From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“The Murphys, they had some little bits of meat and flour. James Miller, he managed to shoot a fox, once. It started to get warmer, seemed like, and there weren’t any storms. Ma and Johnnie fetched down a hide off the roof, and they scraped off the hair, cut it into strips, and boiled it until it dissolved, and that’s what we had to eat toward the end. Ever eaten gruel made of boiled hides? Tastes a little of beef, mostly like glue, but Ma said we had to eat it, nasty as it was, to keep up our strength.

Mrs. Montgomery, she couldn’t bear to eat the boiled hides. She took to her bed after she fainted clean away one morning going out to the privy. Mr. Martin, he and Ma carried her in. Ma had a little bit of sugar saved for an emergency. She dissolved half in a little water for her to drink.

Mary Sullivan had some dried meat left, but she wouldn’t share with anyone but her brother and Mr. Martin. Mr. Martin, though, he felt so sorry for Ma that he gave his portion to us, and Mary Sullivan didn’t like that a bit, and so it was hammer and tongs for a while. Mrs. Montgomery wasn’t so sick that she couldn’t give Mary a piece of her mind. Oh, yes, there was an atmosphere in that cabin, and not all from the privy pots!

Mr. Miller, he finally got so discouraged and desperate, he told us he and Willie were going to walk down from the mountains and go for help. The snow had melted and packed down a little, and there hadn’t been a storm for days. He thought he might be able to get by with hunting, and so they went down the mountain, as the other men done. Mr. Martin couldn’t go with them as he had hurt his foot and it wouldn’t heal properly. He could get around the camp all right, but not well enough to leave out with the Millers.

This was at the end of February. Looking back afterward, I’d guess that Ma was at her wits’ end. We had nothing left to eat but the hides. One morning, maybe two days after Mr. Miller left, my brother Johnnie and I were carrying firewood, as Old Mr. Martin was splitting it for us, and Robert Sullivan came running over to us, saying there was a man coming up from the river.

“It must be Mr. Miller,” we said, and Robert said, no, it was a man by himself with a big pack, and just then we heard a gunshot and a man shouting, “Hello, the camp! Is anyone there?”

Old Mr. Martin, he gave a shout and sank his ax into the chunk of wood he was splitting. “’Tis my boy, Dennis!” he said, and so it was. Oh, my, we were glad to see him. Everyone came running out of the cabins, even Mrs. Montgomery, who was so weakened she could hardly stand, asking a million questions, and crying and laughing.

As soon as he could get a word in edgeways, he said that the others were on the way, they were coming up from Sutter’s Fort. He had passed Mr. Miller and Willie on the way up, and told them the relief was only a few days behind him. Captain Stephens and the men, they were organizing a relief party and supplies to bring to us and take us out of the winter camp, but he was worried about his Pa and came away ahead of them, and also he had promised Mrs. Townsend to go back over the pass to the lake and look for Moses.

Ma just sat right down on the ground, hearing this, and couldn’t speak at all for some considerable time, she was that overcome. Old Mr. Martin then told Dennis some of what our trials had been, and how little we had left. He opened up his pack right away and gave Ma some of his supplies, saying he was right sorry he couldn’t spare much; he had to keep enough to see him over the pass and back. He couldn’t stay the night, even. He said that he didn’t want to risk being caught by a storm, but I always wondered if it was more of what Old Mr. Martin told him of conditions in our camp. So he went off into the higher mountains that very day. We could scarce sleep that night for excitement.”

From Dr. Townsend’s Diary:
“Twenty-forth of February, 1845:  Mr. Patterson and some of his men have brought twenty mules and ten riding horses from his rancho, or borrowed from some of the other landholders, who, hearing of the plight of our party, desired to assist us with such aid as they could render. Mr. Bidwell has drawn similar numbers from Captain Sutter’s vast herds and additional supplies from larders and storehouses to support the relief party and to bring the families out, and arranged for a ferry to cross our party over the Feather River. We fear the snow may be well too deep to move the wagons, referring to Allen Montgomery and Joseph Foster’s witness from December.

Mr. Patterson plans to ride with us, bringing a handful of his own drovers with him, although not Oliver and Samuel. He tells me, with a certain amount of amusement, that he has left them in charge of the rancho in his absence. I relayed to him the general thrust of what I told Mrs. Isabella, when I convinced her to allow Samuel to accompany the rest of us…

“Dearest…we are ready to depart.” John looked into the parlor of Sutter’s grand house, at about mid-morning, Old Martin Murphy at his back. Elizabeth looked up from her sewing. She and Helen had quantities of white muslin and figured calico, scissors and spools of thread strewn about them, all over the parlor. She sprang up from where she sat, a measuring-tape in one hand and a clutch of dark calico in the other, and embraced him.

“Darling, take care. Bring them back to us with all haste.” Then, all practicality, she ran the tape around his wrist. “Oh, good, I have got the right of the buttons and buttonholes on the cuff.” She thrust the calico bundle at him. “A new shirt, Dearest…you have none left fit to be seen in company. Add it to your pack, I beg you. I rushed to finish it before you and the men departed.” She hugged him again, whispering, “Go now. Bring them safe out of the mountains, Isabella and Sarah and all of them. It grieves both of us deeply to think that while we enjoy such safety and generous plenty that our dearest kin and friends are lingering in despair and want.”

Within the parlor, Old Martin embraced Helen, saying with gruff amusement, “So, we are away to bring our dearest children home. Fair Helen—have you any more suits of marriage offered to you that I should know of? Any princes or lords or ambassadors among them?”

“No, Papa, only the usual sort,” Helen giggled. “Do you know, there was a young gentleman who came to the fort, having heard only that some ladies from America were there, and determined therefore to make our acquaintance, and Captain Sutter clapped him in chains and put him in a dungeon.”

“Has he a dungeon?” Elizabeth asked, from across the room. “Not chains, surely, Helen. There are only some strong rooms, under the towers.”

“And he was of the opposite party in the late unpleasantness,” Helen answered. “I am sure that his imprisonment was due to that, rather than any forwardness offered to me. I never was introduced to the gentleman, so he had not the opportunity….”

“Put any of them off until we return, hey?” Old Martin said, cheerily. “For they must have mine and your brothers’ approval before they come a-courting you.”

“Oh, Papa.” Helen rolled her eyes. “You are so old-fashioned. Be assured that anyone whom I encourage is a man you would like and approve of anyway.”

“That’s my darlin’ girl.” Old Martin kissed her firmly on the forehead. “Are these baby clothes you are making? Aye, for Mary-Bee’s little one, and little Ellen… an excellent idea, new clothes to welcome them into the world, and better late than not at all.”

“We had not a chance to do fine sewing on the trail,” Helen replied, and it seemed to John that she spoke too swiftly, and an amused glance flew between her and Elizabeth.

“Surely these are very tiny garments, Dearest.” John cast a glance at a completed dress, laid out on the table nearest the window. “Ellen Miller is now more than six months old….”

“But my namesake is barely three months of age,” Elizabeth interjected, and exchanged another one of those amused looks with Helen, as Old Martin clapped him on the shoulder, saying, “Come away, then, Doctor, we’ve work to do, and the lads are waiting.” And he kissed Elizabeth once more and followed after Old Martin, holding in his mind how lovely she looked, as if she glowed with the return of health, or maybe just the morning sunshine streaming in through the parlor window.

Stephens and Young Martin waited for them, just outside the citadel gate. Dog sat, panting at the feet of Stephens’s horse, but lurched to her feet when Stephens handed Ugly Grey’s reins to John. The pack-trail of mules, and the loose herd, chivvied by the other men, was already fairly far down the roadway along the river.

“Now, boys, let’s see how fast we can move when it’s our own that we are riding for!” Old Martin whooped like a boy, and they departed in a fine spray of mud flung up by their horses’ hooves.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“We were on needles and pins, all through the days after Dennis Martin came. We watched the clouds, dreading another storm, which would delay them. Ma, she sat for hours, looking down the valley, with Sadie or me on her lap, all wrapped around with her shawls, and tried to work out when they would come. Dennis Martin, he said it was seven days’ journey on foot, and he thought they would be leaving three or four days behind him,

“But see,” Old Mr. Martin told us, “they might be driving cattle before them, which would slow them down, some…unless they were mounted, which might see them moving faster… ah, be damned….”

“Mr. Martin!” said Ma, sharpish.

And old Mr. Martin, he looked embarrassed and said, “Begging your pardon…there’s just no way of knowing, until we set eyes on them.” And so it was, but it turned out we did know they was coming.

Mary Murphy, she was Mr. James Murphy’s little girl—he who made us the Christmas toys? She came running into the cabins that afternoon, all excited, saying that she had heard the sound of cattle lowing, away off in the distance. O’course, we all went running outside to the overlook, everyone shushing each other, and trying to listen as hard as we could. You know how quiet it can be, away up on a high place? It’s as if the noise down below floats up to you, over a long distance. We listened and listened… nothing but the sound of the wind in the trees, and we told Mary she must have imagined it through hoping so hard for hearing the men and her father coming to rescue us, but she said over and over again that she had heard cattle and horses at a distance.

All the rest of that day, we kept going back to the overlook, hushing each other, and hoping to hear what she heard. I even stole out after dark, to listen for a bit. But the next morning, though, we could all hear the sounds of hooves and horses neighing, and sometimes very faintly, a ringing as of bells; sometimes even what we thought was men shouting, faint and clear, but such a long way off! We got excited, none the less.

When the men had built the cabins, you know, we had moved into them and took everything necessary out of the wagons. They’d took down the wagon bows, and laid them flat, and stowed the ox yokes on top of them and tied the wagon covers tight over all, but now they were covered deep in snow, there was no way to begin to sweep off the snow, since they were buried so very deep in it. Even if we could sweep away the snow and set the bows upright in the brackets, and put the cover on again,  the snow was over the tops of the wheels. But Ma rounded up a wash-pan and made us all clean up and put on our clean set of clothes. Even Mrs. Montgomery, she called up enough strength to get out of bed. By mid-morning, we could hear them plain, and we kept going back and looking for them between the trees.

Such a welcome sight they was, you cannot believe. We had waited so long for them, and there they were, looking so splendid, driving a great herd of mules and horses in front of them and leading strings of mules with packs behind, riding up through the trees from the river down below, shouting and waving their hats in the air: Captain Stephens, and old Mr. Murphy and his boys, John Sullivan, and Doctor Townsend, and Paw-Paw, with a man I didn’t know at first.

He got down off his horse and looked at Sadie and me, and after a moment I saw that he looked like my oldest brother, Oliver, so I knew it must be Pa. Sadie, she was hiding around behind me; so much noise frightened her, and she never cared much for strangers.

“Sadie-girl, it’s your Pa,” Paw-Paw told her, but Pa was smiling very gently, and he said, “Hello, Eddie, you’ve grown so big I’d hardly know you.”

He stuck out his hand, and I shook it, and I blurted out, “Pleased to meet you, Pa. Ma says she’s going to box your ears when she sees you, for having taken so long.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll do that, Eddie,” he says, and he picks up Sadie, and takes my hand, and he says “We came as soon as we could… now, take me to your Ma.”

And so I led him to where Ma was. She was looking around for us, shading her eyes with her hand. She said, “Oh, Samuel!” like she was about to cry, and he set down Sadie and put his arms around her…oh, it was a sight, it was. We hadn’t seen Pa in almost three years, by that time…”

Patrick Martin came hobbling from the direction of the wagons as John swung down from Ugly Grey’s saddle. “Faith, but ye’are a sight for sore eyes… we have been longing for a sight of you, since Dennis said you were on the way…”

“Dennis? Isn’t he here with you? He went on ahead of us, he was so concerned over you—we thought sure he’d be waiting when we got here. What’s the matter with your foot, Patrick?”

“Nothing at all,” Patrick answered stoutly. “Just a gash that won’t heal. Dennis made a promise to your lady wife, before he left Sutter’s. He went up to the pass, three days ago it was. She had begged him to look for your lad and bring him out if he were still alive.”

A wave of gratitude threatened to overcome John’s composure, gratitude and affection for the stocky, combative Irishman and his sons, and Patrick took his arm, and lowered his voice. “He said you were not to wait for him, or the lad, but to get moving and get the women and the babies out of this camp before another storm hits.”

John looked at him very closely. Under the excitement that animated his features, Patrick appeared terribly gaunt.

“How bad is it, Patrick?” he asked, very softly and Patrick replied, “Ah, nothing that a little whiskey on the outside, and the inside too, couldn’t have cured. Oh, d’you mean here? Well, it were tolerable fair for all, for a month, not so fair for another month, and perilous close to starvation for the last three weeks.”

John went cold. Damn Sutter. Goddamn him to hell. Damn him and his favors with strings attached, his cold pebble eyes, and his everlasting politicking.

“Who’s the worst off, then, Patrick?” With an effort, he controlled his temper. He had left some medical supplies here and had also brought a small assortment with him, in his saddle bags. He took them from the saddle, then. “Sit down, man, take off that boot so I can have a look. Over here, sit on that the stump, where you can appreciate the fine furnishings in my surgery.” Patrick hobbled to the stump, and sank down on it with relief, pulling off his battered boot.”

“Mrs. Montgomery, she’s barely able to rise from her bed. And Mrs. Patterson has been scanting herself for two months to feed the children, so she’s not all that much better. My daughter has done the same, for Mary. And she is in the way of another wee un, so she told me.”

Patrick’s shoulders slumped, and John thought he saw tears welling up in the big man’s eyes.

“Mother Mary and Joseph and all, Doctor Townsend, it’s been the starvation times, all over again. It breaks your heart to see it, day and day. The children are the best off, and Mary-Bee Murphy and Mary Miller too, because of the babies. They fed them, the best of whatever was left to us, or what we could find. I couldn’t bear another day of it, truly I couldn’t. There was nothing to hunt, not a whisker of it, for Miller and me. How do you think we could endure it, seeing all their eyes growing big in the little skulls of them, and not a thing could we do, then?”

“We’ll have you out of here as soon as we can, Patrick.” John promised. Patrick had a bit of cloth wound around the gash on his foot, with some dried herbs in it, binding them against the wound.

“From Mrs. Patterson, the last of her medicinal herbery, she gave me for it.” Patrick explained. John sniffed at it; no putrefying flesh, no smell of infection, just not healed.

“The foot looks bad, Patrick. I’d have stitched it, if I had been here. How long ago did you say?”

“Last month.”

“It should have started to heal by now. There’s no inflammation….” and John started to venture that Patrick must have gone without food himself, and that was why his injury was so slow to heal itself, but Stephens strode up just then, with Dog gamboling at his heels.

“We’ll move them out, Doc. Now. We need to beat the weather, get below the snow line.”

“We’ve been getting ourselves ready, so we have, Captain.” Patrick pulled himself together. Hope was a powerful infusion, seemingly. “Some of our things are already packed and out of the cabin, so. We heard you coming, so we did, and made preparations according.”

“Get the rest of them ready, Patrick” Stephens answered. “We’ll finish packing. We must move as soon as we can, Greenwood says he smells a storm on the air.” He pulled John away with him, as Patrick hobbled towards the mule string.

“Doc… I’ve already got men packing the traps, but if some of them are too sick to set in a saddle, we’ll have to make litters and carry them. Can you see who is fit to ride? Patrick looks like hell, and some of the others don’t look all that well, either.”

“I’ll sort out who’s in bad shape,” John answered. “We ought to move them out first.”  Stephens nodded and hurried away. Fragments of reunions swam before him: Samuel Patterson, with Isabella, in the center of his children. Samuel seemed as if he were holding her up, and it struck him again how tiny she was, shrunken to the size of a child, all bones, tiny and gaunt with hardship. Old Martin, in the middle of his beloved grandchildren, all of them insane with excitement. Young Martin’s sons, Frances and Theresa Miller, all but Mary Murphy, who was in her father’s arms.

Old Martin had a basket of oranges, giving them out one by one, saying, “Aye, they’re oranges…in the Old Country the rich folk grow them in greenhouses, but here they grow on great trees, out in the good clean air, so many that the extra fall on the ground and rot before they are eaten. You take off the peel, first, and isn’t that a miracle? Ah, and the blossoms of them smell like the gardens of paradise, so they do! Mr. Patterson—you know, Eddie’s Pa? He has a friend in the South, who sent him a great bag of them for you, when he heard that there were children who had never had an orange for this Christmas…”

“Don’t let them eat to many, or too fast,” John said to him in passing, and Old Martin whispered, with his eyes welling up, “Faith, they’re fair starved, what ought we do, then?”

“A little at a time,” John answered, “Although the children are well enough, Patrick fears their mothers are in worse case,” and almost to himself, he added, “I blame Sutter, that they were forced to this extremity. We should have pressed harder to return in the fall and brought them out.”

Old Martin looked at him, with shrewd sympathy, and answered, “Aye…we can blame him. Easier than blaming ourselves, I suppose.”

Before John could consider his words, Mary Miller frantically clutched his arm, as he strode toward the cabin. She had the baby in her arms. “Doctor, where are James and Will? I don’t see them anywhere! Are they not with you? They went for help days ago…”

“Mary, be at ease,” John answered, soothingly. “They’re fine. we left them at our last camp, with Allen Montgomery. We cached most of the food there, and they are keeping the fires burning and waiting for us…now, let me look at the little one…oh, yes, Mary, she looks well.”

And little Ellen was well, a fat and gurgling mite, smiling up at him in the guilelessly happy way of a child who has never known anything other than contentment and love. “Let me look at you, too, Mary…ah, you look well, too.”

“As much as can be expected,” Mary Miller answered, almost bitterly, and in his heart, John damned Sutter again.

“Look, Mary, we plan to pack up and move today, lest we are caught by storm… you’ll be with James and William tonight, if we can…I must check on Mrs. Montgomery.”

“She is within.” Mary gestured toward the cabin, “She did not feel well.”

Stephens and the Murphy boys had already loaded the first string of mules with bedding and clothes and such few possessions as were left to the women, in a perfect storm of curses and complaints: Sutter’s animals were half-wild after a winter of idleness. Stephens called, “Let me know who needs to be carried, Doc. We’ll put together some litters and send them out first, with you. Don’t wait for the rest of us, Doc. You’ll be moving slow, and we’ll catch up soon enough.”

Young Patrick shouldered out of the cabin with another roll of bedding, and John caught his arm. “I’ll be taking the first string, as soon as they’re packed. Get your father onto a horse, Patrick.”

“I’m not sure how I’ll manage to do that,” Young Patrick’s eyes widened at the thought of ordering his formidable parent about.

“Tell him we brought along an Englishman for him to fight,” John replied. “And he’s waiting for him, down at the food cache.”

Patrick laughed. “Aye, that would do the trick, for sure.”

The cabin was all but empty, only the rough bunks left, and dark as a cave with only the light coming in from the doorway and a little from the dying fire on the crude hearth. John thought of how crowded it would have been, with everyone and their blankets and possessions all crammed in together, and shuddered. Sarah lay on one of the stripped bunks, fully dressed, her shawl pulled around her, like a doll abandoned by a careless child. Upon hearing John moving through the rough doorway, she stirred and lifted her head.

“Good morning, Mrs. Montgomery.” John sat on the opposite bunk and set down the saddlebags next to him. “Mr. Martin told me you were feeling poorly, so I came to see you directly.”

“’Morning, Doctor John,” she whispered, and John took up her hand to feel the pulse in her wrist. The bones of it felt tiny, fragile, like a bird’s. “I thought I was feeling stronger this morning, the children were all so excited, but every time I stand up, it seems like everything is whirling around me.”

“You haven’t been taking care of yourself, Mrs. Montgomery” John said, chidingly, and Sarah replied with a faint ghost of her old spirit, “I’d just better do that, hadn’t I? It’s not like he will, now. He didn’t come with you all, did he?”

No need for John to ask who “he” was.

He could see the bright trickle of tears out of the corners of her eyes rolling back into her hair. “Mr. Montgomery is down the mountain, half a day’s journey. We’ve cached food and set up a camp. He’s waiting for us there, Sarah.”

“Well, I am surprised.” She laughed then, faint and exhausted laughter. “I thought he would have taken himself off by now. He is going to, you know. We don’t want to be married, any longer, Doctor John.”

“But you have spoken vows, Sarah…. They can’t be unsaid!” John was shocked, but almost equally grieved to see the depth of her unhappiness.

“Yes they can. We’re the world away from where they were said. Hardly anyone will know of us here. He intends to leave me with the wagon and all that’s in it but his tools and just go. Somewhere. Anywhere. We agreed, months back.”

“Sarah, I think it very rash….“John started, but she interrupted: “Doctor John, please don’t. There is nothing you or Elizabeth could say to fix this. I’ll not go back to him, nor he to me. After this, they’ll be an end to it.”

Her eyes closed with an air of finality. After a moment, she whispered again. “I couldn’t eat the hides. I tried, but I couldn’t keep them down. Isabella, she and the children. They could eat them. It’s all they’ve had for three weeks, but for some bread that Dennis Martin gave us three days ago.”

Damn him, John thought again, bleakly, remembering the morning in Sutter’s office, and the bargain they made. Damn him. They should have just taken whatever they needed and gone back to the mountains, back to the winter camp that very day, never mind what anyone advised. But he was reacting like their leader, and a hot-headed one at that, when he should be thinking like a doctor.

“Sarah,” he said, making his voice sound quiet and soothing, consciously banishing the fury that he felt towards Sutter, “I am going to give you a little something to eat, just a little piece of flatbread, and some of the cheese they make at Sutter’s fort. I brought it along for myself, in my saddlebag…here, hold out your hand. Just take little bites. Go slow and careful.” He waited a minute while she chewed and swallowed, carefully. “How does it sit?”

“It tastes funny…but good. Not like real bread,” she answered cautiously.

“Now a bit of cheese…just a crumb, mind you. You’ll not be able to manage anything rich, or very much of it.”

“That was very good,” she said, thoughtfully. “When I think on how long since I had a drink of milk…. When did the cows stop giving milk, Doctor? Just short of Ft. Laramie, I think.”

“Here’s some more bread,” He put a larger piece of it in her hand. “I need to look at some of the others, now, but I’ll come back. We need to fix up a litter for you, since you cannot ride. Is there anything you’ll want to take with you?”

She frowned, thinking upon it. It seemed to take a great effort. “I had one of those Indian baskets, with the rest of my things in it. I think Johnnie took it outside with the blankets.”

“I’ll make sure,” he promised. “Now eat your bread…slowly, now…and I’ll be back.”

Outside, the swirl of activity had intensified. Old Hitchcock and Patterson were helping Jamie Murphy lash together two rough litters out of four long poles and some canvas panels that had once been part of a tent.

“All I ask,” John said, “is that you hang those contraptions between the four gentlest mules you have.”

“Don’t worry, Doctor, we’ll make sure of that!” gasped Patterson.

Underneath their feet, the ground was churned into an unsavory mixture of slush, muck, and droppings.

“You… young Sullivan,” he reached out and reeled in a boy, who shrilled delightedly, “Doctor John! Ain’t it grand?”

“Isn’t,” John corrected him, “Hold still Robert…let me look at you. Yes, it is grand. Captain Stephens asked me to look at everyone, make sure you are all well enough for the last bit of the road… you’ve a sore throat, then. Not enough to keep you from it. I thought sure I had a bag of horehound candy, but never mind.”

