Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

There were those who found Reed hard to take, but he was a born leader, and when his wagons and those of the Donner brothers rolled into the camp of the Russell Party, it was Reed who took the initiative. Hoping to make a good impression, he scrubbed the trail grime off his face and then went to see the captain.

Russell's position was less authoritative than it sounded, for wagon trains were remarkably democratic organizations. Out on the open prairie, emigrants were beyond the reach of the law, so to provide some semblance of order they usually formed into companies, electing officers to organize daily progress and settle disputes. Someone had to assign guard duty and get things moving in the morning, after all. But anything created by a show of hands could be undone just as easily. Companies shifted constantly, adding or subtracting members. Smaller groups split off, latecomers joined, individual families decided for whatever reason to change traveling companions. So too could captains be deposed, and thus they were closer to being first-among-equals than commanders of a hierarchy. Still, competition for the honor was fierce, politics carrying into the wilderness even if the law did not. Russell, who had once served in the Kentucky legislature, was undoubtedly proud of his post.

To Reed he proved "kind and obliging." The captain immediately gathered the men of the party in the center of the camp and gave a speech recommending that Reed and the Donners be admitted. Russell said he knew Reed by reputation and would vouch that he was a gentleman. Somebody moved that the new families be allowed into the company, and every hand went up to signify assent. Russell walked over to Reed's wagons to meet his family, a pleasant little visit. "We are all in good spirits," Reed wrote.

REED'S BUOYANCY WAS A LITTLE OVERSTATED, for one member of the group was suffering. Sarah Keyes, Reed's mother-in-law, was ill, too ill for the journey, really. She was seventy and afflicted with "consumption," probably tuberculosis, but she had insisted on going. Margret Reed was her only daughter, and Keyes had no intention of living out her days with her daughter and grandchildren vanished over the horizon. She may also have hoped to meet one of her sons, who had already gone west. So James Reed outfitted a special wagon designed to provide a comfortable ride for his mother-in-law, and Keyes began a trip that often defeated those half her age. The early stages seemed to do her good, her health and spirits improving by the day, but the recovery did not last. By the time the Reeds joined the Russell Party, Keyes had stopped eating. One of her eyes throbbed with pain. Increasing blindness left her unable to see a coffee cup placed near at hand.

The next morning, Keyes confided in her son-in-law. The trip had sapped her remaining strength, she told James, and she did not expect to live long. He thought the same thing, for it was plain that the old woman was fading. Unless there was "a quick change," he wrote in a letter back home, "a few days will end her mortal carear."

SIX DAYS LATER, THE EMIGRANTS STOOD looking down into the churning waters of the Big Blue River, muddy and menacing and wide as a football field. Driftwood bobbed on the swift surface. Trains typically forded here, in what is now northern Kansas, but rains had raised the water level until it was nearly even with the banks, and the normally gentle ford was instead a wagon-wrecking torrent. They were only hours too late. Two companies ahead of them had reached the river the night before, crossed safely, and could now be seen in the distance, rolling west over the broken landscape.

That night a thunderstorm hit. "The whole arch of the heavens for a time was wrapped in a sheet of flame," one man remembered. In the morning the river was higher than the night before, and the emigrants had to accept that they were stuck, probably for days.

Fortunately, they found a delightful place to wait. A few hundred yards short of the river lay a bountiful spring in a cool and shaded gully, the water "of the most excellent kind." There was good wood for campfires and grass for the stock, and even a short, steep hill nearby that offered a splendid view of the countryside. Edwin Bryant, a newspaperman going west who was the wordsmith of the group, dubbed the site "Alcove Spring," presumably because he thought a small cliff in the gully formed a natural alcove. Another man carved the new name in one of the rocks. Characteristically, Reed engraved his name and the date in big, bold letters.

Such an agreeable campsite should have done them good, but as they waited for the river to fall, Sarah Keyes's health flagged. She grew speechless, weakened before their eyes, and then, still in the presence of the daughter she had vowed not to leave, drew a final labored breath. The men of the party had already started work on a raft so the wagons could be floated across, but the rites of the dead took precedence. The men felled a cottonwood tree, hewed it into planks, and hammered together a coffin. About sixty or seventy yards from the trail they dug a grave. John Denton, a young Englishman traveling with the Donners, found a gray stone and carved on its face the dead woman's name and age.

At 2:00 P.M. the emigrants formed into a funeral procession and marched solemnly to the grave. They sang a hymn—"with much pathos and expression," Bryant noted—and then, gathered beneath the oak boughs, listened to a sermon by a Presbyterian minister along on the journey. Like any good preacher, he tailored his message to his audience. "Trouble yourselves not about those that sleep," he urged, taking as his biblical text the Book of Thessalonians. It was important, he said, to seek a "better country," a place without sickness, like the place where Keyes now rested. George McKinstry, a sickly Mississippi merchant heading west for his health, wrote in his diary that it had been a "sensible sermon." That was true, and the reasons were more than theological. In a race against time amid a great wilderness, the pioneers standing bareheaded at the grave of Sarah Keyes would do well to hustle along toward the better country they were seeking, not tarry over the old woman they had just laid to rest.

THE NEXT MORNING THE RIVER was still running high, too high to ford, and the men returned to building a raft for the wagons. They chopped down two more cottonwoods and hollowed them out to make huge canoes, at least twenty-five feet long and close to four feet wide. Then they laid a cross-frame over the tops of the two craft, creating a platform on which the wagons could be taken over. When it was ready to be launched, they named the raft the "Blue River Rover" and shouldered it out into the swift current. When it stayed afloat, cheers erupted.

They crossed nine wagons that day and were up early the next morning to continue the job. In the afternoon a cold wind blew in from the northwest, and as the temperature dropped rain began to fall. Many of the men were standing in the river working the raft from bank to bank with ropes, holding their footing against a current strong enough to knock a man down, and the brutal conditions began to take their toll. Two normally affable men got into a fistfight, even drawing knives, although peacemakers stepped in before anyone was seriously hurt. The last wagon finally crossed about 9:00 P.M., and they made camp in a brake of trees on the western side of the river, but with the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, many men were shivering violently by the time they reached their tents. They were back on the trail the following morning, but between the funeral and the raft-building, more than five days had been lost, time in which a lucky train might make seventy-five miles.

Cold north winds began to blow relentlessly, forcing the men to bundle up in overcoats, the women in shawls. Some of those who had been riding in the wagons started walking, the better to stay warm. Then, almost overnight, a heat wave struck, and people started looking forward to the shade of their tents or a cooling breeze. On the open prairie, Bryant wrote, the heat could be "excessively oppressive."