The Indifferent Stars Above (3 page)

By the late 1830s, the ague was endemic to the whole Mississippi River drainage. Other plagues, ranging from yellow fever to cholera, were also popping up all over the countryside. Steamboat captains would sometimes refuse to stop at some towns for fear of contagion.

The settlers along the Illinois River, like their forefathers in New England and England, did not know what to blame for these outbreaks. They had inherited from those forefathers a general belief that damp weather and stagnant air—“miasmas,” as they called the combination—were a principal cause of the fevers. But there wasn't much they could do about either the air or the weather. So they did
what they had always done—they dosed themselves with folk remedies. They took pills made from cobwebs. They boiled quarts of water down to pints, “to make it stronger,” and then drank it as if it were medicine. They made tea of herbs like boneset (so called because the leaves are joined at the base, leading many to believe that when wrapped around broken bones they would help set the bones as well as drive off fevers). They took patent medicines laced with mercury and suffered far more terribly from the cure than from the cause. They bled themselves dry and wondered why they grew ever weaker and more tired.

 

T
he culprit behind the ague was one of the world's great scourges, a nasty little parasite of the genus
Plasmodium
—malaria. Today half the world's population is threatened by malaria, as many as 500 million people are infected each year, and about a million die, twice as many as twenty years ago. Most of the fatalities are children in sub-Saharan Africa, where a particularly vicious strain,
P. falciparum,
pre-dominates. Fortunately for the settlers of Illinois, the two strains of the malaria parasite that made their way from Africa to the American Midwest, traveling in the bloodstreams of infected slaves and sailors, were somewhat less virulent than
P. falciparum.
These two strains
—P. vivax
and
P. malariae
—while less likely to cause sudden death, are more likely to cause chronic problems, cycles of on-again/off-again symptoms that may continue for weeks, months, or even years. It is the relentlessly cyclical nature of the resulting fevers that takes a toll.

What all strains of malaria have in common, of course, is that they are spread to and among humans by mosquitoes, specifically female mosquitoes of the prevalent genus
Anopheles.
Western Illinois, because of the poor drainage that its soils and hard limestone substrata offer, was boggy country in the 1830s and 1840s. Water pooled in the lowlands, and wide fringes of swampy land bordered rivers like the Illinois. All of this provided an ideal habitat for mosquitoes. So when settlers like Franklin and Elizabeth Graves chose to build their homes near water and woods rather than on the open, windswept prairies, they chose to make mosquitoes their close neighbors and constant companions.

When the swarms of insects became unbearable, the settlers built smoky fires in their houses to drive them out, then crawled back into the houses on hands and knees, under the smoke, and closed their doors against the pests. But because the settlers lacked even a basic understanding of germs, let alone the concept of how insects act as vectors for the transmission of those germs, they never thought of the mosquitoes as anything more than highly irritating nuisances.

 

B
ad as they were, the endless cycles of ill health that plagued the settlers along the Illinois River were not the only reason that Franklin Graves was ready to pick up and leave Steuben Township by the spring of 1846. Things had been hard all around. He had bought his land to grow wheat, and grow it he did. The soil was so fertile that the wheat fairly burst out of the ground in the spring, rising up tall and green and rank. By midsummer the stalks were golden and bowed over, the heads heavy with grain. But forces soon came into play that rendered all that bounty more or less useless. These forces worked silently and from a great distance far to the east of Steuben Township, but they were inexorable, and like the ague they ground a man down.

In the spring of 1837, six years after Sarah and her family arrived in Illinois, the United States suddenly found itself at the beginning of a depression so deep that it would eventually rival the Panic of 1893 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The causes were complex, but they revolved around rampant speculation in real estate. Serious investors and mere speculators had begun to contemplate and then fantasize wildly about the opportunities that new railroads and canals like the recently completed Erie Canal would open up in the West, particularly in the Mississippi River Valley. They bought up land in towns that did not exist, except in their imaginations. They bought into potential railroads that carried phantom passengers from one imaginary town to another. The speculative fever rose and spiraled out of control. The result was the catastrophic collapse, in April and May 1837, of 343 of the nation's 850 banks. In New York alone, commercial establishments lost almost $100 million within
weeks, and the effects spread across the nation with devastating results.

As Franklin Graves and his neighbors watched helplessly, the markets for anything they might produce dried up and disappeared. By 1842, wheat that cost Graves fifty cents a bushel to produce fetched a mere twenty-five cents, and then only in the unlikely event that he could find a buyer. If he grew corn instead and used it to raise hogs, he learned that pork that had once brought $4.20 per hundredweight now brought less than a dollar. In some ways Graves and his neighbors were still better off than when they had arrived in this country ten years before, with little more than ambition and what they could carry in a farm wagon. At least they now owned their own land. But many of them were reduced to subsistence-level farming, hunting, and a barter economy, depending on themselves and on one another for nearly all the necessities of life while they watched and waited to see whether things would ever improve.

As they waited, they began to dream again of a better place, a place where the climate was dry and healthful, a place without disease-spawning miasmas, a place free of frostbite and killing blizzards, a place where hard work would yield a crop of ready cash. And in all that, they were about to be obliged. As far back as 1840, the St. Louis newspapers had begun publishing glowing descriptions of a Mexican territory in the far West called Alta California. That same year the novelist Richard Henry Dana Jr. had published
Two Years Before the Mast,
in which he painted a vivid and romantic portrait of a fertile and bounteous California, replete with

And when a book titled
The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California
was published in Cincinnati in 1845, word of the promises
it contained spread through the hamlets and homesteads of the Mississippi River Valley like a messianic message.