He released the boy and went on, working his way among the women and children; just a few moments each, and a quick assessment more by sight than anything else. Much as Old Patrick had said, the children had borne semi-starvation well, and the two babies were thriving. He weighed Elizabeth Murphy thoughtfully in his hands; no, she would be too large for the tiny clothes that Elizabeth and Helen were sewing, back at Sutter’s for her. Patrick’s daughter Annie; she looked ill, grey and hollow-eyed.
“Put her in a litter,” John told her husband, “and the girl, too. We’ll sort everything out in camp tonight; I’ll go in a few minutes with the sickest, and she’s one of them.”
Returning to the cabin for Sarah, he found that she had eaten the rest of the bread and fallen into a sort of half-doze. Slipping an arm under her shoulders and another under her knees, he lifted her easily as if she were as light as one of the children. The second litter was ready: John laid Sarah in it, and covered her well with blankets against the cold. Annie and her daughter were already in the other, well wrapped, and Old Patrick had already been mounted on one of Sutter’s ponies; John wondered what Young Patrick had to say to convince him. Old Patrick did look ill, so probably not much.

John put another bit of flatbread into Sarah’s hand, tucked another blanket over her all, and turned his attention toward the Pattersons. According to Sarah, they’d had nothing to eat but boiled hides for three weeks. The children looked thin, but Isabella appeared emaciated, and if it weren’t for her leaning against Samuel, John suspected that she would have fallen.

Stephens appeared, leading Ugly Grey, Patterson’s horse, and two of Sutter’s Indian ponies, a hint if there ever were one. “Ready to hitch up, Doc? We’re burning daylight.”

“Just about,” John answered. “Mr. Patterson…if you would conduct Mrs. Patterson and the children each to a horse, and put them onto it. We’ll ride, as soon as you are ready.”

Isabella straightened, as if she would protest, and John sighed.

“It is my considered medical opinion that eating any more boiled ox-hides, or remaining in this place, will have an adverse effect on your health, dear Mrs. Isabella. Let your husband and me assist you.” And he looked to Samuel and added, “Just get on the damned horse, and I’ll hand her up to you.” Samuel set his foot into the stirrup and looked at John with a particularly amused look.

“Doctor’s orders, my dear. This is really not a good time to argue.”  Samuel swung up into the saddle, and John picked up Isabella and lifted her up to her husband, who set her in front of him.

“Really, Mrs. Isabella, I think Mr. Patterson does have some knight errantly qualities, after all,” John gibed, wondering if he jested so rather than give himself over to fury. “Johnnie, you take Sadie in front of you. Eddie, you get to ride this one, by yourself. Any monkeyshines from you, and I will take over the whipping after your father gets tired.”

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“They were in such a hurry because Captain Stephens feared a winter storm. The men bent every effort into moving fast, moving us down below the snow line, lest we be caught again. They didn’t dare take the time to pack carefully, just lashed the bedding and bags to pack saddles and told us to get up and ride, before we were caught by a storm.

We traveled all the rest of that day, and after sunset, we came to where they had camped before, and there was a great bonfire burning, and such a supper cooked for us. To eat our fill of it, after months of want, oh that was an indescribable delight….”

From E.S. Patterson interview, University of California Local History Archive Project 1932:

“My next oldest brother, Samuel, came to my mother with Paw-Paw and my oldest brother Oliver, who was to go with the men…”

“No!” said Isabella, passionately, “I won’t have it! Samuel is a boy, he is not old enough….”

“Izzy, Izzy, Izzy,” Old Hitchcock chided his daughter, “Don’t shame the lad in front of the others. He’s sixteen and well grown, two years older than Michael Sullivan….”

“Michael is going with his brother, and so would I be,” Samuel pleaded.

“John Sullivan is a man grown, and Oliver is barely more than a boy himself,” Isabella stormed. She dropped the armload of bedding she was carrying from the wagon just inside the doorway of the tiny cabin, and folded her arms, “And you are not too big for me to turn you over my knee….”

“Yes, ma-am….no, ma-am. I am too big for you to do that,” Samuel stammered, bravely. “I’ve been taller than you since mid-summer. Haven’t you noticed? And you’ve been saying at every meal, seems like I eat as much as a man, anyway. So, why can’t I go with the men, seeing as that would leave you all the more?”

“Got you there, Izzy.” Old Hitchcock seemed hugely amused.

She spun on her heel and stormed up to the campfire, where John was trying to warm the inkbottle sufficiently to thaw the ink inside, so as to be able to write a new entry. Given that there was not a shred of privacy in the camp, he already knew what the disputation was about and had been hoping that he would not be drawn into it.

“Doctor Townsend!” Isabella demanded, “Tell him! Tell Samuel he may not go with the men!!”

“Why not?” John asked, reasonably. “It can’t be that he is too young, for Michael is even younger, and he is going. Moreover, he would be going with Oliver… and his grandfather no less… and Captain Stephens and myself as well. Surely you can assume that we would all be most responsible guardians…”

“Men!” cried Isabella in frustration. “You all stick together!”

John sighed and re-corked his inkbottle, putting it in his pocket. Not a good time for a full account of the building of the winter camp and the decision to split the party once again. He stood and offered her his arm.

“Mrs. Patterson… may we speak privately on this matter? Please?”

She took his elbow, and he walked her a little way, to the edge of the winter camp, where they had been felling and trimming trees. Inadvertently, they had cleared a vista, looking out on the folds of snowy forest falling away to the west. He stopped at the place where they could see it all, the trackless lands along the unnamed river.

“Look at it, Mrs. Patterson,” he said, quietly. “It’s where we’re going, tomorrow.”

“So you are, but I don’t want Samuel going with you!” She kept her voice low, but her eyes were full of passionate tears.

“But is it not where Mr. Patterson is…Samuel and Oliver’s father? You set out on this journey so that you and the children could rejoin him. He was going ahead of you all, so he could settle on a good prosperous farm, and then you would join him, as soon as it was all done, and so you shall. Why not send both of them ahead, Isabella? It’s only a short journey, compared to the road that we have already traveled. Captain Stephens and I can send word from Sutter’s establishment, and they will be safe in the care of their father.”

“But I want to keep him safe!” Isabella lost her attempt to keep her voice low, and John took her hands in his. “Samuel is a child. What more can this journey now demand of me? We have spent so much…Goldenrod and all the oxen, now our wagon and everything that we brought with us, perhaps the lives of my boys!? I cannot endure that. I cannot.”

“Not that,” John sighed.”Not that last sacrifice, not after all that. You cannot keep him safe, Isabella, not when he is of an age to think for himself. Let him go with us.”

“No,” And her tears brimmed over, but John continued, relentlessly.

“Listen to me, Isabella. He cannot be rolled up in cotton-wool and protected, as you protect Sadie…and as you try to protect Eddie, that little imp. Listen to me. Our children at a certain age, they crave to be respected, to have responsibility, to be treated by the rest of us as if they are adults, worthy of our regard and company. We must let them have this.

“We must let them have this, because if they do not have this in a good way, they will become distracted and look for it in a bad way. They will become careless and idle and seek for low company and low pleasures…just because they want so much to be worthy and responsible. Samuel yearns for that…let him have it, Isabella. Let him go, and let him see that he can be a man…a brave and responsible man. It is a couple of years before he can be that in truth…but it will do him good, I think.”

“Is that what you told yourself when you let Moses stay at the lake with your wagon?” Isabella said harshly.

“Perhaps it was,” John answered honestly “Perhaps it was. He has already chosen his task. Let him go, Isabella. Let him go and do it, show us all that he can rise to what is expected. We will see that he comes to no harm. Let him go with us, Isabella.”

He knew he had won when her shoulders dropped, even before she looked down at their hands and replied, wearily, “As you ask, then, Doctor. I will let Samuel go with Oliver…but you will promise me on everything that you think holy that you and Captain Stephens will keep him safe until their father comes for them.”

“We’ll keep Samuel and all the boys as safe as it is possible to keep them.” John raised her hands and bowed over them. “Thank you…I know that Samuel will thank you, and so will Mr. Patterson, when the boys rejoin him.”

Isabella smiled then, a little. “Tell him…” her voice quavered a little, “when you see Mr. Patterson…tell him that I am longing to see him again, and that he must come for us as soon as possible.”

“If I am sure of anything,” John answered, “It is that nothing will keep him from riding to your rescue…on a white charger, no less, and with one of your handkerchiefs as a favor. Would you like to give me one of yours, so I can take it to him, as a token of your affections?”

As he had hoped, Isabella laughed outright and answered, “That would not be necessary. He is a very dear man to me, but not, I fear, the knight-errant sort.”

“Then let us go tell Samuel to make up a pack. I imagine that he has been on pins and needles, watching us talk.”

From E.S. Patterson interview, University of California Local History Archive Project 1932:

“Ma was persuaded to let Samuel go with Oliver and the men. They each put on two sets of clothes and their heavy coats, and Ma packed a little food for them. They both carried a roll of blankets, and Ma made them take some extra socks and asked Paw-Paw and Doctor Townsend to promise to send word to Pa’s holdings…”

From Dr. Townsend’s Diary:

“Fifth of December, 1844.” We shall depart on the morrow, having done everything possible to prepare. Snow fell heavily last night, burying the stock of meat fairly deep, as well as a great stack of fire wood which Murphy and his boys thought fit to provide, among other comforts. James Miller and Young Martin have built some rough furnishings (beds and chairs, etc) for the cabin, so that all within may sleep in some comfort, and James Murphy has diverted himself in his usual manner by whittling toys from odd bits of wood. I perceived that he had a small box full of them, and when I asked his purpose, he replied that it would be Christmas in three weeks, and he intended to leave the collection with his brother-in-law, so that each child would have a gift on Christmas morning.

We take nothing but what we can carry, a bedroll and rifle and ammunition each, since we have only my horse, Mr. Hitchcock’s two mules, and three of Greenwood’s ponies left to us. I must leave my writing desk, although my journal, pen, and ink will fit easily into my coat pockets. I must leave most of my medical implements and supplies behind also, in Mrs. Patterson’s care.  We leave, trusting our Savior for a safe journey and swift return.”

Angeline Morrison Letter #3
3rd December,1844
Writ from Sutter’s Fort
New Helevetia, California

Dearest Angeline:
My last letter was writ to you from Ft. Hall as we were about to leave the established trail and venture into the desert, following a small river into the desert sink, from where we hoped to find passage over the mountains. We were successful in this venture, although it cost us much toil.

My dearest husband was taken ill from sunstroke whilst crossing the desert, which distress’d me very much, but he recovered fully. Our party followed a fortuitous river up into the mountains that divide the desert from California like a great wall. With much difficulty and labor, our party brought our wagons along this river, well up into the mountains, but we were caught by winter.

Fearing that we might become stranded, Capt. Stephens call’d for a meeting, at a place where two tributaries met. Knowing not which way might prove a more straight path, it was decided to send out a small party on horseback to follow the southward bending fork, in hopes of an easy crossing. We drew lots, among the fit and strong, and without young children to care for.

You will be amazed, my dear Angeline, to know that my health is so much recovered that I was among six chosen for this desperate venture. Six of us set out on 15th November; besides myself, Helen, John, and Daniel Murphy, and two hired men, Francis Deland, whom my dearest hired in St. Joseph all these months ago to drive our wagon, and Oliver Magnent, who was in the employ of Joseph Foster.

We each took our blankets and some little food, hoping to be able to hunt. Miss Helen and I were allowed a change of clothes each and a piece of canvas to sleep under. The men each bore a rifle and ammunition. We also had two extra horses, to bear packs, as it was hoped we could move rapidly and if necessary, bring back help and supplies upon reaching safety.

We departed from our loved ones with much anguish, Mr. Murphy and my own dearest husband being most particularly affected. I leave any further description of our tender farewells to your imagination, my dear Angeline, as it causes my own tears to flow again when I reflect on them.

We ascended the southward turning canyon with no impediment caused by snow; indeed I was pleasantly surprised at the swiftness of our passage, since we did not have to clear a way for wagons. At the end of two days, we came out on the shores of a magnificent lake, verily an ocean, as blue as a sapphire in a setting of mountains. We could not see to the end of it, but the water itself was as clear as glass. We crossed along the northern shore of it, feeling such a medley of emotions as my pen is feeble to describe—such awe and wonder at this marvel, well mix’d with apprehension of being caught in another storm and mir’d deep in snow.

After some little distance, we found an easy pass over the rim of mountains and followed it westward, leaving behind the marvelous lake. Finding another watercourse flowing west, we descended from the mountains, fleeing the approach of a storm that covered them with impenetrable clouds for many days.

The watercourse became a broad river, as we traveled; within some days we had left the snow behind and were traversing a country of gentle hills, very lightly wooded, and rich with game. To the inexpressible delight of the men, they were able to hunt…and to my own and Miss Helen’s delight, we were able to set aside certain of our heavy garments, and revel in what seemed like the balmy zephyrs of spring.

We were forced to cross the river at one point, and John Murphy’s horse was o’erthrown by the swift current. His rifle was nearly lost, and himself carried some distance by the current, until he was able to catch hold of an overhanging branch. He was drenched thoroughly and nearly drown’d, although we were all wetted to some degree. We made camp immediately on the shore and built a large bonfire to dry our clothing, before proceeding farther.

Wondrously, after some two weeks or twenty days of travel following the river, we came to some houses; the dwellings of a Mr. St. Clair. While astonished at our appearance—think on it: six very tired and travel-worn strangers appearing out of the mountains as if by magic—we were received with much kindness, altho’ Mr. St. Clair and his family and friends expressed great concern upon hearing that we were emissaries of a larger party still maroon’d in the mountains.

They conducted us down to Captain Sutter’s establishment on the confluence of two great rivers in this valley, where we were very kindly received. He is the great magnate in these parts: Miss Helen and myself were given rooms in his own house, and her brothers and the other men quartered suitably near by.

You would be astonished, my dearest Angeline, at Captain Sutter’s vast establishment, for he keeps a very great estate, in a vast square fortress built out of unbaked clay bricks on top of a low hill overlooking the rivers and the territory around. There are a dozen brass cannon on the walls and in the bastions, and a troop of Indian soldiers, turned out in blue drill pantaloons and white shirts, of which Capt. Sutter is very proud.

Being informed by a messenger from Mr. St. Clair of our circumstances, we were conducted into Captain Sutter’s office immediately upon our arrival.  He is a gentleman of many parts, and considerable charm, and received us very warmly, with every protestation of concern at hearing of the plight of our party.

But although we all and severally begged for his assistance in organizing a relief party,  Miss Helen even burst into showers of tears, to no avail. Capt. Sutter firmly demurred, although he seemed much moved, saying that winter storms make the mountains impassible, and any such attempt would only be to condemn the rescuers to an ugly fate.

We had hoped so much from our flying journey across the mountains to rescue our family and friends, and were so gratified by a successful completion; you will know that our distress was very great. Capt. Sutter seem’d most downcast, and sympathetic to our spirits, and encouraged us to hope that the party may have also been able to transport themselves closer to safety by their own efforts. He counseled patience and offered us indefinite hospitality, saying that our lov’d ones may yet appear as we have done, and that winter has only now descended with full force upon the high mountains.

So we must wait, at least for a little while. It still seems very strange to me, having become accustomed to the trail for the last eight months, to live inside a house and sleep in a proper bedstead, and eat meals at a proper table. Civilization fits uneasily, still, like a garment I have not worn for some considerable time.

Every day, Miss Helen and I, and sometimes her brothers Johnny or Daniel take our ponies and ride a little way along the river, by Capt. Sutter’s wheat fields and pasturelands; we look at the distant mountains and watch for a while, hoping to see our dear ones. Each day we ride back, very low in spirits, and then we say to each other, “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll see them.”

The post departs very infrequently from here, when there is word of a ship in port at Yerba Buena or Monterey. Capt. Sutter promises that we well be informed at such a time. I will leave this letter unsealed until then, hoping to add a post-script that my dearest husband and Moses and the others are safely arrived.

Until then, with deepest fondness, Thy friend
Elizabeth

“Doc, I’m goddamn glad there’s no one there for me to say goodbye to,” Stephens murmured to John as they waited by the deserted wagons, on the morning they had decided to leave. John nodded; he had already said his farewells long since and days back, and this desperate trek with the men and boys could be the means of reuniting with Elizabeth, anyway. He had told Isabella to make free of whatever she might be able to use from those of his medical supplies being left behind, and she had nodded distractedly.

Hitchcock stood with them, with his two pack-mules stamping impatiently, and Old Greenwood and his sons, and the four hired men, who might once have sent yearning looks at Mary Sullivan, or Helen Murphy, once upon an evening when there was music around the campfire, but had no chance against the vigilance of assorted brothers…they were impatient to go, also. Dog nudged Stephens’s hand with her nose—oh, she was impatient too. Patrick Martin took each of his sons in a mighty bear-hug,

“Be off with you both then, lads. Don’t start anything you can’t finish.”

Isabella, her eyes filling with unshed tears, pulled Oliver’s coat straight and re-knotted the muffler around his neck. She did the same with Samuel and said fiercely, “You… give my love to your Pa, and tell him to hurry. Mind you pay attention to Doctor Townsend, for if I hear you ain’t been behaving, I can still bend you over my knee, you know!”

“No, you can’t Ma,” Samuel replied, and bending down to hug her, he tightened his arms around her and lifted her clean off her feet as he straightened up.

“Sauce!” she gasped, when he put her down again. “Go on with you, you big man, then. Go on!”

“Bye, Ma. Bye, squirt,” Oliver and Samuel chorused, and Oliver tousled Eddie’s head. “Take care of Ma, Johnnie. This leaves you the man of the house, then.” A hug each for Nancy, and another for Sadie, bewildered enough to have begun sucking her thumb again, and the two of them joined the waiting men.

Young Martin had the baby in his arms; he knelt in the snow with his boys around. John thought he might be telling them to look after their baby sister. Young Martin’s brother Jamie simply stood with his arms around Annie and his adored little Mary. John Sullivan and Michael, the youngest of all those making the trip, stood close by his sister and little brother. Mary Sullivan nodded calmly, as he spoke to her, obviously last-minute directions and instructions, in John Sullivan’s level-headed fashion.

“You should be away, now,” Patrick Martin rumbled finally in his gravelly Irish voice, to his old and good friend, Old Martin. “Before we’re all drowned in tears and used up half the day. Ne’er fear, James and I shall keep them all safe. Be away with you, then, while the day is young. We shall see you when we see you.”

Old Martin took Bernard by one arm and John by the other and said, “Martin…Son James…we’ll away, and be back before you know it. Take care of the children, my dears.” He came up to John and Stephens, saying “Let’s be gone from here, before I commence to wail like a banshee.”

And with that, they straggled off, Dog loping in the lead, dancing and leaping like a wild dervish, although there was many a mournful glance backward, as long as any could see the little straggles of smoke from the campfires and chimneys.

They followed the river, taking turns to walk in front, wading through the snow, and stamping it down for an easier path for the rest, leading the mules and Ugly Grey, and Greenwood’s ponies, marveling at how fast they could yet move, unburdened by wagons.

“At this great rate, we may be able to return in weeks,” Jamie Murphy commented happily, and it seemed to John that their spirits rose. The country was still very rough, and thick-wooded with trees. To bring out the wagons would still be a chore, but with fresh teams…and as long as the snow held off.

The animals fed on rushes that evening; although it seemed that the snow was not as deep on the ground as before, it was still too thick for them to paw it away from last year’s grass. But by the next day, the snow had diminished to a few rags in deep shade, or on a northern facing slope, and they moved even faster.

“Oh, ’tis a splendid country,” Old Martin rejoined. “Look at that grass, ‘tis nearly Christmas, and yet it’s as green as it ever was in Ireland.”

Scouting a little ahead, on the following day, John Greenwood and Dennis Martin shot a brace of fat deer, and they ate their fill of venison that night, at ease around the campfire.

“Oh, now ‘tis sublime, that!” Old Martin sighed, and tossed the last little bit of gristle and bone to Dog, who snapped it up eagerly. Dog had been very well fed on scraps and bones this evening.

“It’s a golden country. No mistake.” Stephens tossed her another bit, and Michael Sullivan produced the most resoundingly noisy belch. The Patterson boys giggled.

“Manners, lads, manners,” Old Martin chided them. “Pigs have none!”

“I think that was the first time in months that I ate my fill without calculating how little that would leave for the next meal,” John observed, idly.

“You also?” Old Martin lifted an eyebrow, “Faith an’ I thought I was the only one doing so. And now we are in the land of plenty, where the rivers are full of milk and honey, and the trees full of golden fruit, and we shall not have to consider every day how many miles we have made.”

“I’m glad it’s nearly over.” Oliver Patterson wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve, and John said, “So am I. I think now if I had known of some of the difficulties….”

“Would you have stayed in St. Joseph, then, Doc?” Stephens asked.

“No, but I might have thought longer on leaving it,” John answered, and Old Martin said, “Doctor, when you’ve lived as long as I have, trust me, you’ll look back on it and forget all the hardships and weariness, and remember only the good times, fine company, and marvelous sights…and then you’ll wish it had lasted longer.”

“It’s lasted quite long enough for me, already,” John answered. “And we are still a little short of Sutter’s, at that. But you are probably right about time painting a fairer picture, in retrospect.”

In the next days, they descended into a gentler country of rounded hills lightly covered in fine spreading oak trees, and then into a valley so large that they could not see an end to it. The river they followed became broad and deep, flowing through lush meadows on either side. They spotted cattle grazing, fine fat cattle, and harvested fields.

At about midday, seven days after leaving the winter camp, they rounded a bend, and in the distance saw what appeared to be a great sprawling enclosure, a great wall with corner bastions, surrounding a number of taller buildings within. Smoke rose from many chimneys, and a banner flew from a tall staff, and the sound of a distant bugle hung on the air.

“That can be no other than Sutter’s establishment” Greenwood said with quiet satisfaction. “It is said that he keeps a greater state than the governor himself.”

“There is only one other sight that could be more welcome to me,” John answered honestly.

“But it is a grand one, none the less,” Old Martin marveled. “Sure, and he lives like a lord, with a village outside the gates. Should we walk up to the front door, think you, or go around to the back to the stables?”

“To the front,” John answered, and it seemed that they walked faster.

There were uniformed men patrolling the walls above, and the coming and going of men, horses, and wagons had beat out a road, a road that led between fine sturdy buildings, roofed with orange-red tile. They passed people going about their own business, who looked at them with a little curiosity—Indians mostly, but dressed like white folk, the men in simple trousers and shirts, and women in chemises, under gaily-patterned calico skirts and shawls.

The gates of Sutter’s fortress stood open, but as they approached, a man called down from the bastion overhead, “May I ask who you are, strangers, and inquire of your business here?”

“We are part of a wagon company who set out from Missouri, under Captain Stephens, some eight months ago,” John answered, raising his voice a little, “and we would need to speak to Captain Sutter….” but his interlocutor exclaimed, “Stay…sir! Oh, this is happy news…you are expected! Come in, come in! We had news of your party…. Wait a moment, let me come down.”

They entered though the gate, coming out into a great courtyard with a well in the center, all a-bustle with activity. A great arcade of structures lined the inside wall: stables and storehouses, workshops and stores. The smell of baked bread filled the air. A large house and several smaller held pride of place in the center, where a number of saddled horses were tied to hitching posts. One of them rather resembled Beau, and John’s heart rose at the sight.

