Stetson, the hotel manager, found a substitute servant, a white woman, who joined the traveling party when the steamship Crescent City glided out of New York Harbor on March 15, 1849. A cheering crowd bid the ship good-bye, and many newspapers took note of the famous explorer’s wife on board. Jessie was on deck with three companions: her daughter, Lily; the new maid; and one of her brothers-in-law, Richard T. Jacob, who had been told to travel for his health and who could serve as Jessie’s escort. Three hundred and thirty-eight passengers crowded the vessel, which a newspaper said was “a larger number . . . than has heretofore gone in any steamer” for Panama. Only 5 of the 338 were female, including Jessie, Lily, and the servant. The men and boys included would-be prospectors and others who hoped to profit by them. One burly passenger, twenty-seven-year-old Collis P. Huntington, was the co-owner of a hardware store in Oneonta, New York, and hoped to set up a branch store in California, obtaining his gold by selling goods that were needed in the goldfields. He was traveling with an initial stock that included rifles, woolen socks, and medicine.
Jessie avoided all such people and retreated to her cabin: “I was too worn down and silenced to care to know strangers.” Once the ship cleared New York Harbor and emerged on the ocean, her brother-in-law also retired to his berth, “thoroughly seasick.” And then Jessie woke in the night to discover the servant stealing items from her trunk. She reported the crime to the captain, who had the servant placed in another part of the ship. Only Lily remained with her. Jessie was more alone than she had ever been.
On the choppy sea off Cape Hatteras, she received a visit from a stewardess, who “made me go into the air.” The sympathetic stewardess arranged a seat for her on the rocking wooden deck beneath the masts and the smoking funnel. “I had never seen the sea,” she said, and “no one had ever told me of the wonderful new life it could bring . . . that grand solitude, that wide look from horizon to horizon, the sense of space, of freshness.” She began to feel of the sea as her husband did. She found some relief from “the numbness of grief” and “morbid dwelling on what was now ended.” In short order she had lost her son, said good-bye to her husband, let go of her mother and father, and separated from nearly everything of the life she had known. Now she plunged forward in a way she never had before. She became aware of the buzz of excitement on the ship and remembered the gold strikes. Above all she remembered her chance to reunite with John, and to do so in the West, which he loved. He might already be in California by now. She felt her optimism return. “Perhaps the sharpest lesson of life,” she said, “is that we outlast so much—even ourselves—so that one, looking back, might say, ‘When I died the first time . . . ’”
* * *
THE LAST LETTER JESSIE HAD RECEIVED from John placed him at Bent’s Fort, the adobe-walled trading post just east of the Rockies. It was the place to which Jessie had addressed her passionate letter to John in 1846, hoping in vain that he would soon find it there. In November 1848 John did stop there to buy extra mules and supplies. The expedition had encountered snow on the prairie and ice when fording the Arkansas River, and men at Bent’s Fort affirmed that winter was arriving early. John didn’t stay long. He pushed westward up the Arkansas to Pueblo, in the future state of Colorado, facing the snowcapped Rockies. He was near the 38th parallel, almost directly west of St. Louis and directly east of San Francisco Bay; and here he asked around for a guide. He needed one because he was not aiming for well-known passes. He meant to move directly westward, through territory much less familiar.
Many lives depended on who gave directions, and the man who took up the challenge was William Williams, known as Old Bill Williams. John knew him; he had worked for the previous expedition when it passed through this region in 1845. Williams was “a man about six feet one inch in height,” according to one description, “gaunt, red-headed, with a hard, weather-beaten face, marked deeply with the small pox.” He was said to be “all muscle and sinew,” worn from his travels but more comfortable outdoors than in. He was an eccentric horseman, who rode with the stirrups so short that his knees nearly touched his chest. But he said he knew passes in the direction John wanted to go, and agreed to try for them even though he expressed doubt about the wisdom of a winter crossing.
Williams, it seemed, had been everywhere and seen everything. As a young man he had lived in western Missouri as a missionary to Indians, but lost interest in converting them and went to live among them. He married an Osage woman, learned the language, and worked for federal Indian authorities as an interpreter and messenger. Sometimes he delivered documents to William Clark, the explorer turned Indian superintendent, and he assisted when Clark persuaded the Osage to sell their land and leave Missouri. Later Williams worked as a fur trapper, ranging as far as California and Canada. Although the perilous and exhausting trade was a young man’s game, he kept on for decades, spending months or years at a time in the mountains before descending into Taos, New Mexico, to cash in his pelts and spend his profits on a drunken spree. He was sixty-two when he proposed to apply his rich experience to guide John’s men, starting by crossing the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) Mountains, which they reached on November 26, 1848. The party numbered thirty-three, after a few had dropped out and Williams joined. They had more than a hundred mules, though the men started out on foot to spare the animals, which were loaded with shelled corn so they could be fed when the grass was covered with snow.
