by H. W. Brands
What to do? Every instinct said go forward. They must be nearly halfway across the desert. If they could hold on for several more hours, twelve at most, they must reach the Carson River, and the desert would be behind them. As always, the calendar drove them forward; every day on the desert exposed them to greater risk in the mountains that still separated them from California.
But the animals were worn to the edge of existence. They had neither eaten nor drunk for many hours. While their masters debated what to do, they were collapsing in harness. Without food and water, they would never make it across the desert. And without them, their masters would soon perish.
All the rest of the night, Sarah and Josiah weighed their options. The next day Josiah and one of two young men who had joined them for the crossing ascended a hill a mile away, in hopes of finding something on the horizon to give them guidance. The horizon yielded nothing. Meanwhile Sarah, to keep the cattle from expiring, ripped open some mattresses in the wagon and fed the animals the bedstraw, handful by precious handful.
The answer to their dilemma had become inescapable. They must turn back and find the Mormon meadow. Yet though inescapable, this answer was almost unbearable. “Turn back!” Sarah wrote.
What a chill the words sent through one. Turn back, on a journey like that; in which every mile had been gained by most earnest labor, growing more and more intense, until, of late, it had seemed that the certainty of advance with every step was all that made the next step possible. And now for miles we were to go back. In all that long journey no steps ever seemed so heavy, so hard to take, as those with which I turned my back to the sun that afternoon of October 4, 1849.
Yet turning back was no guarantee of safety. The cattle grew weaker with each mile, prompting Sarah to get out of the wagon and walk, to lighten the load. She refused to drink, sparing the water for Mary and the others. She slipped into a trance, unsure which part of what she saw was real and which part hallucination. Biblical images filled her head.
I seemed to see Hagar, in the wilderness walking wearily away from her fainting child among the dried up bushes, and seating herself in the hot sand. I seemed to become Hagar myself, and when my little one, from the wagon behind me, called out, “Mamma, I want a drink,” I stopped, gave her some, noted that there were but a few swallows left, then mechanically pressed onward again, alone, repeating, over and over, the words, “Let me not see the death of the child.”
As the sun bore down upon them, Sarah prayed for some sign, some reason to hope that her baby wouldn’t die in this desolate land. They passed through an area where the sagebushes were closer together than usual; in recent days, Indians or emigrants had camped there. Leftover embers apparently had set the sage smoldering, and as Sarah walked by, a few wisps of old smoke curled heavenward. Suddenly, just in front of her, a bush burst into flame. Hot and bright, the fire raced through the branches of the bush before burning itself out. Only ashes and a smoldering trunk remained. “It was a small incident, easily accounted for, but to my then overwrought fancy it made more vivid the illusion of being a wanderer in a far-off, old time desert, and myself witnessing a wonderful phenomenon. For a few moments I stood with bowed head worshiping the God of Horeb, and I was strengthened thereby.”
The sun began to sink behind them; the horned heads of the oxen drooped lower and lower till their noses scraped the sand with each weary step. And then, from a hundred yards in front, came the cheers of the two young men. “Grass and water!” they shouted. They had found the Mormon meadow. For now at least, the God of Hagar and Horeb—and Joseph Smith—had preserved this small wandering tribe.
For the rest of that day and all the next the travelers let the animals drink, eat, and recover. The men cut grass while Sarah repacked the wagon to make more room for the men’s cuttings. On the following day the party set off west. “The feeling that we were once more going forward, instead of backward, gave an animation to every step which we could never have felt but by contrast.” The change of direction was lost on the animals, which needed more rest and recuperation than they had received at the meadow. Sarah allowed herself to nap in the wagon; she woke to hear her husband speaking to one of the oxen: “So you’ve given out, have you, Tom?” Sarah looked out to discover Tom prostrate on the ground. Josiah unhitched him, and likewise his partner in harness, almost equally far gone. With a gesture of thanks for having drawn them so far and so faithfully, their masters left them to die. Four animals now pulled what had strained six. Sarah guiltily resolved to walk the rest of the way. “Nothing could induce me to get into the wagon again.”
