Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

The Stephens-Townsend-Greenwood-Murphy wagons 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 which petered out in reed-grown marsh well short of the mountains. They had been unable to find a pass leading up into the Sierra Nevada, had gone south, abandoning their wagons near Owens Lake, and reached California by going around the mountains entirely. It would not be possible to carry sufficient supplies in packs on the backs of humans and animals for a party which contained so many women, children and babies.

Now, the Stephens-Townsend wagons set up camp at the marsh – the last substantial body of water for miles – and considered their next move. The two old mountain-men, Greenwood and Hitchcock were convinced there must be a way up into the Sierra, more or less directly west of where they were camped. They consulted in sign-language or pantomime with a curious, but seemingly friendly old Indian man who wandered into camp. Likely unknown to them, this was the chief of the Piute tribe, who had traveled with the explorer John C. Fremont the year before, and who had made it tribal policy to be courteous and friendly to those settlers and explorers passing through Piute lands. Someone modeled a range of mountains in the sand at their feet and pointed at the real mountains. The old Indian carefully remodeled the sand range to show a small river running down between two. The next day he rode ahead towards the distant mountains with Greenwood and Stephens, while the rest of the party rested. When they returned it was with good and bad news. There was a river, coming down into the desert, but it was a hard road to get to it with no water except for a small, bad-tasting hot-spring halfway there.

Having scouted the way, the small party made careful preparations: 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. Accounts have them starting the journey at sundown, to take advantage of cooler temperatures, minimize the strain on their draft animals, and get out of the desert as soon as possible. This was the desert crossing which two years later, would break the Donner-Reed party; here, they lost much of their supplies and stock, and broke into constituent family groups. But the Stephens-Townsends held together, through the following day and night. They paused at the hot springs to feed and water the animals, and to rest a while themselves before moving on. Sometime before dawn the next morning, their weary oxen begin perking up, stepping a little faster, as the breeze coming down from the mountains brought the scent of fresh water. This presented another danger, if the teamsters could not control their thirst-maddened animals. Hastily, the men drew the wagons together and unhitched their oxen. Better they should run loose to the water they can smell, than damage the wagons in a maddened stampede. A few hours later, the men returned with the teams, sated and sodden with all the water they could drink from the old Indian’s river, forever after known as the Truckee River. All the way on that first scout, the old Indian kept saying a word which sounded like ‘tro-kay’ to Greenwood and Stephens; it actually meant ‘all right’ or ‘very well,’ but they assumed it was his name, and named the river accordingly.

The Truckee led up into the looming Sierra Nevada range; the highway and railroad line follow its course to this very day. The Stephens-Townsend party moved up the canyon with all speed, for it was now October. At mid-month they camped in meadowlands, just below where the canyon cuts deep through the mountains, the last but most difficult part of the journey. There was already snow on the ground, and they had come to where a creek joined Truckee’s River. The creek-bed looked to be easier for the wagons to follow farther up into the mountain pass, but the river might be more direct. Again, the party conferred and made a decision. They sent a small, fast-moving party on horseback along the river; six of the fittest and strongest with enough supplies to reach Sutter’s Ford, and bring back additional supplies and help. Four men and two women, including Elizabeth Townsend rode out on the 14th of November, 1844. They followed the river south, as snow continued falling. In two days they reached the shores of Lake Tahoe. They worked their way around the western shore to another small creek, which led them over the summit, and down along the Rubicon River, out of the snow, although not entirely out of danger in the rough country. The eastern slope of the Sierras is a steep palisade, the western slope more gradual, but rough, cut through with steep-banked creeks, which within five years would be the focus of the great California Gold Rush. But in this year, it was wilderness.

