Castro, it seemed, had no stomach for a fight with the Americans and two days earlier had fled to Sonora in northern Mexico. In a letter to Mexican authorities he complained he had neither supplies for his men nor money to purchase them. For his part, Governor Pico “retired to one of his estates, lying about forty miles to the southward of Los Angeles.” The American conquest was complete, and the U.S. flag now flew from San Diego to San Francisco and points in between.
Stockton issued a proclamation naming himself governor of California and commander in chief. Martial law was declared and all persons and their property were to be respected. Anyone not willing to obey or acquiesce to the new order would be expelled from the province, including military men, who were required to take an oath not to disturb the peace. Furthermore—and this would cause trouble later—there was a ten p.m. to dawn curfew. A few days later a second proclamation ordered public elections the following month for all alcaldes and municipal officers throughout the state. And a third named Captain Gillespie a military commandant for the territory, headquartered at Los Angeles, with broad discretionary powers under military rule.
Meantime, Stockton was growing anxious to get back into the war; in particular he wanted to sail south to blockade the Mexican coast and attack Acapulco. To that end he wrote Frémont saying he proposed to make him military governor of California in his absence, and that upon his return, “I will meet you in San Francisco and place you as Governor of California.”
In order to convey the developments to Washington, Kit Carson was selected as courier and commissioned a second lieutenant in the army. Carson was to take the shortest route back east, traveling light and with fast horses about two and a half months’ travel, which, Frémont pointedly reminds us, was also the most dicey as it “led through Mexican territory and through the dangerous Indians along the Spanish Trail.”
Unknown to Stockton, Frémont, or any of the others was that this was the same route along which General Kearny was inching toward them with his Army of the West.
* Much has been made of this requisition of munitions by historians seeking to prove that Frémont deliberately exceeded his authority in California and that he had already determined at this point—war or no war—to join or lead an uprising of the settlers to take over the province. Since there is no documentary or testimonial proof of this, it is noted here for what it is worth. Moreover, Frémont had reached the extent of his exploratory range, and his party would have been preparing at some point to head back across two thousand miles of treacherous territory. It might simply have been that he wanted to equip them with ample ammunition for their weapons.
† The original Bear Flag remained on display in San Francisco until April 1906, when it was destroyed in the fire that followed the great San Francisco earthquake.
‡ Here Frémont took the rather dubious precaution of writing out his resignation from the army, in order to avoid any political embarrassment to the U.S. government should the adventure turn sour. He ordered it sent by the next post to his father-in-law, Senator Benton, to be used at his discretion as the situation developed.
§ “Spiking” renders a cannon useless by clogging the firing touch hole. It cannot be easily undone and usually requires drilling or even retooling at a factory.
‖ This quotation is contained in a lengthy statement by Rodman M. Price, an officer under Sloat and the future governor of New Jersey. Written many years after the fact, the statement purports to chronicle the various international intrigues and other machinations attendant to the capture of California.
a The reference is to Wellington.
b He cites no reference or proof for this last assertion, and it is probably false.
c He is referring, of course, to Messrs. Polk, Benton, Marcy, and Bancroft.
d These recollections are from Frémont’s memoirs published forty years later. Controversy remains over what exactly were his charges from the various officials. Here Frémont seems to be saying that there was a kind of tacit understanding between him and the Washington authorities that he was to act to secure California if the opportunity presented itself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“The Dogs Bark, but the
Caravan Moves On”*
Right around the time Commodore Sloat was hoisting Old Glory over San Francisco and Monterey, nineteen covered wagons of the Reed-Donner party creaked across a fair mountain meadow twinkling with wildflowers toward a stout bastion of civilization on the Oregon Trail known as Fort Bridger. Built three years earlier in 1843 by the celebrated mountain man Jim Bridger, the facility served as an Indian and trapper trading post and emigrant supply station on the Blacks Fork River in southern Wyoming. At 7,000 feet, and sandwiched between the Rocky and the Wasatch mountain ranges, the lovely little valley was like something from a storybook. Not many years back it had been a watery bog created by beaver dams, but the beavers were hunted out by the trappers, including Bridger, and the dams broken up, which opened the valley floor to rushing streams, cottonwoods, and high meadow grasses that had an almost Alpine aspect.
