In 1846 spring came slowly to the Illinois River Valley. All through March and the first half of April, an iron-gray sky sat over the bottomlands like the close-fitting lid on a Dutch oven. Day after day relentless rain and snow and sleet slanted down out of the opaque heavens. The countryside was boggy, the Illinois River swollen and spilling over its banks.
The Graves family’s initial objective was to get to St. Joseph, Missouri, where they could count on purchasing all the supplies they would need for the long overland trip and where, equally important, they could count on meeting up with other emigrants to form a traveling party. St. Joe, as it was just then beginning to be called, had the advantage over the other principal jumping-off place—Independence, Missouri—of being sixty miles closer to the Great Platte River Road, the established route to the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains. St. Joe lay to their southwest, but they began by going northwest to a tiny hamlet called New Boston, where a ferry transported their wagons across the Mississippi River. Then they began to travel west and southwest, cutting across southern Iowa and slanting down through northern Missouri.
It was slow going. The whole country seemed to be underwater. Six days after they left, the Illinois Gazette, back home in Lacon, noted that a particularly long siege of rain had finally ended, but it also noted a most unusual event—the Illinois River now was high enough “to float steamers of the largest class.” With the rain, every stream or low spot Sarah and her family came across presented an obstacle that would have to be overcome. Wagons had to be double-teamed to get through boggy spots, small creeks had to be bridged or scouted for places where they could be forded, larger streams had to be searched for a ferryman willing to hazard the crossing, and with a ferry big enough to accomplish it. If a ferry could not be found, the only way across was to build a makeshift ferry of their own, or swim the livestock across and then caulk the beds of the wagons and use them as rafts, a hazardous and arduous endeavor at best.
Mud was their constant companion—it squelched under the heavy feet of the oxen, it plastered the withers of their saddle horses, it flew out from under the turning wagon wheels, it splattered their clothes and their hair and their faces. They scraped mud from their boots, they daubed it from their eyes, they combed it out of their hair, they dug it out from under their fingernails, they tasted it in their food, and they cursed it all the while.
There were thirteen of them, divided among three wagons: Franklin and Elizabeth likely drove the wagon containing their household goods and the hidden coins. Jay and Sarah, a household unto themselves now, drove a second wagon. A young man named John Snyder who had moved to Steuben Township from Ohio the previous winter drove the third. Snyder, at twenty-three, was muscular, strikingly handsome, and notably genial. He had a buoyant, carefree way about him that put others at ease. Hearing that the Graves family was bound for California, he had asked if he might travel with them. Franklin Graves, at fifty-seven, knew that he could use the muscle power of another young adult male, so he struck a deal with Snyder—he could drive the third wagon and perform other chores in exchange for his board until they reached California.
Sarah and her many siblings traveled variously in the different wagons, on foot, or on saddle horses. Mostly they walked, to spare the horses and the oxen on whose strength and endurance their success would eventually depend. Sarah’s closest sister, nineteen-year-old Mary Ann, was widely reputed to be a notable beauty, with dark, wavy hair and a broad white smile. Her oldest brother, Billy, seventeen, was a gangly teenager, built much like his father, already pushing past six feet in height. The younger children were Eleanor, thirteen; Lovina, eleven; Nancy, who would turn eight on April 26; Jonathan, seven; Franklin Ward Jr., five; and the baby of the family, Elizabeth, only about nine months old.
The first green of the spring prairie grass had begun to emerge from beneath the old, dry, butterscotch-colored grass of the previous year. As they drove over the wide-open countryside of southern Iowa, the dead grass whispered continuously around their wagons, stirred by the ceaseless prairie wind. Other than that and the muffled footfall of the oxen on the wet earth, they moved through a largely silent world.
As they turned south into Missouri, the terrain began to change, the amplitude of the hills—the distance from the lowest points of the bottoms to the crests of the hills—began to diminish, and the intervals between the crest of one hill and the crest of the next began to increase, the land still far from flat, but moving in that direction. The weather grew mixed, sometimes wet and sometimes fair, but the cold gradually began to moderate, and the wet wind began to carry hints of spring. Sarah and her siblings were in high spirits. As they walked or rode alongside the wagons, they spent hours imagining and chatting about the wonders that lay before them in California and the adventures they would have on the way there.
