Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (18 page)

The book was a compilation of choice chunks of practical trail wisdom, including such hopefully well-researched nuggets as “Start at 4—travel till the sun gets high—camp till the heat is over. Then start again and travel till dark.” And “After the upper Platte Ford, for over fifty miles, the water is impregnated with poisonous matter. If you would avoid sickness, abandon its use.” And “TRUCKIE'S PASS, You will be tried to the utmost. Pack everything over the summit, then haul your wagons up with ropes. You will certainly save time, and perhaps hundreds of dollars.”

Unfortunately for the author, a few years later he attempted to follow the route he prescribed in his book but fell victim to cholera whilst on the trail.

The ever-present guidebooks were but one bit of the kit that young argonauts—those seekers of gold—were persuaded they needed for a successful journey west. Such starry-eyed rubes were frequently talked into buying tremendous amounts of gear, much of which they would discard on the journey.

“Vital” gear bundles included multiples of the following: heavy woolen trousers, jackets, vests, shirts, socks, boots, a variety of hats, underwear, candied fruits, brandy, salves, and tinctures. The recommended amount of weaponry per man was impressive and included an assortment of knives, hidden and worn outwardly, plus belt revolvers, rifles, and shotguns.

They also bought journals and writing utensils by the dozen. And a good thing, too, as many of these argonauts, primarily young men, kept detailed diaries of their lives on the trail, in the goldfields, and elsewhere. These journals have become valuable and entertaining accounts of early emigrant life. Not to mention that many make mention of the fact that, at some point in their journeys, they realized their guidebooks had proven worthless.

What the guidebooks—well-intentioned versions included—agreed on was that for every enjoyable mile walking under blue skies, with a light breeze and plenty of water, there would be hazards untold along the route from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Frequent deaths occurred from an overabundance of harms awaiting the emigrants. In addition to afflictions such as cholera, scurvy, ague, and scarlet fever, hydrophobia from slavering, crazed wolves and coyotes was a concern. Not to mention crossing rain-swollen rivers, lack of water, food, and firewood, and no shortage of poisonous snakes, stinging plants, and stabbing insects.

And then there were the wagons. . . . Dismemberment and death occurred daily along the trails when wagons rolled over travelers, frequently children, who grew accustomed to hopping on and off the slowly rolling behemoths. The top-heavy conveyances also tipped over with ease. Beasts of burden frequently took ill and died, leaving families with wagons filled with their only possessions, the very things with which they hoped to renew their lives—and with no way to pull them.

The Oregon Trail was littered with pump organs, oak furniture, trunks filled with clothes, cast-iron stoves, heavy tools, anvils, wedding dresses, top hats, and finery of all sorts. Remnants of such goods are still found today, bleached and dried, popped and sprung under the vast, dry Western skies, symbols of the slowly fading ebullience of the westward-headed emigrants. They were people who put their faith and their lives in the hands of others, and frequently those others were journalists who knew less than the people they were instructing.

No emigrants of the mid-1840s are more widely known than the Donner and Reed parties. They were among the many travelers heartened by the (barely) successful journey of three hundred pioneers who chose the largely unexplored California Trail southward from Fort Hall. The route sidled up to the Humboldt River before taking travelers over the Sierra Nevada range and down into Eden, aka the Sacramento Valley. Never mind that the party almost did not make it, having faced severe privation for much of the route.

The Donner and Reed parties brimmed with confidence, armed as they were with a guidebook published in 1845 by Lansford Hastings, a man whose motivation in writing the book was to lure emigrants to California. Once there he hoped they would settle, building up a formidable enough population to wrest California from Mexico's grasp. At that point, Hastings had every intention of becoming president of this fabulous and wealthy new republic. A guidebook to lure settlers to the West was, he reasoned, a fine first step toward building that empire.

Instead of recommending to his readers that they depart from the Oregon Trail at Fort Hall, as had been done so recently, though barely, by other parties, Hastings suggested, based on no personal experience with his suggested route, that they depart from the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. This mud-and-pole trading post was owned by famed frontiersman Jim Bridger, himself a two-decade veteran rover of the frontier.

Hastings Shortcut, as it was soon named, took travelers on an untested route westward across the Wasatch Mountains, through the Salt Lake valley and across the Great Basin before joining the California Trail along the Humboldt River. It purported to save the travelers four hundred miles. All this sounded quite alluring to emigrants such as the Donners and Reeds.

The only trouble with the plan was that Hastings had never gone west along that route. He had followed the Oregon Trail four years earlier, in 1842. But he did travel his proposed shortcut, from west to east, in 1846, though not with winter coming on, not with overloaded wagons and draft animals and elderly and infant family members and dogs and chickens. . . . Hastings had traveled it on horseback, with pack mules, and in decent weather, arriving at Fort Bridger mere weeks before the Donner Party. While there, and emboldened by his success, he talked a wagon train of two hundred people and sixty-six wagons, led by a crusty old frontiersman, Captain George Harlan, into taking his route.

