The Mammoth Book of the West (10 page)

To secure his release, Santa Anna pledged independence for Texas. He soon repudiated this, but Mexico was never able to conquer the new Republic. Most of the 2,000 Mexicans who were in the country at the time of the battle left for Mexico shortly afterwards.

For ten years after the battle of San Jacinto Texas remained a free and sovereign republic. Settlement expanded rapidly, swelling the population of Texas to 140,000. Of these a significant number were Germans, who came to represent the largest foreign-born element in Texas. At places like New Braunfels, Fredericksburg and Sisterdale, this industrious people built homes which were exact replicas of those they had left behind in Europe. They were also startlingly different from the rough-and-ready log cabins and “picket huts” (made of staked walls and with roofs of grass, bound with rawhide) of the American Texans. The writer and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead described the incongruity of these German houses in his
A Journey Through Texas
(1857):

I never in my life, except, perhaps, in awakening from a dream, met with such a sudden and complete transfer of associations. Instead of loose boarded or hewn log walls,
with crevices stuffed with rags or daubed with mortar, which we have been accustomed to see during the last month [elsewhere in Texas] . . . we were in Germany. There was nothing wanting . . . A long room, extending across the whole front of the cottage, the walls pink, with stenciled panels, and scroll ornaments in crimson, and with neatly-framed and glazed pretty lithographic prints hanging on all sides . . .

Aside from Germans and a sizeable French colony at Castroville near the Medina River, most of those settling in Texas were American farmers, thrown off their land by the Great Panic of 1837. “G.T.T” (“Gone to Texas”) was found scrawled across cabin doors the length of the frontier and the width of creditors’ books. With its generous land grants, the Texan Republic provided a second chance.

The men and women who went there were determined to take it. They inclined to play hard and drink hard, and displayed a fondness for settling arguments with fists, knives and guns. The social rank of the opponent hardly mattered. Sam Houston was challenged to no fewer than 24 duels during his two terms as Texas president. Much of the future lawlessness of the West would ride north from Texas.

Yet if most Texans saw themselves as a breed apart, they also considered themselves Americans. Under Sam Houston several attempts were made to secure annexation by the United States, but these were thrown out by Congress at the instigation of abolitionists who charged that the Texan revolution had been a “slaveocracy conspiracy” by Southerners. But by 1845 the mood of Congress had relented. European states were urging Texas to a dangerous sovereignty, and President Polk had just been elected US President on an expansionist ticket. On 29 December of that year James K. Polk signed the proclamation making Texas the 21st state of the Union.

“Millions are marching at once towards the same horizon. Their language, their religion, their manners differ; their object is the same. Fortune has been promised them somewhere in the West, and to the West they go to find it.”

In 1846 the frontier burst asunder as America sought to fulfil its “Manifest Destiny” The flow of emigrants westward grew from a trickle to a flood. Within only a handful of years, the number of White Americans living beyond the Mississippi River would exceed the 350,000 Indians who made the far West their home or their last refuge. The most tumultuous period in American history had begun.

While some pioneers had been gazing longingly across the Sabine River towards Texas, others had cast their eyes further westwards, to California, and to Oregon, the delights of which had been discovered by Yankee sea captains, who had traded along the Pacific coast since the late eighteenth century. But a home in either place would have only been a gleam in the pioneer’s eye if it had not been for some myth-shattering by an intrepid – or perhaps foolhardy – few.

The Pacific was believed to be unreachable by land for ordinary mortals. It was 2,000 gruelling miles from the edge of settlement. There were treeless plains, scoured by alkali dust, and guarded by Indians. And then there were the Rockies, the prevailing opinion of which was summed up in a Congressional report: “Nature has fixed limits to our nation; she has kindly interposed as our Western barrier, mountains almost inaccessible . . . This barrier our population can never pass.” A mountain man might make it through to the shining sea, but not a mass of people.

The people took no notice. They just went, prompted by whips of information from traders and trappers. In 1830 the fur company of Smith, Jackson and Sublette showed that the plains could be crossed by wagons when they took a train to a rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. Accompanying the 12-wagon train were 13 beeves. Water and grass proved easy to find. “The wagons,” the company noted, “could easily have crossed the Rocky Mountains over the South Pass.” Two years later, in 1832, Hall Jackson Kelley, an acid-natured New Englander who believed himself the American Moses, led a handful of followers to Oregon Country. The journey, by an incomprehensibly roundabout route which included New Orleans and Mexico City, took two years. Along the way, all Kelley’s disciples were dismissed. Though the venture failed, it gave others hope. Among them was the ice-manufacturer Nathaniel Wyeth, who formed a joint stock company to exploit Oregon’s bounty. Departing from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1832 Wyeth and his companions travelled with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to its annual rendezvous at the foot of the Shining Mountains. From there they were guided to Fort Vancouver by trapper Milton Sublette, brother of the more famous William. They were the first
party of White Americans to travel what would become the Oregon Trail.

More followed in Wyeth’s still warm tracks, several Methodist missionaries among them. Once in the promised land of Oregon, it struck the reverend men that the place was replete with earthly delights. The climate was gentle, the soil tillable and good, the Willamette Valley a sort of farming heaven. Jason Lee, the nephew of Wyeth, was the most prominent of the Oregon proselytizers. To secure more American colonizers for Oregon – a region outside Louisiana and viewed proprietorially by the British – Lee retook the journey over the Rockies and the plains, but eastwards this time, to spread the good word about Oregon. Thomas Jefferson Farnham heard it in the farm town of Peoria, organized an emigration society, the “Oregon Dragoons”, and had his wife sew them a flag with the legend OREGON OR THE GRAVE. Nineteen Dragoons set out for the Far West. None of them had adequate supplies or any real knowledge of wilderness frontiering. Yet some of them, including Farnham, made it to the Willamette. Afterwards, he wrote a no-truth-spared account of his westering experience, which did not fail to mention that he passed more than one night “more to the apparent satisfaction of vermin than for ourselves.”