None of her siblings’ hearts, though, could have been as light as Sarah’s. In the 1840s it was customary for fashionable brides to take some form of what was variously termed a “wedding journey” or “bridal tour,” often in the company of friends or family. The word “honey-moon” had been in use long before the 1840s but referred more generally to a period of presumed marital bliss following the nuptials rather than to a journey. The brides of successful New Yorkers might expect to make a wedding journey upstate to Niagara Falls. Brahmin girls from Boston’s Beacon Hill might make extended tours of Europe. Country brides like Sarah, though, were seldom able to afford any sort of celebratory journey at all. If she and Jay had stayed in Steuben Township, the most she might reasonably have hoped for was a twenty-mile trip down the river to spend a night or two in Peoria. But instead here she was, embarking on an epic journey to a fabled land. Ahead of her lay not only the prospect of a home and a farmstead of her own in a rich land with a benign climate but also the opportunity to see and experience things she had only read of or imagined before now—surf pounding on a sandy beach, the smell of salt air, ocean fog filtering through dark forests, odd beasts such as antelope and sea lions, dusky-skinned “Spaniards” (as the emigrants often called Mexican Californians), and magnificent mountains. Mountains of any kind would be a novelty, but Sarah knew that ahead of her lay mountains that were reputed to rival the Swiss Alps, picturesque peaks capped by granite crags and draped with deep drifts of snow.
And so they moved slowly and blithely toward St. Joe. But even as they contemplated the prosperity that lay ahead of them, people were in motion and events were unfolding in faraway places—people and events that were as yet unknown to them but that in time would come together to profoundly alter the world they were about to enter and ensnare them in a deadly web.
On May 12 a party of emigrants bound for California departed from Independence, Missouri, south of St. Joe. One of the organizers of the party was forty-five-year-old James Frazier Reed, a businessman from Springfield, Illinois. Reed was relatively affluent and, according to many who were with him that spring, rather full of himself. Though not officially the captain of the group, he seems to have regarded himself as its natural leader from the outset. Traveling with him was his thirty-two-year-old wife, Margret, who suffered greatly from migraines, or “sick headaches” as they were then called, and was generally frail—so frail, in fact, that she had lain in bed at her wedding, with her husband standing by holding her hand. The couple hoped the climate in California would cure her. The Reeds had in tow their children and stepchildren; Margret Reed’s seventy-year-old mother, Sarah Keyes; a cook; a personal servant; and several teamsters whom Reed had hired to drive wagons and handle his livestock.
Anticipating the rigors of the journey ahead, James Reed had gone to extra lengths to prepare at least one wagon that would have in it some of the amenities of home for his wife, children, and aging mother-in-law. His stepdaughter, Virginia, described it in considerable detail.
The entrance was on the side, like that of an old-fashioned stagecoach, and one stepped into a small room, as it were, in the center of the wagon. At the right and left were spring seats with comfortable high backs, where one could sit and ride with as much ease as on the seats of a Concord coach. In this room was placed a tiny sheet-iron stove, whose pipe, running through the top of the wagon, was prevented by a circle of tin from setting fire to the canvas cover. A board about a foot wide extended over the wheels on either side the full length of the wagon, thus forming the foundation for a large and roomy second story in which were placed our beds….
It was, perhaps, not quite the ponderous “palace car” that later mythology would make it out to be, but apparently it was substantially more elaborate and comfortable than the simple, roughly four-by-nine-foot farm wagons that most of the emigrants drove.
Traveling with the Reeds were two brothers, also from the Springfield area—George and Jacob Donner—and their families. George Donner, in his early sixties, was among the older emigrants setting out for California that spring. A prosperous farmer, he was comfortable in his own circumstances, but he hoped to relocate his five daughters to a place where they would find more favorable prospects than in Illinois. Like so many of the emigrants of 1846, he was a large man physically and the son of a Revolutionary War veteran. He had been married three times before. His present wife, Tamzene, was at forty-four a small woman with gray-blue eyes, dark hair, and, according to one source, a “not pretty” face. But she was an accomplished woman. She had twice been a schoolteacher, she spoke French, and she was an enthusiastic amateur botanist. She also had been married before, in North Carolina, but in the course of less than a year she had lost her entire family—a daughter, born prematurely, as well as her husband and her son to illness. Jacob Donner, George’s brother, thought to be about fifty-six, was a slight man and not in robust health. He and his wife, Elizabeth, forty-five, had between them seven children. Like the Reeds, the Donner brothers and their families had brought along a number of hired teamsters to handle the livestock and drive two of their extra wagons.
