The Last Empty Places (27 page)

Astor sent a ship around Cape Horn with orders to establish a post at the Columbia’s mouth, soon to be known as Fort Astoria. He also sent the Overland Party to join up there with the shipboard group. In December 1811, while crossing the Rockies, the Overland Party ran low on food and one of its members, John Day, the crack Virginia
hunter, fell ill and emaciated along the banks of the Snake River in today’s Idaho. Too weak to travel farther, he dropped behind the party’s main body, kept company by his former boss, Ramsay Crooks, who liked and respected Day and wouldn’t leave him behind alone.

After three weeks recuperating, Crooks and Day started west again toward the Pacific Coast, at first following the main party’s tracks in the snow. Eventually they lost the trail. For several weeks, they wandered aimlessly in the mountains, eating horsemeat and beaver and roots. As winter gave way to spring, they finally stumbled over the last ridge of the Blue Mountains, and, with food and directions provided by a friendly tribe of Walla Walla Indians, reached the Columbia River.

They followed the Columbia downstream toward the Pacific Coast and their companions at Fort Astoria. After one hundred miles of traveling the Columbia’s banks, they reached the Mau Mau River and another band of Indians who gave the hungry twosome food. But as Day and Crooks stuffed themselves with nourishment, the Indians took their rifles. They then took Crooks and Day’s fire-making flints and steels.

“They then stripped them naked,” recounted Washington Irving, who was commissioned by John Jacob Astor to write the history of Astor’s fur-trading enterprise, “and drove them off, refusing the entreaties of Mr. Crooks for a flint and steel of which they had robbed him; and threatening his life if he did not instantly depart.”

Reversing course and struggling—naked—back up the Columbia banks, they attempted to return to the villages of the friendly Walla Walla Indians. Day and Crooks had made roughly eighty miles and were about to veer from the river inland when they spotted a party of canoes of Astor’s fur traders descending the Columbia. They shouted out from shore and the canoes steered toward them. Rescued at last, they were taken down the Columbia by canoe and arrived, in May 1812, at the newly founded Fort Astoria on the Oregon Coast.

The haggard and exhausted Day convalesced only a few weeks, however, before he was dispatched back east as a member of a party carrying messages to Mr. Astor in New York City. This meant traveling by canoe, foot, and horseback the same way he had just come with such difficulty, two thousand miles back to St. Louis, whence the messages would be sent on to New York.

The messenger party and Day left Fort Astoria on June 29, 1812,
according to Washington Irving’s book
Astoria
. To the surprise of the group, which knew only his usual manly cheer, John Day immediately showed signs of uneasiness and “wayward deportment.”

“It was supposed,” Irving reported, “that the recollection of past sufferings might harass his mind in undertaking to retrace the scenes where they had been experienced.”

Today we’d say it with an acronym. John Day was suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder.

As they progressed up the Columbia, Day became wilder and more incoherent. His companions tried to calm him without effect. The sight of Indians “put him in an absolute fury” and unleashed from him a barrage of epithets. The party had been under way from Astoria only four days, when, on the night of July 2, while camped at Wapato Island in the Columbia River, John Day made an attempt to kill himself, presumably with a gun. The others stopped him. He calmed down. The camp went to sleep. Sometime before dawn while others slept, he grabbed a pair of pistols, aimed them at his head, and pulled the triggers. He somehow missed, aiming too high. It was then his companions sent him back, in the company of friendly Indians headed downriver by canoe, to his comrades at Astoria.

“[B]ut his constitution,” Irving writes, “was completely broken
³
by the hardships he had undergone, and he died within a year.”

And so Day’s companions renamed the Mau Mau River, at whose mouth he had been stripped naked and driven away into the wilds, the John Day River.

I
HAD A LATE, QUICK BREAKFAST
of eggs and bacon at a café on John Day’s main street before heading south again. The town felt small and far removed, like a mountain village, tucked in a narrow river valley and surrounded by steep piney hills. The date was May 20, 2008, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were feverishly fighting each other for the Democratic presidential nomination. Today was the day of the crucial Oregon primary, and yet, as I drove out of John Day, I saw no indication whatever of this Election Day. No yard signs for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. No billboards. Nothing.

I recalled that “blank spot” feeling I’d had in western Pennsylvania. One definition of “blank spot,” to me, is the absence of outside communications.
You move away from terrain where messages constantly zip in from far away and where you must constantly filter out that information which is exterior and extraneous. In a blank spot, you move into terrain where all messages are local and all, in some way, are significant. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were not—it appeared—significant here. Or, conversely, their campaigns didn’t think John Day significant.

I drove south, over more low mountain summits and across more broad valleys. The terrain grew more arid—juniper trees instead of ponderosa pines. I saw men in pickups and cowboy hats. I saw cows—lots of cows—in distant herds scattered like flecks of pepper over the green pastures. I’d entered the big rangelands, and I’d left urban America, and the Interstate nodes that connect it, far behind.

Burns felt like an old cow town, with its broad streets and low stone buildings and an airy sense of spaciousness that began just beyond the edge of town. To freshen it up, they’d planted young trees along the sidewalks—apple, I believe—which were blossoming pink and white in late May. As I drove into town a cold, wet front suddenly hit from the coast. Low gray clouds swept over Burns, gusting a cold rain over the arid terrain that receives only six inches total moisture per year. I walked along the storm-darkened main street toward a brightly lit café for a sandwich while the rain blew confetti showers of the pink and white apple blossoms from the branches and plastered them in a wilting mosaic to the wet sidewalk. Burns reverted a notch closer to the high-desert town that it is.

