He looked up in triumph, daring anyone to fully comprehend the wonder of that statement.
“Noxious mia what?” Kathryn whispered out of the side of her mouth.
Peter suppressed a grin. “Bad smells that make you sick,” he whispered back, nudging her.
She did not answer but seemed suitably impressed.
Donner lowered the book again, too excited to simply read the words. “He says that oats grow to be eight feet tall and that you can get seventy bushels of wheat per acre, a hundred and twenty in some of the richer spots.”
One of the drivers let out a low whistle. While the bullwhackers and the other hired help traveling in this company would earn little more than room and board while going west, such people usually had dreams, as this man did, of picking up three or four hundred acres of the free land that was waiting in California. While Peter was no farmer and had other reasons for wanting to go with this party, reasons that would likely be incomprehensible to this group, he did not find it hard to understand the look of astonishment he saw on the faces around him.
“Tell them the part about the fires,” Jacob Donner urged his brother.
“Oh, yeah. I read you the part about it being eternally spring there. Well, Hastings says that the only time you ever have to build a fire is when you want to cook your food.”
Margret Reed leaned forward. “And he’s been there, this Mr. Hastings? That sounds a bit like a fairy tale.”
George Donner didn’t like that. “Been there? He’s lived there. He’s got land there. He’s one of the few men who know what California’s really like.” Again he held up the book as proof positive. Everyone nodded and the doubts were dispelled.
Peter smiled inwardly. As a newspaperman, he well knew the power of words. He also knew that the printed word could carry the testimony of charlatans as easily as it could carry the testimony of saints. Not that he was about to say anything. He was certainly no expert on California.
James Reed now stood up beside Donner. “Thank you, George. You have whetted our appetites and fired our vision. I’m ready to start in the morning whether the wagons are ready or not.”
There was a burst of laughter from the group as George Donner sat down. Reed let it die, then plunged in immediately. “Today is the third day of March. Our plan is to leave Springfield about mid-April, just over a month from now. So far, we are the only three families leaving from here. Others may join us on the way.”
He let that register and waited for the whispers to end again. “As you know, Independence, Missouri, is the start of the Oregon Trail. That’s about three hundred miles from here. That will toughen us and our teams up. At Independence we’ll resupply and then, hopefully, join a larger train and accompany them.”
“Will there be danger from the Indians?” asked Solomon Elijah, Jacob Donner’s teenaged stepson.
Jacob, turning to look at his stepson, spoke up. “Not when we’re in a train of fifty to a hundred wagons. None of those savages would dare try to attack us. However”—he looked at Reed—“may I address the group for just a moment?”
“Certainly,” said Reed.
Jacob reached under his chair and pulled out a small box, then stood and faced the group. Opening the box, he brought out a strange-looking pistol and held it up, turning it back and forth for all of them to see. “Just in case, I’d recommend you all do what I’ve done. This is one of them brand-new Sam Colt six-shot revolvers. I think it will come in mighty handy on the trail, for Indians, snakes, or whatever else we may encounter.”
Kathryn saw Mrs. Reed shudder and wasn’t sure whether it was the mention of the Indians or the snakes or the sight of the pistol that caused it. In her own case, there was no question. Even the very word snake made her skin crawl.
“How much?” someone called out.
“Fifty dollars.”
Peter shook his head. He had never owned a gun and didn’t particularly like them, but he and James Reed had already talked about the need for weapons on the trip. Reed had said he would take care of it. At fifty dollars for a pistol, there was no way Peter would be doing it.
A mood of jubilation filled the room. From her seat beside him, Kathryn looked up at Peter. She had a strange expression on her face.
“What?” he asked softly.
“We really are going to do it, aren’t we?”
He laughed softly. “Yes,” he answered. “I think we are.”
Chapter Notes
William Pitt and his brass band would become a significant part of the trek west. Brigham’s wisdom and foresight were such that he knew that keeping up morale on the plains would be very important. Pitt was an English convert, as were most of the band members. William Clayton was a member of the band. It was recorded that on the second night after the Saints’ departure from Sugar Creek, 2 March 1846, after they made camp, the band began to play. The Saints enjoyed the music so much that in spite of their weariness after a difficult day, “they lit huge bonfires and sang and danced throughout the whole evening” (CN, 9 March 1996, p. 12).