The train ran into severe difficulty in the Wasatch Mountains, where narrow gorges necessitated that the travelers move boulders and dense brush. Then, when they could go no farther, they were forced to hoist their wagons up and over bluffs by ropes and pulleys. They came at last to the Great Basin, a vast, unforgiving salt plain without water, on which oxen died and wagons were abandoned. They all felt sure their ends had come. They finally reached the Humboldt River, where they found themselves three weeks behind others who had taken the longer Fort Hall route.

But the Donners and Reeds, arriving at Fort Bridger weeks later, could not know of the difficulties Hastings Shortcut was presenting. Their own nightmare journey would be far worse, presenting hardship almost from the first day. It all began with severely overloaded wagons. These were massive, specially equipped conveyances outfitted with built-in bunks, cookstoves, all manner of heavy gear, far too many head of livestock, plus fine foods, liquors, and wads of cash sewn into bedding. Add to this the fact that the Donner and Reed parties began their trek far too late in the season, then spent weeks playing catch-up with the last of the 1846 emigrant trains.

By the time they reached Fort Bridger, the season was waning quickly, their window of opportunity closing with each day that passed in discussion and dithering. And so they decided to try Hastings Shortcut. After all, they reasoned, hadn't they been told at Fort Bridger that Hastings himself had just taken it? And saving four hundred miles might well mean the difference between getting to California or not—between, dare they think it, life and death.

Their decision made, they set off. The details of the second half of their arduous journey read like a list of all the horrific occurrences that could befall an emigrant wagon train. Almost from the day they departed from Fort Bridger, July 31, 1846, with seventy-four people and twenty groaning wagons, life grew tougher, and each day brought new defeats. They lost time dickering on river passages, taking twenty-eight days to journey the 50 miles to Great Salt Lake.

Their trek through the desert nearly put an end to their journey—one hundred oxen died, numerous wagons were abandoned, their food supplies were nearing depletion, and they had begun grousing amongst themselves. Nonetheless, the haggard party trudged onward, losing members to starvation, exhaustion, lack of water, and infighting.

On October 20 they finally made it to the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, gazing upward to see snow already topping the high peaks. They tried to cross over before the cold and snow settled in for the winter, but only made it as far as Truckee Lake, just below Truckee Pass—the last major obstacle between them and the promise of the Sacramento Valley far below.

A number of them tried several times to breach the pass, but most turned back exhausted. Hoping help would arrive soon, they accepted defeat and settled in at Truckee Lake for what would prove to be a living hell. By Christmas they were reduced to boiling hides of dead oxen and eating the glue-like result. Storms followed storms, a bony family dog was eaten—every bit of him—and one by one human members of the party began dying off. By early February thirteen people had succumbed to starvation. Soon enough, cannibalism of the recently deceased became commonplace and the only way those still clinging to life could survive.

By February, when rescue parties were able to breach the pass, forty-seven of eighty-one people were left alive.

Certainly all the horrors of their unfortunate journey cannot be attributed to Lansford Hastings. But it is fair to say that he and other guidebook authors had been far too flippant in their descriptions of life on the trail, painting light and airy depictions of the roads leading to the promised land. Had the majority of them been better versed and not motivated by their personal sources of greed—be they visions of empire or wads of quick cash from book sales—it is doubtful that today mere mention of the Donner Party, and all the attendant horrors those words conjure, would be such an unfortunate cultural reference point.

As the years wore on, guidebooks claiming mastery of the terrain and always-better routes proliferated, numbering more than one hundred by the time the Civil War began. Slowly, a curious change took place, as a number of these references were written by people who had actually traversed the terrain of which they spoke. And those books became dependable references used by the travelers who continued to stream west toward Oregon and California.

In 1858, a couple of thousand miles east, a prospector from Georgia named William Greeneberry “Green” Russell, along with his part-Cherokee wife and his brothers, struck gold in Colorado's Rockies. The discovery kicked off the Colorado Gold Rush, also known as the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, and the participants would be called Fifty-Niners, a reference to the Forty-Niners, gold seekers drawn to California a decade before.

Unlike numerous smaller strikes in the Colorado region throughout the 1850s, which attracted the attention of jaded miners and prospectors from California's played-out goldfields, many of the new wealth seekers came from the east. They traveled from as close as Kansas and Nebraska, and from as far away as the East Coast—New England, Virginia, and points south. Most of them had no idea exactly where the diggings were or how to get there. But they were convinced that once they arrived, they would be able to, as early, shameless newspaper reports read, “scoop up nuggets of silver and gold as one would river rocks.”

In order to get to Pikes Peak from the east, the most expeditious routes involved travel through Kansas and Nebraska territories. In addition to trekking across vast stretches of unforgiving terrain, the weather could be fickle, and attacks by Plains Indians were all too common.

But the promise of vast wealth clouded the eyes of each seeker, and opportunists popped up at every turn in the road, eager to exploit the travelers' naïveté and fears, and to sell them items they didn't need. These grubbers convinced the soon-to-be prospectors that the admirable urge to seek gold and silver was not enough. It must be accompanied with vast and varied quantities of equipment, specialized gear, clothing, tinctures, tonics, foodstuffs, and more. If all this sounds familiar, that's because the same thing happened ten years earlier when California's goldfields broke wide open.