The Indifferent Stars Above (32 page)

O
n a Sunday morning in March of 2008, I drove down the Pajaro River just west of Monterey Bay, traveling among fields of gray-green artichokes in a dense fog rank with the reek of salt and seaweed. I pulled off the highway and wandered through the derelict streets of downtown Watsonville until I came across the old Pioneer Cemetery on Freedom Boulevard. There I got out of the car and started to look for Sarah's bones.

For more than two hours, I slowly walked the dank cemetery, approaching it row by row, peering through the fog at each and every stone that seemed weathered enough to date back to 1871. Maybe two dozen times, my heart leaped to my throat when I found old marble stones inscribed S
ARAH
, but it was always the wrong Sarah. Surely there was no more common female name in the nineteenth century.

Finally I came to the last stone of the last row, still with no results. I had seen a number of plots with no markers or with wooden markers from which the names had long since faded away, though. And Sarah may lie in one of them. The cemetery in Watsonville was only
about a forty-minute wagon ride from Corralitos in 1871, and it may not be remarkable that her grave was never marked, or marked with something less durable than stone. Though many of the Donner Party survivors were well known as such and much was made of their deaths and burials, there seems to have been little to no awareness in her own community of Sarah's role in history. Two days after she died, the local paper, the
Pajaronian,
noted simply that “a Mrs. Spires of Corralitos fell dead on Tuesday last. Heart disease was the cause.” So the anonymous Mrs. Spires's bones may in fact occupy an unmarked, fog-shrouded grave in Watsonville. But I don't think so.

I returned to my car and drove north on Freedom Boulevard toward Corralitos. The sun had begun to burn through the fog by now, and the valley opened up before me in warm, yellow light—a bouquet of vivid green fields, bright yellow mustard flowers, and fruit trees draped in veils of white blossoms. By the time I reached the village, the sky overhead was blue porcelain and the last few wisps of gray fog were just melting from the tops of the redwoods up in the hills.

I drove to a certain address on a certain street at the western edge of town, got out of the car again, and stared up at a hillside cloaked with a dense tangle of madrones, oaks, bay laurels, and acacias dripping long tassels of bright yellow flowers. The hillside, a local historian had told me, was once home to the Corralitos Cemetery, back in the 1870s. But in 1878 the owner of the property decided he wanted to put in an orchard. He notified the local families that they needed to remove the remains of their loved ones. By then, though, Samuel Spires and his children had moved away from the valley.

Many of the bodies were duly exhumed and moved to Watsonville or elsewhere, but others were still in place when a hired man began to prepare the ground for the orchard. Careless or overzealous with his plow, he destroyed the markers and obliterated any signs of the remaining graves. The man was fined, the orchard was planted, and the dead have remained in place ever since.

Peering into the woods that have since replaced the orchard, it occurred to me that this bit of jungle was much like the tangle of trees through which a barefoot six-year-old girl named Sarah Graves once wandered in the bottomlands along the Illinois River, looking for
secret treasures. I pondered whether this was indeed her final resting place. I could not be sure, of course, but standing there with the warm California sun on my back, awash in the delicious spice of bay laurel, listening to the jabbering of a tribe of scrub jays in the oak trees, I decided to hope so and, finally, to believe so. The place was wondrously alive, joyously fecund, welling up with something intangible but vibrant. It was, at the very least, where Sarah ought to be.

 

M
y visit to Corralitos ended the odyssey I had begun when I visited my great-uncle George Tucker's bones in the Napa Valley in the fall of 2006. In the interval I had traveled some sixteen hundred miles in Sarah's footsteps, trying to get a sense of what she had seen and felt in 1846 and 1847.

Along the way the landscape of the American Midwest and West had offered up many details of touch, taste, aroma, sight, and sound that Sarah and her companions never recorded and that I would never have been aware of without traveling the route. Beyond the sensory details, though, my travels offered me a context in which to muse on Sarah's story, on what to make of so much suffering and so much courage. And so as I traveled, I tried not just to breathe in the dust and feel the glare of the sun but to listen to the quiet whisperings of the bones I passed along the way—bones long lost in tall, blue-green prairie grass, bones scattered across the alkali deserts of Nevada, bones now turned to rich black humus in quiet mountain meadows—to hear what they had to say about Sarah and her companions and to ponder what it all meant.

