The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (9 page)

The Oregon Trail was probably ideal as a breeding ground for deadly organisms spread by diarrhea, vomiting, flies, and contaminated water. The steamboats that fed the trail with emigrants came from St. Louis and other towns along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers where cholera was rampant. The gold seekers then carried it westward, leaving it in abandoned camps and water holes, to be passed on to the next group that followed them. As a result, the trail was soon marked with hundreds of wooden crosses bearing only a name and the word “cholera.”

The Royce wagon train added two more crosses. The first victim was an older man, the oldest in the company. He complained of intense pain, and the Royces had him lie down in their wagon, as it was large and had a comfortable bed. He became worse, much worse. They rushed the man to a doctor, in another camp up ahead, and the doctor said it was cholera. A few hours later, the old man died. Sarah Royce was then left with the nasty task of cleaning the wagon. She washed and aired everything and hoped for the best. Three days later cholera struck down two more. One died that night; the other slowly recovered. They had no more cases, but they saw plenty of crosses as they moved west and heard of many deaths in the companies that followed them.

The Royces remained part of the wagon train until the last Sunday in July. On that day, they decided to honor the Sabbath, to rest and pray. Joining them was one other family, which consisted of a husband and wife and three small boys. For the next month the two families traveled together, protected by just two men, rather than the usual forty or more. Once they reached the Great Salt Lake, the two families parted. This wasn’t unusual. Salt Lake was the place where companies invariably broke up, some members going one way, others another. At Salt Lake every man seemingly made new arrangements for his wagon. New companies thus were formed.

At the time the Royces arrived, there was much talk about a hotshot guide who was organizing a wagon train that was scheduled to leave a month or two later by a “new and better” southern route. The Royces decided not to wait. They also decided not to take the new southern route that was being highly touted. They chose instead to follow an old route, one that crossed the forbidding desert immediately west of the Great Salt Lake and then followed the Humboldt River to the Sierras. The only person willing to accompany them was an old man, in bad health, who was desperate to get to California. He had nothing to contribute except an ox. Nonetheless, with his help, off they went on August 30. They were soon joined by two young men who had nothing to contribute but their youth.

The Royces, moreover, no longer had Frémont’s
Travels
to help them. Their only guide now “consisted of two small sheets of paper, sewed together, and bearing on the outside in writing the title ‘Best Guide to the Gold Mines, 816 miles, by Ira J. Willes, GSL City.’” Put together by an old codger who had been to California and back the previous year, the handwritten document detailed the best route across the Great Salt Lake Desert and down the Humboldt River, identifying campsites, watering holes, and grazing land. But from the Humboldt Sink to the Carson River it was “all confusion.”
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Fortunately for the Royces, as they approached the sink, they encountered a Mormon party returning from California. The leader provided them with very precise and good directions. Unfortunately, they didn’t follow the directions to the letter, missed the cutoff to Mormon Meadow, and ended up in a dry, barren, and deadly desert. Just the thought of turning back appalled them. But they had to do it or die. Retracing their steps, they found the cutoff and spent several days recuperating at the meadow. But the diversion proved too much for two of their oxen. One yoke, Old Tom and his mate, had to be unhitched and left behind to die.

Farther on they encountered even more wreckage—three or four prairie schooners, huge Conestoga wagons, as tall as houses. Around them, scattered about the desert floor, were pasteboard boxes, wrapping paper, trunks and chests, pamphlets and books. In the wreckage, the young men found bacon, the first meat they had had in weeks. The only other thing worth picking up, noted Sarah Royce, was a small clothbound book titled
Little Ella.
She thought that her daughter would like it someday, as a “souvenir of the desert,” and put it into her pocket.
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The next day the lead cows suddenly became excited. First one, then another sniffed the air. Water lay ahead. The Royces had survived the desert. They were so far behind schedule, however, that the next step of their journey—getting over the Sierra Nevada range—was formidable. The first snows had already fallen. Truckee summit would soon become impassable.

Fortunately, the U.S. government had sent out a relief company to help stragglers get over the summit, and a woman in a preceding party had told two of the rescuers about the Royces. The two men came down the mountain to fetch the Royces. They bore some bad news. It was too late in the year to get the wagon and all the household goods over the summit. The good news was that the rescuers had brought mules and knew what they were doing. Abandoning the wagon and half their baggage, the Royces forged ahead.

On October 24, in the evening, they finally reached their destination, the gold camp of Weaverville. They had been on the road for 178 days. Some time later, they moved on to San Francisco. Still later, they moved to Grass Valley, the heart of the mother lode, and became major figures in the community.

The misadventures of the Royces, years later, provided a gripping story when Sarah Royce put her “pilgrimage diary” into narrative form. She did it at the urging of her son, who was born in Grass Valley and had become a prominent philosophy professor at Harvard University. At the time, much was made of the hardships that Mrs. Royce had experienced. In fact, however, her story was fairly typical. Nearly every emigrant, it seems, had a similar hard-luck story. It was easy to make mistakes, to get lost in the desert.

The only way to avoid trouble, many believed, was to book passage on the right wagon train. And that, as Niles Searls learned, was no easy task. A twenty-four-year-old New York lawyer, Searls was not one who was easily fooled. He was also a prudent man. He realized that he was a greenhorn and needed the help of experts in crossing the continent. Many wagon companies offered their services. Which one should he take? The
Daily Missouri Republican,
a highly regarded St. Louis newspaper, touted an outfit called the Pioneer Line. Allegedly it had developed the “best scheme yet devised” to reach the gold fields.