A bearded young man emerged from a small doorway at the foot of the bastion, saying in much excitement, “Captain Stephens, is it? Martin Murphy and Doctor Townsend? I am John Bidwell, Captain Sutter’s foreman and assistant. We had much to do to reassure Mrs. Townsend, Doctor, she was most distraught…”

“They are here?!” Old Martin cried with much delight, “All of them with Helen and Daniel, and Johnny? They are here, and safe?”

Martin and James, and their brother Bernard slapped each other’s backs and crowed, “I knew it, those little scamps…anything to get out of chopping trees!”

“Yes, indeed, they rode in five days ago,” Bidwell answered, “and Captain Sutter….”

But John did not hear another word, for two women had come out of the big house and down the steps, and one of them was Helen Murphy, and the other was Elizabeth. And for the longest time, it was only the two of them, alone in Sutter’s busy courtyard, locked in each other’s arms.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“We looked back down from the top of the pass, and we couldn’t hardly believe we had brung wagons all the way up it… but we had! The snow was all trampled to slush, there was marks of chains all over, trees chopped down, empty casks and scraps of wood all left at the bottom. And tired?! We children were tired enough, but the men, they were exhausted…and three of them that was going to winter over, guarding the other wagons…they said goodbye to us at the top, just at sundown.

We watched them climb down, by the way we had come up, and they went walking off into the valley…I think now that some of us feared they might never be seen alive again, but I was just a little boy then, and I was dead envious of them, camping all winter in the snow, and hunting when they wanted, no school or chores or such.

Doctor Townsend’s foster-son, Moses, he was one of them. To me then, he looked near to a man, the same as my brother Oliver. Looking back now, I know they were both just boys…and I had no idea of how bad things would get, just when we were thinking we were pert near safe….”

John stood with a little knot of people, just at the top of the pass, the setting sun behind them turning all the snow opposite to pink, or lavender where the shadows fell, filling up the valley below like a cup, and turning the ice-water lake to a pool of quicksilver.

He and Sarah, with Stephens, Isabella with Eddie, and Old Martin huddled into coats and shawls against the bitter wind, stood in a small knot to bid their farewells.

“When you can,” he overheard Isabella advising earnestly, “Eat of the innards, especially of the liver…and if you can find it, strip off willow bark and brew a tea of the inner layer. It’s a sovereign remedy against pain and fevers too. Purslane…you know what it looks like? Fat green leaves, growing low to the ground in damp places. If you can dig down through the snow and find last summer’s growing, eating it will stave off scurvy…”

“Lime juice is better for preventing scurvy,” Old Martin said, heartily. “Wish we’d remembered that, buying necessities, way back in St. Joe, lads…aye well. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

He, Stephens, and Isabella were making much of Joseph Foster, because he had no close kin amongst them and it was unseemly to part with someone who had done and would still do great service without taking some kind of notice, and of Moses for his very youth.

Sarah and Allen seemed to have little to say. “It was not so bad as all that,” Allen said, easily. “We’ll sort things out when we get to California. You’ll be taken care of, at least.”

“…to be taken care of!” Sarah sounded indignant, and Allen shouldered his rifle and answered, indifferently.

“Whatever you wish, then.” They said nothing more to each other, after that. Sarah pulled her shawl tightly around her elbows and went to embrace Moses instead, while Allen seemed impatient to leave.

“I mean to thank you, for volunteering to guard our wagons,” John said to him, as Allen stood a little aside from the knot of people. “We have left so much of value in them… and for the love of god, take care of Mose, for Elizabeth’s and my sake.”

“Like a brother,” Allen’s face lightened from the dark cloud on it. “We have long been friends, you and Mose and I. Have nothing to fear for him, Joe and I will be as careful as nursemaids with the boy.”

“He’ll give you no credit for that, I am sure. But we will see that Sarah is safe until we are reunited again.”

Allen’s face again appeared grim and dark at the mention of his wife, and he replied mordantly, “Aye…reunited. That’s a cheery thought to keep a man warm of a winter.”

“It does so, for me,” John answered, and Allen laughed a little, saying, “Aye, but you and Mrs. Elizabeth are happier in your marriage than Sarah and I have ever been…there are people who are meant for marriage, and more and more I doubt that we are such. No, you need not look as sour as a preacher, John. I’ll see that she is always provided for.”

John thought that he might have said more but that Moses had been embraced by Isabella, and Old Martin, and Joseph Foster had shouldered his own rifle. It was time to face that wrenching farewell.

“Moses, lad….” John said, in a voice that nearly gave way, “You’re sure you want to partake of this enterprise? Your sister will be distraught to think of you left behind in this manner…it is not too late to change your mind about it. Allen and Joseph are men grown; they would not expect you to play the part of one, as well.”

It almost seemed that Moses wavered; if he were still the boy he had been when they departed the Bluffs, he might yet have changed his mind. But he was not; he had guarded cattle, and hunted buffalo, borne the responsibilities of a man for all those long months since, even though to John he still appeared absurdly young. “No, Doctor John.” Moses’s shoulders squared under John’s hands. “Liz will not be too worried; after all, she had her task. I am not a child any longer, and I have mine. I’ll not be talked out of it.”

“Boys, it’s getting dark, we’d best mosey along,” Allen said then, impatiently stepping away from the little group, starting the descent of the path tramped out by so many feet on this day.

“I thought as much,” John sighed, and embraced him. Joseph was already following after Allen. “Stay warm, Moses…keep busy as you can. I most especially recommend reading Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. Dear lad… We’ll be back in the spring, as soon as the snow melts and the passes open. That’s a promise.”

“Give my love to Liz, when you meet her again.” Moses shouldered his own rifle. “Good-bye, Doctor John, see you in the spring.” He started down the trail after the other two.

Stephens called after them,     “We left you two oxen, picketed out at the bottom of the pass. They’re not in such good condition, but they’ll make a couple of meals, until the cabin is finished and the hunting picks up.”

Allen waved his rifle, and the next moment they were out of sight, and Isabella saying distractedly, “I wish we had fed them one good supper…but they could not stay, with darkness falling, and who knows when the next storm will come….”

Sarah had walked on ahead, as if she cared little for a last sight of her husband.

“Your father knows.” John took Isabella’s arm. “He says that his rheumatic knee gives him fair warning of all changes in the weather.”

Old Martin chuckled. “Meself, I feel a change of weather in my shoulder.”

“Fiddlesticks! Absolute fiddlesticks!” Isabella snorted, “The stories that man tells! Eddie, my duckling, run along. Tell Nancy I will be at the fire presently.”

Eddie scampered ahead; at least, he still had enough energy to do so. After drawing up each of the wagons, they had moved a little way down the pass, to set up camp and shelter from the wind in a little dell rimmed with dark pines. Someone had started a cookfire, although no one but the children seemed in the least hungry.

“Some of them are true,” John insisted. “And those that aren’t have the benefit of being at least amusing. I’m deeply fond of the one where he spent a winter night in a cave with a hibernating colony of bears. There is a lot to be said for a man who can be good and amusing company in a tight place…and speaking of hibernation for a winter night, I presume that I am to share a tent with Oliver and the boys?”

“It’s all such a jumble, all higgledy-piggledy now,” Isabella lamented, in housewifely fashion. “Sarah and the girls and I in the wagon, and Eddie and the boys in the tent, below. Do you know, Doctor, I nearly traded away the canvas at Ft. Laramie; the boys often didn’t wish to bother with it. They liked sleeping in the open or underneath the wagon if it looked like rain.”

“Sheltering all of us now, with half as many wagons,” Stephens ventured. “Doc, is there enough canvas for all? I was not thinking of anything beyond all the labor of moving the wagons.”

“We should not use canvas after too many more nights,” Old Martin answered jovially. “With luck; we should soon be down below the snow. Mind you, I could sleep comfortable in a snow-bank tonight, for I am that tired with the work we did today.”

“So could we all,” Stephens agreed.

“Is there anyone needing medicinal aid after today’s hard business?” John yawned hugely. “I am myself so weary, I fear I would be applying my skills to the other limb or the wrong end entirely.”

Isabella shook her head, “No, the only one who soon will require your aid may be Mrs. Murphy, and not for another few days, in my opinion.” She sighed, a great sigh of relief. “Do you think it can be true that we are close to the end of our journeying? No, do not answer that…I know neither of you knows, but I would so like to think that we are, just for tonight!”

And John kept silent and so did Stephens, for both of them had looked out toward the west, from the top of the pass, and seen only dark forested mountains, for miles and miles beyond, and nothing of that fabled green and golden paradise that California was supposed to be. Somewhere below and beyond, Elizabeth and Helen and the others rode swift and sure for Sutter’s Fort, while he plodded along with the wagons and longed for a sight of her.

From Dr. Townsend’s diary;

“Twenty-seven November, 1844: Alas for hope, our labors are unceasing as the country is very rough; in one place we were forced to lower the wagons down a steep hillside by means of ropes snubbed around trees, lest the wagon overtake the team. We are descending but gradually, and fear that another great winter storm is about to break over the mountains. We are worn very thi,n and our remaining team animals weakened and near broken. We are wearied to the bone with the necessity of clearing trees out of our path, and Mrs. Murphy (wife of Young Martin) is close to her time…”

The first John knew of it was the screaming. He was halfway down a muddy slope, leading Ugly Grey by the reins in one hand, and gripping an ax in the other. He had been with Stephens, Greenwood and Patrick Martin all morning in advance of the wagons, scouting and felling small trees this way and that, thinking, “I used to be a professional man, with a fine library and a medical practice, and now I am a pioneer, felling trees in front of the wagons. Really, that is a waste of an education, however you look at it”.

He doubled back; it was mostly women screaming, but a man cursing too in a hoarse voice, and the meaty sound of blows, and an ox bellowing in the agonized way of a beast in pain.

“Holy Mother of God,” Patrick panted, running at his side. “What is this, the Indians attacking us, at long last?”

John caught his rifle from the holster on Ugly Grey’s saddle and fired a shot into the air, a signal to Stephens and Greenwood, farther ahead, blazing a path along a ridge above a fast-running little river.

They came upon the wagons, a grim tableau among the green pines and the white snow. Young Martin’s wagon was in the lead that day, keeping to that long-established trail practice, although there were only the five of them left, and John took it all in at a look and stood stock still, frozen with horror at the scene before him. One of the lead beasts was down, fallen to its knees and dragging its yokemate with it, and Young Martin, with the face of a madman, beat it savagely with his whip handle, shouting in a frenzy of rage and despair, “Get up, damn ye, get up,” as the crimson blood splashed onto the snow.

Mary-Bee, half-collapsed and supported in the arms of Annie and Mary Miller, screamed from beside the wagon, begging for him to cease. “Oh, stop, Martin, stop it! The children! Oh, stop, for the love of God!”

The little boys and their cousin Mary watched in horror, some of them crying, and burying their heads in their mothers’ skirts. Like John, all seemed paralyzed alike at seeing Martin, always so even-tempered and gentle, solicitous of his team, administering this frenzied and senseless beating.

Only Isabella and Old Martin seemed able to move sensibly: Isabella ran up and snatched the bloody whip out of his hand, crying, “Oh, enough, enough!” while Old Martin took his son in his arms, pulling him away from the shuddering animal.

“That’s enough, child…come back to us now, let it go….” as Young Martin collapsed to his knees, sobbing in horrible, wrenching gasps in his father’s arms, while Old Martin held him fast. Just so had Isabella cried, that day of the cull in the mountains, and John met her eyes and knew she remembered it also. And Stephens appeared then, out of the woods at John’s elbow, as silently as a ghost himself, and Old Martin met their eyes.

“It’s enough, now,” he said quietly. “We’re done in, Captain.”

Stephens nodded, acknowledging. They were exhausted, had been for weeks, and the mighty effort of getting those five wagons over the pass had sapped the last reserves of strength and endurance left to all; men, women and the team animals. Above them, the storm clouds pressed close against the trees, blurring the sky and the mountains behind in a cloud of falling snow. A couple of fat white feathers of it drifted down on them, melting into the blood that splattered the snow already fallen.

“Mrs. Murphy’s time has also come,” Isabella said, softly. “I do not think we dare travel any farther. And the storm is coming.”

“We’ll make camp, then,” Stephens answered. “There is a suitable place yonder, above a bend in the river.” To John and Old Martin, he added quietly, “After we’ve set up, I’ll want a meeting…everyone, as before…to talk over what to do.”

They straggled along that little way, like survivors of a battle lost, and made camp as the snow fell thick and hard. The ox that Young Martin had beaten so savagely managed to rise and stumble that little way. John and Isabella put Mary-Bee into the Miller wagon, and Isabella tended her there.

“Tomorrow, I think.” She consulted with John, when they loosed the teams. “It does seem strange to be setting camp so early in the day. What do you think Captain Stephens has in mind?”

“I don’t honestly know,” John answered. “There doesn’t seem to be much else we can do now but try and pack out with what we can carry.”

“Not with Mary-Bee…not with the babies, and the other children, not in snow that near comes up to their chins,” Isabella sighed. “What of Young Martin?”

“He’s as tired as the rest of us, only worse for him, with Mary-Bee. I gave him a little tot of medicinal whiskey.”

“At least they are here together,” Isabella sighed again. “And the children are enjoying themselves. Look.”

Stephens had picked a campsite on a low knoll overlooking the river. They had parked the wagons in a sheltered grove, by an open meadow frosted with snow, being covered deeper now by snow still falling. In it the children were romping, throwing snowballs at each other, while their fathers cut poles and branches in the grove, for firewood and to build hasty bowers and shelters for themselves.

“It is good for them not to share our cares,” John said, simply. “They can play for a little longer.”

With poles and canvas, and using trees and the wagons themselves, they had a shelter of sorts rigged, something to keep the fast-falling snow off the fire and themselves, gathering for the meeting that Stephens had called. John looked around; the contrast between them now, and how they had appeared six months ago, preparing to set out and cross the river into the wilderness was almost unbearable. Only Greenwood and his son appeared relatively unchanged; everyone else looked shockingly thinner, worn and sun-burnt, tired and as ragged as some of Old Martin’s tinker gypsies. Isabella and Old Martin, even Patrick Martin, surely they had not so much grey in their hair, six months ago?

By ones and twos they gathered, families and the single men, even Mary-Bee, wincing occasionally as a pain seized her, and Stephens looked into the fire, at his rough, strong blacksmith’s hands, as they gathered.

“What do I say, now, Doc?” he had asked, all those months ago when John had engineered his election to captaincy, and he had taken John’s advice and made the shortest political acceptance speech that John had ever heard. But he had promised to get them to California, or wherever they were going…and now they were so close, so close that at every hillside prospect, it seemed they could almost see that fair green and golden land, but the snow and the mountains had closed around them again, and now they were spent, out of strength and nearly out of food, but Stephens, that big, ugly, and inarticulate man, had never yet failed, had always managed to keep going, to keep them all going. John dreaded that Stephens would ask his advice again, and this time he would have none to give.

“When you ’lected me, you all gambled.” Stephens finally looked up from the fire and met their expectant eyes. “You gambled on me. You gambled on yourselves being able to make the trip, too. An’ I made a promise then…I’d get you all to California. We’re as close as anything to taking our winnings off the table. We’re over the mountains, now. We found a pass. We crossed the mountains on a way that no one but the Indians ever seed before. We’re nearly there, folks… we’re following the river downhill every day. Old Man Hitchcock, here,” Stephens jerked his bearded chin toward the old mountain man, “he’ll tell you that rivers lead down out of mountains, sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Caleb and Isaac and I, we b’lieve we have no more than a couple of days’ travel, but with the snow, and the conditions of the teams and all, it’s clear we can’t carry on as we are. We need to make one more gamble. Most of you tell yourselves you ain’t gambling folk. But you are, and we need to make that last throw. We did it before, on the Green, and again when we left the Fort Hall road, and when we crossed the desert on the say-so of a naked wild Indian we couldn’t say two words to… .Hell, we gambled the day we crossed the river from Kanesville.” Stephens’s water-pale eyes gleamed in his dark face; for once he was touched with the fire of eloquence that was not normally his. John held his breath; for once his friend was saying all the right things.

Stephens took a breath and looked up at them, each of them, the wagon-owners and Isabella, the old mountain men, at John himself, and continued. “But every time we gambled, we looked around at the situation and considered everything we might know…and then we acted on the best advice we had. You all trusted me…better than that, you all trusted each other. Every one of you had a say in each of those gambles, and every one of you all had your own kind of skill, and all of them gambles paid off. Now, we got this one last gamble, and it’s for stakes a man don’t like to put on the table, mostly. This time it’s for the lives of your women and children.” Stephens paused, looking into the fire again. “We’re almost to Captain Sutter’s fort, so I b’lieve. We got some time; we got what’s left of our teams. Greenwood here, he’s been saying for weeks that our only hope is to leave the wagons and pack out fast. Mr. Murphy and Miz Patterson here, they don’t like that thought, since it ain’t possible to pack enough supplies, and all the children with what we have. Me, I think the only way out of this pickle is a compromise. We can’t all go, and we can’t all stay.” Stephens took up a stick and poked the fire with it. The snow falling in it made little sizzling sounds, and Dog started up from sleep at his feet. She lay down again, woofing softly, sleeping with her great fawn-and-black head resting on his boot.

“I propose we leave the wagons here and build a winter camp for the women and children, slaughter the rest of the oxen, and leave a couple men here as guards, and the rest of us take the horses and mules and pack out. We take just enough for a couple of days and leave everything else here. There should be enough to last for a while, long enough for us to come back with a rescue party. I plumb don’t see any other way to play the cards, folks, and that’s the plain truth of it. If anyone else can think of something, I’d ’mire to hear it and put it up for a vote.”

“I cannot, either,” said Old Martin Murphy, after a silent moment, while the fire cracked and sizzled away from the snow falling into it. “I cannot bear the thought of leaving the children, but as we cannot carry them with us, we must leave them well provided for.”

“How long does winter last, in these parts?” James Miller asked thoughtfully. “How long could we expect until the snow melts enough in spring to admit a rescue party?”

Hitchcock and Greenwood looked at each other, and Greenwood at last spoke heavily. “I dasn’t say for sure, James…at a guess, end of February at the earliest, March or April at the latest. Make that three months, four months.”

“Any notion as to how good hunting might be in these mountains?” John Sullivan asked.

“There’s always something about,” Hitchcock answered, “if you gets hungry enough. Gen’rally, the deer and other big game go down the mountains…how far? Depends on how deep the snow is. They’ll stay where they can paw snow off last year’s grass. They won’t be where it’s any deeper.”

No one had to look very far to see how the snow outside their wagon circle had already piled in soft billows halfway to the axles. Four months, on the scant supplies left, and the lean flesh left on forty or so oxen.

“We might yet be able to return sooner,” Patrick Martin said hopefully.

“Remember, every man who goes will leave a greater share for those remaining.” John added. He looked around the campfire; no, it seemed as if there was no more to say, no more questions, and certainly no alternatives. “So, then it is proposed that we build a winter camp here to shelter the women and children. Shall we now go ahead and vote on it?”

“One thing,” Isabella spoke up, firmly. “I believe we should all vote on it, women as well as men. In remaining behind or going forth, it is asked of us all to endure a very great trial and considerable risks. When so much is then being asked of all of us, should we not all have a voice in it, not just those who have a franchise in the party? Oughtn’t we at least be able to look back and say we chose our particular trial freely and fairly, and that it was not another’s choice made for us?”

Old Martin nodded somberly. “’Tis a fair thing to ask, Captain. We are asking much of my daughters and Mary Sullivan, as well as Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Montgomery.”

“I think my choice is made for me already,” Mary-Bee said, halfway between a laugh and a gasp, “and not by any of you!”

“A show of hands, then,” John said, and the hands went up, immediately, and some reluctantly.

“I’ll stay,” Sarah Montgomery was one of the reluctant ones, “but I’d sooner go with the men.”

“You bold thing, you!” said Mary Sullivan, half in jest and half what sounded like malice.

“Sarah, dear, there is no other woman to be a chaperone,” Isabella said, and Sarah answered sullenly, “Then I don’t have a choice then, only what is dictated by propriety.”

“If there’s no objection,” Patrick Martin said, heavily, “I’ll stay here, for a guard, meself.”

“I’ll stay, also,” James Miller spoke up. “We’ll hunt as best as we can.”

“I’ll not go until we have a proper cabin built for everyone,” Young Martin said flatly, “And have done all that we can to for supplies and to keep them safe until our return.”

“That we will,” Stephens promised, and Old Martin added, “And so we must, for the safety of our own souls…as ye said, Captain, a man hardly likes to wager the lives of his own.”

From E.S. Patterson interview, University of California Local History Archive Project 1932:

“So all decided then, for the women and children to stay put, and the men would build a shelter for us, and kill the last of the oxen for food…we couldn’t go any farther in the wagons then, you see the snow was halfway up the walls of the cabin that they began to build, even before the storm was over. They were out in the grove felling trees, working as fast as they could. They did not have the strength left in them, or the time to fell logs for a large cabin, so they built two small ones adjoining under one roof… what Mr. Greenwood said they called a “dog-trot” cabin in the place he was raised up.

Each little room had only a door, no windows and a little fireplace opposite. And we moved in and lived like animals in a burrow; it was warmer in there than in the wagons. Ma and us children with Mrs. Montgomery and Mary Sullivan and her brothers lived in one, and Mrs. Miller and the two Mrs. Murphys all living in the other. The men covered the roof with ox-hides and canvas and piled cut branches on top of it all. They didn’t go until they were finished and the oxen slaughtered, all but two or three they took for meat for themselves.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary: “Encamped at a winter camp on a river, four days journey west of the highest pass, Mrs. Martin Murphy in labor with her child.”

“Well, at least this is easier than chopping down trees,” John remarked philosophically, rolling up his sleeves. The cold bit through his shirt, for he had already set aside his coat. They had brought two kettles full of coals into the wagon, in an attempt to keep it somewhat warmer; in the back of his mind John feared he would put his foot onto one of them, tip it over and set the wagon on fire.

“Speak for yourself,” Mary-Bee Murphy gasped, leaning against Isabella and Annie’s shoulders. She was yet able to smile at him.

“Another strong push there,” crooned Isabella. “Breathe in and bear down now, Mary-Bee.”

“This would be the second of Old Martin’s grandchildren that I have delivered in six months,” John mused, thoughtfully, “There might be a very bright future for my practice in California…very good, now there’s a bit of the head…your father-in-law has four children, three of whom are of age and unmarried, aside from the four who are. The chances are excellent that I would be kept very busy as the family physician.”

“That, and stitching up my pa when he gets in fights,” Annie Murphy put in, as she and Isabella lifted Mary-Bee’s shoulders up.

“Breathe in and bear down, Mary-Bee…that’s our brave girl,” Isabella urged her, and John said, encouragingly, “There’s the head now. Another great push again….” and Mary-Bee made a great moan that rose to a scream, and the rest of the baby’s body slipped out of her body and into John’s hands.

“It’s a little girl,” John said as he bound and cut the cord, and Mary-Bee fell back, laughing thinly between great gasping breaths.

“Oh, the Lord be praised! How she will tease and pester those imps of her brothers!”

John hastily swaddled the baby in a towel, and then another; she was a dusky pink, not pale like her cousin, and immediately began to wail piercingly.

“She sounds angry,” Mary-Bee gasped again. “Is there something the matter with her?”

