The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  The main party knew the Deschutes River lay somewhere ahead near the base of the Cascades. But they didn’t know just where nor how far. Finally, they decided their only hope was to let loose their cows and hope the animals would sniff out water. Many years later, Hanks Neville Hill recounted to his grandchildren that he was one of the small group of men who followed on horseback after the set-loose stock, while the main party stayed put. After the first long, dry day, unable to eat because they had no water, the men were making camp for the night when a fourteen-year-old boy came riding up on a buckskin pony, having tagged along from the main camp. He was Isaac Darneille, who would one day marry Hill’s daughter and be father to the grandchildren to whom Hill was telling the story:

  Bright and early next morning we struck out8 with the boy and pony in the lead.…[L]ate that evening as we were moving wearily along, our jaded beasts, which we had to whip heretofore to keep in a walk, began to show signs of life by picking up their ears and sniffing the air, while the buckskin pony almost raised a trot. We knew what it meant and urged them on till the pony was in a lope away ahead and the rest in a trot. Suddenly the pony stopped, the boy disappeared, and on coming up we found ourselves gazing down fifty feet or more into the rushing waters of the DesChutes river. And there halfway down the almost perpendicular banks was that madcap boy, tearing along.…[F]inally with a tumble and a roll he lands at the bottom, flat on his stomach, face down in cold water, trying in that first drink to quench the thirst that had been burning him up for three days.

  Hill had left his pregnant wife and children back in the main camp. After finding the Deschutes and its precious water, he started back to them the next day, bearing two twelve-gallon kegs lashed on horseback. He traveled all that day and into the night.

  About 10 o’clock that night I sighted the campfire. When I reached it every thing was still, the lights out in all the tents except mine. I hastened inside and up to my wife’s bedside. She looked up with a sad smile and said, “Don’t hurt the baby, dear.” Oh, how I felt! Sure enough, there lay the little stranger as contented as if on a bed of down in a cozy home. We then and there named him “Hardy.” Your Grandma had during all that time, for herself and four children, about a quart of water.…One of my little girls was lying there fast asleep with her tongue swollen out of her mouth. Strange as it may seem, children complained the least and would keep where strong men would faint.

  Scouts now searched the far bank of the Deschutes for the newly blazed road, and, some thirty miles upstream, discovered the terminus of the Free Emigrant Road. This, they hoped, would lead them over the Diamond Mountain pass of the Cascades and down into the fertile Willamette Valley. Another advance party—the first one having disappeared some weeks earlier—hastened up the road to summon help from the Willamette.

  The wagons slowly rolled up the road, chunking over stumps and logs left by the seven young men of the road-blazing crew, which felled the trees but returned to the Willamette without clearing them away. It was supposed to be twenty miles up to the Diamond Pass summit, but, Esther Lyman recalled, it turned out to be “a long forty.” Her husband had gone ahead with the second advance party. Unable to drive her wagon alone, she’d left it, their team of oxen, and her featherbed behind, with the hope of retrieving them when her husband returned. Another emigrant carted them off.

  The train’s cattle had no grass on the long, slow haul up Diamond Mountain. Wagonless, Esther Lyman and her children slept on the ground under a covering that, in the mornings, would be drenched with cold rain or thick with frost. Breakfast meant a scrawny piece of boiled meat. It was now approaching mid-October. The emigrants feared the arrival of early mountain snows that could trap them. They well knew the story of the snows that had trapped the Donner Party seven years before in the California Sierras.

  The last pitch to the summit of Diamond Pass they found excruciatingly steep, muddy, and difficult. The men linked multiple teams of oxen together and pulled the wagons over one by one while the animals’ hooves slipped in cold mud. Snow fell lightly that day at the summit. Some wagons didn’t make it over before dark. The men chocked the wagon wheels with logs to prevent them from rolling backward, and the oxen slept where they stood while the emigrants pitched tents on a piece of flatter ground at the top.

  “Oh what visions of Bred butter pies Cakes9 and other good things to eat visited us by night,” recalled Esther Lyman, “making awakening reality still more dreadful.”

