Authors: H.W. Brands
T
HE MISSOURI RIVER
was where the journey west began in earnest. It was also where the emigrants learned the economics of overland travel.
The Emigrants’ Guide to California
led travelers to expect to purchase supplies at Independence, St. Joseph, and the other river towns “on nearly as low terms as at St. Louis.” This proved hopelessly optimistic, as Hugh Heiskell, among thousands of others, discovered to his dismay. “It ought to be generally known that at St. Joseph emigrants for California are most shamefully imposed upon,” Heiskell recorded. “They are required to pay exorbitant prices for all they need.” He illustrated: six to seven dollars per hundredweight of flour (the
Emigrants’ Guide
quoted two dollars), five to six cents per pound of bacon, fifty to eighty-five dollars per yoke of oxen. Mules old enough to travel well were unavailable at any price, while immature animals of two to three years went for seventy-five to one hundred
dollars each. “But such are considered to be too young to endure the journey.” Yet there was little the emigrants could do. “This being the last point at which any thing can be procured for the trip, they are obliged to give whatever is asked.”
Different people responded to the high prices in different ways. Heiskell’s group grumbled and paid. Charles Dallas paid for provisions for the group Lewis Manly had joined, but then refused to pay the $50 demanded to ferry his company across the Missouri. He ordered a return north, where after a day’s drive they encountered a ferryman willing to take them across for $30.
William Swain’s New York threesome (John Root hadn’t caught up yet) solved the supply problem by joining a more foresighted company. For $100 each, plus a wagon and team of oxen for the three, the New Yorkers became partners in a Michigan outfit calling itself the Wolverine Rangers. The Rangers had sent a purchasing agent ahead to buy provisions before the heaviest of the rush arrived; by joining the Rangers, Swain and his fellows benefited from the Michiganders’ advance planning.
T
HE HIGH PRICES
at the river towns were a worrisome problem for the emigrants, but hardly the most frightening. That distinction fell to the infectious diseases that followed the travelers upriver. Summer was always hazardous to health along populated rivers, where the wastewater of one community became the drinking water of communities downstream. But the summer of 1849 was peculiarly lethal, and with the springtime arrival of tens of thousands more people than the water and waste facilities of the river towns were accustomed to handling, it started early.
Cholera was the worst of the waterborne diseases. It struck with terrifying swiftness. A man or woman could appear hearty at breakfast, complain of queasy bowels at noontime dinner, and be dead by supper. The cause of the disease—the bacillus
Vibrio cholerae
—was unknown, and for this reason the reach of the illness seemed a matter of fate, bad luck, or divine disfavor. St. Louis, as the largest city in the path of the emigration, was the hardest hit. During June alone nearly two thousand people died of the disease there.
The towns above St. Louis did what they could to ward off the epidemic. Steamboats suspected of carrying infected passengers were turned away or compelled to unload across the river. In extreme cases, vessels were simply abandoned; after fifty-three persons died aboard the
Monroe
, the surviving passengers and crew fled for their lives.
But no quarantine could hold back the epidemic. For one thing, cholera’s incubation period of up to five days meant that many apparently healthy people were already infected. For another, the river towns lived on the river traffic; any extended quarantine would have killed them. The Gold Rush was the chance of a lifetime for most Missouri Valley merchants; they were loath to spurn such a windfall of customers. The towns would take their profits and take their chances with the disease.
The emigrants were in a similar bind. They all knew about the epidemic, but they also knew that the chance for gold wouldn’t come again. The compulsion for California caused some emigrants to accept questionable intelligence. Before boarding at Peru, Illinois, William Swain asked the captain of the
Avalanche
about health conditions downstream. “He says that there is nothing heard about cholera at St. Louis, no cases among the inhabitants there,” Swain noted. The captain was lying; the epidemic at St. Louis was already raging, as anyone who made a living on the river knew. Other emigrants held their breath, almost literally, as they crossed the Missouri, hoping to leave the danger at the river’s edge. “The cholera is prevailing to a considerable extent along the river,” Hugh Heiskell wrote from the western side. “But so far we have escaped, and as we are now in a healthy region, we cherish the hope that Providence will still protect and preserve us, and that this fearful scourge will not overtake us.”
