The Indifferent Stars Above (5 page)

 

O
ut in the middle of the desert sage-lands of present-day Nevada, Lansford Hastings was also in motion. On May 20 he had arrived at a crucial juncture in his mission to intercept the westbound emigrants and direct them toward Suttersville. Since leaving the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, he had struggled with horses and pack mules, floundering through deep drifts of snow while crossing the mountains, then making his way down through the basalt canyons of the eastern foothills and out onto the arid plains of western Nevada. By happenstance he was traveling in the company of James Clyman, among the greatest of the generation of mountain men who traveled the American West between the 1820s and the 1850s. Born in 1792 on a farm belonging to George Washington, whom he had seen in the flesh, Clyman had traveled widely in the far West as early as 1823, and it's unlikely that anyone within a thousand miles knew the lay of the land better than he did.

Clyman and Hastings camped that night on the spot where the established emigrant route northeast to Fort Laramie intersected the theoretical shortcut that Hastings had promoted in his book. Now Hastings wanted to take that shortcut, to see it himself for the first time and to reach the emigrants before they could have a chance to take the road to Oregon rather than California. Clyman thought that the proposed shortcut saved little distance and promised much harder traveling than the proven route. They sat by a campfire in the sagebrush that night and argued about it. In the morning they argued some more. But Hastings would not be deterred, and so they left the established road and struck out across the desert. Ahead of them lay the searing salt flats of Utah and the almost entirely unexplored tangle of mountains and canyons known as the Wasatch.

 

C
rossing Iowa and Missouri, Sarah and her family fell into a basic and comfortable routine that varied little from day to day. They
arose early and built campfires. Franklin and Billy Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder rounded up the family's loose livestock and yoked up the teams. Sarah and her mother and Mary Ann took out long knives and cut thick slabs of bacon from the hams hanging ponderously in their wagons and fried them up in cast-iron skillets. They brewed strong coffee or tea, and then they sat on the grass or on wagon gates eating the bacon, sopping up the grease with pieces of bread they had baked the night before.

Then they threw the last few items into the wagons and got under way. At midday they stopped for an hour or two—“nooning,” as they called it—to rest the teams, let the cattle graze, and take another quick meal themselves. Then they continued on again until four or five in the afternoon. When they found a good spot near clean water and with ample grass for the livestock, they combined their wagons with those of other families and drew them into a square or a circle and turned the animals out to graze while they prepared campfires, prepared dinner, set up tents, ate, and gathered around the fires to socialize a bit before turning in. If they felt that Indians were about, they drove the livestock into the enclosure formed by the wagons and set guards out for the night.

When it came time to bed down, they crawled into the backs of wagons or into tents. We do not know where Sarah and Jay slept. Tents were expensive items, and it was common among the emigrants for whole extended families, meaning children, seniors, men, women, and couples—including newlyweds—to share a single large tent. In chilly nights on the plains, and later in the mountains of the West, it was the simplest and most effective way for everyone to stay reasonably warm. But Sarah and Jay might well have chosen to sleep in the relative privacy afforded by the farm wagon they drove.

In the middle of May, they approached St. Joe. They traveled now alternately through open prairies on the uplands and through virgin woods in the valleys. This was rich, fecund land, country that an aging John James Audubon had prowled just three years earlier, making observations and collecting specimens for his
Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,
a follow-up to
Birds of America.
The ancient, massive trees of the woods had leafed out, and as the Graves family descended
into the Missouri River Valley, they entered a world that was a deep, dense, and somber green, but explosive with flashes of brighter colors. Sky blue irises rose in ranks out of the mossy ground. Scarlet tanagers, orange orioles, and yellow warblers drifted through the canopies of tulip poplar and black locust trees. Deer and gray wolves slipped away silently into the understory. Passenger pigeons, with their slate blue backs and wine red breasts, sometimes nearly filled the sky overhead and at other times draped the enormous trees, weighing down the limbs. Along the river, white pelicans plunged out of the sky Icarus-like, piercing the water with hardly a ripple. Blue-winged teals, green-winged teals, and cinnamon teals gabbled and bobbed in the water with hosts of other ducks. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds clung to reeds along the shores, chortling and chattering among themselves and scolding passersby.

