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Title: The Westward Movement
Century Readings in United States History
Editor: Charles Lester Barstow
Release Date: August 5, 2014 [EBook #46513]
Language: English
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THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
CENTURY READINGS
IN
UNITED STATES HISTORY
A series, made up from the best on this subject in THE CENTURY
and ST. NICHOLAS, for students of the upper grammar grades and
the first year high school. Profusely illustrated.
EXPLORERS and SETTLERS
THE COLONISTS AND THE REVOLUTION
A NEW NATION
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
THE CIVIL WAR
THE PROGRESS OF A UNITED PEOPLE
=12mo. About 225 pages each.=
D. APPLETON-CENTURY CO.
[Illustration: From the sculpture by Frederick Mac Monnies.
Kit Carson, the Pioneer.
See pages 173 and 174.]
CENTURY READINGS IN UNITED STATES HISTORY
THE
WESTWARD MOVEMENT
EDITED BY
CHARLES L. BARSTOW
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
INCORPORATED
_New York_ _London_
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE CENTURY CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE
RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR
PORTIONS THEREOF, IN ANY FORM. 326
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BEGINNINGS OF THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT _S. E. Forman_ 3
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST _Emerson Hough_ 14
THE PONY EXPRESS _W. F. Bailey_ 46
EARLY WESTERN STEAMBOATING _Archer B. Hulbert_ 56
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK _Theodore Roosevelt_ 61
BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD _Archer B. Hulbert_ 69
DANIEL BOONE _Theodore Roosevelt_ 75
PIONEER FARMING _Morris Birkbeck_ 82
A PIONEER BOYHOOD _James B. Pond_ 88
"THE PLAINS ACROSS" _Noah Brooks_ 103
THE FIRST EMIGRANT TRAIN TO CALIFORNIA _John Bidwell_ 119
RÉSUMÉ OF FRÉMONT'S EXPEDITIONS _M. N. O._ 140
ROUGH TIMES IN ROUGH PLACES _C. G. McGehee_ 151
KIT CARSON _Charles M. Harvey_ 163
THE MACMONNIES PIONEER MONUMENT FOR DENVER 173
THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA _John S. Hittell_ 175
PIONEER MINING _E. G. Waife_ 192
THE GREAT NORTHWEST _E. V. Smalley_ 199
THE GREAT SOUTHWEST _Ray S. Baker_ 214
THE DESERT _Ray S. Baker_ 223
Acknowledgment is made of the courtesy of Archer B. Hulbert
in granting permission to use the articles on "Early Western
Steamboating," and "Boone's Wilderness Road," from his book "Historic
Highways."
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
PEOPLING THE WEST
From Europe's proud, despotic shores
Hither the stranger takes his way,
And in our new-found world explores
A happier soil, a milder sway,
Where no proud despot holds him down,
No slaves insult him with a crown.
From these fair plains, these rural seats,
So long concealed, so lately known,
The unsocial Indian far retreats,
To make some other clime his own,
Where other streams, less pleasing, flow,
And darker forests round him grow.
No longer shall your princely flood
From distant lakes be swelled in vain,
No longer through a darksome wood
Advance unnoticed to the main;
Far other ends the heavens decree--
And commerce plans new freights for thee.
While virtue warms the generous breast,
There heaven-born freedom shall reside,
Nor shall the voice of war molest,
Nor Europe's all-aspiring pride--
There Reason shall new laws devise,
And order from confusion rise.
=PHILIP FRENEAU.=
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
BEGINNINGS OF THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
BY S. E. FORMAN
In 1636 Thomas Hooker, the pastor of the church at Newton (now
Cambridge), moved with his entire congregation to the banks of the
Connecticut and founded the city of Hartford. Hooker did not like the
way the Puritans acted in matters of government. He thought religious
affairs and state affairs in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were bound
too closely together. He thought also that more people ought to be
allowed to vote than were allowed that privilege in the Puritan colony.
Besides, was not the rich valley of the Connecticut a better place for
homes than the rocky and barren hills around Boston? Hooker and his
followers took their wives and children with them. They carried their
household goods along and drove their cattle before them. As they moved
overland through the roadless forests of Massachusetts, they took the
first step in that great Westward Movement which continued for more
than two hundred years and which did not come to an end until the
far-off Pacific was reached.
At the opening of the eighteenth century in almost every colony there
were great areas of vacant land, and colonial growth for many years
consisted mainly in bringing these lands under cultivation and filling
them with people. This development necessarily took a westward course,
for if the English colonists went far to the north they met the
French, and if they went far to the south they met the Spanish. In New
York the Westward Movement between 1700 and 1740 was very slow, because
the progress of the English was opposed not only by the French, but
also by powerful tribes of Iroquois Indians. But in the western part
of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina the Indians were less
troublesome and there were as yet no French at all. So it was from
Pennsylvania and from the southern colonies that the settlers first
began to move in considerable numbers toward the West.
[Illustration: Savannah in 1741.]
The first important westward movement of population began with the
settlement of the beautiful valley which lies between the Blue Ridge
and the Alleghany Mountains and which is drained by the Shenandoah
River. In 1716 Governor Spotswood of Virginia, with fifty companions,
entered this valley near the present site of Port Republic, and with
much ceremony took possession of the region in the name of King George
of England. His purpose in pushing out into the valley was to head off
the French, who at the time had already taken possession of the country
west of the Alleghanies and were pushing east as fast as they dared.
Soon after the expedition of Spotswood the settlement of the Shenandoah
began in earnest. First came a few settlers from the older parts of
Virginia. Then came large numbers of the Scotch-Irish and Germans
from Pennsylvania. These enterprising people by 1730 had crossed
the Susquehanna and were making settlements in the Cumberland
valley. In 1732 they began to move down into the Shenandoah valley
and build rude cabins and plant corn-fields. In a few years so
many people--Virginians, Scotch-Irish, and Germans--had settled
in the valley that it became necessary for them to have some form
of government. So in 1738 Virginia took the matter in hand and
organized the Shenandoah region as a county and provided it with a
regular government. Thus between 1700 and 1740 the strip of English
civilization along the Atlantic seaboard was greatly widened, and the
Frontier Line was carried westward over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the
eastern base of the Alleghanies.
THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT IN COLONIAL TIMES.
[Illustration: Connecticut and Rhode Island.]
The progress of the Westward Movement in colonial times was slow. A
hundred and fifty years passed before the frontier line was pushed
beyond the Appalachian ridge. This slowness was due in part to the
action of the English government. Soon after England (in 1763) came
into possession of the country west of the Alleghanies the king issued
a proclamation reserving most of the newly acquired territory for
the use of the Indians and forbidding the governors of the colonies
to grant lands to white men west of the mountains. If this plan had
been carried out, English civilization would have been confined to the
seaboard, and the richest and fairest portions of the earth would have
been permanently reserved as a hunting-ground for savages and as a lair
for wild beasts. But the War of the Revolution took the Western country
from England and gave it to the United States. The Ohio valley was then
thrown open to settlers, and white men from all parts of the world
rushed into the new lands like hungry cattle rushing into new pastures.
In twenty years after the acknowledgment of our independence (in 1783)
the Frontier Line moved farther westward than it had moved in a century
under British rule.
KENTUCKY.
The first great stream of Western emigration after the Revolution
flowed into the region now included within the borders of Kentucky and
Tennessee. This territory was a neutral hunting-ground for Northern
and Southern Indians. The red men hunted over it, but did not live
permanently upon it or claim it as their own. The district, therefore,
was easier for the white man to settle than were the surrounding
regions in which the Indians had permanent homes.
The settlement of the Kentucky region really began several years before
the Revolution. In 1769 Daniel Boone, a great hunter and one of the
most interesting of American pioneers, left his home on the Yadkin
River, in North Carolina, to seek the wilderness of Kentucky. With
five companions he passed through the gorges of the Cumberland Gap and
reached the blue-grass region, "a land of running waters, of groves and
glades, of prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forests."
[Illustration: Daniel Boone.]
Boone returned to North Carolina, but not to remain. His restless
spirit still yearned for the beautiful banks of the far-off Kentucky.
In 1773 he sold his farms, and with wife and children and about fifty
persons besides started for Kentucky with the purpose of making a
permanent settlement there. On the way, however, the party was attacked
by Indians--for even in this neutral territory the Indian was sometimes
troublesome--and Boone and his companions were compelled to turn back.
But the fame of the Kentucky country was now widespread, and its
settlement was near at hand. In 1774 James Harrod of Virginia, with
fifty men, floated down the Ohio River in flatboats, and, ascending the
Kentucky River, selected the present site of Harrodsburg as a place
for a settlement and built some cabins. The place was given the name
of Harrodstown (afterward Harrodsburg) and was the first permanent
settlement in Kentucky. The next year Boone safely reached Kentucky and
founded the town of Boonesborough. In 1775 Lexington also was founded.
"When the embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world, a
party of hunters heard the echo and baptized the station they were
building Lexington." Louisville was founded in 1777.
While Boone and his followers were laying the foundation for a State
on the banks of the Kentucky, other pioneers from North Carolina and
Virginia were laying the foundations for another State on the banks
of streams that flow into the Tennessee. In the very year (1769) that
Boone visited the blue-grass region, William Bean of Virginia built
himself a log cabin on the Watauga River. Pioneers came and settled
near Bean, and in a short time several hundred people had their homes
on the banks of the Watauga. This Watauga settlement was the beginning
of the State of Tennessee.
North Carolina continued to let her Western children shift for
themselves, until at last for their own defense and safety they
organized as a separate State, and called the new State Franklin, in
honor of Benjamin Franklin. John Sevier, the greatest of the early
leaders in Tennessee, was elected governor of Franklin, and Greenville
was made the capital of the State. But the State of Franklin had only
a short life. North Carolina came forward promptly and asserted her
rights, and by 1788 the officers of Franklin were all driven from
power, the new State was dead, and North Carolina was again in full
control of Tennessee.
[Illustration: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Early Ohio.]
In the rapid and wonderful growth of Kentucky and Tennessee we see the
first-fruits of the Westward Movement. Here out of the wilderness south
of the Ohio had sprung up, almost overnight, two prosperous, populous,
well-organized commonwealths, States that almost at once could hold
their heads as high as the oldest and proudest of their sisters.
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; THE ORDINANCE OF 1787.
While pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina were moving into
Kentucky and Tennessee, emigrants from the Northern States were moving
into western New York, or were crossing the Alleghanies and settling
the upper valleys of the Ohio. The settlement of western Pennsylvania
began even before the Revolution. In 1770 Washington revisited the
scenes of his early youth and found Pittsburgh a village of twenty
houses. Fourteen years later he would have found it a town of two
hundred houses and a thousand inhabitants. Western Pennsylvania filled
rapidly with settlers, and soon pioneers began to float down the
Ohio in flatboats and build their homes on the soil of the Northwest
Territory. In a few years so many white people were living in this
Western domain that it became necessary for them to have some form of
government. So Congress (in 1787) passed the law known as the Ordinance
of 1787, the most important law ever passed by a lawmaking body in
America.
[Illustration: Emigrants descending the Tennessee River.]
The great law of 1787 provided that, as the Northwest Territory filled
up with people, it should be divided into States--not fewer than three
and not more than five. Each State was to be governed according to the
will of its voters; there was to be no slavery; religious liberty was
guaranteed; education was to be encouraged; Indians were to be justly
treated. When a community came to have as many as 60,000 inhabitants it
was to be admitted into the Union as a State, with all the rights of
the older States; during the time in which a community was too small
for statehood it was to be governed as a Territory.
Such were the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. The law breathed the
spirit of freedom, and showed plainly that Western settlers could look
forward to fair treatment at the hands of the national government. The
Western communities were not to be dependent colonies; they were to be
self-governing States.
THE BEGINNINGS OF OHIO.
The first community to be built up in the Northwest Territory was Ohio.
In 1788 a party of forty-eight New Englanders, the Pilgrim Fathers of
Ohio, landed at the mouth of the Muskingum in a bullet-proof barge
which bore the historic name of _Mayflower_. It was well that the
barge was bullet-proof, for white men passing down the Ohio in boats
were in constant danger of being shot by Indians lurking along the
shore. The _Mayflower_ party went ashore opposite Fort Harmar, where
there was a regiment of soldiers. In the winning of Ohio, soldiers and
settlers went hand in hand, for everywhere through the Northwest there
were Indians, and every acre of land won by the ax and plow had to be
guarded and defended by the rifle.
Under the protection of the soldiers, the New Englanders began to fell
trees and build houses, and to lay the foundation of Marietta, the
oldest of Ohio towns and a place that in the history of the West holds
a rank similar to that held by Jamestown and Plymouth in the history
of the East. At Marietta the wheels of territorial government for the
Northwest Territory were set in motion (July, 1788). General Arthur St.
Clair, who had climbed the rock of Quebec with Wolfe, and who was a
warm friend of Washington, had come out as governor of the Territory.
Cincinnati was founded about the same time as Marietta. In December,
1788, twenty-six settlers landed at the foot of what is now Sycamore
Street in Cincinnati, and began to build a town which they called
Losantiville, but which afterward received its present name. Other
settlements on the Ohio quickly followed those of Marietta and
Cincinnati. The towns of Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Manchester, and South
Bend all appeared within a few years after the founding of Marietta.
The Ohio settlers had to meet the Indians at every step, and as the
white men became more numerous the red men became more troublesome. In
1791 Governor St. Clair was compelled to march against the Indians,
but near the place where the city of Fort Wayne now stands he suffered
a terrible defeat. General Anthony Wayne--"Mad Anthony"--the hero of
Stony Point, was next sent against the red warriors, and at Fallen
Timbers (in 1794) he met them and dealt them a blow that broke their
power completely in Ohio and drove them from the country.
With the Indians out of the way, the settlement of Ohio could go on
much faster. Towns began to be built farther up the streams and farther
inland. In 1795 Dayton and Chillicothe were founded, and the next year
General Moses Cleveland, with a few companions, founded, at the mouth
of the Cuyahoga River, a town to which he gave his name. In 1800 the
original Northwest Territory was divided, and the eastern portion--the
portion that is now Ohio--was set off as the Territory Northwest of the
Ohio, and was given a territorial government of its own. The population
of this new Territory was more than 40,000, and its people were already
beginning to think of statehood.
[Illustration: Marietta, Ohio, in 1790.]
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST
BY EMERSON HOUGH
I. THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS
It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western
life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man
who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need
ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. These days,
vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart upon the earth
again. These early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how
unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part!
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the
West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus
of wild adventure--of these things, certainly, there has been no lack.
There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action
of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more
incredibly keen in spirit.
WHAT WAS THAT WEST?
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to
answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each
epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living
causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant
sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest
may attach to a quest which goes further than a mere summons on the
spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West?
What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and
why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the
West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run
wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
[Illustration: One of the old-time long-haired men of the West.]
We are all, here,--Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World
or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,--but the result
of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which
bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken
over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was
allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which
both belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least
possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far
different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax,
of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of
trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be
observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work,
and back of all these causes were the original law and the original
mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the
upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was
the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who
established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they
could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse,
of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the
pathways of the waters.
THE RECORD OF THE AVERAGE LINE OF WEST-BOUND TRAVEL.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line, "Westward the course
of empire takes its way." The public has always edited it to read that
it is the "star of empire" which "takes its way" to the West. If one
will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he
will not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census
map, which holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest
drama ever written! Excellent census map, which marks the center of
population of America with a literal star, and which, at the curtain
of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the
progress of the drama, westward, westward!
WHY THIS AVERAGE LINE TOOK THE COURSE IT DID.
The first step of this star of empire (that concluded in 1800) barely
removed it from its initial point upon the Chesapeake. The direction
was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at
Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from
the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out
into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of
itself a priceless possession. It was a military reason which first
set moving the Pennsylvania hotbed of immigrants. The restless tide
of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old
as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their
homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest
lines. The first thrust of the outbound population was not along the
parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to have been the rule,
but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians,
where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The
early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat ran
well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even
now they exemplified that great law of population which designates
the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of
population. The valleys of Virginia and Maryland caught the wealthiest
and most aristocratic of the shifting population of that day. Daniel
Boone heard the calling of the voices early, but not until long after
men had begun to pick out the best of the farming-lands of North and
South Carolina and lower Virginia. The first trails of the Appalachians
were the waterways, paths which we do not follow or parallel, but
intersect in our course when we go by rail from the Mississippi valley
to that first abiding-place of the star.
[Illustration: Early Pioneers on the Blue Ridge.]
The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this
child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so
large and matured so swiftly. The path of empire had its head on the
Chesapeake. But let us at least be fair. New England and New York did
not first settle the West, not because the Chesapeake man was some
superhuman being, but because the rivers of New England and New York
did not run in the right direction. We may find fate, destiny, and
geography very closely intermingled in the history of this country, or
of any other. Any nation first avails itself of its geography, then at
last casts its geography aside; after that, politics.
PORTRAIT OF THE FIRST WEST-BOUND AMERICAN.
Let us picture for ourselves this first restless American, this
West-bound man. We must remember that there had been two or three full
American generations to produce him, this man who first dared turn
away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the
sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests which then
encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two
generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free
air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall. Little
fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the
heritage of that courage which comes of good heart and lungs. He was
a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete
who never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look
high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this
same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit
to be called America. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of
Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has
remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the
generation preceding our own.
THE EQUIPMENT OF THE EARLY AMERICAN--HIS SKILL WITH IT.
[Illustration: A Missouri hunter.]
This was our American, discontented to dwell longer by the sea. He had
two tools, the ax and the rifle. With the one he built, with the other
he fought and lived. Early America saw the invention of the small-bore
rifle because there was need for that invention. It required no such
long range in those forest days, and it gave the greatest possible
amount of results for its expenditure. Its charge was tiny, its
provender compact and easily carried by the man who must economize in
every ounce of transported goods; and yet its powers were wonderful.
Our early American could plant that little round pellet in just such
a spot as he liked of game-animal or of red-skinned enemy, and the
deadly effect of no projectile known to man has ever surpassed this
one, if each be weighed by the test of economic expenditure. This long,
small-bored tube was one of the early agents of American civilization.
The conditions of the daily life of the time demanded great skill in
the use of this typical arm, and the accuracy of the early riflemen
of the West has probably never been surpassed in popular average by
any people of the world. Driving a nail and snuffing a candle with a
rifle-bullet were common forms of the amusement which was derived from
the practice of arms.
[Illustration: In the Alleghany Mountains: The retreat to the
blockhouse.]
THIS AMERICAN, SO EQUIPPED, MOVES WESTWARD.
When the American settler had got as far West as the Plains he needed
arms of greater range, and then he made them; but the first two
generations of the West-bound had the buckskin bandoleer, with its
little bullets, its little molds for making them, its little worm which
served to clean the interior of the barrel with a wisp of flax, its
tiny flask of precious powder, its extra flint or so. The American
rifle and the American ax--what a history might be written of these
alone! They were the sole warrant for the departure of the outbound man
from all those associations which had held him to his home. He took
some sweet girl from her own family, some mother or grandmother of you
or me, and he took his good ax and rifle, and he put his little store
on raft or pack-horse, and so he started out; and God prospered him.
In his time he was a stanch, industrious man, a good hunter, a sturdy
chopper, a faithful lover of his friends, and a stern hater of his foes.
HOW HE FINDS THE WATERWAYS EASY AS PATHS WESTWARD.
In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers which
ran not to the southeast and into the sea, but outward, across the
mountains toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies
led one finally to rivers which ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even
farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called
the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away
from salt-water traditions, asked no longer "What cheer?" from the
ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs,
the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past. There came
the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for
adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for
floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into
the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held
intrinsic value at that time--powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells,
women who dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that
turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another
world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted who traveled, the
weak who stayed at home.
[Illustration: Westward movement of the center of population from 1790
to 1900, indicated by stars.]
OTHER DISTANCES, OTHER CUSTOMS, OTHER VALUES.
This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these
for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb
was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes
were of buffalo-hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear
and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere
savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after
they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and
establishing a court of law! Read this forgotten history, one chapter,
and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you
like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your
choice.
[Illustration: Map of the census of 1790.]
In those early days there were individual opportunities so numerous
in the West that no opportunity had value. A tract of six hundred and
forty acres, which is now within the limits of the city of Nashville,
sold for three axes and two cow-bells. Be sure it was not politics that
made corn worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and sold a
mile of ground for the tinkle of a bell. The conditions were born of a
scanty and insufficient transportation.
[Illustration: Map of the census of 1820.]
THE WEST CONTINUED TO GROW DOWN STREAM, NOT UP.
There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built
up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West--a population
which continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The
settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch
with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the
yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream
so intimately connected with American history and American progress.
It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the
Alleghanies.
HAVING THE MISSISSIPPI FOR ITS ROAD, THE WEST IS CONTENT.
Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough
all the dangers which threatened it, continued to work out the problems
of the West. Some breathless, trembling years passed by--years full
of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the
end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of
America's great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory
which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn,
majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to
be included wholly within the borders of the West. The year which saw
the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history
of America and of the world. The date of the Louisiana Purchase is
significant not more by reason of a vast domain added to the West than
because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building
it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the
solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million
uninhabited miles--a million miles of country which will one day
support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained
the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through
it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter
neither France nor any other power might ever do so.
[Illustration: The down-river men.]
HOW MUCH RICHER WAS THIS WEST THAN DREAMED.
How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last
utterance. The sum of $15,000,000 seemed "enormous." To-day, less than
a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made
from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be $266,000,000.
One Western city, located in that despised territory, during one
recent year showed sales of grain alone amounting to $123,300,000; of
live stock alone, $268,000,000; of wholesale trade, $786,205,000; of
manufactures,--where manufactures were once held impossible,--the total
of $741,097,000. It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington. It
is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all
the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into
figures which surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has
grown up within less than a hundred years.
THE WESTERNER RAISES MORE THAN HE CAN EAT.
But now we must conceive of our Western man as not now in dress so
near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was
falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man
had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more
than he himself could use--first step in the great future of the West
as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be
taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot
for aught else than merely similar commodities.
Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to
assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning
history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better
in some cases did we learn the times of happenings of certain great and
significant things. It was an important time when this first Western
farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude
produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as
the broad-horned flatboat which supplanted his canoe.
HOW HE MIGHT SELL THIS SURPLUS FAR FROM HOME.
The flatboat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away
from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself,
cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing,
perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and
only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back
uphill, would not carry him back to that East which was once his
home. So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a
civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the
sea and upon the Old World.
WHAT WAS THE WEST AT THIS TIME OF DOWN-STREAM?
[Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1870.]
It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography
of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a
surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from
the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see page 30) will
prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color tell much
in brief regarding the West of 1800. For forty years before this time
the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred
years there had been a settlement upon the Great Lakes. For nearly a
hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and
there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly
unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all
the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly
west of the original hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and
indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from
the East, though the New-Englander Moses Cleveland founded the town
of Cleveland as early as 1796. Lower down in the great valley of the
Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of
settlers who had formed what was known as the "Mississippi Territory."
Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the
old water-trail from the Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a
dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of
the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied. These valley settlements
far outnumbered all the population of the State of Ohio, which had
lain directly in the path of the star, but the streams of which lay
awkwardly on the scheme of travel. The West was beginning to be the
West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La
Salle the Bold, by Tonti the Faithful,--seed despised by an ancient and
corrupt monarchy,--had now begun to grow.
[Illustration: UNITED STATES CENSUS 1890.]
ANOTHER WEST BEYOND.
Yet, beyond the farthest families of the West of that day, there was
still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to
include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for
the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements
of the past, it must be centuries before the West--whatever that term
might mean--could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted
was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing. There were vague
stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant,
mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey
of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who
believed all his story of a march from Colorado to Chihuahua, and
thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful
settlers of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by
that ancient saga, that heroically done, misspelled story of Lewis and
Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West.
II. AGAINST THE WATERS
THE UP-STREAM MAN.
In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof
of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost
exactly upon the site of the city of Washington.
That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving
more and more of that adventurous population which the statesmen of the
Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return.
The fur-traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies.
The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial
and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of
the tide of West-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream
transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all
the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old
Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war
parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to
Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.
STEAM HELPS THE UP-STREAM JOURNEYINGS.
But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In
1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on
the Ohio River.
KASKASKIA: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE.
Thanks to the man who could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one
hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was
worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard,
at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley.
Kaskaskia the ancient was queen of the down-stream trade in her day.
THE COMMERCE OF THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI WEST.
Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three
dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver-skin was worth three dollars in
New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri. There
you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is
the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to
transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back
into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There
sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that
mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of
trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth.
Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and
was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen
anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the
place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses of the Daniel Boones.
The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures,
took prominent place upon the nation's canvas.
This Western commerce, the wagon-freighting, steamboating, and packing
of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels,
each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose
birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures
to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade
to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or
commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.
CAUSES FOR GROWTH OF SELF-RELIANT WESTERN CHARACTER.
In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note
what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The
conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance upon the soil, made
heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be
strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce,
it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the
persons of those transported. Each man must "take care of himself,"
as the peculiar and significant phrase went. "Good-by; take care of
yourself," was the last word for the man departing to the West. The
strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and
his fellow-laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles
tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by
reverses or hardships--these were the items of the capital universal
and indispensable of the West. We may trace here the development of a
type as surely as we can by reading the storied rocks of geology. This
time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous
personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and
indelibly upon the character of the American, and made him what he is
to-day among the nations of the globe.
THE ADVENTUROUS WEST.
There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long's
expedition up the Platte brought back the "important fact" that the
"whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the
Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the
Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and
therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people." There are many
thousands of farmers to-day who cannot quite agree with Major Long's
dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly.
No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter
ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that
day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture.
"As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer
who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems
with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an
unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without
weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the
touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky,
there was still a West.
THE WEST OF THE FUR TRADE.
There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade. For
generations the wild peddlers of the woods had traced the waterways of
the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from
the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all
from that savagery which offered so great a fascination, often too
strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.
TRANSPORTATION OF THE FUR TRADE.
Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat
triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats,
and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than
transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was
only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. One
of the native ships of the wilderness was the great _canot du Nord_
of the early voyageurs, a craft made of birch bark, thirty feet long,
of four feet beam and a depth of thirty inches, which would carry a
crew of ten men and a cargo of sixty-five packages of goods or furs,
each package weighing ninety pounds. This vessel reached the limits of
carrying capacity and of portability. Its crew could unload and repack
it, after a portage of a hundred yards, in less than twenty minutes.
Thousands of miles were covered annually by one of these vessels. The
crew which paddled it from Montreal to Winnipeg was then but half-way
on the journey to the Great Slave and Great Bear country, which had
been known from the beginning in the fur trade.
THE ULTIMATE TRAILS.
Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of
the natives, the smaller birch barks, took up the trail, and passed
even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the
ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the
dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the
forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.
THE FUR TRADE SHOWED US ALSO THE SOUTHWEST.
The fur trade taught us something of our own geography upon the North
and Northwest, but it did more. It was a fur-trader who first developed
the possibilities of the Spanish Southwest for the second expansion
of our Western commerce. In 1823 General William H. Ashley, of the
American Fur Company, made an expedition up the Platte, and is credited
with first reaching from the East the South Pass of the Rockies, which
was soon to become recognized as the natural gateway of the great iron
trail across the continent. In the following year Ashley penetrated to
the Great Salt Lake, and later reached Santa Fé, situated in territory
then wholly belonging to Mexico.
DETAILS REGARDING SOUTHWESTERN WAGON-TRAINS.
[Illustration: The up-river men--cordelling boats on the Yellowstone.]
The story of the Santa Fé trail has been told by many writers, and its
chief interest here is simply as showing the eagerness with which the
men of that day seized upon every means of transport in their power,
and the skill and ingenuity with which they brought each to perfection.
The wagon-freighting of the Southwest was highly systematized, and
was indeed carried on with an almost military regularity. The route
was by way of the Council Grove, then the northern limit of the
Comanches' range, and it was at this point that the organization of
the wagon-train was commonly completed. A train-master or captain was
chosen, and the whole party put under his command, each man having his
position, and each being expected to take his turn on the night-watch
which was necessary in that land of bold and hostile savages. During
the day the train moved in two columns, some thirty feet or so apart,
each team following close upon the one immediately preceding it in
the line. In case of any alarm of Indians, the head and rear teams of
the two parallel columns turned in toward each other, and thus there
was formed upon the moment a long parallelogram of wagons, open in
the middle, and inclosing the loose riding-animals, and closed at the
front and rear. The wagons were loaded, to a great extent, with cotton
stuffs in bales, and these made a fair fortification. The Indians had
difficulty in breaking the barricade of one of these hardy caravans,
defended as it was by numbers of the best riflemen the world ever knew.
Small parties were frequently destroyed, but in the later days a train
was commonly made up of at least one hundred wagons, with perhaps two
hundred men in the party, and with eight hundred mules or oxen. The
goods in convoy in such a train might be worth half a million dollars.
The time in transit was about ten weeks, the out trip being made in the
spring and the return in the fall.
The Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years,
being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna.
These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with
the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our
Western territory, which gave us the region on the South as well as the
North, from ocean to ocean.
THE GOLD-BEARING WEST.
This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless
population which had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that
region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of
gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America,
and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely
as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions
between the Great Plains and the Coast. The turbulent population of
the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of
the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that
he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as
himself, and animated by a feverish energy which rendered him even
more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and
change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain which
drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time
what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho,
Montana--how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names
followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!
PACK-TRAINS MAKE NEW CITIES.
New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as
there had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé.
Pueblo, Cañon City, Denver, all were outfitting and freighting-points
in turn, while from the other side of the range there were as many
towns,--Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,--which sent out the long
trains of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as
useful as the stage line in developing the Black Hills region, and many
another still less accessible.