It was an idle hope, for many others if not for Heiskell. The Missouri turned out to be no barrier to the epidemic, as Sarah Royce discovered a couple of days across the river. The Royces went over at Council Bluffs, where, because the emigrants were fewer than farther downstream, the cholera epidemic was less severe. And having survived the crossing uninfected, Sarah had reason to hope their party might be spared.
And so it was until they were well out onto the prairie. By then other distractions had driven thoughts of the disease from the travelers’ minds.
Consequently, when the cholera appeared, its arrival was all the more dismaying. Sarah described the first casualty:
The oldest of the men who had joined company with my husband complained of intense pain and sickness, and was soon obliged to lie down in the wagon, which, being large, gave room for quite a comfortable bed behind the seat where Mary and I sat. Soon terrible spasms convulsed him; the Captain was called, examined the case, and ordered a halt. Medicine was administered which afforded some relief.
About this time a horseman or two appeared, with the intelligence that some companies in advance of us were camped at the ford of the Elkhorn River, not more than two miles distant, and that there was a physician among them. We therefore made the sick man as comfortable as we could, and went on. Arrived at the encampment, the Doctor pronounced the disease Asiatic Cholera. Everything was done that could be under the circumstances, but nothing availed, and in two or three hours the poor old man expired.
All mourned the deceased; Sarah faced the additional task of disinfecting her wagon and bedclothes. This was a distasteful and nerve- wracking job, as the hallmark of cholera, and the principal source of transmission, was profuse diarrhea and vomiting. Sarah washed everything as well as she could, and hung the blankets and linen out to dry. But she couldn’t know whether she had washed them well enough or, even if she had, whether that would protect her and her family. Her diary recorded her fears (which echoed those of Jessie Frémont in Panama):
Now indeed a heavy gloom hung round us. The destroyer seemed let loose upon our camp. Who would go next? What if my husband should be taken and leave us alone in the wilderness? What if I should be taken and leave my little Mary motherless? Or—still more distracting thought—what if we both should be laid low,
and she be left a destitute orphan, among strangers, in a land of savages?
T
HOUGH FEW OF THE
emigrants realized it at the time, cholera was the greatest danger most of them would encounter on the journey west. And though that danger didn’t disappear as the migration proceeded onto the prairies and plains west of the Missouri, it did gradually diminish.
It was replaced by another danger that loomed far larger in the minds of most emigrants than in actuality. Every overlander had heard stories of the Plains Indians, particularly the Pawnee (“a treacherous, hostile race,” according to Eleazar Ingalls) and the Sioux; most anticipated their encounters with the aboriginal peoples with trepidation.
Sarah Royce met her first Indians a short distance beyond the Missouri. Looking to the west, she and the others descried a large number of moving objects on both sides of the road where it entered a range of low hills. At first Sarah thought that another wagon train, making early camp, had turned out its cattle. On closer approach, the moving objects proved to be Indians, several hundred of them, lining the road. As the Royce party approached, a small group of the Indians came forward to meet the emigrants. The captain of the Royce train in turn summoned several men among the emigrants to go forward and parley with the natives.
The latter presented a simple demand: before the travelers could pass, they must pay a toll. Whether or not this particular group of Indians put it in such terms, it wasn’t lost on the Indians generally that the emigrants paid tolls to the owners of ferries and bridges; the principle here was the same. Hadn’t the government of the United States itself designated this region as Indian Territory?
To the members of the Royce party, the principle was not the same. “The men of our company,” Sarah wrote, “after consultation, resolved that the demand was unreasonable! that the country we were traveling over belonged to the United States, and that these red men had no right to stop us.” The Indians were informed that they wouldn’t get a penny from this train. The gold-seekers were bound for California, and if allowed to pass
would do the Indians no harm. But if the Indians provoked a fight, they would get a fight, a fierce one.