The brainchild of two St. Louis entrepreneurs, Thomas Turner and a man named Allen, the Pioneer Line promised to take care of everything. All Searls had to do was bring his baggage and pay them $200. Then, in fifty-five to sixty days, he would be in California, making his fortune. On display the company had twenty-two massive freight wagons and twenty sleek carriages for Searls to inspect. All were top-of-the-line, in magnificent shape, with the company’s name prominently emblazoned in big gold letters for all to see. The company had also hired a noted mountain man, Moses “Black” Harris, to “pilot” the expedition. Searls liked what he saw and signed up.

So did 160 other passengers. At first glance they seemed just like the emigrants on every other wagon train. Nearly all were greenhorns, going west to get rich. The oldest was sixty-six years old, the youngest fifteen, and the vast majority were in their twenties. That, in 1849, was the norm. Unlike the emigrants on most wagon trains, however, they didn’t come from just one town, one state, or one region of the country. They came from all over. At least forty-eight were from the Mississippi valley, twenty-two from the Deep South, twenty-one from the Mid-Atlantic states, and twenty-three from New England. Most seemed to be well-off. Most seemed to be prudent, responsible men. Ten listed their occupation as doctor. That, thought Searls, was a good sign.

Searls and the other 160 passengers left for the gold fields on May 15, 1849, about half a month after the Royces. They reached Placerville on October 10, about half a month before the Royces reached Weaverville. They were on the road 138 days, thus beating the Royces’ time by 40 days.

Better trip? No way. The trip was a disaster. Along with 161 passengers, the company started off with forty overloaded wagons and just three hundred mules to pull them. The initial pace was hectic. The mules couldn’t handle it. They began dying off after the first two hundred miles. Baggage and wagons had to be abandoned. The veteran guide, Black Harris, died of cholera before the trip even started. Fifteen passengers died on the trail, nine from cholera. By the time the rest reached Placerville, only a handful could still walk or stand. Seven soon died from their ailments.
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Searls was one of the lucky ones. He never found much gold. But his law practice did well, and he later became chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

The overland route that Searls and his fellow passengers on the Pioneer Line took to get to California was by far the most popular. Hundreds of diaries, travel books, emigrant guides, and reminiscences detailed the experience. Soon it came to be seen as “the” California trail.

The Platte-Humboldt route, however, wasn’t the only one. In its shadow was the southern route, the Gila River trail. In 1849, some twelve thousand emigrants took the Gila River trail to California. Fully half came out of the Mexican state of Sonora, an area that had been ravaged both by civil war and by war with the United States. The remainder came mainly out of Texas.

From all over Texas and Sonora, a network of minor trails fed into the Gila trail. Running along the Old Spanish Trail, the Gila River trail had been upgraded to handle heavy wagons in 1846 by the Mormon Battalion under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke. Sometimes called Cooke’s road, it began on the Rio Grande and proceeded southwest into northern Mexico and then north through Tucson to the Gila River. It then followed the river to its juncture with the Colorado River and crossed the arid Colorado desert to the coastal plains of San Diego.
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Trails west

The Gila trail was generally flatter and wider than the more popular northern trail. Large Conestoga wagons thus found it easier to navigate. It was also possible to hook up two lighter wagons in tandem, something that was next to impossible on the northern trail. But the Gila trail led into southern California, not northern California. So, at trail’s end, the prospector still had four hundred miles to go before reaching the gold fields.

West of Tucson, moreover, the trail was even drier and hotter than the northern trail west of Salt Lake City. Finding firewood and pasture was thus even more of a problem. Travelers loaded up on buffalo chips, which burned well, and often journeyed at night to avoid the heat of the day. Water was an even bigger problem, especially on the ninety-mile stretch of wasteland west of the Colorado River. Here, to be short of water meant certain death.

The greatest disadvantage of the southern route was the danger of Indian attack. Tribes along the northern trail were relatively peaceful, but the Gila trail ran through Apache country, and the Apaches were anything but peaceful. They were few in number, roughly six thousand people, but along with the Comanches, they had long been regarded as the scourges of the Southwest. No government as yet had been able to subdue them. Veterans of 250 years of guerrilla war, first with the Spanish and then with Spanish-speaking Mexicans, they had long lived in a world where stealing livestock, enslaving enemies, and scalping and torturing captives were the norm.
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How did it start? Some scholars would later claim that the Apaches learned the fine art of torture and mutilation from the Spanish. Others would attribute it to Apache culture. Regardless of how it began, it was well established by the time English-speaking Americans pushed their way into Texas.

The Apaches at first saw the newcomers as potential allies in their ongoing struggle against Mexico. That was largely wishful thinking. From the outset the Texans regarded the Apaches as savages and treated them accordingly. In 1849, however, the biggest problem the Apaches faced was still Mexico. As in years past, the Mexican government in Chihuahua offered tempting rewards to anyone who was willing to butcher Apaches. All along the Gila trail, the news was the same: $2,000 for Chief Gómez’s head, $200 for each dead warrior’s scalp, $100 for each dead squaw’s scalp, and a lesser but undisclosed amount for each papoose’s scalp. Did the bounties increase the danger? Or lessen it? No one was certain.
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