At the end of the first day of climbing, the group made camp near an overlook, where several men had a last glimpse of safety in the east. “The sight was beautiful,” said one of the men, Micajah McGehee, “the snow-covered plain far beneath us stretching eastward as far as the eye could reach, while on the opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.” Each day afterward the journey grew more difficult and the snow deeper, and they had not gone far before John began to lose faith in Bill Williams. “We occupied more than half a month in making the journey of a few days,” John complained, “blundering a tortuous way through deep snow, which already began to choke up the passes, for which we were obliged to waste time in searching.” The loss of time was dangerous, damaging the men’s morale and using the mules’ rapidly dwindling supply of corn. John thought Williams must have “entirely forgotten” the mountains they were crossing, while the mapmaker Charles Preuss wrote a summary judgment in his diary: “It was obvious that Bill had never been here.” Williams did make one remark that suggested he knew the ground, though it was not reassuring: Micajah McGehee heard him say that “two trappers . . . had been frozen to death here the year previous.”
Some expedition members blamed their trouble on John, who was giving the orders. Richard H. Kern, brother of the artist Edward Kern, wrote in his journal that exceptionally deep snow on December 9 should have persuaded John to turn back, but “with the willfully blind eyes of rashness and self-conceit and confidence he pushed on.” At last they descended to the broad valley of the Rio Grande, which led in a westerly direction. John was expecting to follow it upstream to the next mountain chain. (“Usually the snow forms no obstacle to winter traveling” in the valley, he said.) But they found the valley covered in powder too deep for the mules to get at grass, and the animals had eaten nearly all their corn supply. As the men camped in a treeless region of snow-covered sand dunes, the hungry mules tried to flee, setting off eastward en masse. “We had to rise from our beds,” said McGehee, “lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike out in pursuit of them.”
The Rio Grande Valley presented the men with an opportunity to show that they were as wise as the mules, because it gave them a chance to escape. Although John was aiming upriver to the west, he knew that if he changed directions and marched downriver, the valley would bend southward toward small settlements not many miles downstream. Beyond those settlements, about a hundred miles away, was Taos, New Mexico, where Kit Carson lived. A detour of several days could bring the men to safety, s
upplies, a better pass, and possibly a different guide. John did not detour. He was not ready to admit defeat, just as he had delayed almost two weeks before giving up his effort to cross the Great Basin in 1844.
They climbed westward into the San Juan Mountains. Richard H. Kern, who, like his brother Edward, was an artist, sketched bare trees and vertical rock walls, beneath which the men seemed like dots on the snow. John considered this terrain to be “the most rugged, and impracticable of all the Rocky Mountain ranges, inaccessible to trappers and hunters even in the summertime.” If this was so, why was he attempting to cross these mountains in winter, and why would he imagine that railroad tracks could run through them? A railroad required a pass with a slope gradual enough for locomotives pulling heavy loads; John seemed to have lost sight of his purpose. “We pressed onward with fatal resolution,” he confessed. “Even along the river-bottoms the snow was already belly-deep for the mules . . . The cold was extraordinary; at the warmest hours of the day (between one and two) the thermometer (Fahrenheit) standing in the shade of only a tree trunk at zero.” The men in the lead beat down the snow with mauls so that it might hold the weight of those who followed. “Nothing was visible at times through the thick driving snow,” said McGehee. “For days in succession we would labor to beat a trail a few hundred yards in length, but the next day the storm would leave no trace of the previous day’s work.” Men suffered frostbite in their “noses, ears, faces, fingers, and feet.” In the evenings their fires sank down as the snow melted beneath them, creating holes where the men ate from their dwindling food stores; the only item of which they seemed to have brought an inexhaustible supply was coffee. At night, after the men had gone to sleep, starving mules ate the blankets off the backs of other mules, or wandered into camp and tried to eat the blankets off the men.
Having forgotten about finding a pass that was gradual enough for a railroad, John seemed even to forget about finding a pass suitable for men. He led the movement toward a final, bare summit ridge high above the tree line. If they could cross this ridge, he believed, they would leave the watershed of the Rio Grande and enter the watershed of the Colorado River, which would lead them on a mostly downhill path to the west and south. On their first try they were beaten back by a snowstorm. “Old Bill Williams,” said McGehee, “was nearly frozen; he dropped down upon his mule in a stupor and was nearly senseless when we got into camp.” The men lit their fires that night at the same place as the night before. On a second try they crested the ridge, descended the far slope to the first stand of timber, and gathered wood for their fires at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet. John looked back up their trail, which resembled the path of a defeated army: “pack saddles and packs, scattered articles of clothing, and dead mules strewed along.” When he studied the vista westward he saw nothing but snow and more mountains. There was no green grass visible down below, no temperate lower valley as there had been when they emerged from the Sierra Nevada in 1844. There was almost nothing to feed the animals, and no sign of game to feed the men. At last John acknowledged his situation: “It was impossible to advance, and to turn back was equally impracticable. We were overtaken by sudden and inevitable ruin.”
San Francisco Bay lay roughly a thousand miles to the west.
