California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (4 page)

She named the baby after her father and
her husband. John Alexander Todd was born on his mother's seventeenth birthday,
October 26, 1845. The
Frémont
expe
dition
had long since come and gone on through
the Rockies farther west. Her condition, unstable through the summer, grew
better with the onset of cooler weather. There were no complications at birth,
though little John Alexander weighed only six and a half pounds when Captain
Canby held him by his ankles and gave him his first stinging smack on the
buttocks. He seemed healthy enough, Canby told Elizabeth. In time, nurtured by
her ample supply of mother's milk, the baby should easily gain his way to
normal weight.

Lying in bed with her infant suckling at
her breast, Elizabeth reread once again the letter from Alex that had reached
her in late August. He had joined a train of one hundred wagons heading mainly
for Oregon. Fifteen of them, including his, would separate from the main column
beyond Fort Hall, veer southwest, and continue on across an even more
forbidding stretch of the Sierras to California. By then the greatest danger
from the Indians would be behind them, he wrote. He anticipated little
difficulty with the savages anyway. There were too many men and arms in the
train to fear more than occasional harassment. He expected to be in California
by the end of October.

Camelia
Canby
sat opposite Elizabeth's bed, rocking as she knitted booties for the baby.
"Wouldn't that be something!" she said. "If he got all the way
to Californee by the time his son is born."

Elizabeth smiled. Silver-haired
Camelia
Canby was given to talking too much, and
too often about things not worth talking about. But she had been a blessing
while Elizabeth was still sick, caring for her as if she were her own daughter.
Alex had left Elizabeth three hundred dollars, more than half his savings. She
offered to pay the Canbys for board and lodging, but
Camelia
stubbornly refused to accept a penny.

After the Christmas holidays, Elizabeth
began helping
Camelia
at
the schoolhouse. John Alexander still lagged in gaining normal weight, but
aside from carrying his crude rocker cradle to the school where she could keep
an eye on him, Elizabeth trusted in Elisha Canby's optimistic expectations.

In February,
Camelia
traveled east for a last visit to her
failing, eighty-four-year-old mother in St. Louis. Elizabeth took over her
teaching duties temporarily. By then she had read through most of Elisha
Canby's shelf of classics and medical texts, some books of more recent vintage
owned by Charles Bent, one of three brothers who had established the fort as a
trading post in the thirties, and had begun borrowing volumes from the
regimental commander. The increased demands of the schoolroom were a welcome
distraction from boredom and the tediousness of marking time until she could
rejoin her husband.

Absorbed by her teaching duties,
Elizabeth almost resented Camelia's return, but within a few days she had her
hands too full to feel anything but apprehension. Seizing upon the baby's frail
little body, the croup quickly developed into pneumonia. John Alexander hovered
near death for a month. Then, as quickly as it had started, the fever and the
illness left him. With Elizabeth still breast-feeding him, he began a steady
climb back to robust health and normal weight, but it took time. It was not
until early June that Elizabeth tearfully said good-bye to the Canbys and headed
north for Fort Laramie with one of the Bent brothers in a supply wagon
accompanied by two squads of dragoons.

They arrived during the third week of the
month. John Alexander had thrived during the rapid journey on his mother's milk
and Camelia's Canby's finely ground corn mush. Still, Elizabeth let one wagon
train, then another pass on from Fort Laramie until she was absolutely certain
her infant was as healthy as he looked. Early in the fourth week she arranged
to travel west with the James Frazier Reed family. Reed, a well-to-do furniture
manufacturer from Springfield, Illinois, and his friend "Uncle"
George Donner were the de facto leaders of a group of twenty wagons carrying
some eighty people. They planned to split off farther west from the larger,
Oregon-bound train in which they traveled, and to head for California.

