The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  For Jennie and Thomas Megquier, rescue came in the form of the steamer Oregon. Like the California, the Oregon had left New York in the autumn of 1848 and sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco. The Oregon, too, planned to sail a Pacific circuit. But the Oregon trailed a month behind the California. Her captain had heard all about how the crew of the California had bee-lined their way to the diggings. When he reached San Francisco, he put his men in chains.

  On May 22, the Megquiers squeezed their way onto the Oregon, taking their place among (by Jennie’s tally) “four hundred passengers, five ladies, and two servants.” Jennie had written to her nine-year-old son, Arthur, the day before. “I am now writing the last letter to my little boy that I shall write in Panama,” she assured him. “I am going aboard the steamboat Oregon in the morning to go to California in the morning.… I shall pick up the lumps and come home as quick as possible.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  GONE!

  FOR SEA VOYAGERS LIKE the Megquiers, the summer of 1849 marked the end of their long journey. Safe in California, they could turn their thoughts to cashing in. For emigrants on the overland route, on the other hand, summer meant that they had reached the worst deserts on their crossing at the worst time of year.

  Nevada in summer baked under a relentless sun. Squinting against the light, tiny figures inched across a vast landscape empty of nearly everything but sage, sand, and distant mountains. Even today, in a car on a highway, the isolation can make you feel trapped in an end-of-the-world movie. Not only are there no towns or motels or billboards, but there are not even other cars. When the gas gauge hits the halfway mark, you start to worry about whether you’ll find a station before you reach empty.

  Nature dictated the emigrants’ route—they needed to follow a river, and the foul-tasting, algae-covered Humboldt was the only possibility. So many animals had died in the Humboldt and along its banks, one traveler wrote, that the river was “nothing but horse broth, seasoned with alkali and salt.” And it was not only that the river was filthy. Just as bad, the Humboldt meandered in the slowest, most maddening way, nearly doubling back on itself over and over and over again. Where it curved, it pooled up, and scum and mosquitoes flourished.

  This was water, but barely. “The reader should not imagine the Humboldt to be a rapid mountain stream, with its cool and limpid waters rushing down the rocks of steep inclines,” wrote one dismayed emigrant. “There is not a fish nor any other living thing to be found in its waters, and there is not timber enough in three hundred miles of its desolate valley to make a snuff-box, or sufficient vegetation along its banks to shade a rabbit.”

  In the blasting desert heat—one emigrant recorded a temperature of 140 degrees—water was a constant preoccupation, and even the most putrid drink was better than none at all. Doctors and lawyers who five months before had sent waiters scurrying for another glass of wine now filled a tin mug in the warm, rancid river and gulped it down. “In the creek we found great numbers of the carcasses of dead horses and cattle,” wrote Franklin Langworthy, a minister from Illinois. “It requires some little practice to relish a beverage in which putrescent flesh has been for months steeping. But here we have no choice.”

  Newspaper accounts beckoning travelers to the Golden West had never featured scenes like these. “I have seen a man eating his lunch and gravely sitting upon the carcass of a dead horse,” Langworthy went on, “and we frequently take our meals amidst the effluvia of a hundred putrescent carcasses.”

  One traveler detailed the process of collecting drinking water from the Humboldt. “For about ten days the only water we had was obtained from the pools by which we would camp. These pools were stagnant and their edges invariably lined with dead cattle that had died while trying to get a drink. Selecting a carcass that was solid enough to hold us up, we would walk out into the pool on it, taking a blanket with us, which we would wash around and get as full of water as it would hold, then carrying it ashore, two men, one holding each end, would twist the filthy water out into a pan, which in turn would be emptied into our canteens, to last until the next camping-place.”

  The emigrants choked down the tepid, salty liquid, gagging on the rotten-egg smell. “Our great want now is: water! water!! water!!!” one traveler moaned, as he stumbled along the Humboldt and fantasized about cool, soothing, satisfying drinks. “Good spring water, good well water, good snow water, good river water. Our dreams are of water.”

