Peter was a little chagrined that he had reacted so strongly. “See how faint the tracks are here? Well, there are some places where we barely left any track at all. I’m not sure I could find the way.”
The man who was the most experienced of the three of them finally nodded. “You’re right. We need to resupply at Fort Hall anyway.”
“There’s nowhere else between here and Fort Bridger to do it,” Brannan said.
“Nothing,” Peter murmured, “except one stretch of trail that even the devils in hell would stay away from.”
Chapter Notes
Sam Brannan, Charles C. Smith, and an “unnamed young man” left Sutter’s Fort on 26 April 1847 and headed east to find Brigham Young and the Saints. Whether Smith was a Latter-day Saint or not is not known, though it is recorded that he had been in Nauvoo previously. Later Brannan wrote: “We crossed the Snowy Mountains of California, a distance of 40 miles, . . . in one day and two hours, a thing that has never been done before in less than three days. We traveled on foot and drove our animals before us, the snow from twenty to one hundred feet deep.” (Quoted in
CS,
p. 87.)
By the time the last of the Donner group were rescued, those left in the mountain camps had also been forced to begin eating their dead. Brannan’s party did stop at the camp beside the lake where most of the Donner Party had perished, and found skulls and bones scattered about in every direction. Thus, though newspaper accounts of the Donner tragedy had been sent east previously, Brannan was the first known white man to bring an eyewitness account of the tragedy out of California.
As shown here, Brannan’s small party elected not to take the Hastings Cutoff through the Salt Lake Valley. Instead, they took the California Trail, which joined the Hastings route about twenty-five miles west of the Ruby Mountains. The California Trail went northeastward through present-day Nevada to join the Oregon Trail at the Snake River.
The exact date is not known that a small group of Saints from Pueblo left for Fort Laramie to intercept the main body of the Saints. It is known that they had been at Fort Laramie about two weeks when the Pioneer Company arrived there on 1 June, so the assumption is that the Pueblo group left sometime around the first of May, as depicted here.
Chapter 39
Matthew and Nathan Steed sat in the back of their wagon while the rain drummed softly on the canvas above them. Nathan was writing, though Matthew couldn’t tell if it was in his journal or if he was writing a letter to Lydia and the children. He sighed, knowing that he should be writing too but not feeling like making the effort. And besides, they had only one pen and ink bottle.
The problem was that Matthew was just plain bored. Today was . . . he had to stop and think for a moment. It was the twenty-ninth of May, which meant it was almost two months now since they had left Winter Quarters. For the most part, each of those almost sixty days had been much the same. That was bad enough, but this was the second day that the rain had been heavy enough that they couldn’t move forward. Here it was half past nine and they were still sitting in place.
That really frustrated him. They were now within fifty miles of Fort Laramie, just two or three days’ journey from here. Everyone was looking forward with great anticipation to that milestone on their journey. Since they had left the Elkhorn more than six weeks ago they had not passed a single community, not a village, not a farm, not a way station of any kind. Fort Laramie couldn’t be much of a splash of civilization this far from nowhere, but after what they had seen in the last month and a half, it couldn’t be anything less than wonderful.
He turned his head. “Letter or journal?”
Nathan looked up. “Letter.”
Matthew grunted, not surprised. They had started to meet up with people moving east now. Near Ash Hollow a trapper had ridden across the river and volunteered to take mail east, but he was in a hurry and couldn’t wait. Matthew had finished a letter and sent it with him. Nathan had planned to get one done, but hadn’t and so missed the opportunity. At Fort Laramie they would almost certainly find someone to take mail east for them.
“How many miles did William Clayton say we’ve come?” Nathan asked, looking up.
“Well, at Scotts Bluff, which was two days ago, it was almost an even five hundred miles from Winter Quarters.”
“So what now do you think? About five hundred and a quarter?”
Matthew hooted. “Are you kidding? At the rate we’re moving, I’ll bet we’ve not come fifteen miles since Scotts Bluff.”
Nathan nodded absently and returned to his writing.
