by H. W. Brands
Some of the Indians expressed regret at her departure, but others exploited it. The effort to scare away the missionaries escalated. The grain mill at the mission, which provided the staff of life to the Whitmans and all associated with them, was set ablaze. “Probably there was more than two hundred bushels of wheat and corn burnt and some flour,” Narcissa wrote to her parents. “The mill bolt and threshing mill, even to part of the wheel, was burnt.” She wondered if it was her fault for leaving her station. “I think, sometimes, if I had not left perhaps it would not have been burnt.” She struggled to see God’s message in this latest trial. “The sensible part of the Cayuses feel the loss deeply, and they will feel it still more when they want their wheat ground next fall. We hope it will be a good lesson to them and be one of making them a better people.”
22
THE WAY WEST
MARCUS WHITMAN LEARNED OF THE ASSAULT ON Narcissa and the burning of the mill only months after the fact. But the knowledge that his wife was in peril every moment he was gone, and that the mission that had become his life’s work could be destroyed in a moment of Indian rage, compelled him to leave Boston as soon as the board gave him its blessing. He stopped briefly in western New York to see members of his family, then proceeded as swiftly as he could to the Missouri.
En route he heard that a large group of emigrants was preparing to leave for Oregon. During the 1830s about the only traffic to the Columbia, aside from fur traders and the odd adventurer, had consisted of missionaries like the Whitmans, but in the early 1840s prospective settlers began to join the flow. Knowing that Whitman had guided women to Oregon made them think the journey was feasible for ordinary folks, and the combined success of Whitman, Joe Meek and Robert Newell in getting wagons to the Columbia caused them to conclude that whole households might be relocated. A handful of emigrants reached the Willamette in 1841; several dozen arrived in 1842.
The news that no great disasters had befallen the emigrants prompted still more to line up for departure in the spring of 1843. By now the mystery of the trek had been largely dispelled; the key points of the route were understood, the difficult passages plotted, the places where the danger of Indians dictated special precautions identified. The journey was still no stroll in the park; the emigrants would be at the mercy of the weather, sleeping roofless for months, chilled at times, broiling at others. Axles would break and oxen grow weary; children would fall under wagons or be kicked by mules; guns would discharge accidentally; women would die in childbirth. But the emigrants knew where they were going and how long the journey might take. Equally important, they knew that others no stronger, braver or more resourceful than they had survived the trek. So could they.
Whitman changed boats in St. Louis, where he visited Thomas Hart Benton. Besides being Missouri’s senior senator and an ardent advocate of America’s westward expansion, Benton was the father-in-law of John C. Frémont, a U.S. army officer who had already made a name in western exploration and who was about to embark on an expedition to Oregon. The three men brought different perspectives to the Oregon question: Whitman that of the missionary, Benton of the statesman, Frémont of the soldier. Their simultaneous presence in St. Louis in 1843 embodied the surge of interest in Oregon. Whitman shared his knowledge of Oregon with the others; Benton told of his political plans for binding Oregon to America; Frémont traced on a map the route he hoped to traverse. They agreed that America’s western future had never been brighter.
PETER BURNETT LATER REMEMBERED WHAT HAD PROMPTED him to set out for Oregon with the 1843 wave of emigrants. Burnett was a Tennessean by birth and a Missourian since boyhood. He was a self-educated lawyer who had made himself unpopular with his neighbors by defending Joseph Smith and other Mormons charged with treason and lesser crimes. He was a merchant drowning in debts he saw no prospect of repaying. And he was a family man who at thirty-five couldn’t figure out how to support his family in anything like the style he wished for them.
