Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Then, at about the time Parkman and Shaw were chatting at the rail of the steamer taking them from Saint Louis to Westport Landing, a prosperous Illinois farmer named George Donner, age sixty-two, thrice married and with thirteen children, rode out in front of an Oregon Trail caravan bound from Independence to California. Accompanying him were his newest and last wife, Tamsen, forty-five; their five youngest children; and Donner’s older brother Jacob and his family. In Springfield, Donner’s neighbor James Frazier Reed, a furniture factory proprietor who had fought with Abraham Lincoln’s company in the Blackhawk War, also set out for the Missouri border. With him were his wife, Margaret, their four children, and Margaret’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Keyes, age seventy-five. While her husband was away attending to circuit court duties, Mary Todd Lincoln and her son Robert came out to see the Reeds’ departure. James Reed had fabricated a huge “two-story” wagon fitted out with bunks and even a stove drawn by eight Durham oxen, and he had two accessory wagons stocked with “fancy goods” and liquor, plus spare draft animals and horses.

  The Donner brothers had twelve yoke of oxen, five saddle horses, a small herd of milk and beef cattle, several hired hands, a dog, and a fortune of $10,000 in cash sewn into a quilt.

  Parkman saw the Donner-Reed wagons corralled on the prairie beyond Fort Laramie that June as he stood on a bluff above the fort and watched other emigrant trains cross the Laramie River. He may also have encountered some of the party when he wrote of entering a log-and-mud “apartment” at the fort full of men “all more or less drunk” on Missouri whiskey apparently carried by “a company of California emigrants.” These had unencumbered the liquor at great loss to the fort’s traders, he said, and were getting rid of the rest of it by drinking it on the spot.

  At the time he saw them, the Donner-train occupants were otherwise unremarkable, not much different from the other emigrant parties departing the frontier.

  But the Donners were making mistakes at the commencement of their journey: They were getting a late start, rushing to catch up with the rear guard of the ’46 migration, and they were overburdened with “fancy goods.” Their gravest miscalculation lay in their decision to take an untested shortcut to California recommended in a popular guidebook written by a zealot named Lansford Warren Hastings. This Ohioan had gone out to the Mexican province in 1842 and dreamed of a flow of American pioneers and adventurers, a revolution, and perhaps himself as president of an independent republic. In his Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California, published in 1845, a year before he saw the route himself, Hastings recommended that overlanders depart the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger instead of taking the customary turnoff at Fort Hall. He advised them to travel directly across the Wasatch Range into the Salt Lake valley, thence across the Great Basin to pick up the California Trail at the Humboldt River of Nevada. The route, he said, would save 400 miles.

  Nearly six months would pass before any news of the Donners reached California, and it would be many months later that Parkman would learn their fate.

  3

  Although Parkman, Shaw, and the others preferred to ride at their own pace, hunting and resting at their leisure and observing no timetable, they did occasionally attach to an emigrant train and sometimes made a night camp among the circled wagons. There the men gathered at the cookfires and told the “news,” mostly rumor amplified in the retelling, brought in by riders from the Missouri settlements: that bands of Kaw Indians were lurking in the brush along the Kansas and Platte Rivers eager to fall upon the trains for loot and scalps; that a party of Englishmen—perhaps a reference to Captain Chandler’s group—were on the move under Her Britannic Majesty’s orders to incite the natives to, as Parkman wrote, “rob, murder, and annihilate” travelers on the Oregon Trail; and that thousands of “Saints”—Mormons—were gathered near the emigrant camps, armed with rifles, knives, and brass field-pieces. These people, the stories said, had blood in their eyes after being chased out of Nauvoo, their settlement in swampy Illinois country bordering the Mississippi, and then evicted from Missouri as well.

  Parkman fell in with this latter fantasy, writing, “No one could predict what would be the result when large armed bodies of these fanatics should encounter the most impetuous and reckless of their old enemies on the prairies.”

  The few Mormons in the vicinity were, in fact, 100 miles north, near Kanesville, Iowa, and while it was true that they kept their guns loaded and eyes narrowed for the sighting of any hated Missourians—whom they called collectively “pukes”—they were not interested in the innocent “Gentile” travelers on the Oregon Trail.