Matthew lay back and closed his eyes. Five hundred miles. In some ways it seemed like a thousand, as if they had been traveling in this wagon from the time of his birth. The whole experience had been huge stretches of tedious monotony broken only by an occasional burst of interest. And even new things had a way of turning monotonous as well.
He thought of the first day they had seen buffalo. The whole camp was in a high state of excitement. That had been the first of May. He remembered the date because they ended up calling it their “May Day hunt.” The hunt went on for almost three hours as the wagons moved along slowly, stopping to watch the hunters when the action was close enough to see. That night the whole camp had exulted over the opportunity to have fresh meat and to taste buffalo for the first time.
But in a few days buffalo had become so commonplace that one hardly glanced up at the sight of them anymore. There were whole days when the prairie on both sides of the river was black with buffalo. William Clayton, ever the one to count things, one day estimated that there were at least fifty thousand head in view.
As he let his mind go back, he was suddenly struck by the irony of the things which stood out in his memory. Their very insignificance was proof of how deeply the tedium was affecting them all. He thought of anthills which sparkled with brightly colored Indian beads. Evidently, after Indians had camped in the vicinity, the ants found the colored “pebbles” fascinating and carried them to their hills. When they were first sighted, grown men would call for their companions to come and see this unique phenomenon. But after a week, that too became commonplace and they barely glanced at them as they passed.
There was the day that Brigham Young lost his telescope as they rode hard to stop some cattle from mingling with the buffalo. Brigham was not a happy man after that. The glass had cost forty dollars and was a favorite of his. The man who should have been watching the cattle got a tongue-lashing, and for the rest of that night the company got a taste of a very grumpy President Young. The next day it was decided that there was not much sense in moving on with their president in such a mood, so a search party went back. Finally, late in the day the glass was found—miraculously undamaged by the buffalo that had passed all around it—and the mood of the camp and Brother Brigham cheered considerably.
There was the day the “roadometer” was put into service. William Clayton had been charged by Brigham Young to keep an accurate record of the trail so that they could provide help to those companies that would be coming after them. Mileage covered each day was an important part of that record. At first Clayton tied a red bandanna to a spoke on a wagon wheel and counted the number of revolutions. He had calculated that exactly 360 revolutions made one mile. That was both dizzying and tedious. So one night Clayton took his problem to the man who was considered to be the most learned in the group, Elder Orson Pratt. Intrigued with the idea of creating a mechanical device to do the counting, Pratt designed a series of wooden cogs that attached to the axle and automatically counted the rotations of the wheel. Appleton Harmon, a skilled mechanic, made it, and to everyone’s amazement it worked. They called it the “roadometer.” William Clayton was as pleased as if he had just received word of the birth of a new child. That’s what monotony did to you.
Somewhere off to his left, Matthew heard a burst of laughter and a man’s howl of protest. Another card game or perhaps some dominoes, he thought. That too was evidence of the mental state of the men. Any kind of diversion was welcomed in their attempts to beat the tedium.
“How tall do you think Chimney Rock was?” Nathan said, again interrupting his thoughts.
Matthew half rolled over so that he could look at his brother. “From the base, or just the chimney itself?” Now, there had been a break in the routine, he thought. After five hundred miles of prairie where a tree or two along the river were considered as stunning scenery, Chimney Rock had been a source of great excitement.
“From the base. Well, both.”
Matthew screwed up his mouth, trying to remember. “Brother Pratt took some sightings on it, I remember.”
“Does two hundred sixty feet for the shaft sound right?”
“Yeah, I think that’s about it. And it was like four hundred and fifty feet above the level plain if you counted everything.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Matthew sighed and rolled to his knees. He crawled to the end of the wagon and peeked out the crack in the canvas. He groaned. The rain was lightening up, but the ground was still covered with large puddles.
Nathan looked up. “What?”
“Nothing.” He came back and lay down again and closed his eyes.
Nathan stopped writing, laying the pen down. He picked up the paper and blew on it to dry the ink. Then he carefully folded it and put pen, ink, and letter back in his trunk. When he finished he turned to Matthew. “And what have you been thinking about so hard?” he asked.
Matthew was a little startled. He hadn’t thought Nathan was paying any attention to anything but the letter. “Boredom.”