Events that would affect Sarah and her family, the Reeds, the Donners, and everyone else setting out for California that spring were also unfolding far to the east, in Washington, D.C. On May 13, President James K. Polk signed a bill declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and Mexico.
Polk had wanted this war—or at least the booty it would yield—from his first days in office. Though the war was ostensibly fought over a border clash between Mexican troops and U.S. troops in the newly independent but disputed Republic of Texas, the real prize was California. California at the time included not only the modern state we know today but also all of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of Colorado and Wyoming—nearly half of Mexico’s territory at the time. Polk had earlier tried to buy California on the cheap, but that having failed, he had resolved simply to take it. The dispute over Texas had given him the opening he wanted, and it dovetailed nicely with a carefully choreographed campaign of presidential deception that would find a disconcerting parallel early in the twenty-first century.
Many in the Congress, and some in Polk’s own cabinet, thought that the outright seizure of California would be unjustified and immoral. But Polk was determined to defend and expand his executive powers against any congressional interference. He was also at times stubborn and narrow-minded. Historian Bernard DeVoto said of him that he was “pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains.” And apparently he counted anyone who disagreed with him about Mexico and California as primary among the spooks and villains. When he sent his war bill to Congress on May 11 and the members of Congress decided that perhaps they should debate the issue before acting on it, Polk was outraged, taking their failure to act immediately to be nothing less than treasonous.
After months of jingoistic rhetoric emanating from Washington about the natural right of Americans to fulfill their manifest destiny and the obvious moral depravity of Mexico and Mexicans, the mood of the country was largely behind Polk. The urge to expand the nation’s territory was almost universal, and it seemed self-evident to most Americans that they had a natural right to as much of the continent as they desired. The administration had crafted its rhetoric carefully, advertising the impending conflict as a defensive war, not as the war of conquest that it in fact would be.
Faced with this kind of popular support, the Congress passed the war bill 42–2. At a cabinet meeting that evening, Polk’s secretary of state, James Buchanan, still had his doubts. He suggested that perhaps the administration should make clear to foreign governments that the United States’ argument with Mexico concerned only Texas and that the United States had no designs on California, New Mexico, or any other part of Mexico’s territory in the West. The president’s angry reaction was to proclaim that certainly he would take California if he could, that he would “acquire California or any other part of Mexican territory which we desire.”
On May 16 the headline for the Illinois Gazette back in Lacon read “WAR! WAR!” Two days later the Republican candidate for Congress in the Seventh District of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, arrived unannounced in Lacon, campaigning for the congressional seat he would soon use to denounce the war with Mexico.
On May 19 the Donner and Reed families, having crossed both the Missouri and the Kansas rivers, fell in with a much larger party led by a Kentuckian, Colonel William Russell, near a Kaw Indian settlement known as Fool Chief’s Village. The Russell Party, glad to have the addition of more men—particularly well-regarded, relatively educated, and affluent men like James Reed and the Donner brothers—voted them into their party unanimously.
Out in the middle of the desert sage-lands of present-day Nevada, Lansford Hastings was also in motion. On May 20 he had arrived at a crucial juncture in his mission to intercept the westbound emigrants and direct them toward Suttersville. Since leaving the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, he had struggled with horses and pack mules, floundering through deep drifts of snow while crossing the mountains, then making his way down through the basalt canyons of the eastern foothills and out onto the arid plains of western Nevada. By happenstance he was traveling in the company of James Clyman, among the greatest of the generation of mountain men who traveled the American West between the 1820s and the 1850s. Born in 1792 on a farm belonging to George Washington, whom he had seen in the flesh, Clyman had traveled widely in the far West as early as 1823, and it’s unlikely that anyone within a thousand miles knew the lay of the land better than he did.
Clyman and Hastings camped that night on the spot where the established emigrant route northeast to Fort Laramie intersected the theoretical shortcut that Hastings had promoted in his book. Now Hastings wanted to take that shortcut, to see it himself for the first time and to reach the emigrants before they could have a chance to take the road to Oregon rather than California. Clyman thought that the proposed shortcut saved little distance and promised much harder traveling than the proven route. They sat by a campfire in the sagebrush that night and argued about it. In the morning they argued some more. But Hastings would not be deterred, and so they left the established road and struck out across the desert. Ahead of them lay the searing salt flats of Utah and the almost entirely unexplored tangle of mountains and canyons known as the Wasatch.