Early in December, the horseback party reached the safety of Sutter’s Fort, as the main body struggled along the promising creek route. They came at last to an alpine valley with a small ice-water lake at the foot of a canyon leading up to the last and highest mountain pass. At times, the only open passage along the creek was actually in the water, which was hard on the oxen’s feet. By the time they reached the lake, two feet of snow had fallen and more promising. It was time for another hard choice; leave six of the wagons at the lake, slaughter the worst-off of the oxen for food, and cache everything but food and essentials. Three young men; Elizabeth Townsend’s brother Moses Schallenberger, with Allan Montgomery and Joseph Foster volunteered to build a rough cabin and winter over, guarding the wagons and property at the lake, living from what they could hunt. The rest of the party pooled the remaining ox teams and five wagons and moved on, up into the canyon towards the crest of the Sierra Nevada, up a slope so steep they had to empty out the contents and carry everything by hand, doubling the ox teams and pulling up the wagons one by one. A sheer vertical ledge halfway up the rocky slope blocked their way. A desperate search revealed a small defile, just wide enough to lead the oxen and horses up it, single file. The teams were re-yoked at the top, and hoisted up the empty wagons by ropes and chains, while men pushed from below, and the women and children labored up the narrow footpath, carrying armfuls of precious supplies. By dint of much exhausting labor, they reached the summit on November 25th, and struggled on through the snow, while the three volunteers returned to the lake. They hastily finished their small cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, roofed with ox-hides, and settled in for the winter, not knowing that the winter would be very much harsher than anything that any of them had experienced in the mid-West.

The main party struggled on through the gradual descent. With snow falling, cutting a trail and keeping the wagons moving was a brutally laborious job. A week, ten days of it was all that exhausted men and ox teams could handle. They set up a cold camp on the South Fork of the Yuba River, and made a calculated gamble on survival, before changing weather and diminishing food supplies forced worse conditions upon them. They would build another cabin, and arbors of brush and canvas wagon tops, and butcher the remaining oxen. The women and children would stay, with two men to protect them, while the remaining husbands and fathers took the last horses, and as little food as possible, and continued on to Sutter’s Fort, returning as soon as they could with supplies and fresh team animals. Before the men rode away, the wife of Martin Murphy’s oldest son gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Yuba Murphy.

It was nearly two months before a rescue party was able to return to the survival camp – and just in the nick of time, for the women and children were down to eating boiled hides. Twenty miles east, the snow had piled up level to the roof of the little cabin by the ice-water lake. The three young men realized that the game they had counted on being able to hunt had all retreated below the snow, far down the mountains. What they had left would not be able to feed them through the winter. From hickory wagon bows and rawhide, Montgomery and Foster contrived three sets of snowshoes, and packed up what they could carry. In one day, they had climbed to the top of the pass, but the snowshoes were clumsy things and the snow was soft, and young Schallenberger — barely 18 at the time — was not as strong as the other two. Agonizing leg cramps left him unable to take more than a few steps. Continuing on was impossible for him, survival at the cabin impossible for three. Bravely, Moses Schallenberger volunteered to return alone to the cabin while the other two went on. He lived for the next three months on the food supplies they had not been able to carry, and trapping coyotes and foxes. When the rescue party came to the winter camp on the Yuba River in late February, one of them, Dennis Martin continued on snowshoes over the pass, hoping to find young Schallenberger still alive. With a hard crust to the snow, the two of them had an easier time of it, and caught up to the main party on the Lower Bear River.

Two years later, the little cabin in which he spent most of the winter would shelter families from the Donner Party. The irony is that everyone has heard of them, and the pass through the Sierra Nevada, which the Stephens party discovered and labored successfully to bring wagons over – increasing their strength by two born on the journey – is named for the group who lost half their number to starvation in its’ very shadow.

(This story became my first novel – To Truckee’s Trail. I thought then and still believe that it could be an absolutely riveting move — until then, the novel will have to do.)

(An early version of this essay began as a sorrowful rant about the lack of good adventure movies a number of summers ago. It turned into a multi-part blog post, and then into my first novel, To Truckee’s Trail, about the first wagon-train party to get their wagons over the Sierra Nevada – in winter yet. They got lost, had to break up into separate groups, were caught by winter while still in the mountains, nearly ran out of food … but unlike the Donner Party of two years later, this party managed to hang together and negotiate the mountain obstacle without any loss of life.)