The vast unsettled territories of the western part of the North American continent were much on the minds of Americans by 1846. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and its exploration by Lewis and Clark had started this interest. Then, as mountain men and trappers and explorers like John C. Frémont brought back descriptions of rich valleys and vast wilderness, the idea of free land became a powerful draw. In 1845 a New York publisher coined the phrase “manifest destiny.” It captured the belief held by most Americans that it was part of the will of Divine Providence that the United States of America should fill the entire continent. In that climate it was no surprise that Lansford Hastings’s book The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, published in 1845, quickly became a best-selling book across America. The fact that Hastings owned land in California and was a shameless promoter may partly account for the “glowing” description of California. (See Timothy Foote, “1846: The Way We Were—and the Way We Went,” Smithsonian, April 1996, pp. 45–46.)
Samuel Colt first patented the revolving six-shooter in 1835. Over the years he greatly improved the design. When the federal government ordered thousands of the weapons for their soldiers during the Mexican War of 1846, the Colt would take its place as a significant influence in the opening of the West. (See James Trager, The People’s Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present, rev. ed. [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992], pp. 419, 441.)
Chapter 4
It was worse than mud. It was worse even than wet clay. It was more like a blend of clay and bookbinder glue mixed with cement. It stuck to the wheels, buried now almost to their hubs, as though it had been smeared on with a brick mason’s trowel. It clung to the feet of the animals in huge globs that left them panting just to walk. For Joshua, it was like one of those nightmares where some horrible danger is bearing down on you and your feet will not respond. His upper thighs were on fire. His knees ached as though they were rheumatic. His ankles were getting mushy. His lungs felt like great bellows that couldn’t suck in enough air to feed the fire within. Around him, he could hear the others gasping for air as he was.
“Hit it again,” Solomon yelled. “Ready?”
They took their positions again. Joshua and Nathan were at the back wheels. Matthew and Derek were at the front ones. The teenaged children—Josh, Emily, Rachel, Luke and Mark Griffith—ringed the wagon box, getting what grip they could on it.
“Go!” Solomon shouted at the oxen and cracked the long bullwhip over their heads. All nine of them threw their weight against the wagon. Joshua clawed at the spokes, grunting and muttering under his breath. The veins on his forehead stood out like great knots, and he could feel the blood rush to his face. Ahead of him, he could see the two off oxen pawing to get a grip in the miry clay, and he could hear their own grunts as they fought for some kind of movement. The wagon rocked forward maybe five or six inches, the wheels making a great sucking sound, then stopped again.
Joshua’s feet suddenly gave way in the slippery mud. With a cry, he went down. His shoulder slammed against the wagon wheel, and his head cracked sharply against the steel-rimmed tire. “Ow!” he yelped, grabbing for his forehead. When he pulled his hand away, the muddy glove had a smear of red on it. He dropped his head, down on all fours now, chest heaving, staring down at the hated mud, and began to swear, softly and steadily.
“Uncle Joshua!” Emily gasped.
Pulled back into awareness, he saw Emily and Rachel, not two feet away, gaping at him in utter disbelief. The two Griffith boys were likewise in shock. It took him a second or two before it registered that they were not looking at his bleeding forehead. They were staring at him, eyes wide, faces flaming.
“Well,” he snapped, lifting his arm and pressing the sleeve of his shirt against the wound. “Just close your ears. That hurt.”
Nathan stepped around the children, panting as heavily as Joshua. “You all right?”
He wanted to swear again, but bit it off this time. “Oh, yeah,” he said sarcastically. “Never been better. And the blood makes a nice contrast to the mud, don’t you think?”
Mark Griffith giggled, then went stone sober as Joshua glared at him.
But Nathan was smiling too. “The blood and the mud. Sounds like a title for a good ghost story.” That set all of the kids to snickering.
Joshua hauled himself to his feet, brushed at the mud caked on his trouser legs, then stopped when he saw he was only smearing it around. He glowered at his brother. “I’m glad someone is finding some amusement in all this.”