Crossing Iowa and Missouri, Sarah and her family fell into a basic and comfortable routine that varied little from day to day. They arose early and built campfires. Franklin and Billy Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder rounded up the family’s loose livestock and yoked up the teams. Sarah and her mother and Mary Ann took out long knives and cut thick slabs of bacon from the hams hanging ponderously in their wagons and fried them up in cast-iron skillets. They brewed strong coffee or tea, and then they sat on the grass or on wagon gates eating the bacon, sopping up the grease with pieces of bread they had baked the night before.
Then they threw the last few items into the wagons and got under way. At midday they stopped for an hour or two—“nooning,” as they called it—to rest the teams, let the cattle graze, and take another quick meal themselves. Then they continued on again until four or five in the afternoon. When they found a good spot near clean water and with ample grass for the livestock, they combined their wagons with those of other families and drew them into a square or a circle and turned the animals out to graze while they prepared campfires, prepared dinner, set up tents, ate, and gathered around the fires to socialize a bit before turning in. If they felt that Indians were about, they drove the livestock into the enclosure formed by the wagons and set guards out for the night.
When it came time to bed down, they crawled into the backs of wagons or into tents. We do not know where Sarah and Jay slept. Tents were expensive items, and it was common among the emigrants for whole extended families, meaning children, seniors, men, women, and couples—including newlyweds—to share a single large tent. In chilly nights on the plains, and later in the mountains of the West, it was the simplest and most effective way for everyone to stay reasonably warm. But Sarah and Jay might well have chosen to sleep in the relative privacy afforded by the farm wagon they drove.
In the middle of May, they approached St. Joe. They traveled now alternately through open prairies on the uplands and through virgin woods in the valleys. This was rich, fecund land, country that an aging John James Audubon had prowled just three years earlier, making observations and collecting specimens for his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a follow-up to Birds of America. The ancient, massive trees of the woods had leafed out, and as the Graves family descended into the Missouri River Valley, they entered a world that was a deep, dense, and somber green, but explosive with flashes of brighter colors. Sky blue irises rose in ranks out of the mossy ground. Scarlet tanagers, orange orioles, and yellow warblers drifted through the canopies of tulip poplar and black locust trees. Deer and gray wolves slipped away silently into the understory. Passenger pigeons, with their slate blue backs and wine red breasts, sometimes nearly filled the sky overhead and at other times draped the enormous trees, weighing down the limbs. Along the river, white pelicans plunged out of the sky Icarus-like, piercing the water with hardly a ripple. Blue-winged teals, green-winged teals, and cinnamon teals gabbled and bobbed in the water with hosts of other ducks. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds clung to reeds along the shores, chortling and chattering among themselves and scolding passersby.
As they emerged from the woods and made their way into the rough-and-tumble town that stretched along a big bend in the river, Sarah and Jay found themselves part of a small flood of emigrants converging on St. Joe that spring. The local newspaper, the Gazette, marveled at the number of wagons that appeared and at the attitude their occupants displayed.
From every quarter they seem to come—prepared and unprepared to meet every emergency. We look out upon them and are astonished to see such careless ease and joyousness manifested in the countenances of almost all—the old, the young, the strong and feeble—the sprightly boy and the romping girl, all plod along as if the jaunt were only for a few miles instead of a thousand—as if a week’s troubles were to terminate their vexations and annoyances forever. What an idea it gives us, and what an insight into human nature—HOPE, the bright, beaming star is ascendant in their sky, alluring them on….
