The Indifferent Stars Above (7 page)

As the men marched and searched, the women back home grew increasingly nervous. The first night after the men's departure, a group of women in nearby Richland Township came together at Nancy Dever's house to discuss how best to defend themselves if attacked. The women were not at all happy that when the men had strutted off to war, they had taken with them nearly every household gun in the township. The women decided that if they were to make it appear as if the Dever house had already been attacked and ransacked, any marauding Indians might pass it by. So they scattered an assortment of furniture and linens and other household goods haphazardly about in the yard. Then they took some food and bedding up into the cabin's loft and lay low.

Later that evening, at dusk, more neighborhood ladies arrived at the cabin. Seeing the shambles in the yard, they concluded that the Devers had been massacred and let out ear-piercing screams of lamentation. The women in the loft, hearing the screams, took them for Indian war cries and, believing they were about to be relieved of their scalps, unloosed a salvo of answering screams. Eventually one of the women in the cabin peered outside and realized the true situation. The ladies spent the rest of the evening sheepishly hauling the Devers' household effects back into the cabin.

Eleven days after the abduction of the Hall sisters, following some negotiations conducted via Winnebago Indian intermediaries, the
girls were ransomed for a bit of money, ten horses, and some corn. Over the next several months, nearly one-third of the U.S. Army and nine thousand Illinois militiamen pursued Black Hawk and an ever-diminishing band of his supporters northward into Wisconsin. After a series of one-sided battles, Black Hawk tried to surrender on August 1, wading into the Mississippi and shouting his intentions to the
Warrior,
a steamboat that had been chartered by the army. No one on board could understand him, though, so they opened fire, killing two dozen of Black Hawk's men but missing him.

The next day the troops surrounded Black Hawk and the last four hundred of his people, and what is somewhat euphemistically called the Battle of Bad Axe began on the eastern side of the Mississippi. As Black Hawk's men fought to hold off the troops, the women tried to swim across the river, many of them with their children clinging to their backs. The men on the
Warrior
shot them one by one. When there was no one left to shoot in the water, the
Warrior
unleashed its cannons on the people clustered along the shore. Then the troops closed in. They shot nearly everyone still alive. They shot old men, women trying to surrender, children trying to flee. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of bodies scattered along the banks of the Mississippi. The troops scalped most of them. Then they cut long strips of skin from the backs of some, in order to make razor strops.

Black Hawk himself escaped, but he surrendered at Prairie du Chien on August 27. He was imprisoned for a time, but in 1833 he was returned to what remained of his people, settled now in Iowa, and he died there in 1838. However, no one who had experienced the violent events of 1832 on the Illinois frontier forgot about them, on either side.

 

S
arah and her family pressed on westward under mostly gray skies, following a snakelike road that wound its way along the crests of the low hills separating the drainages of the Missouri River and the Kansas River. The country was increasingly open now. Thunderstorms began to pop up, drenching the prairie, swelling the rivers, and hastening the growth of the tall, rippling, blue-green grass.

A hundred miles to the west, and slightly to the south of them, the Donners, the Reeds, and the rest of the Russell Party were stalled at a pretty spot that one of their number, Edwin Bryant, had just named “Alcove Springs” on the eastern shore of the Big Blue River. The thunderstorms had raised the river far too high to ford. For days the travelers had sat in the rain, doing laundry, watching flotsam race by at fifteen miles an hour, and waiting for the river to fall. Finally they had begun to construct a ponderous and awkward log ferry.

On May 29, James Reed's seventy-year-old mother-in-law, Sarah Keyes, died, necessitating a funeral and a delay in working on the ferry. Keyes's granddaughter Virginia, who had turned thirteen the day before, wrote her cousin back home about the funeral.

On May 30 they completed work on the ferry. On the thirty-first, after working from dawn until 10:00
P.M
., struggling with the heavy ferry in the swift current and a drenching rain, they finally got the last of the wagons across. But the work was brutal, wet, and cold, and that night a fight broke out in their camp. Tensions had arisen between some of the California-bound emigrants and those bound for Oregon. Knives were pulled out but then put away. Nerves were beginning to fray, and they were not yet out of modern-day Kansas.