A tense several minutes ensued. The Indian representatives returned to their main force; the emigrant delegation returned to the wagon train. The captain of the train directed that every man in the company display and prepare to use every weapon he owned. “Revolvers, knives, hatchets, glittered in their belts; rifles and guns bristled on their shoulders,” Sarah explained. Then the captain gave the order to march.
The drivers raised aloft their long whips, the rousing words “Go’long, Buck!”—“Bright!”—“Dan!” were given all along the line, and we were at once moving between long but not very compact rows of half-naked redskins, many of them well armed, others carrying but indifferent weapons; while all wore in their faces the expression of sullen disappointment, mingled with a half-defiant scowl that suggested the thought of future night attacks, when darkness and thickets should give them greater advantage. For the present, however, they had evidently made up their minds to let us pass, and we soon lost sight of them.
The experience of most emigrants was similar. For many years the Indians of the region west of the Missouri had known the white men as traders, who engaged the Indians essentially as entrepreneurs dealing with entrepreneurs. Although there were occasional misunderstandings and acts of unorchestrated violence, both sides benefited from the trade, and neither had reason to disrupt it. The migration to Oregon that began in the early 1840s altered the situation somewhat. The emigrants weren’t traders, and they did the Indians no good. But neither, at first, did they do the Indians much harm. They were merely passing through—nomads, for the moment, more or less like the Indians themselves.
The Gold Rush altered the situation further. To be sure, these latest emigrants also were just passing through, but there were vastly more of them than before. Their oxen, cattle, mules, and horses ate all the grass in
sight and fouled the streams; their hunters shot buffalo, driving the herds away from the trail.
Yet the very numbers that made the emigrants worrisome to the Indians simultaneously protected the emigrants. As Sarah Royce discovered, as long as the emigrants stuck together, they had little to fear. The particular band the Royce party encountered could have overpowered this one group of emigrants, but there were many other emigrants who would have demanded retribution, and there were soldiers who would have responded to the demands.
Besides, though the emigrants were an annoyance and a potential threat, they were also an opportunity. Indians were happy to trade with the emigrants, supplying ponies, meat, and other provisions required for the cross-country trek, typically at prices well below what the merchants of the Missouri River towns charged. “We are getting among the Indians,” William Swain wrote from the Kansas River. “They come into camp with all their native rigging on, all mounted on ponies splendidly rigged out, for which they ask from $30 to $50.” Writing from farther west, Hugh Heiskell reported, “Camp full of Indians; great excitement. Most of the company trading, blankets for buffalo robes, powder & lead or tobacco for deer skins, lariats, &c.”
From the emigrants’ perspective, the presence and activities of the Indians were another aspect of the grand adventure of the Gold Rush. In this regard, such threat as the Indians posed, and the initial frisson they engendered, were part of their appeal. So were their wild customs. Indian funeral rites occasioned especial notice. Lewis Manly described a scene near Scott’s Bluff on the North Platte:
We found a large camp of the Sioux Indians on the bank of a ravine, on both sides of which were some large cottonwood trees. Away up in the large limbs, platforms had been made of poles, on which were laid the bodies of their dead, wrapped in blankets and fastened down to the platform by a network of smaller poles tightly lashed so that they could not be dragged away or disturbed by wild
animals. This seemed a strange sort of cemetery, but when we saw the desecrated earth-made graves we felt that perhaps this was the best way, even if it was a savage custom.
William Swain, observing a similar scene, reached a generally parallel conclusion: “It was a revolting sight to me, but they probably consider this method as sacred as we do that of burying in the consecrated grounds at home.”
N
EXT TO THE INDIANS
in the emigrants’ catalog of exotica were the buffalo. Whether they had read Frémont’s reports or the more recent
Oregon Trail
by Francis Parkman (which since the gold discovery had been reissued with a new title, The
California and Oregon Trail
), the emigrants all knew about the vast herds of buffalo that roamed the trans-Missouri plains. Nearly every man who fancied himself a hunter felt obliged to take part in a buffalo hunt.