St. Joe that spring was a vortex of commercial activity—a swirling confusion of horse traders, wagon builders, ferrymen, outfitters, Indians, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and entrepreneurs of every stripe. Steamboats trailing black clouds of smoke clawed their way up the notoriously shallow and therefore dangerous Missouri River and tied up along the waterfront. Slaves labored to unload the boats, carrying bales and barrels of goods on bare, sweat-slicked backs. Along the riverside on the south end of town, more slaves tended fields of hemp, a crop grown not for its intoxicating qualities but because it was the source of valuable fibers. Flat-bottomed scows, pressed into service as ferries, struggled back and forth across the river carrying white-topped emigrant wagons, the men at their long sweeps fighting the current all the way. Pottawatomie and Kaw Indians walked bare-chested through the streets hawking vegetables and fish and game. Trappers and mountain men dressed in buckskin breeches, fringed jackets, and bear or coonskin hats mingled with emigrants in broad-brimmed hats and sunbonnets, dispensing advice and tall tales in exchange for liquor and tobacco. Stern-eyed Christian missionaries browsed the mercantile stores for cheap trade goods that might appeal to the heathen out west. Merchants come upriver from St. Louis inspected stacks of furs and made cash-on-the-barrel head offers. Brass whistles on the steamboats shrieked. Hammers and anvils in the blacksmith shops rang out rhythmically in point and counterpoint. Oxen bellowed. Dogs barked. Hogs squealed as they trotted toward the slaughterhouse and their doom. The river stank of raw sewage and pig offal. The streets reeked of manure and horse piss. But bakeries also perfumed the sour air with the aroma of fresh-baked bread.
For many of the emigrants, St. Joe was a last chance to see a doctor before leaving the United States behind, a vitally important consideration for people who soon might find themselves a thousand miles from the nearest doctor. According to the local “card of rates” agreed upon by the physicians of St. Joe the previous year, one could have an abscess opened for fifty cents. For a dollar one could obtain medical advice or receive an enema. A troublesome tooth could be extracted for fifty cents, troublesome toes or fingers amputated for five dollars each, arms for ten dollars, legs for twenty. If an emigrant woman were to find herself in a delicate condition, she might choose to linger in St. Joe long enough to have her baby professionally delivered for five dollars, but there would be no volume discounts—twins would set her back ten.
In the midst of all this activity, Sarah and Jay faced the task of making sure that they were well provisioned for the journey ahead. Some of what they needed they had brought from home, but this was the last and best chance to stock up on any remaining essentials. Selecting the right items and the right quantities was critical to their success—more critical, as it would turn out, than they could yet begin to imagine. Too much in the way of food and gear would weigh them down and tire their oxen, possibly even kill the oxen when the going got tough. Too little would raise the possibility of hunger or even starvation for the family if anything went wrong along the way. The guidebooks, including Lansford Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide, gave specific recommendations for the quantity of certain staples that each adult traveler ought to procure: “at least two hundred pounds of flour, or meal; one hundred and fifty pounds of bacon; ten pounds of coffee; twenty pounds of sugar; and ten pounds of salt….”
But there were many hard decisions to be made beyond figuring out the required quantities of staples, and for the first time in her life, as the mistress of her own household, it was largely Sarah’s responsibility to make these decisions. For one thing, as all frontier women knew, not all flour was created equal.* Sarah had to choose among three basic types that had long been known as “shorts,” “middlings,” and “superfine.” Shorts contained mostly bran and very little of the actual endosperm, the white, starchy portion of the wheat kernel. It was coarse, gritty stuff, often contaminated by dirt, wheat chaff, and insects. Middlings were hardly any better, a mixture of bran and wheat germ, often blended with cornmeal or rye to stretch it. Middlings generally needed further refining to be useful in baking. Superfine flour was stone-ground and passed through sieves. It resembled what we know as whole wheat flour, but it was expensive and beyond the reach of most emigrant families.
Sugar raised another set of issues. It could take the form of molasses in kegs or barrels; sticky, hat-shaped loaves of brown-and-white sugar; lumps of gooey unrefined brown sugar; or “Havana,” a lumpy crushed white sugar that required still more crushing and sifting to be useful in baking cakes or pastries. Because they were relatively inexpensive and portable, the hat-shaped loaves were what most of the emigrant cooks carried, hanging them by strings within their wagons. Most also carried loose-leaf tea and coffee, the latter in the form of green beans that would have to be roasted in a pan over a campfire and then ground in a portable coffee grinder before it could be brewed.
To raise their bread, they took “saleratus,” as they called baking powder, a commodity that they would later, to their delight, find occurring naturally around soda springs in the West, where they could scoop up as much of it as they wanted for free. For the many days when they would not have time or inclination to bake bread, they took hardtack or crackers. Most took a tub of clear suet to substitute for butter, though those who brought along a milk cow could simply hang a bucket of cream inside a wagon and let the bouncing and jouncing of the wagon churn fresh butter for them. Almost everyone brought vinegar, which was useful not only to lend flavor to their food but also as a cleaning agent and, they believed, as a medicine for both their own maladies and those of their livestock. Most also brought whiskey or brandy for the same purposes, and for celebrating special occasions like the Fourth of July.
