by Sally Denton
Jean Rio could not have come to this point, could not have endured the trials already encountered and anticipated the challenges ahead, without wondering if she had made the right choice. For the first time since her conversion by the persuasive missionaries who depicted Zion as a golden Promised Land, and the Saints as God’s chosen people to whom no harm could come, the reality of the situation began to haunt her thoughts. She had had stark evidence that prayer alone could not guarantee the safety of her children. Could she bear to lose another child to the myriad dangers that loomed, life-threatening hazards that made London life seem sheltered by comparison? There was nothing to do now but forge ahead, to reach within to the deepest core of her being and renew the faith in God that had been unshakable just a few months earlier. In the upcoming years she would return to that inner well many times, redefining faith itself and especially the notion of the “Kingdom of God upon Earth.” But for now she would brace herself for what increasingly seemed an amorphous and uncertain future, determined to keep an open mind. “As you are aware I am not one to go through the world with my eyes shut,” she wrote, as if to a friend, with as much lightheartedness as she could muster at the moment. “I expect to be able to send you some little description of my travels by land, to amuse you in a winter’s evening.”
Venturing into Alexandria, Jean Rio found a thriving incorporated community of a thousand souls that boasted of having a mayor, a courthouse, and a schoolhouse that did double duty as a chapel on Sundays. At a small levee was moored a “worn-out steamboat” that served as a hotel for the “Gents of the town who are fond of gambling and drinking.” There she would make purchases for the venture ahead. Taking their “first lessons in oxen driving,” her sons moved their little train of four wagons a mile out of town so the animals could graze. It became clear that two of the oxen that had seemed relatively healthy had in fact been abused by the boatmen beyond usefulness. Jean Rio needed to return to Alexandria to purchase two to replace them, “thus losing $46 to begin with.” Yet another of the animals had been so injured that it was “doubtful whether it will recover or not.”
A billowing canvas roof reminiscent of the George W. Bourne’s wind-filled sails covered each of her wagons. Inside pockets carried the smaller items that would be needed on the trail, so that they could easily be reached at the end of every day. Larger items—chairs, tables, cookstoves, sewing machines, desks—were crammed into the main part of the wagon, with care taken to lodge them efficiently so they wouldn’t slide around with the wagon’s movement.
Once the new team was in shape, Jean Rio’s family party moved four miles west and encamped in a wide, grassy meadow along a branch of the Des Moines River. There they had intended to stay for a week “in order that the cattle may recover as they are in far worse condition than they were when we left St. Louis, thanks to the steamboat men,” but they decided to start the trek west sooner. When the sickly animal died, Jean Rio purchased another for twenty-six dollars. She was beginning to be alarmed at the rate at which she was tapping her resources.
The inhabitants of a nearby farmhouse sold her a “plentiful supply of butter at ten cents a pound and milk at ten cents a bucketful.” Her sons hunted in the nearby woods, and to her surprise they returned with a squirrel and a game bird for dinner. She found the lovely weather reminiscent of days spent in Epping Forest. Locals from the area, eager to provide useful information about the trail ahead, visited them. “Some of them appear to be intelligent and some of them exceedingly cultivated,” she wrote. “One man congratulated me on having been able to escape from such a land of slavery and oppression as he said he understood England to be. I felt my British blood rising at his insulting speech, but the poor mortal evidently knew no better, so I only smiled in reply.” One man brought a freshly caught twenty-five-pound catfish, which she purchased from him for a quarter.
On April 21 Jean Rio’s family group joined another group that was also camping at Alexandria before joining up with the Mormons in Council Bluffs, and the next day the small train made up of some thirty people and a dozen wagons headed out together. Every day they traveled a few miles, stopping well before sunset to set up camp and retire to their wagons before the night chill came on. The road west was not a road at all, she wrote, but “a perfect succession of hills, valleys, bogs, mud holes, log bridges, quagmires, with stumps of trees a foot above the surface of the watery mud so that without the utmost care the wagons would be overturned ten times a day.” She pined for the old roads of England, each day hoping the next would be better. But instead, “the changes have only been from bad to worse.” Even by late May, snow fell nearly every night.
Now pushing hard, traversing the prairie of southern Iowa, even traveling on a Sunday, they began to fear they would arrive too late to meet the rest of their company at Council Bluffs. One morning one of her teams turned “sulky” and no amount of prodding and whipping could move it forward. “The teamster should drive with the team to the right,” wrote the English artist Frederick Hawkins Piercy in an illustrated travel book published in 1855. “When he cries ‘Gee,’ the team should go from him, and when ‘Haw,’ come towards him. When the teamster cries ‘Haw,’ it is usual with a lazy team to let them feel the whip over their necks, and when ‘Gee,’ over their backs.” But as suddenly as her oxen had balked they took off running at full speed, breaking the tongue off the wagon. “Heartsick” at the thought of returning to Alexandria to purchase a new wagon, Jean Rio was pleasantly surprised when her brother-in-law, the genteel Englishman Jeremiah Bateman, rose to the occasion. Lashing the oxen to the wagon with a piece of cord, he fashioned a repair, and the team was able to move forward. Now it was clear to all of them that from this point on they must find reserves within themselves to meet the hardships ahead, find a resourcefulness they perhaps had never known was there.