To those who doubted the wisdom of overland migration such words were a welcome confirmation. Despite the fact of successful land crossings they jibed and railed at the migrants. The editor of the New York
Tribune
, Horace Greeley, usually held to be an unrestrained enthusiast for westward migration, warned one party setting off for Oregon that the route “wore an aspect of insanity” and asserted that “we do not believe that nine-tenths of them will ever reach Columbia alive.” Yet there was more and more evidence that the overlanders could make it across. In 1842 flamboyant explorer and Western expansionist
John Charles Frémont, guided by scout Kit Carson, made an accurate map of the Oregon Trail, detailing such things as campsites and estimates of possible daily travel. Frémont then published the report of the expedition, done up as a colourful adventure story, which became an instant bestseller. With the path marked, more and more people came to believe that they could, God willing, make the Pacific coast overland.

And there was more and more need for poor men and women to do so. The Great Panic of 1837 had dispossessed and impoverished many farmers of the East and Mid-West. They were cheered on by the expansionist-minded so-called “boosters”, who wished to see Oregon as part of the United States.

Then, in the spring of 1843, 1,000 pioneers stepped off into the wilderness at Independence, Missouri, bound for Oregon and California. Their vast train of wagons was guided by Marcus Whitman, a religious-minded physician who was one of Oregon’s leading propagandists. The pioneers made it to the Pacific. With their wagons. The doubts were dispelled. Americans had come to the Pacific coast to stay.

By 1846 thousands of pioneers were surging westwards. On the move too, in “The Year of Decision” as historian Bernard De Voto termed it, were the Mormons, leaving their Illinois base at Nauvoo, heading towards the setting sun. The trails west were becoming so well trodden that, in places, they were highways a mile or more wide.

Not that it was ever an easy road to the promised land. Most emigrants followed a route that began at one of the towns on the Missouri River, such as Independence, Council Bluffs or St Joseph. From there they proceeded up the Platte to Fort Laramie and over the continental divide at South Pass. At Black’s Fork of the Green River in southwest Wyoming, the trapper Jim Bridger had built, in an
astute piece of entrepreneurship, a trading post where the emigrants could rest and buy supplies – at a dismayingly high price. Up to this point, the going was pretty easy, for the kids a glorious lark. After Fort Bridger the trail divided, the northern route going to Oregon, the southern to California. The terrain on both routes grew progressively rougher. The Oregon-bound travellers followed a tortuous track along the banks of the Snake, then headed across 150 miles of barren desert. To get the wagons up the Blue Mountains required ropes and pulleys.

The trail to California went south to the Humboldt River, and then along that disappearing waterway until it sank into the dry sands of the Nevada desert. Then it was 50 dry miles of alkaline waste, which sent up billowing clouds of ash, covering people, wagons and beasts. Men and women went mad, and animals died of heat and thirst. One chronicler counted the bodies of 350 horses, 280 oxen and 150 mules in a single 15-mile stretch of the wasteland. Animals would stampede when they smelled the saving water of the Carson River. After the Carson there came a final steep climb up the Sierra Nevada, and through the mountains it was downhill to journey’s end in the Sacramento Valley.

The favoured means of travel was a canvas-covered wagon or Prairie Schooner, destined to become the enduring symbol of the Old West. Derived from the heavier Conestoga wagon of the Pennsylvania Germans, the schooner was superbly appropriate for the job of transporting pioneers’ families. The heavy-duty canvas top kept off the elements, while the big wooden wheels (the rear pair were up to six feet in diameter) with their wide, iron-covered rims rolled easily over bumps and dips and soft ground or sand. The wagon’s 10 by 3½ feet body could take a ton and a half in weight, though the prudent traveller would keep the load lighter.

Drawn by mules or oxen, lines of these wagons billowed across the west at the sedate pace of 15 to 20 miles a day. The journey to the Pacific took five months and began in May when the prairie was firm enough for the wagons and there was enough grass for the beasts of burden. Pioneering was a seasonal activity, only wise over the spring and summer. Late starts or slips in schedule due to misfortune could be calamitous. If the wagons failed to get across the Sierra Nevada before the snows, the settlers could become marooned. Such a fate befell the Donner Party in 1846.

For dirt-poor settlers a wagon was a luxury. Their lot was a handcart. Many simply walked to the Pacific. A number pushed wheelbarrows. At least one dog pulled his owner’s chattels across the plains. But in general pioneers were not the very poor. The destitute were too poor to move.

The pathfinders often wrote letters to their kinfolk detailing the pitfalls and perils of the overland trips. Newspapers were full of sage advice, and publishers issued “Guides” by the score for the would-be emigrant. Sometimes the advice was sound:

Obtain Illinois or Missouri Oxen, as they are more adaptable to trail forage, and less likely to be objects of Indian desire.

Every male person should have at least one gun.

Of all the places in the world, travelling in the mountains is the most apt to breed contentions and quarrels. The only way out of it is to say but little, and mind your own business exclusively.

Despite the advice, the emigrants were not always well
prepared. Often the wagons were overloaded, and the non-essentials had to be thrown overboard en route. Among the more bizarre items found littering the prairie were a gothic bookcase and a diving bell. “Short-cuts” advertised by unscrupulous traders or ferryboat proprietors proved a frequent disaster for those who failed to heed the experience of others or thought they knew better.