  NO ONE STRUGGLING OVER Diamond Pass realized that, two days earlier, young Dave Mathews had discovered Martin Blanding, member of the second advance party, lying emaciated beside a smoldering campfire. Blanding was the first to stumble out to the Willamette. Following the crude Emigrant Free Road, he’d made it ninety miles down the far side of Diamond Mountain, and, keeping to the twisting pathway, forded and reforded and forded again—some thirty times—the Middle Fork of the Willamette River to the edge of civilization.

  The alarm spread through the newly settled farmsteads of the Willamette Valley. Settlers—some of them promoters of the new road, and surely horrified at the prospect of its first users starving to death—quickly loaded up horses and wagons and headed up the crude trail toward the top of Diamond Pass, bearing more than 20,000 pounds of flour and other goods.

  The wagon train had now started the long, rough journey down Diamond Pass. Huge, dead-fallen firs in the thick rainforest lay across the road. Instead of clearing them away, the road-blazing crew had constructed crude ramps over the three-foot-thick logs. Esther Lyman and her children found it easier to walk ahead than to bump as passengers over them, with the risk of overturning.

  One day as she walked along she heard the faint ringing of a bell. She thought at first it was the wagons that rumbled a mile behind her, or a stray cow that she might slaughter and eat, as she had just run out of meat. Then around the bend came a horse-mounted man leading two horses and a mule. Esther Lyman spotted the sacks of flour, potatoes, and onions that the animals carried.

  I think I was never so glad to see any human10 being in my life before. As soon as I could command my voice sufficient to speak I told him my situation. his reply was that I and my children must be got into the valley as soon as possible, and as I had no husband to see to me he would just take me and the children on his own animals and convey us to the settlements.…When we all got together you had better believe we had a time of feasting and rejoicing; Bread never tasted half so good before although it was made [of] flour salt and water. When we had partiality satisfied our appetites and turned to thank again our generous benefactor the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. he hastaly dashed them aside and replyed that if he had relieved our wants he was amply rewarded. Oh he was a noble young man…

  Esther Lyman and her children were rescued. Soon more provisions reached the struggling wagon train—a total of ninety-four laden pack animals and twenty-three wagons heaped with food, sent by the settlers of the Willamette Valley. It took nearly three weeks from the time Dave Mathews found Martin Blanding until all the parties of the Lost Wagon Train were safely led from the rugged Cascade crest down into the gentle Willamette. Once there, in that fertile green valley, some staked out farms and prospered. Others kept moving toward California. Some of the Lost Wagon Train descendants still live in the Willamette Valley today.

  I THANKED KAREN NITZ for her help and walked out of the Harney County Library into the cold, gusting rain and the apple blossoms scattered on the wide wet streets. Burns was the last town for a long, long while. Bearing in mind the fate of the Lost Wagon Train in the country beyond Burns, I stocked up on canned goods at a local supermarket, and bought an extra five-gallon water jug at the hardware store. I then headed south again, on Highway 205, down the broad Harney Valley, which cradles Malheur Lake. Very shallow, this measures nearly twenty miles across but only ten feet deep. The shoulderless asphalt strip perched precariously on a dike as it crossed the lake’s marshy arms, these oasislike desert wetlands b
rimming with the spring rains. It was right here that Elijah Elliot, pilot of the 1853 wagon train that included Martin Blanding and Esther Lyman, concluded he was lost. Unsure which direction to lead the prairie schooners around the lake, he spent a week wandering back and forth before heading west again, uncertain just where to aim, out into the dry country.

  The emerald expanses of marsh grass held leggy flocks of white, flamingo-like egrets, and storky, gray sandhill cranes, which plucked at the water with their long beaks. This massive watering hole—as distinct from its surroundings as an irrigated putting green on a sere desert landscape—serves as a major stop on the migratory pathways between the Arctic and the subtropics. In 1908, Malheur Lake had been designated a federal bird refuge in order to protect the egrets, herons, swans, and other species from “plume hunters” who sold the feathers to hat-makers back in New York.