 

B
y June 7 the weather across the central prairies had finally begun to warm up and dry out, the thunderstorms growing less frequent and the turgid rivers finally falling. Still well to the east of the Russell Party, Sarah and her family—along with the Tuckers, the Ritchies, the Starks, and the other emigrants out of St. Joe—were making steady if slow progress, traveling at the speed of plodding oxen, working their
way across Kansas just south of the present Nebraska line. Then, turning northwest, they descended into the Platte River Valley and intercepted the Great Platte River Road, the 1840s version of an interstate freeway, near Fort Kearny in Nebraska.

The daily routine had become monotonous, and the novelty of camping out had worn thin, but, for the most part, Sarah and her siblings were still in high spirits. By day they rode or walked through waist-deep, verdant grass. Meadowlarks, clinging to the tall blue stems of grass or to shrubs, chortled and sang, bobbling on their perches in the ceaseless wind. Grasshoppers rattled away from under their feet, flashing flame red or canary yellow underwings. Orange and white and yellow butterflies drifted above the grass. Metallic green and blue dragonflies darted and dodged over the white canopies of the wagons.

On warm evenings, after the livestock were all taken care of and the aftermath of dinner had been cleared up and the guards had been posted, the young people gravitated toward one another, congregating near one campfire or another. Sometimes they just sat in the dark and listened to the night sounds—crickets singing out in the grass, frogs shrilling along a creek, prairie wolves howling and coyotes yapping off in the distance. Usually, though, they talked about the day's events, about the novelty of the scenery or the wild animals they had seen that day, or about what California was going to be like when they finally got there. They were, by and large, still getting to know one another, and all of them were conscious of a fundamental fact that was at once both sobering and thrilling for those among them who were not yet married: They had entered into a very small world, a world where a substantial portion of the young men and women that they would encounter in the future, even after they reached Oregon or California, were sitting here at the campfire with them. Many of them were likely to marry one another, either by choice or by necessity, and they knew it.

So they would chat nervously, watching out of the corners of their eyes to see who was sitting close to whom that night. Then Jay Fosdick, or another of the young men, would get out his fiddle, and somebody else would get out a guitar or a banjo. They would begin to reel off some tunes—“The Arkansas Traveler,” “Money Musk,” and
the popular “Virginia Reel.” The Graveses' teamster, John Snyder, big and handsome, would drop the rear gate on one of the wagons, climb up onto it, and dance a wild jig while the girls laughed at his antics and the boys clapped time. Two by two, boys and girls would get up and pull off their boots and begin to dance, circling and wheeling around the fire, their bare feet kicking up dust, their warm hands holding other warm hands, or lying lightly on broad shoulders, or pressing against the delicate hollow at the small of a slender back.

Tune after tune would fly off the fiddles—fast, hot tunes that swirled through the night air and made you want to get up and stomp your feet. Older folks clutching tin mugs full of coffee would drift toward the fire to watch and then set down the coffee and join in, flinging out their arms and legs like drunken chickens as the screeching of the fiddle and the twang of the banjo stole into their souls and rattled their bones. Somebody would start singing, and a chorus would join in, all of them sharing in songs that had come down to them from their grandparents in Scotland or Ireland or the hills of Virginia or New England—boisterous sea chanteys, sweet love songs, uplifting spirituals, funny songs about foolish lovers or clueless dandies, and many, many sad songs about the folks left back home.

When they had worn themselves out with singing and dancing, the older people would drift away toward their tents or wagons. But the young would linger, sitting around the fire again, staring into it, enjoying the feel of its heat on their faces as the prairie night began to grow chilly, throwing a few more sticks onto it, listening to them pop and hiss. They would talk again, more quietly now that people were trying to sleep nearby, the boys joking and boasting, the girls giggling at them or ignoring them, depending on the signals they wanted to send. Hearts began to grow fond. Some later said that Mary Ann Graves and John Snyder had begun to take particular notice of each other.

 

R
omance was blooming on the road out ahead of them as well. In light of the tension between the Oregon-bound emigrants and the California-bound, the Russell Party had split into two groups on June 2, the Oregonians traveling a few miles out ahead of the Califor
nians under their own captain, Rice Dunbar. On June 12 a member of the California contingent, thirty-five-year-old Charles T. Stanton, a bachelor from Chicago, wrote about the effect of the split on the younger people in a letter to his brother.

