Desperate Passage Read online

  At 2:00 P.M. the emigrants formed into a funeral procession and marched solemnly to the grave. They sang a hymn—"with much pathos and expression," Bryant noted—and then, gathered beneath the oak boughs, listened to a sermon by a Presbyterian minister along on the journey. Like any good preacher, he tailored his message to his audience. "Trouble yourselves not about those that sleep," he urged, taking as his biblical text the Book of Thessalonians. It was important, he said, to seek a "better country," a place without sickness, like the place where Keyes now rested. George McKinstry, a sickly Mississippi merchant heading west for his health, wrote in his diary that it had been a "sensible sermon." That was true, and the reasons were more than theological. In a race against time amid a great wilderness, the pioneers standing bareheaded at the grave of Sarah Keyes would do well to hustle along toward the better country they were seeking, not tarry over the old woman they had just laid to rest.

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING THE RIVER was still running high, too high to ford, and the men returned to building a raft for the wagons. They chopped down two more cottonwoods and hollowed them out to make huge canoes, at least twenty-five feet long and close to four feet wide. Then they laid a cross-frame over the tops of the two craft, creating a platform on which the wagons could be taken over. When it was ready to be launched, they named the raft the "Blue River Rover" and shouldered it out into the swift current. When it stayed afloat, cheers erupted.

  They crossed nine wagons that day and were up early the next morning to continue the job. In the afternoon a cold wind blew in from the northwest, and as the temperature dropped rain began to fall. Many of the men were standing in the river working the raft from bank to bank with ropes, holding their footing against a current strong enough to knock a man down, and the brutal conditions began to take their toll. Two normally affable men got into a fistfight, even drawing knives, although peacemakers stepped in before anyone was seriously hurt. The last wagon finally crossed about 9:00 P.M., and they made camp in a brake of trees on the western side of the river, but with the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, many men were shivering violently by the time they reached their tents. They were back on the trail the following morning, but between the funeral and the raft-building, more than five days had been lost, time in which a lucky train might make seventy-five miles.

  Cold north winds began to blow relentlessly, forcing the men to bundle up in overcoats, the women in shawls. Some of those who had been riding in the wagons started walking, the better to stay warm. Then, almost overnight, a heat wave struck, and people started looking forward to the shade of their tents or a cooling breeze. On the open prairie, Bryant wrote, the heat could be "excessively oppressive."

  But they were making good distances across the tabletop flatlands of southern Nebraska, or at least good distances for a journey that occurred at the pace of an ox—fifteen to twenty miles a day. In early June they reached the first milestone of their trip: the Platte River. Too shallow for navigation, the Platte had been useless to trappers and fur traders, who used heavy keelboats to carry their supplies upriver and their spoils down. But for emigrants, the Platte was perfect—a gentle, unmistakable byway that pointed directly at an important pass in the Rocky Mountains. In the era of the wagon trains, the Platte, which pours down out of the Rockies and traverses the length of modern Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri, was the great highway of the West.

  The Donners and the Reeds and their companions encountered it about at the site of modern-day Kearney, Nebraska, where they turned west and began working their way upstream along the south bank.

  On June 12, Reed shot the first elk taken by the company. Hunters had seen some antelope, but the fleet-footed animals were too fast for most of the horses, and it was hard to get within range. As a result, the meat in the emigrants' diet had been mostly the salted supplies they had purchased in Independence, and the tender, fatty flesh of Reed's elk was welcome.

  The next day, Reed lost a little of his glory when two other men rode back from a hunt with fresh buffalo steaks. Reaching the buffalo herds was always a notable occasion for the westward emigrants, many of whom had never seen the great animals before. "If we had found a gold mine," one man wrote during the Gold Rush, "there could not have been a greater commotion." Not surprisingly, Reed's fellow hunters were feted as heroes in camp, and in a letter back home Reed made plain his feelings about their success. The men were hailed as "the best buffalo hunters on the road—perfect 'stars.' " Reed, on the other hand, was thought a greenhorn, a "Sucker." The other men set out again, and the camp was full of talk that they would bring back more of the prized buffalo meat. When Reed organized his own party, almost no one wanted to go along. The snub rankled, and Reed decided to prove both himself and his horse:

  And now, as perfectly green as I was I had to compete with old experienced hunters, and remove the stars from their brows; which was my greatest ambition, and in order too, that they might see that a Sucker had the best horse in the company, and the best and most daring horseman in the caravan.

  So Reed mounted Glaucus, took three companions, and rode out until he found a buffalo herd so large that it darkened the plains. Disregarding the danger, he outran his friends and then rode straight into the herd. Within minutes, he had shot three buffalo—two bulls and a calf—and was so far ahead of his companions that he rode to a small knoll and sat in the grass to wait. He claimed to have counted 597 buffalo, although it's hard to imagine that he could really have kept track. From his perch, he watched his friends, whose balky horses refused to get close enough to the buffalo to bring one down. Reed had a laugh at their expense, then rode over and joined the hunt, chasing down a bull and shooting him. He shot one more calf, and then they set about the butchering, taking what meat they could carry and leaving the rest for the wolves, unmoved by the waste.