EARLY WHEELED TRANSPORTATION--THE STAGE-COACH.
[Illustration: A prairie schooner.]
The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and
panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest
of the mountain-chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent,
and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human
ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in
transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame. The pony-express
was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage lines
which first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful.
For instance, there was an overland stage line that ran from Atchison,
on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of
Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena,
nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days. Down the old waterways
from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a
distance of about three thousand miles. The stage line began to shorten
distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited
by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like,
in addition to the regular population of the land, the men who called
the West their home.
We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet
in its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States Bank
examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions,
in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand
miles by stage-coach alone.
DIFFICULTIES OF WAGON-TRAINS.
One who has never seen the plains, rivers, rocks, cañons, and mountains
of the portion of the country traversed by these caravans can form but
a faint idea from any description given of them of the innumerable and
formidable difficulties with which every mile of this weary march was
encumbered. History has assigned a foremost place among its glorified
deeds to the passage of the Alps by Napoleon, and to the long and
discouraging march of the French army under the same great conqueror
to Russia. If it be not invidious to compare small things with great,
we may assuredly claim for these early pioneers greater conquests over
nature than were made by either of the great military expeditions of
Napoleon. A successful completion of the journey was simply an escape
from death.
LIVING EXPENSES GOVERNED BY TRANSPORTATION.
"In 1865," comments Mr. Langford, "we note that the principal
restaurant, 'in consequence of the recent fall in flour,' reduced day
board to twenty dollars per week for gold. The food of this restaurant
was very plain, and dried-apple pies were considered a luxury. At that
time I was collector of internal revenue, and received my salary in
greenbacks. I paid thirty-six dollars per week for day board at the
Gibson House, at Helena. During the period of the greatest scarcity
of flour, the more common boarding-houses posted the following signs:
'Board with bread at meals, $32; board without bread, $22; board with
bread _at dinner_, $25."
III. ACROSS THE WATERS.
The early American life was primitive, but it was never the life of a
peasantry. Once there was a time in the West when every man was as good
as his neighbor, as well situated, as much contented. It would take
hardihood to predict such conditions in the future for the West or for
America.
BEGINNING OF WESTERN RAILWAY TRAVEL--THE AMERICAN ÉMIGRÉ.
At the half-way point of this century the early wheels of the West were
crawling and creaking over trails where now rich cities stand.
FIRST WESTERN RAILWAY.
The wagon-wheels had overrun the West before the wheels of steam began
the second conquest of the West. Wagons were first used on the Santa Fé
trail in 1824, but it was not until three years later that there was
begun the first of the Western iron trails.
There were grandfathers in Virginia now, grandfathers in New England.
The subdivided farms were not so large. There were more shops in the
villages. There was demand for expansion of the commerce of that day.
The little products must find their market, and that market might still
be American. The raw stuff might still be American, the producer of it
might still be American. So these busy, thrifty, ambitious men came
up and stood back of the vanguard that held the flexible frontier.
Silently men stole out yet farther into what West there was left; but
they always looked back over the shoulder at this new thing that had
come upon the land.
Thinking men knew, half a century ago, that there must be an iron way
across the United States, though they knew this only in general terms,
and were only guessing at the changes which such a road must bring to
the country at large.
This rapid development of the interior region of America which is a
matter of common knowledge to all of us to-day was not foreseen by the
wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago.
THE RAILWAYS CHANGE AND BUILD THE COMMERCIAL WEST.
With the era of steam came a complete reversal of all earlier methods.
For nearly a century following the Revolutionary War the new lands of
America had waited upon the transportation. Now the transportation
facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance of progress
itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land
upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization
which enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from
Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father
of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came
that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture
derided as folly and recklessness. The proof you may find by seeing the
cities that have grown, the fields which bear them tribute. North and
South and East and West the prairie roads run. The long trail of the
cattle-drive is gone, and the cattle no longer walk a thousand miles to
pasture or to market. Once, twice, thrice, the continent was spanned,
and the path across the continent laid well and laid forever.
The largest, the most compact, and the most closely knit Caucasian
population in the world to-day, is that of America, and to-day America
is potentially the most powerful of all the world-powers. Why? Because
her unit of population is superior. The reason for that you may find
yourself if you care to look into the great movements of the West-bound
population of America.
THE PONY EXPRESS
BY W. F. BAILEY
In the fall of 1854, United States Senator W. M. Gwin of California
made the trip from San Francisco east en route to Washington, D. C., on
horseback, by the way of Salt Lake City and South Pass, then known as
the Central Route. For a part of the way he had for company Mr. B. F.
Ficklin, the general superintendent of the freighting firm of Russell,
Majors & Waddell.
Out of this traveling companionship grew the pony express. Mr.
Ficklin's enthusiasm for closer communication with the East was
contagious, and Senator Gwin became an untiring advocate of an express
service via this route and on the lines suggested by Mr. Ficklin.
The methods of this firm can best be illustrated by the pledge they
required every employee to sign, namely: "While in the employ of
Russell, Majors & Waddell, I agree not to use profane language, not to
get drunk, not to gamble, not to treat animals cruelly, and not to do
anything incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman," etc. After the
war broke out, a pledge of allegiance to the United States was also
required. The company adhered, so far as possible, to the rule of not
traveling on Sunday and of avoiding all unnecessary work on that day.
A stanch adherence to these rules, and a strict observance of their
contracts, in a few years brought them the control of the freighting
business of the plains, as well as a widespread reputation for
conducting it on a reliable and humane basis.
Committed to the enterprise, the firm proceeded to organize the Central
Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company, obtaining a
charter under the State laws of Kansas.
[Illustration: Why one rider was late.]
The company had an established route with the necessary stations
between St. Joseph and Salt Lake City. Chorpenning's line west of
Salt Lake City had few or no stations, and these had to be built;
also some changes in the route were considered advisable. The service
comprised sixty agile young men as riders, one hundred additional
station-keepers, and four hundred and twenty strong, wiry horses. So
well did those in charge understand their business that only sixty
days were required to make all necessary arrangements for the start.
April 3, 1860, was the date agreed upon, and on that day the first
pony express left St. Joseph and San Francisco. In March, 1860, the
following advertisement had appeared in the _Missouri Republican_ of
St. Louis and in other papers:
To San Francisco in 8 days by the C. O. C. & P. P. Ex. Co. The first
courier of the Pony Express will leave the Missouri River on Tuesday,
April 3rd, at---- P. M., and will run regularly weekly
hereafter, carrying a letter mail only. The point on the Mo. River
will be in telegraphic connection with the east and will be announced
in due time.
Telegraphic messages from all parts of the United States and Canada
in connection with the point of departure will be received up to
5:00 P. M. of the day of leaving and transmitted over the
Placerville & St. Jo to San Francisco and intermediate points by
the connecting express in 8 days. The letter mail will be delivered
in San Francisco in 10 days from the departure of the express.
The express passes through Forts Kearney, Laramie, Bridger, Great
Salt Lake City, Camp Floyd, Carson City, The Washoe Silver Mines,
Placerville and Sacramento, and letters for Oregon, Washington
Territory, British Columbia, the Pacific Mexican ports, Russian
possessions, Sandwich Islands, China, Japan and India will be mailed
in San Francisco.
Both Sacramento and San Francisco were afire with enthusiasm, and
elaborate plans were set on foot to welcome the first express. At the
former point the whole city turned out with bells, guns, bands, etc.,
to greet it. Making only a brief stop to deliver the mail for that
point, the express was hurried abroad the swift steamer _Antelope_,
and sent forward to San Francisco. Here its prospective arrival had
been announced by the papers, and also from the stages of the theaters,
so that an immense as well as enthusiastic crowd awaited its arrival
at midnight. The California Band paraded; the fire-bells were rung,
bringing out the fire companies, who, finding no fire, remained to join
in the jollity and to swell the procession which escorted the express
from the dock to the office of the Alta Telegraph, its Western terminus.
All the riders were young men selected for their nerve, light weight,
and general fitness. No effort was made to uniform them, and they
dressed as their individual fancy dictated, the usual costume being
a buckskin hunting-shirt, cloth trousers tucked into a pair of high
boots, and a jockey-cap or slouch-hat. All rode armed. At first a
Spencer rifle was carried strapped across the back, in addition to a
pair of army (Colt's) revolvers in their holsters. The rifle, however,
was found useless, and was abandoned. The equipment of the horses was
a light riding-saddle and bridle, with the saddle-bags, or _mochila_,
of heavy leather. These had holes cut in them so that they would fit
over the horn and tree of the saddle. The mochilas had four pockets,
called _cantinas_, one in each corner, so as to have one in front and
one behind each leg of the rider; in these the mail was placed. Three
of these pockets were locked and opened en route at military posts
and at Salt Lake City, and under no circumstances at any other place.
The fourth was for way-stations, for which each station-keeper had a
key, and also contained a way-bill, or time-card, on which a record
of arrival and departure was kept. The same mochila was transferred
from pony to pony and from rider to rider until it was carried from
one terminus to the other. The letters, before being placed in the
pockets, were wrapped in oiled silk to preserve them from moisture.
The maximum weight of any one mail was twenty pounds; but this was
rarely reached. The charges were originally $5 for each letter of
one half-ounce or less; but afterward this was reduced to $2.50 for
each letter not exceeding one half-ounce, this being in addition to
the regular United States postage. Specially made light-weight paper
was generally used to reduce the expense. Special editions of the
Eastern newspapers were printed on tissue-paper to enable them to
reach subscribers on the Pacific coast. This, however, was more as an
advertisement, there being little demand for them at their necessarily
large price.
[Illustration: Wiping out a station.]
At first, stations averaged 25 miles apart, and each rider covered
three stations, or 75 miles, daily. Later, stations were established
at intermediate points, reducing the distance between them, in some
cases, to 10 miles, the distance between stations being regulated by
the character of the country. This change was made in the interest of
quicker time, it having been demonstrated that horses could not be kept
at the top of their speed for so great a distance as 25 miles. At the
stations, relays of horses were kept, and the station-keeper's duties
included having a pony ready bridled and saddled half an hour before
the express was due. Upon approaching a station, the rider would loosen
the mochila from his saddle, so that he could leap from his pony as
soon as he reached the station, throw the mochila over the saddle of
the fresh horse, jump on, and ride off. Two minutes was the maximum
time allowed at stations, whether it was to change riders or horses.
At relay-stations where riders were changed the incoming man would
unbuckle his mochila before arriving, and hand it to his successor,
who would start off on a lope as soon as his hand grasped it. Time
was seldom lost at stations. Station-keepers and relay-riders were
always on the lookout. In the daytime the pony could be seen for a
considerable distance, and at night a few well-known yells would bring
everything into readiness in a very short time. As a rule, the riders
would do 75 miles over their route west-bound one day, returning over
the same distance with the first east-bound express.
Frequently, through the exigencies of the service, they would have to
double their route the same day, or ride the one next to them, and even
farther. For instance, "Buffalo Bill" (W. F. Cody) for a while had
the route from Red Buttes, Wyoming, to Three Crossings, Nebraska, a
distance of 116 miles. On one occasion, on reaching Three Crossings,
he found that the rider for the next division had been killed the
night before, and he was called upon to cover his route, 76 miles,
until another rider could be employed. This involved a continuous ride
of 384 miles without break, except for meals and to change horses.
Again, "Pony Bob," another noted rider, covered the distance from
Friday's Station to Smith's Creek, 185 miles, and back, including the
trip over the Sierra Nevada, twice, at a time when the country was
infested by hostile Indians. It eventually required, when the service
got into perfect working order, 190 stations, 200 station-keepers and
the same number of assistant station-keepers, 80 riders, and from 400
to 500 horses to cover the 1950 miles from St. Joseph to Sacramento.
The riders were paid from $100 to $125 per month for their services.
Located about every 200 miles were division agents to provide for
emergencies, such as Indian raids, the stampeding of stock, etc., as
well as to exercise general supervision over the service. One, and
probably the most notorious, of these was Jack Slade, of unenviable
reputation. For a long time he was located as division agent at the
crossing of the Platte near Fort Kearney.
The riders were looked up to, and regarded as being "at the top of
the heap." No matter what time of the day or of the night they were
called upon, whether winter or summer, over mountains or across plains,
raining or snowing, with rivers to swim or pleasant prairies to cross,
through forests or over the burning desert, they must be ready to
respond, and, though in the face of hostiles, ride their beat and make
their time. To be late was their only fear, and to get in ahead of
schedule their pride. There was no killing time for them, under any
circumstances. The schedule was keyed up to what was considered the
very best time that could be done, and a few minutes gained on it might
be required to make up for a fall somewhere else. First-class horses
were furnished, and there were no orders against bringing them in in a
sweat. "Make your schedule," was the standing rule. While armed with
the most effective weapon then known, the Colt revolver, they were not
expected to fight, but to run away. Their weapons were to be used only
in emergencies.
[Illustration: An incident between stations.]
Considering the dangers encountered, the percentage of fatalities was
extraordinarily small. Far more station employees than riders were
killed by the Indians, and even of the latter more were killed off duty
than on. This can be explained by the fact that the horses furnished
the riders, selected as they were for speed and endurance, were far
superior to the mounts of the Indians.
Many of the most noted of the frontiersmen of the sixties and seventies
were schooled in the pony-express service. The life was a hard one.
Setting aside the constant danger, the work was severe, both on riders
and station employees. The latter were constantly on watch, herding
their horses. Their diet frequently was reduced to wolf-mutton, their
beverage to brackish water, a little tea or coffee being a great
luxury, while the lonesome souls were nearly always out of tobacco.
The great feat of the pony-express service was the delivery of
President Lincoln's inaugural address in 1861. Great interest was felt
in this all over the land, foreshadowing as it did the policy of the
administration in the matter of the Rebellion. In order to establish
a record, as well as for an advertisement, the company determined to
break all previous records, and to this end horses were led out from
the different stations so as to reduce the distance each would have
to run, and get the highest possible speed out of every animal. Each
horse averaged only ten miles, and that at its very best speed. Every
precaution was taken to prevent delay, and the result stands without
a parallel in history; seven days and seventeen hours--one hundred
and eighty-five hours--for 1950 miles, an average of 10.7 miles per
hour. From St. Joseph to Denver, 665 miles were made in two days and
twenty-one hours, the last 10 miles being accomplished in thirty-one
minutes.
[Illustration: Facsimile of letter sent by pony-express.]
EARLY WESTERN STEAMBOATING
BY ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT.
In the study of waterways of westward expansion, the Ohio River--the
"Gateway of the West"--occupies such a commanding position that it must
be considered most important and most typical. Such is its situation
in our geography and history that it is entitled to a prominent place
among Historic Highways of America which greatly influenced the early
westward extension of the borders and the people of the United States.
* * * * *
The Ohio River was the highway upon which all the great early
continental routes focused. Washington's Road, Braddock's Road, Forbes'
Road, and Boone's Road--like the Indian and buffalo trails they
followed--had their goal on the glories of this strategic waterway. The
westward movement was by river valleys.
* * * * *
The dawning of the era of steam navigation cannot be better introduced
than by quoting a paragraph from _The Navigator_ of 1811.
"There is now on foot a new mode of navigating our western waters,
particularly the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This is with boats
propelled by the power of steam. This plan has been carried into
successful operation on the Hudson River at New York and on the
Delaware between New Castle and Burlington. It has been stated that
the one on the Hudson goes at the rate of four miles an hour against
wind and tide on her route between New York and Albany, and frequently
with 500 passengers on board. From these successful experiments there
can be little doubt of the plan succeeding on our western waters, and
proving of immense advantage to the commerce of our country."
These words came true in a miraculously short space of time. In 1811
the first steamboat was constructed at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on
the Monongahela. Several others were built soon after, but it was
probably fifteen years before steamboats came into such general use as
to cause any diminution in the flat and keel-boat navigation.
By 1832 it was calculated that the whole number of persons deriving
subsistence on the Ohio including the crews of steam-and flatboats,
mechanics and laborers employed in building and repairing boats,
woodcutters and persons employed in furnishing, supplying, loading and
unloading these boats, was ninety thousand. At this time, 1832, the
boats numbered four hundred and fifty and their burden ninety thousand
tons. In 1843 the whole number of steamboats constructed at Cincinnati
alone was forty-five; the aggregate amount of their tonnage was twelve
thousand and thirty tons and their cost $705,000. This gives an average
of about two hundred and sixty-seven tons for each boat and about
$16,000 for the cost of each.
In 1844 the number of steamboats employed in navigating the Mississippi
and its tributaries was two hundred and fifty. The average burden of
these boats was 200 tons each and their aggregate value, at $80 per
ton, was $7,200,000. Many of these were fine vessels, affording most
comfortable accommodations for passengers, and compared favorably in
all particulars with the best packets in any part of the world. The
number of persons employed in navigating the steamboats at this time
varied from twenty-five to fifty for each boat, a total of 15,750
persons employed.
[Illustration: Early steamboating on a western river.]
If, in 1834, the number of steamboats on western waters was two
hundred and thirty, the expense of running them could be estimated at
$4,645,000 annually. In 1844 the calculation was $9,036,000.... It
appears that the steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi valley at this
time exceeded, by forty thousand tons, the entire steamboat tonnage
of Great Britain in 1834. In other words, the steamboat tonnage of
Great Britain was only two-thirds that of the Mississippi Valley. The
magnitude of this fact will be best appreciated by considering that the
_entire_ tonnage of the United States was but two-thirds that of Great
Britain, showing that this proportion is exactly reversed in western
steamboat trade.
* * * * *
The history of the Ohio Basin river-men, from those who paddled a canoe
and pushed a keel-boat to those who labor to-day on our steamboats, has
never been written. The lights and shades of this life have never been
pictured by any novelist and perhaps they never can be.
The first generation of river men, excluding, of course, the Indians,
would cover the years from 1750 to 1780 and would include those whose
principal acquaintance with the Ohio and its tributaries was made
through the canoe and pirogue. The second generation would stretch from
1780 or 1790 to 1810, and would include those who lived in the heydey
of the keel-and flatboat. The third generation would carry us forward
from 1810 to about 1850 and in this we would count the thousands who
knew these valleys before the railway had robbed the steamboat of so
much of its business and pride.
* * * * *
River life underwent a great change with the gradual supremacy of
the steamboat in the carrying trade of the Ohio and its tributaries.
The sounding whistle blew away from the valleys much that was
picturesque--those strenuous days when a well-developed muscle was the
best capital with which to begin business. Of course the flatboat did
not pass from the waters, but as a type of old-time river-men their
lusty crews have disappeared.
In connection with the first generation of river-men social equality
was a general rule. There were no distinctions; every man was his own
master and his own servant. In the days of keel-boats and flatboats
conditions changed and there was a "captain" of his boat, and the
second generation of river-men were accustomed to obey orders of
superiors. Society was divided into two classes, the serving and
the served. With the supremacy of the steamboat this division is
reduplicated over and again; here are four general classes, the
proprietors, navigators, operators and deck-hands.
The upper ranks of the steam-packet business have furnished the West
with some of its strongest types of aggressive manhood. Keen-eyed,
physically strong, acquainted with men and equal to any emergency,
the typical captain of the first half-century of steamboating in the
West, was a man any one was glad to number among his friends and
acquaintances.
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK AND THE CONQUEST OF THE NORTHWEST
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In 1776, when independence was declared, the United States included
only the thirteen original States on the seaboard. With the exception
of a few hunters there were no white men west of the Alleghany
Mountains, and there was not even an American hunter in the great
country out of which we have since made the States of Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All this region north of the
Ohio River then formed a part of the Province of Quebec. It was a
wilderness of forests and prairies, teeming with game, and inhabited by
many warlike tribes of Indians.
Here and there through it were dotted quaint little towns of French
Creoles, the most important being Detroit, Vincennes on the Wabash,
and Kaskaskia and Kahokia on the Illinois. These French villages were
ruled by British officers commanding small bodies of regular soldiers
or Tory rangers and Creole partizans. The towns were completely in the
power of the British government; none of the American States had actual
possession of a foot of property in the Northwestern Territory.
The Northwest was acquired in the midst of the Revolution only by armed
conquest, and if it had not been so acquired, it would have remained a
part of the British Dominion of Canada.
[Illustration: George Rogers Clark.]
The man to whom this conquest was due was a famous backwoods leader,
a mighty hunter, a noted Indian-fighter, George Rogers Clark. He was
a very strong man, with light hair and blue eyes. He was of good
Virginian family. Early in his youth, he embarked on the adventurous
career of a backwoods surveyor, exactly as Washington and so many
other young Virginians of spirit did at that period. He traveled out
to Kentucky soon after it was founded by Boone, and lived there for
a year, either at the stations or camping by himself in the woods,
surveying, hunting, and making war against the Indians like any other
settler; but all the time his mind was bent on vaster schemes than
were dreamed of by the men around him. He had his spies out in the
Northwestern Territory, and became convinced that with a small force
of resolute backwoodsmen he could conquer it for the United States.
When he went back to Virginia, Governor Patrick Henry entered heartily
into Clark's schemes and gave him authority to fit out a force for his
purpose.
In 1778, after encountering endless difficulties and delays, he finally
raised a hundred and fifty backwoods riflemen. In May they started down
the Ohio in flatboats to undertake the allotted task. They drifted and
rowed down-stream to the Falls of the Ohio, where Clark founded a
log-hamlet, which has since become the great city of Louisville.
Here he halted for some days and was joined by fifty or sixty
volunteers; but a number of the men deserted, and when, after an
eclipse of the sun, Clark again pushed off to go down with the current,
his force was but about one hundred and sixty riflemen. All, however,
were men on whom he could depend--men well used to frontier warfare.
They were tall, stalwart backwoodsmen, clad in the hunting-shirt and
leggings that formed the national dress of their kind, and armed with
the distinctive weapon of the backwoods, the long-barreled, small-bore
rifle.
Before reaching the Mississippi the little flotilla landed, and Clark
led his men northward against the Illinois towns. In one of them,
Kaskaskia, dwelt the British commander of the entire district up to
Detroit. The small garrison and the Creole militia taken together
outnumbered Clark's force, and they were in close alliance with the
Indians roundabout. Clark was anxious to take the town by surprise and
avoid bloodshed, as he believed he could win over the Creoles to the
American side. Marching cautiously by night and generally hiding by
day, he came to the outskirts of the little village on the evening of
July 4th, and lay in the woods near by until after nightfall.
Fortune favored him. That evening the officers of the garrison had
given a great ball to the mirth-loving Creoles, and almost the entire
population of the village had gathered in the fort, where the dance
was held. While the revelry was at its height, Clark and his tall
backwoodsmen, treading silently through the darkness, came into the
town, surprised the sentries, and surrounded the fort without causing
any alarm.
All the British and French capable of bearing arms were gathered in the
fort to take part in or look on at the merry-making. When his men were
posted Clark walked boldly forward through the open door, and, leaning
against the wall, looked at the dancers as they whirled around in the
light of the flaring torches. For some moments no one noticed him.
Then an Indian who had been lying with his chin on his hand, looking
carefully over the gaunt figure of the stranger, sprang to his feet,
and uttered the wild war-whoop. Immediately the dancing ceased and the
men ran to and fro in confusion; but Clark, stepping forward, bade them
be at their ease, but to remember that henceforth they danced under the
flag of the United States, and not under that of Great Britain.
The surprise was complete, and no resistance was attempted. For
twenty-four hours the Creoles were in abject terror. Then Clark
summoned their chief men together and explained that he came as their
ally, and not as their foe, and that if they would join with him
they should be citizens of the American republic, and treated in all
respects on an equality with their comrades. The Creoles, caring little
for the British, and rather fickle of nature, accepted the proposition
with joy, and with the most enthusiastic loyalty toward Clark. Not
only that, but sending messengers to their kinsmen on the Wabash, they
persuaded the people of Vincennes likewise to cast off their allegiance
to the British king, and to hoist the American flag.
So far, Clark had conquered with greater ease than he had dared to
hope. But when the news reached the British governor, Hamilton, at
Detroit, he at once prepared to reconquer the land. He had much greater
forces at his command than Clark had; and in the fall of that year
he came down to Vincennes by stream and portage, in a great fleet of
canoes bearing five hundred fighting men--British regulars, French
partizans, and Indians. The Vincennes Creoles refused to fight against
the British, and the American officer who had been sent thither by
Clark had no alternative but to surrender.
[Illustration: "All the day long the troops waded in icy water."]
If Hamilton had then pushed on and struck Clark in Illinois, having
more than treble Clark's force, he could hardly have failed to win the
victory; but the season was late and the journey so difficult that he
did not believe it could be taken. Accordingly he disbanded the Indians
and sent some of his troops back to Detroit, announcing that when
spring came he would march against Clark in Illinois.
If Clark in turn had awaited the blow he would have surely met defeat;
but he was a greater man than his antagonist, and he did what the other
deemed impossible.
Finding that Hamilton had sent home some of his troops and dispersed
all his Indians, Clark realized that his chance was to strike before
Hamilton's soldiers assembled again in the spring. Accordingly he
gathered together the pick of his men, together with a few Creoles,
one hundred and seventy all told, and set out for Vincennes. At first
the journey was easy enough, for they passed across the snowy Illinois
prairies, broken by great reaches of lofty woods. They killed elk,
buffalo and deer for food, there being no difficulty in getting all
they wanted to eat; and at night they built huge fires by which to
sleep, and feasted "like Indian war-dancers," as Clark said in his
report.
But when, in the middle of February, they reached the drowned lands
of the Wabash, where the ice had just broken up and everything was
flooded, the difficulties seemed almost insuperable, and the march
became painful and laborious to a degree. All day long the troops waded
in the icy water, and at night they could with difficulty find some
little hillock on which to sleep. Only Clark's indomitable courage and
cheerfulness kept the party in heart and enabled them to persevere.
However, persevere they did, and at last, on February 23, they came
in sight of the town of Vincennes. They captured a Creole who was out
shooting ducks, and from him learned that their approach was utterly
unsuspected, and that there were many Indians in town.
Clark was now in some doubt as to how to make his fight. The British
regulars dwelt in a small fort at one end of the town, where they
had two light guns; but Clark feared lest, if he made a sudden night
attack, the townspeople and Indians would from sheer fright turn
against him. He accordingly arranged, just before he himself marched
in, to send in the captured duck-hunter, conveying a warning to the
Indians and the Creoles that he was about to attack the town, but
that his only quarrel was with the British, and that if the other
inhabitants would stay in their own homes they would not be molested.
Sending the duck-hunter ahead, Clark took up his march and entered the
town just after nightfall. The news conveyed by the released hunter
astounded the townspeople, and they talked it over eagerly, and were in
doubt what to do. The Indians, not knowing how great might be the force
that would assail the town, at once took refuge in the neighboring
woods, while the Creoles retired to their own houses. The British knew
nothing of what had happened until the Americans had actually entered
the streets of the little village. Rushing forward, Clark's men soon
penned the regulars within their fort, where they kept them surrounded
all night. The next day a party of Indian warriors, who in the British
interest had been ravaging the settlements of Kentucky, arrived and
entered the town, ignorant that the Americans had captured it. Marching
boldly forward to the fort, they suddenly found it beleaguered, and
before they could flee they were seized by the backwoodsmen. In their
belts they carried the scalps of the slain settlers. The savages were
taken red-handed, and the American frontiersmen were in no mood to show
mercy. All the Indians were tomahawked in sight of the fort.
For some time the British defended themselves well; but at length
their guns were disabled, all of the gunners being picked off by the
backwoods marksmen, and finally the garrison dared not so much as
appear at a port-hole, so deadly was the fire from the long rifles.
Under such circumstances Hamilton was forced to surrender.
No attempt was afterward made to molest the Americans in the land they
had won, and upon the conclusion of peace the Northwest, which had been
conquered by Clark, became part of the United States.
BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD
BY ARTHUR BUTLER HULBERT
Our highways are usually known by two names--the destinations to which
they lead. The famous highway through New York State is known as
the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the State and as the Albany
Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it
passes--Utica, Syracuse, etc.,--it is Genesee Street. This path in the
olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old
Forbes Road across Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name.... Few
roads named from their builders preserved the old-time name.
One roadway--the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and
Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in
America--holds the old-time name with undiminished loyalty and is
true to-day to every gloomy description and wild epithet that was
ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use
by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River,
Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek, on the Kentucky River, in
the month preceding the outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and
Concord. It was known as "Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the
"road to Caintuck" or the "Virginia Road," but its common name was
the "Wilderness Road." It seems right that the brave frontiersman who
opened this road to white men should be remembered by this act.
The road itself is of little consequence--it is what the early founding
of the commonwealth of Kentucky meant to the East and to the West.
When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army
of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over
Boone's little path, through dark Powel's Valley, over the "high-swung
gateway" of Cumberland Gap and down through the laurel wilderness
to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville, must not be
forgotten. No army ever meant more to the West.
* * * * *
It was, throughout the eighteenth century, exceedingly dangerous
to travel Boone's Road; and those who journeyed either way joined
together and traveled in "companies." Indeed, there was risk enough
for the most daring, in any case; but a well-armed "company" of tried
pioneers on Boone's Road was a dangerous game on which to prey. It was
customary to advertise the departure of a company either from Virginia
or Kentucky, in local papers, in order that any desiring to make the
journey might know of the intended departure. The principal rendezvous
in Kentucky was the frontier settlement of Crab Orchard. Certain of
these advertisements are extremely interesting; the verbal changes are
significant if closely read:
NOTICE
Is hereby given, that a company will meet at the Crab Orchard, on
Sunday the 4th day of May (1788), to go through the Wilderness, and
to set out on the 5th, at which time most of the Delegates to the
State convention will go.
A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard on Sunday the 25th of
May, in order to make an early start on Monday the 26th through the
Wilderness for the old settlement.
