Authors: H.W. Brands
Although they didn’t know it, Manly and the others were entering the heart of what geologists would call the Basin and Range Province. The tectonic stresses on this portion of the North American plate have caused parallel ranges of mountains to rise and the intervening basins to fall. These ranges and basins run north and south, so that a traveler going from east to west crosses range and basin and range and basin and range and basin from Utah all the way to California. The Humboldt River provided the only east-west corridor across the basin and ranges, having had, over the ages, sufficient power to cut through the rising ranges (though not enough to slice the more rapidly rising Sierras). This was what made the Humboldt route so vital to most emigrants, despite its numerous disadvantages. Farther south, where Manly now was, no such avenue existed north of the Grand Canyon, which—as Chief Walker explained to Manly—was essentially impassable.
Manly spent the last several weeks of 1849 traversing and exploring the basins and ranges. Bennett didn’t need him as a driver, so he became a scout. He roved far ahead of the wagons, and far to either side of their path. While the drivers sought the lowest points of the ranges for crossings, Manly sought the highest points for lookouts.
The vistas were breathtaking—and heartbreaking. “I reached the summit about nine o’clock,” he said of one scouting trip, “and had the grandest view I ever saw. I could see north and south almost forever.” A high,
snowy mountain commanded the western horizon; to left and right of that summit the edge of sight sloped downward. “A few miles to the north and east of where I stood, and somewhat higher, was the roughest piece of ground I ever saw. It stood in sharp peaks and was of many colors, some of them so red that the mountain looked red hot….It was the most wonderful picture of grand desolation one could ever see.”
That desolation, and its incredible vastness, were what made the vista heartbreaking. No one in Manly’s train had any idea how far away California was; with each ridge surmounted, they succumbed to thinking the Sacramento Valley was just over the next. From Manly’s high perch he now perceived the true nature of their predicament: the fact that the ranges and basins rolled on and on to the west like frozen waves on the sea of time. “The more I looked, the more I satisfied myself that we were yet a long way from California, and the serious question of our ever living to get there presented itself to me as I tramped along down the grade to camp. I put down at least another month of heavy, weary travel before we could hope to make the land of gold, and our stock of strength and provisions were both pretty small for so great a tax upon them.”
Like every other argonaut sooner or later, Manly pondered what he had left behind in the East. “I thought of the bounteous stock of bread and beans on my father’s table, to say nothing about all the other good things, and here was I, the oldest son, away out in the center of the Great American Desert, with an empty stomach and a dry and parched throat, and clothes fast wearing out.” Nor, in all likelihood, had he met the worst of it. “I might be forced to see the men and women and children of our party choke and die, powerless to help them. It was a darker and gloomier day than I had ever known it could be, and alone I wept aloud, for I believed I could see the future, and the results were bitter to contemplate.”
Manly shared with the others his assessment of the distance left to travel, until Bennett told him to desist. “Lewis, if you please,” Bennett said, “I don’t want you hereafter to express your views so openly and emphatically as you did last night about our prospects. When I went to bed I found Sarah [Bennett’s wife] crying, and when pressed for the cause, she said she had heard your remarks on the situation, and that if Lewis said so it must
be correct, for he knows more about it than all of you. She felt that she and the children must starve.”
For weeks the party struggled across the desert. Days would pass without water; when finally found, it was often of the vilest sort. Manly was faint with thirst one evening when, walking long after sunset, he literally stumbled on his salvation. “I poked around in the dark for a while and soon found a little pool of it, and having been without a drop of it for two days, I lay down and took a hasty drink. It did not seem to be very clear or clean, but it was certainly wet, which was the main thing just then.” Later he rejoined the rest of the party at the edge of a lake bed that was covered by the thinnest film of water—no more than a quarter-inch. By digging holes they managed to collect just enough to drink.
Food was even more problematic. Game had long since disappeared; though he continued to carry his gun, Manly realized one day that the same load had filled his rifle’s chamber for a month. “Very seldom could a rabbit be seen, and not a bird of any kind, not even a hawk, buzzard, or crow made their appearance.”