There was room enough for Elizabeth and
her son. Indeed, happening on the Reeds seemed to her an extraordinary
blessing. James Reed had spared nothing in providing on the long journey for
his frail wife and for Virginia, her fourteen-year-old daughter by a former
marriage, and their three small children. He had three wagons, the largest of
which carried his family. Appropriately named the
Palace Car
, it dwarfed
the other wagons in the train. On either side, steps made entrance easy.
Inside, what amounted to a small room was furnished with stagecoach spring
seats. An iron stove, its insulated chimney punching up through the wagon's
sun-bleached sailcloth cover, warmed them on chilly mornings. On a second tier
laid across the vehicle there were beds for the entire family. Margaret Reed's
aged mother had begun the trip with them but had died before they were halfway
across the Plains. At James Reed's insistence, Elizabeth and John Alexander
took her bed.

Elizabeth
thought Reed's occasional haughtiness and the spoiled, somewhat jealous
temperament of his stepdaughter easy enough to overlook, considering his
generosity. Beneath the bed platforms there were spacious lockers packed with
sacks of clothing, provisions and delicacies unheard of on the wagon trail.
From the moment she joined them, the Reeds shared freely with Elizabeth. When
she offered to help, James Reed proudly told her there was no need. His hired
girl, Eliza Williams, did the cooking and washing and helped with the children.
He had three drivers and a hired hand to take care of the livestock and
anything else that needed tending.

They celebrated July 4 amid the splendor
of the Rockies. Although Elizabeth had read of these mountains as well as the
Alps, she was filled with awe and wonder that anything could so completely
dwarf the mountains of her Vermont childhood. By July 17 they had begun their
descent down the far side of the Continental Divide at South Pass.

Late that day a rider coming up from the
direction of the sunset met them with a handbill-letter printed by Lansford
Hastings. The author of a book about California, which some of the pioneers
carried with them, Hastings was touting a new, shorter trail he had just explored.
Rather than the well-worn route that passed through Fort Hall and then branched
southwest toward California where it left the Oregon Trail, Hastings urged them
to veer off sooner to Fort Bridger. He was waiting there to guide them on the
new trail, which angled south of the Great Salt Lake.

Elizabeth
paid little attention to the conference between James Reed, George and Jacob
Donner, and several other heads of families who gathered about the sweatstained
frontiersman. After all, she thought, these men know what they are doing. In
addition to their families, they had cattle, and in the case of Reed and the
Donners, a small fortune in personal possessions and commercial goods to
protect. Surely they would make the wisest decision about which route to take.
But that night Elizabeth awoke in the darkness of the huge wagon dripping with
sweat. Once again she had dreamed of a blizzard. This time with more detail and
two additional characters...

She
was wading through thigh-deep snow, John Alexander slung across her back in a
makeshift carrying pouch cut from skins. A man dragged at her arm, jerking her
upright and then forward through almost impassable drifts. He wore buckskins
and had a sharply curved, full moustache, much like the one the frontiersman
carrying the message from Lansford Hastings wore. Then the snow was swirling
out of the night sky, pelting Elizabeth full in the face and blinding her. She
stumbled, and as she fell the baby slipped from the carrying pouch. The man
cursed at her, then said something that was lost in the roaring of a wind so
cold it made her feel as though she were lying naked on an icy lake. Coughing,
spitting snow out of her mouth, she pushed to raise herself and sank deeper.
She rolled on her back and pulled at her knees until she gained a sitting
position. It seemed hours before she was standing again. She tried to breathe
and choked on flakes of snow as broad as silver dollars. She covered her mouth
with her shawl and took a deep breath. The baby... the baby... the baby. Frantically
spinning, almost losing her balance again, she searched the snow around her
feet. The baby was gone... He has the baby... He must have the baby... She
tried to find his outline in the driving, wet, stinging sheets of white that
nearly toppled her backward. He was gone. The baby was gone. She closed her
eyes and screamed. The sound was even more deafening than the wind.

In the morning she waited for the
appropriate moment and drew James Reed aside as the hired hand doused the
breakfast campfire.