The trail seemed to become more rugged with every mile, washed out under deep puddles of water every few hundred feet. “We managed to get along until noon,” she wrote, “when we halted for an hour to feed the cattle and ourselves. On looking among our company I found that there was scarcely a wagon that had not received some injury or met with some disaster or other.” After eating, they set off to cross a vast prairie. “We have had to double team and so help each other out of our muddy difficulties.” Soon another of her wagons was stuck, the tongue pin breaking with a jerk. It was decided they should halt for the night, since so many wagons had either sunk or been overturned.
She was constantly struck by the friendliness of the locals, who routinely offered food, assistance, and tales of the frontier. That evening, a local farmer accompanied by a “tall-looking Negro” approached their camp and offered to help repair the wagon. Two hours later the wagon was fixed, the men refused “all recompense,” and two of her sons accompanied the white man back to his farm to get corn to feed their worn-out cattle. “Our black visitor remained with us and shared our supper, which consisted of coffee, bread and butter, and remains of two fine geese, which I had purchased yesterday for twenty-five cents each.”
“John” entertained her with stories of the Indian war twelve years earlier in which he had participated in taking as prisoner the Sauk tribal leader Keokuk and one of his warriors. John and others had transported the two to St. Louis, where “almost all the city” came to see them on display. John “spoke of the dignity of his (Keokuk’s) whole bearing and the splendid blanket and leggings he wore.” When a peace was concluded, the white men presented Keokuk with “a valuable rifle, plenty of ammunition, a horse, trappings of the most expensive kind, and liberty to return to his own nation and tribe.”
Fascinated, Jean Rio stayed up conversing with the man until midnight. She wrote of her “surprise at finding so much intelligence and I may add refinement, in the language and manners of our late visitor.” When her son returned with the livestock feed, he told his mother he had learned from the farmer that John had been a slave since birth, but was now “free in everything but the nam
e [he was still legally considered a slave]. He had a large farm to manage out here on the prairie, he bought and sold how he pleased, and went out and came home when he thought proper.”
After everyone else retired she stayed awake for several hours longer, sitting in silence broken only by croaking frogs. “Near us the stars glittering in the heavens and the moon shining brightly are enabling us to see for miles around us,” she wrote. “I felt at that moment a sense of security and freedom I cannot describe.”
The next day’s travel was uneventful, but as the day wound down the vista of a “continuance” of “tremendous hills” lay before them: “As we got to the top of one, we discovered three others, each towering above the rest.” It would be but the beginning of increasingly rugged terrain. Ascending the hills was like “going up a flash of lightning edgeways.” But the mountains disappeared as abruptly as they had risen, and the following day they found themselves on wide, flat prairie again. Passing a small farmhouse with a tidy garden near the roadside, Jean Rio and Eliza went to the door in the hope of acquiring some fresh vegetables. What they found was an Englishwoman from their own neighborhood in London who had been in America for seven years. The woman “rejoiced as though she had met some of her own family.”
Continuing on, their party came to a village called Dog-town consisting of some thirty houses, a post office, and a “doctor’s shop.” The road ahead would take them through a series of small towns, through beautiful weather and gentle forests. When one of her oxen became very sick, Jean Rio decided to camp near the Sac-and-Fox River. A young couple living in a farmhouse nearby invited the emigrants over, the settlers apparently as eager to converse with them as the emigrants were to find company on the lonely trail.
Stringtown, as the next settlement was called, comprised forty houses and stores; linen drapery, stationery, glass and earthenware, saddles, groceries, boots, shoes, powder, and lead could be bought there. “The barroom or whiskey shop and the school house [also] does duty for church on Sundays.”
Jean Rio was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers: “Many a time when our wagons have been in the mud hole, men working in the fields have left their plows to come and help us out. Men who in our country would be called ‘gentlemen’ owning 500 to 1,000 acres of land. But it seems to be a rule among them to help everyone who is in need. And they are ready at all times to impart any information which they think will be useful to us.” The frontier wives were just as hospitable, generously supplying the travelers with fresh butter, eggs, and milk, and often inviting Jean Rio to visit their homes.
Falling in love with her new country, she harbored no regrets about her decision to leave England. “I often think that there is no person so thoroughly independent as an American farmer,” she wrote. “His land is his own; he has beef, mutton, pork, and poultry. He shears his own sheep, his wife spins the wool, dyes it of various colors, and in many cases weaves it into clothes for dresses and other various articles of clothing, blankets, and flannels.” All of the homes she had visited were spotless and comfortable, their furniture plain but solid and well crafted.
Passing through a horrible bog in which the wagons sunk to their axles, she dubbed the locale “Devil’s Glen.” Here she would need to purchase three more yoke of oxen, so depleted was her original stock. For a dollar she also purchased a pig, “which when killed and cleaned weighed 70 pounds,” and “three fowls for 25 cents.”
