Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

The Trail out of Fort Hall followed the left bank of the Snake River, tributary of the Columbia, through “a melancholy and strange looking country,” Frémont said, “one of fracture, and violence, and fire,” the crossing of the Snake eased somewhat by two islands, which enabled wagons to cross in three laborious stages.

  A few miles west of Fort Hall, at the American Falls of the Snake, those heading for California left their wagons and mounted horses and mules. Now, with a train of pack animals they followed their pilot southwestward toward the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, a known killer of man and beast, 200,000 square miles of white salt beds, sand, lava, alkali, sage, and clay wastes circled by mountains that reflected the sun’s heat like a mirror. The Hudson’s Bay factor at Fort Hall recommended that emigrants take the California route, hoping to delay the time when Oregon could be invaded by Americans. While playing down the dangers of the southward journey, he warned the Oregon-bound about ravaging Indians, the likelihood of famine, how the Snake River threw itself and its passengers suicidally down its yawning gorges, and how mountain blizzards lay waiting in the Blue Mountains. Much of what he described required no exaggeration.

  The Oregonians listened to the stories and moved on anyway, down the Snake to Salmon Falls, across the sage plains to Fort Boisé, and on to the Grand Ronde valley, a gorgeous campground of piney hills, rich pasturage, and abundant watercourses just east of the snow-shrouded Blue Mountains. They crossed the mountains, often in blizzards, visited the Whitmans’ mission at Waiilatpu, and continued west to Fort Walla Walla with only the Cascades and sixty-odd miles separating them from the Willamette valley but no wagon road to reach it.3

  The more cautious of the emigrants completed their journey down the Columbia banks on horseback. Many took their wagons and struggling animals the 250 miles across the Cascade Range into the forests around Mount Hood, to stagger into the Willamette on their literal last legs. Many more traveled in bateaux, dugouts, and canoes on the Walla Walla and Columbia to The Dalles, where they felled trees, made rafts, dismantled their wagons and placed them aboard, and faced the worst stretch of their 2,000-mile journey. The sixty miles of the Columbia to the mouth of the Willamette River rocketed down a basalt gutter that breached the Cascades, a mountain chain sixty to eighty miles wide with canyons 3,000 feet deep, a roller-coaster ride in icy winds blowing upstream that killed many so near the end of their journey and the beginning of their new lives.

  After recovering from their Columbia passage, the newcomers crossed the river to the mouth of the Willamette. They hugged the shore for about twenty miles to Oregon City, a village on the east bank just below the falls of the Willamette.4

  Most of the emigrants eventually paid a visit to Fort Vancouver, where John McLoughlin received them courteously and at no charge provided them with rooms to rest, salmon, potatoes, firewood, and whatever they required—within reason and usually within the rules of the Hudson’s Bay Company—before they left his domain to travel on south to the land they were claiming.

  20

  The Great Migration

  “MAY WE NOT CALL THEM MEN OF DESTINY?”

  1

  By 1843, even the European press took notice of the Oregon Trail “movers,” the pioneer families who were pointing their wagons west. British papers and journals, protective of their interests in the Pacific Northwest, saw the whole business as inexplicable. In a July 1843 editorial, the venerable Edinburgh Review informed its readers that for six months of the year the territory between the western boundary of the United States and the Oregon Country was “a howling wilderness of snow and tempests” and the remaining six months a wasteland “of hopeless sterility” infested with Indians “of more than Sythian savageness and endurance, who cannot be tracked, overtaken, or conciliated.” The writer praised the energy of the American emigrants but predicted that “Oregon will never be colonized overland from the United States.”

  The view was shared by many influential Americans, among them Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Daily Tribune, the very man who urged, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!” (by which he meant west to the far country of Erie County, Pennsylvania). In 1843 he was in his “Stay east” mode, in which, receiving reports of the extraordinary gathering of wagons and pioneer families on the Missouri frontier he railed, “This migration of more than a thousand persons in a body to Oregon wears an aspect of insanity.” He acknowledged that the United States had a rightful claim to Oregon but cautioned against making unnecessary trouble with the British by an emigrant invasion of the Northwest. The place was too distant, he said, and not nearly as fertile and rich in resources as the paeans of the propagandists would have it.