* * *
JESSIE’S SHIP, THE CRESCENT CITY, was carrying her into a world she had known only through books. The ship was bound through Caribbean waters to the coastline of Panama, which she had first learned about in 1842, when she translated the memoir of the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz. His story had begun at the Spanish gold port of Nombre de Dios, on the Panamanian coast, as she recalled when that coast came into view. The pilot of Jessie’s ship maneuvered toward the port of Chagres, where it must have been possible by now to find the harbor entrance by watching out for the wrecks of other ships that had run aground. When the Crescent City safely dropped anchor, the passengers looked out over woodlands. A fort from Spanish times spread across a hilltop to the left, its stone walls gray and mossy in the heat. Nearby lay a town, which a passenger on the ship described as “two or three hundred huts made of bamboo poles and covered with the leaves of the palm.”
Smoke rose over the water, and a little steamboat came into focus beneath it. The boat pulled up alongside the Crescent City, taking on the first of several loads of passengers and mailbags. The boat, Jessie thought when her turn came to transfer over the side, was “as small as a craft could well be to hold an engine . . . It seemed like stepping down upon a toy.” With Jessie’s party and a few others on board it chugged up the tree-lined Chagres River, which led inland and partway across the isthmus. Soon the river became too shallow and rocky for the steamboat, forcing the passengers to transfer to smaller boats, mostly dugout canoes paddled by local crews. Swarms of Americans were making their way up the river that spring, a journey inland of only thirty miles or so that nevertheless took several days against the current. Sleeping in barns or on the bamboo floors of houses, crowds of men woke each morning and spread through the river valley like locusts, paying high prices for coffee and eggs, which they supplemented by hunting in the woods. “The scenery is delightful—the most beautiful I ever saw,” one traveler wrote home, describing how he and his companions shot birds that resembled wild turkeys, lizards on the riverbanks, and even a monkey, which “cried like a child” when hit. “The woods are alive with parrots, chattering away like so many demons.”
Jessie enjoyed a more comfortable journey, because people in Panama had instructions to care for her. They were American engineers, conducting surveys for a railroad across the isthmus to speed the way to California. An investor in the railroad, William Aspinwall, intended it to connect with his new steamship line, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which was starting service from Panama up the coast to California. Aspinwall had spent time in Washington obtaining a $199,000 contract to carry the US Mail to the west coast, and had become a friend of Senator Benton. Naturally the man with the federal contract was pleased to look after the influential senator’s daughter, “with all the sympathies of his kind nature,” as Jessie put it, and he made arrangements for “my comfort and security.” Rather than a dugout canoe, Jessie’s party boarded a whaleboat, larger and steadier on the water. Coming ashore each evening, she slept in an oversize tent prepared by the surveyors. US Army officers were part of the survey, and at each campsite she would find one or two waiting “to see that everything was right, and to have the pleasure of home talk with a lady.”
The Chagres was nevertheless a miserable river for travel. The whaleboat was repeatedly stuck on sandbars. On the last of these Jessie’s brother-in-law Richard Jacob, “being young and strong and a Kentuckian,” impatiently leaped out and helped to drag the boat into deeper water. “He was very triumphant,” Jessie said, until a short time afterward, “when suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell prostrate from sunstroke.” Jacob was treated by a doctor at Gorgona, the next town, who insisted he must flee this climate and recover in New York. Soon Jessie was even more alone.
While lingering at Gorgona—another collection of bamboo huts, surrounding a handful of stone houses—she began to notice something wrong. The town was supposed to be a way station for travelers, where they left the boats and climbed on mules for the next part of the journey, but people seemed to be stuck. “There were hundreds of people camped out on the hill-slopes,” said Jessie. They had yet to make it to Panama City on the Pacific coast—and there was no rush, because Panama City was crowded with travelers awaiting boats to California. The hillsides around Gorgona were, in effect, the back of a line that stretched more than twenty miles to the ocean. “There were many women, some with babies, among these; they were in a hot, unhealthy climate, and the uncertainty of everything was making them ill: loss of hope brings loss of strength: they were living on salt provisions brought from home with them, which were not fit for such a climate, and already many had died.”
Eventua
lly the engineers arranged mules for Jessie’s party, and the ladies joined the line of other travelers that wound through a tropical forest and over a low chain of mountains. They followed a trail that, Jessie was told, had been used since Spanish times. Generations of travelers had worn a groove into the ground (“It was more trough than trail”), yet the path was still barely the width of one mule. They passed through a rock cut so narrow that men had to ride sidesaddle as Jessie did. Jessie was praised for her fortitude by one of the men from the railroad survey, though she felt that she was deceiving him: “The whole thing was so like a nightmare that one took it as a bad dream—in helpless silence.”
At the old walled city of Panama, cannons jutted out of slots in the tops of the walls, and the ocean glittered beyond. Centuries ago the Spanish authorities had built the city on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific; now, for the American travelers, that peninsula was a magnificent dead end. Pacific Mail steamers were supposed to depart regularly between Panama City and San Francisco Bay, but there was a gap in service. A steamship that had departed for California weeks ago had not returned on schedule; another ship that was expected to begin plying the route had yet to make an appearance at all. Any ships in the harbor that could be chartered had long since sailed away filled with would-be gold prospectors. Stranded Americans were crowding into hotels or camping.
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