  Bernard De Voto said that Parkman’s experiences on the Oregon Trail, and what he wrote of them, were hampered by his “Brahmin snobberies,” and that he “almost felt the emigration” but “succumbed to a parochialism of his class” and failed to have the empathy for the pioneers needed to write a great work. In his unyieldingly disapproving approach to the Mormons, whom he consistently dismissed as “fanatics,” Parkman mirrored a majority attitude but he missed one of the epic stories within the epic of the Oregon Trail.

  The Mormons he saw that summer were the vanguard of thousands searching for a new Zion and but a year distant from finding it. They had vacated their homes in Nauvoo during the winter before Parkman saw the first of their number and eighteen months after the murder of Joseph Smith, founder of their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Smith’s successor, the forty-three-year-old Vermont-born farmer-carpenter Brigham Young, had supervised the Nauvoo exodus in February 1846, leading 1,600 of his “peculiar people” across the ice-blocked Mississippi to a “Camp of Israel” at Sugar Grove, Iowa, while the others in Illinois waited to cross the river. By June, at about the time Parkman reached Fort Laramie, Young had covered the first 400 miles toward Zion by leading the Saints across Iowa to a place on the Missouri River where no town yet stood, but which became known as Kanesville and later as Council Bluffs.

  In the winter, while Parkman was warming his feet at his Beacon Hill fireplace, 12,000 Mormons had established quarters at Florence, Nebraska, near Omaha, where 600 of them were to die in the snows. And in April 1847, after the first three parts of Parkman’s Oregon Trail memoir had appeared in a New York magazine, Brigham Young took a “Pioneer Band” of 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children and pushed west along the north bank of the Platte (to avoid contact with emigrant Missourians on the south bank). The band had seventy-three wagons; 211 horses, mules, and oxen; six months’ rations; and a small brass cannon to frighten off hostile Indians. This vanguard reached Fort Laramie and crossed South Pass in June, bore southwest to Fort Bridger, and moved on over the rugged Uinta Mountains and then across the desert into the eastern spur of the Wasatch Range.

  On the last fifty miles of their journey, they followed a narrow and tortuous trail across the Wasatch that had been broken the year before by the Donners and the Reeds. On July 19, 1847, after the sixth of Parkman’s twenty-one Oregon Trail memoir installments had appeared, Young’s scouting party caught the sun’s glint of a great silvery body of water in the distance, and on the twenty-fourth the Mormons entered the valley of the latter-day Dead Sea known as the Great Salt Lake. They were 1,400 miles from Nauvoo, “thrown like a stone from a sling,” Young said, “and we have lodged in this goodly place just where the Lord wants his people to gather.”

  Within a month of their arrival the Saints had cleared a seven-mile wagon road to bring fir and pine logs to build a fort and frame and roof houses, and had thrown up a stockade that enclosed twenty-nine cabins, a smithy, communal storehouses, and corrals. So much was done in that month that Young and an escort were able to retrace their route to the Iowa-Nebraska frontier and point the 13,000 others waiting there toward the Mormon Trail and their new home.

  * * *

  Four days out on the Platte, a country Parkman, apparently infused with Stephen Long’s old exploration reports, called “the Great American Desert,” the party spotted a buffalo herd and made their first seriou
s “hunt,” the white man’s euphemism in buffalo country for “slaughter.” Parkman’s horse Pontiac had not been broken to such exertions, and the Bostonian was armed with only a pistol, but these were not hindrances. Buffalo were big, dull-witted targets with poor eyesight, and they tended to bunch up: A hunter merely kept shooting into the herd until one or more fell, blood frothing at mouth and nostrils from lung-shots (their deeply buried hearts were rarely hit and bullets glanced off the plates of their skulls). The more their numbers increased, the more were killed—and wasted. Often only the tongue and a few steaks carved from the hump were taken. Parkman’s guide Henry Chatillon, the only real marksman in the party, was averse to sport killing and in deference to him the Americans stopped it.