As darkness fell they entered the worst of the desert. No moon illumined the path, but the shimmering starlight revealed more than the travelers cared to see. The carcasses of cattle lined the road, increasing in number with the miles. Presently a pair of abandoned wagons came into view. The owners, evidently despairing of reaching the Carson with their vehicles, had loaded the absolute essentials onto the few animals that could yet walk, and pushed ahead.
Farther on, the ruin of human dreams touched Sarah in a special way. Grand Conestoga wagons, employed by traders to haul merchandise, towered against the canopy of the stars, looking as tall as houses. They carried—or had carried—all manner of merchandise, of which the remnants were now strewn about the desert floor. Pasteboard boxes, wrapping paper, trunks and chests, pamphlets and books reminded Sarah of home even as they reminded her how far from home she was.
The cumulative effect of one wreck after another was profoundly discouraging. “We seemed to be but the last, little, feeble, struggling band at the rear of a routed army,” Sarah recalled.
The remaining oxen could be moved only by baiting: by holding grass before their noses and making them walk to receive it. The water ran out shortly before daylight, foretelling an imminent end to the animals, and to the humans not long thereafter. The cattle were too tired to complain; neither did the humans speak. Instead Sarah and the others constantly scanned the horizon, seeking any change in the flat, forbidding aspect, any sign that this terrible waste didn’t stretch to the ends of the earth.
Finally Sarah saw something. “Was it a cloud? It was very low at first, and I feared it might evaporate as the sun warmed it.” She asked Josiah what he made of it. “I think it must be the timber on Carson River,” he said.
At that moment one of the lead cattle offered his opinion: a weak, but no longer desperate, lowing sound. Sarah, misunderstanding, expected him to collapse and die. But then the other lead ox emitted a similar sound, and all four animals lifted their heads to sniff the air—and the scent of water it carried.
It was then that Sarah knew they had survived the desert. Reaching the river required hours more; and of course the ramparts of the Sierras remained. But young Mary wouldn’t lose her parents, nor her parents Mary, on the sands of the Carson Desert.
NONE PAID MORE for ignorance than the party of Lewis Manly. Traveling north toward Salt Lake City, glumly expecting to have to winter among the Mormons, Manly and the others were delighted—and Manly amazed—to meet a wagon train that included his original partner, Bennett, whom he had missed east of the Missouri. Bennett recounted that he had linked up with a company upon which fell all the troubles of the trail. Cholera had carried off some of the travelers; the survivors quarreled among themselves; the solemn compact to stick together was voided by those who thought they stood a better chance alone. Division reached the point of sheer spite: when one half-owner of a wagon insisted on cutting the vehicle in two (thinking to convert his half into a cart), the other owner agreed, but sawed the wagon in half lengthwise, rendering it unusable to both. The catalog of troubles delayed the train so long that the central route to the diggings would be impassable by the time the Sierras were reached. Bennett and some others determined to angle south, along the road to Los Angeles, which might be traversed all winter.
Manly decided to join them, not least since Bennett still had much of what the two had purchased together. Mo
st of Manly’s partners from the Green River, having no such stake with Bennett and rather less confidence than Manly that Bennett and the others knew where they were going, declined an invitation to come along.
Fresh problems surfaced almost at once. Some members of the group circulated a map purporting to show a shortcut to the goldfields, one that avoided the Sierra passes but entered California much closer to the mines than the Los Angeles route did. The more impatient members of the group, including Manly and Bennett, voted to secede from the main train and attempt the shortcut.
Within days they began to regret their decision. Pastures and water holes marked on the map weren’t where they were supposed to be; ridges and canyons absent from the map blocked the trail. Before long the se- ceders realized they were on their own—not exactly lost, for they knew more or less where they were and where they wanted to go, but without any information as to how to get there, or what lay between them and their goal.
