They stopped over at the ranch of Kit Carson, whose buckskin outfit, moccasins, and sombrero did not disappoint their expectations. He was attended by a motley entourage of Mexicans and Indians and degenerate Anglos, and he told stories and sold them some horses. In Santa Fe, Pancoast found friends he knew from Missouri and attended a fandango, where he spoke to a beautiful, bright-eyed young Spanish woman who asked whether he had ever met her husband, Joe, who married her and fathered a pretty little girl during the Mexican War. She was hoping he might have sent word about the date of his return. One of the gamblers in his company managed to get beaten, shot, and stabbed for cheating at monte by some Mexican vaqueros wearing tight trousers, lace shirts, and silver buckles.
After several days waiting for Kirker to reappear at camp, the pioneers realized they had been abandoned by their guide, to whom they had paid too much up front, so they continued on to California without him. Probably he had planned to ditch them all along and had used their train simply as a convenient escort across the prairie. Because Kirker still had a ten-thousand-dollar bounty on his head, he was wise to avoid venturing too close to Chihuahua, especially because the latitudinal blunders of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had left the international boundary west of El Paso so uncertain. Much of the southern route west through the lower reaches of the Mimbres Mountains and along the Gila River, not to mention much of southern Arizona, remained legally part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.
Kirker had probably not revealed as much, but he had led his greenhorns into a combat zone, for the War of Apache Scalps was very much alive and was becoming ever more so. In May 1849, quirquismo was ascendant again in Chihuahua, and the state congress renewed the bounty on Apache scalps. It was known as the Kirker bill and, once passed, was called the Fifth Law. A bounty of two hundred dollars was placed on each “barbarous Indian” killed. The law did not specify age or sex. By that time, however, there were plenty of other prospective scalp harvesters in the neighborhood, drifters and adventurers left over from the Mexican War, including John Joel Glanton, whose works and days were immortalized by Cormac McCarthy in his great borderland novel Blood Meridian.
Although Kirker was unable to collect bounties in person, he could easily have discounted them through intermediaries. Certainly he would have learned of the new law as soon as he arrived in New Mexico. The atmosphere in New Mexico might not have been very welcoming. An old Indian trader named Daniel Jones reports in his autobiography, Forty Years Among the Indians, that he ran into Kirker in Santa Fe in 1849 and that people there wanted to lynch him for his part in stirring up the Apaches. All decent men despised him, Jones writes, and for years anytime an Anglo was killed by an Apache, people would remark, “There is another of Kirker’s victims.”
Kirker shows up in San Francisco by October 1850. He died peacefully on his ranch at nearby Mount Diablo in 1852, an old man at fifty-nine. Driving west from Pittsburg to Oakland today, you can take Kirker Pass Road through the low, grassy dun-colored hills.
Pancoast and company made it to California in decent time, passing through Apache country mostly unscathed. They took note of the copper mines of the Mimbres Mountains near Santa Rita, held their noses and drank from scum-covered water holes, marveling at salamanders as they scooted across the mud. Like all wayfarers passing through that country, including the Glanton Gang, Pancoast and his Peoria Pioneers rested at the mission of San Xavier del Bac, south of present-day Tucson, and beheld the elaborately sculpted and painted figures that adorn the great monument even today. Ruins attracted their curiosity, and they wondered at the lives that were led in such a desolate place, now occupied by poisonous insects, owls, and wolves.
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For all who made the journey west along this route, the most difficult passage was through the Sonoran Desert up to Yuma, across the Colorado River, then the perilous crossing through the sands of southern California. Tormented by the sun, teased by mirages, argonauts trudged forward. Progress was slow, because forage for the teams was scarce, so the animals were permitted to range widely at night. Half of the next day would be spent gathering strays. Men grew weak; exhausted women and traumatized children crouched in the shade of their wagons, eyes wide and hollow. Cattle failed, as did mules and men.