I asked the waitress about the election and lack of activity.

“Some people voted,” she said.

I took that to mean it didn’t include her.

At the Harney County Library, around the corner, the cold rain gusted on the big windows. I sat at a research table in its Claire McGill Luce Western History Room, named after its benefactor. She’d grown up on a ranch near Burns, went to New York City for finishing school, met and married Henry Luce III, son of the founder of
Time
magazine, and who eventually became
Time’s
publisher like his father. When she died of cancer at forty-seven, she left funds for these Western collections.

A kind research librarian, Karen Nitz, combed file drawers and pulled folders of material on the “Lost Wagon Train,” piling them in
front of me on the table near the rain-splattered windows. It turned out that several different wagon trains had gone “lost” right around here.

A former mountain man by the name of Stephen Meek
⁴
piloted the first wagon train to attempt the cutoff across southeastern Oregon, in 1845. Meek knew the old Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading trails, which tended to follow Indian trails, and planned to lead the emigrants to the Willamette Valley along them. But the emigrants lost faith in his guidance, departed from his proposed route, ran out of food and water, and, as the weakest among them started to die, nearly hanged Meek from a tripod of upraised wagon hitches. He hid inside a covered wagon, piloting from within, while the train veered due north toward the safety of the Columbia, leaving dozens of graves along the way.

Eight years after Stephen Meek’s 1845 debacle another Oregon Trail party, which included Martin Blanding, made the same shortcut attempt, lured by the promise that a road had been cleared from the Willamette Valley over the Cascades to meet them. Their pilot, one Elijah Elliot, had been paid five hundred dollars
⁵
to bring in a wagon train over the new route by settlers in the Willamette who stood to profit by it. But Elliot, apparently, was personally unfamiliar with this country. Rather, he carried a set of written directions. When the makeshift gallows went up and death threats were uttered, he admitted outright that he was lost.

The distances had been wildly underestimated. Near today’s Burns, the party believed it had almost reached the lush farms of the Willamette Valley, still deserts and mountain ranges away. In the arid country west of Burns they had to travel fifty or seventy-five miles between watering holes.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how much water these wagon trains needed daily,
⁶
these traveling villages where babies were born and people died, all the while moving, moving every day.

A seven-man “advance party” set off on horseback to summon help from the Willamette, thinking they’d return in ten days with relief. A month later they still stumbled through high country in the Cascades, having mistaken the peaks of the Three Sisters areas for their landmark, Diamond Mountain, where they were supposed to find the new road.

One by one, the advance party’s horses collapsed, and the men ate them. Then the men weakened, too. The four strongest went ahead—still farther in the wrong direction—while cold October rains fell in the
Cascades. The three weaker men at the rear couldn’t start a fire with their usual tinder—bits of cotton plucked from the lapel of Andrew McClure’s coat, the cotton set aflame by loading it into a pistol and firing into a hat to catch the flaming bits.

Down on the desert country west of Burns, the main party struggled to find water. Only a little flour and salt remained for food. As the beasts broke down from hunger and exhaustion, the emigrants slaughtered their cattle, which they’d brought to farm the Willamette. Observed Mrs. Esther Lyman, trying to feed the stringy meat to her hungry children, the cattle were so emaciated that “there was not enough [fat] on the whole Beef to greace a griddle.”

The main party knew the Deschutes River lay somewhere ahead near the base of the Cascades. But they didn’t know just where nor how far. Finally, they decided their only hope was to let loose their cows and hope the animals would sniff out water. Many years later, Hanks Neville Hill recounted to his grandchildren that he was one of the small group of men who followed on horseback after the set-loose stock, while the main party stayed put. After the first long, dry day, unable to eat because they had no water, the men were making camp for the night when a fourteen-year-old boy came riding up on a buckskin pony, having tagged along from the main camp. He was Isaac Darneille, who would one day marry Hill’s daughter and be father to the grandchildren to whom Hill was telling the story:

Hill had left his pregnant wife and children back in the main camp. After finding the Deschutes and its precious water, he started back to them the next day, bearing two twelve-gallon kegs lashed on horseback. He traveled all that day and into the night.

Scouts now searched the far bank of the Deschutes for the newly blazed road, and, some thirty miles upstream, discovered the terminus of the Free Emigrant Road. This, they hoped, would lead them over the Diamond Mountain pass of the Cascades and down into the fertile Willamette Valley. Another advance party—the first one having disappeared some weeks earlier—hastened up the road to summon help from the Willamette.

The wagons slowly rolled up the road, chunking over stumps and logs left by the seven young men of the road-blazing crew, which felled the trees but returned to the Willamette without clearing them away. It was supposed to be twenty miles up to the Diamond Pass summit, but, Esther Lyman recalled, it turned out to be “a long forty.” Her husband had gone ahead with the second advance party. Unable to drive her wagon alone, she’d left it, their team of oxen, and her featherbed behind, with the hope of retrieving them when her husband returned. Another emigrant carted them off.