The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  Luzena Wilson, as brisk and practical as ever, had no inclination to sing hymns to the trees or to ponder human nature. The climb up and over the mountains, almost from the moment she completed it, had begun fading into history. And Wilson, an American to the marrow of her bones, viewed “history” in the American sense: it meant not the essential background needed to understand a story but excess baggage that only bogged a person down. “Already we began to forget the trials and hardships of the past,” Wilson wrote, “and to look forward with renewed hope to the future.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  MAROONED

  JOSEPH BRUFF HAD GOT off to a late start back in Missouri, and he had never made up the time. Now the bill came due. On September 14, 1849, in Nevada, he made an innocuous-sounding entry in his journal. “I had determined to take a northern route if practicable,” he wrote, “to avoid the long deserts” and the lurking hazards of the Humboldt Sink, the Forty Mile Desert, “and last, tho’ not least, a very elevated, rugged, and dangerous Pass” across the central Sierra. Bruff had decided to take a shortcut.

  Five days later, he came to the fork in the road where his preferred northern route veered away from the Humboldt River. In high spirits, he wrote a proud note and jabbed it into the ground on a stick, near other notices. “The Washington City Company, Capt Bruff, pass’d on the right-hand trail, September 19th, 2 p.m. 1849.”

  Bruff had opted for a supposedly quick and easy route called the Lassen Cutoff, after a Danish-born rancher and entrepreneur named Peter Lassen who owned an immense tract of land about one hundred miles north of Sutter’s Fort. Lassen had “found” the new path, more or less, in 1848 when he tried to lead a ten-wagon company to his land. (In previous years he had traveled back and forth to his ranch on established routes.) His plan was to sell the easterners land near his own, but he had misplaced his ranch. After a series of desperate misadventures—Lassen’s company nearly lynched him—he managed to stumble home. Unchastened by the near disaster, Lassen sent agents to intercept other California-bound emigrants and direct them to his new route, and he had signs posted at a bend in the Humboldt announcing that the goldfields were only 110 miles ahead.

  This was a hideously dangerous lie. Lassen’s shortcut was two hundred miles longer than the better-known routes through the Sierra Nevada. Moreover, the route led directly across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, one of the harshest landscapes on the American continent, and then veered north, nearly to the California-Oregon border, precisely the wrong direction for the goldfields. When the trail swung back in the proper direction at last, it left the worn-out emigrants one last climb over the mountains just when they were hungriest, and the animals weakest, and the winter snows nearest.

  But in 1849, almost no one knew any of that. The Lassen Cutoff lured emigrants with the promise of a short haul and a low mountain pass, with plenty of grass and water along the way. Thousands of emigrants—Joseph Bruff, Alonzo Delano, and Israel Lord among them—took the bait. By 1850, nearly everyone had heard of their travails. From then on, almost no one opted for what had come to be known as the Death Route.

  The first milestone on the shortcut hinted—heavily—at trouble to come. Rabbit Hole Springs had no springs, it turned out, but only wells that earlier travelers had dug. On September 20 Joseph Bruff picked his way toward the wells, navigating between animal corpses. In one well, he wrote, was “a dead ox, swelled up so as to fill the hole closely, his hind legs and tail only above ground.” Bruff hurried off to fetch his water elsewhere. Another well, another ox.

  Dead oxen littered the ground as if some bizarre battle of the animals had just ended. Bruff made a careful, horrifying drawing. “I counted 82 dead oxen, 2 dead horses, and 1 mule in an area of 1/10 of a mile.” He noted, too, a fresh grave, with an inscription written on a headboard from an abandoned wagon. As always, he copied it down. “M. De Morst, of Col. Ohio, died Sep. 16th, 1849, Aged 50 Years, Of Camp Fever.”

  The desert came next, and it made the springs seem like an oasis. Black Rock Desert was the dried-mud bed of a prehistoric lake. Barren and waterless, without a blade of grass or the puniest shrub, “it seemed to be the River of Death dried up,” one early emigrant wrote, “its muddy bottom jetted into cones by the fires of perdition.”