Once arrived in California, in San Diego or the dreamy old Spanish town of Los Angeles, argonauts found a most salubrious climate and much California wine to refresh their weathered constitutions. Most made their way north to the goldfields, where they engaged in a frenzy of prospecting, digging, and panning, as well as claim jumping, robbing, and the occasional cold-blooded murder. A device known as a rocker was used to sift dirt and stone from the diggings. If gold was found, a claim was made, but all such holdings were tenuous, and men were often pushed off their claims. Most failed to make their fortunes; some, like the Missourian John Strode Brasfield, saw that supplying miners was often more profitable than joining in digging. Others squatted on land belonging to Mexican ranchers and built homesteads when the owners were forced by American courts of law to compromise. Those who managed to keep their stock alive on the long journey made fortunes selling sheep or mules or oxen at great profit. Sheep purchased in New Mexico for fifty cents might sell for fifteen dollars.
Scurvy was a common affliction, as was dysentery. Inevitably, cholera made its appearance. Murder was routine, and thieves were thick; bandits and Mexican guerrillas roamed the roads. Indians made the occasional raid. An industrious digger with a decent claim might yield twenty or thirty dollars a day, sometimes more; sometimes much more, if a large nugget were found. Pancoast tells the story of a small boulder near his tent that he and his companions often used as a seat. A young miner came to visit one Sunday and asked if he might have the boulder, because he thought he could see a speck of gold on its surface. The miner sold the boulder to a storekeeper for two hundred dollars, and he in turn broke it up and sold the gold he found therein for three thousand dollars.
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No reports of Perry’s activities in the goldfields have come down to us, but everything that I have learned about the man suggests that he would have seen the more certain source of lucre in livestock and other supplies rather than dreary backbreaking speculations in the mud pits of Coloma or Hangtown. Family tradition holds that he made more than one trip to California, which suggests that he profited more from horse and mule flesh than from prospecting. Men who knew the trails and how to handle livestock could make good time, especially if they avoided the company of greenhorns and emigrant families. Perry made the journey by sea as well, according to family tradition, and it’s likely he did so on his return trip.
The sea route would seem to be free from worry compared with the overland slog—no deserts, Indians, or snowy mountain passes and no livestock to husband. Passage on an ocean steamer was easily made, and a ticket from San Francisco to New York could be had for $150, not a small sum, but far less than the cost of an overland journey. Perry and his companions, probably his Adamson relatives, would have disembarked at San Juan del Sur, with perhaps a short stop in Acapulco. From the San Juan harbor it was twelve miles by mule from a rough beach landing to Virginia City, on Lake Nicaragua, where a small steamer ferried passengers across the lake to the San Juan del Norte River, where they could take a light river steamboat across the isthmus to the town of San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, and a northbound steamer for Havana, New Orleans, and points north. From New Orleans, young Perry would have made river passage to Missouri.
If he was traveling with his uncle Jacob, the sea voyage might not have gone so well. In about 1852, Jacob set sail from California with some two hundred men, headed for Nicaragua. A drunk captain and bad weather conspired to set the ship adrift for seventy-four days. After eating through their supplies, including mules, men began to speak of drawing lots to see who would be eaten first. The Adamson group made clear that they’d use their pistols before they submitted to such a lottery. A fresh breeze settled the issue, carrying the
m to port.
In 1854, the same year Charles Pancoast, his wanderings complete, arrived home in Philadelphia, Perry came back to Weston, presumably from California, but probably he had already been in Texas. His cousin Larkin Adamson was gone by then, exchanging his residency in Weston, Missouri, for that of Weston, Texas, in Collin County, part of the old Peters colony north of Dallas. Perry returned to Missouri to fetch his sweetheart, who was also his first cousin, Welmett Adamson. They married and set off, no doubt in the company of other Texas travelers, down an old trail through Indian country known as the Texas Road.