“She knows she has just been born on a mountain in the snow, in the middle of the wilderness,” Isabella answered, “and will no doubt make all pay dearly for this lack of forethought.”

John handed the baby to Mary-Bee, who touched her little nose with one finger and cooed,     “Oh, my little sugar-dumpling…how you are going to plague your brothers. I can hardly wait.”

“Have you thought on a name for her?” John asked curiously. Mary-Bee groaned a little, as the afterbirth came away; all there, it looked like.

“We thought Elizabeth would be a pretty name for a girl,” she answered, and John was absurdly pleased.

“Well, it would be a silly one for a boy. He’d be teased at school everlastingly. But if she turns out to be as pretty as my Elizabeth, she’ll lead all her suitors a fine dance, and need a lot of big, watchful brothers to keep them in line.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary:

“Yesterday, Mrs. Martin Murphy delivered of a fine, healthy infant girl, christened by her Grandfather Murphy. We intend to leave on the morrow, the cabin being finished, and all necessary preparations made; all remaining men and boys old enough to be counted as men, numbering seventeen in all, save James Miller and Patrick Martin the elder to remain behind to watch over the winter camp.”

From Dr. Townsend’s Journal:

“14th November, 1844 In the wilderness at the fork of Truckee’s River. This day, I can scarce put pen to paper, being distract’d with grief and worry. Our party is split yet again, this again being of our own decision. My own Dearest is gone ahead with five others, judged fit and sound, and without the care of little ones to attend. Yesterday, our labors brought us to where a tributary came down from the mountains, athwart our path, and leading to the south…We made camp in late afternoon, and Captain Stephens called a meeting.”

“We can’t take the wagons much farther,” said Young Martin flatly, as if daring anyone to argue with him, “unless we follow the west tributary.” He dropped down onto an upturned cask that he was using as a stool, and wincingly pulled off his waterlogged boots. He peeled off his socks, which were also soaked.

“Out of our way,” murmured Old Man Hitchcock, looking into the fire, past his eternal whittling and the knife-blade. “The long way around.”

“The long way around may prove the shortest,” answered Stephens gently. “We done well before, always heading straight west. At the Green, and again from the Sink. I’ll wait to hear what Isaac says.”

He sat a little way back from the fire on a half-rotted fallen log, Dog at his feet. Her great fawn and black head lay on her forepaws, golden eyes going back and forth as if she were paying intelligent attention to the conversation. The fire was the smallest of the three outside the circle of wagons and tents, set up on the lee side a barrier against the icy breeze roaring down from the high mountains, and the cold that came at sundown, the cold that was most particularly felt when the exertions of the day were over.

Allen Montgomery and the Murphy brothers, Jamie, Daniel, Bernard, and Johnny, hunkered around the fire. It had the air of an informal meeting of the men, while the women cooked a sparse but much anticipated meal. The horses and Hitchcock’s precious two mules were close-picketed for the night, just on the other side of the wagons, inside the circle, jostling each other for mouthfuls of tall, dry grass bristling up from the day’s accumulation of snow, and armfuls of green rushes cut from the riverbank by the women and older children.

Around that fragile shelter of canvas, brush, and fires, the snow was trampled to a muddy slush. At other fires, Isabella and Sarah, and the Murphy women moved in an intricate ballet, skirts, shawls, and sleeves carefully held back from the fire, as they cooked the evening meal: stew and cornbread that tasted like sawdust with no butter to spread richly on it, dried apples stewed with a little spice. Isabella’s milk cow had gone dry, months since.

Mary-Bee Murphy sat with Mary Miller on a wagon-bench, dandling the baby Ellen, while her sons and Willie Miller and their cousin Mary leaned on Old Martin’s knees, or sat bundled in shawls at his feet, as he told them another endless story about miracles, and goblins and old heroes of Erin. It was hard to judge by a casual looking, John thought, of how far along Mary-Bee was, all bundled in shawls as she was, but she still walked lightly. She was not far enough gone in pregnancy to be awkward, but she tired easily.

His glance was drawn finally, as it always would be, to his own Liz, her hair silver-gilt in the firelight, wrapped in two shawls and the buffalo robe that Old Man Hitchcock had traded for her from the tribes at Fort Laramie. Sitting on another wagon-bench, she had Sadie in her lap, Nancy and Eddie leaning confidingly against her, under the shelter of that buffalo robe.

Poor Liz, she had never been any shakes as a cook, had never even had to be, let alone over a campfire. But to do her fair, she tried her best, at a cost of some burnt fingers, scorching her own apron, and upsetting a pot of beans and near to putting the fire out, whereupon Isabella spoke out in tones of mixed exasperation and affection, somewhere back along the trail when the three families had begun to share a campfire.

Elizabeth would do them all favors if she could but stay away from the fire and the hot kettles; chop the vegetables, if she would be so kind, and read to the children, give them lessons and keep them out from underfoot.

In that mysterious way she had, of seeming to know when he was gazing at her, her eyes lifted from the book and met his for a smiling moment, quiet communion among the crowd around the campfire. He was here, she was there, and yet they were alone together. And then she went on reading to the children, and he was supposed to be also paying attention to the needs of others in the party.

They had all become a tribe, John realized, a tribe of nomads as like to any of the Indians, bound together, sharing hardship alike with those moments in the evening, those rare moments of rest. Across the trampled circle, Moses and Dennis Martin stepped out of the darkness between two wagons, each with an armload of firewood. They piled their burden roughly beside the largest of the fires, and a storm-bright burst of sparks flew up like fireflies meeting the stars overhead.

“… tonight, after we’ve supped.”

“A meeting?”

John was startled back from his nearly simultaneous contemplation of his own dear Liz and of Young Martin’s left foot, dead white, nearly bloodless, propped up on his knee.

“Pardon…I was lost, considering this interesting combination of foot-rot and frostbite. Dry socks, Martin, dry socks and liniment. And contemplate sealing your boots with tallow and paraffin…other than that, consider staying out of the water, as much as you can…”

There was a dry laugh, shared around the circle around the fire. In the last three weeks, they had been forced into the river-bed time and time again, as it provided the easiest, and on occasion, the only passage for the wagons.

“We must consider what we should do now,” Stephens said. “We might send a party ahead, along the south branch….”

He fell silent, as Mary-Bee Murphy came with a basin and a steaming kettle and Isabella, bearing a dry cloth and her box of medicinal salts.

“Doctor, tell him to soak in this for a bit, and dry them carefully. We’ll bring a set of dry stockings presently, and dry his boots beside the fire.”

“Mrs. Patterson, you are a tonic.” Extravagantly, John caught her hand, and took it to his lips. “And an excellent nurse. I shall see that the patient follows your advice to the letter.”

Isabella gave him a very severe look, as Mary-Bee awkwardly set down the basin and filled it with steaming water. Isabella added salts and gathered up the socks and the sodden boots.

Mary-Bee looked as if she would say something more, but she merely patted her husband’s shoulder and followed in Isabella’s wake.

“See that he does then, Doctor Townsend, see that he does,” Isabella shot over her shoulder.

When she was gone back to the cook-fire and out of hearing, Stephens remarked,
“A good woman is above the price of rubies.”

“I long to meet the man who would play Petruchio to her Kate,” John said, just as Greenwood appeared as silently as a ghost in the circle of firelight, shadowed by Britt, and heralded only by the scent of tobacco smoke. Stephens grinned, a flash of teeth in his whiskered face.

“Nearly as much as I’d like to be warm again, and over those pestilential mountains; he must be a formidable man. I imagine a very Ajax.”

“Not so,” said Hitchcock seriously. “M’son-in-law’s a very mild-tempered man. Never has much to say for hisself.”

“Married to her, who’d wonder?” ungallantly ventured Bernard Murphy sotto voce, as Greenwood sank onto his heels and held his hands to the fire, looking every day of his four-score. Britt took up a seat next to Stephens on the log and casually gentled Dog’s alertly raised head. She lay down again, with an inaudible “woof.”

Stephens merely lifted his brows, and Greenwood sighed. “Not so good for wagons, Cap’n. Not ’less you had a month of good weather and a hundred strong men and them with an ax in either hand. Horses? Yeah, easy enough. We blazed it, two, three miles, far as we could, ‘fore sunset. Horses and pack-mules. It looks right promising, otherwise… but I’ve always said if you want to be over these mountains by winterset, you’ll have to leave all your traps and ride hard.”

“No.” It was Isabella’s voice. She had returned unobtrusively to the fire-circle, joining the men, as was her right as a wagon-owner and the head of a family. ”We cannot just leave our traps, as you say. We have chosen out all the most valuable and useful of goods, and brought them all this way; we cannot just drop them by the wayside as things of no consequence. ”

Greenwood shrugged. “They’re only things. You can get back things, or something like them.”

“Things?! Things, as you say, but they are our things! We considered them very carefully; these are things that are not only valuable to us, but things that we need! They are not frivolous possessions, but necessary tools to earning our livelihoods. Without those “things” we should be beggars, dependant upon charity.”

Her keen hawk-glance went round the circle of faces, and John thought of his books, the case of surgical instruments, Liz’s precious china tea set, which had come from her grandmother, whose family had brought it from Germany and cherished through generations.

“And what about the children? Can they ride hard? Can Mary Miller ride, with a baby at breast, or Mary-Bee Murphy, so close to term? The wagon is our shelter, our home! I’ll not be a beggar, I’ll not be destitute. What if any of us falls sick, though lack of shelter? What do you say, Doctor? How many of us would be fit to leave all behind and ride hard?” Her hard, inimical hawk-glance pinned him, challenged him to speak, to venture his opinion.

“The very youngest or those of a weak constitution could not endure very long in such conditions as this without shelter,” John stammered. As many times as he had talked this over with Elizabeth in the privacy of their bed, he was still stuck on the two-horned dilemma, having never come to any conclusion in his own mind. “Nor the very old.” Old Hitchcock snorted derisively at this, and would have said more but for his daughter’s fierce gaze swinging around toward him.

“The wagons…they are at least of some shelter. I would not choose to leave them. I do not think we could carry enough food and blankets and tents on our backs for the weeks of traveling we still must endure…not if we had to carry the weakest of us.”

Stephens sighed, lines of weariness and responsibility harshly grooving his features in the firelight.

“Our supplies diminish every day that we spend, this side of the mountains. I know that my own do, so I assume the same of you all. Old Man, how far do you think we might be from Sutter’s Fort?”

“I do not know for sure, “Greenwood said, bluntly. “Maybe a week’s journey on a good horse to the summit, maybe longer. Sutter’s place is down in the flatland, on the river, a good piece from the mountains on the other side.”

“What sort of man is he? If we sent for aid for ourselves, would he send it?”

“Aye, he would. I know nothing of him at first hand, though. But he is accounted to be generous, and he has ambitions.”

“As do most men. I’ve a hankering to know what he has ambitions for.” Stephens stood wearily, and stretched,

“Doctor, I’d like to call a meeting… not now, after we’ve all supped. Not just the wagon-owners. Everybody. Tell them it’s to consider sending out a small party ahead. He saluted Isabella with a touch to his hat-brim. “Pardon, all. I shall check on the stock. No,” he added as Greenwood looked to get to his feet. “You’ve earned some rest, Old Man.”

Dog’s eyes had snapped open as soon as Stephens moved, and now she lurched to her feet and padded after him into the darkness outside the firelight.

John sighed; he was wearied to his very bones. How Greenwood must feel after his long scout today, he could only imagine. The old man must be made of iron and buffalo sinews to have endured this kind of odyssey for years.

“Supper’s ready,” said Isabella abruptly. “The table is set…that is, if we had a table.”

John stood, and bowed, elaborately offering her his arm. “My dear Mrs. Patterson, may I then escort you to…our lack of table and our evening repast?”

Isabella nodded regally, her lips twitching with her effort not to laugh. “How very kind of you, my dear doctor.” She took his arm with a flourish, and they moved with elaborate gentility across the trampled mud to their own fire, where Elizabeth watched them, laughing, while the children stared in baffled astonishment.

“La, Mrs. Patterson, I fear you are flirting with my own husband!” she said, while Isabella dissolved into hearty and infectious giggles.

“My dearest, I am wounded at the heart!” John slapped his chest theatrically, “How could I consider being unfaithful to you, even in thought!” He sank onto the bench next to her, as the children had sprung up to help Isabella pass out tin plates. He added in a low voice, “Although I confess I now can see how Mr. Patterson’s affections might have been drawn toward our own Kate.”

“Because she is altogether splendid, “Elizabeth replied. “But too many men are fools. A pretty face and a kind regard is all that is necessary for their attentions. A strong mind and a stout heart are not obviously apparent.”

“I am properly rebuked,” John said, and they sat together in perfect companionship under the buffalo robe, while Sadie brought around the tin plates and her brother a pan of cornbread. Isabella carried an iron Dutch oven, from which the most savory scents emanated. She carefully doled out a ladle and a half to each. Across the fire, John noticed that Allen and Sarah sat next to each other, but separate.

Elizabeth followed his gaze, and intuited his thoughts, perfectly. “They are not happy, Dearest. I doubt they will ever be. They married in haste, thinking they would come to love each other…but I cannot think how that will happen, under the trials of such a journey as this.”

“Perhaps when we get to California,” John ventured, “it may yet work out….” He took a mouthful of the stew. “Oh, this is truly succulent fare… or am I just amazingly hungry?”

Elizabeth twinkled at him. “It is a most Luccellian feast, is it not?”

“This cannot be a potato, surely? I thought we had eaten the last of the potatoes months ago. Murphy made such an event of it; I made a note in the trail diary.”

“No, “Elizabeth replied, serenely. “Those things that taste somewhat potato-like are roots of water-reeds. The Indians eat them, even dry, and grind a sort of flour out of them, or so Mr. Hitchcock says. And we found stands of wild onions when we first came up into the mountains. Truly, this wilderness is a garden if you know where to look.”

“Ah, well…. “John looked with new interest into the contents of his tin plate. “We are well served, and well fed, Darling Dearest. I could not ask for better companions in all the world.”

“So…” Elizabeth ate with renewed interest, “what does Mr. Stephens think we should do next?”

“He wants to hold a meeting,” John replied. “I think he wants to send an advance party, following the creek toward the south, whilst we move the wagons west along the main body. We cannot spare too many men, or horses, though. But at least, they could bring fresh supplies and teams from Sutter’s.”

“Who will he send?” Elizabeth looked around the camp. “Who can be spared? Who can be asked to leave their families behind?”

John followed her gaze. Across the fire, Moses and Allen laughed together. Sarah’s back was to her husband; she talked quietly with Isabella, who seemed to be listening with half an ear while she supervised the children. A tiny line worry-line appeared between Elizabeth’s level brows.

“He’ll ask for volunteers, first.”

“Moses will ask to be sent, I am sure of it.”

“Liz, dearest, he is not a child any more. He is a man, or close enough to it. And we will talk it all over tonight after we have supped.”

Elizabeth’s merry mood seemed to have fled, though, and they ate in companionable silence, until they could see that other men were drifting to Stephens’s campfire, carrying benches and stools; Old Martin Murphy and his sons, and James Miller, Patrick Martin and his boys, young Sullivan, and the various drovers. Sarah and Elizabeth hastily scoured the plates clean, and followed Isabella. John clambered up into the wagon for his little writing-case; he had a sense that he ought to be taking the minutes.

The wagon-owners settled themselves in the first circle around the fire: Stephens and Greenwood, Isabella and her father, Allan, Martin Murphy and his sons, and James Miller, John Sullivan, and Patrick Martin. Wives, and older children, brothers, and the hired men filled in the spaces and spilled over to a second circle, and stood in the gaps behind benches and chairs brought out from the wagons. Coming to the confluence of waters meant a very real decision about what route to take now, a decision with nearly unbearable consequences, now that snow had been falling for weeks. No wonder Old Martin looked particularly worn and cosseted his grandchildren. Fully half the party was his blood kin, and he the person most responsible for bringing them here, too.

“Aye, we must send for assistance, while we can,” Old Martin agreed. Like Isabella, he would not countenance abandoning the wagons; consensus regarding taking the slightly more open but possibly longer route along the creek was complete.

“And how many shall we send? And who can we spare, when we’ll need every strong man to move the wagons, hey?”

“No more than six, “Greenwood replied. “Strong riders, with little gear and just enough food. Eight of the horses are in fair condition, still— six to ride, two for spares and packs.” He cleared his throat and spat thoughtfully into the fire. He seemed almost to hesitate before saying more. “Whoever they be, ’twill be six less on the foodstuff left to the main party. And they need not all be men, either.”

That was a notion to cause an intake of breath around the fire, and a sudden, thoughtful silence. Old Martin was the first to break it. “I’d not countenance asking a mother, or a father yet, to leave children behind in a place such as this…no, no, never. ’Tis an unnatural thing y’d be asking. Not even the heathen savages would ask such.”

“No,” agreed Old Man Greenwood, “But among the tribes, women without children commonly ride with the hunting parties. They do the butchering and dressing out, and cooking and all.”

“What a wonderful time they must have, doing all the work of it!” Sarah said, in a voice that carried just far enough, and there was a rustle of wry laughter from the women on the edge of the campfire.

“So how do we choose the six; should we draw lots from among those of age, young, fit, and without children?”

“Aye,” agreed Old Martin readily. “But it is in my mind; we should first pledge to assist the families of those chosen, in whatever they may require. Our needs might leave them short of a provider and ready hands.”

“So… are we agreed on that, then? To draw lots for a place and to see to the needs of any family left short.”

Stephens’ ugly, lined face appeared more than usually like a grim, fire-gilded gargoyle, looking around the circle. “We are agreed then? Are there any exceptions?”

“None but you, Captain…and the doctor. You are more needed here with us.”

“I had no intent of leaving this company until we are all safe,” replied Stephens, dourly. “Nor does Doctor Townsend; so, how many will draw?” He leant down and began pulling stems of dried grass from the brown tufts that were still un-trampled around his log seat.”

The quiet murmurs ran around the campfire, quickly tallying names; Alan and Sarah, Greenwood’s two sons, and Stephens’s young drover, Tom Flomboy, Oliver Patterson, old Martin’s youngest children, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny, and their sister Helen. The four drovers, Edmund Bray, Vincent Calvin, Matthew Harbin, Oliver Magnent, and Francis, John’s own hired man. Joseph Foster, and Moses’s close friends, Dennis and Patrick Martin.

Not the Sullivans, though, after some discussion, since John and Mary had the care of their younger brothers. But that left Moses himself… and his Elizabeth. John’s heart seemed to turn over in his chest; all of them, fit and strong and young, and childless, twenty of them, nearly a half of the party.

Stephens cut twenty straws, and then cut six of them in half. He set them in his palm so they were all level and then closed his fist. He held out that fist toward Allan Montgomery first, then Britt and John Greenwood. Allan and John Greenwood drew long straws, and so did Britt. Moses also drew a long straw. His disappointment was obvious, but John hoped that his own relief was not. The hired men drew in a body: the Irish drover boys and Stephens’s drover lad, the dark Louisiana French boy whose name was such a tongue-twister, all drew long straws, but Oliver Magnent and Francis Deland both drew short. Joseph Foster stepped forward to draw: another long.

“Tarnation take it, another two months of this!” he said, in good-humored disappointment. “And all on short rations, too!”

“Daniel… Johnny, ye and Bernard step forrard… and where’s Helen?” Old Martin chided his four youngest into the circle and looked on with a deathly countenance, when Helen, Johnny and Daniel all drew short straws. Oliver Patterson stepped forward into the firelight to draw, and Stephens looked at him with a particularly severe and interrogatory frown. “Boy, are you of age for this venture?” and Oliver blushed deep red as Isabella said, white-lipped, “He will be eighteen in three months.”

Oliver drew a long straw though, leaving a pair of wispy straws in Stephens’s fist; Sarah and Elizabeth stepped forward, and John’s heart felt as if it turned over entirely within his chest. Sarah drew a long straw, and could not hide the disappointment on her face. And Elizabeth then took forth the last of the straws from Stephens’s hand: a short straw for the horse party.

Elizabeth, not Moses; John was shaken down to the soul. Old Martin looked hardly better. Stephens let the murmurings of excitement and sympathy die down and quietly said, “Doctor, take down their names into the trail journal. I’ll want to talk to them, all together. They must leave in the morning, as soon as we are ready.” He spoke a little louder, to the gathering at large. “Thank-ee all, sitting out in the cold for this. It’s only trail business we had to settle tonight.”

Taking their cue, the women began chivvying away the children who had not already been settled to bed. The younger men and the families of those who had not been chosen drifted away from Stephens’s campfire in their wake; after such a day of travel, a warm bedroll had a powerful and irresistible allure. As the evening meeting broke apart, Greenwood thoughtfully sized up the six chosen.

“You were well-guided, Cap’n. They are well-suited. Among the women, Mrs. Townsend has the best seat, and little Helen is young and strong. It is good that her brothers are among them, they are both good hands with the beasts and fearless about venturing into wilderness. Magnent and Deland are good shots, and as trail-wise as they come, besides being used to the cold and the snow.”

“For myself, I am glad Mrs. Townsend is amongst them.” John said. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. “The cold and the hardships are so extreme, I fear for her, under these circumstances, and welcome any means for her to escape further exposure to the winter chill.”

“Aye, it may be best at that.” Old Greenwood sighed, grimly. “Would that I could urge all to travel so light and escape these mountains. At least, they will be six less appetites upon the supplies we have left.”

Old Martin and his children, Elizabeth and the two French lads, all of the chosen lingered by the fire as they had been bidden. In the firelight, Elizabeth looked as young as they, and all of them so eager, fired by the prospect of adventure, just as they all had been six months ago at Council Bluffs, when the grass was lush and deep, escaping the drudgery of a mundane existence. Now they looked fair to escape another one, of everlasting cold and the brutal labor of moving the wagons another mile or so farther up the river, the river whose jaws were closing in on them like a trap.

Stephens looked at them, and smiled, wryly. “No great words…wish I did. Ride hard. Look after each other and the horses. Get to Sutter’s place and bring back help.”

“We shall!” Elizabeth’s chin lifted, and her eyes were fired with determination. “We are leaving our kin and dearest ones, and our friends, knowing that their very salvation depends on us. Depend on us, Captain Stephens—we will not fail.”

And even if Old Greenwood seemed to hide a half-cynical smile, the others, Helen and her brothers, the two Frenchmen, all shared the same look of bright dedication. They could not fail; they would throw themselves at the high mountains, the rocks and rivers and the ice; they would win through it all; they would come through, rescue their families, and John’s heart felt as if it would burst with a combination of pride and dread.

“And we will not fail, “Elizabeth whispered, when they lay tucked together in their bedroll of blankets and quilts and the trusty buffalo robe, all spread out on top of the platform of boxes and flat-topped trunks in their wagon. The drawstrings and flaps were drawn tight against the cold, and a kettle of coals taken from the fire lent an illusion of warmth to the tiny, canvas-walled room. A pair of flat stones heated in the fire, wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the bottom of their bed, produced a slightly more convincing degree of warmth, together with the warmth of each other, curled into each other, spoon-fashioned.

Around and outside this fragile shelter came the quiet, near-to sleep voices of Isabella’s children, Allan Montgomery’s irritated voice, raised and quickly hushed, and a quiet crunch of regular footsteps in new snow: the horses pawing the frozen ground, searching for more of the thin, dried grass. Under it all, a nearly imperceptible yet menacing rustle, the constant sound of more snow falling, brushing the canvas and pine branches; fat flakes like feathers, like falling leaves.

