22

THE WAY WEST

MARCUS WHITMAN LEARNED OF THE ASSAULT ON Narcissa and the burning of the mill only months after the fact. But the knowledge that his wife was in peril every moment he was gone, and that the mission that had become his life’s work could be destroyed in a moment of Indian rage, compelled him to leave Boston as soon as the board gave him its blessing. He stopped briefly in western New York to see members of his family, then proceeded as swiftly as he could to the Missouri.

En route he heard that a large group of emigrants was preparing to leave for Oregon. During the 1830s about the only traffic to the Columbia, aside from fur traders and the odd adventurer, had consisted of missionaries like the Whitmans, but in the early 1840s prospective settlers began to join the flow. Knowing that Whitman had guided women to Oregon made them think the journey was feasible for ordinary folks, and the combined success of Whitman, Joe Meek and Robert Newell in getting wagons to the Columbia caused them to conclude that whole households might be relocated. A handful of emigrants reached the Willamette in 1841; several dozen arrived in 1842.

The news that no great disasters had befallen the emigrants prompted still more to line up for departure in the spring of 1843. By now the mystery of the trek had been largely dispelled; the key points of the route were understood, the difficult passages plotted, the places where the danger of Indians dictated special precautions identified. The journey was still no stroll in the park; the emigrants would be at the mercy of the weather, sleeping roofless for months, chilled at times, broiling at others. Axles would break and oxen grow weary; children would fall under wagons or be kicked by mules; guns would discharge accidentally; women would die in childbirth. But the emigrants knew where they were going and how long the journey might take. Equally important, they knew that others no stronger, braver or more resourceful than they had survived the trek. So could they.

Whitman changed boats in St. Louis, where he visited Thomas Hart Benton. Besides being Missouri’s senior senator and an ardent advocate of America’s westward expansion, Benton was the father-in-law of John C. Frémont, a U.S. army officer who had already made a name in western exploration and who was about to embark on an expedition to Oregon. The three men brought different perspectives to the Oregon question: Whitman that of the missionary, Benton of the statesman, Frémont of the soldier. Their simultaneous presence in St. Louis in 1843 embodied the surge of interest in Oregon. Whitman shared his knowledge of Oregon with the others; Benton told of his political plans for binding Oregon to America; Frémont traced on a map the route he hoped to traverse. They agreed that America’s western future had never been brighter.

PETER BURNETT LATER REMEMBERED WHAT HAD PROMPTED him to set out for Oregon with the 1843 wave of emigrants. Burnett was a Tennessean by birth and a Missourian since boyhood. He was a self-educated lawyer who had made himself unpopular with his neighbors by defending Joseph Smith and other Mormons charged with treason and lesser crimes. He was a merchant drowning in debts he saw no prospect of repaying. And he was a family man who at thirty-five couldn’t figure out how to support his family in anything like the style he wished for them.

“There was a bill pending in Congress, introduced in the Senate by Dr. Linn, one of the Senators from Missouri, which proposed to donate to each immigrant six hundred and forty acres of land for himself, and one hundred and sixty acres for each child,” Burnett recalled. “I had a wife and six children, and would therefore be entitled to sixteen hundred acres.” The Linn bill had not yet passed, and it was no sure thing, as the brazenness of the land grab it proposed gave pause to many in Congress. The United States had no title to the land Linn sought to bestow. The joint occupation agreement with Britain was still in force, and the British had as much claim on Oregon as the Americans did. Employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, various missionaries and a modest number of settlers had established farms on parcels of land in the Willamette Valley, but no government had graced their squatting with legal authority. Moreover, the United States government had never given away land before. It had sold land from the public domain, but gifts were another matter. The recipients would be happy for the gifts, of course, but many of the potential donors, the taxpayers of America, expected the government to be a better steward of the nation’s resources.

Yet the possibility of the gift, under the prospective aegis of American federal power, was enough to set Peter Burnett and several hundred other emigrants on the trail to Oregon in the spring of 1843. “I saw that a great American community would grow up, in the space of a few years, upon the shores of the distant Pacific; and I felt an ardent desire to aid in this most important enterprise,” Burnett wrote. He was aware that the British had by no means abandoned their claim to Oregon, but he thought the emigrants could force them to. “If we could show, by a practical test, that American emigrants could safely make their way across the continent to Oregon with their wagons, teams, cattle, and families, then the solution of the question of title to the country was discovered. Of course, Britain would not covet a colony settled by American citizens.”