  I CONTINUED SOUTH, aiming for the center of southeast Oregon’s blank spot. I was in Harney County, the state’s least populated. Highway 205 climbed a rise out of the rich, green Harney Basin and descended into another—this one huge and dry. The horizon receded far ahead of me. Instead of the lapping carpet of marshy swamps, sagebrush grew in a million separate clumps, as if the present had dissolved into a distant, grainy, black-and-white past.

  There were no houses. There were no road signs. There was only the skinny strip of asphalt and the enormous spaces.

  My mind wandered as I drove. I thought of dates. I thought of 1845 and of 1853—the two years, respectively, when Stephen Meek and Elijah Elliot “lost” their wagon trains in southeast Oregon’s high deserts. It occurred to me those were exactly the dates that Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond, lived there, and labored on his manuscript. I sensed a kind of convergence in those years as the European “Romantic” spirit about nature moved west, mingled with the American pioneer spirit.

  The young “mountain men”—these hippies of their era—led the charge. Eager to cast aside convention and security, they left the constraints of the East and traveled up the Missouri River in the wake of Lewis and Clark’s 1804–06 expedition—seeking freedom, adventure, wild places, and, almost incidentally, a fortune in furs. Many didn’t want to go back, intermarrying with Indian women, supporting mixed-race families. I wonder how many had read one of the popular young British poets of their day, Lord Byron, who inspired a whole generation of European youth to seek the wild, lonely places of the earth with poems like his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18).

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore.

  There is society where none intrudes;

  By the deep sea, and music in its roar;

  I love not man the less, but nature more.

  Washington Irving, “America’s first man of letters,” well knew Byron’s Childe Harold. Born in New York City, Irving had moved to Britain in 1815 as an aspiring writer, entered its literary scene, and discovered his voice—“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—by looking back on rural America through a Romantic lens shaped by Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and other British writers. For seventeen years, during the height of the “mountain man” and fur-trade era in the American West, Irving lived amid British and Continental sophistication, among courts, writers, diplomats. From Europe, he read and heard stories of the mountain men opening up the unexplored valleys of the Rocky Mountains. The stories of the American wilderness clearly hit a romantic chord in the urbane Irving. When he finally returned to America in 1832 it was, he said, to see the West before it vanished.

  “[While it was] still in a state of pristine wildness,11 and behold herds of buffaloes scouring the native prairies.”

  Irving joined up with a government commission trying to negotiate peace between Great Plains Indian tribes and tagged along on an extended camping tour of the Kansas and Arkansas territories. The Continental cosmopolitan managed, after some effort, to shoot a buffalo, and came away touting the benefits of the “wild wood life…of a magnificent wilderness.”

  “We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe,”12 wrote Irving in A Tour on the Prairies. “[I]t appears to me that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity and self dependence most in unison with our political institutions.”

  Expressed early by Irving, this sentiment that American wilderness shaped American character would resonate ever more loudly as America’s wild spaces vanished. Even as the mountain men still roamed the West in the early 1830s, trapping beaver, holding their raucous annual rendezvous, marrying Indian women, there was a sense of something irreplaceable slipping away. The aging and cantankerous John Jacob Astor himself, looking back from the 1830s, saw romance in the early days in the Western wilderness. In 1834 he commissioned Irving, at a handsome sum, to write Astoria, the history of his fur-trading endeavor to the West Coast that had occurred only twenty-five years before, which Irving filled with high adventure and romance among mountain men and Indians, including the story of poor John Day.

  By the 1840s, the fur trade had played out, due in part to a fashion shift away from beaver-skin hats. The first wagon trains of settlers in quest of cheap or free land to farm rolled west on the Oregon Trail, guided by ex–mountain men like Stephen Meek. The sense of loss intensified as farmers moved west. Francis Parkman, then an intense young man with a passion for history, lamented in his Harvard graduation address in 1844 that when Columbus came to America, it was “the domain of Nature…the sublimest object in the world” but now the “solemn poetry that breathed from her endless wilderness is gone…”

  Following Washington Irving’s lead, two years after his college graduation, Parkman traveled a part of the newly opened Oregon Trail in the course of his historical research about France’s empire in the New World. The nervous, hyperintellectual Parkman,13 prone to migraines, didn’t have much use for the Oregon Trail emigrants (nor probably they for him), finding them oxlike and oafish and dull. Picture Parkman’s cringe upon meeting, say, the plain-talking Mrs. Esther Lyman: “There’s not enough fat on that beef to grease a griddle.”