“I wish….” said John, into her hair, hugging her dear and familiar self into the shelter of his own body, “I wish that we….”

“Had not taken this journey?” Elizabeth picked up the thread of his thoughts as expertly as she had always done. “Oh, my dear, never wish that. No, never. For I am glad that we have, even if this would be the last night we spend in each other’s arms…and it will not be,” she added firmly, and took his hand in hers, and held it first to her lips, and then her cheek. After a moment, she continued, thoughtfully, “I almost feel as if my life before we started this journey was lived in shadows, a sort of half-life, and then I came out into bright sunshine. Did not we decide upon this great adventure partly because of my own health? And now I am in good heath and have shared your life in a way that I never could before. In our present emergency, I am accounted strong enough to be given a great task, a responsibility. There should be no greater reward. I do not ask for any such. Dearest, there is nothing to regret. I love you all the more for having made this possible. Have no fear for me…I will be safe, and we will not fail.”

“I pray that shall be so, “ John tightened his arms around her, at once wishing for this night with Elizabeth never to end, full knowing it would be the last they would spend together for weeks if not months, and yet wishing that it were tomorrow already, and the agony of parting already over. He was torn between pride in her courage, and worry for her that shook him down to his bones. “We should go to sleep, Liz. You’ll need as much rest tonight as possible.”

“Mmmm. Don’t stay awake yourself, watching over me,” Elizabeth said, teasingly, but John did try to fight off slumber for a while, until sleep claimed them both.

And then too soon it was dark morning, and snow still falling, and he was standing, wretchedly tongue-tied in front of people, for once. He had promised Elizabeth, back in the desert, that he should not have to go on a long scout again and be separated from her. And now, ironically, she was riding on a long scout, leaving him to plod behind.

“Promise me, rather, that wherever one of us will go, the other will follow after in a little while,” she had said, and so he would be following after, but it was bitter, bitter. Moses and he had saddled Beau, had rolled up the buffalo robe and two or three blankets around a pitiful bag of dried meats and hardtack, and a little ground coffee, and strapped them behind her saddle. Isabella and Sarah had fussed over what to send with her, just as the Murphy women had fussed over Helen, Johnny, and Daniel.

Old Martin had tears rolling down his cheeks as he gave his youngest daughter a boost into the saddle. Daniel’s paint pony danced impatiently, crunching the fresh-fallen snow underfoot; the lads were eager to be away.

“Dearest, I must go now.” She leaned down from the saddle and brushed his cheek with her lips, and then she was gone, following the rest of the mounted party. They were veiled in falling slow before they reached the first bend and were lost to sight, but he was almost sure she turned in the saddle and lifted her hand in one last farewell.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

Three days Captain Stephens and Doctor Townsend and Mister Foster was gone in the desert with the old Indian. funny thing, they thought his name was Truck-hee, because that’s what he kept saying, over and over. We were so grateful for his help, guiding them to that river, they named it after what they thought his name was, but it wasn’t his name at all! Truck-hee really meant “all well” or “everything satisfactory”! But he was a chief, right enough, the chief of the Paiute tribe thereabouts, and a very well-thought-of man among them. Rightly, too, I have to say…he took the compliment so well, that he took “Truckee” as his name after that.

A good man, right enough. Died of a tarantula bite, years later; he was given a splendid funeral by all the folk thereabouts, Indian and white. Buried him with a Bible that John Fremont gave him, so the story goes… Anyway, I’m wandering. Privilege of old age, so they tell me; ninety-six years old next April, I’ll be. I’ve outlived all my brothers and sisters, even my little sister Sadie. Outlived my wife, and three of my children… can’t get more privileged than that, hey?

I think Captain Stephens’s dog saw them first. She commenced to whine, and then to bark… she warn’t no dog that barked much, commonly, so that had everyone’s attention…especially since she had been sitting on that very spot since they went and Captain Stephens bade her stay. They came riding out of the desert, leading the extry pony, that dog barking fit to beat the band. Ma, and Doctor Townsend’s wife, and the other women came running out. (Most of the young men were out hunting.)

We had been busy all those three days, patching up the wagons, and the women were washing things, and smoking meat over the fires and all. Such a sight they was, all dirty and sunburnt, but grinning all over. Chief Truckee had led them right to that river, all right. Captain Stephens snapped his fingers at his dog, and she went to capering and leaping about, and running back and forth. Miz Townsend, she reached up and hugged the Doctor…ah, such a lovely woman she was.

I had a bit of calf-love for her, you see. Just a boy of seven or eight, I was then, but she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever set eyes on, and brave she was, too. About broke my heart when she went, but she and the Doctor went together. Within days, I was told. Some comfort in that, I suppose; she never had eyes for anyone but him, big, jolly roughneck that he was. Capable man, he could deliver a baby or doctor an ox and build a road; can’t say that about doctors these days.”

“We found it!” John shouted, waving his hat over his head as they rode into camp. “We found it, right where the Chief said it was!” He slid down from his saddle and swung Elizabeth off her feet; she was laughing and crying at the same time into his shirt-front. Old Hitchcock hobbled up from Greenwood’s campfire, Eddie at his heels, “And a beautiful, beautiful river it is, too. Liz, don’t cry. Why are you crying?”

“I was worried about you!” Elizabeth brushed her cheeks with the edge of her hand,

“Nothing to worry about, Dearest, it was only the desert.”

At his side, Foster clapped Old Hitchcock on the shoulders, saying, “… Ice cold, straight from the mountains…two days’ travel, a little less on horse, as you can see. We’re close to Californy at last, Old Man, close enough to taste it!”

“We ain’t there yet,” Stephens said, quietly. “Down, Dog.” Dog sat obediently at his feet, but her tail kept wagging, and she pressed up against her master as if to reassure herself that he was really there.

More men gathered around the three scouts and their horses, drawn from their chores: Old Murphy, beaming joyfully, James Miller with a hammer still in his hands, a happy babble of voices repeating the good news to the lately arrived.

Stephens finally held up his hand. “Folks, we’re tired, hungry, and saddle-sore. We found the river, but it’s been three days in the desert to get to it, there and back. Give us a mite to clean up. Doc and I’ll call a meeting for tonight, after supper.”

“We’ll not be leaving from here right away,” John added, fairly. “I’ll be worse than that cut-off between the Big Sandy and the Green. We’ll have to carry all the water we can and cut two days worth of fodder for the animals.”
A dismayed murmur rose from all; the memory of that leg of travel, and the temporary loss of forty head of cattle was clear. This desert would be even more desolate and comfortless?

“We’ll go over it all tonight, after supper,” John said again, and Moses appeared, and took Ugly Grey’s reins out of John’s hand.

“Ill take care of him, Doctor John.” Moses looked at him critically. “You might want to…um, wash up, a little.”

“You should.” Elizabeth recovered herself. “You’re as bristly as a bear.” She went on tiptoe and kissed him again. The crowd had melted away, reluctantly, and John went to the water’s edge below camp with a bucket and a rag, stripped off his filthy shirt, and poured water over himself until he began to feel somewhat cleaner.

“It works better with soap,” said Elizabeth, from behind him, “I’ve brought your shaving things and a clean shirt.”

“Bless you, Liz,” John said, gratefully. She also carried a clean towel and a basin of warm water. “It was a hell of a scout on horse with a small party, Dearest…and it will be even worse with the wagons.”

“We’ll manage,” Elizabeth replied, tranquilly. She perched herself on a rock at the water’s edge, “With Captain Stephens and you, and everyone…we’ll help each other, and we’ll manage.”

John upended the bucket and sat upon it, with the basin and soap at his feet, and commenced to scraping beard-stubble off his jaw and from under his chin.

“We’ll need to,” he rinsed off the razor, “We can’t stay much longer here, in any case.”

“What does Captain Stephens plan?” Elizabeth lifted her skirts a little; she had moccasins on her feet, rather than shoes. She slipped out of them and dabbled her feet in the water, as playfully as a child.

“He is going to suggest that we travel at night, mainly. The heat during the day is hellish, Liz. It’s forty miles, at least, so Stephens estimates it. And the last stretch is in deep sand; we’ll be lucky not to lose at least a couple of oxen there, unless we take very good care. There’s not a scrap of grass from here to old Truck-hee’s river, and only one spring of water, and it’s boiling hot and tastes utterly vile, to boot.” He scraped at his face again with the razor, “There…did I miss anything?”

“No, I don’t think so…oh, a little bit, just so….” She stepped out of the water and took the razor out of his hand. With a look of great absorption, she ran the edge of it over the last bit of bristle,

“There,” she remarked with satisfaction. “You look quite respectable again, my dear doctor, not like some shiftless ruffian of the trail…or you will, once you have put on a shirt again. I missed you terribly, these last four days. Since we wed, I think it has been the longest we have ever gone without seeing each other.”

“Once over the mountains,” John ventured, taking up her hands in his, “We will be in California, and I doubt I’ll have to go on such a long scout ahead of the train. Therefore, I think I may safely promise that we will not ever be parted for so long again.”

He kissed her fingers, and she laughed a little and replied, “No, promise rather that wherever one of us goes, the other will follow after in a little while.”

“Always, Liz, always,” and he kissed her fingers again, and she laughed again, and pulled away, to gather up his dirty shirt, and the towel and basin and all.

“I think I may soon need to cut your hair as well, Dearest,” and she slipped her feet back into the moccasins and carried her burdens back to camp.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

We were another couple of days camped at the sink and making preparations. Captain Stephens brought out his sharpening stone, to sharpen knives and sickles, as we needed to cut all the grass and rushes that we could carry with us. We spread out tent-canvas and piled up cut fodder on it, and rolled them up into great bolsters, and tied them onto the backs and sides of the wagons. Mr. Miller mended as many empty barrels as there were with wood scraps and tar and bits of unraveled rope, and we soaked them in the marsh so the wood might swell again and seal up any leaks. Ma and Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Montgomery cooked up enough bread and beans and meat and such to last us for two or three days, for Captain Stephens said, and Mr. Greenwood said too, that we would travel straight through without stopping save to rest the cattle for a few hours…

We rested a little in the afternoon of the second day, and ate a good meal, and as the sun went down, my brothers and the other men hitched up the teams, and Captain Stephens led us out into the desert…”

One after another, as the sun set in a red-gold smear against the lavender-colored mountains, the wagons lumbered away from their camping place, to the gentle accompaniment of the frogs and night birds singing in the marsh, and the querulous voices of smaller children, put to bed in the wagons but unable to sleep for the motion of it. Greenwood and Stephens carried lanterns with them and lit them as darkness gathered; not because they needed the light to retrace the scouting party’s tracks, but rather as a guide to the wagon drivers urging their teams on. Those were plain under the starlight, across the pale desert sands, and clear as daylight when the moon soared over the horizon.

“It reminds me,” Elizabeth remarked, “of those winter nights when there was a fresh fall of snow on the ground, and a full moon behind the clouds. It was night, but everything brilliantly lit, as bright as day.” John circled the slow-moving procession of wagons and returned to walk with her and a knot of women and older children walking close by the Patterson wagon after some hours. The light evening breeze bore the dust away from them. She led Beau, and he walked beside her, leading Ugly Grey,

“It’s almost like walking in snow, too,” Isabella spoke up. She and Oliver were taking turns driving; now she walked with one arm around Nancy’s waist and leading Eddie by the other hand. “Don’t drag your feet, children. It just makes the dust worse.”

“Ma, I’m thirsty,” Nancy said, and Elizabeth unhooked a canteen from Beau’s saddle horn and handed it to the girl.

“Don’t drink any more than you need,” John said. “Often, but not too much. We’ll need to save as much as possible for the horses and the teams and to walk as much as possible ourselves to spare them.”

“How long must we walk, then?” Nancy did her best to sound brave.

“As long as you can, sweeting,” Elizabeth replied cheerfully. “And when you are a little tired, I’ll let you ride Beau for a little, and when you and your brother are really, really tired, you can sleep in the wagon for a while.”

“I’m not tired,” Eddie spoke up, sturdily. “I can walk for miles and miles and miles, yet.”

“That’s our brave Eddie,” Elizabeth said, affectionately, and Eddie fairly glowed.

John kissed his wife and swung into the saddle again, for another patrol, the length of the train. Not near the long chore it was in the days when they traveled with the Oregoners; now just the eleven wagons, and a scant handful of spare oxen, and Old Hitchcock stumping along with his two mules. Old Martin walked with his younger sons and his daughters and daughters-in-law and his grandchildren, although it touched John enormously to see that he was carrying the smallest grandson on his shoulders, and young Helen carried tiny Ellen Independence for Mary Miller. Old Martin was declaiming one of the epics of old Erin, as they marched along through the night.

“…so it came to Queen Maeve that it seemed as if she didn’t own anything at all, if she had not a bull of such splendor among her herd, so she called the herald McRoth into her court to find out if there were any such in the whole kingdoms of Ireland, and the herald McRoth said to Queen Maeve “I know, indeed, where there is a bull even better and more excellent than he, in the province of Ulster in the cantred of Cooley, in the house of Dare MacFinna.” And Queen Maeve ordered him to go, saying to McRoth the herald, “Ask of Dare, for me, a year’s loan of that bull….”

Even Mary-Bee Murphy walked, carrying a basket of small things and leading her sons, linked by their hands.

“You should not overexert yourself unduly, Mrs. Murphy,” John said, with some concern as he overtook them on horseback, and Mary-Bee flashed a smile at him.

“Oh, I am not the least bit tired, Doctor Townsend. I have promised Isabella and my husband that I shall ride in the wagon and rest when I feel the need of it, truly I shall.”

James Murphy walked by his team, driving them with his voice, while tenderly carrying little Mary in his arms. She was asleep, her head on his shoulder. And so they walked on, children stumbling with weariness until they were put to bed in the wagons or into the saddles of horses, and led by their elders. At midnight, John finished another circuit of the wagons; he found Elizabeth leading Beau, with Nancy and Eddie dozing in the saddle.

“Captain Stephens is sending me ahead with Foster and Greenwood’s boys,” he said to her, “so’s we can run off water from the springs, and let it cool off enough for the cattle. Three hours should be enough.”

Elizabeth pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders. “It does seem so much colder at night, out here,” she replied. “Take care, Dearest.”

“We’ll be resting at the springs for a couple of hours before moving on; you should ride for a while. This is the easiest stretch.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I am fine. I’ll rest when you do.”

Using shovels this time, it didn’t take long to break several new channels, laboring like well-diggers in the moonlight, in clouds of sulfur-stinking vapor. When they were finished, John tied Ugly Grey’s reins around his wrist and simply cast himself down on the ground to snatch a little sleep, while Britt Greenwood watched for the wagons.  Britt shook him awake when he spotted the lanterns bobbing in the distance, like a pair of distant yellow glow-worms.

They dared not un-harness the teams entirely, lest they repeat the experience of having them run off, in search of water, but led them in yoke to the pools of cooling spring water to drink. The oxen relished it as little as the horses had, but drank. Once re-hitched, they scattered mounds of fodder in front of them, where they stood in harness, and allowed them to rest and eat of it as they wished.

John found Elizabeth lying on top of their bed in the wagon, fully dressed, even to shoes, and fast asleep, the deep sleep of utter exhaustion. She had managed to unsaddle Beau and leave him picketed next to a bucket of water and an armload of green stuff. Moses and Francis had spread blankets underneath the wagon, and slept also, but it was no more than a brief respite of an hour or so. They ate of the cold food prepared for the journey and moved on stumbling with weariness through a night that seemed endless, until the stars paled, and dawn came up at their backs.

John thought he had moved to somewhere beyond weariness, aware only of a slightly giddy feeling if he moved too fast, as he patrolled the length of the caravan, pausing at each wagon or family. The sun arced higher in the sky, and the heat of it poured down relentlessly. The nighttime coolness fled as if it had never been. The Sullivans and the Martins were at the tail, on this day. Mary Sullivan held her younger brothers and led them by the hand, while her brother drove their wagon. Patrick Martin waved, cheerily. “Holy Mother and all the saints,” he said. “When I am judged before the Lord, I will be able to say that I should go to heaven straight away, as I have already served in Purgatory.”

“I hope you have the right of it, Patrick,” John replied. The Patterson children walked uncomplainingly with Isabella, although Sadie cried in silent misery, her tears drying on her cheeks nearly as fast as they fell.

“Here,” said Old Man Hitchcock to his grandchildren, “this is an old Indian trick. Put a little pebble in your mouth to suck on. You won’t feel so thirsty, then. Sadie-girl, you want to ride on one of Paw-paw’s mules. Ups-a-daisy, there you go. Now, boys, I was once chased by a war-party of Comanche, through a desert just as bad as this….”

Elizabeth had wakened in the wagon, around sunrise, and was walking again, leading Beau. She smiled at John, “Nothing seems to bother him, does it?”

“He’s a tough old bird,” John replied. “I used to think most of his stories weren’t true, and now I am beginning to wonder if most of them aren’t the God’s own truth.”

“Well, the one about being scalped by the Blackfeet…that’s not true,” Elizabeth mused. “But, now that I have seen the hot spring back there…I think the tale of the great fountain of water spurting out of the ground might be true.”

“A little exaggerated, maybe,” John admitted.

Old Martin strode like a patriarch of old among his sons and grandsons, still in full spate.

“Now, Cormac had three companies of warriors, who came to Cruachan; the first company was arrayed in mantles of green, with many-colored cloaks wound about them, and fastened with great silver brooches. They wore tunics woven of golden thread reaching down to their knees, trimmed with red-gold thread. Bright-handled swords they carried, aye, splendid swords with hand-guards of silver, and long shields. Long shields they bore on their left arms, and each man carried a broad, grey spearhead on a slender shaft in the other hand. ‘Is that Cormac, yonder?’ everyone asked, and Queen Maeve made answer ’ Indeed, it is not.’”

Each one of the adults carried a child.

“Anything to lighten the wagons and ease the burden for the teams,” Young Martin Murphy said gravely to John. “This sand is wicked cruel on their feet, and they must pull twice as hard.” He patted the neck of his lead ox as it plodded stoically forward.

“I think we will not know just how much we depend on them until we must carry a like burden ourselves. A good thing they ask so little of us. They certainly get very little in exchange for their great labors.”

No, thought John, only a kindly bullet, at the end of things, after drinking bad water, or miring in quicksand, or breaking a leg when a wagon tipped over on a steep hillside.

Allen and Sarah were quarrelling bitterly; John did not know what about, for they stopped when they saw him riding closer. Allen was red with sunburn and fury, Sarah’s voice sharp with irritation. “Then see if I care, when we get to California!” she snapped, “You may please yourself then, and so shall I!”

John sighed. It was one of those things it would be best to pretend he did not hear. He said, instead, “Captain Stephens says we will rest for three or four hours at noon, wherever we are when the sun is overhead and it is hottest. Allen, can your team manage for another couple of hours?

“Think so,” Allen grunted, and swabbed his forehead with his shirt-sleeve. Sarah said something under her breath and walked a little slower, letting their wagon run ahead while she dropped back to walk with Elizabeth and Isabella.

Foster pulled the handkerchief off his face and grinned hugely at John from where he trudged, sinking into the sand at every step, beside his laboring team. “I am telling them all about Truck-hee’s lovely river, and all that beautiful cool water and the green leaves overhead,” he said, cheerily as ever. “So help me, I think they are listening to every blessed word. It cheers me up no end to think on it, myself.”

“We’ll be there in another day, with luck,” John said, although to even hope of it in this soul-scorching heat, with the wheels biting deep into the hot sand with every step the oxen took, seemed like the veriest illusion.

Old Greenwood and his boys walked with Stephens, leading their ponies and pack string in the van, a little way ahead of Stephens’s own wagon, where the scout party’s own trail ran clear, a churning of the sand marked with shod hoofs, where they had gone and returned.

“How’re they doing back there, Doc?” Greenwood strode along, as strongly as any of the youngest men. “This is a rough road, no mistake.”

“Quite well, considering,” John answered. “Everyone’s teams are pulling strongly still, no one lagging behind. The oxen are terribly thirsty, though. Everyone is walking who can. Allen Montgomery and his wife are quarrelling. Old Hitchcock and Mrs. Patterson are not. The smallest children are tired and cross. Mary-Bee Murphy is riding her brother’s pony, at the insistence of her husband, father-in-law, and myself, strongly backed by a committee formed of all the other Murphys. Old Martin is well launched on an epic tale of war and slaughter in Old Ireland…and I think that I am slightly touched by the sun, or as Hitchcock would say it, “tetched.” This concludes the morning report, Captain Stephens.”

“You’re thirsty.” Stephens said. “Take a good long drink of water, Doc.”

“No, actually, I am not,” John insisted. “I am a doctor. I am fully competent to make my own diagnosis.”

But Greenwood passed him a full canteen and said,“Drink half.”

“We’re supposed to save as much for the teams as we can,” John protested, and Stephens replied, “Won’t do us any good, if you have sunstroke, Doc. Drink.”

“No one authorized you to practice medicine,” John grumbled, and Greenwood said, “They wouldn’t have the nerve. Drink.” John obeyed, finally, but didn’t admit that he felt only slightly better for it, afterward.

“We’ll rest in two hours,” Stephens said, squinting at the sun, nearly at zenith. “And start again, at sundown. We can loose the oxen, then. They’ll not dare leave the water and fodder we’ll put out for them.”

“At least that will lighten the wagons, somewhat,” John remarked, “of the extra water barrels, at least.”

“We might consider lightening them even more,” Stephens said, thoughtfully.

“We have used a fair portion of supplies,” Greenwood pointed out, “which has lightened the burden gradually, as we traveled.”

“But we have brought extra traps with us,” Stephens answered. ”Things for which we have little use or need. Good thing to consider, dumping what we can spare and moving on.”

“It may come to that,” John allowed, and after a moment, confessed, “I have a case of books in my wagon, and of little use are they, in this instance. It might spare my team the effort of hauling another sixty or a hundred pounds, if I dumped them out of the wagon this instant.”

“And so are the smaller children of little use, in this instance,” Greenwood replied crisply, “and yet their parents carry them, willingly. Your books are a promise of future fulfillment, just as the children are, Doctor. Do not consider for a moment leaving them. They are as much a part of what we are, and what we stand for, as the children, and being such are irreplaceable. No, cherish your books, Doctor Townsend. If you are that concerned about the burden, I will carry some of them myself.”

They crawled along, the constancy of creaky wagon wheels and jingling harness occasionally broken by an ox, bawling in misery, and the snap of a whip. The children suffered in silence, all but tiny Ellen Independence, wailing in a thin, constant complaint and could not be comforted. At last, Stephens said, “Here. We’ll rest here, until sundown.”

There was nothing in particular to distinguish that spot, only that the sun stood directly overhead; simply that it was as good as, or as bad as any other, and the bawling from thirsty team animals had become nearly constant. Like automatons, everyone worked to  spread out the fodder and carry wash-pans filled with water, around which the animals clustered so thick, shoving each other and packing so tightly one to another that it was impossible to refill them for some little time, once the desperate stock had drunk them dry.

The women spread out blankets on the sand, in the shade underneath the wagons, or under canvas stretched from the sides, for the heat in the little spaces inside was unbearably stifling. No one had much of an appetite for lukewarm meats and stale camp-bread and crackers, and almost everyone just laid themselves down to sleep.