And indeed, within the next few weeks, three of the Oregon girls were married and two more engaged.

In the same letter, Stanton—who though he stood only five feet five would in the fullness of time turn out to be among the biggest of the big men of the 1846 emigration—also wrote about something more ominous that had befallen the Oregon contingent a few days earlier.

The Pawnees had a bad reputation among many of the emigrants of 1846. Rumors about them abounded on the trail, and J. M. Shively, author of one of the most popular of the trail guides, had singled them out as a particular threat.

Not everyone in the loose assemblage of wagon trains spread out between the Big Blue and the forks of the Platte River in the middle of
June was worried about the Pawnees, though. On June 16, Tamzene Donner wrote to a friend back in Springfield that aside from all the cooking she had to do, she was thoroughly enjoying herself—reading the collection of books she had brought along, taking in the novel scenery, and particularly botanizing. The prairie was in full bloom now, and she was enthusiastically sketching and preserving dozens of species of wildflowers—lupine, “ear drop,” larkspur, poppy mallow, wild hollyhock, and many others she could not name. As for the Indians, she reported that some local chiefs had taken breakfast with the Donners at their tent that morning and that “we have no fear of Indians. Our cattle graze quietly around our encampment unmolested. Two or three men will go hunting twenty miles from camp; and last night two of our men lay out in the wilderness rather than ride their horses after a hard chase.” Then she summed up her state of mind in words that would eventually grow monumentally ironic and chilling: “Indeed if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”

A
s Sarah and her family made their way up the Platte River in June, James K. Polk's plan for California was unfolding nicely out west.

Aside from John Sutter, about whom Vallejo fretted a good deal, Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was the undisputed ruler of the Mexican province of Alta California in 1846. The official military governor of the province and owner of more than 175,000 acres of the finest agricultural land in the world, he was estimated to have an income of ninety-six thousand dollars a year, an enormous figure in the mid-nineteenth century. His empire was centered in a fortified compound and a two-story adobe house he called Casa Grande in the sleepy town of Sonoma north of San Francisco Bay. There he maintained a handful of Mexican troops, equipped with nine brass cannons, 250 muskets, and a hundred pounds of gunpowder, everything that the Mexican government considered necessary for the defense of the province.

Born in 1807 in Monterey, California, Vallejo was thoroughly Mexican, but in recent years he had watched in frustration as a series
of revolutions had racked Mexico and the resulting succession of governments had left California to drift aimlessly. Increasingly, Vallejo, like many Californians of his generation, had begun to wonder whether the province might be better served if it were entirely free from Mexican governmental control. He was on good terms with many of the American settlers who had arrived in his neighborhood in the previous few years, and the idea that California might become an independent American protectorate had begun to intrigue him.

So it was with some considerable astonishment, but also some sense of inevitability, and perhaps even some relief, that Vallejo awoke just after dawn on June 14 to the sound of men banging pistol butts on the main door of Casa Grande. Vallejo and his wife, Doña Francisca, peered out of an upstairs window. In the large, dusty courtyard below, a motley assemblage of men with rifles and pistols were shaking their fists and shouting curses and threats in English. Vallejo hurriedly pulled on his dress uniform and went downstairs. Doña Francisca urged him to flee out a back door, but Vallejo instead went to the front door and flung it open.

The men who stormed into the elegant great room of Casa Grande were dressed in ragged buckskins, torn blue breeches, coyote-skin hats, and greasy red bandannas. A few were bare-chested. Some wore muddy boots; others were barefoot. They smelled of horse sweat. Tomahawks and pistols dangled from their belts, notched to show how many men they had killed. Their apparent leader, one Ezekiel Merritt, wore a long beard stained dark brown with tobacco juice. They were freelance revolutionaries, loosely and unofficially associated with a U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont, who was now encamped just outside of Sutter's Fort in the Sacramento Valley.

Vallejo addressed them formally: “To what happy circumstance shall I attribute the visit of so many exalted personages?” The exalted personages chewed for a moment on their tobacco and then told Vallejo, somewhat less formally, that they had come to arrest him, to secure the surrender of Sonoma, and to declare California an independent republic. Vallejo nodded and ordered someone to bring out his best wine and his best brandy. Then he invited the surprised revolutionaries to sit down for a drink.