"Is there any possibility that we
will be traveling after the first snowfall in the Sierras?" she asked
quiet
ly
.

Reed smiled. "None whatsoever, dear
child. What prompts you to ask?"

"Nothing. Just curiosity. It is a
bit late in the season, though, is it not?"

"Not really," Reed said with
total assurance. "I thought perhaps you had chanced to overhear one of the
worrywarts in this company. Not the Donners, mind you. But we do have a few
traveling with us who are—how shall I put it? Limited, somewhat, in their mentality.
And others hobbled by their fearful imaginations."

"I have not heard such directly or
indirectly."

"Well, never fear. We are among the
last trains to be traveling this year, but there is plenty of time. It is still
summer. If it will put your mind more at ease, I am quite certain we will be
traveling with an expert guide by a nigher route to California, one that
eliminates some four hundred miles from the journey. We should cross the
Sierras many weeks before the first snowflake falls."

"May I trouble you with one more
question?"

"As many as you like," Reed
said, waving his hand magnanimously.

"The man who rode up with the
message yesterday —will he be traveling back with us?"

"The mountain man? No. He left early
this morning for Fort Laramie. Lansford Hastings will be our guide."

Elizabeth
thanked him and returned to the wagon. She felt like a fool.

On July 19, with the going easier each
passing hour, they camped at the waters of the Little Sandy. Under the willows
that lined the creek, a vote was taken. A few California-bound wagons elected
to follow the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and then cut southwest on the proven
route. All twenty wagons under the influence of James Reed and George Donner
voted to follow the freshly cut tracks of the Bryant-Russell party and the
Young-Harlan contingent ahead of them. They had cut off here toward Fort
Bridger, Lansford Hastings, and the new, shorter route.

Elizabeth was surprised when George
Donner was elected leader of the party rather than James Reed. But she knew the
wealthy sixty-two-year-old farmer and Reed were the closest of friends, and
that Reed's judgment, however much the less affluent voters of the party might
resent him, would be no small factor in any decisions Donner made. For all
James Reed's somewhat lofty, slightly patronizing manner, she felt secure with
him, safe. He was forty-six, in splendid physical health, and he had already
displayed his fatherly protectiveness of her.

Handsome, blond, strapping Lewis Keseberg
had found excuses to visit the
Palace Car
, obviously smitten with
Elizabeth. James Reed had finally put a halt to it, extricating Elizabeth from
what had become an awkward situation and sending Keseberg permanently back to
the wife he beat regularly in the privacy of their wagon.

George Donner's tiny forty-five-year-old
wife,
Tamsen,
was
the only one in the party who seemed disappointed with the choice of the new,
shorter route. Normally gregarious and high-spirited, she walked along beside
her wagon now, gloomy and dejected as the wheels, oxen, and small clusters of
beef and dairy cattle raised a thin cloud of dust around the train. It was
relatively easy going over this arid tableland, and everyone else was happy.
Elizabeth was content. She had long since dismissed her fears after the nightmare
as the foolish reaction of a young girl alone with her baby far from home.
Holding John Alexander in her arms and rocking him as she stood in the well of
the wagon behind Reed's driver, she gazed westward over scattered sagebrush to
the point where the earth fell away under a sky dotted with buttermilk clouds.
Four hundred miles shorter was four hundred miles sooner. Four hundred miles
less before she saw her beloved Alex again.

The next ten days were a series of almost
leisurely rides between campsites and campfires. Night meals had a festive air.
During the day several men, Reed among them, rode out and returned with kills.
Antelope, rabbit, and bighorn sheep dressed and cured in the Rockies, sizzled
over blazing logs in the cool, early evening. Later the fiddles and banjos were
broken out, and there was dancing under the brightest moon Elizabeth had ever
seen. Accustomed to the howling of wolves and the gargled yipping of coyotes in
the dis
tance,
she
and John Alexander slept without stirring each night.