Fool's Gold

by Steve Stroble

two of you can share a wagon. You need another $100 or so for ferry tolls and what you buys at the forts and Salt Lake City. I charge $10 per wagon to guide you. That’s the going rate so I thinks it’s fair.”

  “Can we bring our wives along?”

  Dan pulled a well-worn book from his coat’s pocket and flipped through its pages. “This here is called Guide to Oregon and California. An expert wrote it a few years back. This is what it says about womenfolk on the trail: Your mama, sisters, wives, and daughters can’t help you out none on the trail. You gots to drive stock through every kind of weather, over mountains, deserts, and rivers while you’re on foot gitting blisters. There’s snakes, bugs, injuns, bears, coyotes, wolves, buffalo stampedes, and all sorts of disease.” Dan paraphrased what he read to drive home his point. “Now I knows you loves your wives and all but you can’t be bringing them along. All the experts say so. You can read it for yourself if you want.” Dan handed it to the one who had asked the question.

  “So we’ll be bringing a stove, the tools to dig the gold, and tents, then?”

  “Only if you want to end up tossing out most of it by the trail. Listen, it’s more than 2,000 miles or thereabouts from the Missouri River to the gold fields. You haul too much stuff along with you and yer animals give out and fall over and die on you for sure. I saw lots of dead stock along the trail when I came back here last summer. They give out and you’re left with only the food you can carry on yer back. You can buy all your gold digging tools once you git there. Only bring the tools you need to repair the wagons with. And no water barrels. They’re ox killers. The water plumb weighs way too much. Bring two changes of clothes, two guns and lots of powder and caps. Or bullets if you got one of them new fangled kind of guns. I been thinking of getting me one. And 250 pounds of food per man.”

  “But I’ve heard that the other wagon trains are taking at least 300 pounds of food for each person.”

  “And leaving some of it on the trail to rot. We got to travel light as possible. That reminds me. Each one of you bring at least one box or suitcase full to the top of newspapers and as much silverware as you can wrangle. They don’t weigh much but be worth their weight in gold out on the trail, boys.”

  Many in the crowd stared quizzically at the guide.

  “Folks at the forts and Salt Lake are starving for news from back east. You can trade the papers for fresh grub instead of the usual salt pork, stinky dried up beef, biscuits, beans, and coffee you’ll be eatin’ on the trail all the time. The silverware is to trade with the injuns. They’ll give you fish, duck, geese, deer, or buffalo meat for a spoon or fork. Nothing tastes better than fresh game when you’re walking the trail.” He smacked his lips.

  “Can’t we buy the silverware before we leave Independence?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell ye. We’ll be leaving from Kanesville, not Independence.”

  “Why?”

  The entire gathering squeezed toward a sidewall on which hung a map of North America. One man pointed, first at Independence, Missouri, and then Kanesville, Iowa. Within three years Kanesville would be renamed as Council Bluffs.

  “But it’s a lot farther north if we start way up there.”

  “Which only means that there’ll be a whole lot less people.” Dan winked. “If we leave from Kanesville and travel on the north side of the Platte River we’ll have less wagon trains always trying to get ahead of us. On my way back from the Rockies last summer I saw maybe a couple thousand people heading west on the trail. This year there’ll be ten times as many I reckon, on account of the gold strike.”

  His estimate for 1848 was fairly accurate. In that year about 400 souls successfully traveled the California trail, while many more went to Oregon. By the end of 1849 over 25,000 would head west by wagon to California. The following year about 44,000 would travel on the trail.

  “Besides if we leave from Independence there’s five or six more river crossings and three or four more if we leave from St. Joe,” Dan said. “Look, boys. I’m only trying to make it easier on you. People and livestock drown while crossing water sometimes, especially if they ain’t never learnt how to swim.”

  One by one the members’ objections, fears, and reservations were met; their questions answered. A half hour later the guide announced his immediate need. “All this talking has me as dry as noontime on the trail on the Fourth of July. How’s about that drink?”