“There was a bill pending in Congress, introduced in the Senate by Dr. Linn, one of the Senators from Missouri, which proposed to donate to each immigrant six hundred and forty acres of land for himself, and one hundred and sixty acres for each child,” Burnett recalled. “I had a wife and six children, and would therefore be entitled to sixteen hundred acres.” The Linn bill had not yet passed, and it was no sure thing, as the brazenness of the land grab it proposed gave pause to many in Congress. The United States had no title to the land Linn sought to bestow. The joint occupation agreement with Britain was still in force, and the British had as much claim on Oregon as the Americans did. Employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, various missionaries and a modest number of settlers had established farms on parcels of land in the Willamette Valley, but no government had graced their squatting with legal authority. Moreover, the United States government had never given away land before. It had sold land from the public domain, but gifts were another matter. The recipients would be happy for the gifts, of course, but many of the potential donors, the taxpayers of America, expected the government to be a better steward of the nation’s resources.
Yet the possibility of the gift, under the prospective aegis of American federal power, was enough to set Peter Burnett and several hundred other emigrants on the trail to Oregon in the spring of 1843. “I saw that a great American community would grow up, in the space of a few years, upon the shores of the distant Pacific; and I felt an ardent desire to aid in this most important enterprise,” Burnett wrote. He was aware that the British had by no means abandoned their claim to Oregon, but he thought the emigrants could force them to. “If we could show, by a practical test, that American emigrants could safely make their way across the continent to Oregon with their wagons, teams, cattle, and families, then the solution of the question of title to the country was discovered. Of course, Britain would not covet a colony settled by American citizens.”
In the bargain, Oregon would give Burnett a second chance. His creditors at first sought to prevent his fleeing Missouri, but he made a case that flight was in their best interest. “I said that if Dr. Linn’s bill should pass, the land would ultimately enable me to pay up. There was at least a chance. In staying where I was, I saw no reasonable probability of ever being able to pay my debts.” The creditors reluctantly accepted Burnett’s reasoning—much as the creditors of Moses and Stephen Austin had accepted their reasoning about Texas. Burnett’s creditors wished him well and joined the ranks of those rooting for passage of the Linn bill.
Burnett sold what he hadn’t already lost, and purchased three wagons, four yoke of oxen, two mules and provisions for the journey. He traveled around Missouri to find others to join him on the journey west. “I visited the surrounding counties, making speeches wherever I could find a sufficient audience, and succeeded even beyond my own expectations.”
In the same way that the trappers and merchants had arranged their rendezvous in the mountains each summer, the emigrants of 1843 arranged a rendezvous on the prairie that spring. Burnett and his party reached the appointed spot, a dozen miles west of Independence, Missouri, on May 17. A look at the crowd made him reassess the challenge of the journey. “It was not that the trip was beset with very great perils, for we had no war with the Indians,” Burnett recalled. Rather, it was little things that would test the travelers. “At one time an ox would be missing, at another time a mule, and then a struggle for the best encampment, and for a supply of wood and water; and in these struggles, the worst traits of human nature were displayed, and there was no remedy but patient endurance. At the beginning of the journey there were several fisticuff fights in camp; but the emigrants soon abandoned that practice, and thereafter confined themselves to abuse in words only. The man with a black eye and battered face could not well hunt up his cattle or drive his team.”
The emigrants might have found their way to verbal abuse unaided, but they wouldn’t have found their way to Oregon, and so they were thrilled when Marcus Whitman, on his way back to Orego
n, appeared at the rendezvous. Peter Burnett and the others took comfort from the knowledge that they would travel with one so experienced.
Whitman had his own impression of the emigrants. “They appear very willing, and I have no doubt are generally of an enterprising character,” he wrote his brother-in-law. “There are over two hundred men, besides women and children, as it is said. No one can well tell, until we are all on the road and get together, how many there are.”
As things happened, no one ever did figure out how many emigrants there were that year. Estimates varied from eight hundred to twelve hundred. No government authority gave them leave to depart and none greeted them on arrival in Oregon. No one kept a tally. But beyond doubt they were many more settlers than had ever ventured to the American West at once. Descriptions of the westering army caught the American imagination: a mighty people was on the march. They were the American dream in motion. Even many Americans who were content to stay in the East thrilled at what this great migration said about the energy of their country and its bright future.