  Israel Lord came this route, too, staggering through the unrelenting heat with the sun a “monstrous, unmeaning, vacant, lustreless eye staring at you from every point of the compass.” By now the mules and oxen were nearly too weak to pull. So many had died that the road was strewn with carcasses, bodies bloated and rotting and legs extended stiff. Some of the fallen animals lay next to abandoned wagons, their yokes still around their necks, their tongues hanging from their mouths. The stink hung so heavy in the air, Israel Lord wrote, that he could hear it. (Travelers in the next few years would shuffle past dozens of mummified animals, their leathery bodies looking eerily alive because flecks of sand on their open eyes glistened in the light.)

  He had not seen a tree in two hundred miles, Lord lamented, and had drunk water only twice in the past twenty-four hours. “Nothing but rock and sand and clay and ashes and dead animals,” he wrote, stunned by the emptiness, and he took to conferring his own names on landmarks on the way: Point Misery, Mud Lake, Golgotha, Point Distress, Valley of the Shadow of Death, Gate of Desolation.

  Desert gave way to canyon and cliffs. Lord preferred these surroundings. In one chasm he shouted with all his might and found he could hear “eight distinct echoes, the first six very loud.” He scrambled to the top of a precipice, sat down on the edge, and lowered a weight tied to a string. “By actual measurement 428 feet high.”

  Bruff, far more of a Boy Scout at heart than the moody Lord, would have loved to climb rocks and sing at the top of his lungs. He had little opportunity. His company had taken to squabbling. “The selfishness of my men was exhibited to such a degree”—apparently there had been a kerfuffle to do with divvying up supplies—“that I had to interfere in a peremptory manner.”

  Three days later, more trouble. “Held a meeting to inflict penalties for guard and other delinquencies, and to consider an application from… 2 of the most obnoxious men in the company, who prayed that we would grant them… a full discharge.” The two wanted to head off on their own, with mules and six days’ food. “It was unanimously passed with 3 cheers. Such was the company’s opinion of the men, and such their joy at the riddance.” But Bruff may have misread the general mood. “At night the disaffected gang, or 5 of them, stole the wine, reserved for medical purposes.” They swore they hadn’t taken anything—the wine must have leaked from its keg—but Bruff “noticed great laughter & hilarity in their wagons at night.”

  Now the trail moved into the mountains. The highest pass on the route was at 6,100 feet, considerably lower than those farther south, but more than high enough. The ascent was “pretty steep,” Bruff acknowledged, and several wagons set out with twelve yoke of oxen rather than the customary two or three. Bruff instructed his lead wagon to fly the Stars and Stripes when it reached the top, as they’d done at South Pass, to encourage the others.

  A wagon in another company had nearly reached the summit when a harness snapped. Bruff saw the wagon careen backward down the mountain while the women and children inside screamed, and the men outside chased after. Finally the wagon ran into a dead ox in the road, caromed into a team of oxen pulling a heavy wagon, and slowed enough that it could be wrestled to a halt. Everyone survived.

  Over the course of the next several days, Bruff took occasional breaks to gaze around him. “What a scene from here! The Snow Butte [Mount Lassen] and his blue neighbors, deep vales, silver-thread like streams… & in every tint of one of natures most extensive landscapes!” He caught himself. “Pshaw! Enraptured with a landscape! How ridiculous!” Especially for a man with responsibilities. “I must look out for the train, or there will be some accidental capsizements, maybe a broken neck or leg! No time now for the Fine arts, we must patronize the rough ones.”

>   Israel Lord, at about the same spot, found himself not enraptured by the scenery but utterly sick of it. He had worked hard to get this far, and where was he? “To admire is a long way behind me,” he grumped. “I am heartily tired of being shut up among hills and mountains, with loose blocks of granite or basalt hanging over my head.” Let others rhapsodize. Lord polished off the climb in four impatient words. “Ascended the Sierra Nevada.”

  Irritable and frustrated, Lord found himself pondering just what mountains were for. What was the point? The experience of struggling up one mountain valley and down the next, he decided as he mulled it over, was the gold rush in a nutshell. The whole trip west amounted to nothing but “a mere game of seesaw. Go up to go down… take from one pocket to put not as much into the other.” At the end of your travails, Lord felt with a shudder of premonition, you would be no wiser, no richer, just the same old fool with a few new bruises.