A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard on the 15th of May, in
readiness to start on the 16th through the Wilderness for Richmond.
NOTICE
Is hereby given that several gentlemen propose meeting at the Crab
Orchard on the 4th of June in perfect readiness to move early the
next morning through the Wilderness.
NOTICE
A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard the 19th of November
in order to start the next day through the Wilderness. As it is very
dangerous on account of the Indians, it is hoped each person will go
well armed.
It appears that unarmed persons sometimes attached themselves to
companies and relied on others to protect them in times of danger.
One advertisement urged that every one should go armed and "not to
depend upon others to defend them."
The frequency of the departure of such companies suggests the great
amount of travel on Boone's Road. As early as 1788 parties were
advertised to leave Crab Orchard May 5, May 15, May 26, June 4 and
June 16. Nor does it seem that there was much abatement during
the more inclement months; in the fall of the year companies were
advertised to depart November 19, December 9 and December 19. Yet at
this season the Indians were often out waylaying travelers--driven,
no doubt, by hunger to deeds of desperation. The sufferings of such
red-skinned marauders have found little place in history; but they
are, nevertheless, suggestive. One story is to the point.
In the winter of 1787-88 a party on Boone's Road was attacked by
Indians not far from the Kentucky border. Their horses were plundered
of goods, but the travelers escaped. Hurrying in to the settlement a
company was raised to make a pursuit. By their tracks in the snow the
Indians were accurately followed. They were overtaken at a camp where
they were drying their blankets before a great fire. At the first
charge, the savages, completely surprised, took to their heels--stark
naked. Not satisfied with recovering their goods, the Kentuckians
pursued the fugitives into the mountains, where the awful fate of the
savages is unquestionable.
Before Richard Henderson arrived in Kentucky Daniel Boone wrote him:
"My advice to you, sir, is to come or send as soon as possible. Your
company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are
willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time
to frustrate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country
whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will be ever the
case."
This letter shows plainly how the best informed man in Kentucky
regarded the situation.
What it meant to the American Colonies during the Revolution to have
a brave band of pioneers in Kentucky at that crucial epoch, is an
important chapter in the history of Boone's Road.
It is interesting to note that the leaders of civilization in the
West were true Americans--American born and American bred. It was
a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia to the
West. Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the
twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky,
which discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two
were descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of
forty-five members of the convention which framed Kentucky's first
constitution, only three could claim Continental ancestry.
This race gave to the West its real heroes. In frontier cabins
they were bred to a free life in a free land--worthy successors
to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the
empire of which they began the conquest. In the form of these sturdy
colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the
Appalachian Mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river
valley in the world at the end of Boone's Wilderness Road.
Yet the road itself was only what Boone made it--a blazed footpath
westward. It was but the merest footpath from 1774 to 1792, while
thousands floundered over its uncertain track to lay the rude
foundations of civilization in the land to which it led. There was
probably not a more desperate pioneer road in America than this. The
mountains to be crossed, the rivers and swamps to be encountered,
were as difficult as any on Braddock's Road; and Boone's Road was
very much longer.
A vivid description of what a journey over it meant in the year 1779
has been left by Chief-Justice Robertson in an address given half a
century ago:
"During the fall and winter of that year came an unexampled tide
of emigrants, who, exchanging all the comforts of their native
society and homes for settlements for themselves and their children
here, came like pilgrims to a wilderness to be made secure by their
arms and habitable by the toil of their lives. Through privations
incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women and children
came in successive caravans, forming continuous streams of human
beings, horses, cattle and other domestic animals all moving onward
along a lonely and houseless path to a wild and cheerless land.
Cast your eyes back on that long procession of missionaries in the
cause of civilization; behold the men on foot with their trusty
guns on their shoulders, driving stock and leading pack-horses; and
the women, some walking with pails on their heads, others riding
with children in their laps, and other children swung in baskets
on horses, fastened to the tails of others going before; see them
encamped at night expecting to be massacred by Indians; behold
them in the month of December, in that ever-memorable season of
unprecedented cold, called the 'hard winter,' traveling two or
three miles a day, frequently in danger of being frozen or killed
by the falling of horses on the icy and almost impassable trace,
and subsisting on stinted allowances of stale bread and meat; but
now lastly look at them at the destined fort, perhaps on the eve of
merry Christmas, when met by the hearty welcome of friends who had
come before, and cheered by fresh buffalo meat and parched corn, they
rejoice at their deliverance and resolve to be contented with their
lot.
"This is no vision of the imagination, it is but an imperfect
description of the pilgrimage of my own father and mother."
DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as
the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true
pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters,
game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation
after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the
Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument
ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania,
he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what
was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin,
and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other
frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond
which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches
of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians.
Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this
immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had
seen and done.
[Illustration: Daniel Boone in the frontier woods. At close
quarters.]
In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined
himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land
it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out,
making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of
wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country
of Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white
strove with such obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark
and bloody ground." But when Boone first saw it, it was a fair and
smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, where the
open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of
game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they
had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by
any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and
hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north
of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.
A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed
him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his
brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together.
Self-reliant, fearless, and possessed of great bodily strength and
hardihood, they cared little for the loneliness. The teeming myriads
of game furnished abundant food; the herds of shaggy-maned bison and
noble-antlered elk, the bands of deer and the numerous black bear,
were all ready for the rifle, and they were tame and easily slain.
The wolf and the cougar, too, sometimes fell victims to the prowess
of the two hunters.
At times they slept in hollow trees, or in some bush lean-to of their
own making; at other times, when they feared Indians, they changed
their resting-place every night, and after making a fire would go off
a mile or two in the woods to sleep. Surrounded by brute and human,
foes, they owed their lives to their sleepless vigilance, their keen
senses, their eagle eyes, and their resolute hearts.
When the spring came, and the woods were white with the dogwood
blossoms, and crimsoned with the red-bud, Boone's brother left him,
and Daniel remained for three months alone in the wilderness. The
brother soon came back again with a party of hunters; and other
parties likewise came in, to wander for months and years through the
wilderness; and they wrought huge havoc among the vast herds of game.
In 1771 Boone returned to his home. Two years later he started to
lead a party of settlers to the new country; but while passing
through the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap they were attacked
by Indians, and driven back--two of Boone's own sons being slain.
In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt was
successful. The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the
parties of would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their
own. They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets,
surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg; and
the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.
The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian
conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and
in war. At one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses
of Virginia; at another time he was a member of the first little
Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the frontier
militia. He tilled the land, and he chopped the trees himself;
he helped to build the cabins and stockades with his own hands,
wielding the long-handled, light-headed frontier ax as skilfully
as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of surveyor, for
his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it,
in spite of the danger from Indians, created much demand for his
services among people who wished to lay off tracts of wild land for
their own future use. But whatever he did, and wherever he went, he
had to be sleeplessly on the lookout for his Indian foes. When he
and his fellows tilled the stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more
of the party were always on guard, with weapon at the ready, for
fear of lurking savages. When he went to the House of Burgesses he
carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile of which was
free from the danger of Indian attack. The settlements in the early
years depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was
the mightiest of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task
of keeping his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled
the buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black
bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs. The
common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of
Kentucky would waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken
or wild duck; but they sometimes killed geese and swans when they
came south in winter and lit on the rivers. But whenever Boone went
into the woods after game, he had perpetually to keep watch lest he
himself might be hunted in turn. He never lay in wait at a game-lick,
save with ears strained to hear the approach of some crawling
red foe. He never crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without
exercising the utmost care to see that it was not an Indian; for one
of the favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the turkey
call, and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.
Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual
vocations, Boone frequently took the field on set expeditions
against the savages. Once when he and a party of other men were
making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by the
Indians. The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months, but
finally made his escape and came home through the trackless woods as
straight as the wild pigeon flies. He was ever on the watch to ward
off the Indian inroads, and to follow the war-parties, and try to
rescue the prisoners. Once his own daughter, and two other girls who
were with her, were carried off by a band of Indians. Boone raised
some friends and followed the trail steadily for two days and a
night; then they came to where the Indians had killed a buffalo calf
and were camped around it. Firing from a little distance, the whites
shot two of the Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls. On
another occasion, when Boone had gone to visit a salt-lick with his
brother, the Indians ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself
escaped, but the Indians followed him for three miles by the aid of a
tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and then eluded his
pursuers. In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted hunters
and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in expeditions
into the Indian country, where they killed the braves and drove off
the horses. Twice bands of Indians, accompanied by French, Tory, and
British partizans from Detroit, bearing the flag of Great Britain,
attacked Boonesborough. In each case Boone and his fellow-settlers
beat them off with loss. At the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, in
which two hundred of the best riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with
terrible slaughter by a great force of Indians from the lakes, Boone
commanded the left wing. Leading his men, rifle in hand, he pushed
back and overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the Indians
destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear, so
that there was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee with all
possible speed.
As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease.
He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great
prairie-like glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin, where
from the door he could see the deer come out into the clearing at
nightfall. The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped
and ill at ease. So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and
as Kentucky filled up he crossed the Mississippi and settled on the
borders of the prairie country of Missouri, where the Spaniards,
who ruled the territory, made him an alcalde, or judge. He lived to
a great age, and died out on the border, a backwoods hunter to the
last.
PIONEER FARMING
BY MORRIS BIRKBECK (about 1830)
I am now going to take you to the prairies, to show you the very
beginning of our settlement. Having fixed on the northwestern portion
of our prairie for our future residence and farm, the first act was
building a cabin, about two hundred yards from the spot where the
house is to stand. This cabin is built of round straight logs, about
a foot in diameter, lying upon each other, and notched in at the
corners, forming a room eighteen feet long by sixteen; the intervals
between the logs "chunked," that is, filled in with slips of wood;
and "mudded," that is, daubed with a plaster of mud: a spacious
chimney, built also of logs, stands like a bastion at one end: the
roof is well covered with four hundred "clap boards" of cleft oak,
very much like the pales used in England for fencing parks. A hole
is cut through the side, called, very properly, the "door (the
through)," for which there is a "shutter," made also of cleft oak,
and hung on wooden hinges. All this has been executed by contract,
and well executed, for twenty dollars. I have since added ten dollars
to the cost, for the luxury of a floor and ceiling of sawn boards,
and it is now a comfortable habitation.
We arrived in the evening, our horses heavily laden with our guns,
and provisions, and cooking utensils, and blankets, not forgetting
the all-important ax. This was immediately put in requisition, and
we soon kindled a famous fire, before which we spread our pallets,
and, after a hearty supper, soon forgot that besides ourselves, our
horses and our dogs, the wild animals of the forest were the only
inhabitants of our wide domain. Our cabin stands at the edge of the
prairie, just within the wood, so as to be concealed from the view
until you are at the very door. Thirty paces to the east the prospect
opens from a commanding eminence over the prairie, which extends four
miles to the south and southeast, and over the woods beyond to a
great distance; whilst the high timber behind, and on each side, to
the west, north, and east, forms a sheltered cove about five hundred
yards in width. It is about the middle of this cove, two hundred and
fifty yards from the wood each way, but open to the south, that we
propose building our house.
Well, having thus established myself as a resident proprietor, in
the morning my boy and I (our friend having left us) sallied forth
in quest of neighbors, having heard of two new settlements at no
great distance. Our first visit was to Mr. Emberson, who had just
established himself in a cabin similar to our own, at the edge of a
small prairie two miles north-west of us. We found him a respectable
young man, more farmer than hunter, surrounded by a numerous family,
and making the most of a rainy day by mending the shoes of his
household. We then proceeded to Mr. Woodland's, about the same
distance southwest: he is an inhabitant of longer standing, for he
arrived in April, Mr. E. in August. He has since built for us a
second cabin, connected with the first by a covered roof or porch,
which is very convenient, forming together a commodious dwelling....
There are no very good mill-seats on the streams in our
neighborhood, but our prairie affords a most eligible site for a
windmill; we are therefore going to erect one immediately: the
materials are in great forwardness, and we hope to have it in order
to grind the fruits of the ensuing harvest.
Two brothers, and the wife of one of them, started from the village
of Puttenham, close to our old Wanborough, and have made their way
out to us: they are carpenters, and are now very usefully employed in
preparing the scantlings for the mill, and other purposes. You may
suppose how cordially we received these good people. They landed at
Philadelphia, not knowing where on this vast continent they should
find us: from thence they were directed to Pittsburg, a wearisome
journey over the mountains of more than 300 miles; at Pittsburgh they
bought a little boat for six or seven dollars, and came gently down
the Ohio, 1,200 miles, to Shawneetown; from thence they proceeded on
foot till they found us....
By the first of March I hope to have two plows at work, and may
possibly put in 100 acres of corn this spring. Early in May, I think,
we shall be all settled in a convenient temporary dwelling, formed of
a range of cabins of ten rooms, until we can accomplish our purpose
of building a more substantial house.
KENTUCKY PIONEER LIFE
BY GILBERT IMLAY
_My Dear Friend_,
In some of my first letters I gave you an account of the first
settlement of this country. The perturbed state of that period, and
the savage state of the country, which was one entire wilderness,
made the objects of the first emigrants that of security and
sustenance, which produced the scheme of several families living
together in what were called Stations.
As the country gained strength the Stations began to break up and
their inhabitants to spread themselves and settle upon their estates.
But the embarrassment they were in for most of the conveniences of
life, did not admit of their building any other houses but those of
logs and of opening fields in the most expeditious way for planting
the Indian corn; the only grain which was cultivated at that time.
The log house is very soon erected, and in consequence of the
friendly disposition which exists among those hospitable people,
every neighbor flew to the assistance of each other upon occasions of
emergencies.
The next object was to open land to cultivation. The fertility of the
soil amply repays the laborer for his toil; for if the large trees
are not very numerous, and a large proportion of them sugar maple, it
is very likely that from this imperfect cultivation, that the ground
will yield from 50 to 60 bushels of corn to the acre. The second
crop will be more ample; and as the shade is removed by cutting the
timber away, a great part of the land will produce from seventy to
one hundred bushels of corn from an acre.
The cattle and hogs will find sufficient food in the woods. The
horses want no provender the greater part of the year except cane and
wild clover. The garden with little attention, produces him all the
culinary roots and vegetables necessary for his table.
In three or four years his flock of cattle and sheep will prove
sufficient to supply him with both beef and mutton. By the fourth
year, provided he is industrious, he may have his plantation in
sufficient good order to build a better house.
Such has been the progress of the settlement of this country, from
dirty Stations or forts, that it has expanded into fertile fields,
blushing orchards, pleasant gardens, neat and commodious houses,
mining villages and trading towns.
A taste for the decorum of the table was soon cultivated; the
pleasures of gardening were considered not only as useful but
amusing. These improvements in the comforts of living and manners
awakened a sense of ambition to instruct their youth in useful and
accomplished arts.
The distance from Philadelphia by land is between seven and eight
hundred miles, and upwards of five hundred from Richmond. The
roads and accommodations are tolerably good to the borders of the
wilderness; through which it is hardly possible for a carriage to
pass, great part of the way being over high and steep hills, upon
the banks of rivers and along defiles which in some places seem to
threaten you at every step with danger.
The wilderness which was formerly two hundred miles through without a
single habitation, is reduced from the settlement of Powel's Valley
to nearly one half that distance; and it is to be expected that in a
few years more the remainder of the distance will afford settlements
for the accommodation of people traveling that route.
Upon the arrival of emigrants in the country they generally take a
view of that part which it is their object to settle in and according
to their circumstances fix upon such a situation as may appear
eligible for their business. The greater proportion are husbandmen.
(From A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of
America, by Gilbert Imlay, New York, 1793.)
A PIONEER BOYHOOD
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WEST IN THE FORTIES
BY JAMES BURTON POND
In the autumn of 1843 I was four years old and living in a log house in
the town of Hector, Tompkins (now Schuyler) County, New York. One of
my earliest recollections is of a conversation between my father and
mother regarding the expected visit of an uncle and his family, who
were coming to bid us good-by before moving to Illinois. My uncle had
the "Illinois fever"; he had just returned from a "land-looking" in
Illinois, where he had preëmpted a new farm. I remember listening to
my uncle's glowing description of the new country out in the far West
beyond the Great Lakes, where he was going to make a new home. When he
had gone my father talked constantly of Illinois, and the neighbors
said he had Illinois fever.
We passed the long winter in our log house adjoining my grandfather's
farm. All the clothing and bedding people had in those days was
home-made, and every household had its loom. In our home, in the
single room on the first floor were father's and mother's bed, the
trundle-bed, where four of us children slept (lying crosswise), the
loom, the spinning-wheel for wool and tow, the flax-wheel, the swifts,
reeling-bars, and the quill-wheel, besides the table and chairs. We had
two rooms in the attic, one a spare room and the other for the hired
help. Frequently during the long evenings my grandmother and other
neighbors would come in with their knitting and their tow-cards, and
either knit or card tow or heckle flax, talking about Illinois, where
my uncle had gone. That mysterious word was unfathomable to me. It was
finally decided that we should go there too, and all our furniture,
with bedding, spinning-wheels, loom, and crockery, was packed up, and
on Monday morning, March 20, 1844, we started for the new country. At
Ithaca our goods were put on board a canal-boat, and the next morning I
awoke to find myself on Cayuga Lake, in tow of a steamer. For days we
traveled slowly on the Erie Canal, with no memorable incidents except
an occasional "low bridge," one of which swept our provision-chest
nearly the length of the deck.
One evening my uncle, he of the Illinois fever, met us with his
horses and farm-wagon. Father hired another team, and we started for
my uncle's new home near Libertyville, Lake County, Illinois, where
we arrived the following morning. The house was a log hut with one
room and an attic. We found my aunt sick with fever and ague. She was
wrapped in thick shawls and blankets, sitting by the fireplace, and
shaking like a leaf. Before supper was over, mother had a chill and a
shake which lasted nearly half the night. The next day it rained hard,
and we all had chills, and my father and uncle went to town, two miles,
for some medicine. They returned with a large bundle of thoroughwort
weed, or boneset, a tea made from which was the order of the day. It
was very bitter, and I used to feel more like taking the consequences
of the ague than the remedy.
It was too late for father to secure a farm during that first
summer in Illinois, and he obtained work in the blacksmith's shop
in Libertyville, hiring two rooms for his family in the frame
court-house, a half-finished building on a high spot of ground. It was
neither plastered nor sided, only rough boards being nailed on the
frame, and when it rained and the wind blew we might as well have been
out of doors. Here our first summer and winter in Illinois were spent.
As father had a shake every other day, he could work only half the
time, and we were very poor. The ague was in the entire family, my
sister and I invariably shaking at the same hour every alternate day,
and my mother's and father's shakes coming at about the same time. I
have known the whole family to shake together; nor did the neighbors
escape. There were few comfortable homes and few well people. Boneset
tea was a fixture on every stove fireplace. When my morning to shake
arrived, I used to lie down on the floor behind the cook-stove and
almost hug the old salamander, even on the warmest summer days, my
sister on the opposite side, my younger brothers snuggling up close to
me, and my mother sitting as near the fire as she could get, all of us
with our teeth chattering together.
So the long, dreary, rainy, ague summer passed away, to be followed
by a wet and open winter. Father's scanty earnings were our only
support, and my uncle and his family, who were on a new farm two
miles away, were even poorer; for my father occasionally had a few
dollars in money, while uncle had nothing but what a farm of "new
breaking" produced the first year, and with no market for even the
slightest product. My aunt, who was broken down and discouraged, would
occasionally walk the two miles to see us, and my mother and she would
talk about the false hopes and glittering inducements that had led
their husbands to become victims to the Illinois fever.
The spring came early, and father rented a farm with ten acres already
plowed and a log house, about three miles east of the village, and
there we moved. He had the use of a yoke of oxen, farm-utensils, one
cow, seed-grain, and he was to work the farm for half of all it could
be made to produce. He filled in odd moments by splitting rails and
fencing the ten acres with a seven-railstaked and ridered fence.
The farm was in the heavy woods near the shores of Lake Michigan. A
stream of water ran through a deep gully near the house, and there
father caught an abundance of fish, while there was plenty of game in
the woods. One day he came in and said he had found a deer-lick, and
that night he prepared a bundle of hickory bark for a torchlight, and
with that and his rifle he left us for the night, and came in early in
the morning with a deer. It was the first venison I had ever eaten, and
the best. My father's gun supplied our table with venison, wild duck,
and squirrel in abundance. Mother, who had brought a collection of
garden seeds from the East, managed the garden, and we had corn, beans,
cucumbers, and pease, while tomatoes we raised as ornamental plants and
called "love-apples." They were then considered poisonous, and it was
some years later before we found out that they were a wholesome table
delicacy.
We spent only one summer in this place, and then my father rented a
farm on the prairie, in the township of Brooklyn, Lake County, about
five miles west of Little Fort (now Waukegan, Illinois), and we went
there early in the autumn of 1845. It was a happy day for my mother
when we moved from our ague-stricken gully, for she prophesied that out
on the prairie, where there was pure air, we might possibly escape
fever and ague. Only two years before, mother had come from a refined
home in western New York, and she had been shut up in these dreary
woods in a log house all summer, living on game and boneset tea.
We were up early, and started at sunrise for the eight-mile ride to our
new home. Father had come the day before with two teams and a hired
man. The chickens had been caught and put into coops that were fastened
on the rear end of the wagon, the "garden sauce" was gathered, and two
pigs were put into one of the packing-boxes originally brought from the
East. The new home was another log house, but a good one, built of hewn
logs, and a story and a half high. The owner had built a tavern and was
not going to work his farm any longer, so he rented it to father and
kept his tavern across the way.
The minister from Little Fort called, and arrangements were made for a
church home, and we used to drive five miles every Sunday to "meeting."
There was a school for the children, and surrounded as we were by
intelligent and thrifty neighbors, my mother began to wear a cheerful
look. At this time the family consisted of six children, of whom I was
the second, and the eldest son.
Here father began to utilize me, and I saved him many steps; for he
seemed to have something for me to do all the time, both when he was at
work and when he was resting. On Mondays I was allowed to stay about
the place and help mother, pounding clothes, tending baby, and bringing
wood and water. I was able to carry only about a third of the pail of
water, but my young legs were expected to make frequent journeys to and
from the spring, which was over in the cow-pasture, about thirty rods
from the house. It was protected from encroachment of cattle and hogs
by a three-cornered rail fence, which I had to climb and lift my pail
over every time I went for water.
My brother Homer was my constant companion, and he used to help me with
my work. Once I had lifted him over the fence to dip up water for me,
when he lost his balance, and fell into the spring. The water was about
up to his chin, and very cold. He screamed, and mother ran to help him
out, dripping with water and dreadfully frightened. We got into the
house as father came in to dinner. I was so sorry and frightened over
what had happened that I was already severely punished; but father
began to scold, and then decided to give me a whipping. He went out to
the pasture near the spring and cut some willow switches, and after
giving me a severe talking to, began laying the switches on my back and
legs. I feared my father ever afterward. Nothing that I could do to
please him was left undone, but it was always through fear.
EMIGRANTS.
We lived on a public thoroughfare where hundreds, and I may say
thousands, passed on their way to take up new homes in Wisconsin, then
the extreme outskirt of civilization in the Northwest. There was not a
day in which several wagon-loads of emigrants did not pass our door,
and the road was a cloud of dust as far as one could see over the level
prairie country. The usual emigrant wagon contained an entire family,
with all its earthly possessions, and in some of them families had
lived for many weeks. Occasionally a length of stovepipe protruded
through the canvas cover, and it was known that this wagon belonged
to an aristocratic family, such a one usually having two wagons, one
being used as a living-room. Nearly every family had from one to four
cows, a coop of chickens attached to the tail-gate, from two to five
pigs traveling under the wagon, and occasionally a drove of sheep and a
loose colt near by. There was sometimes a rich caravan, or association
of families, which had entered a large tract of land and was moving in
a body, with horse-teams, droves of cattle, and horses.
As we lived near the road, people usually stopped at our house,
either for a drink of fresh spring-water (a scarcity in those days),
or to purchase milk, butter, garden-stuff, or anything that we could
spare. These were the pioneers of Wisconsin, and were mostly from
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They were the second
generation of pioneers of their native States. In asking where they
were from we generally asked, "What are you?" If from New York, it
was "Empire State"; if from Pennsylvania, "Keystones"; if from Ohio,
"Buckeyes." Many more Illinois pioneers moved on to Wisconsin in those
days than remained, owing to the dread of fever and ague. In this
endless train of "movers" it was not uncommon for my mother to meet
people whose families she had known in western New York.
THE LAND-LOOKER.
The land-looker was as much an occupant of the road as the emigrant.
He was the advance-picket who had preceded on foot every family that
passed, and had located his quarter-section, built his preëmption
shanty, and inhabited it three days, which allowed him to hold it one
year, while he could return for his family. These men were passing
daily, winter and summer, and the tavern near us was crowded nightly
with them and with emigrants. Our house, too, was a shelter for many.
Father saw the enterprising home-seekers daily, and heard the accounts
of those who were returning from their prospective homes after having
located; and their glowing descriptions of the country, the climate,
and its freedom from ague, gave him the "Wisconsin fever." Mother,
however, looked distrustfully on the favorable reports brought back
daily, and she pitied the people moving north.
Father had provided a fair living for his large family--sumptuous,
indeed, compared with that of our first year in the West. We had
friends and neighbors and schools. The owner of the farm wished my
father to hire it for two years more, but father would argue that this
was his chance to get a home, and here was an opportunity for his
boys; he could make nothing on rented land, and he had only been able
to keep his family alive for three years. Mother said: "Supposing we
do preëmpt, it is only for a year or two, and then the land must be
entered and paid for at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. Where
is the money coming from?" Father told her that many of the emigrants
who had no money got friends or speculators to furnish it for half the
land. Mother was not enthusiastic, but she finally consented to go if
father could get his sister in Connecticut to enter the land for him
when due, and to hold it in her name until father could, at some future
time, pay for it.
My aunt consented to this, and in February there came a letter from her
inclosing a draft for one hundred dollars, with which to buy a yoke of
oxen and a wagon with which to work the farm.
So my father was fitted out as a land-looker, and mother worked all day
and all night to make his knapsack.
Father had been gone three weeks when a letter came telling us that he
had located a farm in the town of Alto, the southwest-corner township
in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin; that it had a log house on it, twelve
by fourteen, which he had bought; that ten acres had already been
broken by the man of whom he had bought the claim, and that he would
return at once with his wagon and oxen for the family.
In March, 1847, we started for the new home.
We were soon in the long line of dust, making our proportion of what
we had been accustomed to see for two years. I was to help drive
the cows and pigs. Whoever has attempted to drive a hog knows the
discouragements with which I met. Whoever has never attempted it can
never know. It seemed that if we had wanted them to go the other way
it would have been all right. They scattered in different directions
several times, and some of them succeeded in getting back home. My
chagrin was increased by passing or meeting other emigrant boys whose
pigs and cattle kept quietly near the wagons and walked gently along.
It took all day to go about six miles. We stopped overnight near a
farm-house, and father, after getting the cattle and pigs in the barn,
built a fire by the roadside and prepared our supper. He made tea, and
with the cold chicken and bread and butter which mother had given us
for the journey, we fared sumptuously. Father brought an armful of hay
from the barn near by, and with plenty of coverlets he made up a bed
under the wagon, where we slept soundly. This was my first camping out.
At Fort Atkinson we met the first band of Indians I had ever seen.
There was a chief and three or four young buck Indians, as many squaws,
and a number of children, all of the Black Hawk tribe. They were on
ponies, riding in single file into the town as we were going out. I was
so frightened that I cried, and as the chief kept putting his hand to
his mouth, saying, "Bread--hungry--bread--hungry," father gave him a
loaf of bread. It was not enough, but it was all father would let him
have. Homer and I were in favor of giving him everything we had if he
would only move on.
After leaving Watertown we came out on what is known as rolling
prairie--for miles in every direction a green, wavy sheet of land.
No ornamental gardener could make so lovely and charming a lawn,
gently rolling, and sloping just enough to relieve the monotony of the
flatness of the long stretches of prairie and openings we had passed
through. Father told us that these great prairies would always be
pasture-land for herds of cattle, as the farmers could not live where
there was no timber. To-day the finest farms I know of in America
are on these great prairie-lands, but at that time the prospectors
avoided such claims and preëmpted only the quarter-sections skirting
the prairies, where the oak openings supplied timber for log houses,
fences, and fuel.
Trails were now branching in every direction, and after five days
of this travel it seemed as though we had been wandering for months
without a home. That day we had started at sunrise, resting for three
hours at noon, the usual custom at that time. It was ten o'clock when
we reached our home.
We were in another log cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, with
hewn log floor, one door, and one window containing the sash with its
four panes of glass which father had brought on his journey.
We boys slept in the low garret, climbing a ladder to go to bed. Owing
to the exhaustion and excitement of the night before, we were allowed
to rest undisturbed, and the sun was well up and shining through the
chink-holes in our garret when we awoke. Father had gone with the team
to a spring a mile west for a barrel of water. There was no water on
our claim, and we were obliged to haul it on a "crotch," a vehicle
built from the crotch of a tree, about six by eight inches thick and
six feet long, on which a cross-rail is laid, where a barrel can be
fastened. The oxen were hitched to it, and they dragged it to and from
the spring.
Two beds were fitted across one side of the single downstairs room in
our cabin, and father had to shorten the rails of one bedstead to get
it into place. Under it was the trundle-bed on which the babies slept,
and when this was pulled out, and with the cook-stove, table, four
chairs, wood-box, and the ladder in place, there was very little spare
room. By father's order, the lower round of the ladder was always my
seat.
THE FIRST SCHOOL AT ALTO.
There were neighbors from a half mile to three and five miles away, and
they called and offered their assistance to contribute to our comfort.
It was found that there were seventeen children within a radius of five
miles, and the subject of starting a school was discussed.