Like most of the western trails supposedly blazed by pathfinders such as Lewis and Clark, John C. Frémont, and Kit Carson, the Texas Road was originally an Indian highway. When Europeans first penetrated the region, it was largely controlled by the Osage, and the well-traveled trail southwest from St. Louis, through what we now call Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma down to the Red River into the land of the Tejas, was known by the Chouteaus and other French traders as the Osage Trace.
The best descriptions of this route come from the writings of Washington Irving. By the time Irving left Cincinnati on September 3, 1832, bound for the western prairies, the Osage Trace was already busy with traffic bound for the Anglo colonies in Mexican Texas. There were eleven thousand Texan colonists in 1832. The first stirrings of rebellion—the brief, quixotic Republic of Fredonia—had been put down a few years before, and within a month fifty-five delegates would meet in San Felipe de Austin, at the Convention of 1832, to draft a petition to the Mexican government for a greater role in the government of their state.
Irving had spent the previous seventeen years living in Europe, tormented with dreams of his homeland. Upon his return, a chance meeting with Henry Ellsworth, appointed by President Andrew Jackson to administer the Indian Removal Act, led to an invitation to visit Fort Gibson in what is now eastern Oklahoma. He left Cincinnati late on a Monday afternoon, aboard a steamer called Messenger, and noted the weather (thundershowers, mist on the water) and the reflections of moonlight playing on the surface of the river. There was some drama on board that night when a passenger was slashed across the face. An old black steward in a white outfit and checkered apron, a handkerchief made of bright madras cotton covering his head, catered to Irving’s various needs. In a journal, Irving sketched fragments of scenes, glimpses and images set off by copious dashes. Here is a passage from Kentucky:
Little, well-dressed negro girl brings in salver of peaches—fat negro wenches drying apples and peach on board under trees—wild gorse, flowers, etc., about house. In neighboring field negro boys exercising race-horses. Flower garden—iron gate on cotton-wood stanchions—flowers and fruits of various kinds.
A few days later, still on the Ohio River:
Evening scene on Ohio—steam-boat aground with two flats each side of her—we take part of cargo on board—moonlight—light of fires—chant and chorus of negro boatmen—men strolling about docks with cigars—negroes dancing before furnaces—glassy surface of river—undulations made by boat—wavering light of moon and stars—silent, primeval forest sleeping in sun-shine—on each side still forest—forest—forest.
Like many Yankee travelers in the South, Irving was especially struck by the behavior and appearance of the slaves, whom he observed with ironic condescension, as when he describes an “old negro steward scolding young negro boys for lying—he aims at monopoly.” He noticed casual injustices, such as the plight of a Negro woman who lived in a log hut by the river, cooking for men who supply boats with firewood. She was cheerful and contented, a good whistler, but when she was asked about her children, the tears welled up: “I am not allowed to live with them—they are up at the plantation.” On the Mississippi he meets a Negro merchant off to New Orleans with forty dozen chickens he bought for a dollar each. He’ll sell them for three and return with “nothing but money,” which he buries. He pays his master at a rate of fifty dollars a year and next year will have enough saved to buy his freedom. He won’t be able to afford to buy his wife or children, but he plans to see them when he can. Later, in Missouri, Irving praises the Negroes for their good cheer and merry laughter, remarking that they are fine gentlemen and the politest people he has met.
Irving’s fellow passengers hailed from all over, each of them personifying a type. There was the merchant from New York, a “smug, dapper, calculating Yankee,” a boastful and reckless Virginian, a Swiss count, and a young Kentucky dandy he calls Black Hawk. The dandy wears a short green merino coat and a low-crowned broad-brimmed hat and plays cards “with a kindred genius.” Irving dubs one serene Quakeress “the Princess Hullaballoo.” Onshore he meets other Quakers, a couple from Philadelphia, settlers for fifteen years who profess homesickness and disgust for the crude poachers they have for neighbors. They regret their removal from the City of Brotherly Love and pray for schools. He visits another log cabin inhabited by a pretty woman from Nashville and her handsome husband. They miss their church and will return to Tennessee soon. Irishmen and Frenchmen come aboard, all with a story or a scheme to get rich. One Frenchman, beguiled by a countryman, bought land sight unseen, expecting paradise in Kentucky, and emigrated with his wife, only to find their promised land was an uncleared wilderness. Having abandoned the fraudulent dream of easy living on the frontier, they were steaming toward New Orleans.
