The Indifferent Stars Above (4 page)

What Lansford Hastings had to say struck a chord with John Sutter. By early April, Hastings had finished helping Sutter lay out the site of a future town—Suttersville—on a patch of Sutter's land located on a bluff three miles southeast of the fort. In exchange for Hastings's help, some trade goods, and additional unspecified services, Sutter had promised to build Hastings a large home and a general store and to give him title to a portion of the lots in the new metropolis.

First, though, Hastings had something urgent to take care of. In
The Emigrants' Guide,
while he had made California out to be virtually a land of milk and honey, he had also sung the praises of Oregon, a destination that many of the emigrants felt was more easily and more safely reachable than California. He had written his paean to Oregon, however, before he had worked out his arrangement with Sutter. Emigrants who went to Oregon would not be interested in driving the Mexicans out of California, nor in purchasing lots in Suttersville. Hastings needed to divert them.

Luckily, from his point of view, in
The Emigrants' Guide,
he had
inadvertently given the California-bound emigrants an extra incentive to head his way—a shortcut to California, a road that would shave several hundred miles off the trip.

At the time he had written about it, the mention of the potential shortcut probably hadn't meant much to Hastings. At some point while composing his book, he had evidently contemplated one of the vaguely drawn maps of the American West then in circulation and noted that the current route to California looped inefficiently to the northwest to reach Fort Hall in present-day Idaho, before dropping down to the latitude of what we now call Donner Pass, where it entered California. Why not, he must have thought, go southwest from what is now western Wyoming to the south end of the Great Salt Lake and then more or less directly west to intercept the established route to California? It must have seemed a self-evident improvement to the Fort Hall road.

The problem—and it was a substantial one, as he was just beginning to realize—was that Hastings had never taken his own shortcut, which ran directly through the Wasatch Mountains. In fact, except for a few trappers and a mounted expedition under the command of John C. Frémont and Lieutenant Theodore Talbot the previous fall, no one had ever attempted the route, certainly no one riding farm wagons laden with twenty-five hundred pounds of goods drawn by teams of plodding oxen. Anyone who had done so would not likely have suggested it to anyone else. But Lansford Hastings had made many promises in California, and, for him at least, the shortcut offered an opportunity to seal his reputation as a trailblazer, his potential leadership role in a California free from Mexican control, and now his immediate financial interests as well.

And so on April 11, 1846, Lansford Hastings was already in the
saddle in California's Sacramento Valley. He was riding east through green foothills toward the still snowcapped Sierra Nevada Mountains, setting out to meet Sarah and what he expected to be vast legions of emigrants like her, to show them the way to Suttersville.
*

The next morning, April 12, Sarah took one last, long look at the place that had almost always been her home. Then Jay flicked a switch at the rump of one of the oxen and gave a shout. The oxen leaned into their yokes, and the wheels of the wagon turned—the first slow revolution of thousands to come—and Sarah and her family, walking alongside their wagons, began to climb out of the cold, wet bottomlands along the Illinois River, one footstep at a time.

I
n 1846 spring came slowly to the Illinois River Valley. All through March and the first half of April, an iron-gray sky sat over the bottomlands like the close-fitting lid on a Dutch oven. Day after day relentless rain and snow and sleet slanted down out of the opaque heavens. The countryside was boggy, the Illinois River swollen and spilling over its banks.

The Graves family's initial objective was to get to St. Joseph, Missouri, where they could count on purchasing all the supplies they would need for the long overland trip and where, equally important, they could count on meeting up with other emigrants to form a traveling party. St. Joe, as it was just then beginning to be called, had the advantage over the other principal jumping-off place—Independence, Missouri—of being sixty miles closer to the Great Platte River Road, the established route to the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains. St. Joe lay to their southwest, but they began by going northwest to a tiny hamlet called New Boston, where a ferry transported their wagons across the Mississippi River. Then they began to travel west and
southwest, cutting across southern Iowa and slanting down through northern Missouri.

It was slow going. The whole country seemed to be underwater. Six days after they left, the
Illinois Gazette,
back home in Lacon, noted that a particularly long siege of rain had finally ended, but it also noted a most unusual event—the Illinois River now was high enough “to float steamers of the largest class.” With the rain, every stream or low spot Sarah and her family came across presented an obstacle that would have to be overcome. Wagons had to be double-teamed to get through boggy spots, small creeks had to be bridged or scouted for places where they could be forded, larger streams had to be searched for a ferryman willing to hazard the crossing, and with a ferry big enough to accomplish it. If a ferry could not be found, the only way across was to build a makeshift ferry of their own, or swim the livestock across and then caulk the beds of the wagons and use them as rafts, a hazardous and arduous endeavor at best.

