The Indifferent Stars Above (6 page)

By the time Sarah and Jay had fully stocked the wagon that Jay drove for Franklin, it likely weighed as much as three thousand pounds. It was a heavy load, and they knew that it would take a toll on their oxen, but with the things they carried, they believed they were well prepared for what they expected would be at most five or six months on the trail. By the time the first frosts settled on the Sacramento Valley—if such a thing as frost even existed in California—they would be building a new home among golden hills.

 

T
here was one other commodity that the emigrants passing through St. Joe that spring tried to stock up on. Advice. Even the best of the guidebooks, they knew, could not substitute for the firsthand and timely knowledge of those who had recently been to the West and returned. The trappers and traders who roamed the streets of St. Joe had detailed knowledge of what lay ahead—the best routes, the best places to ford a river, which of the natives to befriend and which to be wary of, when to expect what kind of weather, how earlier parties had fared—and so the emigrants listened eagerly to what they had to say.

One bit of news that was just working its way back across the plains that May concerned a large party of emigrants who had left St. Joe the previous spring, bound for Oregon.

They had left St. Joe provisioned much as Sarah and her family now were. All had gone well until, in modern-day Idaho, they began to hear rumors that the Walla Walla Indians, through whose territory the road to Oregon's Willamette Valley lay, were hostile to whites and that they should be prepared for a fight ahead. On August 24 a trapper and guide named Stephen Meek overtook them. Having just escorted a train of emigrants from St. Louis to Fort Hall, and traveling now with his recent bride, Elizabeth, Meek was anxious to find new employment. He had traveled through Oregon a number of times before, including an 1843 expedition on which he had briefly served as a guide for none other than Lansford Hastings. On hearing the emigrants' concerns about the Walla Wallas, he proposed to guide them on a shortcut that would steer them safely to the south of any Indian
trouble. He assured them that the shortcut would follow old trappers' trails that he knew well and that it would save them perhaps 150 miles off the old road to boot, delivering them to a settlement at The Dalles on the Columbia River. From there they could travel by water down to the mouth of the Willamette River. And he'd do it, he said, for five dollars per wagon.

Meek, while not well known himself, was the brother of a renowned trapper, Joseph Meek. There seemed no particular reason to doubt his knowledge of the country. So over the course of the next few days, August 25–27, the party split up. Most continued on the old road, but nearly two hundred wagons, four thousand head of livestock, and nearly a thousand emigrants—turned off the main Oregon Trail and followed Meek up the Malheur River into the Blue Mountains. The river had been given its name by French trappers after Indians stole some of their beaver pelts,
malheur
meaning literally “the bad hour,” but more generally “misfortune.” The Meek Party was about to find that the trappers had named the river aptly.

At first the route seemed tolerable, but within a few days things began to go bad. The country was dry and dusty, and grass for the livestock began to grow sparse. By August 30 one of the emigrants, Samuel Parker—whose wife and child would die as a result of what was about to happen—was already growing disgusted. In his journal he wrote, “Rock all day—pore grass—more swaring then you ever heard.” When they got to higher terrain, up on the bluffs above the river, they found less dust, but the ground was littered with particularly hard, sharp, angular rocks that lacerated the feet of their oxen and horses. Within a few days, the livestock were marking the trail with blood dried to black slicks on the hot rocks. Soon some of the oxen began to give out. Each day a few more lay down in the road and died. By the seventh day, nearly everyone was complaining about Meek and his cutoff. The terrain grew even rougher, the rocks larger. Wagons began to break down, necessitating long delays to make repairs. By now the party was strung out so far along the trail that Meek was a day or more ahead of some of them. He began leaving notes telling them where they were and where to go next, but the notes soon became confused and contradictory, and it slowly dawned on all
of them that Meek was entirely lost. On the tenth day out, one of the party, John Herren, wrote, “We cannot get along fast, and we are rather doubtful that our pilot is lost…. Some talk of stoning, and others say hang him.”

Then things got even worse. They emerged from the Blue Mountains, crossed over the Stinking Water Mountains, and came out into the bleak high-desert country of central Oregon. Water began to become an issue, and the midday heat was now searing. On the fourteenth day, they made it to a large, shallow lake, Lake Malheur, only to find that its water was alkaline, foul-smelling, and undrinkable. They wandered on across the sterile desert for days, often traveling both day and night now, having to settle for whatever water was offered up by the occasional meager and muddy spring. Even when they found sufficient water for all the people, there often wasn't enough for the livestock. Food began to run out in many of the wagons, and the emigrants were reduced to eating what they called “poor beef,” the emaciated and sometimes rancid flesh of their dead oxen.