In the bargain, Oregon would give Burnett a second chance. His creditors at first sought to prevent his fleeing Missouri, but he made a case that flight was in their best interest. “I said that if Dr. Linn’s bill should pass, the land would ultimately enable me to pay up. There was at least a chance. In staying where I was, I saw no reasonable probability of ever being able to pay my debts.” The creditors reluctantly accepted Burnett’s reasoning—much as the creditors of Moses and Stephen Austin had accepted their reasoning about Texas. Burnett’s creditors wished him well and joined the ranks of those rooting for passage of the Linn bill.

Burnett sold what he hadn’t already lost, and purchased three wagons, four yoke of oxen, two mules and provisions for the journey. He traveled around Missouri to find others to join him on the journey west. “I visited the surrounding counties, making speeches wherever I could find a sufficient audience, and succeeded even beyond my own expectations.”

In the same way that the trappers and merchants had arranged their rendezvous in the mountains each summer, the emigrants of 1843 arranged a rendezvous on the prairie that spring. Burnett and his party reached the appointed spot, a dozen miles west of Independence, Missouri, on May 17. A look at the crowd made him reassess the challenge of the journey. “It was not that the trip was beset with very great perils, for we had no war with the Indians,” Burnett recalled. Rather, it was little things that would test the travelers. “At one time an ox would be missing, at another time a mule, and then a struggle for the best encampment, and for a supply of wood and water; and in these struggles, the worst traits of human nature were displayed, and there was no remedy but patient endurance. At the beginning of the journey there were several fisticuff fights in camp; but the emigrants soon abandoned that practice, and thereafter confined themselves to abuse in words only. The man with a black eye and battered face could not well hunt up his cattle or drive his team.”

The emigrants might have found their way to verbal abuse unaided, but they wouldn’t have found their way to Oregon, and so they were thrilled when Marcus Whitman, on his way back to Oregon, appeared at the rendezvous. Peter Burnett and the others took comfort from the knowledge that they would travel with one so experienced.

Whitman had his own impression of the emigrants. “They appear very willing, and I have no doubt are generally of an enterprising character,” he wrote his brother-in-law. “There are over two hundred men, besides women and children, as it is said. No one can well tell, until we are all on the road and get together, how many there are.”

As things happened, no one ever did figure out how many emigrants there were that year. Estimates varied from eight hundred to twelve hundred. No government authority gave them leave to depart and none greeted them on arrival in Oregon. No one kept a tally. But beyond doubt they were many more settlers than had ever ventured to the American West at once. Descriptions of the westering army caught the American imagination: a mighty people was on the march. They were the American dream in motion. Even many Americans who were content to stay in the East thrilled at what this great migration said about the energy of their country and its bright future.

Whitman was encouraged by what he saw. “The immigrants who are going out will be a good acquisition,” he predicted. Oregon would benefit. “My expectations are high for that country. I believe it must become one of the best of countries very soon.”

“IT IS FOUR O’CLOCK A.M.,” JESSE APPLEGATE WROTE, DESCRIBING a day on the trail that season. Applegate would win a reputation, albeit checkered and controversial, as a trailblazer to Oregon, but in the spring of 1843 he took his pedestrian turn with the cow column on the emigrant march up the Platte. The news from Oregon had indicated that cattle were scarce there and expensive, and many of the emigrants brought stock with them. The cattle were gathered into a large herd for a longer drive than any Americans had ever attempted.

“The sentinels on duty have discharged their rifles—the signal that the hours of sleep are over—and every wagon and tent is pouring forth its night tenants, and slow-kindling smokes begin largely to rise and float away in the morning air,” Applegate continued. “Sixty men start from the corral, spreading as they make through the vast herd of cattle and horses that make a semicircle around the encampment, the most distant perhaps two miles away.” Each night the cattle and horses were turned loose to graze, guarded by sentinels to keep Indians from poaching. The guard was never fully secure, and so each morning the herders examined the grass at the edge of the grazing ground for signs that animals had been driven off. If they had, a retrieval party was organized and dispatched. Sometimes the animals were recovered from the Indians, often by ransom; sometimes they were written off as a loss.