They brought hard candy, hard cheeses, figs, raisins, flavored syrups—lemon and peppermint being particular favorites—salted codfish, pickled herring, and jellies, jams, and preserves packed in stoneware crocks. Some of the items they crammed into their provision boxes carried brand names that you or I might still find on our own kitchen shelves—Underwood’s deviled ham for one, and Baker’s chocolate with which to flavor a sweet cake or make hot chocolate at the campfire.
Because they came from a homestead, Sarah and her family probably brought along sides of bacon from their own hogs back home, but if not, they could buy as much smoked, salted bacon as they wanted in St. Joe. Except for whatever game they might kill along the way or as many of their cattle as they might choose to slaughter, the bacon would be the only meat they could count on until they reached California.
Because they did not yet know in whose company they would be traveling, nor how events might separate them from others, every family needed to be capable of basic self-sufficiency all the way to California. This meant that if they hadn’t brought them from home, before leaving St. Joe each family needed to procure all the requisite tools for maintaining and repairing their wagons, preparing their meals, tending to their livestock, providing shelter at night and during storms, crossing flooded streams, and defending themselves from the Indian attacks that they viewed as exceedingly likely and that they feared above nearly all else.* As a result, despite the burden it placed on their mules and oxen and the compromises it imposed on them in terms of what else they could bring along, they had to carry a great many very heavy items—hammers, chisels, augers, axes, bolts, screws, shovels, tents, frying pans, Dutch ovens, coffeepots, additional cooking utensils, bullets or the lead for making them, iron shoes for their oxen and horses, kegs of black powder, and large numbers of guns.
The guns were of two basic types—older flintlocks, which depended on a hammer striking a piece of flint to create a spark that, with luck, ignited a charge of black powder, or the more recent percussion guns. The latter, in place of the flint, depended on a small copper capsule called a “cap.” The cap contained a small amount of highly explosive fulminate of mercury painted on the inside of one end and covered with a drop of varnish. When struck and crushed by the hammer, the cap exploded, igniting a charge of powder and thus discharging the weapon. By 1846 most newer guns, both muskets and pistols, were percussion weapons, which were considerably less likely to mis-fire as a result of damp powder, faulty flints, or wayward sparks. But many of the emigrants, including Franklin Graves, held to the old ways. Along with their percussion guns, they carried flintlocks that dated back to the American Revolution or earlier, guns their fathers and grandfathers had handed down to them and with which they had hunted game ranging from squirrels to bears all their lives.
By the time Sarah and Jay had fully stocked the wagon that Jay drove for Franklin, it likely weighed as much as three thousand pounds. It was a heavy load, and they knew that it would take a toll on their oxen, but with the things they carried, they believed they were well prepared for what they expected would be at most five or six months on the trail. By the time the first frosts settled on the Sacramento Valley—if such a thing as frost even existed in California—they would be building a new home among golden hills.
There was one other commodity that the emigrants passing through St. Joe that spring tried to stock up on. Advice. Even the best of the guidebooks, they knew, could not substitute for the firsthand and timely knowledge of those who had recently been to the West and returned. The trappers and traders who roamed the streets of St. Joe had detailed knowledge of what lay ahead—the best routes, the best places to ford a river, which of the natives to befriend and which to be wary of, when to expect what kind of weather, how earlier parties had fared—and so the emigrants listened eagerly to what they had to say.
One bit of news that was just working its way back across the plains that May concerned a large party of emigrants who had left St. Joe the previous spring, bound for Oregon.