  While in this melancholic mood, Lord saw a man lying dead on the ground. Half an hour before, the man’s friends said, this hapless emigrant had raced ahead “to look on the promised land from the summit.” He had stopped to make a snack of wild parsnips, and poisoned himself. Lord, who could not watch a cloud pass overhead without drawing a moral, clucked in dismay. Within yards of his goal, “as full of life and vigor as any of us,” John A. Dawson of Saint Louis now lay “like a dog, in a hole, without a coffin, a board, or even a blanket, unshaved, unshrived, and unannealed.” Lord took a scrap of wood from a wagon and engraved the dead man’s name, so that he would have, at least, a tiny memorial.

  “The dead know nothing,” Lord wrote in his diary that night, “and the living care for nothing.” The only thought in the minds of the men who had buried Dawson, wrote Lord, was “that there would be one less to dig gold in California.” One more death, one fewer rival.

  By fall, on the Lassen Cutoff especially, many of the emigrants still on the trail were in a bad way. On October 14, 1849, Joseph Bruff encountered a rescue party that had been sent out by California’s military governor to find stragglers in the mountains and bring them safely home. Bruff approved of the mission—he had copied down inscriptions from four graves that very day—but he explained to Major D. H. Rucker that he and his company didn’t need help.

  Bruff’s men disagreed. “The company very anxious for me to make application to Major Rucker for supplies.” Bruff maintained that the food was expressly for “starving families—women and children,” but he was shouted down. Some of his men, Bruff told Rucker shamefacedly, “would take a biscuit out of a woman’s mouth.” Reluctantly, Bruff accepted thirty-one pounds of bacon and fourteen pounds of crackers on the company’s behalf. While Bruff sorted things out with the major, his men hurried off with the crackers, “not reserving me an ounce.”

  One week later, on October 21, Bruff’s company had made it to within thirty-two miles of Lassen’s Ranch. They were down to six wagons (and had only enough mules to pull four) and had nearly run out of food. Around the campfire that night, Bruff proposed a plan. The company would not split up—Bruff was immensely proud that he had “brought them to this point, together, and more prosperous than any company of men in this vast emigration”—and they would proceed, together, to the ranch. The only catch was that they would have to leave two of the wagons and their contents behind, to fetch later.

  That meant that someone would have to stay behind, briefly, to guard the wagons. Bruff volunteered; a captain does not abandon his ship. Until his men returned for him in a few days, he would settle in. He lent one man his horse. Another, named Willis, said he would stay with Bruff. The others marched off. Bruff and Willis totted up their supplies—a couple of handfuls of rice, two biscuits, two pounds of beef, a few ounces of coffee. But they had rifles and ammunition, and this was deer country. “We pitched our tent and made ourselves contented.”

  As the two men waited, emigrants streamed by, all of them tattered and hungry. On October 26, Bruff counted sixty travelers, looking more like wartime refugees than adventurers out to claim a fortune. “Thin with hunger, as well as anxiety,” in Bruff’s words, they struggled along to his fire and tried to gather their strength. Bruff noted down their stories. One had met an old man on the roadside, nearly dead of scurvy and abandoned by his companions. Another had encountered a man breaking his saws and other tools over a tree stump. They had cost plenty back in Saint Louis, he snarled, and if he couldn’t use them, he’d make sure that nobody could. A group of emigrants had purposely set fire to a meadow so that those trailing after them would have nowhere to let their livestock graze. The modern counterpart would be filling up at the last gas station on the edge of a wilderness and then burning down the station.

  On October 29, a group of men from Bruff’s company returned to camp, back from Lassen’s. The visit proved to be anything but a reunion. They’d brought no food, no supplies, and hadn’t even returned Bruff’s horse. Bruff shouted abuse; the men shouted back. We return for you, and this is the thanks we get! Bruff erupted (and, in his journal, he underlined his words indignantly). “You came for me!… No sir! You came for those wagons and their contents, that’s what you came for! Take the plunder and roll on. I’ll not disgrace myself by further companionship with you! I shall go in when it suits me.”

  Bold words but foolish ones. With winter coming on and food running low, this was not a time to dawdle. Bruff’s health had been precarious for months. He needed to get out of the mountains as quickly as possible, before bad fortune or bad weather made it impossible.