  Thirst killed animals and drove men mad. Even the most mundane diarists, whose entries virtually never ranged beyond notations of the number of miles covered, lavished a few words on these horrifying scenes. “One of the men had got crazy and took most of the cover off the wagon,” one emigrant wrote. “They had to hold him & pour water in his mouth twice before he knew enough to drink.”

  Alonzo Delano pushed along gamely, but ankle-deep ash and dust made each step an ordeal. Hoping for firmer ground, Delano ventured off the trail, only to find that “the parched and dry alkaline crust broke under our feet like frozen snow.”

  Breathing proved as hard as walking. Gusts of wind swept ash and alkaline grit into the air and hurled it in the emigrants’ faces. Dust stung their eyes, filled their nostrils, choked their throats, coated their food. “Suppose dry ashes and fine sand were thoroughly mixed together,” Bernard Reid wrote to his brother back home in Pennsylvania, “and I should take a shovel and toss a large pile of the mixture against your face, head, and whole body—suppose then you should run up and down a steep hill in a hot August sun till the perspiration oozed from every pore almost in streams. Let me then give you another coating of dust and ashes; and your appearance would then be a pretty good sample of that of every one of us, at every noon and night halt.”

  Even the staunchly religious seemed shaken by the bleak vistas. They wrote with a bit of extra fervor, in whistling-past-the-graveyard fashion. “It is a dreary barren spot,” wrote a young gold-seeker from Ohio, “but the Lord Jehovah is here. The universe is his great Temple—and the devout worshipper can everywhere look up to his Father in Heaven and be in fellowship with him.”

  Bernard Reid felt no such inspiration. “Towards sundown,” he wrote, “the air becalms and the dust after rising a few feet high overspreads the plain like a lake of smooth muddy water. Along our line of wagons some are completely submerged in it. Others show only their tops, which seem to go floating along like little boats in the water. Here and there the heads of the men on foot stick up and glide along in rows and groups like ducks on a pond.”

  Deprivation and miles had toughened and transformed everyone. Greenhorns they had been, but that seemed long ago. (“On leaving home it looked like a hardship to sleep upon the ground,” Alonzo Delano recalled, “but habit had changed us so completely that I could sleep as well and sweetly on a bare rock as upon a bed of down.”) The gold-seekers had gained skills and confidence, but they had come almost to the end of their strength. “The appearance of emigrants has sadly changed since we started,” wrote an Illinois man. “Then they were full of life and animation, and the road was enlivened with the song of ‘I am going to California with my tin pan on my knee / Oh, California, that’s the land for me.’ But now they crawl along hungry and spiritless, and if a song is raised at all, it is, ‘Oh carry me back to Old Virginia, to Old Virginia’s shore.’ ”

  Men took to walking at night, in the hope that it would be cooler. Wolves howled in the distance and sometimes crept close when the exhausted travelers fell to the ground to sleep. Starving men were a daily sight now, working their way from company to company pleading for a bite of food or a sip of water. Famished mules, ribs poking through their skin, ate ropes, bags, bits of leather, sweat-soaked hats. Horses collapsed onto the ground and struggled, futilely, to regain their feet.

  Then the river disappeared.

  As they’d staggered along, the emigrants had seen the Humboldt narrowing, but they had not quite understood. Proper rivers grew bigger as they went along, as tributaries fed in
. This river got ever smaller and muddier and saltier and soapier tasting (because it had virtually no tributaries). Eventually there was nothing to do but acknowledge the miserable truth they had been warned of—the Humboldt did not go to the sea or anyplace else inviting but simply grew narrower and shallower until it finally vanished altogether, sucked down by the desert sand and cooked away by the sun. “We have absolutely used up a good-sized river!” one shocked emigrant wrote. “Have run it into the ground! It is gone!”

  The Humboldt Sink, this final resting spot was called, and it was a dispiriting sight. One emigrant had imagined “a great rent in the earth, into which the waters of the river plunged with a terrible roar.” Instead, he found “a mud lake ten miles long and four or five miles wide, a veritable sea of slime, a ‘slough of despond,’ an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison, which emitted a nauseous odor and presented the appearance of utter desolation.”