Whitman was encouraged by what he saw. “The immigrants who are going out will be a good acquisition,” he predicted. Oregon would benefit. “My expectations are high for that country. I believe it must become one of the best of countries very soon.”
“IT IS FOUR O’CLOCK A.M.,” JESSE APPLEGATE WROTE, DESCRIBING a day on the trail that season. Applegate would win a reputation, albeit checkered and controversial, as a trailblazer to Oregon, but in the spring of 1843 he took his pedestrian turn with the cow column on the emigrant march up the Platte. The news from Oregon had indicated that cattle were scarce there and expensive, and many of the emigrants brought stock with them. The cattle were gathered into a large herd for a longer drive than any Americans had ever attempted.
“The sentinels on duty have discharged their rifles—the signal that the hours of sleep are over—and every wagon and tent is pouring forth its night tenants, and slow-kindling smokes begin largely to rise and float away in the morning air,” Applegate continued. “Sixty men start from the corral, spreading as they make through the vast herd of cattle and horses that make a semicircle around the encampment, the most distant perhaps two miles away.” Each night the cattle and horses were turned loose to graze, guarded by sentinels to keep Indians from poaching. The guard was never fully secure, and so each morning the herders examined the grass at the edge of the grazing ground for signs that animals had been driven off. If they had, a retrieval party was organized and dispatched. Sometimes the animals were recovered from the Indians, often by ransom; sometimes they were written off as a loss.
This dawn there were no signs of disturbance, and the day shift commenced its work. “By 5 o’clock the herders begin to contract the great, moving circle, and the well-trained animals move slowly towards camp, clipping here and there a thistle or a tempting bunch of grass on the way. In about an hour five thousand animals are close up to the encampment, and the teamsters are busy selecting their teams and driving them inside the corral to be yoked.” The corral was a circle of wagons, some hundred yards in diameter, with the tongue of each wagon chained to the rear of the wagon ahead of it on the perimeter. The corral served the second purpose of a stockade in the event of Indian attack. To the gratification of the emigrants of 1843, this purpose was never utilized.
“From 6 to 7 o’clock is a busy time; breakfast is to be eaten, the tents struck, the wagons loaded and the teams yoked and brought up in readiness to be attached to their respective wagons,” Applegate explained. “All know when, at 7 o’clock, the signal to march sounds, that those not ready to take their proper places in the line of march must fall into the dusty rear for the day.” Otherwise there was a strict rotation on the march. One day’s lead wagon became the trailer the next day, moving stepwise toward the front on each successive day.
“It is on the stroke of seven; the rush to and fro, the cracking of whips, the loud command to oxen, and what seemed to be the inextricable confusion of the last ten minutes has ceased. Fortunately every one has been found and every teamster is at his post. The clear notes of a trumpet sound at the front; the pilot and his guards mount their horses; the leading divisions of the wagons move out of the encampment and take up the line of march; the rest fall into their places with the precision of clock work, until the spot so lately full of life sinks back into that solitude that seems to reign over the broad plain and rushing river as the caravan draws its lazy length towards the distant El Dorado.”
On this morning Applegate accompanied the hunters, a band of young men on horses who ranged to the side of the column in search of buffalo and antelope. They rode for an hour to the bluffs that here marked the edge of the Platte Valley. Applegate stopped to take in the view. “To those who have not been on the Platte,” he wrote, “my powers of description are wholly inadequate to convey an idea of the vast extent and grandeur of the picture, and the rare beauty and distinctness of the detail. No haze or fog obscures objects in the pure and transparent atmosphere of this lofty region. To those accustomed only to the murky air of the seaboard, no correct judgment of distance can be formed by sight, and objects which they think they can reach in a two hours’ walk may be a day’s travel away.” The expanse swallowed sounds; the report of a rifle carried mere furlongs. Yet the puff of smoke from the barrel could be seen for miles.
Applegate looked back toward the Platte. “The broad river glowing under the morning sun like a sheet of silver, and the broader emerald valley that borders it, stretch away in the distance until they narrow at almost two points in the horizon, and when first seen, the vast pile of the Wind River Mountains, though hundreds of miles away, looks clear and distinct as a white cottage on the plain.”