This dawn there were no signs of disturbance, and the day shift commenced its work. “By 5 o’clock the herders begin to contract the great, moving circle, and the well-trained animals move slowly towards camp, clipping here and there a thistle or a tempting bunch of grass on the way. In about an hour five thousand animals are close up to the encampment, and the teamsters are busy selecting their teams and driving them inside the corral to be yoked.” The corral was a circle of wagons, some hundred yards in diameter, with the tongue of each wagon chained to the rear of the wagon ahead of it on the perimeter. The corral served the second purpose of a stockade in the event of Indian attack. To the gratification of the emigrants of 1843, this purpose was never utilized.

“From 6 to 7 o’clock is a busy time; breakfast is to be eaten, the tents struck, the wagons loaded and the teams yoked and brought up in readiness to be attached to their respective wagons,” Applegate explained. “All know when, at 7 o’clock, the signal to march sounds, that those not ready to take their proper places in the line of march must fall into the dusty rear for the day.” Otherwise there was a strict rotation on the march. One day’s lead wagon became the trailer the next day, moving stepwise toward the front on each successive day.

“It is on the stroke of seven; the rush to and fro, the cracking of whips, the loud command to oxen, and what seemed to be the inextricable confusion of the last ten minutes has ceased. Fortunately every one has been found and every teamster is at his post. The clear notes of a trumpet sound at the front; the pilot and his guards mount their horses; the leading divisions of the wagons move out of the encampment and take up the line of march; the rest fall into their places with the precision of clock work, until the spot so lately full of life sinks back into that solitude that seems to reign over the broad plain and rushing river as the caravan draws its lazy length towards the distant El Dorado.”

On this morning Applegate accompanied the hunters, a band of young men on horses who ranged to the side of the column in search of buffalo and antelope. They rode for an hour to the bluffs that here marked the edge of the Platte Valley. Applegate stopped to take in the view. “To those who have not been on the Platte,” he wrote, “my powers of description are wholly inadequate to convey an idea of the vast extent and grandeur of the picture, and the rare beauty and distinctness of the detail. No haze or fog obscures objects in the pure and transparent atmosphere of this lofty region. To those accustomed only to the murky air of the seaboard, no correct judgment of distance can be formed by sight, and objects which they think they can reach in a two hours’ walk may be a day’s travel away.” The expanse swallowed sounds; the report of a rifle carried mere furlongs. Yet the puff of smoke from the barrel could be seen for miles.

Applegate looked back toward the Platte. “The broad river glowing under the morning sun like a sheet of silver, and the broader emerald valley that borders it, stretch away in the distance until they narrow at almost two points in the horizon, and when first seen, the vast pile of the Wind River Mountains, though hundreds of miles away, looks clear and distinct as a white cottage on the plain.”

From his vantage, Applegate could see the past, present and future of the march. The camp of the previous night had been left behind; the wagons rumbled forward; the scouts ranged ahead seeking the best path. “Near the bank of the shining river is a company of horsemen,” Applegate wrote, recognizing the scouts. “They seem to have found an obstruction, for the main body has halted while three or four ride rapidly along the bank of the creek or slough. They are hunting a favorable crossing for the wagons. While we look, they have succeeded; it has apparently required no work to make it passable, for all but one of the party have passed on, and he has raised a flag, no doubt a signal to the wagons to steer their course to where he stands. The leading teamster sees him, though he is yet two miles off, and steers his course directly towards him, all the wagons following in his track.”

The train was a linear village. “They (the wagons) form a line three-quarters of a mile in length; some of the teamsters ride upon the front of their wagons, some march beside their teams; scattered along the line companies of women are taking exercise on foot; they gather bouquets of rare and beautiful flowers that line the way; near them stalks a stately greyhound, or an Irish wolf dog, apparently proud of keep watch and ward over his master’s wife and children. Next comes a band of horses; two or three men or boys follow them, the docile and sagacious animals scarce needing this attention, for they have learned to follow in the rear of the wagons, and know that at noon they will be allowed to graze and rest. Their knowledge of time seems as accurate as of the place they are to occupy in the line, and even a full-blown thistle will scarce tempt them to straggle or halt until the dinner hour has arrived.”

