Hoping to dodge trouble, the gold-seekers clutched their guidebooks like tourists in Paris or Rome today. They had bought gleaming new outfits—“many a man whose legs never crossed a mule stalked along with most terrific spurs clattering at his heels,” one gold-seeker griped—but their gear only marked them as rubes.
“The markets are filled with broken down horses jockeyed up for the occasion,” lamented a California-bound lawyer passing through Saint Joseph, “and unbroken mules which they assure you are handy as sheep.” Farmers, accustomed to sizing up livestock, had a better idea of what they were looking at than did lawyers and clerks, but the debate over which animals to purchase was endless and nerve-racking. A few travelers opted for horses, which were fast but poorly suited to months of hard labor on a grass-only diet. Mules and oxen were better at living off the land and therefore a far more common choice, oxen especially. But how to decide? Mules were hardy and sure-footed but expensive and infuriatingly obstinate. Oxen were stronger and cheaper but prone to hoof ailments and distressingly slow. The expense was serious. A mule cost roughly $75 (about as much as a wagon) and an ox $25, and emigrants needed four or six animals to pull their wagons, plus a few spares in case of trouble.
Decisions, once made, were final. This, too, was new. East of the Missouri River, all the familiar features of life prevailed. “West of that stream,” one emigrant wrote, “were neither states, counties, towns, villages, nor white men’s habitations.” So they had heard, and for once the rumors were largely true. The East was a land of trains, towns, and timetables, with well-traveled roads and well-stocked stores. The West, in one historian’s words, was “the place where civilization ended and the Middle Ages began.”
For many of the gold-seekers, that step back into an earlier age would prove a shock. They had studied their guidebooks, but they had not truly grasped what they had read. They had no idea what it would mean to travel thousands of miles with scarcely any sources of food beyond what you could carry or shoot, no access to water if the river you were following dried up, no recourse if your oxen sickened or your mules died. No idea, above all, what it would mean to cross a vast continent on foot. For no matter its name, the rush was a race run at a crawl. Two miles an hour was a standard pace, fifteen miles in a day good progress.
The guidebooks did provide useful information about the route itself, if not about its hardships. Emigrants knew they would follow the Platte River and then the North Fork of the Platte westward across the Great Plains in what is now Nebraska; then cross the Rocky Mountains at South Pass, in Wyoming, which would mark the halfway point in their journey; then cut across Idaho or the Utah desert—here the maps grew vague—and then trek across Nevada.
Finally, they would climb the Sierra Nevada into California and descend to the goldfields on the mountains’ western slopes. (The first overland party, in 1841, had not been so well informed. “Our ignorance of the route was complete,” one emigrant recalled. “We knew that California lay west, and that was the extent of our knowledge.”)
The gold-seekers knew they had to stick close to water, for themselves and for their animals, and they knew that the calendar would squeeze them hard. They could not start before May, when grass came in on the prairie, and they absolutely had to reach the continent’s far side by November, when snowstorms might block the mountain passes across the Sierra Nevada. (Storms could hit as early as October.) The Donner Party had been trapped in the winter of 1846, less than three years before. The gruesome fate of those California-bound emigrants had horrified the nation—newspapers had wallowed in “the awful truth” about the party’s descent into cannibalism and who had eaten bits of her father’s body or seen her husband’s heart cooked—and the miserable details were still fresh in every traveler’s mind.
But the emigrants did not know that the farther they managed to struggle, the worse the obstacles they would confront. (Nor had the Donner Party: “We are now on the Platte,” Tamsen Donner, the wife of one of the group’s leaders, had written to a friend on June 16, 1846. “We feel no fear of Indians. Our cattle graze quietly around our encampment unmolested.… Indeed if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”)
The endless prairies early on, the first ordeal, would come to seem benign in retrospect. By the time the gold-seekers reached Nevada the trail would be lined with abandoned wagons, dying animals, and a scattering of human skeletons. Buzzards would circle overhead and coyotes skulk just out of reach. Then they would have to drag their wagons up some of the most formidable mountains in North America, tackling jagged peaks and sheer drops beyond the imagination of those who came from parts of the country where a hill a few hundred feet high qualified as a landmark.