As they emerged from the woods and made their way into the rough-and-tumble town that stretched along a big bend in the river, Sarah and Jay found themselves part of a small flood of emigrants converging on St. Joe that spring. The local newspaper, the
Gazette,
marveled at the number of wagons that appeared and at the attitude their occupants displayed.

St. Joe that spring was a vortex of commercial activity—a swirling confusion of horse traders, wagon builders, ferrymen, outfitters, Indians, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and entrepreneurs of every stripe. Steamboats trailing black clouds of smoke clawed their way up the
notoriously shallow and therefore dangerous Missouri River and tied up along the waterfront. Slaves labored to unload the boats, carrying bales and barrels of goods on bare, sweat-slicked backs. Along the riverside on the south end of town, more slaves tended fields of hemp, a crop grown not for its intoxicating qualities but because it was the source of valuable fibers. Flat-bottomed scows, pressed into service as ferries, struggled back and forth across the river carrying white-topped emigrant wagons, the men at their long sweeps fighting the current all the way. Pottawatomie and Kaw Indians walked bare-chested through the streets hawking vegetables and fish and game. Trappers and mountain men dressed in buckskin breeches, fringed jackets, and bear or coonskin hats mingled with emigrants in broad-brimmed hats and sunbonnets, dispensing advice and tall tales in exchange for liquor and tobacco. Stern-eyed Christian missionaries browsed the mercantile stores for cheap trade goods that might appeal to the heathen out west. Merchants come upriver from St. Louis inspected stacks of furs and made cash-on-the-barrel head offers. Brass whistles on the steamboats shrieked. Hammers and anvils in the blacksmith shops rang out rhythmically in point and counterpoint. Oxen bellowed. Dogs barked. Hogs squealed as they trotted toward the slaughterhouse and their doom. The river stank of raw sewage and pig offal. The streets reeked of manure and horse piss. But bakeries also perfumed the sour air with the aroma of fresh-baked bread.

For many of the emigrants, St. Joe was a last chance to see a doctor before leaving the United States behind, a vitally important consideration for people who soon might find themselves a thousand miles from the nearest doctor. According to the local “card of rates” agreed upon by the physicians of St. Joe the previous year, one could have an abscess opened for fifty cents. For a dollar one could obtain medical advice or receive an enema. A troublesome tooth could be extracted for fifty cents, troublesome toes or fingers amputated for five dollars each, arms for ten dollars, legs for twenty. If an emigrant woman were to find herself in a delicate condition, she might choose to linger in St. Joe long enough to have her baby professionally delivered for five dollars, but there would be no volume discounts—twins would set her back ten.

In the midst of all this activity, Sarah and Jay faced the task of making sure that they were well provisioned for the journey ahead. Some of what they needed they had brought from home, but this was the last and best chance to stock up on any remaining essentials. Selecting the right items and the right quantities was critical to their success—more critical, as it would turn out, than they could yet begin to imagine. Too much in the way of food and gear would weigh them down and tire their oxen, possibly even kill the oxen when the going got tough. Too little would raise the possibility of hunger or even starvation for the family if anything went wrong along the way. The guidebooks, including Lansford Hastings's
Emigrants' Guide,
gave specific recommendations for the quantity of certain staples that each adult traveler ought to procure: “at least two hundred pounds of flour, or meal; one hundred and fifty pounds of bacon; ten pounds of coffee; twenty pounds of sugar; and ten pounds of salt….”

But there were many hard decisions to be made beyond figuring out the required quantities of staples, and for the first time in her life, as the mistress of her own household, it was largely Sarah's responsibility to make these decisions. For one thing, as all frontier women knew, not all flour was created equal.
*
Sarah had to choose among three basic types that had long been known as “shorts,” “middlings,” and “superfine.” Shorts contained mostly bran and very little of the actual endosperm, the white, starchy portion of the wheat kernel. It was coarse, gritty stuff, often contaminated by dirt, wheat chaff, and insects. Middlings were hardly any better, a mixture of bran and wheat germ, often blended with cornmeal or rye to stretch it. Middlings generally needed further refining to be useful in baking. Superfine flour was stone-ground and passed through sieves. It resembled what we know as whole wheat flour, but it was expensive and beyond the reach of most emigrant families.