Living conditions deteriorated rapidly, sanitation suffered, and soon a ravaging fever began to spread through the camps. A woman named Sarah Chambers had succumbed to it just a few days out. Now children began to die, then increasing numbers of adults. Soon the evening burial rituals varied only in the number of corpses interred, sometimes just one or two, other times as many as six. Each time, though, on the following morning another family faced the brutal necessity of turning their backs and walking away, leaving the body of a loved one behind in a lonely grave in a desolate landscape to which they knew they would never return. It was an experience that was all too common on the overland trail that summer and in the summers to come. For some the pain and sorrow were eased by the deep Christian faith that many of the emigrants held. But not all of them were religious by any means, and even those who were often found themselves haunted years later by the memory of those forlorn graves scratched out of gravelly soil under a pine tree and then immediately abandoned forever.

Some of the survivors of the Meek Party later referred to the malady that afflicted them as “camp fever,” which suggests that the culprit
was an epidemic form of typhus caused by a species of
Rickettsia
bacteria. Transmitted primarily by lice and fleas, epidemic typhus is typically found where large numbers of people are living in unsanitary conditions, as in ships and military and refugee camps. In the absence of treatment with antibiotics, the mortality rate for epidemic typhus runs as high as 60 percent. Death is generally preceded by headaches, high fevers, rashes, severe muscle pain, sensitivity to light, and sometimes delirium.
*

By now virtually all of the emigrants had given up on Meek, who for the most part was still riding a day or so ahead of the main party with his wife and a small group of friends, perhaps as much to avoid a lynching as to find a way out of the nightmare he had led the others into. On occasions when he had to be in camp, his few remaining friends concealed him in their wagons.

At dawn on September 17, the twenty-fourth day out, they finally struck a reliable source of water at the south fork of the Crooked River, a tributary of the Deschutes, which they knew would lead them toward the Columbia. But they were far from out of danger. Large numbers of them were now too weak to walk or even to ride on horseback, so they had to be loaded into wagons pulled by fewer and fewer oxen. And they were still many miles south of The Dalles and the Columbia River.

Traveling out ahead of the rest of the party, Meek and his wife finally staggered into a Methodist mission at The Dalles on September 29 and informed the startled settlers there that hundreds of people were in dire distress in the interior. He purchased supplies for a relief expedition but declined to make the return trip to deliver them himself, presumably fearing for his life at the hands of the emigrants. Fortunately, someone else stepped forward.

Moses Harris, one of a very few African-American guides and mountain men, was also one of the best. Called “Black Harris” or sometimes the “Black Squire” by his fellow mountaineers, he had traveled throughout the West since 1823, when he first crossed the
Mississippi, probably as a freed slave. In 1844, Harris had guided a train of five hundred souls along the Oregon Trail all the way to Fort Vancouver. He had helped build Fort Laramie. He was thought by his peers to be unsurpassed in winter travel and survival skills. And now he was the only one at The Dalles who was both capable of, and willing to attempt, a rescue of Meek's lost party.

Harris and a small group of rescuers, many of them Indians from the mission, rushed south with provisions and, just as important, with equipment for helping the emigrants surmount one last challenge. To reach The Dalles, they had to cross the Deschutes River deep in its canyon, where it ran swift and cold and deadly between sheer basalt cliffs.

But Moses Harris had anticipated that and brought block and tackle, pulleys, ropes, and axes with him. He and the emigrants, with considerable help from local Indians, who were familiar with the ways of the Deschutes and who fished from elaborate scaffolding that they suspended over the river, set about building a suspension bridge for those who could still walk. Then they began caulking the beds of wagons, loading the sickest of the emigrants into them, and towing them across the water. It took two weeks to get everyone across.

Even after the last of them arrived at The Dalles, the emigrants who had taken the shortcut continued to die. A few were so hungry that they bolted down half-cooked food and became ill. Some were simply too weakened from the ordeal to have any chance of recovering. In the end more than fifty of them died.