Nor did the emigrants have any way of knowing that their very presence would add to the hazards on the trail. In pre–gold rush years, so few travelers had headed west that there was grass and water for all. In post-rush years, trading posts and other amenities would give the journey some of the trappings of routine. But in 1849 and for a few years afterward, the crush was at its peak and conditions were at their worst. Grass was sparse because thousands of animals had devoured it, water was filthy because crowds of humans had contaminated it, and help along the way was almost nonexistent.
No one could have imagined how quickly the West would change. Twenty years after the gold rush, the transcontinental railroad would span the nation. Roads, cities, and factories would rise out of nowhere. A boy born into a world where a galloping horse represented the fastest speed imaginable might one day cruise down a highway in a convertible with the radio blaring. Bronco Charlie Miller, who claimed to be the last of the Pony Express riders, lived to see gas stations and all-night diners where once he had clung to his pony’s neck while dodging Indian arrows. An emigrant named Ezra Meeker, one of the first white settlers in the Northwest, traveled overland to Oregon Territory in 1852. In his old age, he flew in an open-cockpit airplane over the same route he had once inched along in an ox-drawn wagon.
But those changes would come too late for the ’49ers, who found themselves in a predicament too strange to have a name. They had been catapulted ahead in time, to a brand-new world where for the first time a person could get rich overnight. But it was true, too, that they had been flung backward into an ancient, pretechnological era akin to the Middle Ages, a world powered not by coal and steam and machines but by tensed animals and straining muscles.
When the gold-seekers called themselves argonauts, they meant the term as a literary flourish. It was more than that. Prepared or not, they had left behind the familiar features of the nineteenth century. Modern mundanities like bills and shopping errands were irrelevant on the road, and life was reduced to age-old, almost mythic priorities—survival and starvation and the quest for hidden treasure.
CHAPTER FIVE
A DAY AT THE CIRCUS
THE GOLD-SEEKERS AT THE jumping-off towns set out eagerly, shoving their way into line for a ferry across the Missouri. “The crowd at the ferry is a dense mass fighting for precedence to cross,” Joseph Bruff wrote on May 5, 1849. “Two teamsters killed each other on one of these occasions, with pistols, at the head of their wagons.”
Once they had made it across the river, the travelers looked around to get their bearings. With the United States and all its comforts now behind them, they confronted for the first time just what they had volunteered for. “Our first campfire was lighted in Indian Territory, which spread in one unbroken, unnamed waste from the Missouri River to the border line of California,” Luzena Wilson wrote. “Here commenced my terrors.”
Wilson’s terrors, like those of nearly all the emigrants, had mostly to do with Indians, who would no doubt swoop down in the night, tomahawks clutched in their teeth. “I had read and heard whole volumes of their bloody deeds,” Wilson wrote, “the massacre of harmless white men, torturing helpless women, carrying away captive innocent babes.” Tales of Indian depravity
had been a staple of American literature from the earliest colonial days, as popular as crime thrillers today or pulp novels a few generations ago. Readers shivered at first-person narratives of kidnaps, desperate escapes, and tortures. “Gracious God! What a scene presented itself to me! My child scalped and slaughtered… my husband scalped and weltering in his blood,” Mary Kinnan wrote in one of countless similar narratives, in 1795.
As the years passed, the tales grew less earnest and more lurid, the blood and gore ever more explicit. By the 1840s, readers across America put their work aside at day’s end, sank into a favorite chair, and settled down with Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mason, with an Account of the Massacre of her Youngest Child or perhaps Indian Atrocities: Affecting and Thrilling Anecdotes.
No sooner had Luzena Wilson begun her journey and crossed the Missouri River than she found herself surrounded by two hundred of the red fiends. Darkness fell and she cowered in fear. “I felt my children the most precious in the wide world, and I lived in an agony of dread that first night.… I, in the most tragi-comic manner, sheltered my babies with my own body, and felt imaginary arrows pierce my flesh a hundred times during the night.” Finally the sun rose, and the Wilson party set off through Indian country. “I strained my eyes with watching, held my breath in suspense, and all day long listened for the whiz of bullets or arrows.”