Lydia, who had been following behind the wagons, helping her two youngest, came forward enough that she was parallel to Joshua. She took a rag from her apron pocket. “Come over here and let me have a look at you.”
He shook his head. Now the whole family was coming up to see what had happened. “It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.”
She put one hand on her hip. “Are you going to make me wade into the mud or are you going to come over here.”
He mumbled something, shot Nathan, who was trying to hold back a grin, a dirty look, then hauled himself out of the slough and up to where she waited. She pulled his head down and began to dab at the cut, carefully wiping away the mud Joshua’s glove had left there. “You’ll have a goose egg, sure enough, but the cut doesn’t look too deep.” She pressed the rag against it, making him wince. “Here, hold this in place for a minute. My insensitive husband may like the idea of mud and blood, but I don’t.” She shot Nathan a look, but it was more a look of warning than of condemnation. Couldn’t he see when Joshua was in no mood to be funned with?
But if Nathan saw the look, he didn’t pay her any mind. He came up and peered at his older brother. “Did it help?”
“What?”
“Swearing.”
“Nathan,” Joshua growled, his eyebrows narrowing, giving a warning of their own. “I don’t need a sermon right now.”
“No, no sermon,” Nathan said innocently. “I was just wondering. If it did any good, I might be persuaded to become a cussing man.”
He said it with such longing and such feeling that it broke the tension. Even Joshua had to laugh. Nathan a cussing man? Now, that would be something. Joshua turned to the older children who had been pushing on the wagon box. “Sorry, kids. I kind of forgot that I’m not out on the trail with a bunch of cigar-smoking teamsters.”
“It’s all right, Uncle Joshua,” Rachel said, recovered now. “Does your head hurt?”
Joshua was strangely hit by a sudden pang of sorrow. Rachel had called him Uncle Joshua as naturally as Emily did. And yet she was his daughter. They—he and Jessica—had long ago determined that that was best, but every now and then it hit him, and it always left him wincing with guilt. Why the thought hit him now he wasn’t sure.
He managed a wobbly grin back at her. “My head’s fine, but someone better check the wagon wheel.”
“I’ll say,” Derek quipped. “It sounded like steel ringing on steel to me. I heard it from where I was.”
Now the whole family laughed merrily. Joshua pulled a face and looked at Lydia. “Why is it that everyone feels like my tragedy gives them the right to make jokes?”
“I don’t know,” she answered solemnly. She looked at her British brother-in-law. “Derek, I think you need to apologize to Joshua.” Then her eyes twinkled. “Right after you check the wheel to see if it is broken.”
“See?” Joshua said, looking hurt.
His mother joined them now, coming from the other wagons which were hanging back until Solomon’s wagon was through this muddy part of the road. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. The bigger question is, how are we going to get this through?”
Solomon grunted. Of the men, he was the only one not still wheezing from their exertions, but only because he had been driving and not pushing. “Maybe we’re going to have to unhitch the other teams and bring them up here. It’s a sure thing we’re not moving it much this way.”
Matthew was squatting down, peering under the wagon, sizing up the depths and thickness of the mud. “I say we find us a pole and try to lift it up a little, then try again. Those wheels are what are giving us the problem. They’re in too deep.”
Nathan straightened, all seriousness again. “Good idea.” He half turned. They had crossed a creek a quarter of a mile back. A scattered stand of trees lined its banks. “Solomon. Derek. Get some axes. Let’s go cut us a lever.”
Forty-five minutes later, they were ready. They were using a two-foot length of old log they had found as the fulcrum and a ten-foot, six-inch-thick length of elm as the lever. Joshua, being the tallest—cut head and aching shoulder now forgotten—grasped the end of the pole. Matthew, Nathan, Derek, and Josh lined up in front of him. Once again the others—women now as well as the older children—waded into the mud and found a place to push. Solomon was once more at the head of his oxen.
Joshua called forward. “Solomon. We’ll try to lift it first, then holler at you.” Then to those at the wagon, “Don’t push until you feel the wagon come up.”
Everyone nodded and took their places. Those on the log pole raised their hands, getting a solid grip.