Together they began to draft a document formalizing Vallejo's surrender and California's declaration of independence. By 8:30
A.M.,
the wine and brandy had mellowed everyone out considerably. The proceedings inside Casa Grande took on the atmosphere of a party. The revolutionaries were hungry, so Vallejo had a young steer butchered, and breakfast preparations were begun. By 11:00
A.M.,
the document was complete, and California was a republic—at least in the eyes of the revolutionaries. Vallejo went to his room and fetched a ceremonial sword and handed it over to the men in buckskin, but nobody could figure out what to do with it, so Vallejo returned it to his room. Finally Vallejo was ushered out of his house to be taken under guard to meet Frémont at Sutter's Fort.

Out in the courtyard, William Todd, a nephew of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, sat down on the ground by the flagpole with several of his fellow revolutionaries, a piece of unbleached cotton, some scraps of red flannel, and some homemade ink made of linseed oil and ferric oxide. If this were to be a republic, they figured it ought to have a flag. They emblazoned the cotton with the words “California Republic.” Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power.

The American seizure of California would not in the long run turn out to be a laughing matter, though, nor a bloodless one. A few days after Vallejo's capitulation at Sonoma, two young American men named Cowie and Fowler were apprehended by a small Mexican force near Bodega Bay. After being kept prisoner for a day or two, Cowie and Fowler were tied to a tree and stoned. When one of them suffered a broken jaw, a cord was tied to the jaw and it was yanked out of his face. Then, slowly and deliberately, their tormentors began to slice off bits and pieces of their flesh—fingers and toes and other appendages—and stuff them down the men's throats. Finally the two men were disemboweled and left to die.

 

O
n June 17, the day after Tamzene Donner had taken breakfast with some local Pawnee chiefs and written her buoyantly optimistic letter home, Sarah and her party arrived at the same approximate spot on the south bank of the Platte River. That night a party of Pawnees stole up to the edge of their encampment and ran off a large portion of the emigrants' 150 head of cattle.

The loss of so much livestock could prove catastrophic later in the trip, so in the morning small groups of men fanned out across the surrounding countryside to round up as many of the cattle as they could find. As two of them—an Iowan named Edward Trimble and a Ohioan named Harrison—were driving five head of the cattle back to camp, a dozen or more Pawnees rose out of the tall prairie grass, demanding the men's horses. Trimble refused, and the Pawnees promptly loosed a volley of arrows and rifle shot at him. Trimble tumbled from his saddle, dead. The Pawnees took Harrison prisoner and were in the process of stripping him naked when another search team arrived on the scene and charged the Pawnees, chasing them off.

Trimble left a pregnant wife, Abarilla, and four small children. Faced with the prospect of continuing across the plains pregnant, with young children in tow and without a husband, she declared that she wanted to go home to Iowa. The only eastbound travelers in the area, however, were all male. A woman could not even contemplate giving birth without the assistance of other women, so she reluctantly continued westward.

Trimble's death, and the plight of his widow, must have abruptly changed the prevailing mood of Sarah's party, particularly that of the women. Every wife among them was suddenly brought face-to-face with a hard reality that they generally tried not to think about but constantly feared nevertheless. To be widowed out here on the plains or in the mountains ahead was—to a large extent—to be rendered instantly dependent on the goodwill of the men around you. As good and trustworthy as those men might be—and most of them were both—few of them had extra time or energy to drive your cattle, to hunt game for you, to repair your wagons, to chop your firewood, or to attend to the various other heavy chores that you might require having done. Most of the men either had families of their own who
had to be a first priority or were hired hands, expected to tend to the needs of their employers. Bereaved widows were sometimes incorporated into other families to some extent, and the other women in the party almost always gave them extra help. In the end, though, the amount of energy and the number of resources that any family could muster were finite, and there was a practical limit to which either could be shared. Farther down the trail, everyone knew, a shortage of either could be a matter of life or death.

Many emigrant women who found themselves in this precarious situation adapted themselves to it heroically, doing all the “masculine” chores themselves. But it was a heavy, sometimes crushing, burden to add to the traditional duties they already performed.

It was all the worse for those women who were mothers as well as wives, as most of them were. The number of ways in which their children might come to harm along the trail was staggering, and women who had to drive a team or repair a wagon were unable to devote much time to watching out for them.