The second night proved as harrowing as the first. Wilson saw a wagon train camped nearby and begged her husband to ask if they could all travel together, for protection. The train had a grand name—the Independence Company—and a splendid appearance, with sturdy, mule-drawn wagons, banners flapping in the wind, and a brass band tootling away.
Mason Wilson pleaded on his wife’s behalf. No dice. “They sent back word they ‘didn’t want to be troubled with women and children; they were going to California,’ ” Luzena recalled years later, still indignant at the memory. “My anger at their insulting answer roused my courage, and my last fear of Indians died a sudden death. ‘I am only a woman,’ I said, ‘but I am going to California, too, and without the help of the Independence Company!’ ”
Luzena and Mason and their small wagon train trudged along, on their own. The Independence Company raced ahead, their speedy mules vastly outpacing the Wilsons’ oxen. Luzena watched them vanish in the distance.
They would meet again.
No attack came. The Indians turned out to be “friendly, of course,” Luzena remarked later, and had nothing more dire in mind than trading ponies for liquor and tobacco. (This would not always be the case. In the 1840s, Indians could still look at the tiny trickle of westward-moving whites as more a novelty than a threat, and as a source of trade goods besides. By the 1850s, the trickle of outsiders had grown to a flood, and Indian indifference had shaded into hostility. Even so, the emigrants killed more Indians than the other way round. By the tally of the historian John Unruh, a renowned scholar of westward migration, Indians killed 362 emigrants in the years between 1840 and 1860, and emigrants killed 426 Indians.)
The emigrants’ terror drained away when they saw they would not be attacked. No longer in a panic, they found themselves perplexed and intrigued instead, adrift in an unfamiliar landscape. The long, open, empty views lured them but spooked them, too. “The timber continued four or five miles,” Alonzo Delano wrote, “when it ceased, and the eye rested on a broad expanse of rolling prairie, till the heavens and earth seemed to meet, on one vast carpet of green.”
They had yet to reach the true prairie, but this blankness was dismaying enough. Delano scanned the horizon for something familiar to grab onto. Nothing. “In vain did the eye endeavor to catch a glimpse of some farmhouse, some cultivated field, some herd of cattle cropping the luxuriant grass in the distance; yet no sign of civilization met the eye. All was still and lonely, and I had an overwhelming feeling of wonder and surprise at the vastness and silence of the panorama.”
Nearly all the emigrants, used to forests and fields, struck a similar bewildered note. “Now that we are over [the Missouri], and the wide expanse of the plains is before us,” wrote a woman named Margaret Frink, “we feel like mere specks on the face of the earth.” After another five days’ travel, her awe began to shift toward distaste. Other eyes might have found the vista enticing—rolling hills, a dozen varieties of grass in countless shades of green, darting birds, flitting butterflies, wildflowers—but the emigrants saw only emptiness. “We left all forests behind us at the Missouri River,” Frink went on. “Here the whole earth, as far as the eye can reach, is naked and bare except that a thin growth of grass partly hides the sandy ground.”
The panorama soon grew oppressive. The worst feature of the trip’s first several hundred miles was that the scenery scarcely changed, and the prospect of crossing that infinite expanse came to seem a mockery. The emigrants found themselves in the predicament of swimmers who had never seen the ocean but had nonetheless vowed to cross it.
Some lost heart and turned around. “Gobacks,” as they were called, numbered perhaps several hundred altogether. Emigrants on their way west routinely ran into their discouraged, eastbound counterparts. Joseph Banks, part of an Ohio company of gold-seekers with the jaunty name Buckeye Rovers, noted in his diary that he had met a man who had decided to head back home. “Says he can’t go all the way,” Banks wrote. “Has money enough; loves his wife more than gold.”
