The Indifferent Stars Above (9 page)

In other groves and in the dusty open fields in front of the fort, scores of white-topped emigrant wagons were assembled in loose clusters. Everywhere men and women, both white and Native American, were bustling about—tending to children, trading horses for mules or tobacco for furs, doing laundry in the river, repairing wagons, sitting in the shade smoking clay pipes. The Sioux warriors—some of them bare-chested, some resplendent in suits of white-tanned buffalo skins decorated with colored beads, some wearing feathered headdresses and full war paint, some with scalps dangling from their waists—crowded into the small, dark, and relatively cool apartments of the fort itself, taking in the wonders of the commissary and trying to arrange favorable trades for rifles, knives, pots and pans, and provisions of all sorts.

The following day was the Glorious Fourth of July, in many ways the most important day of the year for the emigrants. At Fort Laramie and all along the trail, the day was given over to festivities. Bottles of whiskey that had been squirreled away in wagons were brought out and opened. Children gathered berries for the making of pies, tarts, and cakes. Men rode gleefully out on buffalo hunts or slaughtered
beef cattle and prepared huge barbecue fires. They drank more whiskey. They hoisted the flag and fired salutes to the Stars and Stripes with the fort's cannons and with whatever other firearms they could get their hands on. They invited the Sioux into their camps and gave them small gifts. As evening came on, they built bonfires and drank whiskey again. Under a fat moon, waxing gibbous, they gave speeches about the dawning of liberty in the world. They made toasts to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and James K. Polk. Fiddlers fiddled. Girls and boys danced round the fires. Men shot their rifles into the night air and whooped for joy and drank still more whiskey.

Charles Stanton, camped that night with the Donners and Reeds a week's travel west of the fort, sat and watched as his fellows banged on a drum made from the skin of a dog killed the day before for the purpose. A young man camped nearby, Frank Kellogg, feasted with his companions on a pot pie made from the brisket of a large buffalo. Then they rose and unleashed a continuous volley of fire from 150 guns they had assembled around them and stood astonished as the night air crackled and popped with the sound of five or six hundred more guns answering from far up and down the valley of the North Platte.

Much farther to the west, John Frémont and the American revolutionaries who had seized Mariano Vallejo's compound at Sonoma also celebrated the Glorious Fourth. They roasted sides of beef on spits over open fires, drank fine Mexican brandy, discharged Vallejo's brass cannons, and sampled tamales provided by the villagers. In the large adobe home of Salvador Vallejo, Mariano's brother, Frémont's regular-army troops in blue uniforms along with irregulars in buckskins, an assortment of newly enlisted volunteers, and a handful of Delaware Indians who served as Frémont's scouts sang Yankee songs, drank more brandy and wine, and danced gleefully with one another deep into the night.

Mariano Vallejo spent the evening in a cell at Sutter's Fort, shivering and shaking with malaria, swatting at the mosquitoes that swarmed up from the slough behind the fort.

O
n the morning of July 5, Sarah and Jay repacked their wagon, rounded up their cattle, joined the rest of the family, and moved slowly out of the cool cottonwood groves of Fort Laramie into the surrounding dry hills, bleached blond by the summer sun. They departed without most of the companions with whom they had come this far. If nothing else, Franklin Ward Graves was an independent man, and he seems to have paid little heed to the widely shared belief that for safety's sake the emigrants should always travel in large groups. When he wanted to depart, he departed. As they left the fort behind them, only two other wagons accompanied them—one belonging to the William Daniels family and the other to the John McCracken family.

To avoid crossing the river, they struggled over a steep bluff north of the fort, their wheels cutting ruts into the soft gray sandstone—ruts that would be amplified by the passage of thousands of wagon wheels in the next few years and that are still visible today near Guernsey, Wyoming. Off to the west, they could see the purple hump of Laramie Peak rising 10,240 feet on the horizon, their first good look at the
Rockies. The country here was increasingly arid, the hills increasingly rocky, cut by gullies and studded with shrubby junipers and sagebrush. This was an ancient landscape, shaped only by tectonic forces and by wind and rain and thundering herds of buffalo. It was virtually untouched by the hand of man, except for the pony trails and occasional villages of Native Americans, and it had endured thus for tens of thousands of years. Sarah's generation was among the first European Americans to behold it and would also be among the last to see it in all its pristine glory, so rapid were the transformations that were coming.