The school-house was a log shanty six logs high, with holes for a
window and a door, which had been removed and were now a part of Mr.
Boardman's new house. Trees were cut down and the trunks split open and
holes bored in the ends of each half of the log; legs were put in, and
then they were hewed as smooth as an ax could make them, and placed on
the ground for benches. Four of these "puncheon" benches were made, and
at half-past nine the teacher took her place on a chair, which had been
brought especially for her, and called the school to order.
The first thing to do was to get an idea of what books the pupils
had. Mother had sent all her children had ever owned, and so had
others, and there were Cobb's Spelling-book, Dayball's Arithmetic,
Parley's Geography, McGuffey's Reader, Saunders's Spelling-book, Ray's
Arithmetic, Spencer's Spelling-book, Adams's Arithmetic, and Saunders's
Reader, gathered from all parts of America. There were no duplicates.
The school opened with a prayer by Mr. Wilbur.
We were not long in wearing a well-beaten path between our house
and the school, which for a number of years was a thoroughfare for
pedestrians.
My chief duty after school was to hunt up the cows and drive them
home in time for milking, and I came to know every foot of country
within a radius of ten miles. No boy's country life can be complete
without having hunted cows. "Old Red" wore the bell. Every neighbor
in the country had a bell-cow and a cow-bell, and my friend Matt Wood
and I always arranged that our cattle should herd together, and they
were invariably driven to the same range in the morning. Each of
us boys owned dogs, and we knew not only every cow-bell, but every
woodchuck-hole and every gopher-hole, and many a time, I fear, father
used to milk after dark because our dog had found a deep gopher-hole,
and that gopher must be had, milk or no milk, supper or no supper.
The first summer father planted and raised two acres of potatoes, with
some cabbages, onions, beets, carrots, and five acres of corn, and
he succeeded in splitting rails and putting a fence around ten acres
of land. I was trained to all branches of usefulness on a new farm.
Once in two weeks I went for the mail to the nearest village, eleven
miles away, often returning to tell father that there was a letter in
the office with sixpence postage to pay. In those days there was no
compulsory prepayment on letters, and it was sometimes months before
a turn of any kind would bring the money to get the letter out of the
post-office. The New York _Weekly Tribune_ was always a member of our
family, and our copy was read by everybody in the settlement. For three
years I walked to the village every week for that paper. We children
had to listen to my father read it every Sunday afternoon, as it was
wicked to play out of doors, and we had only morning church to attend.
A PIONEER CHRISTMAS.
Father came home from Milwaukee at Christmas-time, bringing the flour
of a few bushels of wheat, a pair of shoes for my brother and me, a
new pair of boots for himself, and some unbleached muslin. Weren't we
happy! It was a day of rejoicing. I remember father's going to the
woodpile and in a few moments cutting a pile of wood, which gave us the
first hot fire of the season. That afternoon mother made bread, and we
had salt, pepper, tea, and fresh meat, for father had bought a quarter
of beef.
A NEW LIFE.
We lived in Alto until 1853, and then the farm was abandoned, and my
parents, with all the children except myself, moved to the neighboring
city of Fond du Lac, where father could work by the day and earn
enough to support the family. I was left to work for a neighbor; but
I grew so homesick after a lonely Sabbath in a household where there
were no children and it was considered wrong to take a walk on Sunday
afternoon, that on Monday I took my other shirt from the clothes-line
and started for Fond du Lac. I knew the stage-driver, and he gave me a
lift.
As we approached the city the driver made me get down, and he told me
to follow the sidewalk along the main street until I came to a foundry,
next to which was father's house. I followed close behind the stage,
keeping in the middle of the road. Soon I found myself in the city,
where there were houses and stores on each side of the street, and
board walks for pedestrians. I feared to walk on the sidewalks, for I
was barefooted, and my feet were muddy and the sidewalks very clean.
The people seemed to be dressed up as if for Sunday, and all the boys
wore shoes, which excited my pity, for I knew how hot their poor feet
must be.
As I groped my way along Main Street I noticed a sign that stretched
nearly across the entire building over three stores. In large wooden
letters, at least six feet long, were the words "Darling's block."
It was the largest building I had ever seen, three stories high, and
I ventured to step on to the sidewalk; and while gazing in awe upon
the mighty structure my attention was attracted by a noise inside. I
walked in and found myself in a printing-office.
As I was taking in the wonderful scene the pressman spoke to me in a
gruff voice, asking me what I wanted. "Nothing," I said, trembling, and
starting for the door. "Don't you want to learn the trade?" he shouted.
"The editor wants an apprentice."
Just then the editor appeared in the doorway of his sanctum. He was a
pleasant-faced man, and he asked me in a kindly tone whose boy I was
and where I belonged.
"Why, your father is one of my subscribers. I want an apprentice to
learn the printer's trade. I can give you twenty-five dollars for the
first year, thirty for the second, and fifty dollars and the carrier's
address for the third year, with your board and washing."
"All right." In less time than it takes to write it I was behind the
press, and in five minutes I was covered with printer's ink from head
to foot.
My pioneer days were over.
[Illustration]
"THE PLAINS ACROSS"
BY NOAH BROOKS
[Illustration: A bull-whacker.
The loaded whip was used in two hands and was twenty feet long, or
more, in the lash. In some cases it had a horseshoe-nail in the end of
the snapper.]
During the ten years immediately following the discovery of gold in
California, the main-traveled road across the continent was what was
known as the Platte River route. Starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa, a
town then famous as the "jumping-off place" for California emigrants,
the adventurers crossed the Missouri by a rope ferry and clambered up
a steep, slippery bank to the site of the modern city of Omaha. The
only building of any considerable dimensions in the early fifties was
a large, unpainted, barn-like structure, which, we were proudly told,
was to be the capitol of the Territory of Nebraska, the Territorial
organization of which was authorized by Congress in 1854.
The trail from the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake valley grew more and
more difficult as we approached the rocky fastnesses of the Wahsatch
range of mountains, that defends the land of the Latter-Day Saints on
its eastern border. Leaving the valley and skirting the northern end of
Great Salt Lake, the route followed the general course of the Humboldt,
crossed the dreadful desert which takes its name from the river, and we
finally caught sight once more of civilization in Honey Lake valley, at
the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada. Here the trail began a toilsome
ascent of the gigantic mountain wall, and scaling the roof of the
world, as it seemed to us, slid down into the valley of the Sacramento
through the wooded ridges of the Plumas mining region.
The average cost of a journey to California in those days did not
greatly vary whether one took the water route by the way of Cape Horn
or the land route by the trail just described. In either case the
emigrants usually clubbed together, and the cost per man was therefore
considerably reduced. A party of overland emigrants, supplied with a
team of horses or oxen,--preferably the latter,--and numbering four
or five men, were expected to invest about five hundred dollars for
their outfit. This included the cost of provisions, clothing, tent,
wagon, and animals, and a small sum of ready money for emergencies by
the way. The necessaries of life were few and simple. The commissariat
was slender, and included flour, dried beans, coffee, bacon, or
"side-meat," and a few small stores--sugar, salt, baking-powder,
and the like. In those days the art of canning goods had not been
invented, and the only article in that category was the indispensable
yeast-powder, without which bread was impossible. The earliest
emigrants experimented with hard bread, but soft bread, baked fresh
every day, was found more economical and portable, as well as more
palatable.
But, after all, beans and coffee were the mainstay of each
well-seasoned and well-equipped party. In our own experience, good
luck (more than good management) furnished us with enough of these two
necessaries of life to last us from the Missouri to the Pacific. The
coffee, it should be explained, was bought in its green state, and was
browned and ground as occasion required. That variety of pork product
known as side-meat was a boneless slab from the side of a mast-fed
porker, salted and smoked. In western Iowa and Missouri we usually
found this meat corded up in piles after it had been cured. Corn-meal,
that beloved staff of life on the Western frontier, was an unprofitable
addition to the stores of the emigrant. It was not "filling," and its
nutriment was out of all proportion to its bulk. Hot flour bread, made
into the form of biscuits, and dipped in the "dope," or gravy, made by
mixing flour and water with the grease extracted from the fried bacon,
was our mainstay.
Does the imagination of the epicure revolt at the suggestion of so rude
a dish? To hundreds of thousands of weary emigrants, trudging their way
across the continent, spending their days and nights in the open air
and breathing an atmosphere bright with ozone, even ruder viands than
this were as nectar and ambrosia.
[Illustration: Fresh buffalo meat.]
The evolution of cooks, teamsters, woodsmen, and herders from the
raw materials of a party of emigrants was one of the interesting
features of life on the Great Plains. Here was a little company made
up of a variety of experiences and aptitudes. Each man's best faculty
in a novel service must be discovered. At the outset, none knew who
should drive the oxen, who should do the cooking, or whose ingenuity
would be taxed to mend broken wagon or tattered clothing. Gradually,
and not altogether without grumbling and objection, each man filled
his own proper place. No matter if the members of the party were
college-bred, society men, farmers' sons, or ex-salesmen; each man
found his legitimate vocation after a while. The severest critic of
another's work was eventually charged with the labor which he had all
along declared was not rightly performed by others. By the time the
journey was fairly undertaken, the company was manned in every section
as completely as if each worker had been assigned to his place in a
council of the Fates. It was just and fit that he who had steadily
derided the cooking of every other should show the others how cooking
should be done; and common consent gave to the best manager of cattle
the arduous post of driver. There was no place for drones, of course,
for this was a strenuous life. Before the continent had been crossed
the master spirits had asserted themselves. It was an evolution of the
fittest.
I have said that these assignments to duty were not accomplished
without grumbling and objection. Indeed, the division of labor in a
party of emigrants was a prolific cause of quarrel. In our own little
company of five there were occasional angry debates while the various
burdens were being adjusted, but no outbreak ever occurred. We saw not
a little fighting in the camps of others who sometimes jogged along the
trail in our company, and these bloody fisticuffs were invariably the
outcome of disputes over divisions of labor.
It should not be understood that the length of time required to
traverse the distance between the Missouri and the Sacramento was
wholly consumed in traveling. Nobody appeared to be in a feverish haste
to finish the journey; and it was necessary to make occasional stops
on the trail, where conditions were favorable, for the purpose of
resting and refitting. A pleasant camping-place, with wood, water, and
grass in plenty, was an invitation to halt and take a rest. This was
called a "lay-by," and the halt sometimes lasted several days, during
which wagon-tires were reset, ox-yokes repaired, clothes mended, and a
general clean-up of the entire outfit completed preparatory to another
long and uninterrupted drive toward the setting sun. If the stage of
the journey immediately before us was an unusually difficult one, the
stop was longer and the overhauling more thorough.
A day's march averaged about twenty miles; an uncommonly good day
with favorable conditions would give us twenty-five miles. The
distances from camping-place to camping-place were usually well known
to all wayfarers. By some subtle agency, information (and sometimes
misinformation) was disseminated along the trail before us and behind
us, and we generally knew what sort of camping-place we should find
each night, and how far it was from the place of the morning start. So,
when we halted for the night, we knew pretty accurately how many miles
we had covered in that day's tramp.
Of course riding was out of the question. We had one horse, but he
was reserved for emergencies, and nobody but a shirk would think of
crawling into the wagon, loaded down as it was with the necessaries
of life, unless sickness made it impossible for him to walk. In this
way we may be said to have walked all the way from the Missouri to the
Sacramento. Much walking makes the human leg a mere affair of skin,
bone, and sinew. We used to say that our legs were like chair-posts.
But then the exercise was "good for the health." Nobody was ever ill.
Grass, wood, and water were three necessities of life on the trail. But
these were sometimes very difficult to find. Usually one or two of the
party went on ahead of the rest and looked out a suitable camping-place
where those essentials could be found. Fuel was sometimes absolutely
unobtainable, possibly a few dry weeds and stalks being the only
combustible thing to be found.
Emigrants who were dependent upon open fires for cooking were often
in very hard case. We were fortunate in the possession of a small
sheet-iron camp-stove, for the heating of which a small amount of fuel
was sufficient. This handy little apparatus was lashed to the rear
end of the wagon when on the trail, and when it was in use, every sort
of our simple cookery could be carried on by it with most satisfactory
results. When we were obliged to camp for the night on wet ground after
a rain, the flat-bottomed camp-stove, well heated and light, was moved
from place to place inside the tent until the surface on which we must
make our bed was fairly dry. Sometimes, however, we camped down on the
damp ground; and sometimes, before we learned the trick of digging a
ditch around the tent when signs of rain appeared, we woke to find
ourselves lying in puddles of water. In such a case it was better to
lie in the water that had been slightly warmed by the heat of one's
body than to turn over into a colder stream on the other side. These
experiences were novel and interesting; nobody ever suffered seriously
from them.
[Illustration: Old Fort Bridger, east of Salt Lake City.]
In the matter of the necessaries of life, we had times of plenty and
times of scarcity. There were places where our cattle were knee-deep
in wild, succulent grasses, and there were times when they had nothing
but the coarse and wilted sheaves of grass carried along the trail
from the last camp. Flour, coffee, and bacon never failed us; and
there were times when we had more fresh meat than we could eat. In
the buffalo country, of course, we had the wholesome beef of that then
multitudinous animal in every possible variety. In the Rocky Mountain
region, antelope, prairie-dogs, black-tail deer, jack-rabbits, and
occasionally sage-hens gave us an enjoyable change from our staple
diet of bacon and bread. The antelope were very wild and timid, and
no one thought of chasing them; they were brought down by stratagem.
A bright-colored handkerchief fastened to a ramrod stuck into the
ground was a lure which no antelope could resist. A small drove of
these inquisitive creatures would circle distantly round and round
the strange flag: but ever drawing nearer, sometimes pausing as if to
discuss among themselves what that thing could possibly be, they would
certainly come at last within gunshot of the patient hunter lying flat
on the ground; a rifle-ball would bring down one of the herd, and the
rest would disappear as if the earth had swallowed them.
[Illustration: A lane through the buffalo herd.]
In the heart of the buffalo country the buffaloes were an insufferable
nuisance. Vast herds were moving across our trail from south to
north, trampling the moist and grassy soil into a black paste, and
so polluting the streams and springs that drinking-water was often
difficult to obtain. The vastness of some of these droves was most
impressive, in spite of the calamitous ruin they left behind them. As
far as the eye could reach, the surface of the earth was a heaving
mass of animal life; the ground seemed to be covered with a brown
mantle of fur. As we advanced along the trail, the droves would quietly
separate to our right and left, leaving a lane along which we traveled
with herds on each side of us. From an eminence, looking backward and
forward, one could see that we were completely hemmed in before and
behind; and the space left for us by the buffalo moved along with us.
They never in the least incommoded us by any hostile action; all they
asked, apparently, was to be let alone.
[Illustration: First view of Salt Lake from a mountain pass.]
The buffalo is not the clumsy animal he looks in captivity or in
pictures. It is a fleet horse that can overtake him; and to see him
drop into a wallow while on a keen run, roll over and over two or
three times, and skip to his feet and away with his comrades with the
nimbleness of a kitten, is a sight to be remembered.
Although we traveled a part of the time through what was known as a
hostile Indian country, we were never molested by the red men. Friendly
Indians came into our camps to beg, to pilfer, or to sell buckskins and
moccasins. Before us and behind us were several attacks upon caravans,
the victims usually being few in number and unprepared for a skirmish.
But while we were in the region deemed dangerous from Indians we massed
in with other companies of emigrants, so that we were seldom less than
one hundred and fifty strong; a regular watch was kept by night, and
the wagons were parked in a circle which could be used as a defense in
case of an attack.
In the course of weeks, the camp, wherever it might be pitched, took on
the semblance of a home. The tent was our house; the rude cooking-and
eating-apparatus and the comfortable bedding were our household
furniture, and the live stock about us was our movable property. Except
in the most trying and difficult straits, evening found us busy with
household cares and amusements. Our neighbors were changeable, it is
true, but we often found new and pleasant acquaintances, and sometimes
old friends from whom we had been separated for weeks would trundle up
and camp near us.
One of the famous landmarks to which we had looked forward with great
interest was the Devil's Gate of the Rockies, through which we passed
before beginning the climb of the backbone of the continent. It was a
far more impressive spectacle than the pass. The gate is double, and
through one of its tall, black portals murmurs the Sweetwater on its
way to join the North Platte. The trail lies through the other fissure,
trail and stream being only a few hundred rods apart.
Two days from Fort Bridger we entered Echo Cañon, one of the most
delightful spots which I remember on the long, long trail. The cañon
is about twenty miles long, and could be readily traversed in a single
day; but we loitered through it, so that we were more than two days
in its charmed fastnesses. On each side of the route the cliffs tower
to a great height, marked with columnar formations and clouded with
red, white, yellow, and drab, like some ancient wall of brick and
stone. The crests of these towers are crowded with verdure, and here
and there are trees and vines that line the cañon and climb upward to
the flying buttresses of the rocky walls. A delicious stream of water
crosses and recrosses the trail; and while we were in the cañon, grass
and fuel were abundant. To make our comfort complete, great quantities
of wild berries hung invitingly from the bushes by the sides of the
way. Silvery rivulets fell from the walls of the cañon, and wild
vines and flowers in great variety bloomed against the buttresses and
donjon-keeps of the formations through which we threaded our way.
Crossing the Weber, we entered one more cañon, and suddenly, one
afternoon, emerging from the mouth of Emigrant Cañon, we looked down
upon one of the fairest scenes on which the eye of man has ever
gazed--the Great Salt Lake valley. It was like a jewel set in the
heart of the continent. Deep below us, stretching north and south,
was the level floor of the valley. Far to the westward rose a wall of
mountains, purple, pink, and blue in the distance. Nearer sparkled the
azure waters of the Great Salt Lake.
The route from the city of the Saints lay around the northern end
of the lake, but, in order to reach the road to Bear River, we were
obliged to cross a few fenced fields, and this involved long parleys
with surly owners. We passed through a string of small towns on our
way up to the main-traveled trail, the last of these being Box Elder,
now known as Brigham City. Box Elder was a settlement of about three
hundred people, and boasted a post-office, a blacksmith's shop, a
trading-post, and a brewery. At this last-named establishment we bought
some fresh yeast, which served us a good turn in breadmaking for many a
day thereafter. We bought new flour in Salt Lake City at a fair price,
having skimped ourselves on that article for some time on account of
the exorbitant cost of it at the trading-posts on the trail. At Fort
Bridger, flour was thirty-five dollars a barrel, and bacon was one
dollar a pound.
[Illustration: Moonlight in the western desert.]
We were now approaching the edge of the Great Desert, which, stretching
from the Bitter Root Mountains, in northern Idaho, to the southern
boundary of Arizona, interposed for many years a barrier that was
supposed to be impassable to the hardy emigrant. Now came long night
marches and dreary days spent in traversing a region intolerable with
dust, heat, rocky trails, and sideling hills.
The last day's drive in the desert was the hardest of all. Twenty
miles lay between us and the Honey Lake valley. It was to be traveled
in the night; and as the numerous trains and caravans swept down into
the plain from the point of rocks on which I was sitting, waiting
for our wagons to come up, it was pathetic to note the intentness
with which this multitude of home-seekers and gold-seekers set their
faces westward. There was no haste, no fussy anxiety, but the vast
multitude of men, women, and children who had left all behind them to
look for a new life in an unknown land trooped silently down into the
desert waste. The setting sun bathed the plain in golden radiance, and
eastward the rocky pinnacles of the ranges through which we had toiled
were glorified with purple, gold, and crimson. It was a sight to be
remembered--as beautiful as a dream, hiding a wilderness as cruel as
death.
Honey Lake belied the sweetness of its name. It was a small sheet of
muddy water, but emptying into it was a sparkling river, or creek,
known as Susan's River, which, meandering through an emerald valley
and watering many a meadow, gave unwonted beauty to a scene the like
of which had not been gazed upon by the toil-worn plainsmen for many a
day. Here, too, we got our first glimpse of the Sierra Nevada.
After the privation and poverty of the desert, the wild abundance
of the forests of the Sierra was luxury indescribable. We camped by
crystal waterfalls with rank and succulent grasses all about us;
overhead were the spreading branches of noble pines, and our camp-fires
were heaped with an extravagance of fuel. But we soon found how hard
it was to climb the mountain-range; and when, after a day's solid rest
and comfort, we reached the crest of the ridge, we saw that the trail
pitched almost perpendicularly over the sharp backbone of the Sierra.
Two or three trees that grew by the place where the track led to the
brink were scarred and worn nearly through by ropes that had been
wound around them to let down the heavy wagons into the abyss below.
The cattle were taken out of the teams and driven down through the
undergrowth of thickets; and then, making a rope fast to the rear axle
of each wagon, one wagon at a time was carefully lowered down the steep
declivity.
That arduous labor over, we passed through the "Devil's Corral" and
camped in Mountain Meadows, a very paradise of a spot, in which it
seemed as if we were surrounded by every luxury imaginable, albeit we
had nothing but what uncultivated nature gave us.
The vale of the new Eldorado was tawny and gold with sear grass
and wild oats. In the distance rose the misty mountain wall of the
Coast Range; nearer a heroic outline of noble peaks broke the yellow
abundance of the valley's floor. This was the group known as Sutter's
Buttes, near the base of which was Nye's Ranch (now Marysville), the
goal of our long tramp. Dogtown, Inskip, and a little host of other
mining hamlets, claimed our attention briefly as we swept down into the
noble valley, on whose farther edge, by the historic Yuba, we found our
last camp.
Here we met the wave of migration that earlier broke on the shores of
the Pacific. In the winter of 1849-50 two hundred and fifty vessels
sailed for San Francisco from the ports of the Atlantic States; and
their multitudes of men were reinforced by other multitudes from other
lands. In a single year the population of the State was augmented by an
influx of more than one hundred thousand persons, arriving by sea and
by land.
[Illustration]
THE FIRST EMIGRANT TRAIN TO CALIFORNIA
BY JOHN BIDWELL (PIONEER OF '41)
[Illustration]
In the spring of 1839--living at the time in the western part of
Ohio--being then in my twentieth year, I conceived a desire to see the
great prairies of the West, especially those most frequently spoken of,
in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Emigration from the East was tending
westward, and settlers had already begun to invade those rich fields.
Starting on foot to Cincinnati, ninety miles distant, I fortunately
got a chance to ride most of the way on a wagon loaded with farm
produce. My outfit consisted of about $75, the clothes I wore, and a
few others in a knapsack which I carried in the usual way strapped
upon my shoulders, for in those days travelers did not have valises
or trunks. Though traveling was considered dangerous, I had no weapon
more formidable than a pocket-knife. From Cincinnati I went down the
Ohio River by steamboat to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St.
Louis, and thence to Burlington, in what was then the Territory of
Iowa. Those were bustling days on the western rivers, which were then
the chief highways of travel. The scenes at the wood landings I recall
as particularly lively and picturesque. Many passengers would save a
little by helping to "wood the boat," _i. e._, by carrying wood down
the bank and throwing it on the boat, a special ticket being issued on
that condition.
[Illustration: A peril of the plains.]
In 1839 Burlington had perhaps not over two hundred inhabitants, though
it was the capital of Iowa Territory. After consultation with the
governor, Robert Lucas of Ohio, I concluded to go into the interior
and select a tract of land on the Iowa River. In those days one was
permitted to take up 160 acres, and where practicable it was usual to
take part timber and part prairie. After working awhile at putting up
a log house--until all the people in the neighborhood became ill with
fever and ague--I concluded to move on and strike out to the south and
southwest into Missouri. I traveled across country, sometimes by the
sun, without road or trail. There were houses and settlements, but they
were scattered; sometimes one would have to go twenty miles to find a
place to stay at night.
On my arrival, my money being all spent, I was obliged to accept the
first thing that offered, and began teaching school in the country
about five miles from the town of Weston, which was located on the
north side of the Missouri River and about four miles above Fort
Leavenworth in Kansas Territory. Possibly some may suppose it did
not take much education to teach a country school at that period in
Missouri. The rapid settlement of that new region had brought together
people of all classes and conditions, and had thrown into juxtaposition
almost every phase of intelligence as well as of illiteracy. But there
was no lack of self-reliance or native shrewdness in any class, and I
must say that I learned to have a high esteem for the people, among
whom I found warm and lifelong friends.
In November or December of 1840, while still teaching school in Platte
County, I came across a Frenchman named Roubideaux, who said he had
been to California. He had been a trader in New Mexico, and had
followed the road traveled by traders from the frontier of Missouri
to Santa Fé. He had probably gone through what is now New Mexico and
Arizona into California by the Gila River trail used by the Mexicans.
His description of California was in the superlative degree favorable,
so much so that I resolved if possible to see that wonderful land,
and with others helped to get up a meeting at Weston and invited
him to make a statement before it in regard to the country. At that
time when a man moved out West, as soon as he was fairly settled he
wanted to move again, and naturally every question imaginable was
asked in regard to this wonderful country. Roubideaux described it
as one of perennial spring and boundless fertility, and laid stress
on the countless thousands of wild horses and cattle. He told about
oranges, and hence must have been at Los Angeles, or the mission of
San Gabriel, a few miles from it. Every conceivable question that we
could ask him was answered favorably. Generally the first question
which a Missourian asked about a country was whether there was any
fever and ague. I remember his answer distinctly. He said there was but
one man in California that had ever had a chill there, and it was a
matter of so much wonderment to the people of Monterey that they went
eighteen miles into the country to see him shake. Nothing could have
been more satisfactory on the score of health. He said that the Spanish
authorities were most friendly, and that the people were the most
hospitable on the globe; that you could travel all over California and
it would cost you nothing for horses or food. Even the Indians were
friendly. His description of the country made it seem like a Paradise.
[Illustration: Westport Landing, Kansas City.
(From a print of the period.)]
The result was that we appointed a corresponding secretary, and a
committee to report a plan of organization. A pledge was drawn up
in which every signer agreed to purchase a suitable outfit, and to
rendezvous at Sapling Grove in what is now the State of Kansas, on
the 9th of the following May, armed and equipped to cross the Rocky
Mountains to California. We called ourselves the Western Emigration
Society, and as soon as the pledge was drawn up every one who agreed to
come signed his name to it, and it took like wildfire. In a short time,
I think within a month, we had about five hundred names; we also had
correspondence on the subject with people all over Missouri, and even
as far east as Illinois and Kentucky, and as far south as Arkansas. As
soon as the movement was announced in the papers we had many letters
of inquiry, and we expected people in considerable numbers to join us.
About that time we heard of a man living in Jackson County, Missouri,
who had received a letter from a person in California named Dr. Marsh,
speaking favorably of the country, and a copy of this letter was
published.
[Illustration: A bit of rough road.]
Our ignorance of the route was complete. We knew that California lay
west, and that was the extent of our knowledge. Some of the maps
consulted, supposed of course to be correct, showed a lake in the
vicinity of where Salt Lake now is; it was represented as a long lake,
three or four hundred miles in extent; narrow and with two outlets,
both running into the Pacific Ocean, either apparently larger than the
Mississippi River. An intelligent man with whom I boarded--Elam Brown,
who till recently lived in California, dying when over ninety years
of age--possessed a map that showed these rivers to be large, and he
advised me to take tools along to make canoes, so that if we found the
country so rough that we could not get along with our wagons we could
descend one of those rivers to the Pacific. Even Frémont knew nothing
about Salt Lake until 1843, when for the first time he explored it and
mapped it correctly, his report being first printed, I think, in 1845.
At the last moment before the time to start for the rendezvous at
Sapling Grove--it seemed almost providential--along came a man named
George Henshaw, an invalid, from Illinois, I think. He was pretty well
dressed, was riding a fine black horse, and had ten or fifteen dollars.
I persuaded him to let me take his horse and trade him for a yoke of
steers to pull the wagon and a sorry-looking, one-eyed mule for him to
ride. We went _via_ Weston to lay in some supplies. One wagon and four
or five persons here joined us.
The party consisted of sixty-nine, including men, women, and children.
Our teams were of oxen, mules, and horses. We had no cows, as the later
emigrants usually had, and the lack of milk was a great deprivation to
the children. It was understood that every one should have not less
than a barrel of flour with sugar and so forth to suit; but I laid
in one hundred pounds of flour more than the usual quantity, besides
other things. This I did because we were told that when we got into the
mountains we probably would get out of bread and have to live on meat
alone, which I thought would kill me even if it did not others. My gun
was an old flintlock rifle, but a good one. Old hunters told me to have
nothing to do with cap or percussion locks, that they were unreliable,
and that if I got my caps or percussion wet I could not shoot, while if
I lost my flint I could pick up another on the plains. I doubt whether
there was one hundred dollars in money in the whole party, but all were
enthusiastic and anxious to go.
In five days after my arrival we were ready to start, but no one knew
where to go, not even the captain. Finally a man came up, one of the
last to arrive, and announced that a company of Catholic missionaries
were on their way from St. Louis to the Flathead nation of Indians with
an old Rocky Mountaineer for a guide, and that if we would wait another
day they would be up with us. At first we were independent, and thought
we could not afford to wait for a slow missionary party. But when we
found that no one knew which way to go, we sobered down and waited for
them to come up; and it was well we did, for otherwise probably not one
of us would ever have reached California, because of our inexperience.