  Two days later, as if to drive home that message, Bruff woke to the sound of a man screaming for help. It was one o’clock in the morning in a driving storm. A huge oak tree had crashed to the ground, smashing a tent with four men inside. Bruff ran to see what he could do. “An aged, grey headed man and his grown son, with their hips buried in the ground and their ghastly eyes turned up in death! Next another son, and beside him, a young man, his comrade, slowly dying in agony, with broken legs and mutilated bodies.” Bruff covered the dead bodies with a coat and started digging graves. Snow and rain pelted down.

  By the next morning, November 1, the two younger men had died. Bruff borrowed a prayer book and read the burial service. One of the widows wanted to look at the faces a last time. Bruff climbed down into the grave, found his footing between the bodies, and peeled back a bedsheet. Later he wrote a poem for the grave marker. “They here sleep together, in one grave entombed, / Side by side as they slept on the night they were doom’d!”

  Another storm hit on November 2. Bruff, the least jumpy person alive, began to wonder whether soon it would be time to worry. “Alas for the sick & helpless, in these hills tonight!” Lassen’s Ranch was only a few days’ journey, but the road was bad “and rheumatism and hermarhoyd forbid my attempting it on foot, and I have failed, in several applications to emigrants, to take me in, they are generally too selfish.”

  Bruff did his best to convince himself that he was not stranded but merely biding his time. Just think of his precious drawings and journals, not to mention his mineral collection; to abandon camp would be to leave it all behind. Looked at in the right way, this brief delay was a fortunate break. “I have the opportunity here, which I could not have below, of correcting my notes and drawings.” He was bound to regain his strength in a few days. He could travel then.

  Emigrants continued to pass by, and Bruff played host as if presiding at a mountain lodge. “2 ox wagons passed; 2 women and a little girl, on foot, called to warm their feet at my campfire. I had just prepared my dinner, of roast venison & coffee (no bread) and invited them to partake, which they did.”

  On November 4, in a snowstorm, Bruff made the acquaintance of a companion destined to prove a loyal friend. This was a bull terrier puppy, soon dubbed Nevada. Bruff tucked her under his poncho and brought her home. Tagging along in the storm, too, were a young woman clutching at Bruff’s coat “to assist her in walking over the wet & slippery trail,” followed by her two “poor little
girls, hand & hand, slipping & tottering and crying with cold and wet.”

  Bruff’s plan, such as it was, was to wait for a break in the weather and hope that he and Willis could find mules or oxen to bring them to Lassen’s. In the meantime, he collected abandoned clothes and boots, dried them by the fire, and handed them over to “many a poor, wet, tired, and ragged hombre” to replace their torn and sodden gear. “Hundreds I have had the pleasure of thus assisting,” he wrote. “I keep up a large fire.… I have no food for them but plenty of coffee, and a good strong pot full is ever at their service.”

  This was a good plan for the emigrants, not so good for Bruff himself. His journal entry for November 11 ended with a worrying observation. “Unsuccessful hunt today, meat getting low. The sick men are improving, except myself.” Somehow the deer never seemed to venture within range of a rifle shot. Bruff returned to the same theme a few days later. “I have a very severe headache today,” he wrote on November 14, and, on the same day, “Hunters returned unlucky. Quite ill tonight, with headache & fever.” Newly arriving emigrants began to report ominous news. “For about four miles the snow was above the hubs of the wheels, and up to the oxen’s bellys, and the wheels became immense circular blocks of snow.”

  Bruff had pictured that any day now he would wake up sound and strong and ready to travel; instead, he’d grown steadily weaker. And he’d expected a lull in the weather, but no sooner did the sky clear than another storm swept in. The one consolation was that he’d found a new ally. This was an old friend, William Poyle, who had not seen Bruff since the Platte. Now he’d turned up in the Sierra and had vowed not to part from his companion again. (Bruff’s Washington Company acquaintance, Willis, had gone off, supposedly to hunt, and had not returned.)

  Bruff would need his friend’s help. By mid-November he could scarcely fight through the pain to venture out in search of food. As if that weren’t enough, he had taken on a new responsibility, a sick little boy with a neglectful father. On November 16, Bruff learned the story of “an inhuman wretch camped here, by the name of Lambkin.” The improbably named Lambkin had brought his four-year-old son across the country with him, and one day Bruff happened to hear the half-starved child crying, alone, shivering next to a burned-out campfire. Bruff tracked down Lambkin and told him his son was crying. “ ‘Yes, d—n him,’ says he, ‘let him cry!’ ”