Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Fifteen miles a day, more or less; the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must do so before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water, and the men going to hunt for meat – which when dried over the fire and stored away, may mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.

All accounts of the emigrant trail agree, some of them very lyrically, that the first weeks out on the trail are the most pleasant. Dr. Townsend’s journal, as he was nominated the secretary from the Stephens Party, is long gone, but many other emigrant accounts from various other parties remain. The prairie grass is lush and green, the land gently rolling. The oxen are healthy and rested, the burden of travel not onerous. Elderly men and women in San Jose, or Portland, penning their memoirs early in the 20th century will look back on it as the most marvelous adventure of their childhood; running barefoot in the green grass, the white canvas wagon-top silhouetted at the top of a gentle rise against a blue, blue sky, meals around a campfire, and sleeping under the stars. They will remember seeing herds of buffalo, a sea of brown woolly backs as far as the horizon goes, the trick of scrambling up from the ground over a slow-moving wagon-wheel, and how the wagon jolted over every little rock and rut. They will remember the look of the Platte River, wide and shallow— and inch thick and a mile wide, so it was said, and how they also said it was too thick to drink and too thin to plough. For small children, alive in the immediate day to day present, and innocently trusting their parents as all-wise, all-capable beings, those first weeks on the trail could only be a grand adventure, an endless picnic excursion, with something new and wonderful always around the next bend.

For their mothers, it was a picnic well stocked with ants and dust and the endless chore of cooking over an open fire, of setting up camp every night, and unrolling the bedding, or carrying buckets of fresh water – all that after an exhausting day of either walking alongside the wagon or riding in it. Women’ work on a farm in those days was grueling enough by our standards, but in the settled lands they had left there was a community, family, friends, an orderly routine. These eight women and the older girls in the Stephens-Townsend Party would have formed their own little community; discovering again that a bucket of milk hung from the wagon-box in the morning would have churned itself into a small lump of butter at the end of the days journey, and dried beans left to soak overnight in the dying heat of the evening campfire would be ready to cook the next morning. How to contrive meals out of cornmeal and flour, dried beans, dried fruit, salt-pork, how to do at least a minimal laundry along the trail, how to glean edible greens and wild plums from the thickets in the creek bottoms. The presence of Dr. Townsend, with his medical expertise, and small range of surgical kit must have also been very reassuring, most especially as the party reached the landmark of Independence Rock, shortly before July 4th. There Mrs. James Miller gave birth to a baby daughter, named Ellen Independence Miller. When the party moved on towards the distant Rocky Mountains and Fort Hall (in what is now Idaho), it was on a shortcut of Isaac Greenwood’s suggesting. It would later be called Sublette’s Cutoff, and it saved them five days of travel.

The westbound trail split at Fort Hall. From then on, the Murphys, the Townsends, the Millers and their infant daughter, Old Hitchcock and his daughter, and all the others would be on their own, and finding their own trail in the faintest of traces left from wagons who attempted the California route the year before.

The eleven wagons led by Elisha Stephens and guided by Greenwood, the old trapper and mountain-man, struck off the main trail in the middle of August, following the wheel tracks of a group led the previous year by another mountain man and explorer, the legendary Joseph Walker. Walker’s party had followed the Humboldt River, a sluggish trickle of a river which eventually petered out in a sandy desert basin well short of the mountains. Walker’s party had been unable to find a pass leading up into theSierra Nevada, had gone south and eventually abandoned their wagons near Owens Lake, reaching California by going around the mountains entirely. This was a desperate and impractical solution for the Stephens Party.

They camped by the desert marsh; experienced frontier hands Greenwood and Hitchcock were convinced there had to be a way up into the Sierra, more or less directly west of where they were camped, and they consulted, mountain-man fashion with a curious, but seemingly friendly old Indian man who wandered into camp. They may not have known it at the time, but the old Indian was the chief of the Piute tribe, and had made the acquaintance of the explorer John C. Fremont— traveling into California with Fremont, even— and made it tribal policy to be courteous and friendly to those settlers and explorers passing through Piute lands. Communication seems to have been through sign language, and pantomime. Was there a pass into the mountain-range? Greenwood or Hitchcock modeled a range of mountains in the sand at their feet and pointed at the real mountains. The old Indian looked at it thoughtfully, and carefully remodeled the sand range to show a small river running down between two. Could there be a gateway through the mountains?