The cattle, bringing up the rear, were a different story. “Lazy, selfish and unsocial, it has been a task to get them in motion, the strong always ready to domineer over the weak, halt in the front and forbid the weak to pass them,” Applegate observed. “They seem to move only in the fear of the driver’s whip; though in the morning, full to repletion, they have not been driven an hour before their hunger and thirst seem to indicate a fast of days’ duration. Through all the long day their greed is never satisfied, nor their thirst quenched, nor is there a moment of relaxation of the tedious and vexatious labors of their drivers, although to all others the march furnishes some season of relaxation and enjoyment. For the cow-drivers there is none.”

Applegate decided that his sightseeing must end for the day. He rode back to the column in time for the nooning, the midday break. The pilot had selected the spot as having grass and water; the scouts improved the water supply by scooping shallow wells by the bank of the Platte that served as watering troughs for the animals. The oxen were not unyoked but merely let loose from the wagons; they grazed in pairs. The wagons were drawn up in columns rather than circled. The men, women and children ate without fuss or extensive preparation.

The business of the train was conducted at the noontime halt. On this day the business was judicial, with the elected council of the train seated as a court. One of the emigrants had hired a younger man to help with the work of the journey in exchange for bed and board. A dispute had arisen between the two, and the council was convened to resolve it. Each party was questioned; other members of the train were summoned as witnesses. The council rendered its decision, which was enforced by the cooperation of the train as a whole. The process permitted no appeal.

“It is now one o’clock,” Applegate wrote. “The bugle has sounded and the caravan has resumed its westward journey.” The warmth of the afternoon, the demands of digestion and the repetitiveness of the undertaking gradually took their toll. “A drowsiness has fallen apparently on man and beast; teamsters drop asleep on their perches and even when walking by their teams, and the words of command are now addressed to the slowly creeping oxen in the soft tenor of women or the piping treble of children, while the snores of the teamsters make a droning accompaniment.”

An unexpected occurrence broke the spell, at least for those close at hand. “An emigrant’s wife, whose state of health has caused Doctor Whitman to travel near the wagon for the day, is now taken with violent illness. The Doctor has had the wagon driven out of the line, a tent pitched and a fire kindled. Many conjectures are hazarded in regard to this mysterious proceeding, and as to why this lone wagon is to be left behind.” But left behind it had to be, for the train had many miles to go, with the threat of winter always looming between the emigrants and their final destination.

The sun sank low in the west. The first wagons reached the place where the pilot waited, and where he directed the forming of the nighttime circle. Everyone knew the routine by now. “The leading wagons follow him so nearly around the circle that but a wagon length separates them. Each wagon follows its track, the rear closing on the front, until its tongue and ox-chains will perfectly reach from one to the other, and so accurate the measure and perfect the practice that the hindmost wagon of the train always precisely closes the gateway, as each wagon is brought into position.” The circling took but ten minutes.

Dinner fires were kindled. Families settled in for the night. But as the sun touched the horizon many eyes looked back along the trail for the wagon left behind. In the waning light it appeared. “The absent wagon rolls into camp, the bright, speaking face and cheery look of the doctor, who rides in advance, declare without words that all is well, and both mother and child”—the latter, newborn, the cause of the halt—“are comfortable.”

The evening routine unfolded. Dinner completed, the men gathered to smoke their pipes, the women to talk of the child born that day, the children to play inside the circle of the wagons. “Before a tent near the river a violin makes lively music, and some youths and maidens have improvised a dance upon the green; in another quarter a flute gives its mellow and melancholy notes to the still night air, which, as they float away over the quiet river, seem a lament for the past rather than a hope for the future.” The day has been a good one: twenty miles traveled, and a life added to this moving village.

“Time passes; the watch is set for the night; the council of old men has been broken up and each has returned to his own quarter; the flute has whispered its last lament to the deepening night; the violin is silent, and the dancers have dispersed; enamored youth have whispered a tender good-night in the ear of blushing maidens.” The last fires were banked, and the firefly glow of the pipes winked out. Silence settled upon the weary travelers.

Camp on the Oregon Trail. This is a stylized version of part of the daily routine. The women and children must be elsewhere.