“I am sorry, Dearest,” John set aside his plate. “I am only thirsty. I will force myself to eat, but I cannot confess to any enthusiasm for it.”

Moses had wolfed down his own portion, and now he said, “You should eat, Doctor John. But I’ll take that, if you aren’t hungry.”

“I do not see that anyone has much of an appetite but you.” Elizabeth took John’s untouched plate and tipped its contents onto Moses’s. “Well, perhaps when you have rested a while….”

“Only for a short while,” John replied. “Stephens has asked that we set a watch on our cattle; he fears some of them might be so crazed with thirst….”

“He is asking too much of you, Dearest,” Elizabeth said, indignantly. “You must have a care for everyone else but yourself, and I won’t have any more of it this day. You both have had no more than two hours’ sleep, but I slept long in the wagon this morning. I will sit and watch the silly cattle… and you will rest.”

She flung his plate back into the box with the other camp tin-ware, and took up John’s rifle, with a fierce and determined look. She sat down in a flurry of faded calico skirts, by where John lay, and lifted his head onto her lap. “I can see the animals from here, and I will know if you exert yourself in the slightest.”

Moses chewed his last mouthful of camp bread and remarked, “Really, Doctor John, I wouldn’t argue with her, when she’s this way.”

“I have no intention of arguing….” John answered, and then he dropped like a stone into deep, deep sleep, and remained there until the sun went down and the camp roused and prepared for the final desperate push.

Before harnessing the teams, they put out the last of the cut fodder and all but a barrel or two of water, thinking to save that last to dole out little by little. The oxen sounded querulous and miserable; even Foster’s team obeyed with reluctance. The coolness in the air that came with sundown and the short rest, though, had somewhat revived animals and humans alike. They marched on through the moonlit night with renewed energy. They were almost at the end of the desert torment, surely? Stout souls like Elizabeth and Old Hitchcock, Old Martin and Joseph Foster rallied the faltering and exhausted.

“It’s a marvelous river,” Elizabeth’s voice lilted. “Doctor Townsend told me it looks like a river that flows through the Garden of Eden….”

“How does he know about the Garden of Eden?” Eddie asked, and Nancy answered scornfully, “He just does, silly.”

“ And in the middle of battle, the great king Conchobar heard that the fight had gone against him three times from the north.” Old Martin was in fine form, under the golden moonlight, reciting for his grandchildren.

“Then Conchobar cried out to his guardsmen, the men of the Red Branch: “Hold ye here a while, ye men!” cried he, “even in the line of battle, that I may learn who has attacked us three times from the north!” Then vowed the men of his household: “We will hold, for the sky is above, and the earth underneath and the sea all round, and unless the heavens fall with showers of stars on the face of the world, or the blue-bordered ocean break over it, or the ground yawns open, we shall not move a thumb’s breadth backward from here, until the very day of doom and of life everlasting until you return to us!”

“Green trees and water, boys, green trees and sweet cold water.” Foster snapped his whip over the laboring team.

“We crossed a wicked desert like this, once before.” Old Hitchcock stumped along. “Four days at it, we were….”

They rested a little at midnight, with the oxen standing in harness. They were fractious and unhappy by then, since the water was nearly gone, and with having to pull hard against the deep sand.

“I think we are close to the top of the sand.” John consulted with Stephens and Greenwood, after a short scout ahead. His head ached abominably. “But with the moon gone down, I can’t say for sure. The teams are moving faster, though.”

“Aye, so they are. I think we must be on the far side of it, now.”

“Were it daylight, we could see the river from here,” John explained to Greenwood.

“Pass the word,” Stephens said,

“It’ll give everyone heart,” Greenwood said, “And tell them too, that when the oxen begin to smell the water, they might get a little jumpy. Remind all to be on their guard.”

“It takes a lot to set an ox to stampede,” John said, cautiously, and Greenwood answered, “But when they do, they stampede real bad.”

“Especially bad if they’re still hitched.” Stephens added, grimly.

Knowing that they were close to the river, though, revived everyone’s flagging energies, and at first everyone was glad of the oxen walking faster, pulling with more energy than the plodding lethargy of earlier. But the crackle of whips and irritated shouts from the drivers filled the night.

Ugly Grey began fretting at the bit, as John did a circuit of the march; yes, the animals were fractious, barely obedient to their drivers, maddened beyond all endurance by the smell of water. One of Foster’s oxen began to bellow and toss its horns, and the frantic contagion leaped like a wildfire, a crash from within a wagon, and a woman screaming, oxen bellowing, and a storm of dust rising up.

“We’re losing them, Captain!” John shouted, and Stephens stood in his stirrups and cupped his hands.

“Circle the wagons, circle them now, and let the oxen go! Un-harness them and let them go!”

The half-dozen loose cattle pounded by, throwing up great gobbets of sand, swiftly followed by two boys on horseback. John thought one of them might be Moses, on Beau. The column split and circled in a storm of sand, cursing, and the bellowing of unhappy oxen.

“Let them go, let them go!” he circled the camp, waving his hat. “Un-harness and let them run, before they do any damage!”

In the maelstrom, he caught a brief sight of John Flomboy, clinging to the neck of one of Stephens’s frantic animals, shouting and beating it about the head with his whip-handle, and Bernard and Johnny Murphy struggling to free the yoke from another. One of old Hitchcock’s mules flashed by, with its pack nearly under its belly. Two, three, four loose animals charged through the camp, maddened beyond any control, and somewhere a child screaming piteously. That was Mary Murphy in her father’s perilously rocking wagon, and James shouting to her to stay still, stay where she was.

Dog was barking somewhere in the middle of it, a deep ringing bay, like a very hellhound. The terrible cracking sound of rending wood—oh, god, was one of the wagons going down? More loose animals plunged away, two of them still yoked together. Old Martin’s wagon stood free, all the animals away, and Young Martin and Mary-Bee huddled underneath it with the boys; at his own wagon, Elizabeth and Francis struggled valiantly to free the last yoke. More loose oxen, one with a broken leg dangling free and horrible, chasing after its fellows, and a rider-less horse, reins and stirrups dangling loose.

Ugly Grey snorted and reared, jibbing sideways as a handful of loosened oxen bore down like phantoms out of the dust, but they were there and then gone, and left silence settling with the dust after them. His head pounded; he felt sick, sawing at Ugly Grey’s bit, battling for control of his frantic horse.

He caught sight of  Elizabeth, sheltering under his wagon, cast up like some kind of bizarre shipwreck, askew in a tumbled sea of sand, but hoofbeats pounded out of the dark at his side, and Stephens shouted, “We need to ride hard, Doc!”

“Liz!” he shouted to her. “We’ll be back when we can!”

She came out from the wagon, calling, “Just get them back!”

“Well, we sure as hell ain’t going anywhere, less’n we do!” Stephens grunted, and they were away in the dark, following the stampede trail, even in starlight as broad and unmistakable as a city road. They passed a couple of the teamsters on foot, Old Martin with John Sullivan and the Martin brothers.

“Go on w’you!” Old Martin shouted, “We’ll catch up!”

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“Oh, that was something frightening… not that they nearly stampeded, that all happened so fast, Sadie and Nancy and Ma and me barely had time to be frightened. It was sitting under the wagons in the desert all alone, waiting for the men and Captain Stephens to come back. All the men had run after the cattle, or taken their horses and left us. Oliver and Samuel and Johnny had gone after the cattle, too, and there we were, all the women and little children, sitting under the wagons in the dark, with just a little water.

Ma had her old dragoon pistol, and she spread out a blanket for us and told us to sleep. Mrs. Miller with her baby, and Mrs. Murphy, who was going to have a baby, they sat under the next wagon with all their children, and the baby crying all that while. We were all so thirsty…and then the sun came up, and we could see a cloud of dust, and it was the men coming back, driving the herd ahead of them. Such a welcome sight as I’ll never forget! The oxen had all drunk as deep as they wished and eaten all they wanted… but five or six ran off, and we never found them again, and one of Miller’s had panicked in harness and manage to break its leg.

They brought us canteens of fresh, cold water, and it tasted so fine! We hitched up and carried on toward the river, which was as welcome to us, and seemed every bit as beautiful, as Mrs. Townsend had promised: a river out of the Garden of Eden, with lush green grass everywhere, and beautiful trees, golden trees on the hills all around, and good hunting. Best of all, the river came out of the west, down out of the mountains, like Chief Truckee said, and we followed it until we came to a beautiful meadow…but the canyon walls closed in, and one morning we woke up, and there was snow all over the ground….

From Dr. Townsend’s diary:
“Third of October, 1844, encamped in the desert sinks by Mary’s River, in considerable perturbation about the direction of our continued journey. We are resting ourselves and our animals, repairing the wagons, and re-provisioning ourselves, whilst some of us explore nearby. This morning came to our camp by chance, an old Indian….”

Toward dawn, a mist rose up from the marshes, burning off as the sun rose, iridescent and pearly, among the voices of waterfowl and frogs, and now the rattle of iron skillets and spoons over the fires, fires that in the pallid early morning light burned with a pale primrose flame. John leaned back in his accustomed seat, resting his back against a wagon wheel, and reflected on how the hardships of this journey made one so appreciative of small innocent pleasures like a cup of good coffee and hot bread baked over a fire.

“Oh, the Lord save us all, just like clockworks,” Sarah remarked, in resigned exasperation, “Here’s another one of them. We might as well set another plate every day!”

“What?… Oh, an Indian.” Elizabeth straightened from bending over the Dutch oven, and John glanced down, reassuring himself that he had set his rifle within close reach, leaning against the wheel and easy to hand. “Sarah, my dear, I do not think he is a beggar…look, he just walked by Murphy’s campfire.”

“No, you are right, he doesn’t look as if he wants a handout,” John agreed.

The Indian appeared to be immensely aged and, although that might have been due to the hardships of life, without a spare ounce of flesh on him. He was all but naked, seamed and scarred and burnt brown, but bore himself with enormous dignity and assurance; he was, John felt instantly, a person of consequence.

The old Indian strolled with leisurely purpose through the camp, observing it all with mild interest, as if he were paying a formal call on new neighbors.  He also carried no weapons other than a short knife and a small bundle slung over his shoulder, and John blinked in astonishment, as the Indian passed by their campfire and their eyes met; did the old man nod his head to him, as a white man would in passing by a slight acquaintance on the street? No, the old man was not a supplicant; they watched him walk by the Pattersons’ wagon, and by this time every eye in camp was on him, and it was clear where he was going.

Greenwood and his sons had built a small campfire just beyond. Old Hitchcock commonly joined them in the mornings. It seemed like some kind of signal passed among the three old men—Greenwood, Hitchcock, and the mysteriously confident old Indian. As John watched, Old Hitchcock creakily stood up and unrolled a blanket, spreading it flat upon the ground with the hospitable gesture of a grand host, inviting an esteemed visitor into the parlor. The old Indian settled onto it unhurriedly, cross-legged on the ground. Old Hitchcock sat, and Greenwood too, after gesturing to Britt. Britt left off saddling his pony and came to the Townsend’s fire.

“Pa, he says for you to come. Bring some bread. Enough for five. The Old One is a chief, he thinks. I am fetching the Captain. Pa says for him to be there as well.”

John wiped his mouth. Any man alive could have told the old Indian was a leader of no small consequence, just from his very bearing and assurance. Elizabeth handed him the bread, five slices wrapped in a clean towel on a tin plate, and he joined the three old men, sitting on the blanket, in the pearly light of a desert sunrise. Stephens also arrived, carrying a couple of tin camp mugs, into which Greenwood poured coffee, and passed a mug to their visitor. He tasted it, and could not entirely hide a dislike of it, but John, in obedience to Old Greenwood’s nod, handed out a piece of Sarah’s good camp-bread to all of them, and the old Indian ate more than just a courtesy bite…no, he ate with evident good enjoyment, and they ate of their own, while John and Stephens followed Hitchcock’s and Greenwood’s cue, and waited with as much tranquility as they could pretend to.

Hitchcock and Greenwood were much better at this than the younger men. It seemed as if there was all the time in the world, all the time in the world to get to the purpose of this, the purpose for which all their lives hung in a balance. And to John, watching intently, it seemed that he could see and understand the gestures and expressions as plainly as if they were written in one of the books in his small library.

The old Indian finished his morsel of bread, seeming to relish it, and made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the whole camp, the wagons and the penned horses, the campfires with the women and children gathered around them.

Who are you, what are you doing here? What is it that you want?

Old Hitchcock made a walking gesture with his fingers and pointed at the distant mountains; in a way, John realized, he was as good with his hands as Old Martin was with his voice, a master musician, conveying acres of meaning with a minimum of voice and motion.

We are here, and just traveling through, we want to go over there, but…

He watched as if mesmerized, and the old Indian did also, eyes opaque with mild puzzlement as Old Hitchcock gathered up a double handful of sand, and then another, pouring it out onto the middle of the blanket between them. He flattened the mound of sand, and in part of it, traced the outline of the river and the marsh. He stood a few blades of green grass in it, to indicate the marsh itself.

“Your canteen, Caleb,” he asked, then, and when Greenwood silently handed it to him, he uncorked it and poured a little dribble of water to indicate the river, and a pool of it for the marsh. Looking at the Indian’s face, Hitchcock pointed at his little model, and made another of those sweeping gestures; the camp, the marsh, and the river to the east. Here… this is the place were we are.

The old Indian nodded gravely. I understand.

Then Hitchcock took another double handful of sand, but instead of pouring it out all at once in a heap, he dribbled it in a long, narrow line to one side of the sand model of the sink marshes. He modeled it into a series of mounds, a mountain range in miniature, took up another handful, and did the same again. He passed his hand over the little peaks of sand and pointed at the far distant blue range to the west, then made that walking-fingers gesture, along the near side of his modeled range.

These are the mountains. We want to cross over them, but there is no path.

Comprehension bloomed, and John thought the old Indian might have come close to smiling. He looked at the sand ranges, thoughtfully, then reached out with one hand and flattened the middle. He carefully re-molded the sand peaks, with a gap between them, and took Greenwood’s canteen, just as Hitchcock had done, and traced a little dribble of water running through it. Then he poured a few drops in the middle of the space between the sand range, and the marsh, re-corked the bottle, and levelly met their gaze. There is a river in the mountains. There. And a spring in the desert, halfway there.

Hitchcock pointed at the sun and traced its path across the sky, and then moved his hand from the damp patch of sand, indicating the marsh, to the little sand range. How many days?

The old Indian held up two fingers. Two days’ journey.
Hitchcock pointed first at Stephens, then at John himself, finally at the old Indian, and gestured at the mountains. Will you show them?

A brief, almost imperceptible nod of assent, and Stephens said, “Have your boys get him a horse. Doc, you and I ride.”

“We’d best take one more… just for safety.”

“Who’s up next on the rota for out-riding?”

“Foster.”

“Good. He’s one of the better shots.”

It took a moment to fathom that remark, and John looked at Stephens, horrified. “He’s not a hostage…surely you are not thinking of shooting him, after he shows us this river, or if his people try to attack ours!”

“No… the Chief here is mebbe what passes for an honest man, in these parts, and I’d as soon he was safe with us.” Stephens scratched his jaw, thoughtfully. “Jus’ wish I knew why he was being so helpful to strangers, that’s all.”

“Easy enough,” Greenwood answered, “Either he is a Good Samaritan… or his folk wish we would just move on down the road a little way, and out of their lands. Stop spoiling their hunting, and distracting their young bucks.”

“Whichever it is, it’s to our advantage,” Hitchcock said, “I’d not go looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

“If we ain’t back in five days, don’t send any lookin’ for us.” Stephens got to his feet and gave John a hand up,

“You two and Murphy take everyone south, follow Chiles’s tracks, and do the best you can. Doc, you and I best saddle up now and take us plenty of water.”

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“So Cap’n Stephens and Doctor Townsend and Mr. Foster all rode out into the desert, following that old Indian. Cap’n Stephens had him a big old dog, big as a pony she was, and she liked to follow him ever’where, but as they left camp, he snapped his fingers at her, told her to “stay,” and she sat down right on that spot, watching after them ‘til they was no more’n little dots out in that desert. And she sat there, looking after the direction they went, didn’t move from that spot, didn’t eat, didn’t hardly sleep none, just looking after the direction they went, making a little whine, deep in her throat.

Ma, she got to worrying, sent my sister Nancy with a basin of water and some scraps from dinner for Cap’n Stephens’s dog; and Nancy said the dog drank a little, but didn’t eat none. Nancy said she took her by the collar, tried to bring her into camp from that spot, but the dog pulled away, an’ showed her teeth, even growled a little, which she never done to any of us, and finally Ma said, just leave her alone. Three days Cap’n Stephens’s dog sat there, waiting for them to come back.”

John went to his wagon, gathered up extra canteens, and took the bundle of food and supplies that Sarah, ever competent and foresighted, had assembled for him. Elizabeth said, “Dearest, do you want to take your journal with you?”

“No.” John leaned down and kissed her from horseback. “I shall make a long entry upon our return.”

Her voice quavered. “Do you trust this man… this wild Indian…who has promised to guide you to the river?”

“Aye, yes, I do.” John’s instinct in judging men—and women, too, come to think on it —had almost never played him wrong. He had long learned to trust that small, cool judgment, that judgment that had told him to trust Stephens, Murphy, and Old Hitchcock and the others, the same judgment that warned him off Thorp, all those long months ago at the emigrant campground outside Kanesville.

The same judgment that had told him he should press his suit to marry Elizabeth, on that long-ago morning in Stark County, when he went to call on a well-to-do merchant’s family and first laid eyes on her, playing the parlor piano.

”Don’t fret, Liz. Stephens is the most sensible man I know. We aren’t in any danger.” Or, as he silently added to himself, “any more than we are already.”

“I dislike being left alone.” Elizabeth handed up another filled canteen.

“You aren’t alone.” John looped the strap of it around his saddle horn, where it hung with three more against Ugly Grey’s withers. “You have Moses to look after, and Sarah Montgomery, and Mrs. Patterson to keep you company….”

“You know what I mean.”

“Dearest Liz, I’ll be back in four days, I promise from my heart.”

“I know.” But she couldn’t keep the fear and bewilderment out of her eyes, any more than Dog could when Stephens snapped his fingers and bade her sit and stay, as they rode away, into the desert, and camp and dog grew small in the distance behind them.

The sun burned down pitilessly from a harsh blue sky, baking the ground underneath. Their horses’ hooves scuffed up quantities of fine, bitter-tasting alkali dust. John tied a large calico handkerchief over his nose and the lower part of his face, to try and keep from breathing it. Foster had already done so, more to shield his sunburned and peeling face from any more exposure than to prevent breathing dust. They looked, John decided, like the veriest desperados. The old Indian led at a cracking pace, seeming impervious to the temperature and the dust. Once or twice, when their horses started to flag, he looked over his shoulder and seemed to be encouraging them,

“Truck-hee, truck-hee” he kept saying. “Truck-hee.”

“What does that mean, do you think?” Foster asked, when they halted at midmorning to pour out a little water for the horses, and pass around a canteen for themselves.

“Could it be his name, mebbe?” Stephens ventured.

“Hell of a thing, to have a guide you can’t talk to.” John dampened his handkerchief, and tied it over his face again.

“Me, I’d learn that hand-talking language from Old Man Hitchcock,” Foster remarked, “Or, I would if I were going to do this trip ever again. Oncet I get to Californy and get me a nice little farm, with a trout stream nearby, I ain’t gonna set foot off it. Or sleep on the ground ever again, either. Ma Foster’s little boy Joseph has done about all the traveling he is ever gonna do.”

“But not today, he hasn’t,” Stephens replied, “Let’s ride, gentlemen.Our guide wants us to move on.”

The old Indian watched them, seemingly with a mix of concern and impatience.

Foster waved reassuringly and said, “Truck-hee, truck-hee.” And the old man looked mollified, even a little pleased. Foster made an aside to John: “Well, at least now we know it ain’t something rude in his lingo.”

On and on, across the baking and featureless ground, the sun blazing a slow arc over their heads, their path chosen by their tireless guide toward the mountains,  and pitiless heat drying the moisture from their mouths, and clothing. Mirages like quicksilver pools danced and shimmered on the horizon. They spoke little and drove their horses at as fast a pace as they dared.

Very late in the afternoon, they came upon the springs, heralded by a stench of sulfur. In the middle of a barren desert valley, a number of pools of water steamed and bubbled away like a pot on the boil. The biggest of them spurted like a great stinking fountain, a good few feet into the dry air.  Another was elevated in a pyramid-shaped wall of reddish clay to the height of a man, and vented steam with an ominous rumbling sound, and yet another overflowed a shallow basin, a lively trickle as white as milk.

They sat on their horses for some moments, marveling at the sight, until John remarked, “In my medical opinion, Foster, it would do marvels for your health if you would take the waters. The ancient Romans thought very highly of the medicinal properties of natural hot springs such as this and built bathing pools and temples around them. Many such places remain popular today amongst the quality and nobility of Europe.”

“No foolin’, Doc?” Foster pulled his kerchief off his face. “Certainly stinks enough to be good for what ails you.”

“Alas, this spring is a little short of the amenities,” John admitted. “No assembly rooms, no gardens, no medicinal bathing pools… nothing that makes a visit to such a spa so enticing a prospect.”

“I reckon we’ll survive.” Stephens swung down from the saddle and unshipped his small hatchet. “We’ll have to dig a channel, run off some of this, and let it stand until it’s cool enough for the horses.”

“Truck-hee, truck-hee,” said the old Indian. He slid down off Greenwood’s pony like an otter slipping from creek bank to water. Stephens was already hacking out a small channel in the bank of the biggest pool.

“I guess this is where we camp tonight.” John unsaddled Ugly Grey and piled the empty canteens in a heap. He still had one half-full of water. Even lukewarm and straight from the river-sink, it no doubt tasted better than the stuff from the hot springs.

“We’ll have to cut fodder for the teams,” Stephens remarked thoughtfully. “There’s nothing here but mud.”

“And load up water in everything that don’t leak,” Foster added. “How long is it? Two days, didn’t Chief Truck-hee tell us?”

“Two days, maybe less.” John answered, thoughtfully. “Depends, too, on how fast you are moving. I think we made about fifteen miles today, moving faster than a man on foot, or following a team and wagon.”

“Ain’t no wood, either.” Foster un-strapped his bedroll. “Say, that patch of sand here, or that patch of sand over there…so many nice patches of sand to choose from.”

“Long as you ain’t settled on the patch with an ant nest in it.” Stephens cracked a smile.

“I like a lively time in bed as well as the next man, but that don’t include a passel of vermin.” Foster shook his head.

“My good man, cast no such vile aspersions on St. Joseph’s finer lodging houses,” John said. “I have it on good authority that the vermin in the beds there provide quite the liveliest of nights, and at no additional expense.”

“Speaking of lively nights,” Foster lowered his voice slightly, “shall we draw straws on keeping a watch during the night? On the horses and Chief Truck-hee?”

“I’ll take the first watch, after we eat. Just as well there ain’t no wood, I wouldn’t want to build a fire anyways.”

“What about when we come back with the wagons?” John asked. “We can bring along wood….”

“No,” Stephens shook his head. “We’ll not set up a camp…. I’ll talk it over with Greenwood, but it might be best to just haul straight on through. Start at sundown and just carry on.”