The author of
The Emigrants' Guide,
Lansford Warren Hastings, was a tall, dashing, and energetic figure, given, when traveling through the West, to dressing as a mountaineer, in fringed buckskin suits trimmed with plucked beaver fur. He was also a lawyer. From Mount Vernon, Ohio, originally, Hastings had traveled extensively through Oregon and California in 1842 and 1843 with the particular goal of sizing up those territories for potential American settlers. In the process he hoped to build a reputation, and perhaps a political career for himself in one of the new lands. A pair of inconvenient facts—that Oregon was at the time jointly and uneasily claimed by both Great Britain and the United States, and that California was sovereign Mexican territory—held little sway for Hastings and the other Americans nosing about in the West.

A number, in fact, had already taken a chance and settled in Oregon. A few had even put down roots in California. Among the latter, an even smaller number had complied with the Mexican government's requirement that they obtain official immigration documentation and become naturalized Mexican citizens. Most simply ignored both the Mexican government and its requirements and thus became California's original illegal immigrants.

What Hastings had to say about California in
The Emigrants' Guide
mesmerized many of the settlers in Illinois and Missouri. He told of the “vast extent of its valleys and plains,” the “unexhausted and inexhaustible resources,” and “the extraordinary variety and abundance of its productions.” He assured his readers of California's “salubrity of climate.” And he forestalled concerns about the rights of the Mexican Californians by painting them as little more than savages.

As for the “barbarous tribes,” the California Indians, Hastings pointed out that many of them were already conveniently dead, mostly as a result of diseases introduced by the whites.

Hastings, in fact, had personally contributed to the mortality in 1843, en route from Oregon to California, when he and the party he was leading had massacred somewhere between twenty and forty Native Americans along the way.
*

 

B
y the spring of 1846, the American economy had finally pulled out of the doldrums enough to bring some renewed interest in the farmlands along the Illinois River and the products of those lands. So when one George Sparr showed up in Steuben Township that spring looking to buy some land, and with the hard cash to do so, Franklin Graves jumped on the opportunity.

On April 2 he went to the courthouse across the river in Lacon and signed the papers granting Sparr all five hundred acres of his land in exchange for three dollars an acre, fifteen hundred dollars in cash. When he had the money securely in hand, Franklin Graves went home and took an auger and bored a series of holes in a pair of wooden cleats. Then he slipped the greater part of the money, almost all of it in silver coins, into the holes and nailed the cleats under one of his three farm wagons. Looking at them, no one would know that the cleats had any purpose other than supporting the wagon.

The coins within the cleats, a very substantial nest egg for a frontier family of the 1840s, were of various currencies—Mexican pesos,
French five-franc pieces, U.S. half-dollars, Spanish dollars, a Bolivian dollar, and a Saxon five-mark piece—some dating back as far as 1806. Neither Franklin Graves nor anyone else on the Illinois frontier was fool enough to take government paper money in exchange for land. With California beckoning and a cache of silver hidden in his wagon, he must have felt as if the whole world were finally going his way.

And if her father had reason to exult on April 2, Sarah had even more. On the day that Franklin Graves went to the courthouse to sign away his land, Sarah went with him. So did Jay Fosdick. Together they stood before Justice of the Peace David Dickinson and were married. They had resolved to go to California together, to build their new life there. Mrs. Jay Fosdick, as she could now call herself, had all she could hope for: her young man, her beloved family, the prospect of a home of her own in a place said by many to be a sort of paradise on earth, and an opportunity to see a world far wider and far more exotic than the narrow confines of the damp river bottoms in which she had grown up.

 

S
ixteen hundred miles to the west, though, something else was afoot that would soon affect Sarah and Jay in unfathomable ways. Lansford Hastings had been talking to John Sutter—a Swiss immigrant who more than matched Hastings for outsized ambitions and a sometimes casual regard for the truth.

Since arriving in California in the summer of 1839 with a retinue of Hawaiian laborers, Sutter had begun to unfold a grand plan in the Sacramento Valley—first to build a substantial fort as a defense against the local Indians and second to found a colony called New Helvetia. The colony, he hoped, would be populated by future waves of Swiss immigrants—artisans and farmers who would produce a wide variety of products to enrich the settlement and its proprietor.

Over the past several years, Sutter had systematically brought the local Miwok Indians under his control, blending diplomacy and generosity on the one hand with brutal discipline on the other. Hundreds of Miwoks had been engaged in building thick, high adobe walls around the fort. A select few had been enlisted into Sutter's homemade
personal army, dressed in green-and-blue Russian uniforms and set to drilling in the central courtyard of the fort.

From time to time, when factions among the neighboring Indians had grown too bold and threatened to steal his horses, Sutter had meted out violent, preemptive justice. In a dawn raid on a nearby encampment of Miwoks in 1840, Sutter and his men had opened fire with cannons and small arms, killing about thirty people without warning. For minor transgressions he relied mostly on imprisonment and whippings, though he also sometimes ordered executions. An admiring visitor, William Wiggins, commented that Sutter was “the best Indian tamer and civilizer that I know of.”

Now Sutter and Hastings had been contemplating what Sarah and thousands like her would mean to them and their personal fortunes. Hastings had been bending Sutter's ear, telling him that thousands of American emigrants, perhaps twenty thousand or more, were on their way to California, largely as a result of his book. Many of them, he said, were Yankee farmers, men of substantial means, men with capital to invest in California real estate, a commodity that Sutter possessed in vast quantities.