Letters to America

by Tom Blair

  Following this dire recounting, Mister Akins went to his trunk; after a few moments of searching I was handed a copy of General History, written by Alexander Tytler, his father’s friend; then I was tasked to read it and provide him an oral synopsis. Never again did I pose a question to Mister Akins for the sake of delay. Nor did I ever inform the Captain that his beloved United States was doomed.

  Slowly the train’s journey turned southwest. After a day of no challenges, we rejoined the Platte and set camp just above Deer Creek, snaking in from the south. That night, with the men of the train hunkered around the communal fire, gold shone brighter than flames. Hesitantly two men asked that the Captain delay for a day while they explored whether the rumors were true, that gold mines were only a few miles south of where the Platte and Deer Creek merged. Captain spoke; told them he would delay the train so that they could collect the pots of gold at the end of rainbows, but he wasn’t stopping at Deer Creek.

  Two days past Deer Creek the train ferried across the Platte River to the southside. No waiting to cross, but another five dollars Father grudgingly fished from the bottom of Mother’s hope chest. After the crossing more than fifty miles of no trees, only red dirt, rocks, and prickly sagebrush. Our goal, the Captain always set a goal of a few days, was Devil’s Gate. But before Devil’s Gate we camped by Independence Rock. Unless a train reached this landmark by July Fourth, it well might not be through the mountain passes before the great snows. We were a week behind. Arch and I snuck out early the next morning before camp broke and ran a mile to the base of Independence Rock. Bigger than Scotts Bluff the rock was, and just as rumors said, more than a hundred names of settlers were carved in stone. In the warm light of dawn Arch and I scraped our names on its steep rock wall. I stood back, gazed at the etchings, wondering how many settlers had written their names for the last time. If I had known what the Lord had planned, I would have scraped Mrs. Johnson’s name onto the stone.

  The night after leaving Independence Rock we heard a woman screaming louder than I had ever heard. An Indian attack, I thought. Father ran with his rifle toward the screams, as Mother pushed Mary and me into our wagon. In the darkness we huddled and listened. No more screaming, then Father was back. It was Johnson’s wife, in the cold night air she had gone to lay a blanket on her mother and saw her eyes were open. Open not with life, but with death. Before the sun was fully over the horizon the Captain had her grave dug, the train was going to reach Devil’s Gate by the time set.

  Even Mister Akins said it was a sight to behold, a granite cliff more than three hundred feet high. Almost straight up; impossible for oxen to climb. Of course oxen didn’t have hands that could grab and pull, and oxen had more common sense than Arch and I had back then. After camp was set on the far side of the Devil’s Gate, Arch and I made it to the top, we were higher off the ground than ever before. Staring toward the east I claimed that I could see Iowa. Arch turned looking east, squinting his eyes, then he saw my smile. There was something I could see, below and behind a large boulder shielding them from the camped wagons were Levi and Mary. Levi being one of the young men that Mary thought might have matrimonial potential. Standing together, and as I would have said B.A., they were sparking.

  Right through the granite cliff ran Sweetwater River. Mister Akins said a million years of the water flowing wore down the granite, making the “Gate” our wagons rolled through. Captain said we would hug the banks of the Sweetwater River for three days before reaching Parting of the Ways, where the trail split between the Northwest, settlers traveling to Oregon, and the Southwest toward California. Devil’s Gate earned its name. After leaving its shadow, three days of a vicious wind, a wind of no pause that blew sand into eyes, mouths, ears, cups of water, and every fold of clothing. Each bite of food a gritting of sand between teeth. For three days we built no fires, ate only hard stale bread and dried beef salted with sand. Blinded by the sand, the oxen staggered forward with eyes closed. Each wagon had some poor soul, mouth covered with cloth, grasping the lead harness, pulling and directing the oxen, each wagon pulled by five beasts, four oxen and one man or woman.

  Perfect clear sky when we woke the morning of our camp at Parting of the Ways. First cooking fires since leaving Devil’s Gate, hot coffee, hot biscuits, and warm smiles. Good spirits after days of blowing hard sand. Mister Akins said that the greatest happiness is not always the beginning of something wonderful, but often the end of something awful. He said this without having visited truly awful, we had yet to reach the Salt Desert.