 

A
s they finished the last of their preparations in St. Joe in late May, Sarah and Jay and Sarah's family learned that another party of Oregon-bound emigrants, the last of the season, was assembling on the far side of the Missouri just a bit to the north of town. Though he and his family were bent on California, not Oregon, Franklin Graves knew that it would be best to have company crossing the plains, so when they were fully provisioned, they drove four or five miles north of St. Joe to a crossing called Parrott's Landing and loaded their wagons onto one of the big, flat-bottomed scows that served as ferries.

When the boat pulled away from the Missouri shore, they left the United States behind them. Everything west of here was foreign and alien. There were no inns, no stores, no farms, no reliable means of re-supply except for a couple of frontier forts hundreds of miles down the trail. But their three wagons were amply stocked, a small herd of beef cattle swam alongside the ferry, and fistfuls of silver coins were squirreled away under the cleats in their family wagon. Nobody, it must have seemed to them, could be better prepared for the journey ahead.

However, they had neglected one critical piece of advice. Of all the many tips, encouragements, admonitions, and suggestions that Lansford Hastings dispensed in
The Emigrants' Guide to California and Oregon,
the best of them had to do with timing one's departure. On this he was both honest and correct when he said that the emigrants must “enter on their journey on, or before, the first day of May; after which time they must never start, if it can possibly be avoided.” On the consequences of not doing so, he was even more pointed: “Unless you pass over the mountains early in the fall, you are very liable to be detained by impassable mountains of snow until the next spring, or perhaps forever.”

On the day that Sarah, Jay, and the rest of the Graves clan stepped aboard the ferry at Parrott's Landing, May Day was already more than three weeks in the past.

W
hen she disembarked from the ferry on the western side of the Missouri, Sarah found a movable village assembling itself in the woods. Perhaps 150 of her fellow emigrants were bustling around among tents and wagons, busily making their final preparations for the journey ahead. Men were shoeing horses and oxen, packing and repacking supplies, sharpening knives and axes, cleaning guns, gathering in small groups to study maps and consult guidebooks, talking politics, swearing, starting to get to know one another, sizing one another up. Women, too, were beginning to make acquaintances, edging up to one another and introducing themselves, gathering around smoky campfires to share folk remedies and recipes and gossip, trading small items and bits of advice. Some of them, like many of the men, smoked tobacco in long-stemmed white clay pipes as they talked.

Older children helped their parents with their various chores; younger children played in wagons or down along the river, skipping stones, exploring, looking for treasure, watching out for Indians—dangerous ones now that they had crossed the river. On the fringes of
the camp, adolescent boys and girls eyed one another from afar and tended to livestock, talking to horses as they led them about, shouting at mules and oxen, snapping willow switches at their hindquarters to make them move. Here and there someone sat in the shade of a tree reading a Bible or a book of verse or writing a first excited and optimistic letter from Indian Territory to someone back home. A few plucked at banjos or sawed softly at fiddles, trying out tunes. From time to time, people stopped what they were doing for a moment to swat at the mosquitoes and horseflies that pestered them. Dogs ran to and fro, yapping and making acquaintances of their own, bounding down to the river and throwing themselves into the water for the sheer joy of it, then racing back ashore and shaking off the water, then bounding back into the river again. The smells of wood smoke, of frying bacon, of coffee, and of baking pies melded together and drifted among the wagons.

Franklin Graves led his family into this temporary village by the river and found a spot to park their wagons and pasture their cattle. Except for themselves, almost all of these families were bound for Oregon, or thought they were. That meant that at some point along the trail, at least by the time they reached Fort Hall, where the Oregon and California trails diverged, they would need to find new traveling companions. But that was months in the future, so for now they climbed down from their wagons and began to mingle, starting to forge their own friendships.

Among these friendships, those that would prove the most important, in unexpected ways far down the line, involved several families headed up by particularly large men—men who were outsize not only physically but, as it would turn out, also in the quality of their character and the quantity of their courage.

One of them was Colonel Matthew Dill Ritchie. Born in Pennsylvania in 1805, Ritchie, like Franklin Graves, had made a series of westward moves with his wife, Caroline, and an expanding brood of children. Like Franklin Graves, Ritchie had fought in the Black Hawk Indian War more than a decade earlier, and it was in that bloody event that he had acquired the title of colonel. Among Ritchie's children were two teenagers with whom the older Graves children could inter
act and find much in common as they traveled across the plains—fourteen-year-old Harriet and nineteen-year-old William Dill. Another of Ritchie's offspring, Mary Jane, was married to the largest of the large men in the camp—a twenty-eight-year-old giant named John Schull Stark. From an old Kentucky family, Stark was a distant relation of Daniel Boone. Powerfully built and weighing 220 pounds, he was said to have the strength of two men.