  The fresh meat must have boosted spirits, but it was the acclaim that Reed cherished most. When they made it back to camp, he reported proudly, he was hailed as "the acknowledged hero of the day." Other men huddled around Glaucus and pronounced her the finest horse in the train. When he wrote home, Reed made sure to mention the compliment.

  3

  Vexatiously Slow

  The pace could drive a man mad. The column creaked along at two miles an hour. Men could walk faster. They might stop by the trail to write a letter or butcher a fresh kill, and then an hour or two later they would rise and pocket their pencils or their hunting knives and, with a bit of brisk walking, catch the ponderously rolling wagons. Progress, one man said, was "vexatiously slow."

  "Covered wagons" became the symbol of the journey, but in fact the rigs used by the emigrants were typically small and simple, not the huge Conestoga freight wagons of the movies. The beds were four or five feet wide and perhaps twice as long, a size that allowed them to maneuver through the canyons and forests and mountain passes the emigrants would eventually face. The running gear was simple: wooden axles and wheels, although strips of iron were wrapped around the wheels to serve as tires. There were no brakes. Going downhill, a wheel or two would be locked with a chain to take off some speed, or a felled tree would be dragged behind, the deadweight serving as a kind of land anchor. Typically, there was no seat for the "driver." Instead, he walked along beside the draft animals, controlling them with nothing but a whip and voice commands.

  As a cover, canvas was stretched over bows of wood that had been soaked and bent. In a particularly strong wind, emigrants were known to take down the canopies to reduce the pressure and avoid damage or even being toppled. But almost always the canvas crowns shone out over the trains, a gleam of white against a stark prairie backdrop. That too produced a maritime analogy. As the wagons snaked along ridges and dropped to river crossings, winding with the aimless terrain, the wagon covers looked from a distance like the sails of ships. In time, the mirage produced a fanciful nickname for vehicles that were a thousand miles from the sea: prairie schooners.

  The proble
m with the wagons was the engine. To pull great loads across the better part of two thousand miles, most emigrants used oxen, which were recommended over horses or mules in the tattered guidebooks bouncing in the wagon beds, books that had been thumbed through countless times during the months of preparation back on the farm. Oxen were cheaper, more durable, and said to be less likely to wander from camp. But the ox is not a fleet animal. Two miles an hour for a journey of two thousand miles meant a thousand hours on the trail, 125 days at eight hours a day, more than four months in all. And that ignored the inevitable—the odd day of rest, one of sickness, a busted axle or a shattered wheel. There would be rivers to ford, hills to climb, mud and sand where moving the wagons at two miles an hour was a fantasy even with eveiy ox on the team straining at the front and every man in the company pushing from the rear. There would be obstacles they could not yet imagine. On a journey into the unknown, perfect progress is perfectly impossible.

  Edwin Bryant, the newspaperman, was one of those who rued the crawling tempo.

  In the moving frontier village that was the wagon train, Bryant stood out—he had studied medicine and later worked as an editor at the Louisville Courier—and like all intellectuals he thought too much. Walking along, a troubling realization began to vex him. Some emigrants lacked the necessaiy impatience, the gut-level recognition of the potential disaster that delay might invite. There was no such thing as getting to California too early, but being too late might mean never getting there at all. Saving time at the early stages was like putting money in a bank. Later, when the inevitable difficulties and delays cropped up, the train could draw down its account and still make it over the final mountains in time. And as with any savings plan, the sooner you began investing, the greater your nest egg at the end. Yet there were those who wanted to pitch camp early and break it late. "I am beginning to feel alarmed at the tardiness of our movements," Bryant wrote, "and fearful that winter will find us in the snowy mountains of California."

  ***

  TAMZENE DONNER WAS MORE SANGUINE. After more than a month on the trail, things were going well, she thought. The Indians had proven surprisingly amiable. The chiefs of a local tribe had taken breakfast at the Donner tent that very morning. "All are so friendly that I cannot help feeling sympathy and friendship for them," she wrote to a friend back home. No cattle had been stolen—at least not "where proper care has been taken"—and the previous night two men who had exhausted their horses in a hard hunt had slept out in the open, a sign they feared no attack.

  The open spaces of the prairie provided "a first rate road," and the countryside was "beautiful beyond description." Even crossing the creeks, though difficult, presented no real danger. The grass, sparse from lack of rain the year before, was plentiful for the cattle, and the cows produced ample supplies of milk and butter. Russell had proved an "amiable" captain, although she had to admit the wagon train was a mixed band. "We have [some] of the best of people in our company, and some, too, that are not so good."

  Tamzene herself was making time for reading and botany. She had found tulips, primrose, lupine, "the ear-drop," larkspur, creeping holly-hock, and a "beautiful flower" she could not identify but that resembled the bloom of the beech tree. Most of her time, she admitted, was consumed with cooking, but even that was hardly an onerous chore. She was a little concerned that their flour might run low, but rice and beans and cornmeal were proving good staples, and the hunters were bringing in plenty of meat. As fuel, "Buffalo chips are excellent—they kindle quick and retain heat surprisingly." That night they had dined on buffalo steaks that were as tasty as if they had been cooked over hickory coals.