 

I
began in Sparland, Illinois—the meager village that has grown up on the land that Franklin Graves sold to George Sparr in 1846. I drove into town early on the morning of April 12, 2007, exactly 161 years to the day after Sarah had left.

I made my way to the top of the limestone bluff that rises above the river to get a view of the landscape. When I stepped out of the car to take a few pictures, a frigid west wind sliced through my many lay
ers of clothing, numbed my fingers, clawed at my face, brought tears to my eyes. I hastily snapped a few photos and dove back into the shelter of the car.

From within the warm cocoon of the car, I surveyed the place where Sarah grew up. A couple of dozen small white houses clung to the side of the bluff below me. At the base of the bluff was a crossroads with a gas station, a grubby convenience store, and a small brick post office. Nearby stood an old frame house on the site where the Graves cabin once stood—far enough back from the river to avoid flooding but close enough to allow access to the water. To the east of that, the land sloped gently down into the muddy fields where Franklin Graves once grew his wheat and corn, and beyond that to a swath of deciduous woods fringing the river. The river itself, dark and overflowing its banks as it was the day that Sarah left, was spanned by a steel-and-concrete bridge—an edifice that would have astounded Elizabeth Graves could she have looked up and contemplated it on one of those winter days when she rowed across the river to deliver herbs and advice to her neighbors.

Looking at the bridge, I wondered if I would be able to bridge the distance to Sarah, to find a common strand of humanity that would enable me to comprehend her world and her travails. To really understand her story, I knew I would have to travel farther than just the sixteen hundred miles that lay between me and California. I would have to travel into the heart of a girl who was a product of a vanished world. And not only that, but a girl who encountered in her life challenges more daunting and tragedies more profound than I have ever begun to confront in my own.

A bit ill at ease, I drove down off the bluff, turned left onto the highway, and set out west, starting to follow Sarah.

 

I
n one long day of driving, I covered the ground that Sarah covered in a month—from Sparland to St. Joe, Missouri. As I drove into the old river city that evening, the crumbling brick warehouses and limestone office buildings of downtown, softly aglow in the colors of faded roses and aged ivory, looked something like the ruins of a lost civilization.

I pulled off the freeway and parked in a gravel parking lot and looked west across the Missouri River in the twilight. The broad river slid by, silent except for the slapping of little waves on the concrete riprap under my feet. As I took it in, it seemed to me that the view across the river was the single most compelling thing about St. Joe. That was a kind of paradox, for I could see almost nothing on the far side of the river, only what Sarah must have seen in 1846—a dark line of trees etched against a soft evening sky. I couldn't see anything beyond the trees, and that was what interested me.

For Sarah, everything on the far shore, everything unseen beyond that line of trees, was outside the United States and outside the normal scope of her life. It was a vast unknown, a blank slate on which her entire future and much of her country's future, both real and mythical, were about to be written. Everything she hoped for, and everything she feared, lay beyond those trees, and she could not yet know in what proportions they would be mixed. Whether she and Jay would prosper, what kinds of lives they would live, what sorts of children they might raise, what nation's flag they would live under, what hardships they might be forced to endure, what friends they might make, what deaths they would eventually suffer—all that and more waited, unrevealed, beyond those trees.

Standing there, listening to the Missouri lap at the rocks below me, watching the trees on the opposite bank dissolve into darkness, I wondered how she did it. What species of hope allowed or compelled Sarah and her family to make the leap, to cross the river and venture beyond the trees into so vast an unknown when so many more chose to stay home?

I am, coincidentally, the father of two daughters, one exactly the age that Sarah was in 1846, the other almost exactly the age that Mary Ann Graves was. And I am myself almost the same age that Franklin Ward Graves was in the spring of 1846. I love my daughters beyond words, and I believe that each of them, in her own, quiet way, is courageous. But I cannot imagine either of them undertaking what Sarah undertook. Like Franklin Graves, I understand how it is to see better opportunities elsewhere and to pick up a family and move in order to capitalize on them. But the choices I have made and the chances I have
taken shrink to insignificance compared with Franklin Graves's choices and chances. I cannot begin to conceive of hazarding what he did.