  At the next meeting it was decided that the company would leave Elmira on March 28 so that they could meet Dan in Kanesville sometime in April. The guide would go on ahead to begin purchasing the wagons and livestock that would take the 62 adventurers westward. Twenty of the company insisted on bringing their own wagons from home. They planned to sell the horses that hauled the wagons on the first leg of the journey in Pittsburgh and then ship the wagons on the riverboats that also would take them to Kanesville. There they would buy oxen. Independent spirits, they also planned to carry a few items that Dan had advised against. Their ringleader, Mr. Smithton, planned to haul more contraband than the other 19 combined. Rudolph was elected to travel with Dan to ensure that the entrusted money would be spent on oxen, wagons, food, and equipment at Kanesville and not gambled away or drunk up on a riverboat.

  On February 27, 1849 Dan and Rudolph left by stagecoach and then train to Pittsburgh. They had to wait a week for the ice to melt enough on the Ohio River for the steamboats to start their routes southwestward toward the Mississippi River. It was slow going as the steamboat’s pilots dodged the ice flows. By the time they reached Cairo, Illinois and the junction with the much wider Mississippi, warmer weather had eliminated part of the ice. They boarded another steamship headed north and in a few days arrived in St. Louis.

  Dan felt obligated to introduce Rudolph to every saloon and dance hall. Anxious to keep moving, Rudolph ended their sightseeing by convincing Dan that the sooner they arrived in Kanesville the better deals they would get on their purchases.

  “The prices are sure to go up as more people show up there.” He hoped he could convince the lackadaisical guide. “I think it is called demand and supply.”

  “Huh? Hadn’t thought of that. Good thing they picked you to come along, boy. You got the smarts. I got the knowledge. We make a team, huh?”

  Next they traveled due west on the Missouri River, which bisected the state of the same name. Rudolph grew increasingly anxious when over half of the ship’s passengers disembarked at Independence, the first choice for those heading to Oregon or California. Another large contingent got off two days later in St. Joseph. Here Dan and Rudolph transferred to a smaller riverboat, which was headed still further north up the Missouri. When over half of those passengers went ashore at Old Ft. Kearney, he could contain himself no longer.

  “I have heard the passengers talking on every boat we’ve been on. All the ones who say they are going to California have gotten off at Independence, St. Joseph, and now Old Ft. Kearney. They said the further north you go the more dangerous the Indians are. Others have said only Mormons take the trail from Kanesville.”

  “So?” Dan ignored his anxiety.

  “But are you certain that is the best place to start?”

  “Look, son. The Pawnees and Sioux along the first part of the trail we take ain’t no worse than the Cheyenne, Shawnee, and Delaware that the wagon trains on the trails out of Independence, St. Joe, and Old Ft. Kearney run into at first. Besides our trail merges with all of them other trails once we get as far as Ft. Laramie. You can swap stories ‘bout injuns and such with those you heard gabbing on the steamboats once we git to Ft. Laramie.”

  “Uhhh…. But won’t they all get there before us? They’ll all get to the gold first. Our company won’t be to Kanesville for another five weeks.”

  “No one in their right mind starts out on the prairie ‘til the spring rains lets up. If they do they git their wagons stuck in mud up to their axles. They’ll wear their livestock out in the first 100 miles because the grass won’t be high enough to feed
‘em.”

  “But what about the Mormons? They say they are dangerous.”

  “Boy, you think too much, which makes you worry too much, which makes you talks too much. What about them? The only ones of them I ever met who was hostile was on account of them being run off their land back east. If’n you lets ‘em knows you got no beef with ‘em they lets you alone, like most folks act. Can’t ever figger out how come they wants more than one wife, though. I always had enough trouble with one at a time, whether they be injun or white.” Dan saw that his companion still worried. “Look boy, every guide I talked to last summer complained about how crowded the Oregon Trail was. It’s only gonna be a whole lot worse off this year. Trust me.”

  Kanesville was much smaller than Independence but demand had brought in outfitters who imported wagons and livestock to sell to those headed west. In addition the numerous farms surrounding it had farmers who knew that supplying all of the Argonauts would be a steady supplemental income. That income cushioned the uncertainties of trying to make a living on the high prairie land by growing crops that the weather could either sustain or destroy. Dan and Rudolph experienced such weather a month after arriving in Kanesville. The day had started pleasantly enough without a cloud in the sky but by late