  He urged caution. The Oregon boom was a sickness, infecting otherwise sensible folk into febrile acts, such as leaving comfortable homes, good farmlands, and markets, leaving their churches and friends and responsibilities. He wrote in his paper on July 19, 1843, “For what, then, do they brave the desert, the wilderness, the savage, snowy precipices of the Rocky Mountains, the weary summer march, the storm-drenched bivouac, and the gnawings of famine? Only to fulfill their destiny! There is probably not one among them whose outward circumstances will be improved by this perilous pilgrimage.”

  Nor was that all. Greeley wrote of starvation and savages, warning would-be pioneers who were so accustomed to the comforts and safety of their civilized lives that they could expect Indian attacks, perhaps several, during their journey between Missouri and Oregon, as well as other dangers and privations. He attempted to soften his panicky editorializing by assuring his readers that he was actually in favor of American settlement of the lands beyond Missouri, and looked in favor at the American pioneer spirit. But, he said, a mass movement to Oregon was too extreme, and he called upon all prudent men to “stop this side of the woods”—meaning at the Missouri boundary—because it was “palpable homicide to tempt or send women and children over this thousand miles of precipice and volcanic sterility to Oregon.”

  Greeley’s shaky sense of distance and topography improved in 1859, when he made an overland trip to California and en route invented the Q&A newspaper interview after having a chat with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City. However, even as late as 1845, when 10,000 overlanders were clogging the Medicine Road, he was still calling the enterprise “foolhardy,” still warning against Indian depredations and famine. He cautioned on the consequences of depending upon the Hudson’s Bay Company to be of assistance if the emigrant miraculously got to Oregon, sick, shrunken to a skeleton, with his belongings strewn along the trail and his animals done in or dead. The Hudson’s Bay people, he said, could not be expected to provide succor to “a horde.”

  While Greeley was among the most persistent and eloquent of the lemmings-to-the-sea school of observers of the Great Migration, he had company in his views. The North American Review compared Oregon to Siberia and said the roads to each were similarly perilous. The New Orleans Picayune advised in 1846, after the Oregon Trail had conveyed thousands to the Pacific, that emigrants, if they insisted on hazarding the journey west, do so via the Isthmus of Panama “to divert the travels to Oregon by the long, dangerous and expensive route across the prairies and Rocky Mountains.” Even the Daily Missouri Republican in Saint Louis counseled menfolk to “stay home and earn an honest living.”

  In Congress, reactions to the growing traffic on the Trail were mixed. In January 1843 Senator George McDuffie of South Carolina thanked God “for placing the Rocky Mountains in such a way as to thwart Americans from reaching the Pacific.” That same month, Lewis Linn of Missouri, surgeon in the War of 1812, Jacksonian Democrat, and party warhorse, died, indefatigable to the end in introducing bills for the settlement of Oregon. In one of his last addresses to the Senate he spoke of the “easy” passes across McDuffie’s thwarting Rockies and expressed envy at the “wild and strange rapture” Daniel Boone must have felt when he penetrated the forests and first cast his eye upon Kentucky. The Oregon pioneer would experience such a rap
ture, he promised, and, never at a loss for biblical precedent, said the journey of the westward pioneers recalled those going “to the wilderness, like our first parents, when God sent them forth from the Garden of Eden to subdue the earth.” Representative Orlando Bell Ficklin of Illinois took this a step further, speaking of the emigrants of the 1840s in allusions to Abraham and Lot, Moses and Aaron, and said he dreamed of the day he could climb the mountains to see and hear “with wild delight” the roar of the mighty Columbia as it crashed into the western sea.

  Those whose dreaming had turned to doing were propelled west in 1843 for practical reasons. The residue of the economic Panic of ’37 lingered; prices for farm goods remained depressed, as did those who raised the goods, who scratched out a meager subsistence from their Mississippi valley or Ohio valley acreage. Fresh reports from witnesses as reliable as Marcus Whitman, Jason Lee, Elijah White, and John C. Frémont told of open markets, fertile land, and limitless opportunity for “industry” and the industrious in Oregon.