  She estimated they had traveled 450 miles since leaving Independence and had only 200 more miles to go before reaching Fort Laramie. Unlike the cautious Edwin Bryant, she was buoyed by optimism. "Indeed," she wrote, "if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started."

  4

  Pleasure Trip

  Virginia Reed swung into the saddle of her pony and galloped out onto the prairie. She loved getting away from the dull plod of the wagons, out into the high grasses where the wind whistled through a girl's hair as she rode. She stopped from time to time and gathered wildflowers, the bright sunshine glinting off a dazzling palette of colors in her growing bouquet.

  The oldest of the four Reed children, Virginia had been born Virginia Backenstoe, the daughter of her mother's first husband. He died when Virginia was barely a year old, and when her mother remarried a year after that, James Reed adopted her. He treated his stepdaughter as his own, and Virginia grew into a spirited young woman, twelve now and looking forward to her thirteenth birthday in only a few days. In time, she would show a gift for describing the Donner Party's plight in pithy, moving letters.

  She could scarcely remember the first time she had been set in a saddle. Outings with her adoptive father had always leavened her mood, the two of them sharing their love of horses and riding, and as she had contemplated the westward trip the previous winter, it was the prospect of daily jaunts on her prized pony, Billy, that made Virginia smile. The valley of the Platte River, up which the wagons were now rolling, was a smooth and welcoming road, perfect for riding, and Virginia took full advantage. Every morning, she stroked Billy's face and talked to him as though he were human. "I wonder what we will see today," she would say, feeling the softness of his mane between her fingers. "Take good care of me, Billy, and don't let me get hurt." He would bow his head as if to promise her safe return, and off they would ride into the freedom of the prairie. To her, it was a portion of the journey that was nothing less than "an ideal pleasure trip."

  With hundreds of miles behind them, the wagon trains had by now settled into a daily rhythm. At dawn or before, a trumpeter sounded reveille to rouse the camp. The women made coffee and fried bacon for breakfast, the wafting scent tempting laggards from their bedrolls. If the oxen had been set loose to graze the night before, they were driven into the corral formed by the wagons, and men began to hitch the teams. George Donner, perhaps still playing his hometown role of "Uncle George," liked to encourage a little hustle by mounting a small gray pony and riding about camp, bellowing out, "Chain up, boys! Chain up!" If things went well, wagons rolled out of camp by 7:00 or 7:30. At 12:00, they stopped for lunch, perhaps pickled pork and baked beans, cold ham, bread and butter, pickles, cheese, and dried fruit, with coffee and tea, and milk for the children. "Nooning," as the emigrants invariably called it, might be a short break or might stretch out for an hour, giving both the people and the animals a chance to rest. Depending on where they found water and grass for the animals, they stopped for the night sometime between 4:00 and 6:00, forming the wagons into a corral once again. If they were passing through a region where they feared Indian attack, the horses and oxen were driven inside the ring of wagons; if not, they were turned loose to graze, although guards were still posted to protect against wolves or other predators. Occasionally, the mosquitoes were so thick that emigrants feared for the health of the livestock, so the animals would be penned or picketed and fires lit nearby in hopes that the smoke would drive away the insects. To save space for the livestock inside the ring of wagons, tents and campfires were placed outside. Men worked on repair jobs or cared for the animals, while women and children fetched water for cooking and gathered wood or buffalo dung—euphemistically known as "chips"—for fires. In the evening, if exhaustion could be held at bay, a fiddler might scratch out a tune. If spirits were high there might even be singing or a little dancing. At the end of the night, families took to their tents and guards took up their weapons, although frequently the sentries fell asleep.

  In all, there were nearly five hundred wagons in this moving community, perhaps half headed to California, half to Oregon. Unfortunately for the Donners and the Reeds, they were near the rear of the long column. In letters home, others traveling with them claimed to be trailing by design, convinced that their slow pace hel
ped preserve their livestock. The lead wagons, they believed, were working the animals too hard. Draft stock were priceless. Driving the poor animals until they collapsed was the ultimate example of short-term thinking, a way to make a few extra miles now and suffer more later. The race, in the end, would go to the tortoise, not the hare.

  ***

  THE WAIL OF A NEWBORN sang out from one of the wagons, a happy broadcast carried along by the stiff prairie wind. Philippine Keseberg, a young German immigrant going west with her husband and three-year-old daughter, lay back, exhaled, and cradled her new baby boy. They named him for his father. Farther back on the trail, the family wagon had tipped over, throwing Philippine from the bed and plunging her into a pool of water, but the accident seemed to have had no major ill effects, and Lewis Keseberg Jr. emerged into the world as the newest member of the migration.

  Although he would be the only trailside baby born to the members of the Donner Party, little Lewis was hardly unique. It was not uncommon for women to give birth during the journey, nor, interestingly, less than nine months after its completion. Pregnancy rarely slowed the trains, at least for long. Maybe the Kesebergs spent a little extra time in camp the next day, or perhaps the other women lent a hand with the family's washing, but Philippine Keseberg and her son, like everybody else, kept moving west.