From his vantage, Applegate could see the past, present and future of the march. The camp of the previous night had been left behind; the wagons rumbled forward; the scouts ranged ahead seeking the best path. “Near the bank of the shining river is a company of horsemen,” Applegate wrote, recognizing the scouts. “They seem to have found an obstruction, for the main body has halted while three or four ride rapidly along the bank of the creek or slough. They are hunting a favorable crossing for the wagons. While we look, they have succeeded; it has apparently required no work to make it passable, for all but one of the party have passed on, and he has raised a flag, no doubt a signal to the wagons to steer their course to where he stands. The leading teamster sees him, though he is yet two miles off, and steers his course directly towards him, all the wagons following in his track.”
The train was a linear village. “They (the wagons) form a line three-quarters of a mile in length; some of the teamsters ride upon the front of their wagons, some march beside their teams; scattered along the line companies of women are taking exercise on foot; they gather bouquets of rare and beautiful flowers that line the way; near them stalks a stately greyhound, or an Irish wolf dog, apparently proud of keep watch and ward over his master’s wife and children. Next comes a band of horses; two or three men or boys follow them, the docile and sagacious animals scarce needing this attention, for they have learned to follow in the rear of the wagons, and know that at noon they will be allowed to graze and rest. Their knowledge of time seems as accurate as of the place they are to occupy in the line, and even a full-blown thistle will scarce tempt them to straggle or halt until the dinner hour has arrived.”
The cattle, bringing up the rear, were a different story. “Lazy, selfish and unsocial, it has been a task to get them in motion, the strong always ready to domineer over the weak, halt in the front and forbid the weak to pass them,” Applegate observed. “They seem to move only in the fear of the driver’s whip; though in the morning, full to repletion, they have not been driven an hour before their hunger and thirst seem to indicate a fast of days’ duration. Through all the long day their greed is never satisfied, nor their thirst quenched, nor is there a moment of relaxation of the tedious and vexatious labors of their drivers, although to all others the m
arch furnishes some season of relaxation and enjoyment. For the cow-drivers there is none.”
Applegate decided that his sightseeing must end for the day. He rode back to the column in time for the nooning, the midday break. The pilot had selected the spot as having grass and water; the scouts improved the water supply by scooping shallow wells by the bank of the Platte that served as watering troughs for the animals. The oxen were not unyoked but merely let loose from the wagons; they grazed in pairs. The wagons were drawn up in columns rather than circled. The men, women and children ate without fuss or extensive preparation.
The business of the train was conducted at the noontime halt. On this day the business was judicial, with the elected council of the train seated as a court. One of the emigrants had hired a younger man to help with the work of the journey in exchange for bed and board. A dispute had arisen between the two, and the council was convened to resolve it. Each party was questioned; other members of the train were summoned as witnesses. The council rendered its decision, which was enforced by the cooperation of the train as a whole. The process permitted no appeal.
“It is now one o’clock,” Applegate wrote. “The bugle has sounded and the caravan has resumed its westward journey.” The warmth of the afternoon, the demands of digestion and the repetitiveness of the undertaking gradually took their toll. “A drowsiness has fallen apparently on man and beast; teamsters drop asleep on their perches and even when walking by their teams, and the words of command are now addressed to the slowly creeping oxen in the soft tenor of women or the piping treble of children, while the snores of the teamsters make a droning accompaniment.”
An unexpected occurrence broke the spell, at least for those close at hand. “An emigrant’s wife, whose state of health has caused Doctor Whitman to travel near the wagon for the day, is now taken with violent illness. The Doctor has had the wagon driven out of the line, a tent pitched and a fire kindled. Many conjectures are hazarded in regard to this mysterious proceeding, and as to why this lone wagon is to be left behind.” But left behind it had to be, for the train had many miles to go, with the threat of winter always looming between the emigrants and their final destination.