  “Hurry on,” many who had seen the elephant were writing home, and warnings filtered eastward that the journey was becoming most costly for those who tarried and who did not provision themselves adequately. Post traders, capitalizing on the surge of traffic on the Trail, were charging exorbitantly for supplies. Frémont’s cartographer Charles Preuss wrote in his diary in 1843 that “Carson [Kit Carson] was sent ahead to Fort Hall to secure provisions for us. If the emigrants get ahead of us, we shall not find much there.” Marcus Whitman, who served as a guide for many of the Oregon-bound that year, wrote of the booming business and high prices at the four principal Oregon Trail posts—Forts Laramie, Bridger, Hall, and Boisé.

  (The pitiless scalping escalated: At Fort Laramie in 1846 Francis Parkman seethed that the traders had become the “natural enemies” of the overlanders who, he wrote, “were plundered and cheated without mercy.” He told of “one bargain, concluded in my presence,” in which “I calculated the profits that accrued to the fort, and found that at the lowest estimate they exceeded eighteen hundred per cent.”)

  * * *

  On May 18, 1843, at Elm Grove, the rendezvous place twelve miles out of Independence, recognizable for its one large elm tree and one small one, a concourse of wagons, ox and mule teams, horse and cattle herds, and people from every part of Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and farther-flung hamlets and towns awaited the signal to begin the long walk to the Pacific. They had trickled in for weeks, “relying only on the fertility of their invention.” One notable man among them, Jesse Applegate, later wrote, “Always ready and equal to the occasion and always conquerors. May we not call them men of destiny?”

  The men, women, and children of destiny numbered between 875 and 1,000 with 150 wagons, an immense cattle herd, and a collection of spare horses, mules, and oxen—all told as many as 5,000 animals. The assemblage was late in starting—a cold spring had kept the bluestem grass in hibernation—and impatient. They were oblivious to the stragglers pouring into their bustling camp every day who jockeyed for lead spots in the line of march. There was much quarreling over the cow herd, which the cowless felt would drag them all down and delay them reaching the mountains before winter.

  At the head of the caravan, which moved west on May 22, was Captain John Gantt, a Marylander and former army officer in his early fifties. A tough, no-nonsense guide, he had found his own second chance and a new life in the West after being court-martialed and dismissed from the service in 1829 for falsification of pay accounts, and he had close to twenty years’ experience in Indian country. He had been recruited as pilot at the rate of one dollar per emigrant and agreed to lead the caravan as far as Fort Hall, where he would then continue on to California.

  Another experienced hand who signed on to assist Gantt, Joseph Ballinger Chiles of Kentucky, had gone to California in ’41 with the Bartleson-Bidwell train and had returned home with permission to build a grain mill in the Napa valley north of San Francisco Bay. He had recruited thirty men and had eight wagons loaded with mill equipment.

  News arrived at Elm Grove that Dr. Marcus Whitman would be joining the caravan after he finished some business at Shawnee Mission, the Methodist Indian school at Westport Landing. He had returned to Boston the year past to convince the Board of Foreign Missions to save Waiilatpu and the Spaldings’ mission at Lapwai.

  When Whitman caught up with the Gantt train on the Platte, he calmed such anxieties as those created by many Trail veterans who warned the party that their wagons could not be taken beyond Fort Hall. Whitman said they could be taken all the way to the Columbia because the caravan had the combined manpower, which he lacked in ’36, to get them there.

  Also hurrying along toward the Missouri border was Lieutenant John C. Frémont, with a new expedition of forty men, pack animals, carts, and even a twelve-pounder cannon to impress any belligerent Indians on his line of march. He was heading toward South Pass again, but this time he intended pushing on to Oregon.