Afterwards when we came in contact with Indians our people were so
easily excited that if we had not had with us an old mountaineer the
result would certainly have been disastrous. The name of the guide was
Captain Fitzpatrick; he had been at the head of trapping parties in
the Rocky Mountains for many years. He and the missionary party went
with us as far as Soda Springs, now in Idaho Territory, whence they
turned north to the Flathead nation. The party consisted of three Roman
Catholic priests--Father De Smet, Father Pont, Father Mengarini--and
ten or eleven French Canadians, and accompanying them were an old
mountaineer named John Gray and a young Englishman named Romaine, and
also a man named Baker. They seemed glad to have us with them, and we
certainly were glad to have their company. Father De Smet had been to
the Flathead nation before. He had gone out with a trapping party,
and on his return had traveled with only a guide by another route,
farther to the north and through hostile tribes. He was genial, of
fine presence, and one of the saintliest men I have ever known, and
I cannot wonder that the Indians were made to believe him divinely
protected. He was a man of great kindness and great affability under
all circumstances; nothing seemed to disturb his temper. The Canadians
had mules and Red River carts, instead of wagons and horses--two mules
to each cart, five or six of them--and in case of steep hills they
would hitch three or four of the animals to one cart, always working
them tandem. Sometimes a cart would go over, breaking everything in
it to pieces; and at such times Father De Smet would be just the
same--beaming with good humor.
[Illustration: A powwow with Cheyennes.]
[Illustration: Water!]
In general our route lay from near Westport, where Kansas City now
is, northwesterly over the prairie, crossing several streams, till we
struck the Platte River. Then we followed along the south side of the
Platte to and a day's journey or so along the South Fork. Here the
features of the country became more bold and interesting. Then crossing
the South Fork of the Platte, and following up the north side for a day
or so, we went over to the North Fork and camped at Ash Hollow; thence
up the north side of that fork, passing those noted landmarks known
as the Court House Rocks, Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluffs, etc., till we
came to Fort Laramie, a trading post of the American Fur Company, near
which was Lupton's Fort, belonging, as I understood, to some rival
company. Thence after several days we came to another noted landmark
called Independence Rock, on a branch of the North Platte called the
Sweetwater, which we followed up to the head, soon after striking the
Little Sandy, and then the Big Sandy, which empties into Green River.
Next we crossed Green River to Black Fork, which we followed up till
we came to Ham's Fork, at the head of which we crossed the divide
between Green and Bear Rivers. Then we followed Bear River down to Soda
Springs. The waters of Bear Lake discharged through that river, which
we continued to follow down on the west side till we came to Salt Lake.
Then we went around the north end of the lake and struck out to the
west and southwest.
For a time, until we reached the Platte River, one day was much like
another. We set forth every morning and camped every night, detailing
men to stand guard. Captain Fitzpatrick and the missionary party would
generally take the lead and we would follow. Fitzpatrick knew all
about the Indian tribes, and when there was any danger we kept in a
more compact body, to protect one another. At other times we would be
scattered along, sometimes for half a mile or more. We were generally
together, because there was often work to be done to avoid delay. We
had to make the road, frequently digging down steep banks, filling
gulches, removing stones, etc. In such cases everybody would take a
spade or do something to help make the road passable. When we camped
at night we usually drew the wagons and carts together in a hollow
square and picketed our animals inside in the corral. The wagons were
common ones and of no special pattern, and some of them were covered.
The tongue of one would be fastened to the back of another. To lessen
the danger from Indians, we usually had no fires at night and did our
cooking in the daytime.
The first incident was a scare that we had from a party of Cheyenne
Indians just before we reached the Platte River, about two weeks after
we set out. One of our men who chanced to be out hunting, some distance
from the company and behind us, suddenly appeared without mule, gun
or pistol, and lacking most of his clothes, and in great excitement
reported that he had been surrounded by thousands of Indians. The
company, too, became excited, and Captain Fitzpatrick tried, but with
little effect, to control and pacify them. Every man started his team
into a run, till the oxen, like the mules and horses, were in a full
gallop. Captain Fitzpatrick went ahead and directed them to follow,
and as fast as they came to the bank of the river he put the wagons in
the form of a hollow square and had all the animals securely picketed
within. After a while the Indians came in sight. There were only forty
of them, but they were well mounted on horses, and were evidently a war
party, for they had no women except one, a medicine woman. They came up
and camped within a hundred yards of us on the river below. Fitzpatrick
told us that they would not have come in that way if they were
hostile. Our hunter in his excitement said that there were thousands
of them, and that they had robbed him of his gun, mule and pistol.
When the Indians had put up their lodges Fitzpatrick and John Gray,
the old hunter mentioned, went out to them and by signs were made to
understand that the Indians did not intend to hurt the man or to take
his mule or gun, but that he was so excited when he saw them that they
had to disarm him to keep him from shooting them; they did not know
what had become of his pistol or of his clothes, which he said they had
torn off. They surrendered the mule and the gun, thus showing that they
were friendly. They proved to be Cheyenne Indians. Ever afterwards that
man went by the name of Cheyenne Dawson.
On the Platte River, on the afternoon of one of the hottest days we
experienced on the plains, we had a taste of a cyclone: first came
a terrific shower, followed by a fall of hail to the depth of four
inches, some of the stones being as large as turkeys' eggs; and the
next day a waterspout--an angry, huge, whirling cloud column, which
seemed to draw its water from the Platte River--passed within a quarter
of a mile behind us. We stopped and braced ourselves against our wagons
to keep them from being overturned. Had it struck us it doubtless would
have demolished us.
Guided by Fitzpatrick, we crossed the Rockies at or near the South
Pass, where the mountains were apparently low. Some years before a
man named William Subletts, an Indian fur trader, went to the Rocky
Mountains with goods in wagons, and those were the only wagons that
had ever been there before us; sometimes we came across the tracks,
but generally they were obliterated, and thus were of no service.
Approaching Green River in the Rocky Mountains, it was found that some
of the wagons, including Captain Bartleson's, had alcohol on board,
and that the owners wanted to find trappers in the Rocky Mountains to
whom they might sell it. This was a surprise to many of us, as there
had been no drinking on the way. John Gray was sent ahead to see if he
could find a trapping party, and he was instructed, if successful, to
have them come to a certain place on Green River. He struck a trail,
and overtook a party on their way to the buffalo region to lay in
provisions, _i. e._, buffalo meat, and they returned, and came and
camped on Green River very soon after our arrival, buying the greater
part, if not all, of the alcohol, it first having been diluted so as
to make what they called whisky--three or four gallons of water to a
gallon of alcohol. Years afterwards we heard of the fate of that party:
they were attacked by Indians the very first night after they left
us and several of them killed, including the captain of the trapping
party, whose name was Frapp. The whisky was probably the cause.
[Illustration]
As I have said, at Soda Springs--at the northernmost bend of Bear
River--our party separated.
We were now thrown entirely upon our own resources. All the country
beyond was to us a veritable _terra incognita_, and we only knew that
California lay to the west. Captain Fitzpatrick was not much better
informed, but he had heard that parties had penetrated the country to
the southwest and west of Salt Lake to trap for beaver; and by his
advice four of our men went with the parties to Fort Hall to consult
Captain Grant, who was in charge there, and to gain information.
Meanwhile our depleted party slowly made its way down the west side of
Bear River.
One morning, just as we were packing up, a party of about ninety
Indians, on horseback, a regular war party, were descried coming up.
Some of us begged the captain to send men out to prevent them from
coming to us while we were in the confusion of packing. But he said,
"Boys, you must not show any sign of hostility; if you go out there
with guns the Indians will think us hostile, and may get mad and hurt
us." However, five or six of us took our guns and went out, and by
signs made them halt. They did not prove to be hostile, but they had
carbines, and if we had been careless and had let them come near they
might, and probably would, have killed us. At last we got packed up
and started, and the Indians traveled along three or four hundred
yards one side or the other of us or behind us all day. They appeared
anxious to trade, and offered a buckskin, well dressed, worth two or
three dollars, for three or four charges of powder and three or four
balls. This showed that they were in want of ammunition. The carbines
indicated that they had had communication with some trading-post
belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company. They had buffalo-robes also,
which showed that they were a roving hunting party, as there were no
buffaloes within three or four hundred miles. At this time I had spoken
my mind pretty freely concerning Captain Bartleson's lack of judgment,
as one could scarcely help doing under the circumstances.
We now got into a country where there was no grass nor water, and then
we began to catechize the men who had gone to Fort Hall. They repeated,
"If you go too far south you will get into a desert country and your
animals will perish; there will be no water nor grass."
Our course was first westward and then southward, following a river
for many days, till we came to its Sink, near which we saw a solitary
horse, an indication that trappers had sometime been in that vicinity.
We tried to catch him but failed; he had been there long enough to
become very wild. We saw many Indians on the Humboldt, especially
towards the Sink. There were many tule marshes. The tule is a rush,
large, but here not very tall. It was generally completely covered with
honeydew, and this in turn was wholly covered with a pediculous-looking
insect which fed upon it. The Indians gathered quantities of the honey
and pressed it into balls about the size of one's fist, having the
appearance of wet bran. At first we greatly relished this Indian food,
but when we saw what it was made of--that the insects pressed into the
mass were the main ingredient--we lost our appetites and bought no more
of it.
From the time we left our wagons many had to walk, and more and more
as we advanced. Going down the Humboldt at least half were on foot.
Provisions had given out; except a little coarse green grass among the
willows along the river the country was dry, bare, and desolate; we
saw no game except antelope, and they were scarce and hard to kill;
and walking was very fatiguing. Tobacco lovers would surrender their
animals for any one to ride who would furnish them with an ounce or two
to chew during the day. One day one of these devotees lost his tobacco
and went back for it, but failed to find it. An Indian in a friendly
manner overtook us, bringing the piece of tobacco, which he had found
on our trail or at our latest camp, and surrendered it. The owner,
instead of being thankful, accused the Indian of having stolen it--an
impossibility, as we had seen no Indians or Indian signs for some days.
Perhaps the Indian did not know what it was, else he might have kept
it for smoking. But I think otherwise, for, patting his breast, he
said, "Shoshone, Shoshone," which was the Indian way of showing he was
friendly. The Shoshones were known as always friendly to the whites,
and it is not difficult to see how other and distant tribes might claim
to be Shoshones as a passport to favor.
[Illustration]
On the Humboldt we had a further division of our ranks. In going down
the river we went sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, but
mostly on the north side, till we were nearing what are now known as
the Humboldt Mountains. We were getting tired, and some were in favor
of leaving the oxen, of which we then had only about seven or eight,
and rushing on into California. They said there was plenty of beef in
California. But some of us said: "No; our oxen are now our only supply
of food. We are doing well, making eighteen or twenty miles a day."
Leaving the Sink of the Humboldt, we crossed a considerable stream
which must have been Carson River, and came to another stream which
must have been Walker River, and followed it up to where it came out of
the mountains, which proved to be the Sierra Nevada. We did not know
the name of the mountains. Neither had these rivers then been named;
nor had they been seen by Kit Carson or Joe Walker, for whom they were
named, nor were they seen until 1845 by Frémont, who named them.
We were now in what is at present Nevada, and probably within forty
miles of the present boundary of California.
[Illustration: Wagon train near the junction of the forks of the
Platte.]
We went on, traveling west as near as we could. When we killed our
last ox we shot and ate crows or anything we could kill, and one man
shot a wild-cat. We could eat anything. One day in the morning I went
ahead, on foot of course, to see if I could kill something, it being
understood that the company would keep on as near west as possible
and find a practicable road. I followed an Indian trail down into the
cañon, meeting many Indians on the way up. They did not molest me,
but I did not quite like their looks. I went about ten miles down the
cañon, and then began to think it time to strike north to intersect the
trail on the company going west. A most difficult time I had scaling
the precipice. Once I threw my gun up ahead of me, being unable to hold
it and climb, and then was in despair lest I could not get up where it
was, but finally I did barely manage to do so, and made my way north.
As the darkness came on I was obliged to look down and feel with my
feet lest I should pass over the trail of the party without seeing it.
Just at dark I came to an enormous fallen tree and tried to go around
the top, but the place was too brushy, so I went around the butt, which
seemed to me to be about twenty or twenty-five feet above my head. This
I suppose to have been one of the fallen trees in the Calaveras Grove
of _Sequoia gigantea_ or mammoth trees, as I have since been there, and
to my own satisfaction identified the lay of the land and the tree.
Hence I concluded that I must have been the first white man who ever
saw the _Sequoia gigantea_, of which I told Frémont when he came to
California in 1844. Of course sleep was impossible, for I had neither
blanket nor coat, and burned or froze alternately as I turned from
one side to the other before the small fire which I had built, until
morning, when I started eastward to intersect the trail, thinking the
company had turned north. But I traveled until noon and found no trail;
then striking south, I came to the camp which I had left the previous
morning. The party had gone, but not where they had said they would go;
for they had taken the same trail I had followed, into the cañon, and
had gone up the south side, which they had found so steep that many of
the poor animals could not climb it and had to be left. When I arrived
the Indians were there cutting the horses to pieces and carrying off
the meat. My situation, alone among strange Indians killing our poor
horses, was by no means comfortable. Afterward we found that these
Indians were always at war with the Californians. They were known
as the Horse Thief Indians, and lived chiefly on horse flesh; they
had been in the habit of raiding the ranches even to the very coast,
driving away horses by the hundreds into the mountains to eat. That
night after dark I overtook the party in camp.
We were now on the edge of the San Joaquin Valley, but we did not even
know that we were in California.
As soon as we came in sight of the bottom land of the stream we saw
an abundance of antelopes and sandhill cranes. We killed two of each
the first evening. Wild grapes also abounded. The next day we killed
thirteen deer and antelopes, jerked the meat and got ready to go on,
all except the captain's mess of seven or eight, who decided to stay
there and lay in meat enough to last them into California! We were
really almost down to tidewater, but did not know it.
The next day, judging by the timber we saw, we concluded there was a
river to the west. So two men went ahead to see if they could find a
trail or a crossing. The timber seen proved to be along what it now
known as the San Joaquin River. We sent two men on ahead to spy out
the country. At night one of them returned saying they had come across
an Indian on horseback without a saddle who wore a cloth jacket but
no other clothing. From what they could understand the Indian knew
Dr. Marsh and had offered to guide them to his place. He plainly said
"Marsh," and of course we supposed it was the Dr. Marsh before referred
to who had written the letter to a friend in Jackson County, Missouri,
and so it proved. One man went with the Indian to Marsh's ranch and
the other came back to tell us what he had done, with the suggestion
that we should go on and cross the river (San Joaquin) at the place to
which the trail was leading. In that way we found ourselves two days
later at Dr. Marsh's ranch, and there we learned that we were really
in California and our journey at an end. After six months we had now
arrived at the first settlement in California, November 4, 1841.
RÉSUMÉ OF FRÉMONT'S EXPEDITIONS
BY M. N. O.
[Illustration]
A full account of the exploring expeditions of John C. Frémont would
form almost a complete history of the great West during that time--from
June, 1842, to February, 1854. The three earlier expeditions were made
at the expense and under the direction of the Government. The two later
ones were private ventures.
The first expedition left Choteau's Landing, near the site of Kansas
City, on June 10, 1842. The party consisted of twenty-eight members,
with Frémont in command, Charles Preuss, topographical engineer, Lucien
Maxwell, hunter, and Kit Carson, guide. It was accompanied by Henry
Brant, a son of Colonel J. H. Brant, of St. Louis, and Randolph Benton,
Frémont's brother-in-law, a boy of twelve. The remainder of the party,
twenty-two in number, were principally Creole or Canadian _voyageurs_.
The party was well armed and mounted, with the exception of the eight
cart-drivers. For some distance the expedition followed very nearly the
route taken by the first emigrant train, of which General Bidwell was a
member, and, like them, met vast herds of buffaloes and other game.
This route followed the general line of the Kansas and Platte Rivers,
and for forty miles beyond the junction of the North and South Forks
of the Platte it kept close to the latter. At this point the party
separated, Frémont with five men continuing along the South Fork, while
the others struck across country to the North Fork, and, resuming
the emigrant route, passed by Scott's Bluff, Chimney Rock, and other
landmarks. At Fort Laramie they were reunited early in July. Every
obstruction was thrown in the way of their advance. The trappers, under
the well-known mountaineer, Jim Bridger, warned them against the danger
of proceeding; and the Indians at Fort Laramie threatened them with
destruction if they insisted upon advancing. But warnings and threats
alike failed. In a council held at Fort Laramie Frémont announced his
intention of pressing on in pursuance of his original plans.
On the 28th of July it was decided that the party should conceal its
_impedimenta_ and push forward in light marching order.
The Rocky Mountains were crossed at South Pass on the 8th of August,
and the party then struck northward, now for the first time traveling
over untrodden ground. After many adventures and much hardship they
reached the Wind River Mountains; the highest peak, named, after the
first man to make the ascent, Frémont's Peak, was scaled, and the
American flag planted upon its summit. This mountain, perhaps the
loftiest in the Rocky Mountain system, is 13,570 feet in height. From
this point the party returned by way of the Nebraska River, reaching
St. Louis on the 17th of October.
The second expedition started in the spring of 1843. Frémont received
instructions to connect his explorations of 1842 with the surveys of
Commander Wilkes on the Pacific coast. There were thirty-nine men
in the party. Mr. Preuss was again topographical engineer; Thomas
Fitzpatrick was guide. Theodore Talbot and Frederick Dwight joined the
party for personal reasons. These with thirty-two white men, a free
colored man, Jacob Dodson, and two Delaware Indians, completed the
number.
[Illustration: View of the dry bed of the South Fork of the Platte
(1890).]
The preparations for departure being completed, on the 29th of May
the party set out, following the general direction taken by the first
expedition but farther to the south, crossing the two forks of the
Kansas and reaching Fort St. Vrain on the Fourth of July. Instead of
turning directly north to Fort Laramie, as he had done in 1842, Frémont
took a westerly course. On the 14th, at the point where the Boiling
Spring River enters the Arkansas, the party were delighted to meet Kit
Carson, and to secure his services as guide. Several parties had been
sent out to secure supplies. Failing in this, they returned to Fort
St. Vrain. At this point Alexis Godey was engaged as hunter. Frémont
says, "In courage and professional skill he was a formidable rival to
Carson." Going through the Medicine Butte Pass, following the Platte
and the Sweetwater, they crossed the South Pass and struck directly
westward to the Bear River, which, flowing in a southerly direction,
empties into Great Salt Lake. After some exploration of its northern
end, on the 18th of September the party were again united at Fort Hall
on the Shoshone, and preparations were made to push on to the Columbia.
The cold and the scarcity of provisions decided Frémont to send back
a number of the men who had so far accompanied him. Eleven men, among
them Basil Lajeunesse, who was an extremely valuable man, returned, for
one reason or another, to their homes. The remnant of the party pushed
on, following the course of the Snake River to Walla Walla. On the 4th
of November they passed the Dalles of the Columbia, and a few days
later reached Fort Vancouver. A number of excursions in the vicinity
brought into view the snow-covered peaks of Mount Rainier (Mount
Tacoma), Mount St. Helen's, and Mount Hood. On the 25th of November
the party began its homeward trip, which was accomplished by a wide
southerly sweep, and through much privation, danger, and suffering.
The path lay first down through Oregon and California, over the snowy
passes of the Sierra Nevada, by the waters of the Sacramento to
Sutter's Fort. The experiences of travel on the snow-covered mountains,
through which their way had to be broken, were terrible. Worn out,
sometimes crazed by exposure and suffering, one man after another
would wander off and get lost, and the strength of the rest, which was
weakness at best, would be taxed to hunt up the wanderers. At last the
stragglers were all gathered in except Baptiste Derosier, who was given
up for lost, but who turned up two years later in St. Louis.
[Illustration: Independence Rock, Sweetwater River.]
This expedition through the great valley lying between the Rockies on
the east and the Sierra Nevada on the west opened up a country unknown
except to Indians and trappers, and disproved the idea, which had
hitherto been accepted as fact, that a great waterway led directly
westward through the Sierra to the Pacific coast. After an excursion to
San Francisco the route southward was resumed, along the direction of
the coast and about one hundred miles east of it, to a point not far
from Los Angeles, then curving up and proceeding due northeasterly and
then northerly till Great Salt Lake was again reached at its southern
extremity. This great reëntrant curve of three thousand five hundred
miles was traveled over in eight months, during the severities of a
winter in the mountains and never once out of sight of snow. During
these eight months no word had come back to the East from the party,
and grave fears were entertained for their safety.
The third and last Government expedition set out in the autumn of 1845.
The object in view was to follow up the Arkansas River to its source in
the Rocky Mountains, to complete the exploration of Great Salt Lake,
and to extend the survey westward and southwestward to the Cascades
and the Sierra Nevada, in order to ascertain the best route by which
to reach the Pacific coast in this lower latitude. Matters were in a
very unsettled condition; the Mexican war was impending, and trouble
was brooding over our southwestern possessions. Before going on this
expedition Frémont was brevetted lieutenant and captain at the same
time.
[Illustration: Laramie Peak, from one of the old mountain trails.]
Bent's Fort was reached as expeditiously as possible, since the real
object of the exploration lay beyond the Rockies, and the winter was
fast approaching. The _personnel_ of the party it is difficult to
find. Edward Kern took the place of Mr. Preuss as topographer; he
was also a valuable acquisition to the party because of his artistic
ability. Lieutenants Abert and Peck were under Frémont's command.
Jacob Dodson, the colored man who accompanied the second expedition,
and a Chinook Indian who had gone back to Washington with Frémont, and
two gentlemen, James McDowell and Theodore Talbot, accompanied the
expedition. Fitzpatrick again served as guide and Hatcher as hunter.
Later they were joined by Alexis Godey, Kit Carson, and Richard Owens,
three men who, under Napoleon, says Frémont, would have been made
marshals because of their cool courage, keenness, and resolution.
When they set out from Bent's Fort the party numbered sixty members,
many of them Frémont's old companions. After a short and easy journey
they reached the southern end of Great Salt Lake, and spent two weeks
exploring it and fixing certain points. Then they struck out in a
westerly direction, across the dreary, barren desert west of Great Salt
Lake to the foot of the Sierra, by way of the Humboldt River. When the
party, after following two routes, met again at Walker's Lake, Frémont
found his men too worn and exhausted and the stock of provisions too
low to think of trying to cross the mountains together, so the party
was again divided. Frémont with fifteen picked men undertook to cross
the mountains, get relief at Sutter's, and meet the other and weaker
party. These he ordered to go southward, skirting the eastern base
of the Sierra till a warmer climate and more open passes were found,
and to meet him at an appointed place. In ten days Frémont reached
Sutter's Fort, laid in his supplies of cattle, horses, and provisions,
and proceeded to the appointed place, but no signs of Talbot's party
were to be seen. Owing to a mistake each party went to a different
place. Both halted, and turned about, hoping to effect a junction, but
to no purpose. Frémont suffered severely from the attacks of hostile
Indians. Finally each party found its way separately to the California
settlements. Then followed a conflict concerning which there is much
controversy. Frémont was compelled by the Mexican governor to retire to
Oregon. After serious conflicts with the Klamath Indians he returned to
take part in the Bear Flag insurrection, which was the occasion of the
conquest of the territory. A difference as to precedence arose between
Commodore Stockton of the naval and General Kearny of the land forces.
Frémont chose to serve under Stockton, as it was from him in the first
instance, before Kearny arrived, that he had received his orders.
He was court-martialed for mutiny and disobedience to his superior
officer, and was found guilty, but was pardoned in consideration of his
distinguished services to his country. Feeling that the verdict was
unjust, he threw up his commission, and so ended the last Government
expedition.
The fourth expedition was a private venture made at Frémont's own risk
and that of Senator Benton. The party followed for some distance the
route along the Kansas, turning southward at the junction of the two
forks, and striking across to the Arkansas, and so on as far as Bent's
Fort. On November 25, 1848, the party, thirty-two in number, left the
upper pueblo of the Arkansas with one hundred good mules and ample
provision for crossing the St. Johns Mountains, part of the Rocky
Mountain System. They had for guide a well-known mountaineer, Bill
Williams, but he proved a blind leader of the blind. Instead of finding
a pass, he led the party over the top of the highest mountains, where
there was no pasturage and where they were exposed to intense suffering
and toil and terrible loss of life: every mule and horse, and one-third
of the men, perished from starvation or freezing. The rescued remnant
of the party moved southward to Taos, and so by a more southerly route
to California. The addition made to geographical knowledge by this
disastrous expedition was not great. Frémont believed that if they had
not been misled by their guide he would have discovered the best route
to California.
[Illustration: A brush with the Redskins.]
In March, 1852, an appropriation was made by the Government for further
surveys of the great western routes. A highway and railroad were
growing more and more necessary since the acquisition of California.
Frémont, on the strength of this, determined to prove his belief
about the central route which he had so disastrously failed to find
on his fourth expedition. In August, 1853, he set out on his last
expedition. After two weeks' detention in consequence of Frémont's
illness, the party was again set in motion. It crossed the Rockies
at Cochetopa Pass, not far above the scene of the terrible suffering
in the preceding exploration. For a time it seemed as though the
experiences of the fourth expedition were going to be repeated.
Provisions became very scarce, and at last failed entirely, and then
the explorers began to kill and devour their horses. Colonel Frémont
called his men together and made them take a solemn oath never to
resort to cannibalism, no matter what extremities they might reach.
Times grew worse; they were reduced to living upon the hides, entrails,
and burned bones of their horses. By these and by a certain variety of
cactus which they occasionally were able to get from under the snow,
life was sustained. In this way the party of twenty-two lived for fifty
days, tramping through the snow with Frémont at their head treading
out a pathway for his men. At last the entire party became barefoot.
On February 1 Mr. Fuller gave out. The snow was very deep; his feet
were severely frozen, and he found it impossible to advance. He was put
upon one of the remaining horses and the men divided their miserable
pittances of rations to increase his. Almost in sight of succor he
died,--in Frémont's words,--"like a man, on horseback in his saddle,
and we buried him like a soldier on the spot where he fell." Frémont,
in the words of Benton, "went straight to the spot where the guide had
gone astray, followed the course described by the mountain men, and
found safe and easy passes all the way to California through a good
country and upon the straight line of 38° and 39°." It probably did
not seem such a "safe and easy" thing to the starving and half-frozen
men during those fifty days of anguish. At last, after they had been
forty-eight hours without a morsel of food, relief came to the party.
Something of the practical value of these explorations may be inferred
from the fact that the great railroads connecting East and West lie in
large measure through the country explored by Frémont, sometimes in the
very lines he followed; and this is equally true of the highways.
The winter of this last exploration was exceptionally severe; and since
the point Frémont wished to demonstrate was the practicability of this
route in winter, the season was peculiarly favorable.
ROUGH TIMES IN ROUGH PLACES A PERSONAL NARRATIVE
BY C. G. MCGEHEE
[The earlier explorations of Frémont through the Rocky Mountains
and into California--those of 1842, 1843, and 1845--were made under
the direction and at the expense of the United States Government,
and of these we have full reports. Far less is known of the fourth
expedition, which he made in 1848-49, at private expense.
The following article is made up of the records and diary of a member
of the party, and left at his death.
As far as Pueblo, on the Arkansas River, at the entrance to the
Rocky Mountains, this party followed very nearly the same line taken
by the expedition of 1844, which in the main follows the present
route of railway travel on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé
line. The experiences of the party in their slow progress over the
plains--their encounters with Indians, buffaloes, elk, antelopes, and
wild horses--are not unique, and will, therefore, be omitted. We take
up the diary where the old trail is left and the party plunges into
the unknown mazes of the Rockies under the guidance of one of the
trappers, named Bill Williams,--of a type which has long passed out
of existence,--and who is thus described:]
Bill Williams was the most successful trapper in the mountains, and
the best acquainted with the ways and habits of the wild tribes among
and near whom he spent his adventurous life. He first came to the West
as a sort of missionary to the Osages. But "Old Bill" laid aside his
Christianity and took up his rifle and came to the mountains He was
full of oddities in appearance, manner, conversation, and actions. He
generally went out alone into the mountains, and would remain there
trapping by himself for several months together, his lonely camps being
often pitched in the vicinity of hostile savages. But he was as well
versed in stratagem as they, and though he bore the marks of balls and
arrows, he was a terror to them in single fight.
He was a dead shot with a rifle, though he always shot with a "double
wabble"; he never could hold his gun still, yet his ball went always to
the spot on a single shot. Though a most indefatigable walker, he never
could walk on a straight line, but went staggering along, first on one
side and then the other. He was an expert horseman; scarce a horse or
mule could unseat him. He rode leaning forward upon the pommel, with
his rifle before him, his stirrups ridiculously short, and his breeches
rubbed up to his knees, leaving his legs bare even in freezing cold
weather. He wore a loose monkey-jacket or a buckskin hunting-shirt,
and for his head-covering a blanket-cap, the two top corners drawn up
into two wolfish, satyr-like ears, giving him somewhat the appearance
of the representations we generally meet with of his Satanic Majesty,
at the same time rendering his _tout ensemble_ exceedingly ludicrous.
He was a perfect specimen of his kind, an embodiment of the reckless
and extravagant propensity of the mountaineers, and he pursued his
lucrative but perilous vocation from an innate love of its excitement
and dangers. For twenty-one years he had lived in the mountains without
returning to civilized life until he was taken back under guard, a year
or two previous, by Captain Cook, for the offense of manoeuvering and
acting the Indian in his buckskin suit on the plains, thereby deceiving
the captain into the belief that he was an Indian, and giving his
men a fruitless chase of several miles over the prairies before they
could overtake him on his pony, much to his diversion and the officer's
chagrin.
Such was old Bill Williams--he who was destined to be our guide at
this time. But it was not without some hesitation that he consented to
go, for most of the old trappers at the pueblo declared that it was
impossible to cross the mountains at that time; that the cold upon
the mountains was unprecedented, and the snow deeper than they had
ever known it so early in the year. However, Old Bill concluded to
go, for he thought we could manage to get through, though not without
considerable suffering.
On the 26th of November [1848] we entered the Rocky Mountains, which
had been for days looming up before us, presenting to view one
continuous sheet of snow. The snow already covered the mountains and
was rapidly deepening. I have frequently since called to mind the
expression of one of the men as we rode along before entering Hard
Scrabble. As we looked upon the stormy mountain so portentous of the
future, he said, "Friends, I don't want my bones to bleach upon those
mountains." Poor fellow, little did he dream of what the future would
be!