  After Parting of the Ways we hugged the Sweetwater River into the Rockies. More than a dozen times we forded the river, always seeking the easiest trail. Often in deep canyons, their high walls offering welcomed shade and cool air. Walls that also allowed a yelled voice to be echoed and echoed again. Echoes that somehow made us less small in the dark bottom of the folds of nature’s great canvases. Sometimes more than one or two miles we strayed from the Sweetwater’s flow. But always came back to its banks, banks that had a backdrop of nature’s beauty that I never had seen, or would see again. Touching and framing the churning river were wildflowers, willows and birch, behind these hills of green pine with the smell … no, not a smell … the aroma, of all that is pure and fresh, and looming over these green hills, great mountains of every shade and texture of gray, in every angular shape known, but all shapes together forming majestic peaks capped in last winter’s white.

  The Captain claimed the Sweetwater Pass was God’s gift to California-bound travelers, without it only a man and his mule would see the Pacific. And our travels over its eight thousand foot pass provided yet more opportunities for Mister Akins’s lessons; temperature drops three degrees Fahrenheit for each thousand feet of height, and the formula for converting Fahrenheit temperature to Centigrade temperature is to first subtract 30 from the Fahrenheit temperature and divide by two.

  It was the first night after the Rockies, with the men hunkered around our campfire, that the Captain announced that we weren’t heading south toward Fort Bridger. We were going to follow close to the Hastings Cutoff, taking a path straight to the south side of the Great Salt Lake. After that we would attack the Salt Desert. Two weeks travel to the Salt Lake, and two weeks of my education being applied by Mister Akins in greater and greater bundles of facts, quotes, theories, formulas, and questions; often questions posed in a manner to cause me to ponder the principles and physics of a hypothetical. Such was the case with a rowboat, pond, sledgehammers, and the two-thousand-year-old Archimedes principle. If I was floating in the middle of the pond in a rowboat and in the rowboat were a score of sledgehammers, and if I threw the sledgehammers overboard and they sank to the bottom of the pond, Mister Akins asked would the level of the pond rise, fall, or stay the same. He asked this as we finished our day’s schooling before setting up camp for the evening. I considered the question. I considered it long and hard. I asked Father. He in turn questioned why anyone would toss sledgehammers into a pond. In the morning, with a bucket of water, Mister Akins demonstrated the principles of the matter. Something floating in the water, perhaps a piece of board, displaces its weight in an amount of water equal to the same weight. An item that sinks to the bottom displaces its volume of water. Hence, when the sledgehammers were in the floating boat the combined weight of the boat and tools displaced a volume of water equal to their same weight. When the sledgehammers were thrown overboard, because they sank, they only displaced their volume; weight was of no consequence. Ergo, the answer to Mister Akins question: the level of water in the pond would fall, less water displaced. It wasn’t the physics of the matter that etched my memory, but rather the explanation point to the scientific concept recounted by Mister Akins. When Archimedes, during his bath two thousand years before, recognized the principles of displacement, he immediately yelled “Eureka”; the same term yelled by an excited James Marshall when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in ’49. The latter eureka being the impetus for several families in our train to sell
their farms and risk death in the hope of finding a yellow rock fortune in California.

  Slowly our train evolved from strangers in wagons to a village on wheels. Friends were made, strengths were recognized, and frailties accommodated. Families came to accept that the common good was only possible through a common struggle. Cooking fires were shared, clothes exchanged, tools lent, and remedies discussed. The Captain’s declaration that we all, or none, would reach California was silently acknowledged by everyday sacrifices on the trail. Sacrifices made by individuals for the benefit of all. Such was Mister Graham who, Father claimed, was the best carpenter ever to drive a nail. But hammering was not what served us best. While others rested after the supper meal, Mister Graham cut and shaped spokes. A drop into a gully, or a sideways glance off a stone outcropping, whatever cracked or broke a wheel, Mister Graham could fix a mend. From Minnesota were the Jurgovans, with them Mister Jurgovan’s mother who each night, if the weather was fair, would search for edibles; berries, mushrooms, and, perhaps, a honey nest. Anything found she would first eat; not to quench hunger, but to make certain no poisons would harm others. Her son was a blacksmith, always willing to shoe horses and repair the steel-rimmed wagon wheels for those traveling on the Captain’s train. No consideration paid for his labor other than a thank-you. And any shoe or boot could be made right by Mister Ebbs. Anything of leather, a harness, a strap to a stirrup, boots with worn-through bottoms, with his three-inch needles, more as nails, and cowhides kept stretched and drying on the side of his wagon, all was made right.