Infrequently they found food cached by Indians. Manly warned against eating it, remarking that the natives were as hungry as they were, and certain to resent such theft. Remembering Walker’s warning about the unfriendly character of the Indians, Manly had no desire to antagonize them unless absolutely necessary.
Yet the hungry members of the party did more than steal the Indians’ food. At one point some men from the train happened upon a lone native, whom they captured. For days they held the man hostage, forcing him to act as their guide. But eventually he escaped, leaping down a cliff and between some rocks where only a mountain sheep could have followed.
In their extremity, Manly’s party were reduced to killing their oxen. One instance was precipitated by Indians who ambushed the train—which, between breakdowns and decisions to turn back, had dwindled to seven wagons. The Indians shot three of the oxen with arrows. Two of the animals survived after the arrows were removed; the third was wounded mortally. Lest the ambushers benefit—and the owners lose—Manly and the others killed and butchered the animal themselves. Some feared eating the meat,
thinking the arrow had been poisoned. But Manly pointed out that the Indians hoped to eat the meat and wouldn’t have tainted their own supper.
Shortly Manly’s group was slaughtering their oxen without the encouragement of the Indians. The reward hardly repaid the effort. “Our animals were so poor that one would not last long as food. No fat could be found on the entire carcass, and the marrow of the great bones was a thick liquid, streaked with blood resembling corruption.”
The hunger became all-embracing. Not long after leaving the Los Angeles trail, Manly’s party had been passed by a group of young men from Kansas calling themselves the Jayhawkers. This impetuous bunch had driven swiftly by, and then—after having got lost—driven by again, less swiftly. One day Manly came across the carcass of an ox they had killed. The best cuts of beef—a very relative term under the circumstances—had been carved and packed off. But some leavings remained on the bone. How long the carcass had been lying in the sun, he couldn’t say. Nor did he ask. “I was so hungry that I took my sheath knife and cut a big steak which I devoured as I walked along, without cooking or salt. Some may say they would starve before eating such meat, but if they have ever experienced hunger till it begins to draw down the life itself, they will find the impulse of self-preservation something not to be controlled by mere reason. It is an instinct that takes possession of one in spite of himself.” Later Manly found some scraps of bacon rind left on the ground. “As I chewed these and tasted the rich grease they contained, I thought they were the sweetest morsels I had ever tasted.”
Manly’s party by now was thoroughly lost. They wandered semideliriously through a maze of mountains and valleys. They wanted to go west, but the valleys kept pushing them north and south. Each mountain range crossed revealed another ahead. How many more ranges separated them from California, God alone knew.
More discouragingly, the mountains kept getting taller and more rugged, and the valleys lower and more hostile. In one valley, during the last week of 1849, Manly made an appalling discovery. “As I reached the lower part of the valley, I walked over what seemed to be boulders of various sizes, and as I stepped from one to another the tops were covered with
dirt and they grew larger as I went along. I could see behind them and they looked clear like ice, but on closer inspection proved to be immense blocks of rock salt, while the water which stood at their bases was the strongest brine.” Encountering yet again the Jayhawkers, he compared impressions with them. “One fellow said he knew this was the Creator’s dumping place, where he had left the worthless dregs after making a world, and the devil had scraped these together a little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar had been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man were to die he would never decay on account of the salt.”
The sole redeeming feature of the place was the moderate temperature. Snow covered the mountains that towered above the valley (Telescope Peak, the prominence Manly had seen from more than a hundred miles away, rises to 11,000 feet), but on the valley floor the sun shone warm, despite the imminence of the new year. Ironically, if their luck hadn’t been so bad thus far, Manly’s party would have arrived earlier and risked being broiled. But now the temperature was quite comfortable.
Manly and the others had no way of knowing that they had reached the lowest point on the North American continent, nearly 300 feet below sea level. The same pressures that thrust the ranges (including the Amargosa Range just behind and the Panamint Range just ahead) toward the heavens drove the basins toward hell. Like a sheet of paper or aluminum foil, the earth’s crust crumpled as the North American plate crashed into the Pacific plate; in the collision, parts of the plate went up, other parts went down.