  Now their suffering would grow worse. One stunned, exhausted diarist tried to make his punctuation convey an agony his words could not. “Sand!!! Hot!!! Grass parched and dry.” When the Humboldt’s silty pools dried up at last and the river vanished completely, the diarist wailed his despair in the cadences of an ancient prophet. “From slew to Sink (O barrenness).”

  It had taken some four months of hard walking, from early spring to late summer, to reach this point. The desert stretched ahead. Forty miles, scarcely any water, the animals dying, the emigrants themselves nearly out of strength and food, and all this on the heels of a grueling 350-mile crawl across Nevada. Worse yet, a trap triggered months before was about to snap shut.

  At the start of their journey, the emigrants had been forced to wait for the spring grass to come up. Condemned by that late start, they had reached the desert at the hottest time of year. The best plan now, they decided, was to load their barrels with carcass water and take their chances. Trying to coax a few more miles out of the half-starved mules and oxen, they set off late in the day and planned to walk far into the night, to avoid the brutal sun. By the next day, they hoped, they’d have made it across.

  “It was a forced march over the alkali plain,” wrote Luzena Wilson, and this was simple fact, for Wilson was temperamentally incapable of complaining or dramatizing hardship. The gold-seekers had entered a tableau from a medieval painting; embellishment was unnecessary. “The road was lined with the skeletons of the poor beasts who had died in the struggle. Sometimes we found the bones of men bleaching beside their broken-down and abandoned wagons. The buzzards and coyotes, driven away by our presence from their horrible feasting, hovered just out of reach.”

  In camp that night Mason Wilson came to Luzena with a strange story. Did she remember the Independence Company, back in Missouri? She did. When she and Mason had barely begun their journey, she had pleaded to join the Independence men. Their company was so large, hers so small. Could the Wilsons’ party travel with theirs, for protection? Haughty and in a hurry, the men of the Independence had turned their backs and ridden off.

  Now here they were, “their mules gone, many of their number dead, the party broken up, some gone back to Missouri… [and the survivors] not distant forty yards, dying of thirst and hunger.” Luzena took pity on them. “Who could leave a human creature to perish in this desolation? I took food and water and found them bootless, hatless, ragged and tattered, moaning in the starlight for death to relieve them from torture. They called me an angel; they showered blessings on me; and when they recollected that they had refused me their protection that day on the Missouri, they dropped on their knees there in the sand and begged my forgiveness.”

  Sunrise the next day opened a curtain on a nightmare, unveiling “a scene more horrid than the rout of a defeated army,” in the words of the Illinois lawyer Eleazer Ingalls. “Dead stock line the roads, wagons, rifles, tents, clothes, everything but food may be found scattered along the road; here an ox, who standing famished against a wagon bed until nature could do no more, settles back into it and dies; and there a horse kicking out his last gasp in the burning sand, men scattered along the plain and stretched out among the dead stock like corpses, fill out the picture.”

  Ingalls concluded with a heartfelt prayer. “The desert! You must see it and feel it in an August day, when legions have crossed it before you, to realize it in all its horrors. But heaven save you from the experience.”

  Before the emigrants dared hope that their ordeal might be near its end, the animals sensed it. For miles now, the exhausted travelers had sustained themselves with the knowledge that somewhere ahead were the cold, clear rivers—and water!—that came down from the Sierra Nevada.

  “While we were yet five miles from the Carson River,” Luzena Wilson wrote, “the miserable beasts seemed to scent the freshness in the air.” Heads raised, nostrils distended, the weary oxen did their best to speed up. Half a mile from the river, “they broke into a run, a perfect stampede, and refused to be stopped until they had plunged neck deep in the refreshing flood; and when they were unyoked, they snorted, tossed their heads, and rolled over and over in the water in their dumb delight.”

  Wilson had a soft spot for the faithful cattle that had carried her so far. “It would have been pathetic had it not been so funny,” she wrote happily, “to see those poor, patient, overworked, hard-driven beasts, after a journey of two thousand miles, raise heads and tails and gallop at full speed, an emigrant wagon with flapping sides jolting at their heels.”