In the evening, from our first camp, eight miles in the mountains,
several of us climbed to a high point to take a last look at the
plains. The sight was beautiful; the snow-covered plain far beneath
us stretching eastward as far as the eye could reach, while on the
opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.
We entered the mountains on foot, packing our saddle-mules with corn
to sustain the animals. We traveled on, laboring through the deep snow
on the rugged mountain range, passing successively through what are
called White Mountain Valley and Wet Mountain Valley into Grand River
Valley. The cold was intense, and storms frequently compelled us to lie
in camp, from the impossibility of forcing the mules against them. A
number of the men were frozen; the animals became exhausted from the
inclemency of the weather and want of food, what little grass there was
being all buried in the snow. As we proceeded matters grew worse and
worse. The mules gave out one by one and dropped down in the trail, and
their packs were placed upon the saddle-mules. The cold became more and
more intense, so many degrees below zero that the mercury sank entirely
into the bulb. The breath would freeze upon the men's faces and their
lips become so stiff from the ice that it was almost impossible to
speak; the long beard and hair stood out white and stiff with the
frost. The aspect of the mules was as bad as that of the men; their
eyelashes and the long beard about their mouths were frozen stiff,
and their breath settled upon their breasts and sides until they were
perfectly white with frost. The snow, too, would clog under their hoofs
until it formed a ball six inches long, making them appear as though
they were walking on stilts. With the deep snow around us, and the
pendant frost upon the leafless trees, Nature and ourselves presented a
very harmonious picture. Two trappers, Old Bill informed us, had been
frozen to death here the year previous.
After coming through Robideaux's Pass, which was exceedingly difficult,
we descended into Grand River Valley. The snow lay deep, as elsewhere,
and there was no sign of vegetation. One broad, white, dreary-looking
plain lay before us, bounded by lofty white mountains. The Rio Grande
lay fifty miles ahead, so we determined to get through the snow-covered
plain as quickly as possible. We traveled late and camped in the
middle of it, without any shelter from the winds, and with no fuel but
some wild sage, a small shrub which grew sparsely around. At night
the thermometer stood at seventeen degrees below zero. During the day
Ducatel, a young fellow in the company, had come very near freezing
to death. By collecting a quantity of the sage we made sufficient
fire to cook, or rather half-cook, our supper of deer meat, five deer
having been killed that evening by two of the men. Bolting down the
half-cooked meat, we quickly turned into our blankets in order to keep
tolerably warm and to protect ourselves against the driving snow, for
since leaving the States we had scarcely stretched our tents. In the
night, as ill luck would have it, our mules, poor creatures, which
had stood shivering in the cold with bowed backs and drooping heads,
suffering from their exposed situation and half-starved, being now
reduced to a pint of corn twice a day, and having no other resource for
food, broke loose from their weak fastenings of sage bushes and started
off _en masse_ on the back trail. As soon as it was ascertained that
they were gone, in the middle of the night, we had to rise from our
beds, lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike
out in pursuit of them. We overtook them several miles from camp, and,
taking them back, made them secure. But we rested little the remainder
of the night.
The next day we reached the Rio Grande del Norte. This we found frozen
over, and we camped on the river bottom, which is thickly timbered
with cottonwood and willow. Here my feet and those of several others
were frozen--the result in part of wearing boots, for which I quickly
substituted moccasins, with blanket wrappers, which are much warmer
than socks, and which, with leggings of the same material, afford the
best protection for the lower extremities against severe cold.
Continuing up the river two or three days, we again entered the
mountains, which soon assumed a very rugged character. Nature, in
the ascent towards the Sierra Madre, presents herself with all her
features prominent and strongly marked, her figures bold and colossal.
Our progress became slow and laborious. Our track lay through deep
mountain gorges, amid towering precipices and beetling crags, and
along steep declivities where at any other season it would have been
next to impossible to travel, but where now the deep snow afforded a
secure foothold. In making the ascent of some of these precipitous
mountain sides, now and then a mule would lose its footing and go
tumbling and rolling many feet down. My saddle mule took one of these
tumbles. Losing her foothold, she got her rope hitched upon a large
log which lay loosely balanced on the rocks, and, knocking me down and
jerking the log clear over my head, they went tumbling down together.
But fortunately no one was hurt. A great obstacle to our progress were
the rapid, rough-bottomed, but boggy streams which we had frequently
to encounter in the deep and narrow ravines, where the mules would get
balked, half a dozen at a time, with their packs on. Then we had to
wade in up to our middle among the floating ice in the freezing water
to help them out.
The farther we went the more obstacles we had to encounter;
difficulties beset us so thickly on every hand as we advanced that they
threatened to thwart our expedition. The snow became deeper daily, and
to advance was but adding dangers to difficulties. About one-third
of the men were already more or less frost-bitten; every night some
of the mules would freeze to death, and every day as many more would
give out from exhaustion and be left on the trail.... Finally, on the
17th of December, after frequent ineffectual attempts, we found that
we could force our way no farther. By our utmost endeavors with mauls
and spades we could make but half a mile or a mile per day. The cold
became more severe, and storms constant, so that nothing was visible at
times through the thick driving snow. For days in succession we would
labor to beat a trail a few hundred yards in length, but the next day
the storm would leave no trace of the previous day's work. We were
on the St. John Mountain, a section of the Sierra Madre and the main
range of the Rocky Mountains proper. At an elevation of 11,000 feet the
cold was so intense and the atmosphere so rare that respiration became
difficult; the least exertion became laborious and fatiguing, and would
sometimes cause the blood to start from lips and nose. The mercury
in the thermometer stood 20° below zero, and the snow was here from
four to thirty feet deep. When we built our camp-fires deep pits were
formed by the melting of the snow, completely concealing the different
messes from each other. Down in these holes we slept, spreading our
blankets upon the snow, every morning crawling out from under a deep
covering of snow which had fallen upon us during the night. The strong
pine smoke,--for here there was no timber but pine,--together with the
reflection from the snow, so affected our sight that at times we could
scarcely see. The snow drifted over us continually, driven about by the
violence of the chill blasts which swept over the mountains.
Besides ourselves and our mules, no vestige of animal life appeared
here in this lofty and dreary solitude; not even the ravens uttered
their hoarse cry, nor the wolves their hollow and dismal howl. Finally
nearly the entire band of our one hundred mules had frozen to death.
After remaining in this condition for five days without being able
to move camp, the colonel [Frémont] determined to return as quickly
as possible by a different course to the Rio Grande. There we had
left game upon which we could subsist until a party, to be previously
despatched, should return with relief. So on the 22d of December we
commenced our move, crossing over the bleak mountain strewn with the
frozen mules, and packing our baggage with us. We were more than a
week moving our camp and equipage over the top of this mountain, a
distance of two miles from our first camp. The day we began to move
(our provisions having been all consumed, except a small portion of
macaroni and sugar, reserved against hard times), we commenced to eat
the carcasses of the frozen mules. It was hoped we might save the few
that yet lived, but this proving impossible, we began to kill and eat
the surviving ones. On Christmas Day the colonel despatched a party
of four men, King, Croitzfeldt, Brackenridge, and Bill Williams, to
proceed down the Rio del Norte with all possible speed to Albuquerque,
where they were to procure provisions and mules to relieve us. He
allowed them sixteen days to go and return. We made our Christmas
and New Year's dinner on mule meat,--not the fattest, as may be
judged,--and continued to feed upon it while it was within reach....
At last we reached the river, but we found no game; the deer and elk
had been driven off by the deep snow. For days we had been anxiously
looking for the return of King's party with relief. The time allotted
him had already expired; day after day passed, but with no prospect of
relief. We concluded that the party had been attacked by Indians, or
that they had lost their way and had perished. The colonel, who had
moved down to the river before us, waited two days longer, and then,
taking just enough provision before it was all exhausted to last them
along the river, himself started off with Mr. Preuss, Godey, Theodore
(Godey's nephew), and Sanders, the colonel's servant-man, intending to
find out what had become of the party and hasten them back, or, if our
fears concerning them proved true, to push on himself to the nearest
settlement and send relief. He left an order, which we scarcely knew
how to interpret, to the effect that we must finish packing the baggage
to the river, and hasten on down as speedily as possible to the mouth
of Rabbit River where we would meet relief, and that if we wished to
see him again we must be in a hurry about it, as he was going on to
California.
Two days after the colonel left we had all assembled on the river. The
last of our provisions had been consumed, and we had been living for
several days upon parfleche. Our condition was perilous in the extreme.
Starvation stared us in the face; to remain there longer was certain
death. We held a consultation and determined to start down the river
the next day and try to make our way to some settlement where we could
get relief; in the mean time keeping as much together as possible, and
hunting along as we went as our only chance of safety.
Now commenced a train of horrors which it is painful to force the
mind to dwell upon, and which the memory shrinks from. Before we had
proceeded far Manuel, a California Indian of the Cosumne tribe, who
had his feet badly frozen, stopped and begged Mr. Vincent Haler to
shoot him, and failing to meet death in this way turned back to the
lodge at the camp we had left, there to await his fate. The same day
Wise lay down on the ice and died; and the Indian boys, Joaquin and
Gregorio, who came along afterward, having stopped back to get some
wood for Manuel, seeing his body, covered it over with brush and snow.
That night Carver, crazed by hunger, raved terribly all night, so that
some in the camp with him became alarmed for their safety. He told
them, if any would follow him back, he had a plan by which they might
live. The next day he wandered off and we never saw him again. The next
night Sorel, his system wrought upon by hunger, cold, and exhaustion,
took a violent fit which lasted for some time, and to which succeeded
an entire prostration of all his faculties. At the same time he was
almost totally snow-blind. Poor fellow, the next day he traveled as
long as his strength would allow, and then, telling us we would have
to leave him, that he could go no farther, blind with snow he lay down
on the river-bank to die. Moran soon joined him, and they never came
up again. Late at night, arriving one by one, we all came into a camp
together on the river-bank. Gloom and despondency were depicted on
every face. Our condition had become perfectly desperate. We knew not
what to do; the candles and parfleche had kept us alive thus far, but
these were gone. Our appearance was most desolate as we sat in silence
around the fires, in view of a fast approaching death by starvation,
while hunger gnawed upon our vitals. Then Vincent Haler, to whom the
colonel had left the charge of the camp, and whom for that reason we
had allowed to have the chief direction, spoke up and told us that he
then and there threw up all authority; that he could do nothing, and
knew not what to advise; that he looked upon our condition as hopeless,
but he would suggest, as the best advice he could give, that we break
up into small parties, and, hunting along, make the best of our way
down separately, each party making use of all the advantages that might
fall in its way, so that if any should chance to get through to a
settlement they could forward relief to the others.... It was curious
to hear different men tell of the workings of the mind when they were
starving. Some were constantly dreaming or imagining that they saw
before them a bountiful feast, and would make selections of different
dishes. Others engaged their minds with other thoughts. For my part,
I kept my mind amused by entering continually into all the minutiæ
of farming, or of some other systematic business which would keep up
a train of thought, or by working a mental solution of mathematical
problems, bringing in review the rudiments of some science, or by
laying out plans for the future, all having a connection with home
and after life. So in this way never allowing myself to think upon
the hopelessness of our condition, yet always keeping my eyes open
to every chance, I kept hope alive and never once suffered myself to
despond. And to this course I greatly attribute my support, for there
were stronger men who, by worrying themselves, doubtless hastened their
death. Ten out of our party of thirty-three that entered the mountains
had perished, and a few days more would have finished the others.
Late in the afternoon of February 9, cold, hungry, and weary, with no
little joy we all at once hailed the sight of the little Pueblo of
the Colorado. We raised a yell as we came in sight which made the
Pueblanos stand out and gaze. In a few minutes, with their assistance,
we struggled forward with them and sought the comfort which the place
afforded.
In sight of Taos, and several miles to the southeast, at the mouth
of a deep gorge or cañon by which the Taos River debouches from the
mountains, is a walled town or pueblo, one of a great many of the same
kind in this country, inhabited by the Pueblos or civilized Indians, a
remnant of the race of Montezuma. They live in houses built of stone
and earth, or of adobe, most of which at this place were three or four
stories high, and some of which even attained the height of eleven
stories, each story receding a few feet back from the front of the one
below it, and each one reached by a ladder placed against the wall,
communicating with the door on top, and capable of being let down or
drawn up at pleasure. A high mud wall incloses the buildings, which
front towards the center, and in the middle is a lofty church of the
same material as the other buildings, with walls six feet thick.
At Taos we first heard with certainty of the abundance of gold
in California, the first account of which had reached the States
immediately before our departure, but was scarcely believed.
On the 13th of February, having laid in a supply of provisions from the
quartermaster's department, being facilitated by the generous kindness
of the army officers, and having hired muleteers and a train of mules
to take us down to Albuquerque, we set out for Santa Fé.
KIT CARSON, LAST OF THE TRAIL-MAKERS
BY CHARLES M. HARVEY
In his various activities, Carson played many parts, including those of
hunter, ranchman, and miner.
As historians and writers of Western romance picture him, Kit Carson
was solely an Indian-fighter and scout. Frontier exigencies, indeed,
compelled him to be these, but he was much more. He was a sagacious
civic chieftain as well as intrepid leader in war, Indian, foreign and
civil; a wise counselor of red men and white; a man who touched the
West's wild life at more points than any other person of any day; a man
who blazed trails on which great commonwealths were afterward built,
and who helped to build some of them.
Born in Kentucky ten months later than Lincoln, and seventy-five miles
east of Lincoln's birthplace, Kit Carson, at an early age, was carried
to Missouri by his parents. He received little school education, but
learned to ride, to handle a rifle, and to trap bear and beaver on that
borderline of civilization. He was set to work at a trade which had no
attractions for him; and his imagination was fired by the tales of the
strange and stirring scenes and deeds in the vast expanse off toward
the sunset that came to him through passing hunters and traders. The
_Missouri Intelligencer_, a weekly newspaper published in Franklin, on
the Missouri River, in its issue of October 12, 1826, tells the sequel:
Notice is hereby given to all persons that Christopher Carson, a
boy about sixteen years old, small for his age, but thick-set, with
light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard
County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's
trade, on or about the 1st of September last. He is supposed to have
made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified
not to harbor, support, or assist said boy, under penalty of the law.
One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the
said boy.
DAVID WORKMAN.
Six years earlier than this, on the banks of the Missouri, and a
hundred miles east of Franklin, died Daniel Boone. In the retrospect,
Carson's name naturally associates itself with Boone's. On a broader
field, in the face of obstacles and perils equally formidable, with
a greater variety of resources, and with a far readier adaptability
to rapidly changing conditions, Carson continued the rôle of
empire-builder which Boone had begun.
[Illustration: Kit Carson.]
In 1826, the only States west of the Mississippi were Missouri and
Louisiana, and these, with the Territory of Arkansas, contained not
much more than a third as many inhabitants as a single city of that
region, St. Louis, has in 1910. Our present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Utah, Nevada and California, with parts of Colorado and Wyoming,
belonged to Mexico, and, with Mexico, had just broken away from Spain.
Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with large portions of Wyoming and
Montana, were in controversy between the United States and England,
and were to remain in that condition for twenty years longer. West and
southwest of the Missouri, and on its upper waters for hundreds of
miles east of that river, roamed some of the most warlike and powerful
Indian tribes of North America. Except that, in the interval, the
capital of the southwest territory had swung from Madrid, Spain, to
Mexico, no perceptible change had taken place on the western frontier
since the days, twenty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark explored the
region from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia;
or since Captain Zebulon M. Pike, seeking the sources of the Red
River, entered Spanish territory unawares, in the southern part of
the present Colorado, and was carried a prisoner before Charles IV's
governor-general at Santa Fé. In no age or land did adventure ever
offer a more attractive field to daring and enterprise than that which
spread itself out before young Carson at the moment when, fleeing from
the little saddler's shop, he plunged into the current of the stirring
life off to the westward.
First as a teamster on the Santa Fé Trail, of which Franklin was then
the eastern terminus, then as a worker at the copper mines on the Gila,
and afterward as a hunter, trapper, and guide across the West's wide
spaces, Carson traversed a large part of the region from the Missouri
to the Sacramento, from the Gulf of California to the upper reaches
of the Columbia, and, as exigencies demanded, alternately fighting,
fleeing from, or affiliating with Comanches, Apaches, Sioux, Pawnees,
and Blackfeet. Thus he was thrown into active association with St.
Vrain, the Bents, Ewing Young, Fitzpatrick, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger,
the Sublettes, and other well-known plainsmen and mountaineers of
the middle third of the nineteenth century, and won a reputation for
initiative, versatility, and daring which made him a marked figure
among the frontier leaders of his day. Moreover, in the midst of his
exciting activities he found time to marry, to establish a home, and
to practise the civic virtues which, refusing to lend themselves to
picturesque treatment, have eluded the writers of romance.
At this time, May, 1842, Lieutenant John C. Frémont, on his way up the
Mississippi with the first of his exploration parties, fell in with
Carson and induced him to enter the government service as the official
guide of the expedition. He afterward wrote:
On the boat I met Kit Carson. He was returning from putting his
little daughter in a convent school in St. Louis. I was pleased with
him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man
of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear,
steady blue eye and frank speech and manner--quiet and unassuming.
Carson, then a little less than thirty-three years of age, was already
a national character. The association which began at that time lasted
to the end of the Mexican War.
Washington, a city which saw many strange spectacles, had a novel
sight on the June day of 1847 when Kit Carson entered it with letters
from Frémont. In various phrase, this is the substance of what the
newspapers of Washington, New York, and Boston said: Here is the man
who has blazed paths for the Pathfinder from the mouth of the Missouri
to the Golden Gate; who, in 1846, guided General Stephen W. Kearny's
column of the Army of the West through New Mexico to the Pacific;
who, when Kearny was surrounded and besieged by the Mexicans, brought
Commodore Stockton's forces to the rescue; and who has just ridden from
Los Angeles, nearly 4,000 miles, with a military escort for the first
1200 miles of the way, eluding or fighting Mexicans and Indians, as
circumstances dictated, carrying to President Polk and to War Secretary
Marcy the story of the conquest of California and of the raising of the
Stars and Stripes along the Pacific coast.
A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of
historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which
Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and
the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity,
his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could
Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the
alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story,
just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional
tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington
was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time
dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the
reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland
march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter
of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the
Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass,
and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.
With the modesty which was one of his characteristics, Carson declined
to accept himself at the appraisement which Washington gave him. As he
viewed them, his achievements were merely part of his day's work, for
the performance of which he deserved no special credit. Accordingly he
left the Capital gladly with the despatches which Polk gave him for the
military commander in California, and then, after another journey back
to Washington, he returned, in 1848, to Taos, and resumed the life of a
ranchman, which had been interrupted six years earlier.
Once more now, in Carson's case, we see the initiative, the
versatility, and the resourcefulness which the frontier conditions of
the older day demanded. In their widely different fields, Crockett,
Sam Houston, and Lincoln disclosed these qualities. Appointed in
1853 Indian agent for the district of New Mexico and vicinity by
President Pierce,--a post which he held till his death, except for
the interlude of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of a
brigadier-general,--he entered a sphere in which he gained a new
distinction. The most formidable Indian-fighter of his age, he was
equally successful as a counselor and conciliator of Indians. His
administration stands guiltless of any complicity in the "century of
dishonor."
As a peacemaker between red men and white and between red men and red,
Carson was more effective than a regiment of cavalry. This was because
he knew the Indian's nature, talked his tongue, took pains to learn
his specific grievances, and could look at things from his point of
view. The Indian had confidence in Carson in a larger degree than in
any other agent of the older day except General William Clark, Lewis's
old partner in the exploration of 1804-06, who, from Monroe's days in
the Presidency to Van Buren's, was superintendent of Indian affairs,
with headquarters at St. Louis. Except Clark, he was more active in
treaty-making between the Government and the red man than any other
agent down to his time.
Socially as well as physically Carson was a path-blazer. With the Dawes
severalty act of 1887 began a revolution in our methods of dealing
with the red men. Many years before that statute was dreamed of,
Carson recommended that the Indians be taught to cultivate the soil,
that allotments of land be given to them as they become capable of
using them, that they be trained to become self-supporting, and that
they be prepared to merge themselves into the mass of the country's
citizenship. In a crude and general way our Indian policy for the last
quarter of a century has proceeded along these lines.
More than any other Indian agent of his day or earlier, Carson exerted
influence with the national authorities to induce them to listen to the
appeals of the country's wards, to remove their grievances, as far as
practicable, to deal with them as individuals, and to arouse in them an
ambition to rise to the industrial status of their white neighbors.
Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death
many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the
West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year
or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction
writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse
of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero
to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at
the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated
with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and
resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De
Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter Root
River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time.
"One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael
Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of
scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who
was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican
Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was
of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian
blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling
all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of
sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife,
Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the
pet name of Chipita."
Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who
became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most
pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch
near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city
with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from
New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and
dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the
course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick,"
he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became
sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to
live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities."
Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I
returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule,
caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there
for many years afterward."
Daniel L. Taylor, mayor of Trinidad, Colorado, who probably stood
closer to Carson during the later years of his life than any other man
now living, related recently to me an incident showing his dislike
of anything which savored of flattery. One day in 1862 the great
frontiersman chanced to stop at Maxwell's ranch, on the Cimmaron River,
in New Mexico, a well-known point on the Santa Fé trail, when a regular
army officer of high rank who was there exclaimed, exuberantly: "So
this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run."
Carson silenced his eulogist by quietly remarking: "Yes, I made some
Indians run, but much of the time they were running after me."
For his honesty and courage in exposing an official who was defrauding
the Government in 1864-65 he was removed by one of his political
superiors from the command at Fort Union to Fort Garland, in Colorado,
but he never complained, and the cause of the removal, which was
eminently creditable to him, was divulged by others, and not by himself.
"In Kit Carson Park, which I have given to the city of Trinidad," said
Mayor Taylor to me, "we shall soon erect a monument to Carson, and we
shall try to make the affair interesting to the entire West. In many
ways he was the most wonderful man that I ever knew."
Even to his old neighbors and associates Carson was a hero during his
lifetime. Merit meets no severer test than this.
An old friend of Carson's told me that his dying exclamation to the
physician who was with him, was "_Doctor, compadre, adios_." The date
was May 23, 1868. As this last of the great trail-makers was dying,
the Union Pacific, pushing westward, and the Central Pacific, moving
eastward, were about to meet at Promontory, Utah, and the continent was
crossed by rail. The heroic age of western expansion had closed.
THE MACMONNIES PIONEER MONUMENT FOR DENVER
AN EMBODIMENT OF THE WESTERN SPIRIT
See Frontispiece.
The pioneer monument of which the equestrian statue of Kit Carson is
the crowning figure consists of a granite shaft decorated with buffalo
skulls and oak garlands, rising from basins decorated with bronze
sculpture groups typifying the prospector, the hunter and the pioneer
mother and child. The fountain, the ground-plan of which is hexagonal,
will be raised on five granite steps. Water will spout into basins
from mountain-lion and trout heads. At the base, the shaft will be
decorated with the arms of Denver, and horns of plenty overflowing with
fruit, grain, corn and gold and silver money--all being the produce of
Colorado.
In developing the main motive of the monument, which seeks to express
the expansive character of the West and its people, the sculptor has
sought to reconcile sculpturesque quality and decorative style with the
portrayal of types of character, without the loss of local definition.
He has sought dignity by avoiding momentary, story-telling situations,
and in the portrayal of character rather than episode, has endeavored
to condense all that is most broadly typical of the West.
In the prospector he has sought to express something of the philosophy
of the miner who alone, in the solitude of the desert, is sustained
by constant hope, and a prophetic vision which recognizes great
possibilities in the smallest indications. In the hunter he has tried
to suggest something of the roving life of the pioneer living among
primitive conditions, daily menaced by death, either from starvation
or from treacherous enemies, and who is only saved from destruction by
constant vigilance and superior woodcraft. In the group of the mother
and child, he has endeavored to reflect the high qualities of courage
and resourcefulness of the pioneer woman, always ready to meet danger
in the defense of her child and her home.
In the equestrian statue of Kit Carson, the sculptor's aim was to
sum up the sentiment of the whole western movement, "The Call of the
West"--"Westward Ho."
The costumes are from actual objects, including a coat worn by Carson,
now owned by Mr. John S. Hough, of Lake City, Colorado. Suggestions
for the head of the mounted scout were taken from his early portraits;
for the hunter, from Jim Baker, an old scout of Colorado; while the
head of the prospector was studied from portraits of prominent Colorado
pioneers.
THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA
BY JOHN S. HITTELL
In the summer of 1847 the American residents of California, numbering
perhaps two thousand, and mostly established near San Francisco Bay,
looked forward with hope and confidence to the future. Their government
held secure possession of the whole territory, and had announced its
purpose to hold it permanently. The Spanish Californians, dissatisfied
with the manner in which Mexico had ruled them, and convinced that she
could not protect them, had abandoned the idea of further resistance.
Notwithstanding the unsettled condition of political affairs, the
market prices of cows, horses and land, which at that time were
the chief articles of sale in the country, had advanced, and this
enhancement of values was generally regarded as a certain proof of the
increased prosperity that would bless the country under the Stars and
Stripes when peace, which seemed near at hand, should be finally made.
It so happened that at this time one of the leading representatives of
American interests in California was John A. Sutter, a Swiss by his
parentage; a German by the place of his birth in Baden; an American by
residence and naturalization in Missouri; and a Mexican by subsequent
residence and naturalization in California. In 1839 he had settled at
the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers, near the site of
the present city of Sacramento.
[Illustration: The most approved California outfit (from _Punch_).]
When he selected this site it was generally considered very
undesirable, but it had advantages which soon became apparent. It was
the head of navigation on the Sacramento River for sailing vessels, and
steam had not yet made its appearance in the waters of the Pacific.
It had a central position in the great interior valley. Its distance
of sixty miles from the nearest village, and its situation on one
of the main traveled routes of the territory, gave political and
military importance to its proprietor. The Mexican governors sought his
influence and conferred power on him. But more important than all these
advantages was the fact that the only wagon road from the Mississippi
Valley to California first reached the navigable waters of the Pacific
at Sutter's Fort. This road had been open for several years and was of
much prospective importance. The immigration had been interrupted by
the war, but would certainly start again as soon as peace should be
restored.
The American residents of California, knowing the feeling prevalent
among their relatives east of the Rocky Mountains, expected that at
least a thousand immigrants, and perhaps two or three times as many,
would arrive overland every year; and they supposed that such additions
to the population would soon add much to the value of property, to
the demand for labor, and to the activity of general business. The
immigration would be especially beneficial to Sutter. At his rancho
they would reach the first settlement of white men in the Sacramento
Valley. There, after their toilsome march across the desert, they
would stop and rest. There, they would purchase supplies of food and
clothing. There, they would sell their exhausted horses and oxen, and
buy fresh ones. There, the penniless would seek employment. There,
those who were ready to continue their journey would separate for the
valleys to the northward, westward, and southward. There, parties
starting for Oregon or "the States" would obtain their last stock of
supplies. The advantages of the site were numerous and evident.
[Illustration: The rush to California; a caricature of the time from
_Punch_.]
But the advantages of Sutter's Fort imposed certain obligations on its
owner. He should be prepared to furnish provisions to the immigrants.
He should not expect the Americans to be content with the Mexican
system of crushing grain by hand on the _metate_, as the flat under
millstone of the Mexicans and native Californians is called, the upper
millstone being cylindrical and used like a rolling-pin. He ought to
build a flour-mill in the Sacramento Valley to grind the wheat which
he cultivated in considerable quantity. There was no great difficulty
about the construction of such a mill. He had a site for it on his own
rancho. The necessary timber for it could be found not far away. Among
the Americans at the fort there was skill to build and to manage it.
These ideas pleased Sutter; he adopted them, and acted on them. He
selected a site and made his plans for a flour-mill, and, partly to get
lumber for it, he determined to build a saw-mill also.
Since there was no good timber in the valley, the saw-mill must be in
the mountains. The site for it was selected by James W. Marshall, a
native of New Jersey, a skilful wheelwright by occupation, industrious,
honest, generous, but "cranky," full of wild fancies, and defective in
some kinds of business sense. By accident he discovered the gold of
California, and his name is inseparably connected with her history,
but it is impossible to make a great hero of him. The place for his
mill was in the small valley of Coloma, 1500 feet above the level of
the sea, and 45 miles from Sutter's Fort, from which it was accessible
by wagon without expense for road-making. Good yellow-pine timber
was abundant in the surrounding hills; the water-power was more than
sufficient; there were opportunities to make a secure dam and race with
small expense, and there was little danger of loss by flood. Sutter
left the plans and construction of the mill, as well as the selection
of the site, to Marshall, and on the 27th of August the two signed an
agreement of partnership under which Sutter was to furnish money, men,
tools and teams, and Marshall was to supply the skill for building and
managing.
While the project of the saw-mill was under consideration some Mormons
arrived at New Helvetia and solicited employment. They had belonged to
the Mormon battalion, which, after enlisting in Nebraska for one year,
marching to the Pacific by way of the Gila, and garrisoning San Diego,
had been mustered out at Los Angeles on the preceding 16th of July.
They were on their way to Salt Lake, but at the fort received letters
advising all who could not bring provisions for the winter to remain
in California until the following spring. They were sober, orderly,
peaceful, industrious men, and Sutter hired them to work at his
flour-mill and saw-mill. He sent six of them to Coloma. Besides these,
Marshall had three "Gentile" laborers, and about a dozen Indians. All
the white men were natives of the United States.