IN MID-JULY THE TRAIN REACHED FORT LARAMIE. SOME OF the members reprovisioned, at a steep cost. Coffee sold for $1.50 a pint, and brown sugar the same. Rough flour ran 25 cents a pound and lead 75 cents. Complaints at the high prices were greeted with shrugs and a warning that prices would only mount the farther the emigrants got from civilization.

The party met a band of Cheyennes at Fort Laramie, headed by an impressive chief. “He was a tall, trim, noble-looking Indian, aged about thirty,” Peter Burnett remarked. “He went alone very freely among our people, and I happened to meet him at one of our camps, where there was a foolish, rash young man, who wantonly insulted the chief. Though the chief did not understand the insulting words, he clearly comprehended the insulting tone and gestures.” Burnett watched him carefully, fearing the worst. “He made no reply in words, but walked away slowly, and when some twenty feet from the man who had insulted him, he turned around and solemnly and slowly shook the forefinger of his right hand at the young man several times, as much as to say, ‘I will attend to your case.’”

Burnett would prove to be an able politician when he reached the West; now he showed some of the skills that would serve him then. “I saw there was trouble coming, and I followed the chief, and by kind earnest gestures made him understand at last that this young man was considered by us all as a half-witted fool, unworthy of the notice of any sensible man; and that we never paid attention to what he said, as we hardly considered him responsible for his language.” Burnett was relieved to discover that his diplomacy was working. “The moment the chief comprehended my meaning I saw a change come over his countenance, and he went away perfectly satisfied. He was a clear-headed man; and, though unlettered, he understood human nature.”

Other Indians occasioned worry. A party of several dozen Kansas and Osage warriors looked fearsome. “They were all mounted on horses, had their faces painted red, and had with them one Pawnee scalp, with the ears to it, and with the wampum in them.” They also looked hungry. The party’s paid guide, John Gantt, counseled the emigrants to give the Indians some provisions as a gesture of goodwill. Otherwise they would steal the cattle they wanted. Burnett and the others accepted the recommendation. “We deemed this not only good advice but good humanity, and furnished the starving warriors with enough provisions to satisfy their hunger.”

For the most part the Indians were content to keep their distance from the train. “They must have been impressed with a due sense of our power,” Burnett wrote. “Our long line of wagons, teams, cattle, and men, on the smooth plains and under the clear skies of the Platte, made a most grand appearance. They had never before seen any spectacle like it.”

THEY GOT TO FORT HALL IN LATE AUGUST. BURNETT BEGAN to wonder that anyone had ever thought the journey to Oregon difficult. “Up to this point the route over which we passed was perhaps the finest natural road, of the same length, to be found anywhere in the world,” he wrote.

He was assured that things would change. Marcus Whitman had been traveling with the group but not leading it; at Fort Hall he assumed charge from John Gantt, who hadn’t intended to proceed farther. Whitman informed the emigrants that the road grew more difficult to the west.

They took the lesson almost too much to heart. “We had many misgivings as to our ultimate success in making our way with our wagons, teams, and families,” Burnett recalled. “We had yet to accomplish the untried and most difficult portion of our long and exhaustive journey. We could not anticipate at what moment we might be compelled to abandon our wagons in the mountains, pack our scant supplies upon our poor oxen, and make our way on foot through this terribly rough country as best we could.”

Whitman now bucked them up. “Dr. Whitman assured us that we could succeed, and encouraged and aided us with every means in his power.” Burnett sought a second opinion. He asked Richard Grant, the Hudson’s Bay Company trader at Fort Hall, what he thought. Could wagons get through to the Columbia?

Grant was circumspectly discouraging. “He replied that, while he would not say it was impossible for us Americans to make the trip with our wagons, he could not himself see how it could be done. He had only traveled the pack-trail, and certainly no wagon could follow that route; but there might be a practical road found by leaving the trail at certain points.”

