The Age of Gold (27 page)

With Rogers, Manly again traced the route up the western canyon. The two surmounted the walls of the bowl that had turned him back before; by dark they were near the top of the canyon. At that elevation the night air was sharp; they slept huddled together for warmth. The next morning they reached the summit. To the east they could see the entire country they had traveled since early November; to the west, above a hazy
valley even wider than any crossed thus far, stood yet another range of mountains, higher than any previous range, and dim in the distance. “It seemed to me the dim snowy mountains must be as far as 200 miles away.”

Perhaps compensating for previous disappointment, Manly this time overestimated. Mount Whitney and the Sierra summits were only about a hundred miles away. Even so, he and Rogers could tell they would never cross those mountains and return in time to save the men, women, and children left behind.

Toward the south the mountains were lower and less formidable; in that direction the two proceeded. After a day they passed the corpse of one of the Jayhawkers. So hard was the soil, and so hurried the dead man’s companions, that no attempt had been made to bury him. Thus far no scavenging animals had visited the body; from the looks of the country, not even scavengers came this way.

More than once Manly and Rogers detoured toward water only to find it too salty or alkaline to drink. They pressed on, the temperature rising as their elevation diminished. They grew so thirsty they had to chew pebbles to induce saliva; where they found a spear of grass, they sucked it for all the moisture it contained.

They tried to eat but choked on the jerked beef. Though they chewed and chewed, the lack of saliva left the meat as tough as leather, and they had to disgorge it. After weeks on the verge of starvation, this final irony was the most bitter of all. “It seemed as if we were going to die with plenty of food in our hands, because we could not eat it.” They were exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come, held at bay by their hunger and thirst.

They decided to split up, the better to search for water. If one discovered anything, he would fire his rifle to alert the other. Eventually Manly heard the report of Rogers’s gun; his partner had found a thin sheet of ice, no thicker than a pane of window glass, that had frozen overnight. They sucked the ice, then melted more to drink. Before it was gone they managed to force down a few bites of meat.

Farther on they met additional Jayhawkers—alive, although these told of another member of their party who had expired. The survivors were utterly discouraged and were wandering south to avoid the mountains, for
fear of snow in the passes. Several supplied Manly and Rogers with addresses of their next of kin, to be notified of their loved ones’ death.

By now Manly and Rogers were out of the mountains and onto the Mojave Desert, which, although deadly in the hotter months, saw irregular traffic during what passed for winter. The first sign of human activity was a rude corral woven from willow branches near a spring. Next the two men saw the remains of domesticated animals, including several horse heads. Though they lacked an explanation for the presence of the heads and the absence of the rest of the carcasses, they interpreted these as good signs.

Yet they were hardly beyond danger. Their supply of meat ran out, and they were reduced to eating a crow Rogers shot. “That abominable crow!” Manly wrote. “His flesh was about as black as his feathers, and full of tough and bony sinews…. Ever since that day, when I have heard people talk of ‘eating crow’ as a bitter pill, I think I know all about it from experience.”

Inevitably, the endless miles and insufficient rest and nourishment levied their toll. One morning Manly felt a sharp pain in his left knee. The more he walked the worse it got. He told Rogers to go on ahead, arguing that those left behind might already be dying.

But Rogers refused, saying they would get out together or not at all. After resting, they hobbled on. They struggled up the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains, where they saw a small pack of prairie wolves snarling over some unrecognizable prize. “We regarded this as another encouraging sign, for these animals only live where some sort of game can be found, and they knew better than we that it was not for their health to go into the barren desert.”

Shortly they topped the summit of a pass—and felt an immense wave of relief.

All seemed happy and content, and such a scene of abundance and rich plenty and comfort bursting thus upon our eyes, which for months had seen only the desolation and sadness of the desert, was like getting a glimpse of Paradise, and tears of joy ran down our faces. If ever a poor mortal escapes from this world, where so many trials come, and joys of a happy Heaven are opened up to him, the change cannot be much more than that which was suddenly opened to us on that bright day.

M
ANLY AND ROGERS
knew they were saved. Where cattle lived, people lived. Whether the men, women, and children still left back across the desert and the mountains, camped on the floor of that terrible salt valley, could be saved was another matter, and one that quickly broke Manly’s and Rogers’s reverie. They hastened forward as fast as the still-hobbling Manly could walk. They encountered a Mexican couple, who gave them cornmeal, and an American, who gave them directions to Los Angeles, some thirty miles to the west, where he said they might get help. The cornmeal caused them acute intestinal distress after so long on an all-meat (and vanishingly stringent) diet; the directions led them to another American, a man named French, who informed them that Los Angeles was deserted. Everyone had gone to the goldfields. They would find no help there. But French guided them to the mission of San Fernando, where for sixty dollars they purchased food, three horses, and a mule.

The journey back to the salt valley went much faster than the trip out, because of the horses and because Manly and Rogers knew where they were going. They tried one shortcut, which almost failed when a dry streambed they were ascending was blocked by huge boulders. Night was falling; they had traveled all day without water. The horses were ready to drop from
thirst and exhaustion. There was no turning back, for the horses would expire before they could reach the most recent water hole. And in any event, to detour would surely condemn the people in the salt valley to death, if they weren’t dead already.

The mule was nimbler than the horses. At one giant stair-step that the horses refused to try, she skipped right up. Manly and Rogers decided to abandon the horses to their misery and move on. “One who has never heard the last despairing, pleading neigh of a horse left to die can form no idea of its almost human appeal,” Manly remembered.