Still, considering the hordes heading west, the number of those retreating was minuscule. For most travelers, life at this early stage of the journey retained a quality of cheerful chaos that reality had not yet managed to undo. Wagons carried brash names like Wild Yankee or Gold-Hunter or Helltown Greasers painted on the canvas, or high-toned ones like Pilgrim’s Progress—California Edition. So many wagons flew the Stars and Stripes that, in camp at night, the emigrants looked more like an army than a party of civilians.
But no army had this improvised, helter-skelter feel. “Every mode of travel that ever was invented since the departure of the Israelites has been resorted to this year,” one gold-seeker wrote, and the mood in the early days on the road was more akin to that of a parade than an expedition. “Some drive mules,” Israel Lord wrote, “some oxen, some horses. All kinds of vehicles are en route for California—buggies, carts, boats on wheels, arks.”
One man set out on foot from Saint Joseph, alone, trotting behind a wheelbarrow that contained all his possessions. He covered twenty-five to thirty miles a day, whistling “Yankee Doodle” as he ran. Three hundred miles into his trip, the Scottish-born Wheelbarrow Man turned down an offer to join a wagon train. “Na, na, mun, I ken ye’ll all break doon in the mountains and I’ll gang along myself.” He did continue by himself, all the way to California. When he returned home to Pennsylvania in 1852 (still on his own), he brought with him a fortune of $15,000, some $300,000 in today’s money.
Wheelbarrow Man had no monopoly on unfounded optimism. From the nation’s birth onward, the historian Simon Schama has pointed out, Americans were never more pleased than when they were in motion. To stay at home was not to put down roots but to rust in place. “Happiness for Voltaire was cultivating one’s garden,” Schama observed. “Happiness for Thomas Jefferson was rolling across the continent, gathering the millions of acres needed to make the American homestead.”
Now the gold-seekers had begun rolling their own way across the continent. They were young and on their way to riches, and, mostly, they were happy. As untroubled by their ignorance as campers on their first overnight trip, they reveled in the newness of every sight and experience. A twenty-year-old New Englander named Kimball Webster wrote excitedly, on May 3, 1849, that he and the rest of his company had pitched their own tents, and cooked their own suppers, and slept outdoors. All these were firsts.
So was waking in the middle of that first night, drenched, under sopping wet blankets. Webster and his companions had made camp at the bottom of a hill in a rainstorm. No one had seen how that might not be a good idea, and certainly no one had thoug
ht to dig a trench to divert the water that came streaming down the hillside. Webster good-humoredly chalked up the mistake to “our own innocent ignorance.” For nearly all these boisterous young men, such mishaps weren’t warnings of trouble ahead but opportunities for gleeful teasing of anyone who had blundered even more badly than you had. Everyone was in the same pitching, rocking boat, after all, everyone struggling to master the same skills.
The more ludicrous the pratfalls and the more elegant the victims’ outfits, the better the entertainment. “There is another company from Virginia who are dressed in uniform,” wrote a gold-seeker from Wisconsin. “It is fun to see them breaking mules being, most of them, clerks & mechanics who never had any thing to do with animals. They make awkward business of it and a good deal of sport for the bystanders.”
Mules had a special talent for taking advantage of greenhorns. Anyone foolhardy enough to try riding a mule, rather than strapping a pack to its back or harnessing it to a wagon, quickly regretted his decision. Kicking and bucking, the mules sent would-be riders spinning into the air and then crash-landing, in the words of one observer, “Hell, west & crooked.” They were as “wild as the deer on the prairie,” wrote Kimball Webster, and the emigrants had scarcely any idea how to tame them. “It took as many men to pack a mule as could stand around it,” Webster noted, “and we were obliged to choke many of them before we could get the saddle upon their backs.”
The mules fought gamely and managed to kick many of their would-be packers into submission. Improvised strategies proved no use. “We tried in vain to break our mules by putting large packs of sand on their backs and leading them about,” Webster went on, “but it availed very little.” On their first day on the road, Webster’s company woke at sunrise to pack the mules. After a full day’s futility, they finally took their first steps out of camp at five in the afternoon.
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