Children fell under wagon wheels and were crushed to death or crippled for life. They wandered off into the tall grass and were never seen again. Occasionally they were abducted by Native Americans. Much more frequently they drowned when swept away by rivers their families were trying to ford. Drowning incidents were so common, in fact, that some mothers wrote their children's names in indelible ink on labels and sewed the labels into their children's clothes. It didn't prevent them from drowning, but it sometimes allowed a grieving mother to identify a body that had been in the water too long. Children were bitten by rattlesnakes, struck by lightning, trampled by unruly oxen or horses, pummeled by hailstones as large as turkey eggs, and shot by the nearly daily accidental discharges of the guns that their fathers carried. They died of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, malaria, infected cuts, food poisoning, mumps, and smallpox. Perhaps the only break that mothers on the Platte River Road had that summer was that it wasn't yet 1849, when Asiatic cholera would kill thousands along this same stretch of trail, the graves in some places averaging one every two hundred feet.

The greatest fear that widowed mothers shared, though, was that they themselves would die and leave their children orphaned on the trail. Usually other mothers took such orphans in. One woman, Margaret Inman, walked five hundred miles with an orphaned newborn in her arms, searching out nursing mothers who would offer the infant their breasts each night and morning. But as the emigrants got farther west and every aspect of life on the trail got harder, attitudes also hardened. When both got hard enough, nobody could count on compassion. It didn't happen often, but more than once during the emigration years of the late 1840s and early 1850s, women who did not own or could not drive wagons were simply left behind as their companions moved on over the horizon.

It happened to a young woman named Polly Owen White. When her husband died, the family for whom he had been working refused to take her any farther without some form of payment. When she couldn't produce it, they left her and her baby girl sitting by the side of the road. Eventually they were picked up by another family and made it to Oregon, where Polly remarried and went on to bear, improbably, four sets of twins. But everyone knew that under extreme circumstances individuals would look out first for themselves and their family members and that abandonment of the old, the ill, the lame, the helpless, or the dependent was always a possibility.

 

A
s the Graves family and their companions moved up the Platte River Valley and deeper into Pawnee country in late June, they increased their vigilance, posting guards all night, every night now. Following one day's hard work and preceding another as they did, the stints of guard duty were onerous, so they were rotated among all the able-bodied men. Women were not expected to serve guard duty, but when Jay Fosdick's turns came around, Sarah—with no children to attend to in her wagon—often accompanied him out into the dark.

It offered her a rare chance to be alone and unobserved with her husband, to do the things that young brides most want to do—to sit side by side with him and talk quietly about their future, to listen as he serenaded her softly with his fiddle, to tease him, to hold his hand,
to lean against him and sit in the warmth of his arms. The moon had waned to a thin crescent by the third week in June, and the black velvet of the prairie sky was spangled with shimmering drifts of silver stars. When they were sure that it was safe, Sarah and Jay could sink into the prairie grass, lie on their backs, listen to the crickets, stare into the immensity of the heavens, count falling stars as they streaked across the skies, ponder what such things meant. They could pull each other close, brush warm lips, and make love quietly, lost in each other and in the vastness of the dark prairie night.

 

F
or the most part, sex in the 1840s was like sex anytime, but it involved complexities and carried consequences in 1846 that can be hard for us in the twenty-first century to fully appreciate. Sarah had come of age during one of the successive waves of evangelical Christianity that swept over the United States in the nineteenth century. Carrying strains of Puritanism, but also drawing on much older fundamentals of Western theology, the evangelical movement of the 1830s taught that sexuality in any form was essentially degrading. Virtuous people were those whose conduct was most removed from any association with the rest of the animal kingdom and the various animal appetites that could be readily seen in any barnyard—the sexual appetite in particular.

That was the official line at any rate. It was the implicit and explicit message that Sarah and her sisters and young women like them had likely heard many times at camp meetings and in country churches back home in Illinois. No doubt it profoundly affected the way they thought about sex and about themselves as women. But, of course, nature does assert itself, and sooner or later many country girls and the country boys with whom they had grown up did what country girls and boys have always done. They nestled under blankets on back porches, they crept into haylofts, or they snuck off into the woods.