  By the time Parkman’s party reached the South Platte, they stopped something else: They had had enough of the Englishmen. Captain Chandler “was by no means partial to us,” Parkman said, and seemed determined to retard the journey “we were anxious to quicken” by calling a halt at unreasonable hours, often when they had traveled but fifteen miles. The Americans resolved to travel on to Fort Laramie on their own, a matter Captain Chandler said was “an extraordinary proceeding, upon my word!” However, his officer-as-gentleman remonstrances did not change the decision.

  Parkman reached Fort Laramie on June 15, 1846, the day of the Anglo-American treaty settling the Oregon boundary question and the day before a band of American squatters captured the town of Sonoma, raised their homemade Bear Flag Republic banner, and signaled the beginning of the conquest of Mexican California.

  In 1846, Laramie was a fur-trader’s oasis, a decrepit but busy log-palisaded adobe fort on the North Platte adjacent to 600 lodges and upwards of 2,000 Oglala and Brulé Sioux. The Americans arrived there just as a band of Oglala, headed by a chief named Old Smoke, rode in from their village at a watering place called Horse Creek. This event, a happening common to the habitués of the fort, proved eventful to Parkman. Chatillon, who was married to a Sioux woman, made a visit to the Indian camp and introduced his Boston friends to Old Smoke. The chief agreed to let them stay.

  In the two weeks that followed that July of 1846, Parkman found the “savage adventure” of his Oregon Trail journey. The experience was not to be without cost. He had come out West to study Indians and improve his health, and he had in fact strengthened on the journey to Laramie. But once there he had contracted dysentery and was so weakened he could scarcely walk, and it was in this frail state he was given the opportunity to study the Indians and live among them.

  When he and Shaw joined them, Old Smoke’s people were preparing to go to war against the Shoshoni to punish some obscure outrage committed the year before, but for reasons equally obscure the war party became a buffalo hunt, a safer venue for Parkman to observe the Indians in their daily survival work. He was dangerously ill, still battling dysentery, taking six grains of opium at a dose, feeble, giddy, and often doubled over with the agony of stomach cramps. Nor did the Oglala diet help. Early in his stay with Old Smoke’s band he visited the chief’s lodge and was invited to stay for a meal. Outside, one of the chief’s wives knocked a puppy in the head with a stone mallet, chopped the dog to pieces, singed its hair off over the fire, and threw it all, entrails included, into a stew pot. Parkman ate his share. “A dog-feast,” he said, “is the greatest compliment a Dakota can offer to his guest; and, knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we attacked the little dog, and devoured him.”

  He joined the hunters even when mounting his horse exhausted his ebbing strength. “To have worn the airs of an invalid would certainly have been an indiscretion,” he wrote, and in any event he felt he had to go. If he lay abed, he said, “a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue.” While hunting buffalo on horseback over a broken country when “he could scarcely sit upright in the saddle” was not strictly necessary for maintaining prestige, he believed “that to tame the devil it is best to take him by the horns.”

  He had a sharp eye for the divergence of cultures around Fort Laramie: the Indians; the French-Canadians who married into their bands; the trappers, hunters, and guides; and the American emigrants camped in the meadows along the river.

  Parkman knew there could be but one end to it. The Indians were a dying race and he saw the Oglala as representative of a culture that could never withstand the white invasion. At Horse Creek he once stood with Old Smoke and one of his young wives, who sat astride a fine mule caparisoned with whitened deerskins and held her husband’s feathered lance and shield. Not far from them were other tribal leaders, “stately figures, their white buffalo robes thrown over their shoulders, gazing coldly upon us,” and behind them, their camp, swarming with warriors, women, children, and dogs, and “close at hand, the wide, shallow stream was alive with boys, girls, and young squaws, splashing, screaming, and laughing in the water.” For a thousand summers such a carefree and peaceful tableau had taken place there, but Parkman saw something that augured the end of it. Approaching and crossing Horse Creek came a long train of emigrant wagons, “dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their descendents, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth.”

  He tried to depict the Indians he saw with honesty: They were at once noble and petty; they had great courage and physical prowess; they lived in a disorderly society, rudimentary in its greatest moments; they were preoccupied by internecine warfare; they were dogged and doomed by such ancient traits as their inability to make a plan and abide by it.