Large numbers of Sioux, on their way to do battle with the Crow, continued to pass them. On the afternoon of July 6, a small band of warriors approached Mary Ann Graves, who was riding side by side with her brother Billy a bit behind the wagons and the rest of the party. Falling in beside her, the young men on their ponies studied Mary Ann carefully. Then they addressed Billy with hand signs and bits of English. They admired Mary Ann's beauty, they said, and they wanted to purchase her from her brother. Billy, whether good-humoredly or not we do not know, declined the offer. Disappointed, one of the young men laid hold of the bridle of Mary Ann's horse as if to lead her away. Billy raised his rifle and leveled it at the young man's chest. After a tense few moments, the young man released the bridle. He and his companions wheeled around on their ponies and rode off, and Billy and Mary Ann hurriedly rejoined their family.

For the next two weeks, they rolled northwest, passing and being passed by elements of what had been the Russell Party, now under the leadership of Lilburn Boggs, the fiercely anti-Mormon former governor of Missouri who had taken over leadership when Russell resigned on June 18. They slowly gained elevation as they proceeded, generally following the drainage of the North Platte but out of sight of the river most of the time. Near modern-day Casper, Wyoming, they rejoined the river, crossed to the north side, and then left it behind for good, setting a more westerly course, aiming for the drainage of the Sweetwater River, which would guide them up to the South Pass.

Among the Graves girls and the other young people moving west from Fort Laramie that July, spirits still remained mostly high. If there was little to contemplate in the increasingly desolate landscape,
there was all the more time to ponder what the future held in store for them in California or Oregon. Traveling a few days ahead of Sarah, Frank Kellogg, after enjoying his brisket of buffalo on the Fourth of July and then meeting a number of eastbound travelers from California, wrote an enthusiastic letter home.

But for the older adults, particularly those with families to attend to and worry about, the visions of California and Oregon were beginning to seem like ever-receding mirages shimmering on the endless sea of sage that stretched out ahead of them. Many of them had walked the better part of a thousand miles by now. The hardships and the doubts were beginning to accumulate like the dust on the backs of their plodding oxen. The days were crackling-hot now—often over a hundred degrees in the afternoons—but because of the higher elevation the nights were frequently bitter cold. During the long hot days, they had to take care not to let their livestock drink the alkali-poisoned water that increasingly filled roadside ponds. The road itself was sandy, the kind of soft, loose footing that was hard for the oxen to pull the heavily laden wagons through. When they stopped to take their meals, yellow jackets harassed them viciously, contending with them for their food. When they walked through tall grass, ticks as
saulted them. Clouds of mosquitoes plagued them in the evenings. And worse than the mosquitoes or the yellow jackets or the ticks were the swarms of buffalo gnats that descended on them whenever they stood still, swarming into their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths, biting any soft flesh they could find.
*

The fraying of nerves that had begun among members of the Russell Party back in May, when they were delayed by high water on the Big Blue, slowly began to evolve into a contagion of ill will among the Boggs Party and all the emigrants up and down the trail. Families argued with other families, contending over camping spots and rights-of-way on the road. Men stood in the late-afternoon heat, covered with dust, bellowing at one another over whether to halt for the day or press on for another hour. Women, their arms and legs worn out from toting buckets of water from distant creeks and springs, their backs aching from bending over smoky campfires, eyed one another suspiciously and murmured about who was and who wasn't doing her fair share.

Among the group traveling with the Reeds and the Donners, Louis Keseberg, a tall, thirty-two-year-old German immigrant with a thin brown beard, was becoming particularly unpopular. A number of them noted that Keseberg seemed to be abusive to his pretty and petite young wife, Philippine, who had just given birth to her first son. Some said he was an outright wife beater.

By twenty-first-century standards, even the normal relations between frontier husbands and wives might well be considered abusive. Deeply sexist attitudes and assumptions governed all interactions between the two genders. The same month that Sarah approached the Rocky Mountains, her hometown newspaper, the
Illinois Gazette,
published some handy “Rules for Wives,” among them these:

These were rules that Sarah and Jay and most of their contemporaries took for granted. But there were rules for husbands, too.

Keseberg seems to have been one of those husbands who paid attention only to the first set of rules.