  While most all the men would hunt and fish given a chance, one returned with a kill most often. Mister Visnic was said to be the best shot in the train. Some thought it was his long-barreled Springfield, others said he possessed hawk eyes. For whatever reason, while others tracked rabbits, Mister Visnic returned with a limp elk or antelope burdening his horse. And the meat well butchered by Mister Hanson, so agile with his cleaver and knives that Father said he could divide a two-hundred-pound elk into fifty five-pound cuts.

  It wasn’t only the men with skills shared. In their wagon Mister Civera’s wife had more than a dozen large clay jars, each with colored herbs and spices, many never heard of by Mother. These she shared, explaining which should be rubbed on fish, which sprinkled on cooking meats, and which added to boiling turnips or fried potatoes.

  And while each sunset of our trek marked the end of another day of exhaustion, there was one reality that served as the salve for our tired bodies. If not each day, certainly each week the train fought its way closer to California … California being that great basket of promise that held the individual dreams of those dirty, tired, bruised, and scared, yes scared, souls of our train. Souls who at night lay on the hard ground and gazed at the night sky—a sky so expansive as to render humble and insecure the most confident—and wonder if they had entered into a fair bargain. A bargain where the price they paid in suffering and hardship was known while the reward was not. But it was known, known because the reward was a nebulous right, not a tangible prize. Those settlers reaching California would have earned the right to continue their struggle to realize their dreams. Dreams that were best dreamt while lying under a clear star-sprinkled night sky of no limits or boundaries.

  And it was our steady but slowly measured pace toward California that brought Mister Akins to revise my curriculum. At first he hoped to apply a broad whitewash to my chipped and fading education. As our train drew nearer to California he reconsidered. After crossing the Rockies Mister Akins declared that Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear were lost forever in one of its great canyons. For the final weeks of our journey he would only stretch my brain around math and sciences. I smiled a premature smile. That afternoon Akins asked that I calculate the circumference of a rear wagon wheel, it being larger than the front wheels. First, two more vocabulary words added: calculate and circumference. I considered the task. In time a solution. I took a piece of well-worn rope from the wagon, and starting at the bottom of the wheel, carefully “walked” it around the full rim of the wheel, marking the rope where it met at the beginning point of its journey. Knowing that my father’s boot was close to a foot long, I walked his boot along the length of the rope and confidently announced to Mister Akins the circumference was just over twenty-one feet. He, as usual, had been reading while I toiled. Looking up he stated that I had not done what he had assigned. I had attempted to measure the circumference. He had directed that I calculate the circumference. Why, I asked, was it necessary to calculate? His answer … Because Hipparchus didn’t have a rope long enough to reach the moon … I came to understand later.

  Mister Akins finished the page he was reading, noted the page number, carefully set the book down, and proceeded to calculate the circumference. He took the same rope, marked a length between the center of the axle and the outer portion of the rim. He then reached inside his jacket, unbuttoned the flap over the inside pocket, and removed his wallet. He did this as explaining that while he didn’t have a twelve-inch long measuring stick, he did carry a five and three-quarter inch measuring stick. Mister Akins withdrew a five-dollar note from his wallet, then precisely toggled it along the length of the rope, counting seven lengths before a fraction remained. He then folded the note, first in half, then against to fourths and finally to eights and sixteenths. After measuring the folds against the last portion of rope, he announced the radius of the wheel was seven and three-sixteenths of a five-dollar note. Mister Akins then sat down, pulled his Parker pen from his coat, and performed various calculations. In time he peered over the top of his glasses and announced the circumference of the wheel was 21.6 feet. Then he handed me his calculation:

  7.1875 times 5.75 times 2.0 times 3.14 divided by 12 equals 21.6

  I stared at the numbers, in time I understood two of them. But why multiply by 2 and then 3.14? That day I was introduced to Pi. Certain constants exist in the universe, Mister Akins explained. One being Pi. Take the diameter of a circle, which is twice the radius … or twice the length of a spoke of a wagon wheel … and multiply it by Pi, 3.14, and the precise circumference of the circle is calculated. Didn’t believe him at first. Measured one of Mother’s pie pans as best I could, perhaps the ultimate test of Pi, and, as predicted, the circumference was touching 3.14 times the diameter.

  As Mister Akins taught me equations, the combined variables on each side of the equal sign must agree, in time I came to understand the formula and the equal sign between Mother and Mister Akins. He was at all times a gracious gentlemen to my Mother, offering his hand when she stepped from the wagon. While Father and I would remain seated around the cooking fire, Mister Akins would stand when Mother approached. And when he greeted her each new day, he would tip his narrow-rimmed hat as he offered her a pleasant morning. On the other side of the equal sign never a day passed without Mother performing a kindness for Mister Akins. Washing a shirt, sewing on a button, asking if her cooking met with his approval. Once when Mister Akins tore the sleeve of his coat on a nail head, Mother went from wagon to wagon until she found thread of the color of the ripped apparel. Carefully as a surgeon she repaired the tear.

  In time, the challenge the Captain had spoken of during his first meeting with the men of our train in Council Bluffs loomed before us: the Salt Desert. Evening gatherings of the men no longer brought worries of savage Indians, no more complaints about the sharing of food. Crossing the Salt Desert drew everyone’s disquiet. Stories were told, some true, some not. It was a tale Mister Jurgovan repeated that caused those men squatting around the evening campfire to contemplate their mortality. Well, not the story alone, but what the Captain added.

  Mister Jurgovan claimed that two years before a train halfway across the Salt Desert was stalled for days by a wind worse than anyone could imagine. Stalled, drinking most all of the little water they had. When the storm took its leave the train broke camp, many wagons were without water, the baking sun and salt air making men and oxen mad of mind. One demented soul with a parched t
ongue and baked reasoning drank coal oil from his wagon’s lamp. Rolling in agony as his stomach tried to squeeze out the burning oil, he shot himself in the gut. As this poor soul was twisting in the sand screaming from the wound, another man from the train fired a bullet into his head, ending his misery. After Jurgovan’s tale of woe, all were quiet, then someone offered that it was only a story told in darkness; no one would try to drench a parched throat with coal oil, no matter how mad they be. The Captain spoke; a true recounting, and he knew it to be so because he was the one who shot the screaming man; and they didn’t take time to bury him, they had to reach water before they all died.

  For two days we hugged the south side of the Salt Lake, a journey that should have been a single day, but the Captain claimed that he didn’t want to labor the oxen and cattle before the Salt Desert crossing. Rather, I think he wanted to rest the two-legged animals of our train. Before our assault on the Salt Desert he directed that no one eat bacon, and with each family the Captain met, to make certain their water bladders and kegs were full, and that they knew if any wagon broke down there would be no delay for repair or discussion. Each person to another wagon, only water carried from the abandoned wagon. Oxen cut from their harnesses and free to follow, but the train would not stop.

  A long night before the desert crossing, no campfire or meeting of the men. Each wagon tended by their owners, each family speaking softly of the morrow’s tasks. Prayers whispered; I saw Mother with her Bible, not seen since the crossing of the Missouri. Its holy grace saved for rivers and deserts.

  Camp broke before dawn, the Captain hoping to steal five miles before the sun began its attack. Cold coffee and a torn hunk of dark hard bread our morning meal. The night before we had dug till water, impure and brown, was found; the last drinks for our oxen who knew nothing of what lay before. To the west our savior, mountains. In moonlight only gray against a black sky. Before us an ocean of sand. Flat sand of no threat. But with the rising sun the desert floor a hard anvil under our feet as the sun’s hammer tried to bend us as a blacksmith might.