“I’d agree on that,”

John brought out his own supplies: Sarah and Elizabeth had supplied him with dried meat, some tack, and dried fruit, and the rest of the morning’s bread baking. Chief Truck-hee’s little bundle seemed to be a little dried meat wrapped in a tattered blanket. John offered him some bread, and he took a little of it, and then wrapped himself in the blanket and hollowed a place for himself in the sand. The old man dropped off to sleep as simply and rapidly as a cat curled up in a familiar place, and John envied him that ability profoundly. He, like Foster, did not look forward to sleeping on the ground.

By then the pool of water run off from the hot spring was cool enough for the horses to drink, although they did not seem to relish it in the least. They lowered the empty canteens by their straps into the least-muddy of the springs and let the water run gurgling into them until they were filled, heavy and dripping and radiating heat.

“Might keep us as warm as a fire would,” Foster ventured. “Still and all, I wish he had brought along fodder for the horses today.”

“We’ll get an early start, after we’ve had some sleep,” Stephens said. “Doc, I’ll wake you in three hours, then you wake Foster in three. Foster, when your three hours is up, wake us all, and we’ll head out.”

Perhaps he was getting used to the hardships of the trail, for it seemed that he lay for only a few minutes, looking up at the stars; huge they were, hanging so close above him that it seemed as if he could reach up and pluck one from the sky as easily as he could pick a rose from an arbor just over his head. And the next moment, Stephens gently shook his shoulder, and he was reaching for his rifle before he was entirely awake.

“You awake, Doc?”

“I am now. Wish I had some coffee, Captain.”

Stephens’s teeth gleamed in the faint starlight as he handed John one of his canteens. “It ain’t real hot, Doc, but it is coffee. I emptied a whole pot into this here canteen this morning, and it’s been soaking in that there hot spring since sundown. I thought we might have need to stay awake.”

John drank gratefully—yes, coffee, hot and strong, banishing sleep, and one of the few comforts on this long scout.

“Thank you, Captain. This reminds me of the main reason I backed you for the captaincy, back in Kanesville: You think of everything, days before the rest of us even get around to considering the possibilities.”

“I try, Doc.” Stephens shrugged; John thought he might be embarrassed by such off-hand praise.

“Other men try, Captain… you do, without any fuss about it. When I want to give myself nightmares, I think of what might have happened to us if Thorp had been elected captain at the first.”

“No need. We’d have made our own way before very long.”

“Perhaps.” John pulled his blanket around him against the chill of a desert night.

“Still… we gained some days on the trail when the traveling was easy, when we might have thought to take our ease. That was your doing, gaining us a little more time before the snow sets in.”

“We’ll need those days now, I think,” Stephens replied, and looked to where Orion would be striding up over the horizon. “Good night, Doc.”

“Good night, Captain Stephens.” John said, and Stephens pulled his own blanket around himself, and as swiftly as Chief Truck-hee had dropped into sleep was himself gone in slumber.

The horses fidgeted at the end of their pickets, and the stars overhead blazed in midnight glory. Foster was a faintly snoring bundle, but Truck-hee stirred and rolled over under his ragged bit of blanket. His eyes gleamed in the faint starlight for a moment, and John thought he seemed a bit surprised to see anyone still wakeful.

“Truck-hee, Chief, truck-hee,” John said soothingly, and it seemed that the old man smiled a little in the starlight,

“Truck-hee,” he replied, and the gleam winked out, and he was another blanket-covered bundle, snoring faintly under the glorious, ever-wheeling stars.

Three hours later, John shook Foster’s shoulder and handed him the canteen of coffee, newly heated in the hot spring.

“Doctor, you are a gentleman and a scholar.” Foster uncorked the canteen and gratefully swigged down sufficient of the contents to render him awake and alert, re-corking it with a gasp, “And a damn-fine judge of horse-flesh. I am in your debt, always.”

“It was Stephens who brought the coffee,” John pointed out, and Foster took another swig,

“A gentleman too, and a very considerate one, and I am in his debt as well. How is Chief Truck-hee?”

“Sleeping the sleep of the blameless,” replied John, and he lay down and pulled his blanket around himself, but it was in fact Chief Truck-hee who wakened him by shaking his foot, and Foster was holding the canteen of coffee—nearly drained, by the weight and gurgling sound of it when he tipped back for a deep swig of the contents, and saying,

“Morning, Doc… I think Chief Truck-hee wants us to saddle up and ride.”

“Better to travel in the cool of the day.” Stephens had already rolled up his blankets and saddled his pony. It was still dark, but the sky in the east was lightening somewhat, and the stars there looked pallid.

A few minutes to water the horses from slightly cooler water, drawn off the spring during the night, and they were mounted and away, with no temptation to linger at the springs. The sooner they found Chief Truck-hee’s river, the sooner they could bring the wagons over this last stretch of desert and be done with it. They urged the horses to a trot, and made good time in the coolness before the sun rose at their backs and the temperature soared until it seemed the ground shimmered like the top of a stove.

“I thought yesterday was bad,” Foster said, when they paused to rest and water the horses around mid-day, “But this beats all.” He poured a little water into his handkerchief and wrung it out over his head, so the water dripped down over his face. He passed the canteen to Chief Truck-hee, who drank sparingly from it.

“Truck-hee, truck-hee,” he said, as usual, and waved an arm toward the west.

“The oxen will have a hell of time in this,” Stephens’s pony stood with head drooping, hoof-deep in fine, shifting sand. They seemed to be going up the flank of a long, gradually sloping ridge. They had been so for hours, never quite seeming to reach the crest of it.

“I don’t know what Greenwood will advise.” John took the canteen from Chief Truck-hee. The water in it was as warm as blood and tasted vile, only temporarily soothing his heat-cracked lips. “But I agree with you, Stephens…we’ll be better off attempting passage of this desert at night. Anything to alleviate the strain on the teams.”

“Will we be able to find our own tracks, in the dark?” Foster asked, “I’d not want to become lost in this hell on earth and go in circles all the night.”

“We’ll steer by the stars, Foster, as sailors do,” John said. “Stephens and I have been keeping note of the North Star, relative to us…just to make sure we were not being led in circles ourselves, this morning.”

“By gum,” Foster exclaimed in admiration, “I’d have never thought to do that! I was just trusting the Chief here and thinking we would just follow our tracks back to camp.”

“Always best to think on other plans,” Stephens took the canteen from John and drank deeply of the distasteful stuff.

“Reckon that’s why you’re the captain, then,” Foster said and took back his canteen. “Any idee on how much farther?”

Stephens squinted at the sun, far overhead. “’Bout noon now, I’d say. Chief did say it was two days from the marsh. We made good time; I’d guess another three-four hours; sundown, at the latest.”

“Truck-hee, truck-hee,” said the Chief, making a waving motion toward the west.”

“Wish’t I knew what that means,” Foster mused.

“In this case, probably something like ‘gentlemen, let’s meander a little farther along this invitingly scenic trail,’” John answered, wryly.

“His lingo sure packs a lot o’ words into a little, don’t it, Doc?”

“You’ve never studied Latin, Foster.”

“Can’t say I ever had the pleasure.”

John laughed, and pressed his heels into Ugly Grey’s sides. “Then I shall while away the next part of this journey conjugating Latin verbs for you, Foster.”

“Hey, that ain’t something illegal, is it?”

“No, but there are many schoolboys who would disagree in the strongest possible terms.”

“Hell, listen to the Doc talk long enough, Foster, you’ll be as eddicated as he is,”

Stephens looked over his shoulder as John filled his lungs and began declaiming to the desert, “Amo… I love; amare…to love;  amavi…I have loved; amatus…loved…. Oh, damnation, I have forgotten what comes next.”

“Don’t worry about it, Doc. I figure I’m already as eddicated as I need to be.” Foster sounded cheery as always, probably smiling broadly under the sodden neckerchief tied around his face.

In mid-afternoon, the sun slanting about halfway down the sky in front of them, they finally topped the long, shallow ridge and were able to look down the other side—a vast and featureless sweep of sand, as far as the eye could see…but just on the very edge, right on the horizon, a thin scribble of green lay across the desert, with dun-colored hills beginning to mound up toward the blue mountains beyond.

“Truck-hee.” The chief waved an arm toward it, and John murmured, “Truck-hee indeed. Gentlemen, I believe there is our river, and the key to getting over the mountains.”

“What are we waiting for, then?” Foster made as if to spur his horse, and Stephens said, “Easy does it—t’s a good few miles off.”

But they could see that thin, random line of green, and it heartened them to have their destination so clearly in view, incrementally becoming larger and more distinct, a line of green trees, the poplar trees that meant water, and plenty of it. Their horses became restive and energetic, almost dancing with impatience; they could smell water, sense the moisture in the air, and the scent of lush green pastures.

Soon John could smell it also, and he and the others allowed the horses to trot and then canter. The sand and dust rose in a great plume behind them, and then their hooves drummed on firmer ground. They shot across a thin strip of pasturage, and reined them in on the gravelly bank, half-crazed with thirst and the glory and richness of it all, water, sweet water with green rushes growing all around, and yellow and green poplar leaves rustling and whispering overhead.

He leaped down and let Ugly Grey plunge into the river, up to his knees in it, while he lowered his head and drank in great gulps of water. Stephens’s pony and the others waded in, and John knelt on the bank and dipped his hat into it, pouring great scoop of fresh water over himself. Foster kicked out of his boots, and waded in with the horses, stretching out his arms and whooping like a madman before falling flat into it with a mighty splash.

John poured another hatful of water on himself and thought how beautiful this place looked, after that desert. The afternoon sun lay golden in this grove, sifting through the leaves, and a little breeze rustled the tall clumps of rushes. Great dragonflies and other insects hovered above the water, and the murmur of water melded with the sounds of leaves and insects into one tranquil symphony.

Chief Truck-hee stood quietly on the bank, holding the reins of Greenwood’s pony, watching them for a moment with what John read on his face as great satisfaction, and even a bit of gentle amusement.

“Truck-hee,” he remarked one last time and then handed the reins to John, settled his blanket bundle on his shoulder, and padded away along the riverbank, vanishing like a wilderness sprite among the rushes and dusty golden bars of sunlight slipping down through the trees.

“Let him go.” Stephens halted John with a hand on his shoulder, even though John had no intention of stopping the old man, “He kept his end of the bargain.”

“I’d still like to know,” Foster sat up in the water and retrieved his hat, “if this river has a name,”

“It does now,” John said. “I’d name it after the old man and call it Truck-hee’s River.”

“Truckee?” Stephens shrugged. “Have to call it something, I guess. We’ll camp here, and head back in the morning.”

“It purely is a beautiful place.” Foster looked around, appreciatively. “You sure was right about taking the waters, Doc… I feel better already.”

From Dr. Townsend’s Diary:

“Sixteenth of August, 1844 Ft. Hall, upon the Oregon Trail. We depart upon the morrow from here and within a few days turn southward and aside from the established road. The Oregon company has caught up to us whilst we were encamped here. Mr. Case and the others who had accompanied us since Ft. Laramie upon the Sweetwater remain wholly resolved upon Oregon and part with many expressions of sorrow and the most sincere good wishes for our successful translation to California.

Captain Grant, the factor of the establishment of Ft. Hall  has given us information concerning a party and the trail that we are resolved to embark upon, to whit: A small company guided by an old comrade of Mr. Hitchcock’s named Jos. Walker and captained by a Mr. Chiles departed intent on California at about this time last year. Capt. Grant has no intelligence upon the happy conclusion of their journey, save only that their wagons had planned to depart from the trail at the Raft River crossing, and strike out into the desert, following the route of Mary’s River into the desert sink, and to essay a crossing of the mountain barrier beyond. Aside from that, we know as little as we did three months ago….

Some of our party, fearing their supplies may run short, were desirous of replenishing them here but were utterly dismayed at the cost of doing so: flour at one dollar a pound, et cetera. We were able to trade for a little stock of dried meat and consider that our spare oxen constitute a food reserve sufficient for our needs. Captain Stephens has required of me to compile a complete listing of our party, with their condition and property, a copy of which being left with Captain Grant against some kind of dreadful misfortune falling upon us. The greater portion being of the Murphy family or connections thereof, I begin with them:

Martin Murphy, senior; widower and farmer by trade, accompanied by those of his family yet unmarried: Daniel, Bernard, Helen, and Johnny, and a hired man, Edmund Bray.

John had come to like the Murphy paterfamilias; prosperity and material success had not dulled the sharp, ambitious edge that the old man must have had in him since migrating from his poor, green island so many years ago. And Old Martin was shrewd enough about his own limits, unlike many another self-made man. He placed much the same degree of confidence in Stephens that John himself did. John had treated him for a touch of bursitis, and aside from some rheumatism in his hands, which did not prevent him from playing the penny-whistle for the amusement of his grandchildren, he was as fit as any of his sons. Johnny, the youngest of them, had been ill for many days as they had traveled along the Loup River, from the same fever that had killed Vance, but he had since recovered his youthful energy and vigor.

Martin Murphy, Junior, a farmer by trade; with him his wife, Mary, and four sons, aged from twelve to three years: James, Martin, Patrick, and Bernard, and a hired man, Vincent Calvin. Mrs. Murphy is in a delicate condition, expecting to be delivered of another child approximate to our arrival in California.

“I am praying to the Blessed Virgin that this one is a girl!” Mary-Bee Murphy had told him, laughing ruefully, as she rested her hands on her pregnant belly. “Another boy like the rest would have me tearing out my hair. I’d never survive running after five of them all the day, truly I wouldn’t.”

James Murphy, likewise a farmer by trade, wife Annie, and daughter Mary, and hired man, Matthew Harbin.

John had made a physic for Matthew Harbin’s piles and had treated him with mustard poultices for a long graze across his arm that had gone septic, and been called to attend little Mary, usually by Jamie, who doted on his only child.

James Miller, a carpenter by trade, wife Mary (daughter to Martin Murphy Sr.), son William and daughters Frances, Teresa, and Ellen; the youngest being an infant of ten weeks and delivered whilst on this journey.

John smiled to think of tiny Ellen Independence, and Mary Miller’s exhausted but triumphant face. Like her father, like the other Murphys, they had some small prosperity on this earth but counted a larger part of their riches in their children. Besides attending that birth, John had also doctored James’s left hand; back on the Elkhorn crossing, as they were disassembling wagons for their makeshift ferry, James had broken two fingers, caught between a wheel and the axle.

Patrick Martin, farmer, a widower with two grown sons, Dennis and Patrick.

That very day, Patrick had gotten into a long-anticipated fight with one of the factor’s men; leave it to him to find the only Englishmen within a thousand square miles and get into a fight with one of them straightaway. He had come to John to be treated for split knuckles on his right hand.

“Broke it on the jaw of an arrogant Englishman, so I did!” he had announced triumphantly.  John reckoned they would be fortunate to leave Ft. Hall without Patrick getting into any more fights with the Englishmen there.

John Sullivan, farmer, with his grown sister, Mary, and two younger brothers, Michael and Robert, aged about eleven and fourteen. The Sullivans were a distant family connection to the Murphys: In his early twenties, John Sullivan seemed oddly older, a sober and responsible youth, having the charge of his orphaned younger brothers, and vexed by the flirtatious ways of his sister, who, along with Helen Murphy was one of the only two marriageable girls in the party and consequently much admired by the younger unmarried men. Mary Sullivan had gone to Isabella for some unspecified female ailment: it probably wasn’t serious, for Isabella would have consulted with John if it had been, instead of just mentioning it to him, but the poor girl blushed as red as a beet when John asked after her health, offhandedly.

Robert had fallen, climbing down from their moving wagon, early on, and broken his collarbone, and his younger brother had gouged his hand on a sharp branch while gathering firewood. Their stores of supplies were the lowest of all in the party, a matter of guarded concern for Martin Murphy, who had taken his worries to John when there was nothing at Fort Hall in the way of supplies.

Allen Montgomery, a gunsmith by trade, wife Sarah.

Funny that John Sullivan could appear to be grave, sober, and reliable while barely twenty, and Allen, much his senior in years, conducted himself generally as a careless and irresponsible youth. As for the Montgomerys’ health, Sarah had burnt her hands several times on hot kettles over the cook fire and once had asked after a physic that would make her courses more regular, and then hastily said, no, there was nothing the matter, when he had asked with concern if she had been very much delayed in them. “No, only a few days.”

Mrs. Samuel Patterson, with children Oliver, Samuel, Johnnie, Nancy, Edward, and Sarah, aged from seventeen to three years of age.

Aside from young Eddie’s continuing adventures, to which he had added being roundly sick from drinking too much water from Soda Spring, the Pattersons otherwise had little need of John’s doctoring, Isabella being a fair hand at that herself, with her box of medicinal salts and herbs. In the early days on the trail, Oliver’s shoes had raised great blisters on his heels, which had become infected, and Sadie had been bitten on the wrist by some kind of insect that raised a great red welt.

Otherwise, Isabella and the older boys managed the days of travel very well. John did fear that the Pattersons, like the Sullivans, might run low on supplies if the journey lasted much longer than another three or four months. Watching Oliver, Samuel, and John wolf down their evening meals, John wondered nightly if Isabella underestimated the ravenous appetites of three boys who were doing men’s work.

Elisha Stephens, blacksmith and elected captain. Hired man, John Flomboy.

Flomboy drove Stephens’s team, while Stephens himself ranged on horseback with the advance party. John had not been called to treat either of them for illness or injury, although Dog once had torn the pads of her right forepaw on a sharp rock and left a long trail of bloody footprints in the dust behind Stephens’s wagon until Oliver Patterson, driving just behind, took notice and called for John. John inked his pen, and wrote carefully;

“I am proud to call him my friend, and can think of no one better fitted to lead us unto the wilderness, even with his distinct oddities of character.”

Joseph Foster, farmer and wheelwright by trade, hired man, Oliver Magnent.

Joseph Foster, still chipper and cheery, trying his luck with his fishing pole every river they came to. His hired man, Oliver Magnent, was another French-Canadian like John’s driver, Francis Deland.

John Townsend, doctor of medicine, wife Elizabeth and brother-in-law, Moses Schallenberger, with hired man, Francis Deland.

John considered his list again; he must finish it soon, and the copy for the factor as well. The sound of a fiddle came from across the campsite; so many wagons drawn up here, it seemed like a town. It would be the last of any sort of settlement they would see until they got over the mountains into California. Lanterns and campfires burned yellow, gold, primrose in the twilight, and voices, the clatter of supper clean-up, the noises that cattle and horses made as they bedded down for the night, all of this floated on the evening air.

Women’s voices, the laughter of children, and Old Martin’s penny-whistle and Elizabeth, all verve and drama, reading Pilgrim’s Progress to Eddie and Sadie, over at the Pattersons’ campfire, all of them  floated on the night as well,  the complicated symphony of the trail, and John set his pen to paper again.

Elizabeth continued to be well, riding Beau, or leading him and walking with the women and children, as if all the summer agues, all the nights of struggling for breath, the days when she was prostrated with headaches, as if all that had been but a series of vile dreams. It pleased him also that Moses spent rather more time with Young Martin, John Sullivan, and with Dennis Martin, better models for Moses and the Patterson boys of what a man ought to be than Allen Montgomery.

The above listed all are wagon owners: We are accompanied also by Isaac Hitchcock, trader and trapper, and Caleb Greenwood, trail guide by profession, with sons John and Britain…

Old Hitchcock’s two mules with their packs held all of what the old trader needed, although John rather thought that some of his heavier possessions and stores must be in the Patterson wagon. As for Hitchcock’s health, he complained of rheumatism, only to be expected in a man of his years, but little else. Caleb Greenwood did not even complain of that, but it was clear to John that the cataracts in Greenwood’s left eye would cost him vision there within a few more years. He and his sons also lived out of their small pack-train and from hunting; John often wondered how fast they would have been able to travel, were it not for the wagons.

So this being an accounting of the company in which we now travel, much reduced in numbers after three months of experience, but each of us now having a fair sense of each other’s qualities and capabilities. We are risking much in this journey, but I cannot think of better company in which to venture forward.

Nineteenth of August, 1844, at the crossing of the Raft River. Cannot imagine anyone having to use a raft to cross a bare trickle such as this! Captain Stephens has ridden ahead a little, with the Greenwood boys. He thinks to have espied the trail of last year’s party, as it stands out best at a distance, going over the next rise of land; with little rain falling throughout the year, the wheel ruts remain clear in sand as in dried mud; as wel,l their passage is marked in broken sage and the clear places where campfires burned. This morning, we have finally turned aside from the trail, following a little stream into a broad and well-grassed valley. Old Hitchcock tells me this is called Kassia, or Cassia Creek.”

“Grass is plentiful along the streams, which are small but providential, but the uplands all around are burnt and dry, supporting only sparse sage and a species of cacti…passing a great bowl-like valley, studded with rock outcroppings like candied fruit…the heat is unrelenting, and the dust boils up from our passage describing a pillar like that which led the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.”

Day followed weary day, plagued by dust, a fine powdery grit and baked by the sun, with never a pitying cloud in the sky. When the wind blew, the dust was everywhere and in everything, caking on sweaty faces and limbs like some itchy and dun-colored mask. The women despaired of keeping it out of their hair or from penetrating the bedding: the dust was everywhere, and inescapable. Allan Montgomery swore he even felt it gritting in his teeth in every mouthful of bread that he ate.

They seemed to crawl like ants over an endless and featureless platter. There were no landmarks to catch the eye once they had left the spires of rock at the tangled tributaries of the Raft River, nothing to see and mark their progress by, only an endless succession of low ridges and dales, like an ocean in a flat calm, sparsely covered with sun-burnt grass and the endless and eternal sagebrush. Only along the creek banks was there anything green to refresh the eye or taller than a man to cast a comforting shade.

“I don’t know which is more of a plague,” John remarked, one day during the noontime rest, “the dust, or those poor damned Digger Indians.”

He and Stephens, with Greenwood and Old Murphy were resting in the shade under a length of canvas rigged between the side of John’s wagon and a pair of cottonwood poles, and keeping a watchful eye on a pair of nearly naked Indians, going around to the other wagons, begging. Most of the other families had set up something of the sort for a bit of shade by their wagons. They had taken to nooning in the hottest part of the day, while the sun was directly overhead.  While they watched, one of the Diggers suddenly ducked, and scooped up something from the ground, and ate it with apparent relish.

“Lizard, mebbe… or a cricket. It’s a delicacy, ’round these parts,” Greenwood explained, and Old Martin said, “Jay-sus, Mary, and Joseph, that’s something pathetic.”

“They ain’t Sioux,” Stephens remarked.

“And that’s the plain truth,” Old Martin said.” The Sioux are gentry; these are tinkers, picking over the rags. ’Twould be an honor to be killed by the Sioux, I’m thinking, but a right embarrassment to be killed by one of this poor lot. At least, the Sioux are clean.”

“We’re not exactly fragrant ourselves, of late,” John pointed out, and Stephens cracked a brief smile. ”How dangerous are Diggers?”

“Not very,” Greenwood admitted, “More given to thieving, here and there.”

“Naught too hot, or too heavy, eh?” Old Martin said, humorously. “Still and all, I wouldn’t want them as enemies, not if there’s a grudge in their black little hearts and a sharp blade in their hand. Our cattle… saints preserve, what is he doing?”

John Greenwood suddenly appeared purposefully around the corner of Sullivan’s wagon with a quirt in his hand, where the ragged pair of Indians importuned Mary Sullivan and the boys for something more to eat. They could not hear what John Greenwood was saying to them, but his voice sounded angry, and when he struck out with the quirt, the smack of it on the Indian’s bare shoulders sounded harsh in the desert silence.