It came out with such disgust that Nathan chuckled. “Reaching Fort Laramie will help.”
“And just how do we do that when we sit here waiting for this blasted rain to stop?”
Nathan ignored the outburst. “They say once we leave Laramie, we’re out of prairie country. That will help. The endless prairie is part of it, I think.”
“I don’t know,” Matthew drawled lazily, “I like getting up in the morning and being able to see three days in advance.”
Nathan laughed, then stretched out beside his brother on their mattress. “They tell me that one of the best cures for boredom is a quick nap.”
“Hmm,” Matthew said dryly. “Maybe that’s a theory we ought to test.”
Shortly after ten o’clock the bugle sounded across the camp, giving the signal to hitch up the teams. Matthew leaped up immediately and opened the flap on their wagon. The sky was still overcast, but it was considerably lighter than before and the rain had stopped. He kicked Nathan on the bottom of his boot.
“I’m awake,” he growled. “Don’t you be worrying about me.”
Matthew sat down and began pulling on his own boots. “I hate this waiting.”
Not until twelve o’clock were they finally ready to move out. By that point Matthew was ready to scream. Two hours to hitch the teams, pack the rest of their gear, and gather in the stock. Two hours! How did Brigham stand it? This must drive him to distraction. By now, had Matthew been in charge, he would have gone after several of the brethren with a bullwhip to see if he couldn’t spark a little life into them.
He turned as a shout sounded over the camp. It was Heber C. Kimball. “Brethren, we’d like you to gather your teams around the boat, please.”
Matthew gave Nathan a questioning look, but Nathan just shrugged. He was up on the wagon seat. Matthew was standing beside the team. The “boat” was Luke Johnson’s wagon, the Revenue Cutter. Since it had no top, it made a good stand from which the leaders could address the company. Matthew groaned. Not another delay! With a sigh borne of deep pain, he took the bridle of the near horse and clucked to him softly. “Okay, boys, let’s move.”
To gather seventy-two wagons and teams tightly around one point was not an easy thing and it took some jockeying. As they finally got into place, Brigham Young climbed up into the leather boat. “Brethren,” he said in a loud voice, “we’d like the captains of tens to lead out your respective companies and get all of your men together.” He motioned to Luke Johnson to drive ahead. “We’ll gather over there.”
This time Matthew’s questioning glance at Nathan was filled with curiosity. There was some order of march, usually based around the companies of ten, but they had never lined up all the companies before departing in quite this way before.
Nathan shook his head, equally puzzled. “Something’s up.”
Matthew and Nathan had been assigned to John Brown’s company of ten, the thirteenth ten. Nathan looked around, then spied Brother Brown moving forward. He clucked to the team and got their own wagon moving in that direction. It took another five or six minutes to get everyone in position.
Finally, when they were all aligned by companies, Brigham Young got up in the boat a second time. The camp quickly fell quiet.
“Brother Bullock?”
Thomas Bullock, the camp historian, raised his hand. “Here, President.”
“Brother Bullock, I’d like you to take a roll of the camp, please.”
Now everyone looked at each other in surprise. This definitely was not the usual procedure. Bullock nodded, evidently already having been warned, and climbed up into the boat with the chief Apostle. He had some sheets of paper. He held them up and began to call out names. “First Ten. Wilford Woodruff, captain.”
“Present,” Elder Woodruff called out.
“Jacob Burnham.”
“Here.”
One by one he quickly moved through the fourteen companies of tens. But with one hundred and forty-eight names, it took almost ten minutes. When he was finished he glanced quickly through his sheets. “We are missing four, President. Joseph Hancock and Andrew Gibbons, who are reported to be out hunting, and Elijah Newman and Nathaniel Fairbanks.”
“Brother Newman is sick and confined to his wagon,” someone called out.
“The same with Brother Fairbanks,” said another.
“Good,” Brigham Young said. “Thank you, Brother Bullock.”
As Bullock jumped down again, Brigham let his eyes sweep over the assembly. No one made a sound and every eye was on their leader. They could tell from his demeanor that something significant was about to happen.