Not much farther on, even the mule appeared stumped. A sheer rock face ten feet high—a dry waterfall—spanned the canyon. For a man to climb it would be difficult; for a mule, impossible. Yet the mule exuded uncanny confidence, which almost alone prevented her human partners from despairing. In the darkening shadows they piled rocks along one of the canyon walls, building a bridge to a narrow ledge by which the mule might—just might—cross to the top of the falls. “It was a trying moment. It seemed to be weighted down with all the trials and hardships of many months. It seemed to be the time when helpless women and innocent children hung on the trembling balance between life and death.” The mule crept forward, finding footing where no horse and few men could. At the last step she hesitated, as if finally asking herself whether this was a good idea, then jumped across to the top of the falls and safety.

After an anxious, cold night in the mountains, Manly and Rogers came out on the floor of the salt valley. They saw no sign of those they had returned to save. After several miles they found the body of one of the men, sprawled in the sand, a makeshift canteen at his side. Their worst fears crowded upon them. Was no one left alive?

Farther on, Manly and Rogers sighted the wagons, apparently empty and as still as death. Thinking that Indians might have attacked the party, and remained nearby, the two let the mule approach first. Her senses were sharper than theirs, and she would smell trouble before they did. But the mule neither brayed nor shied. Counting his bullets, Manly fired a shot into the air to see what reaction the report might bring; he kept enough in reserve to kill at least a few Indians if any appeared.

The gunshot elicited no echoes from the distant mountains, nor any immediate response from the wagons. Yet after several long moments, a man emerged from beneath one of the vehicles. Dazed by the light, he looked all around before finally locating the source of the noise. “The boys have come! The boys have come!” he shouted.

This raised other figures and other voices. Bennett and Sarah appeared, rushing forward to embrace Manly and Rogers. But the number of the party was considerably diminished. Manly told about meeting the dead man that morning; where were the rest?

Bennett explained that no sooner had Manly and Rogers departed than some of the others predicted that the two would never return, and would be damned fools if they did. These skeptics decided they would rather die trying to escape than awaiting a rescue party that would never come. They packed their goods on their oxen and headed off, a few at a time. The dead man whom Manly and Rogers had discovered that morning had left with the last group. Whether the others shared his fate, undiscovered, Bennett didn’t know.

Preparing the survivors for the trek to Los Angeles required a couple of days. The wagons would remain behind; food and children would be packed out on the mule and on those oxen not slaughtered for food. None of the survivors underestimated the trials that still separated them from safety, but, traveling with men who knew the route, they could be confident of ultimate success. At the crest of the range that had so long stood in their way, they gazed back upon the fearful valley. “We took off our hats,” Manly recalled, “and then overlooking the scene of so much trial, suffering, and death, spoke the thought uppermost in our minds, saying: ‘Good-bye, Death Valley!’”

T
HE RESCUE OF THE
survivors of Death Valley—the name stuck— was a private matter. Other rescues were publicly organized. In 1849 the memory of the Donner party was fresh among the Americans in California; many sensed that there, but for the grace of God and the luck of the trail, went they. The massive influx of gold-seekers, which continued far into autumn,
raised the specter of a Donner-like disaster multiplied by a thousand. To prevent such a fiasco, the governor of California, Persifor Smith, sent rescue parties back east along the trails.

Most emigrants didn’t require rescuing but nonetheless appreciated the effort. “We bid a long and hearty goodbye to this team-killing, backbreaking, leg-soring mountain,” William Swain wrote on October 12, just west of the Sierra summit, “and arrived in camp at sundown, where we indemnified ourselves in part with a pot of smoking beef soup, the material for which was received from a relief train sent out on the route by Governor P. Smith with a drove of beef cattle to be distributed among the emigrants as their necessities required.”

More important than the soup meat, in Swain’s case, was the intelligence the relief party brought. The soup tasted better than the news. Swain and the Wolverine Rangers learned that they were much farther from the diggings than they thought. Swain’s concerns about the northerly trend of the Lassen trail had proved well-founded; by the relief party’s calculation they were 380 miles from Sutter’s Fort. To make matters worse, that distance included rugged ridges, broken plateaus, and not much of a road.

So discouraging was this news, at what had seemed the moment of triumph, that the feeling of common purpose that had held the Rangers together across the plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin suddenly dissolved. Those who knew they could travel faster determined to do so; calling a meeting of the association, they moved to disband. The motion carried. In groups of four, the members split up the common property, with each foursome getting a wagon, a team, and an equal share of what provisions remained. “Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Bailey, Mr. McClellan and self drew a team and wagon together and shall travel the remainder of the way on our own hook,” Swain recorded.

Through the country of the Pit Indians (so called for the pits they dug to trap game and unwary enemies), Swain and the others trudged, keeping watch night and day to prevent the theft of animals or food. The last week of October and first week of November brought snow on the ridges and rain in the valleys; they slogged through mud up to the axles. As the government beef ran low, they missed meals once again. But finally, at sun
down on November 8, Swain and his partners reached the Sacramento River at Lassen’s Ranch.

H
UGH HEISKELL AND
Sarah Royce met the relief parties on the eastern slope of the Sierras, where the central emigrant trail climbed out of the Great Basin. Heiskell and his Tennessee and Alabama companions had fared better than many overlanders, crossing the Carson Desert without undue hardship, and they subsequently made the ascent of the Carson River into the Sierras in good shape and time. The last stretch over the top slowed them, with the steep trail requiring a doubling of teams to pull the wagons up. Not far from the crest a relief party with extra oxen arrived. “They brought us 6 yoke of cattle to assist us,” Heiskell wrote. “We could have [a word is missing here: managed?] without danger, but we will not insult Uncle Sam by refusing his aid.”