Sugar raised another set of issues. It could take the form of molasses in kegs or barrels; sticky, hat-shaped loaves of brown-and-white
sugar; lumps of gooey unrefined brown sugar; or “Havana,” a lumpy crushed white sugar that required still more crushing and sifting to be useful in baking cakes or pastries. Because they were relatively inexpensive and portable, the hat-shaped loaves were what most of the emigrant cooks carried, hanging them by strings within their wagons. Most also carried loose-leaf tea and coffee, the latter in the form of green beans that would have to be roasted in a pan over a campfire and then ground in a portable coffee grinder before it could be brewed.

To raise their bread, they took “saleratus,” as they called baking powder, a commodity that they would later, to their delight, find occurring naturally around soda springs in the West, where they could scoop up as much of it as they wanted for free. For the many days when they would not have time or inclination to bake bread, they took hardtack or crackers. Most took a tub of clear suet to substitute for butter, though those who brought along a milk cow could simply hang a bucket of cream inside a wagon and let the bouncing and jouncing of the wagon churn fresh butter for them. Almost everyone brought vinegar, which was useful not only to lend flavor to their food but also as a cleaning agent and, they believed, as a medicine for both their own maladies and those of their livestock. Most also brought whiskey or brandy for the same purposes, and for celebrating special occasions like the Fourth of July.

They brought hard candy, hard cheeses, figs, raisins, flavored syrups—lemon and peppermint being particular favorites—salted codfish, pickled herring, and jellies, jams, and preserves packed in stoneware crocks. Some of the items they crammed into their provision boxes carried brand names that you or I might still find on our own kitchen shelves—Underwood's deviled ham for one, and Baker's chocolate with which to flavor a sweet cake or make hot chocolate at the campfire.

Because they came from a homestead, Sarah and her family probably brought along sides of bacon from their own hogs back home, but if not, they could buy as much smoked, salted bacon as they wanted in St. Joe. Except for whatever game they might kill along the way or as many of their cattle as they might choose to slaughter, the bacon would be the only meat they could count on until they reached California.

Because they did not yet know in whose company they would be traveling, nor how events might separate them from others, every family needed to be capable of basic self-sufficiency all the way to California. This meant that if they hadn't brought them from home, before leaving St. Joe each family needed to procure all the requisite tools for maintaining and repairing their wagons, preparing their meals, tending to their livestock, providing shelter at night and during storms, crossing flooded streams, and defending themselves from the Indian attacks that they viewed as exceedingly likely and that they feared above nearly all else.
*
As a result, despite the burden it placed on their mules and oxen and the compromises it imposed on them in terms of what else they could bring along, they had to carry a great many very heavy items—hammers, chisels, augers, axes, bolts, screws, shovels, tents, frying pans, Dutch ovens, coffeepots, additional cooking utensils, bullets or the lead for making them, iron shoes for their oxen and horses, kegs of black powder, and large numbers of guns.

The guns were of two basic types—older flintlocks, which depended on a hammer striking a piece of flint to create a spark that, with luck, ignited a charge of black powder, or the more recent percussion guns. The latter, in place of the flint, depended on a small copper capsule called a “cap.” The cap contained a small amount of highly explosive fulminate of mercury painted on the inside of one end and covered with a drop of varnish. When struck and crushed by the hammer, the cap exploded, igniting a charge of powder and thus discharging the weapon. By 1846 most newer guns, both muskets and pistols, were percussion weapons, which were considerably less likely to mis-fire as a result of damp powder, faulty flints, or wayward sparks. But many of the emigrants, including Franklin Graves, held to the old ways. Along with their percussion guns, they carried flintlocks that dated back to the American Revolution or earlier, guns their fathers and grandfathers had handed down to them and with which they had hunted game ranging from squirrels to bears all their lives.