And in fact the part underlying Death Valley (where Manly stood, although the valley had yet to earn its name) had plunged much farther than topography revealed. The rock salt on the valley floor, deposited over millions of years by evaporation of water flowing off the mountains, was more than a thousand feet thick. Had Manly stood on bedrock, he would have been that much lower, and the mountains would have appeared that much higher. Though Manly couldn’t even guess the depth of the salt bed, he could see its extent. “It looked to me as if the whole valley, which might be a hundred miles long, might have been a solid bed of rock salt.”
With each day and mile, the hunger deepened and put all on edge.
Manly half expected some of his companions to lose their minds. “A man in a starving condition is a savage. He may be as bloodthirsty and selfish as a wild beast, as docile and gentle as a lamb, or as wild and crazy as a terrified animal, devoid of affection, reason, or thought of justice. We were none of us as bad as this, and yet there was a strange look in the eyes of us sometimes, as I saw by looking round, and as others no doubt realized, for I saw them making mysterious glances even in my direction.”
Despair drove some of the stronger to abandon the others. Four hired drivers announced that they were going off on their own. None could gainsay their choice, as they were unattached by blood or long acquaintance with those left behind. They were apportioned their small share of the common supplies, which they packed on their backs, and they disappeared south down the valley floor, toward a place where the mountains seemed somewhat lower than elsewhere.
Manly and the others tried a more westerly route. With painful steps they struggled from the floor of the valley up one of the long slopes of alluvium that marked the places where the side canyons debouch into the valley. If they had understood that these features are the work of flash floods, themselves the result of furious rainstorms at the heads of the steep, narrow canyons, the irony of their inescapable thirst would have rendered their steps still more painful. Manly scouted the way, working uphill across the alluvial fan to the side canyon at its head, and up the canyon’s broken floor. Higher and higher he climbed; narrower and narrower the canyon became. Then, to his surprise and encouragement, the canyon began to broaden out, promising easier passage for the wagons. He rounded a corner—and his encouragement evaporated. The canyon abruptly terminated in a large bowl with nearly vertical sides, from which there was no wheeled escape. A man might climb out of the bowl, but the wagons never could.
With this grim intelligence he returned to the where the wagons still struggled up the canyon. “They could hardly endure their disappointment.” Starving, they now had to give up every step won with such sacrifice coming up the slope. One of the oxen refused to retreat, instead surrendering on the spot. It was killed and butchered.
That night a council was held. Clearly the end was near. They could live as long as the oxen did, and then till the meat of the oxen ran out. But they couldn’t move, because the oxen couldn’t move. They certainly couldn’t make it over the mountains—and over whatever lay beyond the mountains.
After much morose and circular discussion, Bennett suggested a plan. Suppose two of the youngest, strongest members of the party struck out on foot. They could be supplied with all the food the others could spare; considering the dire straits, this would hardly weigh them down. They would cross the mountains and seek help, which they would lead back to where the rest of the party waited.
Bennett’s proposal was better than anything else on offer, but the others hesitated to embrace it. Although none seems to have said so aloud, doubtless some were wondering what guarantee they had that the help- seekers would return—assuming they survived the trek to the nearest settlement, wherever that might be.
Bennett broke the hesitation by recommending Manly. He knew Manly and trusted him. If anyone could get out, Manly could. And if Manly got out, he could be relied on to return. Manly agreed to go. John Rogers, the last of the Green River crew, volunteered to join him.
Another ox was killed and butchered. So wasted was the animal that the meat it furnished, when dried, barely exceeded what Manly and Rogers could carry in their improvised knapsacks. A collection was taken of all the money the party had, and given to Manly and Rogers. The parting was tearful, both sides fearing they would never more see the others alive. Sarah Bennett was the last to squeeze Manly’s and Rogers’s hands, asking God to bless these two young men and let them bring food back to her starving children.