In comparison to the notorious and hard-luck Donner-Reed Party, hardly anyone has ever heard of a similar wagon-train company who crossed over almost the exact same trail two years previously. The party led by Elisha Stephens and John Townsend, and advised by the old mountain-man, Caleb Greenwood, walked much of the way between the Mississippi-Missouri and the Sacramento Rivers, across plain and desert, blazed a trail up the wilderness of a steep canyon, and finally hauled wagons up a sheer mountain cliff. Generally they remain a footnote in the history books, mostly noted for being the first to bring some of their wagons up the Truckee River canyon and over the Sierra Nevada into California. There was no tireless letter-writer or professional memoirist among them, no extensive first-hand accounts, although John Townsend, a medical doctor and Mason may have kept a diary.

In the year 1844, only a bare handful of explorers, missionaries and fur trappers had ever seen for sure what lay beyond the jumping-off points at Council Bluffs, Independence, St. Joseph. There was southern trail to Santa Fe, and beyond that to the thinly-populated enclave of Spanish and then Mexican territories in California, and a northern track which followed along the Platte River and terminated in Oregon Territory. Lewis and Clarke, and William Ashley’s fur-trapping brigades – all had gone that way, by boat, horseback or on foot. Hearing of the rich lands in the Pacific Northwest, farmers and small tradesmen also began following the siren call. This was not a journey for the impoverished. Besides a wagon, and stock to pull it, the journey required a six-month food supply, tools, clothes, bedding and cooking gear. There might be space in the wagon for books, and other small treasures, for the wagons were small, and food took up most of the space. The draft animal of choice was not the horse, as many would think. Horses were expensive, and the road was 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 also expensive. Most emigrants could better afford ox teams; four to six pair to a wagon, guided by a driver who walked by the lead team and controlled them by verbal commands.

In the spring of every year until the steel rails united the east and west, travelers looked out from the jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri at last years’ tracks and ruts and waited for the new new grass to grow tall enough to feed their teams. Late in of May, 1844, ten families – fifty souls all told, and the eleven wagons carrying their stock and worldly goods set out from Council Bluffs, in company with a larger party bound for Oregon. They had elected an ex-trapper and blacksmith named Elisha Stephens as their own leader – and intended striking off the established trail at Fort Hall, and head for California.  A little under half of Stephens’ group was an extended clan: Martin Murphy, his three adult sons, their wives and children, and his married daughter and her husband 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 by Mexico—for being nominally a Catholic country. Dr. Townsend also looked to a healthier climate; his wife Elizabeth was supposed to be in frail health. Elizabeth Townsend’s orphaned younger brother, Moses Schallenberger, aged 17, counted as a man for this journey as did the teenaged half-Indian sons of Caleb Greenwood. Greenwood had roamed all over the Rockies and the Great Basin as a fur-trapper, twenty years before. He was 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 and widowed daughter and her children.

Neither Greenwood nor 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 for his teamstering expertise 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.

Most accounts of the emigrant trail agree that the first weeks out on the trail are the most pleasant. Dr. Townsend’s journal was lost before the turn of that century, 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, and the burden of travel not onerous. Elderly men and women writing down their reminiscences of that journey early in the 20th century will look back on it as the most marvelous adventure of their childhood. They will remember seeing herds of buffalo, a sea of brown woolly backs as far as the horizon goes and how the wagon jolted over every little rock and rut. They will remember the look of the Platte River, wide and shallow — an inch thick and a mile wide, too thick to drink and too thin to plough.

For the eight women of the party, it must have seemed an 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 they had left a community, family, friends, a cherished orderly routine. These eight women and the older girls in the party would have formed their own little community, contriving meals out of cornmeal and flour, dried beans, dried fruit, salt-pork, doing a minimal laundry along the trail, gleaning 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 that point 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.

(To be continued)