A week earlier there had been several hundred emigrants in the Donner train, captained originally by a forty-four-year-old “hellroaring orator” named William H. “Owl” Russell, a Kentucky lawyer, Black Hawk War veteran, and onetime secretary to Henry Clay. Russell would go on to become a major in Frémont’s California Battalion, but there had been a parting of the ways, with the Donners and their crew peeling off southwest along a new, untested route, the so-called Hastings Cutoff. It turned out to be a fateful decision.
Most of their decisions had been fateful, though, since leaving Independence, Missouri, seventy-six days and nearly a thousand miles ago; on the trail the blink of an eye could be the difference between life and death. The ominous warnings began in earnest when they reached Independence, according to Edwin Bryant, a forty-one-year-old transplanted Yankee who had given up his job as editor of the Louisville Courier and Journal to go west—where, it was said, a man had once immigrated long ago and lived to the ripe old age of two hundred years, so healthful was the golden California climate. But also, or so it was rumored—according to Bryant—a party of five thousand Mormons had recently marched across the prairies, “with ten brass field pieces, and that every man of the party was armed with a rifle, a bowie-knife, and a brace of large revolving pistols. It was declared that they were inveterately hostile to the emigrant parties and when the latter came up to the Mormons, they intended to attack and murder them, and appropriate their property.”†
Another rumor was that “the Kansas Indians had collected in large numbers on the trail for the purpose of robbery and murder”; and finally “that a party of five Englishmen, supposed to be emissaries of their government, had started in advance of us, bound for Oregon, and that their object was to stir up the Indian tribes along the route, and incite them to deeds of hostility towards the emigrants; to rob, murder and annihilate them.” And that was just the beginning, Bryant remembered. One day as a wagon train was leaving Independence, the headman of the local Masonic fraternity began an oration in which “he consigned us all to the grave, or to perpetual exile,” while old Santa Fe traders warned that by the end of the long California trek everyone’s hair “will have turned white as snow, and ten years will be taken from our lives.”
Such frenzied tales, predictions, and rumors roiled in Independence, Missouri, in the spring of ’46 as thousands of emigrants churned the mud of its streets on the cusp of the greatest mass migration the country had yet seen. The town was a bedlam of promiscuous commotion, with hundreds of prairie schooners clogging the roads and byways while teamsters and bullwackers polluted the air with a gale of horrible profanities. From stores and sidewalks traders sold, and emigrants bought, everything under the sun they had been told was needed for months on the lonesome trail: barrels of flour, molasses, crackers, salt pork, whiskey, and bacon; sacks of beans and rice, coffee, sugar, and cornmeal and bags of salt and spices. Gunpowder, priming caps,
and lead for bullets were also high on the list; the men had brought their own weapons—tall “Kentucky long rifles” of high caliber, most of which were actually manufactured in Pennsylvania—and some few might have owned one of the new revolving pistols that Samuel Colt had started making in Connecticut a decade earlier. A yoke (of two) oxen went for $21.67, reported journalist Bryant.
The Reed-Donner party, including the wagons of James Reed and his family, had kicked off on May 12, in a torrential downpour, led by Owl Russell, crossing the Kansas River by ferry for $1 a wagon. It contained a melting pot of souls hoping for a better life—or at least a different life—on Pacific shores. Every manner of language was spoken by the emigrants—French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Scandinavian tongues in addition to English and its Irish and American versions. Among the travelers were two nephews of Daniel Boone, as well as former Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, who had recovered from his assassination attempt by the Mormons and was taking his new wife, Panthea, on a hunt for greener pastures. The emigrant train’s progress had been calculated at eighteen miles per day, what it would take to reach the Sierra Nevadas before the first snows of October closed off the passes for the winter. This was critical, for to be stuck on the eastern slopes, or high in the mountains themselves, was to invite death by starvation. Everyone, then, must pull together for this purpose and help his fellow travelers do the same, while the wagons creaked along, pulled by beasts of burden, flanked by outriders on horseback, guarded by an escort of dogs, and trailed by herds of cattle for meat and milk, which were trailed in turn by sullen packs of wolves, waiting for stragglers.