Yet another set of friendships that the Graves family began to develop in that first encampment by the Missouri revolved around Reason Penelope Tucker and his sons. Like Franklin Graves, M. D. Ritchie, and John Stark, Reason Tucker was a large-framed man. Gentle and soft-spoken, he wore his beard, as was popular at the time, in a fringe around his clean-shaven face. A Virginian born of Scottish parents, he had been married and widowed once already, and he now found himself a bachelor again as his second wife refused to follow him west. Traveling with him, though, were his three oldest boys—John Wesley, Stephen, and George Washington.

All three of these families—the Tuckers, the Ritchies, and the Starks—and most of the others that gathered by the Missouri that third week in May had much in common with the Graves family and with one another. Whether their ancestors first stepped ashore on the rich tidelands of Virginia or the stony shores of New England, they were almost all the children and grandchildren of men who had fought in the American Revolution. Many of them carried in their hands weapons that had been used in that conflict, and they carried deep in their hearts an absolute devotion to the idea that their liberty was the most valuable thing they owned. They commonly and solemnly referred to the fourth day of July as “the Glorious Fourth,” without the slightest hint of irony or embarrassment. They named their sons Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Lafayette, or Adams, lest those sons forget where they came from and how they had gained their unique and sacred freedoms. For the most part, they despised what they called “the trammels of civilization” and preferred to stay close to the frontier, even as it moved relentlessly westward. They believed deeply that they were destined to spread the light of liberty across the continent—to create, in fact, as Thomas Paine had put it, “the birthday of a new
world” in the West. They tended to be forthright, plain-speaking, earnest, friendly, and trustworthy. They took a man at his word, unless they had good reason not to. And above all they were fiercely self-reliant, unflinchingly independent. In the trying weeks and savage months ahead, though, they would find that one man's freedoms could become another man's fetters.

 

T
hey broke camp and moved out on May 23, climbing up out of the Missouri bottomlands, following the course of a stream called Clear Creek. When they reached the top of the bluff, they got their first full view of what lay to the west. The blue-green prairie grass was knee-high now, still pushing up through the taller, dry, dead grass of the previous year. Gently rolling hills extended to the horizon, and the swell of those hills, along with the grass billowing in the wind, created the overwhelming impression—shared by nearly all who saw it—that they were about to set forth on a great, windswept sea.

In the first fifty miles, they had to cross a series of muddy creeks, some of them running in gullies etched as deep as twenty feet into the surrounding prairie. At many of them, they had to fill the stream with brush and then pull the wagons across with ropes. At Mission Creek they came across the last sign of American civilization that they would see until they reached Fort Kearney in present-day Nebraska—a thirty-seven-room, three-story brick Presbyterian Indian mission just being constructed that spring to replace an older log structure. West of the mission, they moved out into flatter, wide-open country.

For the first time, they started to see what many of the men in the party, and many of the women as well, had been looking forward to since leaving home, an astonishing quantity of wild game—turkeys, prairie hens, wild geese, elk, deer, and occasionally pronghorns—or “antelope,” as they called them. They had not yet come to the buffalo herds, which everyone eagerly anticipated, but this was the beginning of an extended hunting excursion that many of them had dreamed of all through the preceding winter. There were no vegetarians among
them. They were serious meat eaters all, and as they made camp each evening, they could now look forward to feasting on roast fowl, grilled steaks, rich stews, and pot roasts.
*

On the fourth night out, Sarah's seventeen-year-old brother, Billy, took his turn standing guard on the perimeter of the camp, along with several other young men. It was a dark night, with only a thin crescent moon hanging low in the western sky. At about nine, Billy noticed that a grass fire had erupted in an arid patch of prairie about a half a mile north of the camp. The flames, pushed along by a dry west wind, streaked by well to the north of the camp and seemed to pose no threat to it or to the livestock. Within a few minutes, though, he was surprised to see a young man running toward him full tilt. Billy called out, “Who comes there?”

“Friend!”

Billy recognized the man as one of his fellow guards but decided he'd best follow protocol.

“Friend, advance and give the countersign!”