  For Parkman, the Oregon Trail experience was not the domain of Nature at her “sublimest.” But there was an odd convergence in these years, the late 1840s, between the Romantic outlook on Nature of the Parkmans, and the practical pioneering spirit of the Esther Lymans. All at the same moment, Thoreau scribbled away in his cabin at Walden Pond, Parkman traveled the Plains in search of Romance, and emigration on the Oregon Trail surged toward its peak.

  It’s no coincidence, then, that during this convergence of time and attitudes in the late 1840s, a young boy named John Muir emigrated from Scotland with his family to chop a farm from the Wisconsin woods. He embodied both the pioneering spirit of an Esther Lyman and the Romantic take on Nature of a Francis Parkman. As he matured, he, too, would head west and become America’s, and perhaps the world’s, foremost advocate of saving wilderness.

  AN HOUR’S DRIVE SOUTH of Burns on Highway 205, I spotted a green oasis of cottonwood trees nestled against a dry hillside, like a patch of moss at the base of a big rock. The road suddenly curved, slowing, easing from the hard sagebrushy landscape into the cozy green pocket. Six or seven houses were tucked pleasantly under the trees, along with a tiny general store, a schoolhouse, and an old frame building with a smooth green lawn. A sign identified this as the Frenchglen Hotel. I parked on the crunching gravel, climbed the thumping steps of the wooden front porch, opened the creaky screen door, and got a room for the night.

  “Dinner’s at six thirty,” said John Ross, the manager behind the stand-up desk. “It’s family style.”

  Three or four tables were laid with fifteen or twenty place settings in the combination lobby and dining room. The room had a warm, cluttered, woody feeling, and from the kitchen wafted the rich, browned smell of roasting meat. I hauled my duffel bag up the creaking steps to my room. Very small, maybe eight feet square, it had
one bed, wainscot trim painted neatly in gray and white, and an old-fashioned sash window that looked onto the green lawn under the cottonwoods. I recalled, from similar hostelries in Montana, that this is what a typical Old West boardinghouse or stagecoach stop looks like. Simple wooden construction, narrow, creaking stairways and passages, doorknobs that rattled, rooms just big enough for a bed and for your boots and maybe a washbasin, with the bathroom down the hall.

  Now owned by the Oregon state parks department, the Frenchglen Hotel was once known as “P Station”—stagecoach stop, guesthouse, supply depot—of Pete French’s cattle empire, the P Ranch. French had grown up on his family’s sheep ranch in California in the 1850s and 1860s, and was eventually hired on as a horse breaker with a much more prosperous California cattle rancher, Dr. Hugh Glenn. Diminutive in stature but fiercely ambitious, French learned how to work cattle with horses under the tutelage of the Spanish-speaking vaqueros of Glenn’s ranch.

  In the spring of 1872, Dr. Glenn financed Pete French14 and sent him north to rumored grazing lands in the Oregon Territory at the head of an entourage of 1,200 shorthorns, six vaqueros, twenty horses, and a Chinese cook. Where I stood at Frenchglen, Pete French had come upon a many-miles-long strip of wet, grassy marshland along the Donner und Blitzen—“Thunder and Lightning” in German—River that could be diked and ditched and drained to create rich hayfields, supplemented by the upland pastures of nearby Steens Mountain. It was just what he was looking for.

  Single-mindedly, young French pieced together a cattle kingdom by whatever means he could, including fencing off lands that other ranchers considered their own and appropriating water rights. He defied the threats against him, small as he was physically, or perhaps because of it.

  “I’ll fight any man,”15 he claimed.

  The French-Glenn Cattle Co. and its P Ranch numbered some twenty thousand head by 1878. It survived an attack that year by Paiute and Bannock Indians, it survived several terrible winters, and it even survived the breakup of an eight-year marriage between Pete French and Dr. Glenn’s daughter. What the P Ranch ultimately didn’t survive was Pete French’s in-your-face personality.