They groped forward. After three days ascending a ridge, they found themselves on the brink of a steep canyon running as far to north and south as they could see. There appeared to be no way to get the wagons down into the canyon or, once in, to get them out. For days they were stymied; several members lost courage and retreated toward the trail they had left. At last a scouting party reported that it had found a way through the canyon. The route wouldn’t be easy, but neither was it impossible.
Manly and the others set off. The route led north, which troubled Manly, as California was still so far to the west. Until the canyon was behind them, nothing could be done; but when the trail continued north beyond the canyon, he felt obliged to speak up. He told Bennett and the others they must turn west if they ever hoped to reach California. By all indications, the trail they were on simply led back to Salt Lake City. A council was called, the case was heard, and Manly’s motion carried. Leaving the northbound track, the party turned left toward the trackless west.
Although they didn’t know it, Manly and the others were entering the heart of what geologists would call the Basin and Range Province. The tectonic stresses on this portion of the North American plate have caused parallel ranges of mountains to rise and the intervening basins to fall. These ranges and basins run north and south, so that a traveler going from east to west crosses range and basin and range and basin and range and basin from Utah all the way to California. The Humboldt River provided the only east-west corridor across the basin and ranges, having had, over the ages, sufficient power to cut through the rising ranges (though not enough to slice the more rapidly rising Sierras). This was what made the Humboldt route so vital to most emigrants, despite its numerous disadvantages. Farther south, where Manly now was, no such avenue existed north of the Grand Canyon, which—as Chief Walker explained to Manly—was essentially impassable.
Manly spent the last several weeks of 1849 traversing and exploring the basins and ranges. Bennett didn’t need him as a driver, so he became a scout. He roved far ahead of the wagons, and far to either side of their path. While the drivers sought the lowest points of the ranges for crossings, Manly sought the highest points for lookouts.
The vistas were breathtaking—and heartbreaking. “I reached the summit about nine o’clock,” he said of one scouting trip, “and had the grandest view I ever saw. I could see north and south almost forever.” A high, snowy mountain commanded the western horizon; to left and right of that summit the edge of sight sloped downward. “A few miles to the north and east of where I stood, and somewhat higher, was the roughest piece of ground I ever saw. It stood in sharp peaks and was of many colors, some of them so red that the mountain looked red hot….It was the most wonderful picture of grand desolation one could ever see.”
That desolation, and its incredible vastness, were what made the vista heartbreaking. No one in Manly’s train had any idea how far away California was; with each ridge surmounted, they succumbed to thinking the Sacramento Valley was just over the next. From Manly’s high perch he now perceived the true nature of their predicament: the fact that the ranges and basins rolled on and on to the west like frozen waves on the sea of time. “The more I looked, the more I satisfied myself that we were yet a long way from California, and the serious question of our ever living to get there presented itself to me as I tramped along down the grade to camp. I put down at least another month of heavy, weary travel before we could hope to make the land of gold, and our stock of strength and provisions were both pretty small for so great a tax upon them.”
Like every other argonaut sooner or later, Manly pondered what he had left behind in the East. “I thought of the bounteous stock of bread and beans on my father’s table, to say nothing about all the other good things, and here was I, the oldest son, away out in the center of the Great American Desert, with an empty stomach and a dry and parched throat, and clothes fast wearing out.” Nor, in all likelihood, had he met the worst of it. “I might be forced to see the men and women and children of our party choke and die, powerless to help them. It was a darker and gloomier day than I had ever known it could be, and alone I wept aloud, for I believed I could see the future, and the results were bitter to contemplate.”
Manly shared with the others his assessment of the distance left to travel, until Bennett told him to desist. “Lewis, if you please,” Bennett said, “I don’t want you hereafter to express your views so openly and emphatically as you did last night about our prospects. When I went to bed I found Sarah [Bennett’s wife] crying, and when pressed for the cause, she said she had heard your remarks on the situation, and that if Lewis said so it must be correct, for he knows more about it than all of you. She felt that she and the children must starve.”