He seemed quite positive there was, and the next day he rode ahead towards the distant mountains with Greenwood and Stephens, while the rest of the party rested and waited for the scouting party to return. When they did, they brought the good news; there was a river, coming down into the desert, cutting a passable gateway — and the bad news; it was a hard journey across barren desert, and no water at all save for a small, bad-tasting hot-spring halfway there. Careful preparations were made; everything that could be made water-tight was filled to the brim. They cut armfuls of green rushes and brush as fodder for the cattle and their few horses. Some accounts have them deciding to start across the desert at sundown, and just to keep going, all night, the next day, and into the next night. Take advantage of the night’s cool temperatures, minimize the need for water and get out of the desert as soon as possible. As much water as possible would be reserved for the oxen, on whose strength and pulling power survival depended. Perhaps the smallest children would be tucked up in the wagons for the grueling trek; everyone else would walk, stumbling half-asleep under a desert moon.

(To be continued)

At the start of the summer movie season in 2005, I was lamenting on my then-blog about the depths of my decided uninterest in anything premiering over the following months. I used to love going to movies, had subscriptions to Premiere, and to Entertainment Weekly  . . .  and then, somehow I just lost interest. The blog-lament turned into an essay about a dream movie epic – a frontier adventure that I would love to see made. The essay eventually became an epic itself, and a reader of the blog suggested that I work it into a movie treatment, as she had friends in “the business.” Nothing ever came of the movie treatment, until about a year later, when she showed it to a writer friend, who thought it was fantastic, but I would have better luck doing it as a novel first . . .  and so did it become, within a very short time, with their encouragement. Now, as I am preparing a second edition of To Truckee’s Trail, through Watercress Press, I dug up the original series from the archives.

Hardly anyone has ever heard of this particular party of men, women and children. They blazed a trail in the wilderness, walked nearly three thousand miles, across plain and desert, and finally hauled wagons up a sheer mountain cliff. They set out into country unknown to most, and very possibly all, all for a gamble that life at the other end of the trail would be better. They are a footnote in the history books, going under several different names. They seemed to have functioned as a kind of self-organizing committee, although they had formally elected a leader, as was the custom of the trail.  They had no diarist, no tireless letter-writer or professional memoirist among them, no extensive first-hand contemporary accounts; they were ordinary people … but on an epic journey.

In the year 1844, these United States, for all intents and purposes, extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi/Missouri River. And west of the rivers, two-thirds of the continental territories theoretically American were an unknown quantity. Desert, high plains, mountains, rivers –  only a bare handful of explorers, missionaries and fur trappers had ever seen for sure what lay beyond the jumping-off point at Council Bluffs, Independence, St. Joseph. There was a slender and perilous established overland trail to Santa Fe, and beyond that to the thinly-populated enclave of Spanish and then Mexican territories inCalifornia. That trail wound through the scrub and deserts of the Southwest, traveled mostly by professional traders and merchants, heavily armed and escorting great lumbering Conestoga wagons packed with profitable trade goods: fabrics and glass, gunpowder and tools, for the markets in Santa Fe, and the outlaying pueblos. They were businessmen, with little interest in lingering, since most of the route lay though desert.

There was another trail, also — a northern track which followed along the PlatteRiver, through deserts and mountains, and eventually terminated in Oregon. Lewis and Clarke, the fur-trapping brigades – all had gone in that general direction, by boat, on horseback and on foot. And by the 1840s, hearing of the rich lands in the Pacific Northwest, farmers and small tradesmen had begun to follow the siren call also. An agricultural depression, epidemics of malaria and yellow-fever, a bit of manifest destiny, ambition and just plain restlessness no doubt played a part.

Families across what is now the middle-west sold off land and assets; this was not a journey for the impoverished, or the reckless. Aside from a wagon, and stock to pull it, these adventurers would have to bring along supplies for six months, tools, clothes, bedding and cooking gear, spare parts for the wagon, perhaps seeds and roots to plant a new garden in the Willamette Valley, or by Sutter’s Fort in far California. There might be some little space in the wagon for some books, and china and other small treasures, for the wagons were small, and food took up most of the space. The larger wagons, purpose-built for the trail were about four feet wide, ten to twelve feet long, covered with waterproofed canvas, spread over four or five arched hickory bows, although many families made do with ordinary farm wagons, fitted out with a cover. The draft animal of choice was not the horse, as many would think. Horses were expensive, and the road was rough, too rough in the early days for even the toughest horse in dray harness. Mules made a good showing on the southern trail, but they were expensive. Most emigrants could better afford ox teams; four to six pair to a wagon, patient and plodding, guided by a driver who walked by the lead team and shouted verbal commands.