“Don't talk so loud. Hain't you seen them?” the young man croaked.

“Seen what?”

“Why, the Indians. They are setting the prairie on fire and are going to surround us and kill us and take our stock.”

“Where…?”

“Why, there, running along by the fire. There are hundreds of them.”

The young man pointed at the flames. Seriously scared now, trembling in fact, as he later admitted, Billy turned and looked at the fire again. He was ready to bolt for the camp, but then he looked one more time.

In silhouette against the flicker of the flames, he saw the form of hundreds of what the emigrants called “resin weeds” bobbing and
wavering in the wind.
*
With the flames streaking past them, the tall weeds did appear to be human forms.

Billy laughed and pointed out the error, and the young man sheepishly extracted from him a promise not to tell the others about his mistake. But even as they chuckled about it, they heard a commotion in the camp. Dozens of men were rushing about, clutching guns, shouting, giving orders. Two other guards on the far side of the cattle had also seen the phantom Indians and rushed into camp to sound the alarm. For days thereafter much of each evening's entertainment centered on tormenting those other two guards about their hasty retreat in the face of marauding resin weeds. Billy and his companion sat smugly by and watched.

 

A
nxiety about Indian attacks pervaded all the emigrant parties that headed west that spring. To a large extent, the fear was exaggerated and misplaced. Most of the Plains Indians that Sarah and her family would encounter along the way were not predisposed to attack the emigrants. They had little reason to hazard their own lives in order to take those of the emigrants, though that would change in the years ahead with the wholesale destruction of the buffalo herds and the utter destitution that the tribes began to experience as a result. For now, while they were often intensely curious about the various exotic foods and gadgets the white strangers carried with them, and sometimes coveted them, the Indians generally tried to obtain them through barter rather than the use of force. Some of the young men among them, however, were quite willing to make off with the emigrants' fat beef cattle and horses if given sufficient opportunity.

Most of the emigrants had developed very hard attitudes and deep prejudices well before they first encountered what they regarded as the “wild Indians” of the plains. For Sarah's family, as for many of those traveling with them, those hard feelings went back to the bloody sequence of events that they had experienced firsthand shortly after arriving in Illinois—the Black Hawk War.

In April of 1832, about a thousand Fox, Sauk, and Kickapoo Indians—men, women, and children—had crossed the Mississippi and entered Illinois bent on returning to their ancestral lands, territory that they regarded as sacred but had lost in a disputed treaty in 1804. A sixty-five-year-old Sauk warrior named Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, led them. Black Hawk had hoped to avoid conflict, but his entry into Illinois set off widespread panic among the white settlers. Within days a makeshift assemblage of U.S. Army troops, Illinois volunteer militiamen, and Sioux and Menominee mercenaries was pursuing him. The militia, called out by the governor of Illinois, consisted of virtually all the healthy adult white males in Illinois. Throughout April and May of that year, small, detached bands of Native Americans, some of them only loosely allied with Black Hawk, fought a series of battles and skirmishes against the whites and their Native American allies.

On the afternoon of May 20, things got truly ugly. A group of seventy to eighty Pottawatomie warriors, apparently not attached to Black Hawk at all, attacked a white settlement of three families at a place called Indian Creek. The whites were quickly overwhelmed, and the results were horrific. A Native American witness later recounted what transpired.

Fifteen settlers were killed. Fifteen-year-old Rachel Hall and her seventeen-year-old sister, Sylvia, crawled into a bed and tried to conceal themselves but were discovered and taken away as prisoners. That night they watched in horror as their mother's scalp, among others, was scraped and stretched on a willow hoop to cure.

That same day, in Lacon, Franklin Graves answered the governor's
call and joined the militia. His neighbor John Strawn had the previous year been named a Colonel of Militia. Now Strawn, attired in a full regimental dress uniform replete with gold epaulets and a plumed helmet, stood on an open piece of ground, formed Franklin Graves and the other men of the neighborhood into a line, and addressed them with a flourish. “Ye sons of thunder! Our country is in danger, and the call is ‘To arms.' Those willing to enroll yourselves among her defenders will step three paces forward.” Franklin Graves stepped forward and enrolled as a noncommissioned officer, the outfit's drum major. For the next month, he and the other members of the newly constituted Fortieth Regiment of Mounted Volunteers drilled and marched up and down the Illinois River searching for hostile Indians but finding none.