Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

LIKE ALL TRAVELERS, WESTERING EMIGRANTS wanted a record of their great adventure, so many of them found time around the campfire or along the trailside to keep a journal. In all, there are hundreds of such recollections, an archival treasure trove that accounts for much of what we know about the pioneer experience. Of the original Donner Party group that set out from Springfield—the Donners and the Reeds—the only surviving diary of the early portions of the trip was kept by Hiram Miller, a Mend of Reed's who had signed on to work as a teamster for the Donners. Remarkably, Miller's record did not emerge into the public eye for a centuiy. For decades, it lay unnoticed in the basement of a family home, and only in 1946 did a Reed descendant donate it to a museum in Sacramento.

Miller was apparently a no-nonsense fellow, for most of his entries offer nothing more than the daily distance traveled and the location of the nightly campsite. There is nothing about his ideas or emotions, nothing about his comrades in the train, not even a note about the weather. His chronicle reveals more about nineteenth-century spelling and punctuation than about the scenery. The day after the wagons crossed from the south branch of the Platte to the north branch, a striking piece of territory and a milestone of the trip, Miller's entire entiy reads, "and from their wee traveled up the plat a Bout 18 mills and Camped near the plat." The next day, he allowed himself a rare burst of comparative lyricism:

And from their wee traveled up the plat a Bowt 12 miles and Camped near the plat By a fine Spring. No timber. Off to the left of the Spring on the Bluffs is a Beautiful pine ridge, the first that i have Seen on the Rout.

Still, for all its just-the-facts simplicity, Miller's diaiy allows us to trace the movements of the Donners and the Reeds with some precision, especially when it is pieced together with the letters and journals of other emigrants traveling nearby.

With each mile up the Platte, the party slowly departed the vast grasslands of the Great Plains and entered the kind of arid, high-desert country that dominates the American West. Along the river valleys, bluffs soared higher into the broad open skies, "rugged and sterile, exhibiting barren sands and perpendicular ledges of rock." Wagon wheels sank eight or ten inches into the dry, sandy soil, the oxen straining to keep the axles turning. Shallow and muddy, the water of the Platte tasted terrible, but there was nothing else to drink, so the emigrants forced it down.

The terrain threw up memorable landmarks everywhere, and the wagons began to pass them daily. On June 22 Courthouse Rock loomed up, though many people thought it looked nothing like a courthouse. On the 23rd it was Chimney Rock, a spire that could be seen for thirty-five or forty miles. They guessed its height at anywhere from 200 to 800 feet; it was probably 450 or 500 feet, although weather has now eroded it significantly. The next day the wagons rolled beneath Scott's Bluff, a sandstone face rising straight up out of the flatland. The landscape brought fanciful thoughts to mind for an emigrant named Charles Stanton, who wrote to a relative back east to describe the "knobs, or hills. or bluffs, or whatever else they may be called.... The wagons will often wind along under these bluffs, and, in their broken appearance, you can trace houses, castles, towns, and every thing which the imagination can conceive." One formation, he wrote playfully, looked like a citadel placed there to guard "the genii and spirits which dwell in the caverns and deep recesses of the ragged peaks."

THE DONNER CHILDREN STARED WIDE-EYED at the family's breakfast guests, two Sioux warriors in full regalia: beads, feathers, seashells acquired by trade all the way from California, pieces of colored tree bark, even the hair of scalps they had taken in battle. It was all "tastefully arranged," according to George Donner, who, true to his gregarious nature, had invited the visitors to join the family meal. "The Indians all speak very friendly to us," Donner wrote in a letter to a friend back home.

They had stopped at Fort Bernard, a grand name for what was in fact nothing more than a small log building built by a trapper at the very eastern edge of what is today the state of Wyoming. Just eight miles farther along the trail stood Fort Laramie, an adobe-walled quadrangle enclosing the space of half a football field, perhaps a little more, and containing watchtowers and a two-story administrative building. Like almost all the "forts" of the West in 1846, these were not military facilities, merely private trading posts, although eventually the federal government would buy Fort Laramie for four thousand dollars and station troops there until 1890. For now, though, the name "fort" seemed a little grandiloquent. Amused, Biyant put "Fort Bernard" in quotation marks in his book.

The neighborhood bustled. Between the two forts, there were fur trappers, traders, passing emigrants, and hundreds of Sioux preparing to make war against the Crow. It was by far the largest community of people the emigrants had seen since jumping off.

"Our journey has not been as solitary as we feared," Donner wrote to his friend. Like his wife in her earlier letter written along the Platte, Donner was optimistic. "I can say nothing except bear testimony to the correctness of those who have gone before us," he wrote. A month and a half after leaving Independence, they had avoided serious accident. "Our company are in good health. . . . Our supplies are in good order." With a touch of pride, he noted that their preparations had served them well. Even the wagons were in good shape. The covers shed the rain quite nicely.

At 9:00 A.M. on Saturday, July 4, the Donners and the Reeds and some other families gathered near their campsite along Beaver Creek, a stream lined with box elder and willows. Brightly colored wildflowers poked through the grasses, and high red bluffs lined the little valley. There was no hurry to wash the breakfast dishes and hitch the teams, for they intended to stay in camp all day to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Patriotic feelings ran high, for the country was at war. A few days after the wagon train left Independence, latecomers rode into camp bearing the latest St. Louis newspapers, which told of hostilities between American and Mexican troops on the Rio Grande. The news was no surprise. The year before, President Polk had acted on his campaign promise by annexing Texas, ostensibly an independent country but one that had been unrecognized by Mexico and coveted by the United States. Mexico and the United States still disputed the southern border of Texas, and it had been easy to see that the situation could lead to war, but that didn't lessen the importance of the issue for California-bound emigrants. California remained a part of Mexico, and now the United

States and Mexico were at war. Emigrants had no idea how they might be treated when they arrived, even whether they might be arrested as hostile foreign nationals. They must have huddled around the campfires and pored over every word in the papers, but anyone willing to take the risk of a new life in California was not easily dissuaded. "How this important event is to affect us upon our arrival in California, it is impossible to foresee," Edwin Bryant, the journalist who began the journey with the emigrants, wrote at the time. "No one, however, is in the least disposed to turn back in consequence of it."

When Independence Day rolled around, there were those in camp who saw the melancholy side—celebrating the founding of a country they were abandoning—but nobody wanted to be a killjoy, and so the celebration started early. The men fired off a salute, and then a procession formed and marched solemnly around the corral of wagons, returning to the shade of the trees. Somebody read the Declaration of Independence. Colonel Russell gave a speech, although nobody bothered to write down what he said. They sang patriotic songs and made patriotic toasts, firing off more salutes when they felt like it. Just before noon, James Reed pulled out a bottle of liquor saved for the occasion. Friends back in Springfield had told him that at twelve sharp on the Fourth of July, they would face due west and raise a toast, while he did the same facing east. Enjoying his luxuries as always, Reed saluted his distant friends, then treated the whole company to a drink. The children gulped down lemonade. Perhaps because they were leaving their country behind, the little band of emigrants at Beaver Creek took the holiday to heart and made it their own. The celebration had "more spirit and zest," one participant wrote, than the grand and gaudy festivals back home.