  Exhausted, ecstatic men and women celebrated just as fervently. After the endless, empty desert, all sand and scrub, here were trees, and water, and life! “Men were seen to rush up, half crazed with thirst and hunger,” one emigrant wrote, “and embrace those noble old trees and weep as children, and bless God for their deliverance.”

  Many of the travelers couldn’t talk, because their tongues were black and swollen, and when they plunged their faces in the water they found that at first they couldn’t drink, either. “We buried our faces in the clear bright water, guzeled it up as best we could,” wrote an emigrant named James Carpenter, “then waited a few minutes and guzel again.” While Carpenter and his companions sprawled in the shallows, gulping down water, a team of desperately thirsty oxen charged into the river nearly on top of them. Fine. “We wanted a drink as bad as they did and laid there and drank with a cow on each side of us.”

  Looming overhead were some of the steepest mountains in North America. The mountains in children’s drawings take the shape of an upside down V, with the peak neatly placed in the middle. Not so the Sierra, which rise abruptly on their eastern face and slope gradually on the western, Pacific-facing side. The emigrants would be climbing nearly straight up and making their way along narrow passes flanked by vertiginous drops.

  The climb was brutal, “as steep as the roof of a house,” in one emigrant’s judgment. In places you could touch the ground without bending over. A trick of perspective made matters appear even worse—the mountains rose so sharply that, to the emigrants’ bewilderment, the wagons high above them seemed to be floating in midair, atop the trees. On some routes, the emigrants ran into sheer ledges that soared into the sky and hemmed them in, like dungeon walls cutting off a prisoner’s escape. “Just ahead,” wrote one dismayed traveler, “was a wall several thousand feet high which had to be climbed to get out of this valley.”

  With no choice but to carry on, the emigrants took their wagons apart and dragged them up over the ledges with ropes (and then had to find a longer way around that the oxen or mules could negotiate). Or they wrapped ropes around the trees, block and tackle style, and dragged the wagons uphill inch by inch. In many places, barrel-sized rocks blocked the way. The emigrants pried and levered their wagons over the obstacles, all the time keeping an uneasy eye on the fractured boulders overhead. “It made one’s flesh creep to look up and see huge crags suspended,” one emigrant wrote, “wanting only the vibration of an echo to break the frail ligatures, and grind you into eternity.”

  Fr
anklin Langworthy, the Illinois minister, described the climb with pride and horror. The trail along a pass called Devil’s Ladder was so steep that at times the oxen had to “creep upwards upon their knees.” On either side of the road were giant drops, and for the last two miles “it was necessary for several men to brace themselves against a wagon to prevent its upsetting and rolling down the side of the mountain.”

  Langworthy struggled his way to the summit. At 9,300 feet, he and his company were 2,000 feet higher than South Pass, in the Rockies. “I do not think it possible to drive teams over heights more difficult than those we have ascended,” Langworthy wrote proudly, “being twice the height of the Alleghenies, and as high as the White and Green Mountains piled upon each other, and I think higher than any of the passes of the Alps into Italy.”

  Hannibal and Napoleon had “gained deathless renown by crossing the Alps,” Langworthy added, and now he and thousands of other anonymous emigrants had outdone them.

  High in the mountains, mission nearly accomplished, the gold-seekers paused for breath. Langworthy was drunk on scenery and accomplishment. “Bewildered and lost amidst the boundless expanse,” he gazed in awe at mountains that receded into infinity and trees that soared out of view. Trees a dozen feet in diameter and too tall to measure loomed over his campsite. “By the side of such a grove, the stateliest pine forests in the eastern States would appear like humble shrubbery.”

  Eleazer Ingalls waxed philosophical. “It does not take much to make man happy after all,” he mused. He and his companions had managed to shoot three woodchucks, and life had taken a definite upturn. “Here we have been starving along for the last month, crossing deserts, drinking rotten, alkali or salt water, or deprived entirely, and now we’ve got to the top of the Nevadas, around our campfire amid snow drifts, with plenty of good water and three woodchucks for three of us, and we are the happiest mortals alive.”