Mud was their constant companion—it squelched under the heavy feet of the oxen, it plastered the withers of their saddle horses, it flew out from under the turning wagon wheels, it splattered their clothes and their hair and their faces. They scraped mud from their boots, they daubed it from their eyes, they combed it out of their hair, they dug it out from under their fingernails, they tasted it in their food, and they cursed it all the while.

There were thirteen of them, divided among three wagons: Franklin and Elizabeth likely drove the wagon containing their household goods and the hidden coins. Jay and Sarah, a household unto themselves now, drove a second wagon. A young man named John Snyder who had moved to Steuben Township from Ohio the previous winter drove the third. Snyder, at twenty-three, was muscular, strikingly handsome, and notably genial. He had a buoyant, carefree way about him that put others at ease. Hearing that the Graves family was bound for California, he had asked if he might travel with them. Franklin Graves, at fifty-seven, knew that he could use the muscle power of another young adult male, so he struck a deal with Snyder—he could drive the third wagon and perform other chores in exchange for his board until they reached California.

Sarah and her many siblings traveled variously in the different wagons, on foot, or on saddle horses. Mostly they walked, to spare the horses and the oxen on whose strength and endurance their success would eventually depend. Sarah's closest sister, nineteen-year-old Mary Ann, was widely reputed to be a notable beauty, with dark, wavy hair and a broad white smile. Her oldest brother, Billy, seventeen, was a gangly teenager, built much like his father, already pushing past six feet in height. The younger children were Eleanor, thirteen; Lovina, eleven; Nancy, who would turn eight on April 26; Jonathan, seven; Franklin Ward Jr., five; and the baby of the family, Elizabeth, only about nine months old.

The first green of the spring prairie grass had begun to emerge from beneath the old, dry, butterscotch-colored grass of the previous year. As they drove over the wide-open countryside of southern Iowa, the dead grass whispered continuously around their wagons, stirred by the ceaseless prairie wind. Other than that and the muffled footfall of the oxen on the wet earth, they moved through a largely silent world.

As they turned south into Missouri, the terrain began to change, the amplitude of the hills—the distance from the lowest points of the bottoms to the crests of the hills—began to diminish, and the intervals between the crest of one hill and the crest of the next began to increase, the land still far from flat, but moving in that direction. The weather grew mixed, sometimes wet and sometimes fair, but the cold gradually began to moderate, and the wet wind began to carry hints of spring. Sarah and her siblings were in high spirits. As they walked or rode alongside the wagons, they spent hours imagining and chatting about the wonders that lay before them in California and the adventures they would have on the way there.

None of her siblings' hearts, though, could have been as light as Sarah's. In the 1840s it was customary for fashionable brides to take some form of what was variously termed a “wedding journey” or “bridal tour,” often in the company of friends or family. The word “honey-moon” had been in use long before the 1840s but referred more generally to a period of presumed marital bliss following the nuptials rather than to a journey. The brides of successful New Yorkers might expect to make a wedding journey upstate to Niagara Falls. Brahmin girls
from Boston's Beacon Hill might make extended tours of Europe. Country brides like Sarah, though, were seldom able to afford any sort of celebratory journey at all. If she and Jay had stayed in Steuben Township, the most she might reasonably have hoped for was a twenty-mile trip down the river to spend a night or two in Peoria. But instead here she was, embarking on an epic journey to a fabled land. Ahead of her lay not only the prospect of a home and a farmstead of her own in a rich land with a benign climate but also the opportunity to see and experience things she had only read of or imagined before now—surf pounding on a sandy beach, the smell of salt air, ocean fog filtering through dark forests, odd beasts such as antelope and sea lions, dusky-skinned “Spaniards” (as the emigrants often called Mexican Californians), and magnificent mountains. Mountains of any kind would be a novelty, but Sarah knew that ahead of her lay mountains that were reputed to rival the Swiss Alps, picturesque peaks capped by granite crags and draped with deep drifts of snow.

 

A
nd so they moved slowly and blithely toward St. Joe. But even as they contemplated the prosperity that lay ahead of them, people were in motion and events were unfolding in faraway places—people and events that were as yet unknown to them but that in time would come together to profoundly alter the world they were about to enter and ensnare them in a deadly web.

On May 12 a party of emigrants bound for California departed from Independence, Missouri, south of St. Joe. One of the organizers of the party was forty-five-year-old James Frazier Reed, a businessman from Springfield, Illinois. Reed was relatively affluent and, according to many who were with him that spring, rather full of himself. Though not officially the captain of the group, he seems to have regarded himself as its natural leader from the outset. Traveling with him was his thirty-two-year-old wife, Margret, who suffered greatly from migraines, or “sick headaches” as they were then called, and was generally frail—so frail, in fact, that she had lain in bed at her wedding, with her husband standing by holding her hand. The couple hoped the climate in California would cure her. The Reeds had in tow their children
and stepchildren; Margret Reed's seventy-year-old mother, Sarah Keyes; a cook; a personal servant; and several teamsters whom Reed had hired to drive wagons and handle his livestock.