On June 14, 1846, about a month since the party had set out, Bryant experienced an epiphany. Late in the day, around sundown, as the wagon train headed toward its encampment, he was approached by several men from wagons up ahead who had been told that he was a doctor.
• • •
He wasn’t, but he was well enough educated that he might pass for one in some instances. What constituted a doctor in those times was often presupposed by loose qualifications. But in this instance the medicine was well beyond Bryant’s skill. Two days earlier, a boy of eight or nine had fallen off the tongue of a wagon and was run over by its wheels, shattering his leg. With misgivings, Bryant agreed to go with the men to see what he could do, not as a “doctor,” he would remember, but as a “good Samaritan.”
What he found was nearly beyond pity. The boy lay on a bench with his leg encased in a crude splint. It was a compound fracture, the jagged bone protruding through the skin. Gangrene had set in and the wound was swarming with maggots “from foot to knee, in a state of putrefaction.” Doctor or no, Bryant told the distraught mother, it was too late for an amputation. The child was too weak to survive an operation, which he had neither the instruments nor the skill to perform.
But she was desperate and pleading and beseeched an old French-Canadian who offered up that he’d once been an assistant to a surgeon and seen such amputations performed. His tools, said Bryant, “were a butcher’s knife, a carpenter’s handsaw, and a shoemaker’s awl to take up the arteries.”
The operation was thus performed with no anesthetic, the leg removed above the knee, and the boy suffering through it “never offering a groan or complaint.” But in watching his face, Bryant could tell the lad was fading, and just as the Frenchman finished, and drew the cord to tie the skin around the stump, he died. The grief of the mother and family was too much to bear, and Bryant ultimately left the scene only to run into acquaintances who invited him to, of all things, a wedding.
It was an unpretentious wedding by any standards, Bryant recalled, the bride being a Miss Lard, “a very pretty young lady,” and the ceremonies performed in a bare tent with cheap candles and a cake “not frosted with sugar, nor illustrated with matrimonial devices.” There was no music or dancing, either, and after being handed a slice of cake Bryant drifted off to the edges of the encampment, where in the dim twilight he “could see by the light of the torches and lanterns the funeral procession containing the corpse of the little boy whom I saw expire, to his last resting place in this desolate wilderness.” As he stood ruminating on this “mournful scene,” a man Bryant recognized passed by to announce that the wife of one of the settlers had “just been safely delivered of a son, and that there was in consequence of this event great rejoicing.”
Here was Bryant’s epiphany, as he suddenly reflected that within the space of two hours and the physical distance of two miles, he had in some fashion been a party to “a death, and a funeral; a wedding and a birth,” and that tomorrow, “in this wilderness, the places where these events had taken place, would be deserted and unmarked except by the grave of the unfortunate boy. Such is the checkered map of human suffering and enjoyment.”
On July 9, two months out from Independence, they got their first view of the Rocky Mountains, “which,” said one of the crew, “seem almost to mingle their summits with the clouds.” Another week and they found themselves at the crest of the South Pass, at an altitude of near 8,000 feet, where even in July the sunrise was cloaked in a veil of frost.
Descending the western slope of the Rockies, the cavalcade entered southern Wyoming, subsequently to become famous for its profusion of superb dinosaur fossils. Even in those days, more than a decade before Darwin published his thought-provoking treatise, it had become fashionable for erudite people to speculate on these absorbing relics. Thus Bryant told his diary, “Many ages ago, in the spot where we are encamped in a crater, there flowed a river of liquid fire [and] the thunders of its convulsions affrightened the huge monster animals which then existed.”
Life on the trail was rarely easy, as we have seen from Kearny’s march down the Santa Fe Trail. But the Oregon Trail, which was also the way to California, presented new challenges. First, it had been in general use for only a year or so, thus there remained many rough or steep sections of the track, while many river crossings had not been thoroughly worked out, often forcing travelers to improvise. Likewise, the trail led through arid deserts and steep mountains, which strained the stamina and resources of the emigrants. And of course there was the omnipresence of the Indians, whose raiding parties carried off stray or lagging cattle, causing the settlers to corral and guard their beasts at night, and who were often quick to prey on and kill or capture anyone who ventured too far from the train.