Increasingly, the emigrants' worries and arguments concerned grass. Grass was the gasoline of the mid-nineteenth century. It fueled the engines that propelled them forward, their oxen. As the country dried out, it was harder and harder to find sufficient grass for pasturage every night. As the grass grew sparser, it became ever more important to conserve what energy the oxen had, and the only way to do that was to lighten the loads they had to pull. All along the trail, people started to throw things overboard—things they had thought essential when they'd packed their wagons back home or in St. Joe or Independence. Among the first to go were the heaviest things—cookstoves, extra pots and pans, iron tools, and hardware. Then furniture was thrown overboard—chests of drawers, rocking chairs, bed frames, and tables. Finally, as the oxen began to heave and strain on the longest, driest hills approaching the South Pass, even smaller items had to go—extra clothes, books, linens, nonessential food items.

The sacrifices were often hard to make, not always logical, and not always voluntary. An Oregon-bound emigrant of that year, eleven-year-old Lucy Ann Henderson, watched in amused astonishment as one of the adults in her party was told he had to part with a rolling pin.

As they approached the South Pass, the long, slow climb was tiring and the enthusiasm of the younger people finally began to wear thin. Impatient young men flailed at exhausted oxen with bullwhips, cursing them for their slowness. Adolescent girls trudging alongside the wagons slipped into sullen sulks and cast murderous looks at the parents who had gotten them into this. Toddlers, their faces flushed red with heat and exhaustion, bellowed in the backs of wagons.

A fateful question now hung in the air for many families—whether to make for California or for Oregon. Some of those who had intended to go to California had reconsidered after hearing Jim Clyman speak ill of it along the North Platte. And by now word had worked its way along the trail that the United States and Mexico were officially at war. The news injected another element of doubt and risk for many of the California-bound, but it energized others who relished nothing more than the idea of running the Mexicans out of California and taking it for themselves.

Beginning about July 11, they began to encounter an eastbound traveler traveling alone—a somewhat dubious character named Wales B. Bonney, around whom rumors of a possible murder were then swirling in Oregon, from whence he had recently and suddenly departed. Bonney was carrying an open letter from Lansford Hastings, whom he had encountered a few days earlier on the Sweetwater River. The letter was addressed to “all California emigrants now on the road.” In it Hastings talked of having just explored his new cutoff. He advised all who read it to hasten on to Fort Bridger, where he would be waiting to guide them on to California via his route. Hastings, having put the letter in Bonney's hand, had retreated to Fort Bridger to await the emigrants' arrival. While he was doing so, he had ample
opportunity to consult with the fort's proprietors—Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez—about how best to advance their mutual interests.

On July 12, Charles Stanton wrote home from just east of the South Pass to report that another division had taken place in the Boggs Party, leaving only eighteen wagons California bound. That same day Wales Bonney rode into the California party's camp bearing Lansford Hastings's letter. For Stanton, who had read
The Emigrants' Guide
and written enthusiastically about it in an earlier letter home—“get it and read it. You will see some of the inducements that led me to this step”—this unexpected contact with Hastings must have seemed providential. And it must have seemed no less so for James Reed, who was increasingly worried about the lateness of the season. Hastings, the famous and well-regarded pathfinder, they now learned, was waiting for them, in person, just up the trail, to guide them the rest of the way. At the campfire that night and on subsequent nights, the discussions turned increasingly to the merits of taking Hastings up on his offer and his new route.

On July 18 the California-bound wagons traveling with the Donners and the Reeds took their noon break at the broad, bleak, windswept expanse of South Pass and then began for the first time to follow streams that flowed westward through sagebrush toward the Pacific Ocean. The next evening they camped on one of those westward-flowing streams, the Little Sandy—not much more than a wide, shallow creek running swiftly through an arid plain. A number of the Oregon-bound emigrants whom they had passed and repassed along the trail since leaving St. Joe were encamped nearby. This was the last the California-bound emigrants expected to see of them. The road forked here, the right-hand branch bearing northwest toward Fort Hall and the proven, northerly route to either California or Oregon, the left-hand branch bearing southwest toward Fort Bridger and Lansford Hastings. To this day the place is called “the Parting of the Ways.” By the next morning, the California party had committed themselves to the left-hand road, and, in an act that would fuse their names with his darkly and forever in the American imagination, the men had come together to elect George Donner as their captain.

 

T
he members of the newly constituted Donner Party were a diverse lot. It was a group that was from the beginning in danger of fracturing along cultural, economic, and religious lines. There were Protestants and Catholics. There were Irish, German, English, Belgian, and Yankee individuals and families. There were men who considered themselves rich and men who owned little more than the threadbare shirts on their backs. There were well-educated men and men who likely could not even write their own names.