For four months these men worked at Coloma, seeing no visitors, and
rarely communicating with the fort. The mill had been nearly completed,
the dam was made, the race had been dug, the gates had been put in
place, the water had been turned into the race to carry away some of
the loose dirt and gravel, and then had been turned off again. On the
afternoon of Monday the 24th of January Marshall was walking in the
tail-race, when on its rotten granite bed-rock he saw some yellow
particles and picked up several of them. The largest were about the
size of grains of wheat. They were smooth, bright, and in color much
like brass. He thought they were gold, and went to the mill, where
he told the men that he had found a gold mine. At the time little
importance was attached to his statement. It was regarded as a proper
subject for ridicule.
Marshall hammered his new metal, and found it malleable; he put it
into the kitchen fire, and observed that it did not readily melt or
become discolored; he compared its color with gold coin; and the more
he examined it, the more he was convinced that it was gold. The next
morning he paid another visit to the tail-race, where he picked up
other specimens; and putting all he had collected, about a spoonful, on
the crown of his slouch hat, he went to the mill, where he showed them
to the men as proof of his discovery of a gold mine. The scantiness in
the provision supply gave Marshall an excuse for going to the fort,
though he would probably not have gone at this time if he had not been
anxious to know Sutter's opinion of the metal. He rode away, and,
according to Sutter's diary, arrived at the fort on Friday the 28th.
Sutter had an encyclopedia, sulphuric acid, and scales, and with the
help of these, after weighing the specimens in and out of water, he
declared that they were undoubtedly gold.
[Illustration: Sutter's Mill, the scene of the gold discovery.]
The first record of the discovery, and the only one made on the day of
its occurrence, was in the diary of Henry W. Bigler, one of the Mormon
laborers at the mill. He was an American by birth, then a young man,
and afterwards a citizen of St. George, Utah. He was in the habit of
keeping a regular record of his notable observations and experiences,
selecting topics for remark with creditable judgment. His journal kept
during his service in the Mormon battalion and his subsequent stay in
California is one of the valuable historical documents of the State. On
the 24th of January, in the evening, Bigler wrote in his diary, "This
day some kind of mettle was found in the tail-race that looks like
goald."
The artless arrangement of ideas, and the ungrammatical phraseology,
accompanied by the regular mental habits that demanded a diary, and
the perception that enabled him to catch with his pen the main facts
of life as they passed, add much to the interest as well as to the
authority of his diary.
For six weeks or more the work on the mill continued without serious
interruption. Never having seen placer-mining, and having no distinct
idea of the methods of finding and washing gold, the laborers at
Coloma did not know how to gather the treasures in their vicinity.
The first one to find gold outside of the tail-race was Bigler, who
was the hunter of the party, sent out by Marshall at least one day in
every week to get venison, which was a very acceptable addition to
unground wheat and salt salmon, the main articles of food sent from
Sutter's Fort. Deer being numerous in the neighboring hills, it was
not necessary that Bigler should go far for game; and more than once
he managed, while hunting, to look at the banks of the river and
find some of the precious metal. His report of his success stimulated
others, and they, too, found gold at various places.
[Illustration: The song of the sirens (from "Punch").]
In regard to the beginning of gold washing as a regular occupation
there is a conflict of testimony. Bigler says that the first men
who, within the range of his observation, devoted themselves to
placer-mining were Willis Hudson and five others, all of Sam Brannan's
Mormon colony, whom he visited at Mormon Island, on the American River
below Coloma, on the 12th of April. On that day, washing the gravel
with pans and pan-like Indian baskets, they took out more than two
ounces and a half (forty-one dollars) for each man. On the other hand,
Isaac Humphrey, who had been a placer-miner in Georgia, and who was the
first person to use a rocker in the Sierra Nevada and to teach others
there to use it, said that he arrived in Coloma on the 7th of March,
and within a week commenced work with a rocker. We may explain the
discrepancy between these two authorities by imagining that for some
weeks Humphrey purposely avoided observation, as placer-miners often
do; or that in the interval of ten years between his first appearance
at Coloma and the publication of his reminiscences his memory misled
him in the date.
In the spring of 1848 San Francisco, a village of about seven hundred
inhabitants, had two newspapers, the _Californian_ and the _Californian
Star_, both weeklies. The first printed mention of the gold discovery
was a short paragraph in the former, under date of the 15th of March,
stating that a gold mine had been found at Sutter's Mill, and that a
package of the metal worth thirty dollars had been received at New
Helvetia. Five weeks later the _Star_ announced that its editor, E. C.
Kemble, was about to take a trip into the country, and on his return
would report his observations. He went to Coloma and either saw nothing
or understood nothing of what he saw, for he preserved absolute silence
in his paper about his trip. On the 20th of May, after a number of men
had left San Francisco for the mines, he came out with the opinion
that the mines were a "sham," and that the people who had gone to them
were "superlatively silly." The increasing production of the mines
soon overwhelmed the doubters; and before the middle of June the whole
territory resounded with the cry of "_gold!_ GOLD!! GOLD!!!"
as it was printed in one of the local newspapers. Nearly all the men
hurried off to the mines. Workshops, stores, dwellings, wives and even
fields of ripe grain, were left for a time to take care of themselves.
[Illustration: A primitive outfit.]
In 1848 the gold hunters of the Sierra Nevada did not need a scientific
education. The method of washing gold was then so simple, and they were
so skilful in many kinds of industrial labor, that they learned it
quickly. Capital, like scientific education and technical experience,
was unnecessary to the early placer-miner. With the savings of a
week's work he could buy the pick, shovel, pan, and rocker which were
his only necessary tools. As compared with other auriferous deposits
of which we have definite knowledge, those of the Sierra Nevada were
unequaled for the facility of working. They were not deep under ground,
or scantily supplied with water, as in Australia and South Africa; nor
in a land of tropical heat, as in Brazil; nor in a region of long and
severe winters, as in Siberia. The deposits were on land belonging
to the National Government, which, without charge, without official
supervision, and without previous permit or survey, allowed every
citizen to take all the gold from any claim held in accordance with the
local regulations adopted by the miners of his district.
The first gold washing was done on the bars of the rivers, where the
gravel was shallow, usually not more than two or three feet deep, and
where prospecting was easy, and mining was prompt in its returns and
liberal in its rewards. The gravel was rich if it yielded twenty-five
cents to the pan; and in favorable situations a man could dig and wash
out fifty to sixty pans in a day, while with a rocker he could do
three times as much. But on the bars of the American, the Bear and the
Yuba Rivers it was no uncommon event to obtain from one dollar to five
dollars in a pan, and then the yield for a day's work was equal to a
princely revenue.
When the rainy season began in the winter of 1848 the rivers rose
and covered their bars, and the miners, compelled to hunt claims
elsewhere, found them in ravines which were dry through nine months
of the year. These were in many cases almost as rich as the bars. It
was not uncommon to hear, on good authority, that this or that man had
taken out $1000 in a day, and occasionally $5000 or more would reward
the day's work. In 1849 the miners generally got $16 a day or more, and
when a claim would not yield that much it had no value.
The successful miners demanded provisions, tools, clothing and many
luxuries, for which they offered prices double, treble, and tenfold
greater than those paid elsewhere. Sailing vessels went to Oregon,
Mexico, South America, Australia and Polynesia with gold dust to
purchase supplies, and soon filled all the seaports of the Pacific
with the contagion of excitement. The reports of the discovery, which
began to reach the Atlantic States in September, 1848, commanded little
credence there before January; but the news of the arrival of large
amounts of gold at Mazatlan, Valparaiso, Panama, and New York in the
latter part of the winter put an end to all doubt, and in the spring
there was such a rush of peaceful migration as the world had never
seen. In 1849, 25,000--according to one authority, 50,000--immigrants
went by land, and 23,000 by sea from the region east of the Rocky
Mountains, and by sea perhaps 40,000 from other parts of the world,
adding twelve-fold to the population and fifty-fold to the productive
capacity of the territory. The newcomers were nearly all young,
intelligent, and industrious men. Fortunately the diggings were rich
enough and extensive enough to give good reward to all of them, and to
much larger numbers who came in later years. The gold yield of 1848 was
estimated at $5,000,000; that of 1849 at $23,000,000; that of 1850 at
$50,000,000; that of 1853 at $65,000,000; and then came the decline
which has continued until the present time. In forty-one years the gold
yield of California was about $1,200,000,000.
Gold mining was neither novel nor rare, but the unexampled combination
of wonderful richness, highly favorable geographical conditions,
high intelligence in the miners, and great freedom in the political
institutions of California led to such a sudden rush of people, and
such an immense production of gold, that the whole world was shaken.
The older placers of Brazil and Siberia, and the later ones of
Australia and South Africa, had a much smaller influence on general
commerce and manufactures.
The discovery of the mines was an American achievement. It was the
result of the American conquest, and of preparation for American
immigrants. It was made by an American, one of a little group of
laborers in which all the white men were Americans, as were the
first men who devoted themselves to mining. They also were Americans
who subsequently invented the sluice and the hydraulic process of
placer-washing, and who planned and constructed the great ditches,
flumes, and dams that gave a distinctive character to the placer-mining
of California.
Let us now consider the consequences of the discovery. First, as to
the men at Coloma in January, 1848, Marshall was not enriched. His
lumber was soon in demand at $500 a thousand feet of board measure, or
twenty-fold more than he had expected when he commenced his work; but
not many months elapsed before all the good timber trees near Coloma
had been cut down by the miners, and then the mill had to stop. He
turned his attention to mining, but was not successful. When he had
money he did not know how to keep it. When he had a good claim he did
not stick to it.
[Illustration: Marshall Monument at Coloma (erected in 1889 by the
Society of the Native Sons of the Golden West).]
Sutter's popularity with the pioneers was so great that when he had
lost all his property the legislature came to his aid with a pension
of $3,000 a year, which sum was paid for six years; and it would
perhaps have been continued till his death if he had not left the
State in order to demand justice from Congress for the spoliation
of his property. But he did not possess the same popularity and
influence in the Eastern States as in California. He spent winters
of vain solicitation at Washington, and there he died on the 18th of
June, 1880, at the age of seventy-seven years. His grave is at Litiz,
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he had made his home.
For California the main results of the discovery have been the sudden
changes from a Spanish-speaking to an English-speaking community;
from popular ignorance to high intelligence; from pasturage, first to
mining, and then to tillage, as the occupation of most of the people;
from a population of less than 10,000 to more than 1,200,000; and
from isolation to frequent, cheap, and convenient communication with
all civilized countries. The State has become one of the most noted
gardens, pleasure grounds, and sanitariums of the world; and San
Francisco is one of the most intellectual and brilliant, and in many
respects one of the most interesting, of cities. To the United States
the Californian gold discovery gave a vast increase of the national
wealth; great attractiveness for immigration from Europe; a strong
stimulus to shipping; the development of the mineral wealth of Nevada,
Idaho, and Utah; and the vast railroad system west of the Mississippi.
But Marshall's find did not limit its great influences to our
continent. It aroused and stimulated industrial activity in all the
leading nations. It profoundly agitated all the countries of South
America. It shook Europe and Asia. It caused the first large migration
of the Chinese across the Pacific. It opened Japan to the traffic of
Christendom. It threw a belt of steam around the globe. It educated
Hargraves, and taught him where to find and how to open up the gold
deposits of Australia. It built the Panama railroad. It brought the
Pacific Ocean within the domain of active commerce. Directly and
indirectly it added $3,500,000,000 to the stock of the precious metals,
and by giving the distribution of this vast sum to the English-speaking
nations added much to their great industrial and intellectual influence.
MARSHALL'S OWN NARRATIVE.
"In May, 1847, with my rifle, blanket, and a few crackers to eat with
the venison (for the deer then were awful plenty), I ascended the
American River, according to Mr. Sutter's wish, as he wanted to find
a good site for a saw-mill, where we could have plenty of timber, and
where wagons would be able to ascend and descend the river hills. Many
fellows had been out before me, but they could not find any place to
suit; so when I left I told Mr. Sutter I would go along the river to
its very head and find the place, if such a place existed anywhere upon
the river or any of its forks. I traveled along the river the whole
way. Many places would suit very well for the erection of the mill,
with plenty of timber everywhere, but then nothing but a mule could
climb the hills; and when I would find a spot where the hills were not
steep, there was no timber to be had; and so it was until I had been
out several days and reached this place, which, after first sight,
looked like the exact spot we were hunting.
"I passed a couple of days examining the hills, and found a place where
wagons could ascend and descend with all ease. On my return to the fort
I went out through the country examining the cañons and gulches, and
picking out the easiest places for crossing them with loaded wagons.
"You may be sure Mr. Sutter was pleased when I reported my success. We
entered into partnership; I was to build the mill, and he was to find
provisions, teams, tools, and to pay a portion of the men's wages. I
believe I was at that time the only millwright in the whole country.
In August, everything being ready, we freighted two wagons with tools
and provisions, and accompanied by six men I left the fort, and after a
good deal of difficulty reached this place one beautiful afternoon and
formed our camp on yon little rise of ground right above the town.
"Our first business was to put up log houses, as we intended remaining
here all winter. This was done in less than no time, for my men were
great with the ax. We then cut timber, and fell to work hewing it for
the framework of the mill. The Indians gathered about us in great
numbers. I employed about forty of them to assist us with the dam,
which we put up in a kind of way in about four weeks. In digging the
foundation of the mill we cut some distance into the soft granite; we
opened the forebay and then I left for the fort, giving orders to Mr.
Weimar to have a ditch cut through the bar in the rear of the mill,
and after quitting work in the evening to raise the gate and let the
water run all night, as it would assist us very much in deepening and
widening the tail-race.
"I returned in a few days, and found everything favorable, all the
men being at work in the ditch. When the channel was opened it was my
custom every evening to raise the gate and let the water wash out as
much sand and gravel through the night as possible; and in the morning,
while the men were getting breakfast, I would walk down, and, shutting
off the water, look along the race and see what was to be done, so
that I might tell Mr. Weimar, who had charge of the Indians, at what
particular point to set them to work for the day. As I was the only
millwright present, all of my time was employed upon the framework and
machinery.
"One morning in January,--it was a clear, cold morning; I shall never
forget that morning,--as I was taking my usual walk along the race
after shutting off the water, my eye was caught with the glimpse of
something shining in the bottom of the ditch. There was about a foot of
water running then. I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made
my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about
half the size and of the shape of a pea. Then I saw another piece in
the water. After taking it out I sat down and began to think right
hard. I thought it was gold, and yet it did not seem to be of the right
color: all the gold coin I had seen was of a reddish tinge; this looked
more like brass. I recalled to mind all the metals I had ever seen or
heard of, but I could find none that resembled this. Suddenly the idea
flashed across my mind that it might be iron pyrites. I trembled to
think of it! This question could soon be determined. Putting one of the
pieces on a hard river stone, I took another and commenced hammering
it. It was soft, and didn't break: it therefore must be gold, but
largely mixed with some other metal, very likely silver; for pure gold,
I thought, would certainly have a brighter color.
"When I returned to our cabin for breakfast I showed the two pieces to
my men. They were all a good deal excited, and had they not thought
that the gold only existed in small quantities they would have
abandoned everything and left me to finish my job alone. However, to
satisfy them, I told them that as soon as we had the mill finished we
would devote a week or two to gold hunting and see what we could make
out of it."
PIONEER MINING
BY E. G. WAITE
[Illustration: Working a claim.]
Pioneer mining life--what was it? The miner must have an outfit of a
pick, pan, shovel, rocker, dipper and bucket of wood, or of rawhide. A
tent was good to have, but he could make shift during the dry season
with a substitute of boughs, for there was no fear of rain from May
to October. A blanket of rubber spread on a stratum of leaves, on
which his woolen blankets were laid, sufficed for a bed. His culinary
utensils were confined to a frying-pan, a small iron pot, tin cups
and plates, knife, fork, and spoon. His wardrobe consisted generally
of a pair of serviceable shirts, a change of trousers, strong boots
and a slouch-hat. With these, and a supply of bacon, flour, salt,
saleratus, beans, a few candles and occasionally fresh beef, the
miner was ready for work. His luxuries were tea and raw sugar, with
occasionally the addition of dried peaches from Chili. His bread was
made by mixing flour, water, and saleratus in the tin or iron pan which
did double duty in the kitchen and in gathering gold, and baking it
about two inches thick, like a shortcake. But slapjacks, the legitimate
successors of the Mexican tortillas, were also a standard article of
diet. Tin teapots were sometimes affected, but the small iron pot with
a hollow handle did duty for both tea and beans or frijoles. The latter
were of a brown variety grown in Chili, and were prepared after the
Mexican style with a piece of bacon or fresh beef and plenty of chili
colorado, or red pepper. They were allowed to cook a long time, often
standing in the hot embers over night to be ready for breakfast in the
morning. The bill-of-fare did not vary much for breakfast, dinner and
supper.
[Illustration]
The most expensive instrument of the early miner was the rocker,
which, though simple in construction, cost in the mines from fifty to
a hundred dollars. In general appearance it was not unlike a baby's
cradle as used by our grandmothers and as still seen on the frontier.
It consisted of a flat bottom with two sides that flared outward, and
an end board at the head, while the foot was open save a riffle about
an inch and a half high at the bottom to catch the gold that might pass
another riffle across the bottom near the middle. At the head of the
cradle was a hopper about eighteen inches square, with a perforated
sheet-iron bottom or wire screen. Under this was an apron, or board,
sloping downward towards the head. Two substantial rockers under the
whole completed the simple machine which gave to the world millions of
dollars. The _modus operandi_ may be described as follows: Two sticks
of wood hewn on the upper side were imbedded at the river's brink, one
four inches lower than the other, on which the rockers were to rest,
thus securing a grade in the machine to facilitate the outward flow of
the water and sand. Two miners usually worked together as partners.
One shoveled the earth into the rocker, while the other, seated on a
boulder or block of wood, dipped the water from the river, and poured
it upon the earth in the hopper with one hand, all the time rocking
with the other. When the earth was thoroughly washed, he rose, lifted
the hopper from its place, threw out the stones and gravel, replaced
it, and thus the work went on. As the ground about the rocker became
exhausted to the bed-rock, recourse was had to the bucket, and the
earth was carried sometimes a few rods, making laborious work for the
miner. To keep the rocker going another hand would be employed to
carry earth, and each would carry two buckets at a time. I was in many
camps down to 1854, and in none did I ever know of a theft of gold,
and I heard of but one, and that was punished by a cat-o'-nine-tails,
which was afterward nailed to the center-post of a trader's tent, as a
warning to evil-doers.
[Illustration: Surface sluicing.]
The gold taken from the river bars was mostly in the form of scales
resembling cucumber seeds, and of varying size. It was most plentiful
on the bed-rock and in a few inches of soil above it, though sometimes
three or four feet of earth would pay to wash. Where the bed-rock was
hard the miner cleaned it, for a shovelful of dirt might contain a
few dollars in small particles. Where the bed-rock was soft shale or
slate on edge the miner picked away an inch or so and washed it, as
frequently the scales were found to be driven quite thickly into the
crevices. When the ground was very rich the rocker was cleaned of
gold every hour or two. When work was over, around the supper fire
the events of the day were discussed, earnings compared, reports made
of grizzly bears or deer being seen or killed, of better diggings
of "coarse gold" discovered. This was the hour for speculations as
to the origin of the gold in the rivers, and a strong opinion was
entertained by many who were not well-read that immense masses of the
precious metal would some day be brought to light in the snow-capped
peaks towering to the east. "Coarse gold" was a charm to the ear of
the ordinary miner. His claim might be paying him an ounce a day in
fine gold, but he was always interested in some reported diggings
far away where the product was in lumps, and not infrequently he
left a good mine to seek some richer El Dorado. The characteristic
and besetting fault of the early miner was unrest. He was forever
seeking better fortune. Yet it was this passion for prospecting that
resulted in the discovery of gold in an incredibly short time from
the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley to the northern limit of
the State. To "prospect" was to find a spot that looked favorable and
make an examination of it. The miner would take a pan of earth, shake
and gyrate it under water, raising and tipping it frequently to run
the dirt and water off, then plunge it again, and so continue until a
small residuum of black sand and gold remained. A speck of gold was
the "color," several specks were "several colors," and the number and
size determined the judgment of the miner whether he should go to work
or move on. I have seen ounces taken in this way in a single pan, but
in the earlier days we counted a "bit" to the pan, twelve and a half
cents, a fair prospect.
[Illustration]
The average gain of the miner in those days can never be known. Though
he was extraordinarily frank and confiding in the offhand conversations
about the camp-fire, yet there is reason to believe that his largest
receipts were sometimes not reported. My observation was that the
industrious worker rarely brought to his supper less than ten dollars,
often an ounce (reckoned at sixteen dollars), and sometimes six ounces,
or even more. I myself took from the earth nearly one hundred and fifty
ounces in seventeen successive working days. My largest clean-up was
$224. One day, in less than half an hour, I took with my knife from a
crevice in the rocks six and a half ounces of gold. When the river went
down after it had been swollen by the first rains and had swept over
the bed-rock of bars supposed to be worked out, hundreds of glittering
scales were left exposed, affording pleasant picking for a day or two.
Mining is one of the most fascinating and exciting of employments.
But in the earlier days, when we knew less about genuine indications,
mining was, more than now, a species of gambling. The effects are yet
to be seen in hundreds of men still living near their old haunts, who,
in common phrase, have "lost their grip"; others live in our memories
who, after repeated disappointment, sleep on the mountain sides in
nameless graves. Yet these same unfortunates did their part in giving
to the world thousands of millions of dollars, thus stimulating
progress probably more than was ever known in any other epoch of
similar length in the history of mankind.
The early miner has never been truly painted. I protest against the
flippant style and eccentric rhetoric of those writers who have made
him a terror, or who, seizing upon a sporadic case of extreme oddity,
some drunken, brawling wretch, have given a caricature to the world as
the typical miner. The so-called literature that treats of the golden
era is too extravagant in this direction. In all my personal experience
in mining-camps from 1849 to 1854 there was not a case of bloodshed,
robbery, theft or actual violence. I doubt if a more orderly society
was ever known. How could it be otherwise? The pioneers were young,
ardent, uncorrupted, most of them well educated and from the best
families in the East. The early miner was ambitious, energetic, and
enterprising. No undertaking was too great to daunt him. The pluck
and resources exhibited by him in attempting mighty projects with
nothing but his courage and his brawny arms to carry them out was
phenomenal. His generosity was profuse and his sympathy active, knowing
no distinction of race. His sentiment that justice is sacred was never
dulled. His services were at command to settle differences peaceably,
or with pistol in hand to right a grievous wrong to a stranger. His
capacity for self-government never has been surpassed. Of a glorious
epoch, he was of a glorious race.
[Illustration]
THE GREAT NORTHWEST IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES
BY E. V. SMALLEY
FURTHER WEST.
The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when
the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the
towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards
the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming
settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops,
and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted
farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement
of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must
depend for its existence. The towns-folk are untiring in their praises
of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of
human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a
farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable
weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snows in May
or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it
is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of
railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of
the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or
a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a
hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad,
and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and
is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the
railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share
the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they "scrip" the
adjoining sections of Government land, or take it up with desert land
claims. A large amount of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in
pursuance of Indian treaties, Agricultural College grants, old Military
Bounty Land acts and other peculiar features of our complicated Public
Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able
to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preëmption
claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate
with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and
in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of
excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a
good example of a town made by this process. In the beginning it had
no existence save in the brains of its inventors. The bare prairie was
staked out in streets, avenues and parks, on a scale for a city of
twenty thousand inhabitants. A map was engraved, and within a few weeks
after the place got its name, the "Billings boom" began to be talked of
as far east as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town
from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and
New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more about the valley of
the Yellowstone than about that of the Congo, and few of them could
have put their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of
Billings. They heard there was a boom, and were eager to take their
chances for profit or loss. It was enough for them to hear the place
spoken of as the future metropolis of the Yellowstone Valley. Within
sixty days from the time when Billings got a local habitation and a
name, lots to the value of $220,000 were sold within its limits, and
before thirty days more had elapsed the purchasers had advanced the
imaginary value of their holdings from one hundred to three hundred per
cent.
Charles Dickens once said that the typical American would hesitate
about entering heaven, unless assured that he could go further West.
The men who lead the advance of the army of civilization on the
frontier skirmish line do not come from the rear. They are always
the scouts and pickets. The people of the six-weeks-old town do not
come from the East. As a rule they are from the one-year-old and
two-year-old towns a little further back. Most of the men I met in
the Yellowstone country were from Eastern Dakota, or the Black Hills
region, or from Western Minnesota. When asked why they left homes so
recently made in a new country, their reply was invariably that they
wanted to get further West.
BILLINGS AND COULSON.
We came upon Billings one sunny day in May [about 1882], dropped upon
it, I might say; for after a ten miles' drive across a high and windy
plateau, the immense dazzling range of the Big Snowy Mountains looming
up in front, the ground fell away abruptly and the town lay at our
feet in a broad, green valley. The yellow-pine houses, untouched by
paint, glistened in the sunlight like gold. The valley, hemmed in
by precipitous cliffs on the north, and by black, bare hills beyond
the muddy river on the south, stretched away to the west to distant
mountain slopes. Under the shadow of a huge sandstone butte lay the
little hamlet of Coulson, now quite out of spirits because of the new
town a mile further on. Old Coulson, it was called, though its age was
only three years. It had made some money buying buffalo robes of the
Crow Indians across the river, and selling shirting, groceries, and
whisky to a few herdsmen whose cattle graze in the Musselshell Ranges.
Now it must abandon its score of "shacks" and shanties or move them
up to Billings. The new town, when I visited it, consisted of perhaps
fifty cheap structures scattered over a square mile of bottom-land.
Many people were living in little A tents or in their canvas-covered
wagons, waiting for lumber to arrive with which to build houses. Sixty
dollars a thousand was the price of a poor quality of green stuff
brought from a mill twenty miles up the Yellowstone. All articles of
food, except beef, were frightfully dear. Potatoes were eight cents
a pound, flour six dollars a sack. I doubt if one in ten of the
inhabitants could tell why he had come. The migrating impulse is the
only way to account for the movement of merchants, mechanics, farmers,
speculators, gamblers, liquor-sellers, preachers and doctors to a point
nearly one hundred and fifty miles from anything that can be called a
town--a point, too, in a region inhabited only by Crow Indians and a
few scattered herdsmen. At the signal that a town was to be created,
all these people, of diverse possessions and ambitions, moved forward
and occupied the site as though they were soldiers marching at the
word of command. What a wonderful self-organizing thing is society!
How did the German baker from St. Paul, the milliner from Minneapolis,
the Chinese laundryman from the Pacific slope, the blacksmith, the
carpenter, the butcher, the beer-seller, the grocer and all the other
constituent parts of a complete community happen to feel the desire, at
the same time, to go with their trades and wares to a remote spot in an
unknown land?
[Illustration: A great farm in the New Northwest.
All the land is cultivated, even the hillsides.]
Large herds of cattle graze in the valleys of the Yellowstone and
its tributaries, and in the hill country as far north as the Upper
Missouri, wherever there are small streams or water holes. Now that
the buffalo is fast disappearing, the region would afford pasturage
to at least ten times as many cattle as it supports at present. The
stockmen who occupy it are generally careful, however, not to let this
fact be known, as they naturally would like to keep the whole section
for the future increase of their own herds. Cattle-raising in Montana
is an exceedingly profitable business. One hears a great deal said in
the Territory of the wealth of the "cattle-kings," and how they began
their careers a few years ago with only a few hundred dollars. The
local estimate of the annual return from money invested in a herd of
cattle is from thirty to fifty per cent. The life of a stockman is
not, however, an idle and comfortable one, as often pictured in the
newspaper accounts of the business. Unless he is rich enough to hire
herdsmen he must look after his herd constantly. He lives, as a rule,
in a wretched dirt-roof "shack," and passes most of the time in the
saddle, seeing that his animals do not stray too far off the range. In
the fierce winter storms he must be out driving the herd into ravines
and deep valleys, where they will be protected from the wind. No
shelter is built for stock in Montana. The dried bunch-grass furnishes
abundant winter grazing, and the animals get through the severe weather
with a loss rarely exceeding four per cent. In the spring each owner
"rounds up" his herd, and brands the calves. Every ranchman has his
own brand, which he registers in the office of the county clerk, and
advertises in the nearest local paper, printed, it may be, one or two
hundred miles from his range. The annual drive of bullocks across the
plains southward to the Union Pacific Railroad, or eastward to the
temporary terminus of the Northern Pacific, takes place in the summer
months.
BITTER ROOT VALLEY.
South of Missoula within rifle-shot, is the entrance to the great Hell
Gate Cañon; westward across the angle formed by the two rivers rises
the huge, dark wall of the Bitter Root Mountains, higher here, and
more picturesque, than the main range of the Rockies, which are half
concealed by the grassy swells of the foot-hills on the east. Lo-Lo
Peak, the loftiest and most individual mountain of the Bitter Root
chain, is covered with snow all summer; its altitude must be about
ten thousand feet. Northwest of the town the valley is broad enough
for cultivation for a distance of twenty miles, when it closes in at
the cañon of the Missoula River. A range for which there is not even
a local name rims the valley on the north. One summit, called Skotah
Peak, is a perfect pyramid in form. This cloud-compassed landmark we
shall not lose sight of in three days' travel.
Up the Bitter Root Valley there are farms scattered for sixty miles.
The valley is warmer than any other in Western Montana, and the small
fruits and some hardy varieties of apples are grown. Herds of horses
and cattle feed on the slopes of the mountains. Grain and potatoes are
grown by irrigation, and the valley is a source of food-supply for
military posts and mining-camps. Hogs are fattened upon peas and wheat,
and the flavor of a Bitter Root ham is something altogether unique
and appetizing. In June the bitter-root plant, from which the valley
gets its name, covers all the uncultivated ground with its delicate
rose-colored stars. The blossom, about as large as a wild rose, lies
close upon the earth. The long, pipestem-like root is greatly relished
by the Indians for food. When dried it looks like macaroni, and it is
by no means unpalatable when cooked with a little salt or butter, or
eaten raw. The squaws dig it with long sticks, and dry it for winter
food. Another root, also a staple in the aboriginal larder, is the
camas, which loves moist prairies, where it flaunts its blue flowers
in the early summer. In June, when the camas is ready to gather, even
the most civilized Indian on the Flathead reservation feels the nomadic
impulse too strong to resist. He packs his lodge upon ponies, and
starts with his family for some camas prairie, where he is sure to
meet a numerous company bent on having a good time.