  “Great changes are at hand,” he wrote. “The buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must be broken and scattered. The Indians will soon be abased by whiskey and overawed by military posts; so that within a few years the traveller may pass in tolerable security through their country. Its dangers and its charms will have disappeared altogether.”

  As his stay among the Oglala lengthened Parkman became an insomniac—the warriors drummed and sang at all hours and his host had dreams that forced him to get up at midnight to join in a long song-chant. He wrote of being “hipped”—depressed—a condition that would plague him throughout his life. But when the Sioux exhausted their stock of buffalo meat and moved north toward the Black Hills, he accompanied them. Away from the camp, in the open wilderness, afoot as often as on horseback, he seemed to recoup his strength and after two weeks with Old Smoke’s band was ready to return to Laramie.

  He distributed his few remaining gifts among his hosts and then, with a couple of Indian companions and one of the French-Canadians in the camp, took his leave of them and returned on August 3 to Fort Laramie, where Shaw and the others had preceded him.

  They decided to return to Saint Louis by a different route, a 300-mile drop straight south to the Arkansas River, east to Bent’s Fort and to the Missouri frontier along the Santa Fé Trail. They joined a party of trappers and hunters and set off.

  En route to Bent’s they learned that the expected war with Mexico was no longer a rumor, and at a dilapidated village in Colorado called the Pueblo they picked up some details of Zachary Taylor’s first victories, encountered a scattering of Mormons and learned of their desperate winter crossing of the Mississippi from Nauvoo into Iowa. Parkman continued to regard the Saints as “blind and desperate fanatics.”

  Bent’s Fort, the great oasis on the Arkansas River, showed the effects Kearny’s expedition had in passing through en route to Santa Fé, the Gila River, and California: His dragoon horses, draft animals, and cattle herd had consumed the grass around the fort.

  Parkman and Shaw returned to Westport Landing, paid off Deslauriers, and, with Chatillon accompanying them, took a steamer downriver to the Mississippi, an eight-day voyage with one-third of the time spent fast aground on a sandbar. Once they reached the crowded Saint Louis levee, the Bostonians took rooms at Planter’s House, sought a tailor, and bought clothing appropr
iate for the return home.

  Henry Chatillon paid them a last visit at the hotel. “No one who met him in the streets of St. Louis,” Parkman wrote, “would have taken him for a hunter fresh from the Rocky Mountains. He was very neatly and simply dressed in a suit of dark cloth; for although since his sixteenth year he had scarcely been a month together among the abodes of men, he had a native good taste which always led him to pay attention to his personal appearance.” Both Bostonians had a high regard for their guide—“He had served us with a fidelity and zeal beyond all praise”—and in addition to the salary he had been paid at Westport, Shaw had given Chatillon his horse and Parkman presented him with his favorite rifle.

  A fortnight later, in mid-October, they were home, and in February 1847 in Knickerbocker Magazine appeared the first of twenty-one installments of “A Summer’s Journey Out of Bounds By a Bostonian,” under the general heading “The Oregon Trail.”

  23

  Waiilatpu

  “IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO TO STOP THE BLEEDING?”

  1

  On the Oregon Trail and its busy tributary into California, 1847 opened and closed in lamentation.

  The year began with a story of a calamity in the snowdrifts of Truckee Pass in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range. There were no details in the early reports received at John Augustus Sutter’s fort on the west side of the mountains, only sketchy information on an emigrant party of Illinoisians said to have been shut out of the passes by wind and blizzard. The details, when they did become known, were terrible beyond imagination.

  * * *

  When Francis Parkman saw their wagons on the meadow beyond Fort Laramie in June, the Donners and the Reeds and the others making up their California-bound train were getting a late start toward reaching the Sierras before the onset of winter, but they were confident. They planned to reduce travel time by 400 miles by departing the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger and taking the “Hastings Cut-off.” This route would take them south along the Wasatch Range, past the Great Salt Lake, and across the Utah-Nevada desert to the Sierra foothills in time to cross the mountains before winter closed them out.