble on the route. Ignoring the remaining party’s advice as well as warnings from the Pimas, who knew the region better than LeConte, the Oatmans set out for Yuma alone. By now Royce had given up his vision of utopia on the Colorado River and was set on mining gold in California.

“The decision was a severe trial to my father,” wrote Olive. “If he went on he must now go alone with his helpless family & expose them to the dangers of the way; & if he remained starvation & perhaps death, from the treachurous [sic] savages, would be their fate.”⁵¹ The family left with four milk cows and two oxen pulling their wagon into a 190-mile desert wasteland.