A MONTANA TOWN.
The picturesque features of life in a Western Montana town like
Missoula are best seen as evening approaches. Crowds of roughly clad
men gather around the doors of the drinking-saloons. A group of
Indians, who have been squatting on the sidewalk for two hours playing
some mysterious game of cards of their own invention, breaks up. One of
the squaws throws the cards into the street, which is already decorated
from end to end with similar relics of other games. Another swings a
baby upon her back, ties a shawl around it and herself, secures the
child with a strap buckled across her chest, and strides off, her
moccasined feet toeing inward in the traditional Indian fashion. She
wears a gown made of a scarlet calico bed-quilt, with leggings of some
blue stuff; but she has somehow managed to get a civilized dress for
the child. They all go off to their camp on the hill near by. Some
blue-coated soldiers from the neighboring military post, remembering
the roll-call at sunset, swing themselves upon their horses and go
galloping off, a little the worse for the bad whisky they have been
drinking in the saloons. A miner in blue woolen shirt and brown canvas
trousers, with a hat of astonishing dimensions and a beard of a year's
growth, trots up the street on a mule, and, with droll oaths and
shuffling talk, offers the animal for sale to the crowd of loungers on
the hotel piazza. No one wants to buy, and, after provoking a deal of
laughter, the miner gives his ultimatum: "I'll hitch the critter to one
of them piazzer posts, and if he don't pull it down you may have him."
This generous offer is declined by the landlord; and the miner rides
off, declaring that he has not a solitary four-bit piece to pay for his
supper, and is bound to sell the mule to somebody.
Toward nightfall the whole male population seems to be in the street,
save the busy Chinamen in the laundries, who keep on sprinkling clothes
by blowing water out of their mouths. Early or late, you will find
these industrious little yellow men at work. One shuffles back and
forth from the hydrant, carrying water for the morning wash in old
coal-oil cans hung to a stick balanced across his shoulders. More
Indians now--a "buck" and two squaws, leading ponies heavily laden with
tent, clothes and buffalo robes. A rope tied around a pony's lower jaw
is the ordinary halter and bridle of the Indians. These people want to
buy some article at the saddler's shop. They do not go in, but stare
through the windows for five minutes. The saddler, knowing the Indian
way of dealing, pays no attention to them. After a while they all sit
down on the ground in front of the shop. Perhaps a quarter of an hour
passes before the saddler asks what they want. If he had noticed them
at first, they would have gone away without buying.
THE STAGE-COACH.
Now the great event of the day is at hand. The cracking of a whip
and a rattle of wheels are heard up the street: the stage is coming.
Thirty-six hours ago it left the terminus of the railroad one hundred
and fifty miles away. It is the connecting link between the little
isolated mountain community and the outside world. No handsome Concord
coach appears, but only a clumsy "jerky" covered with dust. The
"jerky" is a sort of cross between a coach proper and a common wagon.
As an instrument of torture this hideous vehicle has no equal in modern
times. The passengers emerge from its cavernous interior looking more
dead than alive. A hundred able-bodied men, not one of them with a
respectable coat or a tolerable hat, save two flashy gamblers, look on
at the unloading of the luggage. The stage goes off to a stable, and
the crowd disperses, to rally again, largely reinforced, at the word
that there is to be a horse-race.
[Illustration: Seattle in 1879 and in 1910.]
Now the drinking saloons--each one of which runs a faro bank and a
table for "stud poker"--are lighted up, and the gaming and guzzling
begin. Every third building on the principal business street is a
saloon. The gambling goes on until daylight without any effort at
concealment. In all the Montana towns keeping gaming-tables is treated
as a perfectly legitimate business. Indeed, it is licensed by the
Territorial laws. Some of the saloons have music, but this is a
rather superfluous attraction. In one a woman sings popular ballads in
a cracked voice, to the accompaniment of a banjo. Women of a certain
sort mingle with the men and try their luck at the tables. Good order
usually prevails, less probably from respect for law than from a
prudent recognition of the fact that every man carries a pistol in his
hip-pocket, and a quarrel means shooting. The games played are faro
and "stud poker," the latter being the favorite. It is a game in which
"bluff" goes farther than luck or skill. Few whisky saloons in Montana
are without a rude pine table covered with an old blanket, which, with
a pack of cards, is all the outfit required for this diversion.
The main street of the frontier town, given up at night to drinking and
gambling, by no means typifies the whole life of the place. The current
of business and society, on the surface of which surges a deal of mud
and driftwood, is steady and decent. There are churches and schools and
a wholesome family life.
A ROCKY MOUNTAIN VALLEY.
The Jocko Valley is one of the prettiest of the minor valleys of the
Rocky Mountain system. It was all a green, flowery meadow when I
traversed it in the month of June. Its width is about ten miles and its
length perhaps thirty. Low, wooded mountain ranges surround it. That
on the east is broken by the main branch of the stream, and through
the rift can be seen the main chain of the Rockies--a mighty mass of
crags and cliffs and snow-fields thrust up among the clouds. For thirty
miles after the Jocko joins the Clark's Fork of the Columbia, called
by most people in this region the Pend d'Oreille River, the main river
is bordered by narrow green bottoms and broad stretches of grassy
uplands rising to the steeper inclines of fir-clad mountains. Herds
of horses are occasionally seen, and now and then the log hut of some
thrifty Indian or half-breed, or the canvas lodge of a family that
prefers the discomforts and freedom of savage life to the comforts and
restraints of a local habitation. The first night out from the agency
was spent at the hut of one of the queer characters that hang about
Indian reservations,--a shiftless white man, who pays for the privilege
of ferrying travelers across the river by taking the Indians over
free. He lives in a dirty one-room hut. In response to a suggestion
about supper, he declared that he would not cook for the Apostle Paul
himself, but added that we were welcome to use his stove, and could
take anything eatable to be found on the premises. His bill next
morning was seven dollars--one dollar, he explained, for victuals for
the party, and six for ferriage. A wagon-box offered a more inviting
place for a bed that night than the floor of the ferryman's cabin.
A day's travel brought us out of the Flathead Reservation, and at
the same time to the end of the wagon road and of the open country.
The road did not, like one of those western highways described by
Longfellow, end in a squirrel track and run up a tree, but it stopped
short at a saw-mill on the river's edge, where a hundred men were at
work cutting logs and sawing bridge timber for the railroad advancing
up the gorge eighty miles below.
There are many camas prairies, big and little, in Montana and Idaho,
and they all resemble each other in being fertile green basins among
the mountains, in whose moist soil the camas plant flourishes. This
was, perhaps, fifteen miles broad by twenty-five long--all magnificent
grazing land. We passed an Indian village of a dozen lodges, the doors
of the tents shaded by arbors of green boughs, under which sat the
squaws in their red, green and white blankets. On the plain fed herds
of horses, and among them Indian riders galloped about seeking the
animals they wanted to lariat for the next day's hunting expedition.
FOREST TRACKS.
Nor is the forest altogether lonely. Occasionally a pack-train is
met, or a party of pedestrians, tramping with blankets, provisions
and frying-pans from the settlements or railroad camps west of the
mountains to those in the mountain valleys, and sleeping _al fresco_
wherever night overtakes them. Rough fellows these, but good-humored,
and in no way dangerous. Indeed, there is no danger in any of the
country I traversed on my northwestern pilgrimage, to a traveler who
minds his own business and keeps out of drinking dens. Almost everybody
I met had a big pistol strapped to him; but I carried no weapon of any
kind, and never once felt the need of one.
In Montana every traveler carries his bed, whether he depends upon
hoofs or wheels for locomotion, or on his own legs. Even the tramp who
foots it over the prairies and through the mountains, pretending to
look for work, but really on a summer pleasure tour, subsisting upon
the country, has a pair of dirty blankets or an old quilt slung by a
rope across his shoulders. The sleeping equipment of a traveler who can
afford to pay some attention to comfort, consists of a buffalo robe and
two pairs of blankets. With these, and perhaps a rubber poncho, he is
prepared to stop wherever night overtakes him, fortunate if he has a
roof over his head, and a pine floor to spread his buffalo upon, but
ready to camp out under the stars. Along the stage roads one is rarely
more than twenty miles from a house of some kind, but no one expects
beds. The ranchman does not ask his guests if they would like to go to
bed; he says: "Well, gents, are you ready to spread your blankets?"
A FAR WESTERN TOWN.
My journey next took me to Walla-Walla, largest and handsomest of all
the East Washington towns. Doubtless the name of Walla-Walla brings
no suggestion to the minds of most readers in the far-away East, save
of a rude frontier settlement. Yet the place luxuriates in verdure
and bloom, and many of its shady streets, bordered by pretty houses,
with their lawns, orchards and gardens, would be admired in a New
England village, while the business streets would do no discredit to
an Ohio town of half a century's growth. In the homes of well-to-do
citizens one finds the magazines and new books and newspapers from
New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and discovers that they manage to
keep abreast of the ideas of the time quite as well as intelligent
people on the Atlantic slope. The town has five thousand inhabitants,
but in its importance as a center of trade and social influences it
represents an Eastern town of many times its size. There is barely a
trace of the frontier in the manners of the people, and none at all in
their comfortable way of living; yet they are thousands of miles from
New York by the only route of steam travel. A fairer or more fertile
country than that which stretches south and east of Walla-Walla to the
base of the Blue Mountains one might travel more than five thousand
miles to find. In June it is all one immense rolling field of wheat
and barley dotted at long intervals--for the farms are large--with neat
houses, each in its orchard of apple and peach trees. The mountains
rise in gentle slopes to snow-flecked summits. Over the wide plain
move tall, tawny cloud-like columns of dust, in size and shape like
water-spouts at sea. From the foot-hills scores of these singular
formations may be seen on any warm day, though the air seems still.
THE GREAT SOUTHWEST
BY RAY STANNARD BAKER
No part of the United States is less generally known than the
Southwest, and none is better worth knowing. Of no other part of
the United States is so large a proportion of the unpleasant and
unattractive features known so well, and so small a proportion of the
beauties, wonders and utilities known so little. To the Eastern and
Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare
mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage,
greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals
which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians,
of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle,
of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. This
impression is based in part on the stray paragraphs from this unknown
land that occasionally creep into the metropolitan newspapers, but it
is chiefly founded upon the hasty observations and reports of dusty
transcontinental travelers, car-weary for three or four days, the edge
of their interest quite blunted with longing for the green wonders and
soft sunshine of California.
What is generally known as the Southwest may be said to comprise
all of Arizona and New Mexico, the greater portion of Texas,
perhaps best described as arid Texas, southern California east of
the Coast Range, and the western half of Oklahoma, including the
"Strip." Eastern Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests,
and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different
country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In
extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as
large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original
States of the American Union. Its population is sparse and occupied
almost exclusively in cattle-and sheep-raising, mining, and
irrigation-farming, with a limited amount of lumbering. All its vast
territory contains only a little more than half as many inhabitants
as the city of Chicago. Its largest city, on the extreme eastern edge
of the arid land, is San Antonio, Texas. All of its other cities are
much smaller. It is traversed east and west by two, in Texas three,
great railroads, running generally parallel, having many branches, and
connected by several cross-cuts running north and south.
It is a land of amazing contrasts. It is both the oldest and the newest
part of the United States--oldest in history and newest in Anglo-Saxon
enterprise. Long before the Cavaliers set foot in Virginia or the first
Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, even before St. Augustine in Florida was
founded, the Spaniards had explored a considerable proportion of New
Mexico and Arizona, and the settlements made soon afterward at Santa
Fé and near Tucson were among the earliest on the American continent.
Indeed, for many years the region was better known to white men than
New England. Yet to-day there is no part of the United States so little
explored, many places, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, being
wholly unsurveyed. Probably the least-known spot in the country is the
mysterious wilderness, nearly as large as Switzerland, which lies in
the northwestern corner of Arizona beyond the Colorado River. It is
bounded on the south and east by the stupendous and almost impassable
chasm of the Grand Cañon, and on its other sides by difficult mountains
and little-explored deserts. Here, in this long-known land, if anywhere
on the continent, can be found the primeval wilderness of nature.
Though the Great Southwest is now the most sparsely inhabited region
of its size in the United States, it was once the most populous and
wealthy, probably more populous than it is to-day, with all its
present American enterprise. Hundreds of years before the Spaniards
first appeared in the New World, the valleys of Arizona and New Mexico
contained a numerous population, supporting considerable cities, and
irrigating extensive tracts of land with wonderful engineering skill.
Frank H. Cushing, the anthropologist, who in 1882-83 wrote of the ruins
of the Southwest, estimated that the irrigated valleys of Arizona were
once the dwelling-place of two hundred and fifty thousand people,
about twice the population of the entire Territory then. The remains
of these ancient civilizations--the pueblo-dwellers, the cliff-and
cave-dwellers--are found scattered everywhere throughout Arizona and
New Mexico, and in such numbers that archæologists have only begun to
explore them.
No part of the United States, indeed, has had a more thrilling
and eventful history. While denominated a desert "not worth good
blood,"--in the words of the historian,--it has been a center of
contention for centuries, overwhelmed by one tide of conquest after
another. From the time that the Spaniards first invaded the country,
hunting for gold, down to the capture of Geronimo by American soldiers
in the eighties, it has been the scene of many bloody Indian wars. It
was the source of contention between the United States and Mexico in
the war of 1846-48. Once a possession of Spain, and later of Mexico,
the story of the struggle for independence by the Texans and for
annexation by the Californians is full of fascinating interest. Its
soil has developed some of the boldest and most picturesque characters
in American history--Boone, Crockett, Kit Carson, Sam Houston, and many
a pioneer cattleman and settler, to say nothing of the Crooks and the
Lawtons of the Indian wars. The main trail of the El Dorado hunters of
'49 on their way to California let through it, garnishing its history
with many a story of bloodshed and hardship. No American fiction is
more vital and characteristic than that which deals with the early
lawless days of the miner, the buffalo-hunter, and the cow-boy; none is
more richly colored, picturesque, or rudely powerful.
[Illustration: Mummy cave, Cañon del Muerto, Arizona.]
In its material aspects it is equally full of contrasts. Here are the
greatest deserts and waste places in America, and side by side with
them, often with no more than a few strands of barbed wire to mark
the division-line, are the richest farming-lands in America, lands
more fertile, even, than the famed corn-fields of Illinois or the
fruit-orchards of Michigan. The Southwest has been denominated, with
reason, the treeless land, and yet it contains to-day the largest
unbroken stretches of forest in the country, there being nothing to
equal the timber-lands of the Colorado plateau in northern and central
Arizona. No part of the United States possesses such an extent of
grass-plain, Texas being the greatest of the plain States, and yet
none has grander mountains. Only three States have higher peaks than
the noble Sierra Blanca of New Mexico, fourteen thousand two hundred
and sixty-nine feet in altitude, and there are few more magnificent
elevations than San Francisco Mountain in Arizona.
Though the region, to the hurried railroad traveler, seems barren and
desolate almost beyond comparison, it is yet richer in variety, if not
in luxury, of vegetation than any other part of the country. Professor
Merriam found many arctic types in the flora of the upper regions of
the San Francisco Mountain. Within a radius of a few hundred miles grow
the pines and firs found in northern Canada, and the figs and dates
of the African semi-tropics; Southern oranges and olives grow side by
side with Northern wheat; the cactus and the fir are often found within
sight of each other. Nowhere are there so many strange and marvelous
forms of life as here--of flowers, multitudinous cacti and the palms;
of animals, the Gila monster, the horned toad, the hydrophobia skunk,
and many other unique species. Besides the monotonous desert, with
its apparent lack of interest to the traveler, the region contains
the greatest natural wonder on the continent--the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado River. It also possesses unnumbered other natural phenomena
and some of the grandest mountain and forest scenery. With all its lack
of rain, it is watered by two of the great rivers of the continent--the
Colorado and the Rio Grande.
In its human life it is equally prolific in diversities. In few other
places in the world is there such a commingling of dissimilar human
elements. I doubt if even the cities of the Orient can present such
contrasts of wholly unrelated races of people, as well as so great
a variety of the white race. Here, in one small town, one may find
representatives of several different tribes of the aboriginal Indians,
in every state of civilization and savagery, picturesquely attired in
bright-colored costumes, bearing their peculiar baskets and pottery.
Here, also, is the next higher stratum, the Mexicans, in great
numbers, and in all mixtures of blood from the nearly pure Indian peon
upward. Here are African Negroes in considerable numbers, emigrants
from the Southern States, and every town has its Chinese and usually
its Japanese contingent, the overflow from California. Above all
these, and in greatly superior numbers, rises the white man, usually
American by birth, and yet generously intermixed with many of European
nationalities. In most of the older towns, such as San Antonio in Texas
and Tucson in Arizona, whole neighborhoods appear more foreign than
American, presenting strange contrasts between modern store-buildings,
banks, and churches, and ancient weather-worn adobe houses where the
Mexicans live almost as primitively as did their forefathers a century
ago.
The peopling of the country makes one of the most interesting and
significant stories in the history of the nation. For many years it
was the unknown land, the land of possibilities and wonders, as well
as of danger and death. Therefore it attracted the hardy pioneer, and
here, for lack of any other frontier on the continent, the pioneer,
though with the germ of westward ho! still lingering in his blood, has
been compelled at last to settle down. I shall not soon forget the
sorrowful desert-dweller whom I met in what seemed the ends of the
earth in Arizona. His nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away, his
post-office twenty-five miles, and yet he was bemoaning the fact that
the country was becoming crowded. "If there were any more frontier," he
said, "I'd go to it."
It is hardy blood, that of the pioneer, good stock on which to found
the development of a country. For years the West has been the lodestone
for those adventurous spirits who love the outdoor and exciting life
of the mining prospector, the cow-boy, the hunter--a healthy, rugged
lot, virtually all pure Americans. The Rough Riders sprang from this
element. But probably the most distinct single human invasion of the
Southwest was made by the irreconcilables of the Confederate Army after
the Civil War. They could not endure the Federal domination of the
reconstruction period, or else they had lost all their property, and
with it their hope of rising again in their old neighborhood, and so
they set westward, remaining, as immigrants usually do, in the same
latitude as that from which they came. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona
all have a strong substratum of the Old South, still possessing many of
the bitternesses left by the great conflict, and yet rising with the
opportunities of the new land, and adding to its development peculiar
pride, dignity and often culture. Owing to its wildernesses and its
contiguity to Mexico, the Southwest was also for many years the refuge
of outlaws from all parts of the country--an element which, though
small, was so perniciously active that it earned an undue prominence in
fiction and contemporary literature, giving the country a complexion
of evil which it did not deserve. This element still effervesces in a
train-robbery, but its effect on the Southwest has been inconsequential.
All these earlier sources of population, however, were small
compared with the great inundation of the last few years, following
the extension of the railroads, the crowding of other parts of the
country, and the hard times of 1893, which, causing discontent among
many Easterners and Northerners, tempted them to try new fields of
enterprise. There are virtually no native-born Anglo-Saxons of voting
age in New Mexico and Arizona--at least, they are so few as to be a
wonder and a pride. In Texas there are many, for the changes in that
part of the Southwest are a step older and possibly not quite so rapid,
although Texas, too, is overrun with people from every part of the
country. It is safe to ask any middle-aged man what part of the East he
is from. Of this later influx of population there are representatives
from every part of the United States, with a specially large number
from Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Missouri--the Middle West.
In many cases these settlers had first immigrated to the States just
beyond the Mississippi, and had there taken up farms; but uncertain
rain and crop-failures drove them onward to the irrigated valleys of
the region, and there they are to-day.
Up to this point the population consisted of the strongest and most
enterprising American manhood, for the weaklings do not undertake the
chances and hardships of pioneering. With this drift of population,
however, there has appeared a large number of invalids, mostly with
pulmonary complaints, from every part of America. Many of them have
been promptly cured, and have engaged in business or taken up farms
in the valleys or ranches on the plains. A considerable proportion of
them are people of education, culture, refinement and often of wealth.
Much of the money of the region, as in Southern California, has been,
brought in and invested by health-seekers. This class has added much
to the social and religious development, and it includes some of
the leading spirits in politics. As yet there has been very little
immigration of Italians, Russians, or the lower class of Irish, most of
whom are by preference city-dwellers.
It will be seen, therefore, that the Southwest is peopled with the
very best Americans, segregated by the eternal law of evolutionary
selection, with almost no substratum of the low-caste European
foreigner to lower the level of civilization. With such a start, and
such a commingling of Americans from all parts of the Union, the man
from Boston rubbing elbows with the Atlanta man, and Kansas working
side by side with Mississippi, it would seem that, the region may one
day produce the standard American type. It has already manifested its
capacity for type-production in the cow-boy, now being rapidly merged
in the new Southwesterner, a type as distinct and as uniquely American
as the New England Yankee or the Virginia colonel.
THE DESERT
BY RAY STANNARD BAKER
To science there is no poison; to botany no weed; to chemistry no
dirt.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
After all, there is no desert. Within the memory of comparatively
young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the
Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a
region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as
half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky
Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable
rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of
snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of
lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. It was rutted by chasms
and washes, the channels of rivers that thundered with a passion of
water for a single month in the year, and were ash-dry for the other
eleven. Some stretched eastward toward the Mississippi, some southward
toward the Gulf, and some westward toward the Pacific. It was an empire
of wild grandeur, of majestic heights and appalling depths, of silent
waste places, of barbaric beauty of coloring, of volcanoes and the
titanic work of volcanoes, of fierce wild beasts and wilder men; but
it was a desert. Here, for months at a time, no rain came to moisten
the parched earth, and there were few clouds to obscure the heat of
a blazing sun. The earth became dust and ashes, all but uninhabited
and impassable, here grown up to cactus and greasewood and sage, here
to gray grass, here to nothing--a place where animals dropped in
their tracks from heat and thirst, and shriveled there, undecaying,
until their ragged hides crumpled like parchment over their gaunt
skeletons. Many a pioneer bound for the El Dorado of California felt
the tooth of the desert, and left his bones to whiten on the trail as
a dreadful evidence of the rigor of these waste places. This was the
Great American Desert, the irreclaimable waste of fifty years ago, the
dread-spot of the continent. To-day you may seek it in vain.
When reduced to its essence, the work of every great explorer and
pioneer in the West has consisted in showing that the desert was no
desert. It was a cramped and mendicant imagination and a weak faith in
humanity that first called it a desert, and it has required the life of
many a bold man to dispel that error. The pioneer cow-man came in and
saw the dry bunch-grass of the plains. "This is no desert," he said;
"this is pasture-land," and straightway thirty million cattle were
feeding on the ranges. A colony of Mormons, driven to the wilderness
by persecution, saw, with the faith of a Moses, green fields blooming
where the cactus grew, and in a few years a great city had risen in
the midst of a fertile valley, and a new commonwealth had been born. A
Powell came and disclosed the possibilities of the desert when watered
from rivers that had long run to waste, and a hundred valleys began to
bloom, and millions of acres of barren desert to grow the richest crops
on the continent. Miners came, found gold and silver and copper in the
hills, and built a thousand camps; the railroads divided the great
desert with a maze of steel trails until it was a veritable patchwork
of civilization; and timid tourists came and camped, and went away
better and braver. To-day several million Americans are living in the
desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time,
and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green
hills of New England.
A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where
he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true
desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places.
I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as
far as the eye can reach--sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling
mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus,
gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no
man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever
will again. But what is that sound--_click_, _click_, _click_--that
comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert.
Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly,
for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have
a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed
for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all
its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here
are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in
carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place,
having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and
so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the
_click_, _click_ of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an
indomitable, conquering humanity.
Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that, and you will
see a still stranger sight--a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed
iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm,
weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically
dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind
burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and
grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the
bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the
sand, with the water following in a broad brown band.
[Illustration: View among the cacti.]
"Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will
irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years
there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that
mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the
city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near
those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all
the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for
gold; see herders setting up windmills; see farmers boring holes for
artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat
roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels,
and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man
dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and
your heart will throb with the pride of it--this splendid human energy
and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their
homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they
die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying
wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak
and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh
at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a
little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future.
Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts.
Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are
still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his
physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so
incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him
and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may
be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards
of a spring, and die there of thirst.
To him, in such cases, it is all as much of a desert and quite as
dangerous as if there were not a human habitation within a thousand
miles. But to the man who is reasonably schooled in the wisdom of
trails and the signs of water, the desert has been robbed of nearly
all its terrors. With proper care and preparation he may go anywhere
without fear, although frequently not without acute discomfort and
even suffering.
The desert still maintains its fastnesses in the West. There are some
spots better entitled to the name than others, but each year these
fastnesses are shrinking before the advance of human enterprise, as the
water might rise over the land, leaving the high and difficult places
to the last. So these islands are scattered through several States and
Territories, mostly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah
and Oregon, in the great valley lying between the main ridge of the
Rocky Mountains, on the east, and the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and
the Coast Range on the west. Chief among them are the Mohave Desert,
in southeastern California, a territory as large as Switzerland;
the Colorado and Gila deserts of southwestern Arizona and Southern
California; the marvelous Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona; and
the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. Opening northward from the Mohave
Desert lies Death Valley, perhaps the most desolate and forbidding
spot in America, though comparatively small in extent. Yet there are
few places even in these desert strongholds that are wholly without
life of one sort or another, and a large proportion of them could be
reclaimed, if water were available. Even as it is, not one can bar
human activity; railroads have been built directly across three of
the worst of them; mines are being opened, and oil-wells driven; land
is being reclaimed by irrigation; and even in the fastnesses of Death
Valley there are many mining-camps and an extensive borax industry. In
all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully
forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the
man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, where fire has
followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste
thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green
forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which
nature molds even the most unpromising material; the other is hideous,
grotesque, pitiful, a reminder of the reckless wastefulness of man.
The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty
of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first,
yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls
and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a
man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not
more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert
for the long hot stretches of their open land.
Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon
its power of resistance to thirst. One marvels at the consummate
ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities,
turning every capability to the conservation of such little water
as there is. Everything in the desert has its own story of economy,
patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore
the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all
other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants
and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks
upon the men who dwell in its wastes.
Everywhere there are evidences of the terrible struggle for water--a
struggle in which men who come to the desert must instantly engage:
every wagon that crosses the desert carries its barrel of water; every
man who sets out takes with him a canteen; every ranch has its windmill
and its water-barrel. Water is the only thing that is not free. Stop
at a desert well, and a sign offers water at ten cents or five cents a
head for your horses.
Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who
has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in
the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and
beautiful.
Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert,
suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a
deep, clear blue above--nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air--the
stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy,
a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the
far-off echoing scream of some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl?
The horses loom big and dark where they feed in the near distance;
here and there on the top of a dry yucca-stalk an owl or a hawk sits
outlined in black against the sky; otherwise there is nothing anywhere
to break the long, smooth line of the horizon.
It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty
of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and
have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get
down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. "Few in these
hot, dim, frictiony times," says John Muir, "are quite sane or free;
choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much
good and making so much money--or so little--they are no longer good
themselves." But here in the desert there yet remain places of wildness
and solitude and quiet; there is room here to turn without rubbing
elbows, places where one may yet find refreshment.
INDEX
Across the Continent, 43-45, 103-118, 119-139.
Beginnings of the Westward Movement, 3-13.
Bill Williams, 151-154.
Blue Ridge Pioneers, 18.
Boone, Daniel, 7, 8, 42-43, 69-81.
Buffaloes, 106, 110, 112, 140.
California, 103, 124, 138, 139, 148, 175-191, 192-198.
Clarke, George Rogers, 61-68.
Desert, 116, 223-230.
Down-stream Movement, 14-31.
Early Western Character, 14, 15;
see also "Pioneer."
Early Western Steamboating, 56-60.
First Western Railway, 44-45.
First West-bound American, 19-20.
Frémont Expeditions, 140-162.
First Emigrant Train, 119-139.
Further West, 199-201.
Fur-trade, 36, 37.
Gold, Discovery of in California, 175-191.
Gold, mining of, 192-198.
Illinois, 67, 80, 127, 130, 134;
see also "Pioneer Boyhood."
Kentucky, 75-81, 85-87.
Kit Carson, 140, 146, 163-174.
Land-looker, 94-98.
Marshall, Jas. W., 178-191.
Mining; see Gold.
Mississippi River, 26.
Montana, 206, 207.
Northwest, 61-68, 199-213.
Pack-trains, 41.
Pioneer Boyhood, 88-102.
Pioneer Christmas, 100.
Pioneer Farming, 82-84.
Pioneer Life, 85-87.
Pioneer Mining, 192-198.
Pioneer School Life, 98-100.
Plains, 103-118;
see also First Emigrant Train.
Pony Express, 46-55.
Prairie Schooner, 41.
River Life, 59, 60;
see also "Up-stream Man" and "Down-stream Man".
San Francisco, 48, 118;
see also School-life, California.
Southwest, The Great, 214-222.
Stage-coach, 207-208.
Steamboating, 56-60.
Up-stream Man, 32-43.
Wagon-trains, 42, 43.
Westward Movement:
Beginnings, 3-13.
Colonial Times, 5.
First Transportation, 16.
Kentucky, 6, 7.
Northwest Territory, 9, 10.
Ohio, 11, 12, 13.
South, 19.
Wilderness Road, Boone's, 42-43.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
-Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
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