Which Way to the Wild West? (23 page)

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Authors: Steve Sheinkin

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Biddy Mason,
the formerly enslaved woman who won her freedom in a California court, settled in Los Angeles, where she began working as a nurse and midwife. In 1866, after ten years of hard work and frugal living, Mason bought her first piece of L.A. real estate (it cost her $250). With a few more years of smart buying and selling, Mason built a fortune, becoming one of the richest women in the West. She built a day care center and a church, and gave so much money to local charities that hungry people, black and white, heard about her generosity and often lined up outside her house to ask for help. Mason died in L.A. at the age of seventy-three.
While running for president in 1844,
James K. Polk
promised that if elected he'd serve only one term. Polk accomplished his major goals of securing American control of Texas, Oregon, and the rest of the West. Then he did something truly amazing—he kept a campaign promise. Refusing calls to run for reelection, Polk retired to his home in Tennessee in 1849. Exhausted and sick (turns out he had cholera), Polk died later that year—giving him the sad distinction of enjoying the shortest retirement (104 days) of any president in American history.
“
Red Cloud,
the famous old Sioux Indian chief, is dead.” That was the first sentence of a small article in the
New York Times
on December 11, 1909. Though he had led the most successful war ever fought by Native Americans against the United States, Red Cloud was unable to win lasting freedom for his people or himself. He lived the last thirty-five years of his life on reservations. Still a respected leader, Red Cloud spent much of that time arguing passionately against the U.S. government's plans to break reservations into smaller and smaller pieces. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Red Cloud said of the government. “But they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
The thirteen-year-old Donner Party survivor
Virginia Reed
settled with her family in California. When she was sixteen she fell in love with a young man named John Murphy. They wanted to marry, but Virginia's father vowed, according to a newspaper report, “that he would shoot Murphy if he dared attempt a marriage.” “Sir, you may shoot me,” Murphy responded. “But I shall marry your daughter.” One night
soon after, Virginia told her mother she was going across the street to a friend's house. There she met Murphy and they were secretly (and very quickly) married. And it worked out—they had nine children. Virginia Reed died in 1921, at the age of eighty-seven.
History loses touch with
Sacagawea
soon after the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Some sources report that she traveled west and rejoined the Shoshone, living happily with them until her death in 1884. But scholars who have spent time looking for clues say it's much more likely that she died in 1812 at a fort in what is now South Dakota. In December of that year, a clerk at the fort wrote in his diary that the “wife of Charbonneau” had just died of fever. “She was a good and the best woman in the fort, age about 25,” wrote the clerk. Sacagawea would have been about twenty-five by 1812. One other piece of evidence: in 1820 William Clark wrote a report with updates on the members of his expedition. For Sacagawea, he wrote “dead.”
We know more about Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste, who crossed the West with Lewis and Clark as an infant. William Clark became his legal guardian and enrolled him in school in St. Louis. Jean Baptiste learned four languages and traveled the world before returning to the West and working as a fur trapper, mountain guide, and gold miner. He was on his way to search for gold in Montana when he died in 1866, age sixty-one.
After watching her parents die on the Oregon Trail, then witnessing the death of her adoptive parents in the Whitman massacre, life calmed down a bit for thirteen-year-old
Catherine Sager.
She spent her teen
years with a new family in Oregon, then married a minister named Clark Pringle, settled in Spokane, Washington, and had eight children. In her spare time she wrote an account of her adventures as a girl, planning to use the profits from book sales to build an orphanage. Incredibly, no one wanted to publish her story (what, not dramatic enough?). Catherine died in 1910, at the age of seventy-five, but her children saved her writing, and today you can (and should) read her book—it's called
Across the Plains in 1844.
After losing Texas and the rest of the West to the Americans,
Antonio López de Santa Anna
spent a few years in exile, then returned to Mexico City and regained the presidency. Now calling himself dictator for life (also “Most Serene Highness”) he pocketed millions in government money before being booted out yet again in 1855. He then drifted from Cuba to Colombia to New York City. Searching for a get-rich-quick scheme (to fund another attempt to take power in Mexico), he imported a shipment of
chicle
—a natural gum from Central American trees. His plan: find a way to turn chicle into rubber for carriage tires. This failed, but an American friend, Thomas Adams, mixed Santa Anna's chicle with sugar and flavor, shaped it into balls, and sold it in drugstores as “chewing gum.” A new industry was born, though Santa Anna never saw a penny. He died broke and nearly forgotten in 1876.
After retiring from the army in 1884,
William Tecumseh Sherman
was so popular that Republican leaders started talking about nominating him for president. The general was not interested. “If nominated I will not run,” he grunted. “If elected I will not serve.” After years of harsh
and merciless war, Sherman retired to New York City, took up painting, and spent his time going to dinner parties and the theater. The major danger facing him now was that crowds of excited admirers followed him everywhere. In 1886 he shook so many hands that he broke a bone in his right hand. The next year he lost two fingernails. Sherman survived the mobs (and admitted privately that he loved the fame). He died in New York in 1891, at age seventy-one.

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