For weeks the party struggled across the desert. Days would pass without water; when finally found, it was often of the vilest sort. Manly was faint with thirst one evening when, walking long after sunset, he literally stumbled on his salvation. “I poked around in the dark for a while and soon found a little pool of it, and having been without a drop of it for two days, I lay down and took a hasty drink. It did not seem to be very clear or clean, but it was certainly wet, which was the main thing just then.” Later he rejoined the rest of the party at the edge of a lake bed that was covered by the thinnest film of water—no more than a quarter-inch. By digging holes they managed to collect just enough to drink.
Food was even more problematic. Game had long since disappeared; though he continued to carry his gun, Manly realized one day that the same load had filled his rifle’s chamber for a month. “Very seldom could a rabbit be seen, and not a bird of any kind, not even a hawk, buzzard, or crow made their appearance.”
Infrequently they found food cached by Indians. Manly warned against eating it, remarking that the natives were as hungry as they were, and certain to resent such theft. Remembering Walker’s warning about the unfriendly character of the Indians, Manly had no desire to antagonize them unless absolutely necessary.
Yet the hungry members of the party did more than steal the Indians’ food. At one point some men from the train happened upon a lone native, whom they captured. For days they held the man hostage, forcing him to act as their guide. But eventually he escaped, leaping down a cliff and between some rocks where only a mountain sheep could have followed.
In their extremity, Manly’s party were reduced to killing their oxen. One instance was precipitated by Indians who ambushed the train—which, between breakdowns and decisions to turn back, had dwindled to seven wagons. The Indians shot three of the oxen with arrows. Two of the animals survived after the arrows were removed; the third was wounded mortally. Lest the ambushers benefit—and the owners lose—Manly and the others killed and butchered the animal themselves. Some feared eating the meat, thinking the arrow had been poisoned. But Manly pointed out that the Indians hoped to eat the meat and wouldn’t have tainted their own supper.
Shortly Manly’s group was slaughtering their oxen without the encouragement of the Indians. The reward hardly repaid the eff
ort. “Our animals were so poor that one would not last long as food. No fat could be found on the entire carcass, and the marrow of the great bones was a thick liquid, streaked with blood resembling corruption.”
The hunger became all-embracing. Not long after leaving the Los Angeles trail, Manly’s party had been passed by a group of young men from Kansas calling themselves the Jayhawkers. This impetuous bunch had driven swiftly by, and then—after having got lost—driven by again, less swiftly. One day Manly came across the carcass of an ox they had killed. The best cuts of beef—a very relative term under the circumstances—had been carved and packed off. But some leavings remained on the bone. How long the carcass had been lying in the sun, he couldn’t say. Nor did he ask. “I was so hungry that I took my sheath knife and cut a big steak which I devoured as I walked along, without cooking or salt. Some may say they would starve before eating such meat, but if they have ever experienced hunger till it begins to draw down the life itself, they will find the impulse of self-preservation something not to be controlled by mere reason. It is an instinct that takes possession of one in spite of himself.” Later Manly found some scraps of bacon rind left on the ground. “As I chewed these and tasted the rich grease they contained, I thought they were the sweetest morsels I had ever tasted.”
Manly’s party by now was thoroughly lost. They wandered semideliriously through a maze of mountains and valleys. They wanted to go west, but the valleys kept pushing them north and south. Each mountain range crossed revealed another ahead. How many more ranges separated them from California, God alone knew.
More discouragingly, the mountains kept getting taller and more rugged, and the valleys lower and more hostile. In one valley, during the last week of 1849, Manly made an appalling discovery. “As I reached the lower part of the valley, I walked over what seemed to be boulders of various sizes, and as I stepped from one to another the tops were covered with dirt and they grew larger as I went along. I could see behind them and they looked clear like ice, but on closer inspection proved to be immense blocks of rock salt, while the water which stood at their bases was the strongest brine.” Encountering yet again the Jayhawkers, he compared impressions with them. “One fellow said he knew this was the Creator’s dumping place, where he had left the worthless dregs after making a world, and the devil had scraped these together a little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar had been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man were to die he would never decay on account of the salt.”