They had left St. Joe provisioned much as Sarah and her family now were. All had gone well until, in modern-day Idaho, they began to hear rumors that the Walla Walla Indians, through whose territory the road to Oregon’s Willamette Valley lay, were hostile to whites and that they should be prepared for a fight ahead. On August 24 a trapper and guide named Stephen Meek overtook them. Having just escorted a train of emigrants from St. Louis to Fort Hall, and traveling now with his recent bride, Elizabeth, Meek was anxious to find new employment. He had traveled through Oregon a number of times before, including an 1843 expedition on which he had briefly served as a guide for none other than Lansford Hastings. On hearing the emigrants’ concerns about the Walla Wallas, he proposed to guide them on a shortcut that would steer them safely to the south of any Indian trouble. He assured them that the shortcut would follow old trappers’ trails that he knew well and that it would save them perhaps 150 miles off the old road to boot, delivering them to a settlement at The Dalles on the Columbia River. From there they could travel by water down to the mouth of the Willamette River. And he’d do it, he said, for five dollars per wagon.
Meek, while not well known himself, was the brother of a renowned trapper, Joseph Meek. There seemed no particular reason to doubt his knowledge of the country. So over the course of the next few days, August 25–27, the party split up. Most continued on the old road, but nearly two hundred wagons, four thousand head of livestock, and nearly a thousand emigrants—turned off the main Oregon Trail and followed Meek up the Malheur River into the Blue Mountains. The river had been given its name by French trappers after Indians stole some of their beaver pelts, malheur meaning literally “the bad hour,” but more generally “misfortune.” The Meek Party was about to find that the trappers had named the river aptly.
At first the route seemed tolerable, but within a few days things began to go bad. The country was dry and dusty, and grass for the livestock began to grow sparse. By August 30 one of the emigrants, Samuel Parker—whose wife and child would die as a result of what was about to happen—was already growing disgusted. In his journal he wrote, “Rock all day—pore grass—more swaring then you ever heard.” When they got to higher terrain, up on the bluffs above the river, they found less dust, but the ground was littered with particularly hard, sharp, angular rocks that lacerated the feet of their oxen and horses. Within a few days, the livestock were marking the trail with blood dried to black slicks on the hot rocks. Soon some of the oxen began to give out. Each day a few more lay down in the road and died. By the seventh day, nearly everyone was complaining about Meek and his cutoff. The terrain grew even rougher, the rocks larger. Wagons began to break down, necessitating long delays to make repairs. By now the party was strung out so far along the trail that Meek was a day or more ahead of some of them. He began leaving notes telling them where they were and where to go next, but the notes soon became confused and contradictory, and it slowly dawned on all of them that Meek was entirely lost. On the tenth day out, one of the party, John Herren, wrote, “We cannot get along fast, and we are rather doubtful that our pilot is lost…. Some talk of stoning, and others say hang him.”
Then things got even worse. They emerged from the Blue Mountains, crossed over the Stinking Water Mountains, and came out into the bleak high-desert country of central Oregon. Water began to become an issue, and the midday heat was now searing. On the fourteenth day, they made it to a large, shallow lake, Lake Malheur, only to find that its water was alkaline, foul-smelling, and undrinkable. They wandered on across the sterile desert for days, often traveling both day and night now, having to settle for whatever water was offered up by the occasional meager and muddy spring. Even when they found sufficient water for all the people, there often wasn’t enough for the livestock. Food began to run out in many of the wagons, and the emigrants were reduced to eating what they called “poor beef,” the emaciated and sometimes rancid flesh of their dead oxen.
Living conditions deteriorated rapidly, sanitation suffered, and soon a ravaging fever began to spread through the camps. A woman named Sarah Chambers had succumbed to it just a few days out. Now children began to die, then increasing numbers of adults. Soon the evening burial rituals varied only in the number of corpses interred, sometimes just one or two, other times as many as six. Each time, though, on the following morning another family faced the brutal necessity of turning their backs and walking away, leaving the body of a loved one behind in a lonely grave in a desolate landscape to which they knew they would never return. It was an experience that was all too common on the overland trail that summer and in the summers to come. For some the pain and sorrow were eased by the deep Christian faith that many of the emigrants held. But not all of them were religious by any means, and even those who were often found themselves haunted years later by the memory of those forlorn graves scratched out of gravelly soil under a pine tree and then immediately abandoned forever.
Some of the survivors of the Meek Party later referred to the malady that afflicted them as “camp fever,” which suggests that the culprit was an epidemic form of typhus caused by a species of Rickettsia bacteria. Transmitted primarily by lice and fleas, epidemic typhus is typically found where large numbers of people are living in unsanitary conditions, as in ships and military and refugee camps. In the absence of treatment with antibiotics, the mortality rate for epidemic typhus runs as high as 60 percent. Death is generally preceded by headaches, high fevers, rashes, severe muscle pain, sensitivity to light, and sometimes delirium.*
By now virtually all of the emigrants had given up on Meek, who for the most part was still riding a day or so ahead of the main party with his wife and a small group of friends, perhaps as much to avoid a lynching as to find a way out of the nightmare he had led the others into. On occasions when he had to be in camp, his few remaining friends concealed him in their wagons.