The wagons rolled on metal-tired wheels; there was no suspension system, no springs. Most emigrants walked by choice, rather than endure jolting along in a wagon. It would take six months, easily – and in the early days there was no known road, and only two or three outposts all along that way to buy additional supplies, or to mail a letter. The pioneers looked out from the noisy clamor of St. Joseph, and Independence, and Council Bluffs at last years’ tracks and ruts, overgrown with the new grass that would feed their ox teams on the first part of the journey, as soon as it was grown tall enough. They looked at two thousand miles of wilderness. They would step off the safe perch, on the riverbank at the edge of civilization, and swing out like a trapeze artist across the vast, emptiness, guided by their own good sense, and hard work, faith and hope and no little amount of luck – but they would not go alone.

Late in of May, 1844 such a party of emigrants stepped off from Council Bluffs, in company with a larger party bound for Oregon. Ten families, with as many (or a few more) wagons, with all their stock and worldly goods had elected an ex-trapper and blacksmith named Elisha Stephens as their own leader, and intended to strike off the established trail at Fort Hall, and head for California.

 All the other archetypal western stories are almost exclusively male domains. The writer of a romantic yard about cowboys and the open range, the Gold Rush, the mountain men, or the fighting cavalry, must go to great length to import an adventurous school-marm or a tart. But the emigrant wagon trains, the great Mormon migration, and the post-Civil War homesteaders, they were all family matters. Stephen’s party of fifty souls included eight women and fifteen children. A little under half of them were an extended clan: Martin Murphy, and his three adult sons, with their wives and children. Martin Murphy himself had emigrated from Ireland, to Canada, and then to Missouri. His wife and a grandchild had died in a malaria epidemic; the clan sought a healthier climate, and Martin Murphy thought all the better of California— still held byMexico — for being nominally a Catholic country. Dr. John Townsend, very possibly the most educated person in the party, also looked to a healthier climate; his wife, Elizabeth, was supposed to be in frail health. Elizabeth Townsend’s orphaned younger brother, Moses Schallenberger, counted as a man for this journey, at the age of 17. The teenaged half-Indian sons of Caleb Greenwood probably also counted as men. Caleb Greenwood had roamed all over the Rockies and the Great Baisin as a fur-trapper, twenty years before. Greenwood was thought to be in his eighties, but still hale and vigorous. Another old mountain-man, Isaac Hitchcock also felt the lure of the west, traveling with his oldest daughter and her children.

 None of these men; Stephens, Greenwood, or Hitchcock had been all the way along the trail they proposed to follow to California. It is thought that Stephens may have worked as a teamster or wagon-master on the Santa Fe Trail, and a descendent of Isaac Hitchcock found evidence in archives that Old Man Hitchcock had been in California briefly in the 1820s. Stephens seems also to have been enormously respected by the other men; there were none of the bitter divisions that fractured other parties, under the stress of moving the heavy-laden wagons an inexorable fifteen miles a day, and chivvying the stock herd, finding water and safe pasturage, of being dusty and exhausted and hungry, day after grinding day, and knowing that the hardest part of the journey was at the end of it.

(To be continued)

 These were the places where the trails all began: the trails that lead to Oregon, to the Mormon colonies in Utah, to California, and before them, into the fur-trapping wildernesses in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, and the commercial trade to Santa Fe.

 Five towns, all along a 200-mile stretch of the Missouri River;  many of which have long-since outgrown their original footprint as a river-boat landing on the edge between civilization and wilderness, leaving only the smallest traces here and there among a century and a half of building up and sprawling outwards. The modern towns of Kansas City, Weston-Leavenworth, St. Joseph, Nebraska City and Council Bluffs-Omaha, were the places where the journey began. They were once rowdy, muddy, enormously crowded in those months when the emigrant, exploring, or trading parties were preparing to set out. Primitive,  bursting with excitement, overrun with emigrants and stock pens, the crossroads where merchants sold everything necessary for the great journey, the very crossroads of the west; Indians and mountain men, Santa Fe merchants and soldiers, emigrants, missionaries and foreigners passed each other in the spaces between buildings that did duty as streets. This was the inland coast, from which the emigrants looked out upon the sea of grass and made preparations.