Heavy rainfall detained them for two days, and when they were able to continue on it was into the most frightening of landscapes yet encountered. “Now I want you all on my side,” she wrote in the diary as if it were a letter meant for friends back in England. “Imagine yourself standing upon a hill as of that in Greenwich Park and looking down into a complete basin, across the bottom of which runs a wide stream of water.” Her fear of fording the stream was palpable as she watched the drivers wading up to their waists among the cattle, struggling to keep the wagons afloat: “I confess I trembled as I looked, for I expected no less than to see the wagons run over and crush the cattle during the descent.” Safely across, they put their exhausted animals out to graze and waited for the wagons to dry out. The following day brought yet another “quagmire through which the cattle were floundering for nearly four hours,” and by the time they reached a dry and flat campsite they had traveled a mere three miles. Here they would spend a full day resting and preparing for what was clearly a more treacherous and daunting expedition than they had expected. It took great effort to move a short distance, and fatigue and frustration began to overtake the party.
They started out again on the morning of May 15 and had traveled less than an hour before they came to “a worse bog than the last if possible.” Sixteen oxen were necessary to pull one wagon through—each wagon weighing around two thousand pounds—and so the depleted animals were forced to cross the muddy tract dozens of times. It took four hours for her last wagon to reach the other side. Their camp would be plagued that night with a forceful thunderstorm, and the pelting rain would confine them to their wagons for the entire next day. “In England we know little about thunder,” she wrote, “but here among the hills the echoes are so numerous that we frequently hear the second clap begin to rattle before the first has finished.”
The next morning an infant in the group died, delaying their travel until midafternoon. By now the plains folded into forests so thick with hickory and oak as to be nearly impassable, the wagons plodding along at a rate of two miles per day. But the weather had improved and the land was now lush with flowers reminiscent of the most cultivated gardens of England. “We are constantly walking over violets, primrose, daisies, bluebells, the lily of the valley, columbines of every shade from the deepest blue to white Virginia stocks in large patches,” Jean Rio wrote. “The wild rose, too, is very beautiful, perfuming the air for miles. Onions grow wild by the sides of streams, while in the forests hundreds of trees have their trunks covered by hop or grapevines.” Deer, wild turkey, fresh fish, and strawberries now rounded out their daily meals, and the women gathered herbs along the riverbanks to flavor the food.
Increasingly, the days were unbroken by any sign of human habitation, the camp visited by wolves. “We passed . . . a great many of their dens,” wrote Jean Rio. “They are simple mounds of earth, which the animals throw up and make their nests in the hollow beneath, leaving an entrance hole on one side.” She found the elusive animals more interesting than threatening, even with their incessant nighttime howling, convinced as she was that they lived on small rabbits and squirrels and never attacked “the human race.” Thunderstorms and flash floods persisted—“the little gully at the bottom of the hill across which I could have stepped with ease yesterday evening is now a rapid stream at least 20 feet in width.” Despite the rattling of the wagons from the thunderclaps, they felt “quite snug in our castles,” and when the storms passed the air lit up with fireflies.
By May 22 Jean Rio’s party and the other families that had joined them had been on the trail from Alexandria for thirty days, and had advanced only 116 miles. Jean Rio and her fellow travelers were becoming anxious about meeting up with the main company of Saints at Council Bluffs. They couldn’t bear the thought of traversing the unknown, dangerous land with only their little band.
The first disaster struck the group when they came to what she called a “slough,” or a hollow part of the prairie where the rain settled, “a perfect bog” extending for miles. It became necessary to double- or triple-team the wagons to get them across. As one of Jean Rio’s wagons was crossing, the animals revolted and struggled to break free, pulling the wagon toward two women who were holding infants. The oxen stampeded and the wagon ran over one of the women at her waist and the other just above her ankles. Jean Rio’s son William rushed to grab the babies, who were uninjured, and then returned to help his mother lift the women out of the bog. “The weight of the wagon was completely forced down on them into the soft mud and providently they had no bones broken,” Jean Ri
o wrote. “Had it been on the hard ground nothing could have saved them from being crushed.”
They laid the women side by side on Jean Rio’s bed in the wagon and finished crossing. Once safely installed on solid ground they assessed the women’s injuries. Mrs. Margett, whose legs had been run over, was sore but otherwise all right. The other victim, Mrs. Bond, was in great pain and unable to move. But even so grave an accident did not detain the group, which was increasingly apprehensive about meeting up with the other Saints. Though the group rarely traveled on Sunday, the leaders now made an exception and decided to push on.
By noon on May 25 they had reached the mouth of the Sheridan River, a daunting body to cross, with a strenuous ascent on the other side. Rainstorms dogged them, slowing their progress, and when an axle on one wagon broke and a wheel of another smashed into the riverbank, they were forced to stop for two days to repair the vehicles. While waiting, the women stocked their wagons with peaches and plums from nearby trees heavy with the fruit and swatted at the latest menace—mosquitoes. Next on their map was the White Breast Creek, which they found to be a “roaring torrent” instead of the small tributary they were expecting. Beginning at four a.m., the men worked in a downpour to build a bridge across the creek, which was rising at the rate of one foot an hour. Four wagons managed to cross before the newly built bridge washed out. It would be hours before a new bridge could be constructed and the remaining wagons conveyed to the other side.