Nine days’ travel brought the famous writer to St. Louis, where he met the great Indian trader Auguste Pierre Chouteau, son of Jean Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, and Governor William Clark, military director for Captain Meriwether Lewis’s celebrated western expedition. His short buggy drive to the governor’s farm crossed a verdant prairie, fragrant with wildflowers. Arriving at the farm, Irving noted the productive orchards of walnut and peach trees, bending to the breaking point under their bounty, grapevines, beehives, happy Negroes (freed from bondage yet continuing in loyal service to the governor) whispering and preparing food on tables in a shady grove, golden sunshine and bright skies and pure breezes, all serenaded by the autumnal lamentations of the cricket. A pastoral wonderland now replaced by weedy fields in fallow, hog farms, and suburbs. On his way back to St. Louis, Irving passed by a circle of Indian burial mounds; a local potentate had built his house so as to use one of these noble sacred sites as a terrace. Irving notes the desecration without comment.
Setting off down the trace toward Independence, accompanied among others by Clark and Colonel Chouteau, as everyone called him, Irving collected Indian lore: Cherokees and Kickapoos, serial victims of American bad faith, had been thrown together as allies and neighbors in a new territory; formerly, they had always sworn to fight until all were dead, and even then, they claimed, their bones would continue the fight. The governor, in a remarkable comment, recommended that Indian horse thievery be understood, and perhaps forgiven, as the only remaining avenue for Indians to achieve honor and distinction.
Two days’ journey from Independence, Irving’s party came to the Grand River, where they encountered a pair of bee hunters, with a wagon drawn by four oxen, carrying large barrels for the honey they’d be harvesting in the vicinity. Most of the honey closer to Missouri had been hunted out. Indians, Irving notes, see the advance of the honeybee across the West as the harbinger of the white man, who brought the honeybee from Europe, and so the pleasure of suddenly finding formerly hollow moldering trunks in their woodlands filled with a sweet, exotic, and ambrosial delicacy must be tempered by the knowledge that their ancient hunting grounds would soon be overrun by pale hordes from the East.
Irving seemed to thoroughly enjoy his jaunt across the prairies toward the frontier, sleeping under the stars, dining on honey cakes and roast ducks, entertaining pretty pioneer wives with his stories, taking notes on Indian language and customs. The Osage, he learned, never ate breakfast early when traveling; the women led horses packed with skins for beds, corn, meat, puppy dogs, babies wrapped up in papooses. Young men walked. The Osage were tall and erect. The women, when they rode, carr
ied umbrellas against the hot sun. Noble and austere, like ancient Romans, the Osage remained aloof from the whites.
The Creeks, in contrast, reminded Irving of Turks or Arabs, wearing bright fringed calicos of brilliant colors, embellished with twinkling beads and tassels, and gaudy bolts of cloth bound about their heads like turbans.
As a man of culture and refinement, Irving was particularly fascinated by the mechanics of hunting and killing. “Man is naturally an animal of prey; and, however changed by civilization, will readily relapse into his instinct for destruction,” he wrote after a deer hunt. “I found my ravenous and sanguinary propensities daily growing stronger upon the prairies.”
Irving’s blood rose when a prairie wolf appeared within range and the expedition’s half-breed scouts instantly pursued it. He jumped out of his wagon and mounted his pony to join in the chase, and though their tactics were sound, the beast escaped. Another quarry presented itself shortly, and again the company mounted its charge, along with a greyhound named Henry Clay. After the horsemen attempted to trample the wolf, someone managed to fire off one barrel, breaking the animal’s leg. “We surround and kill him.”
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