At one point in the passage a Pawnee chief pulled off a successful shakedown scheme by offering the company “protection.” According to the account reconstructed by Eliza Donner, one of the five Donner girls, it worked this way. “Frequently [the Indians] walked or rode beside our wagons, asking for presents. Mrs. Kehi-go-wa-chuck-ee [the chief’s wife] was made happy by the gift of a dozen strings of glass beads, and the chief also accepted a few trinkets and a contribution of tobacco, after which he made the company understand that for a consideration payable in cotton prints, tobacco, salt pork, and flour, he himself and his trusted braves would become escort to the train in order to protect its cattle from harm, and its wagons from the pilfering hands of his tribesmen. His offer was accepted,” she added, “with the condition that he should not receive any of the promised goods until the last wagon was safe beyond his territory. This bargain was faithfully kept,” Eliza said, “and when we parted from the Indians, they proceeded to immediate and hilarious enjoyment of the luxuries thus earned.”
Numerous wagon trains that left from Independence that year soon invented a rude kind of post office in which informational notes from the leading trains were left for succeeding groups, written on the bleached skulls of dead buffalo or on trees that had been skinned of bark.
They covered the first three hundred miles in relative ease, but when they reached the Platte River in present-day Nebraska the terrain became a wilderness with just a two-rut track to hint that civilization had made any appreciable inroads, and hardly that. Yet the wagon train itself was like a miniature city on the move, encompassing the same joys, sorrows, antagonisms
, and travails of everytown, U.S.A. A knife fight, for instance, between two men angry over who knew what was broken up before blood was drawn, but hostility remained. Axle trees cracked, iron tires around wheels slipped and had to be fixed by a blacksmith, teams of oxen entangled, wheels fell off. Days or even weeks were characterized by mud or dust or both. Tempers flared; Indians kept everyone on edge and men slept with their rifles and carried them during the day at the half-cock. A council was called and proposed to split up the Oregon-bound wagons from those headed to California. It was hoped this would relieve tensions. Bryant had started a journal in which he wrote, “The trip is sort of a magic mirror, and exposes every man’s qualities of heart connected with it, vicious or amiable.”
Before leaving Springfield, Jim Reed and the Donner brothers, George and Jake, had carefully read Lansford Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California. Now, out on the plains, a thousand miles from Independence, and another thousand from Sutter’s Fort on the California side of the mountains, they took stock of the mileage and the distance and fretted over time. It was mid-July, they were behind schedule, and the shortened route that Hastings mentioned in his book began to look appealing.
When he’d written the book for emigrants a full year earlier, Hastings, an enterprising but not very honest Ohio lawyer, had set neither foot nor hoof along this alleged shortcut, the so-called Hastings Cutoff, but apparently had heard of it from mountain men. In fact, it was more or less the same path Frémont had taken when he’d sent Kit Carson ahead across the great desert near Salt Lake to report on Pilot Peak. But Frémont and his party were on horseback and with pack animals, unencumbered by large, heavy wagons pulled by teams of oxen, and, most important, Frémont and his people were seasoned explorers.
Jim Clyman was also a seasoned explorer, a mountain man of some renown, heading back east from California for the umpteenth time, guiding none other than Lansford Hastings, who now got to see firsthand the “cutoff” he’d touted in his book—the one that would “save 300 miles” but actually saved none. Clyman had spent nearly a quarter century in the mountains and had offered to raise a company in support of Frémont right before the Bear Flag rebellion, and coming back now to the States he found himself mistrustful of Hastings, whom he looked upon as a huckster. So when Hastings took his party up the trail from Fort Bridger to try to steer settlers to California instead of Oregon and by his much touted cutoff, Clyman went down the trail to try to steer them the other way. It was there, on June 27, some two hundred miles east of Fort Bridger, that he found himself before a roaring fire at a positive drunk-out near Fort Laramie, where the Owl Russell train, including of course the Donners and the Reeds, had for some cloudy reason decided to lighten their load by selling some of their whiskey to the Sioux and drinking the rest themselves.
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