To be sure, he and his family were all no doubt caught up in the great national passion of their time—to conquer the West, to do God's work by seizing what was manifestly their destiny. But in the end I suspected that making the decision to go depended on something deeper and more personal than any of that. They must each have found something in their hearts—some quality of faith and hope so powerful and reassuring that it caused them not to shrink from but to embrace the human heart's seemingly inexhaustible proclivity to populate the future with what it hopes to find there. To say, when asked, “Yes, I will go.”

 

L
ate in June, I rejoined Sarah's trail near where I had left it on the Missouri near St. Joe. I drove northwest, bouncing along gravel roads through great tracks of the shoulder-high corn that has replaced the sweeping prairie Sarah knew, following the Little Blue River as nearly as I could north to I-80, then hopping onto the freeway and heading west along the Platte River, paralleling the old California Trail that Sarah had followed up the south bank.

Over the next several days, I beat my way westward on I-80, taking photos and making notes, stopping en route to get a feel for the land, exploring the south bank of the Platte where Tamzene Donner botanized and Edward Trimble died, then cutting northwest across the dusty, dry hills between the South Fork of the Platte and the North Fork to Ash Hollow, where I hiked among scrubby junipers in the surrounding hills, worrying about rattlesnakes and ticks with every step. I traveled up the North Fork past Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff and arrived at Fort Laramie early on the morning of the Fourth of July.

I stayed for the day to celebrate the holiday, as Sarah had in 1846, and found that in many ways things had not changed much since she left. The old fort itself was gone, reduced to a crumbling rock foundation and replaced by white wooden structures built later in the nineteenth century. But the spirit of the place seemed to be intact. Hundreds
of people had shown up for an old-fashioned celebration put on by the fort's staff and volunteers. There were encampments of RVs and trailers in the shady cottonwood groves down along the river where Sarah and her family had set up their own encampments. Smoke rose from dozens of barbecues; men and little boys walked about the grounds in cavalry uniforms; women and little girls wearing sunbonnets sat in the shade drinking root beer and calling it sarsaparilla. I sat in the shade, too, for much of the day, watching the festivities unfold, leaning against a cottonwood that was perhaps descended from one under which Sarah had sat a century and a half before.

That afternoon, as the sun began to sink toward the rolling, pale gold hills that lay just to the west, I watched the last of the celebrants pack up their cars and RVs, getting ready to drive back home for their evening fireworks. It was an easy leap to conjure up Sarah again, to watch as she packed her wagon down among these cottonwoods on that long-ago Glorious Fourth of July, still wondering, as she must have been, what lay over those golden hills.

 

I
n early August, I drove over the South Pass and down the Big Sandy and the Blacks Fork of the Green River to Fort Bridger, now a Wyoming state park, complete with a convincingly shabby replica of Jim Bridger's original trading post. From there I followed I-80 west beneath the spectacular red-rock cliffs of Echo Canyon to Henefer, Utah, where the Donner Party found the note from Lansford Hastings stuck in a clump of sagebrush. Just outside Henefer, I left the interstate and turned up into the mouth of present-day East Canyon. A pair of sandhill cranes heading south cranked their way laboriously across the sky ahead of me. I made my own way slowly up Highway 65, which approximates the course that James Reed blazed into the Wasatch in 1846.

Winding up the tortuous route, it didn't take me long to see how discouraging it must have been for Sarah and her family. Every canyon the road turned up seemed a little steeper than the one before, a little more densely choked with vegetation. Finally my car struggled up a series of switchbacks to the windswept pass that Reed named
“Reed's Gap,” though no one since Reed seems ever to have called it that. From a parking lot at the pass, I took in the panoramic vista of the Salt Lake Valley to the west. Trees blocked my view to the east, though, so I decided to hike farther up toward the summit of the peak to my south.