At dawn on September 17, the twenty-fourth day out, they finally struck a reliable source of water at the south fork of the Crooked River, a tributary of the Deschutes, which they knew would lead them toward the Columbia. But they were far from out of danger. Large numbers of them were now too weak to walk or even to ride on horseback, so they had to be loaded into wagons pulled by fewer and fewer oxen. And they were still many miles south of The Dalles and the Columbia River.
Traveling out ahead of the rest of the party, Meek and his wife finally staggered into a Methodist mission at The Dalles on September 29 and informed the startled settlers there that hundreds of people were in dire distress in the interior. He purchased supplies for a relief expedition but declined to make the return trip to deliver them himself, presumably fearing for his life at the hands of the emigrants. Fortunately, someone else stepped forward.
Moses Harris, one of a very few African-American guides and mountain men, was also one of the best. Called “Black Harris” or sometimes the “Black Squire” by his fellow mountaineers, he had traveled throughout the West since 1823, when he first crossed the Mississippi, probably as a freed slave. In 1844, Harris had guided a train of five hundred souls along the Oregon Trail all the way to Fort Vancouver. He had helped build Fort Laramie. He was thought by his peers to be unsurpassed in winter travel and survival skills. And now he was the only one at The Dalles who was both capable of, and willing to attempt, a rescue of Meek’s lost party.
Harris and a small group of rescuers, many of them Indians from the mission, rushed south with provisions and, just as important, with equipment for helping the emigrants surmount one last challenge. To reach The Dalles, they had to cross the Deschutes River deep in its canyon, where it ran swift and cold and deadly between sheer basalt cliffs.
But Moses Harris had anticipated that and brought block and tackle, pulleys, ropes, and axes with him. He and the emigrants, with considerable help from local Indians, who were familiar with the ways of the Deschutes and who fished from elaborate scaffolding that they suspended over the river, set about building a suspension bridge for those who could still walk. Then they began caulking the beds of wagons, loading the sickest of the emigrants into them, and towing them across the water. It took two weeks to get everyone across.
Even after the last of them arrived at The Dalles, the emigrants who had taken the shortcut continued to die. A few were so hungry that they bolted down half-cooked food and became ill. Some were simply too weakened from the ordeal to have any chance of recovering. In the end more than fifty of them died.
As they finished the last of their preparations in St. Joe in late May, Sarah and Jay and Sarah’s family learned that another party of Oregon-bound emigrants, the last of the season, was assembling on the far side of the Missouri just a bit to the north of town. Though he and his family were bent on California, not Oregon, Franklin Graves knew that it would be best to have company crossing the plains, so when they were fully provisioned, they drove four or five miles north of St. Joe to a crossing called Parrott’s Landing and loaded their wagons onto one of the big, flat-bottomed scows that served as ferries.
When the boat pulled away from the Missouri shore, they left the United States behind them. Everything west of here was foreign and alien. There were no inns, no stores, no farms, no reliable means of re-supply except for a couple of frontier forts hundreds of miles down the trail. But their three wagons were amply stocked, a small herd of beef cattle swam alongside the ferry, and fistfuls of silver coins were squirreled away under the cleats in their family wagon. Nobody, it must have seemed to them, could be better prepared for the journey ahead.
However, they had neglected one critical piece of advice. Of all the many tips, encouragements, admonitions, and suggestions that Lansford Hastings dispensed in The Emigrants’ Guide to California and Oregon, the best of them had to do with timing one’s departure. On this he was both honest and correct when he said that the emigrants must “enter on their journey on, or before, the first day of May; after which time they must never start, if it can possibly be avoided.” On the consequences of not doing so, he was even more pointed: “Unless you pass over the mountains early in the fall, you are very liable to be detained by impassable mountains of snow until the next spring, or perhaps forever.”
On the day that Sarah, Jay, and the rest of the Graves clan stepped aboard the ferry at Parrott’s Landing, May Day was already more than three weeks in the past.