Some of the party, young men without families, preemptively ditched their wagons in favor of pack animals and forged ahead of the main group. Burnett and the rest lightened the loads in their own wagons and pressed on. “The road was rocky and rough,” Burnett recalled of the track across the Snake Valley. Where it wasn’t rocky it was covered with thickets of sage or wormwood, three feet high and a nuisance for the lead wagons to get through. The lead wagons beat down the sage bushes but also pulverized the soil. “It was very soft on the surface and easily worked up into a most disagreeable dust, as fine as ashes or flour.” Fortunately the dry climate rendered the sage less sturdy than bushes that grew in the East. “Had the sage been as stout and hard as other shrubbery of the same size, we should have been compelled to cut our wagonway through it and could never have passed over it as we did, crushing it beneath the feet of our oxen and the wheels of our wagons.”

THEY REACHED FORT BOISE ON SEPTEMBER 20. THE SEASON was late and they didn’t tarry. They forded the Snake River where the water was worrisomely deep but not swift; they got over without mishap. An incident on the Powder River, at a place called Lone Pine, oddly deflated Burnett. “This noble tree stood in the center of a most lovely valley, about ten miles from any other timber,” he wrote. “It could be seen at the distance of many miles, rearing its majestic form above the surrounding plain, and constituted a beautiful landmark for the guidance of the traveler. Many teams had passed on before me; and at intervals, as I drove along, I would raise my head and look at that beautiful green pine.” Burnett drove farther, his mind wandering. Then he looked again toward the tree and had a shock. “The tree was gone. I was perplexed for the moment to know whether I was going in the right direction.” The wagon tracks said he was, and he kept on until he discovered the cause of the disappearance. “That brave old pine, which had withstood the storms and snows of centuries, had fallen at last by vandal hands of men. Some of our inconsiderate people had cut it down for fuel.” But the wood was too green to burn, and the vandals availed nothing by their crime. “It was a useless and most unfortunate act.”

The Blue Mountains were a trial that contained a treasure. “On October 1st we came into and through the Grande Ronde, one of the most beautiful valleys in the world,” Burnett wrote. “It was generally rich prairie, covered with luxuriant grass and having numerous beautiful streams passing through it, most of which rise from springs at the foot of the mountains bordering the valley.” The Nez Perce gathered camas root in the valley, and they were willing to share. “We purchased some from them, and found it quite palatable to our keen appetites.”

The last leg to the Columbia, descending the Blue Mountains, was the most difficult. “These hills were terrible,” Burnett recalled. A snowstorm on October 5 made the bad situation worse. “We had great difficulty in finding our cattle, and the road was very rough.” Again the natives helped out. “From the Indians were purchased Indian corn, peas, and Irish potatoes in any desired quantity. I have never tasted a greater luxury than the potatoes we ate on this occasion.” Burnett didn’t comment on the fact that the potatoes he so enjoyed weren’t part of the Indians’ traditional cuisine; rather, they and the corn and peas were products of the agricultural techniques learned from Whitman and his fellow missionaries. But the Nez Perce had long been traders, and they had integrated the new goods into their stock-in-trade. Burnett was glad they did. “We gave the Indians, in exchange, some articles of clothing, which they were most anxious to purchase. When two parties are both as anxious to barter as were the Indians and ourselves, it is very easy to strike a bargain.”

They reached Waiilatpu on October 10 weary and still hungry but whole. Burnett remembered with embarrassment that some of his party did not behave well toward their recent guide and current host. “The exhausting tedium of such a trip and the attendant vexations have a great effect upon the majority of men, especially upon those of weak minds. Men, under such circumstances, become childish, petulant, and obstinate. I remember that while we were at the mission of Dr. Whitman, who had performed much hard labor for us and was deserving of our warmest gratitude, he was most ungenerously accused by some of our people of selfish motives in conducting us past his establishment, where we could procure fresh supplies of flour and potatoes. This foolish, false, and ungrateful charge was based upon the fact that he asked us a dollar a bushel for wheat and forty cents for potatoes.” The emigrants, before leaving home, had been used to receiving half that for their produce. “They thought the prices demanded by the Doctor amounted to something like extortion, not reflecting that he had to pay at least twice as much for his own supplies of merchandise and could not afford to sell his produce as low as they did theirs at home.” Burnett felt personally the cost of his fellow travelers’ outrage. “So obstinate were some of our people that they would not purchase of the Doctor. I remember one case particularly, where an intimate friend of mine, whose supplies were nearly exhausted, refused to purchase, though urged to do so by me, until the wheat was all sold. The consequence was that I had to divide provisions with him before we reached the end of our journey.”