  Notable among the tyros in the 1843 caravan was Peter Hardeman Burnett, one-time storekeeper in Weston, Missouri, a self-taught lawyer who was hopelessly in debt and had an ailing wife and six children. Taken down with Oregon fever, he had spent a year lecturing in western Missouri, calling for the other fever-stricken comrades to join him in Independence to start the journey. He had patched together the funds to buy two wagons and the oxen to pull them and by the time he arrived in Independence he had many followers and seemed a natural leader.1

  Also eager and impressive were the Applegate brothers, Jesse, Lindsey, and Charles, from the Osage valley of Missouri. The Applegates were originally Kentuckians, having moved to Missouri when the boys were young to farm corn and cotton and raise hogs and cattle. Jesse had studied surveying and was known to have walked up to sixty miles a day in his work. He was tall, rawboned, and “so homely,” David Lavender wrote, “he avoided mirrors all his life.” He had gone broke farming and surveying, sold his property, and enlisted his brothers, who were little better off, to sell out. They all brought their wagons, cows, and families to Independence.

  2

  The train rolled out of Elm Grove on May 22, 1843, heading southwest along an old trace that intersected the Santa Fé Trail, by now a broad roadway pounded flat from two decades of heavy trade-wagon traffic. A day out of Fitzhugh’s Mill, near Gardner, Kansas, they turned due west to the Wakarusa River, the first of many river obstacles that would try the patience and endurance of the tenderfeet, a steep-banked stream that required a path to be spaded down for the wagons’ passage. The next crossing, the Kaw (or Kansas) River, was far worse. Gantt led the caravan thirty miles along its banks before finding a suitable fording place, then supervised the building of cross-timbered rafts to ferry the wagons, and people, across. The operation, including swimming the horses, draft animals, and cattle herd to the far bank, occupied five days.

  Meantime, stragglers continued coming up. On May 31 Frémont and his expedition reached Elm Grove, where he observed ragged files of wagons bumping along toward the Kaw nine days behind the main train. Among the others who caught up were two Jesuit missionaries bound for the Flathead villages of the Bitterroot valley, and William Drummond Stewart, the Waterloo and Fifteenth King’s Hussars veteran. Sir William had been hunting and taking part in the fur traders’ rendezvous for a decade and was now returning to his beloved American West for the last time, accompanied by a party of sportsmen friends, heading for the Green River. Stewart was popular for his stories of Wellington in the Iberian Peninsula and fighting Napoleon’s Grand Armée at Waterloo. Stewart’s guide, Bill Sublette, had endless campfire tales of his experiences as one of Ashley’s “enterprising young men” in ’23: his narrow escape in the Arikara fight on the Upper Missouri, his journey with Jedediah Smith into Crow country and all the way to Hudson’s Bay territory in Oregon, recollections of Nat Wyeth in 1832, and his wound in the Blackfoot battle at Pierre’s Hole on July 18 that year. Sublette, now ailing and with on
ly two years to live, was, like his employer, making his last journey into the mountains.

  Past the Kaw and into rolling hills covered with wildflowers the train crawled northwest amidst daily thunderstorms and whipping winds that blew the rain horizontally into their faces, scattered tents and camp gear, and chased the terrified stock into the brush.

  The long passage of the Kaw signaled the need for a better organization of the caravan, one along military lines for better discipline and order. This probably resulted from Captain Gantt’s counsel and, perhaps because he brought the most people to the Elm Grove rendezvous, Peter Burnett was elected captain and James M. Nesmith, a bachelor, “orderly sergeant” for the train. Burnett lasted eight days before resigning due to “ill health,” but he more than likely succumbed to the squabbles between the cattle haves and have-nots. The big cow herd, ponderously slow crossing the waterways, spooking and scattering in thunderstorms, was delaying the entire party, the have-nots said, and they clamored to have the column split, with those owning only a few head of stock to move ahead while the big herd followed with its drovers in the rear. The Applegate brothers, majority cow owners, undertook to mind the “cow column” with Jesse in overall command.

  Jesse Applegate, of whom James Nesmith would write, “As a frontiersman, in courage, sagacity, and natural intelligence he is the equal of Daniel Boone,” managed to keep a colorful record of the journey west and in A Day with the Cow Column, 1843, described one eighteen-hour day that advanced his party twenty miles toward Oregon.

  At four A.M., Applegate wrote, “sentinels on duty fire their rifles in the air and every wagon and tent pours forth its occupants; 60 men spread out to form the cattle in a semicircle around the camp; corral formed by wagons connected to each other by tongue and ox-chains, entrenchment against Indians and impenetrable by a maddened ox or cattle stampede.”