Anticipating the rigors of the journey ahead, James Reed had gone to extra lengths to prepare at least one wagon that would have in it some of the amenities of home for his wife, children, and aging mother-in-law. His stepdaughter, Virginia, described it in considerable detail.

It was, perhaps, not quite the ponderous “palace car” that later mythology would make it out to be, but apparently it was substantially more elaborate and comfortable than the simple, roughly four-by-nine-foot farm wagons that most of the emigrants drove.

Traveling with the Reeds were two brothers, also from the Springfield area—George and Jacob Donner—and their families. George Donner, in his early sixties, was among the older emigrants setting out for California that spring. A prosperous farmer, he was comfortable in his own circumstances, but he hoped to relocate his five daughters to a place where they would find more favorable prospects than in Illinois. Like so many of the emigrants of 1846, he was a large man physically and the son of a Revolutionary War veteran. He had been married three times before. His present wife, Tamzene, was at forty-four a small woman with gray-blue eyes, dark hair, and, according to one source, a “not pretty” face. But she was an accomplished woman. She had twice
been a schoolteacher, she spoke French, and she was an enthusiastic amateur botanist. She also had been married before, in North Carolina, but in the course of less than a year she had lost her entire family—a daughter, born prematurely, as well as her husband and her son to illness. Jacob Donner, George's brother, thought to be about fifty-six, was a slight man and not in robust health. He and his wife, Elizabeth, forty-five, had between them seven children. Like the Reeds, the Donner brothers and their families had brought along a number of hired teamsters to handle the livestock and drive two of their extra wagons.

 

E
vents that would affect Sarah and her family, the Reeds, the Donners, and everyone else setting out for California that spring were also unfolding far to the east, in Washington, D.C. On May 13, President James K. Polk signed a bill declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and Mexico.

Polk had wanted this war—or at least the booty it would yield—from his first days in office. Though the war was ostensibly fought over a border clash between Mexican troops and U.S. troops in the newly independent but disputed Republic of Texas, the real prize was California. California at the time included not only the modern state we know today but also all of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of Colorado and Wyoming—nearly half of Mexico's territory at the time. Polk had earlier tried to buy California on the cheap, but that having failed, he had resolved simply to take it. The dispute over Texas had given him the opening he wanted, and it dovetailed nicely with a carefully choreographed campaign of presidential deception that would find a disconcerting parallel early in the twenty-first century.

Many in the Congress, and some in Polk's own cabinet, thought that the outright seizure of California would be unjustified and immoral. But Polk was determined to defend and expand his executive powers against any congressional interference. He was also at times stubborn and narrow-minded. Historian Bernard DeVoto said of him that he was “pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains.” And apparently he counted anyone who disagreed with him about Mexico and Cali
fornia as primary among the spooks and villains. When he sent his war bill to Congress on May 11 and the members of Congress decided that perhaps they should debate the issue before acting on it, Polk was outraged, taking their failure to act immediately to be nothing less than treasonous.

After months of jingoistic rhetoric emanating from Washington about the natural right of Americans to fulfill their manifest destiny and the obvious moral depravity of Mexico and Mexicans, the mood of the country was largely behind Polk. The urge to expand the nation's territory was almost universal, and it seemed self-evident to most Americans that they had a natural right to as much of the continent as they desired. The administration had crafted its rhetoric carefully, advertising the impending conflict as a defensive war, not as the war of conquest that it in fact would be.

Faced with this kind of popular support, the Congress passed the war bill 42–2. At a cabinet meeting that evening, Polk's secretary of state, James Buchanan, still had his doubts. He suggested that perhaps the administration should make clear to foreign governments that the United States' argument with Mexico concerned only Texas and that the United States had no designs on California, New Mexico, or any other part of Mexico's territory in the West. The president's angry reaction was to proclaim that certainly he would take California if he could, that he would “acquire California or any other part of Mexican territory which we desire.”

On May 16 the headline for the
Illinois Gazette
back in Lacon read “W
AR!
W
AR!”
Two days later the Republican candidate for Congress in the Seventh District of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, arrived unannounced in Lacon, campaigning for the congressional seat he would soon use to denounce the war with Mexico.

 

O
n May 19 the Donner and Reed families, having crossed both the Missouri and the Kansas rivers, fell in with a much larger party led by a Kentuckian, Colonel William Russell, near a Kaw Indian settlement known as Fool Chief's Village. The Russell Party, glad to have the addition of more men—particularly well-regarded, relatively
educated, and affluent men like James Reed and the Donner brothers—voted them into their party unanimously.