 Greater Kansas City encompasses no less than four locations from which these voyages into the wilderness were launched: Ft. Osage, established by the US government in 1808, was the oldest. The fur-trading Chouteau Brothers of St. Louis established a trading post at the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas River. Known variously as Chouteau’s Landing, Kanzasmouth or Westport Landing, it is now somewhere underneath the business district of Kansas City. Captain Bonneville launched his three-year exploration from the successor to Ft. Osage. Sublette and Fremont’s expeditions in the 1830ies and 1840ies departed from Westport Landing. In turn, they were overshadowed by Independence, the springboard for the growing Santa Fe trade, which served in turn the Oregon migration in the 40ies, and was swamped by the ’49 Gold Rush Argonauts. An arrival in that year noted the presence of a daguerreotype gallery… and the appalling noise of teams and animals. There were but two public houses in the city, crammed to capacity, with everyone else having to board with local residents or camp out in their wagons. The last was Westport, a little south and a little way down the Santa Fe Trail; begun as a mission and trading post for the Indians. Francis Parkman passed through Westport in 1846.

 It eventually dawned on emigrants for Oregon and California,  that going farther north along the Missouri shortened the distance they need travel towards the Platte, that great river road to the west.  Ft. Leavenworth was established in the 1820ies, with an eye towards intimidating the Indians, and it became the locus for a number of ’49 Argonauts. They looked to avoid congestion at Independence and St. Joseph, farther upstream, and departed from the town of Weston, the ‘Ville (established by a veteran of Army service at Ft.Leavenworth) across the river from it. Weston was built on a series of steep hills; Argonauts coming from Central Europe called it “Little Switzerland”.  John Bidwell, of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841, claimed to have organized the first wagon party for California from Weston. (They arrived safely for the most, but without their wagons.) It was necessary to ferry wagons and emigrants across the river at Weston, and the town thrived for a number of years, until being sidelined by the railroad boom in the 1860ies.

 The fur-trader, Joseph Robidoux saw into the future; he saw that more and more settlers would come. A trail that began two more days farther up the river by steamboat would save two weeks on the journey to the Platte River, the great highway into the west. He called his little planned city after his patron saint, Saint Joseph, but mostly they called it Saint Joe, or Robidoux’ Landing. By 1844, according to a west-ward bound emigrant that year, it had two or three stores and one hotel. Five years later, it was the major jumping-off point for the Gold Rush; two ferries ran, day and night, and the town was crowded to bursting with emigrants that outnumbered residents four or five times over. The Pony Express ran its 10-day service from St Joseph to Sacramento for one glorious year starting in 1860. The Pony Express was the brain-child of the Russell, Majors & Waddell freighting service, which already held contracts to deliver to military establishments in that era.

 There were a number of minor crossings between Saint Joe and the Council Bluffs area, most of them utilized during the years of extreme congestion following the Gold Rush. One of the popular crossings was near the site of Old Fort Kearney, on the Missouri. A town, Nebraska City rose on the site of the old fort, and boomed in the 1850ies, supplying the Army, and those seeking riches in later gold and silver rushes to Pike’s Peak and Virginia City.

 Finally, there was Council Bluffs, the name given by Lewis and Clark to the site of their parley with the Tribes in 1804.  This was the name for the general district, which covered a number of smaller communities in existence at various times in the neighborhood of present-day Omaha.  A small fort which became a mission under the direction of Father DeSmet ministered to the Potawatomi, until 1841. Five years later, Mormon refugees from Illinois arrived nearby. They crossed the river, and established the Winter Camp, the staging area for the great migration to Salt Lake.  The area was popular with emigrants from the northern states; Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. It fed emigrant traffic  into the so-called Mormon Trail along the northern side of the Platte River. Prior to the Gold Rush and the Mormon exodus, other Oregon and California-bound parties departed from Council Bluffs, notably the Stephens-Townsend party of 1844.  Construction of the Union Pacific railroad began at Omaha in 1864, foreshadowing the end of the jumping-off places for emigrants and wagon trains, departing from along the Missouri River. After the coming of the railroads to the West, venturing into it would no longer mean a journey of six months, dependent solely on the travelers’ own resources, and the strength and good health of their team animals.

(I originally wrote this as part of the background for my first novel, To Truckee’s Trail … which is now being prepared for release as a second edition in mid-October. The Kindle and Nook editions of the first edition will be available until then.)