“There’s no call for that,” said Old Murphy, in shocked disapproval. Greenwood was already up and halfway to the Sullivans. “They’re only begging, the poor tinkers. Caleb had best rein in that boy of his, before he brings down trouble on the lot of us.”

“He’s a hothead,” Stephens agreed, watching Old Greenwood and his son alertly.  “Half Crow hisself. The only reason the Crows ain’t at war with the Diggers is they ain’t gotten to it yet.”

“Give them time,” John said. “And let us be out of the way, first.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye on him, then.” Old Martin sighed.” I’ll tell my boys, quiet-like.”

“Anyone else liable to borrow trouble?” Stephens asked, thoughtfully.

“Montgomery? Any of the young bucks?”

John shook his head. “None of them seems to hate Diggers the way the Greenwood boys do.”

“I’d tell Greenwood to keep his lads on a short lead,” Old Martin advised, and they did so, but when trouble came of the young men of the party and the Indians, it was not provoked by the Greenwoods.

Were it not for the necessity of keeping track of it for his diary, John might have lost all count of days as they followed Mary’s River farther and farther into the desert. They had no need of the faint traces left by Chiles’s wagons the year before. The river itself, shallow, sluggish, and a slash of green across the desert was their road and guide.

At night the stars hung low and brilliant, as thick in the velvet dark sky as dust motes in a sunbeam, until the moon floated free of the horizon, waxing and waning and waxing again. But among the constellations of early morning, the hunter Orion swung farther and farther up into the sky, a harbinger of autumn and winter to follow. One morning, as they were saddling their horses for the day’s march, John saw that Stephens was looking at the stars, too, standing there holding his horse’s bridle, with patient Dog at his feet.

“What date are we at, Doc?”

“The last week of September,” John answered. Stephens didn’t say anything else, but John wondered if he also thought of the snow-topped mountains off in the distance, as they had crossed the great divide at the height of summer.

That very day for the first time, John thought he could see a faint, dark blue outline on the edge of the sky ahead, just where it met the farthest dun-colored fold of desert, but the dust of the day came up and masked it all, and he thought he had been misled by a mirage, shimmering and elusive like a pool of mercury, until the sun set. Clear against the orange-gold sun was a distant jagged outline.

“The mountains,” said Old Man Hitchcock that evening, with immense satisfaction. He lit his pipe from a twig thrust into the embers of their shared campfire.

They had taken to building them from sage, hacked out of the low desert bushes and piled up in a shallow pit. It burned down to an aromatic steady fire, much more satisfactory than the buffalo chips they’d had to burn back on the Platte. John and his family and Sarah and Allen Montgomery had lately begun to share a campfire with the Pattersons, as it tripled the quantity of sagebrush cut for the one fire. Supper was over, and the few dishes scoured with handfuls of sand and washed at the water’s edge. The day’s heat fled with the sun; John stretched out his hands to the fire gratefully, and asked, “How far away are they?”

“No idea…. I’ve heard a hunnert miles from the Sink, an’ I’ve heard fifty…and there’s still a mite o’ current to the river, so we ain’t at the Sink, yet.”

“What is the sink?” Elizabeth asked, curiously, from next to John.

“Ma’am, it’s a great flat place in the middle of the desert, where this here river spreads out into a marsh and just flat-out sinks into the sand and vanishes.”

“How curious,” Elizabeth remarked. “To think of it ending, just like that, when we have been following it for such a long time. Were not we always taught that a river should empty into an ocean? Water flowed naturally from the highlands down to the sea… this all seems quite odd. So, you and Mr. Greenwood are convinced there is a river coming down from these mountains, into this… sink, as you call it?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, ma’am.” Hitchcock puffed away, while Isabella, mending a tear in a pair of Eddie’s trousers, rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath, “Old fool. You’ve never seen it, but you know it must be there.”

“Ahh, Izzy, Izzy, Izzy…blessed are those who do not see and yet believe. ’Tis one of those great truths, which I have yet to see disproved. It rains in mountains, and in the winter it snows, and when all that snow melts, the water runs down out of those mountains. Wherever there are mountains in this great western desert, there are rivers of water coming down out of them, and where the water comes down, that’s where men can climb up into the mountains and mebbe cross over them.”

“But… you do not know exactly where this river might be?” Elizabeth ventured, and Old Hitchcock puffed on his pipe and said, “We can make us an eddicated guess, ma’am,” and Isabella snorted in derision.

“Educated fiddlesticks!”

“But what are we going to do, when we get to this sink, where the river ends?” Elizabeth asked.

“We’ll camp for a couple days, rest the cattle,” Hitchcock said, ”I reckon Cap’n Stephens will send out a couple scouts, see if we can track them wagons from last year. Mebbe they found the way over the mountains, mebbe not. Make a couple of casts north and south to look for that river… we have time.”

But not terribly much of it, John thought, remembering Orion swinging up in the star-field every morning.

In another couple of days, the river ceased to resemble a river at all and became more of a marsh, with great swales of green rushes, the haunt of waterfowl, fringed with mud and alkali ponds and alive with deer and antelope. Stephens and the two old men consulted and led the wagons around to a fair stretch of meadow on slightly higher ground,
“We’ll stay here awhile, rest the teams, and do some hunting,” Stephens said to the scouting party, John, young Martin Murphy, and the Greenwoods. They could see the mountains clearly now, a haunting blue shadow, clearest at dawn and again at sunset.

“I swear, the teams are in prime condition,” Young Martin said. “They’re fitter now than when we left Missouri.” And just then, Dog suddenly barked, a sound more like a deep and startling baying and launched herself fruitlessly after a flock of ducks at the water’s edge. They rose from the water in a storm of agitated wings as Dog plunged after them. Stephens whistled, and she returned instantly, wet and baffled.

“Not unless you’ve grown wings, girl,”

Behind them, on the meadow, the wagons deployed for the night camp. So practiced were the drivers by now that it all seemed like some vast clockwork. The smaller children and the women had already been gathering firewood, collecting promising sticks of dried wood as they walked.

“Still, I wish’t we hadn’t lost those three to the alkali,” Stephens said.

Two of the Murphys’ stock, and Isabella’s lead ox, Socks, had drunk from a pool of tainted water and died of it. The children wept for Socks, so tame that he had followed Oliver trustingly into the river, on that first day when they had swum the oxen over the river and commenced this journey. Isabella might have wept a little too, but then she had put her cherished milk cow in harness to replace Socks.

“Or the pony that John Greenwood said the Indians stole.” Young Martin added.

“John Greenwood is always ready to blame the Indians for any loss… real or imagined.” John said.

Left to him, and if he did not respect Old Greenwood so much, he’d have gagged and bound the younger man and carried him all this way in one of the wagons. Of late, the Indians had been a different sort, rather less wretched and rather more dressed than before. Pai-ute, said Old Greenwood, with a little more of a fight in them than the Diggers formerly. And Hitchcock had dryly commented that with the fight they had to get any sort of living out of the desert, no wonder they had no energy left for anything more.

And John looked at the distant mountains, in all their sunset glory and visibility, and thought of how close they were to that goal. Just the mountains, just the mountains and over them before the winter snow; just that little bit farther, and he would have a grand house for Elizabeth, and she would be healthy and fit for the rest of her life, and play the piano, and he would school Moses with his fine library, instead of living this vagabond life in a wagon, camping in the wilderness, like a bunch of old Martin’s tinker gypsies.

Stephens held council in the morning, as girls and women carried baskets of laundry to the water’s edge, and cattle stood near to their shoulders in grass.

“Two long scouts. We cast north and south of here for Chiles’s tracks,” he said. “Three to four in each. Greenwood takes the north; I’ll take the south, but not more than a day.”

“Fat hunting country,” Hitchcock remarked. “Keep the young bucks busy.”

“So, that’s the plan, then?” Old Martin ventured, “We rest and restock and mend the wagons here, for the last push?” Stephens nodded. “Ah, then ’tis a fair place…a little short on good timber, though. And if you do not find their trail, or that grand river of yours, then what do we do then, hey?”

“Cross that bridge when we get to it,” Stephens abruptly stood up. “Who’s with me, and who’s with Greenwood?”

John volunteered to ride south with Stephens, and Allen Montgomery and Patrick Martin and Dennis went for the North with the Greenwoods—a hard day’s ride in the saddle either way of it, casting west and south into the dry desert that lay between the sink and the mountains.

They found the traces almost at once, but Chiles’s party looked to have gone south. They followed it with Stephens as far as they dared, until early afternoon, when Stephens reined in his horse at the top of a rise, from which they could see the faint tracks scribbled over the next rise, and the one beyond that.

“I don’t think those boys knew any more’n we do,” he said. ”We’ll head on back, see what Greenwood found.”

When they returned to camp, though, Greenwood had not returned—fortunate in a way, because it meant that his sons were not there to make a bad situation worse. Old Martin met them with a grave face,

“Doctor, there’s been some trouble with your lad. You’d best come quick.”

“What kind of trouble? How badly is Mose hurt? Is Liz with him?” John’s heart sank within him, clear down to his dusty boots.

Old Martin said quickly, “No, not that kind of trouble…he caught one of those pesky tinkers stealing away his halter….”

Old Martin led him rapidly toward a knot of men—Murphy’s sons, and the Sullivan boys, and a large knot of Indians gathered around Old Man Hitchcock. Hitchcock was in full hand-talking spiel, gesturing and making signs with his fingers; it looked as if he needed no help. John didn’t see Moses at first, off to one side with Young Martin.

Moses looked angry and aggrieved, and John thought instantly of a guilty boy caught in some mischief; Young Martin just looked angry, pale with it and lecturing Moses in a furious undertone, and Old Martin continued, “You know that fine one of his, braided out of colored rope? He missed it, and looking around, spotted one of those Indians, wearing a fine blanket…trimmed all over with bird feathers, it was, but the halter hanging down beneath it as fine as you please, and with all his friends around. And your boy grabbed it back, and the Indian was angry then. He drew up his bow and nocked an arrow, and all his friend did the same, and your fine lad took up his rifle and pointed it at him….”

“Oh, god, no,” and John’s blood ran cold at the thought of what shooting one of the Indians might bring down on Moses, and the rest of them.

Old Martin patted his shoulder. “No, Martin struck up his rifle and took your lad aside, and Hitchcock came and began to talk sense before everyone got offended…well, offended very much more, as I judge. Isaac had to talk very fast, and for a good while, but I think he has got them all properly soothed…but you’d best talk to the lad.”

“Doctor John!” Moses cried as soon as John came up to them. “Tell them…that thieving wretch tried to steal away my own property, and I caught him fair and square. Are we to continue submitting meekly to these insults?”

“Yes,” Young Martin replied bluntly, before John could even begin to formulate a reply.

Old Martin stepped in front of Moses and regarded him compassionately. “Yes, my lad, you should. That’s the short answer, and this is the longer one, and why ’tis necessary. Better men than you have taken worse insult…better men than you have been turned out in the road by the landlords, and seen their sisters and wives treated like common whores, and had to learn their letters in the hedges, and leave the land that their ancestors bled for, generation after generation. And they endured it, because to strike back would have cost their lives, and all of those lives they held dearest. So, you had a small thing taken from you…and yes, it was stolen, we are clear on that, and you’ve a right to be angry…but lad, ye canna let the anger lead you to act rashly! There are many of them, and poor ragged savages they might be, but they are here, the Lord Himself only knows how many, w’their bows and arrows, and knives, and we are just a bare handful passing through!”

Old Martin had the gift, John thought, of weaving spells with his voice, as if he had only to talk, and talk in that gruff but musical Irish voice, to compel agreement and obedience, and Moses already looked a little less angry. Old Martin continued,
“If you and John Greenwood want to start a war with them over trifles, I’d say ‘Be my guest’, have it. Have as many as you like, if it just fell on your own heads, but this is my sons and daughters, and the children in the way of it, an’ that is where I say, we canna risk provoking them!”

“They are stealing from us, night and day, and anything that isn’t nailed down,” Moses protested. “I’m sick of it, and sick of having them take advantage….”

“Moses, that’s enough.” John kept his voice low, although he wanted to shout. “Be silent…you could have set off a massacre of all of us, with your temper and thoughtlessness,” while Old Martin shook his head, pityingly.

“Lad, lad, be listening to me. Don’t be thinking of it as stealing, if you like. Think of it as us paying a toll to pass through their lands…only instead of coming to us fair and open with their hand out and asking for the price of it, they amuse themselves by collecting it piecemeal. What have we lost, now, really? Some few clothes, and a couple of blankets, and some bits of bread and meat, and maybe that pony, but myself I think the wretched beast just strayed. We can afford to hand them those trifles, after all, they might have come to us and asked for an ox, an’ that we couldn’t do.”

“They could help themselves to the oxen any time they wished,” John pointed out, “We guard them as best we can, but if they wished, I am sure the Indians could bleed us dry. You may like to think we are kept safe by our own efforts…but we are also secure because to this point I do not think they feel any great urge to harm us.”

“We must not give them any reason to wish us ill,” Old Martin added. “D’ye understand now, lad?”

Moses nodded grudgingly but with a stormy face. “I understand…but I do not like it at all, Mr. Murphy!”

“Aye, well, lad, and we’re not asking you to like it,” Old Martin said, clapping him on the shoulder, “just to keep your temper and put up with it for a little longer.”

He stumped away, and Moses looked at the ground and then at John. “You’re angry, Doctor John, like Martin was… I am sorry; I did not think it through.”

“At least, Young Martin did,” John said, gravely. “And you must remember our situation also, and think carefully, before you act. What you do may affect more than just yourself, for as long as we are part of this company.”

“I will remember next time,” Moses promised.”

“You must, Moses lad, you must. We have get to get out of this desert and over those mountains.”

“I’ll do better, Doctor John. I promise I will do my part.”

“We shall all have to do that,” John sighed, and his eyes sought the thin blue lines of the mountains once more.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“Oh my, Missy, you have no notion of what it looked like when the buffalo herds covered the earth, all along the Platte Valley they were sometimes, covering the ground like a great woolly brown blanket, and the sound of their hoofs like thunder, shaking the ground and your heart in your very chest! We was near caught in a stampede, and oh my, the sound of it! And another time a great herd of them crossed our route of march as we was all strung out. There they were, crossing between the wagons as casual as you please, and all the men could do was put the women and children into the wagons and keep meandering along, as quiet and as slow as we could, moving through the herd as they grazed. They were huge, hairy beasts as like to an African lion as a cow.

Some of the brave young sparks tried to hunt them as they would any other animal, but it was a waste of ammunition to shoot at their great heads, for their skulls were inordinately thick, to say nothing of the layers of mud and hair matted like armor on their foreheads. Finally Paw-Paw told Mr. Montgomery and the other young sparks the trick of it; to aim for a spot on the buffalo’s side, just behind the forelegs and about a third of the way up.

Anything else was a pure waste of lead. Mr. Montgomery, he put eighteen shots into an old bull oncet, and still that old bull wouldn’t go down. Mr. Montgomery, he was that mad. Paw-Paw and old Greenwood, they was looking down their noses about buffalo hunting, themselves. It was for greenhorns, and about as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Them two old men, they had trapped beaver in their time, which called for much more skill, the way they looked at it, but the buffalo made prime eating, I tell you what. We did not lack for meat, all along the Platte.”

From Dr. Townsend’s Diary:

“Fifteenth of June, 1844… this day having crossed to the Loup River, we have commenced to travel along the south bank thereof, the terrain very gravely, but open. Our passage is swift, unimpeded by the quicksand along the Platte, which we must eventually rejoin.

Much good hunting, particularly of antelope…the women are able to gather abundant wild plums and cherries from thickets…there are few trees save for cottonwoods, which grow wherever there is any water at all.

John Murphy afflicted with a fever, and there are other illnesses amongst the party which keep me oft’ from my bed at night and other business during the day. Young Master Patterson suffered a slight concussion in falling down a steep bank and striking his head on a large stone.

This day passed an enormous village of “prairie dogs,” which look not so much like dogs as very large squirrels, which live in burrows below ground and spend much of their day standing sentry on top of small, conical mounds built up from the spoil of excavating said burrow. At the slightest hint of trespass or danger, they chatter loudly and dive down into their safe burrow, and seeing that, every other nearby does alike.

At night we hear the howling of the prairie wolves all around our camp; not true wolves, as Mr. Greenwood tells me, but smaller, tawny-colored beasts, very cunning thieves. We think it is they who have taken the last of Mrs. Montgomery’s chickens, which have not laid for some weeks, so we were intending a fine dinner of them, but alas! We must make do with prairie fowl!”

At the end of another day spent toiling along the gravely banks, and dampening down a fight between the contentious Shaw and an equally contentious old fellow named Darby, John would have thought he was owed a bare few moments peace in which to eat his supper; but no, that was Jamie Murphy hesitating at the edge of the firelight.

“Good evening, all,” he said, a little awkwardly. Elizabeth and Sarah had just put out the plates. Allen was pouring a trickle of boiling water down the barrel of his long rifle, followed carefully by a twist of clean flannel.

“Jamie, what say we look for buffalo, tomorrow,” Allen said, heartily. “Say man, are you up for it or not?”

“Oliver and I are going to go hunting,” Moses chimed in, and Jamie said, “I really…I wanted to have a word with the doctor…it’s just that…my wife says that I am worrying too much, but with my brother being so sick….”

“Whatever is the matter then?” said Allen, in puzzlement, and Elizabeth caught John’s eye and murmured, “I’ll save your supper, Dearest,” as John concealed a very small sigh and reached up for his medical bag. He had of late been keeping it handy, just under the wagon seat.

“Johnny’s not taken a turn for the worse, has he?” Old Martin’s youngest boy was a year and a half older than Moses and had been recovering slowly from a fever that left him weakened and barely able to move.

“No,” stammered Jamie, “it’s m’daughter…it seemed like she was burning up with the fever, tonight, and couldn’t take a bite of supper. Annie says it’s nothing but a childhood sickness, but…if you wouldn’t mind taking a little look at her, Doctor….”

“Not at all,” John said, reassuringly, “Better safe that sorry, Jamie.”

He followed Jamie toward the cluster of Murphy family wagons, thinking that Annie Murphy, a sensible and hard-headed woman, was probably right. But Jamie adored his only child and took her little injuries and illnesses much to heart. He played the fiddle sometimes of an evening but more often spent his little leisure with whittling small wooden figures and dolls, toys for Mary and the Miller children and young Martin’s boys, things that he made and gave away freely without a second thought. Jamie, like his father Old Martin, was adored by his small nephews and nieces.

Now Annie looked up from mending one of her husband’s shirts, under a lantern on the wagon-box and the last of the dying daylight, and said in exasperation, “Oh, Jamie, you did not need to bother the doctor. She is sleeping fine now. It was only a little too much sun….”

“I am not bothered, Mrs. Murphy,” John answered reassuringly, “I wished to make certain myself, since so many others have been made ill from bad water and such, and thought it at first to be nothing more than some minor ague.”

“Well, as long as you are here, and it’s no trouble at all….” Annie put aside her sewing, and John thought that she might herself have been more than a little concerned. Despite her words, there was a look of relief on her face. Parents did, after all, bury children, and the memory of how Martin and Mary-Bee had left their baby daughter to a lonely grave back in Holt County must have been in both their minds.

Annie followed him into the wagon with the lantern, to where Mary lay already restlessly asleep, under a couple of blankets. She was about Eddie’s age, with Annie’s crow-wing black hair, and the blue eyes that came from Patrick Martin. She had tossed a little, in her sleep, and the bedcovers were disarranged, and the black eyelashes on her closed eyes were half-circles of silky fringe on her cheeks. She clutched a little wooden horse in one hand, and Annie whispered, “Jamie made that today, and so it would be her favorite. He has it in mind to make a whole Noah’s ark for her. Mary, sweetheart, the doctor has come to take a look at you.”

“No need to wake her,” John cautioned. He felt her forehead, and swiftly ran his fingers under her jaw, feeling for any swellings there. “There is no fever now, she has perspired a little, and her forehead is cool. The glands in her neck are not swollen…she was not complaining of a sore throat, was she?”

“No,” Annie answered.

“What about her appetite? Did she eat supper?”

“No, she seemed not to hunger… but she was thirsty. Mrs. Patterson said she should drink some of her herbal tea that she made for her, and so I did let her, unless you thought she should not.…”

“No, I cannot think that Mrs. Patterson’s herbal brews can do much harm to a healthy child…and perhaps it did some good after all, for she is sleeping without a fever now.”

John resettled the blankets around Annie’s daughter, and Annie said, “I’m sorry for Jamie dragging you from supper for nothing….”

“No,” John answered, “It’s never nothing, until I have taken a look for myself. For all I know, you both would fret your own selves into an illness over worrying about Mary here, and then I would have two patients, and frankly at this time I have all the patients I can manage.”

Eighteenth of June, 1844: “This day one Vance, a hired man with the Oregon party, died after being ill and delirious for several days. All remedies applied had no effect upon his illness, which was much exacerbated by the necessity of travel. Mr. Vance was buried with dignity and the full rites of his beliefs, and our fervent prayers that he may be the only such loss that our company sustains.

Sadly, we must leave his resting-place unmarked, although not unrecorded. Our Mr. Greenwood warned us that the natives, being curious or avaricious, would unearth and desecrate the body, unless extreme measures to hide his resting place were taken. Alas, this necessitated interring Mr. Vance close to our trail, as we could then run the loose herd over the grave. We have recorded the approximate location, but in this wild and featureless country, I do not suppose anyone will ever be able to find where he was laid to rest, until the day of the Resurrection, when we all shall stand before our Maker…

This day of travel brought us within sight of a great ruinous castle, off in the near distance seemingly, with the river at its foot in the manner of a moat, with a wreath of mist all around, upon which it appears to float. This marvel was in view of our train for many days and held the attention of all, as we discussed much on what it most resembled: a vast domed court-house, a pagan temple of old, or an ancient walled fortress with many towers and bastions and the stump of a central tower crowning all. The view of it at around sunset, when gilded by rays of dying sunlight against a darkening sky was most sublime….

…Much disputation between ourselves and the Oregon party, Captain Stephens quite out of sorts and bad-humor’d in this respect, saying that “those lazy so-and-sos would rather play cards, and dance and fiddle around the fire of an evening, and rise with the sun of a morning, and dawdle all along the trail the next day,” and I own that I too, am grown impatient.  The Oregon party are even racked with dissention among themselves; William Case came to me this morning, full of impatience, and vowed that he would sooner travel with us to California than abide one more day with them. I fear to some of our fellow pilgrims this journey is a long holiday, whereas to our captain, it is a business, out of which we must earn a profit, and essential that we move as expeditiously as possible….

…We have passed near the foot of a great skyward pointing finger of rock, like a shot-tower or a giant’s chimney, which we have had in view for some days, it being a particular feature of the landscape, even though it is some miles distant on the other side of the river. The air is so clear that judging distances is a matter of great difficulty: objects that appear to be only a few miles distant are often a considerable distance removed!

Mr. Greenwood insists to me that when he first traveled this way, many years ago, this monument was yet a quarter again as tall as it is at present. I suspect him of jesting in this particular, but Mr. Hitchcock said the same, and both gentlemen with much laughter told me that the natives name for this landmark translates very roughly as “Elk Brick”… Both he and Captain Stephens say we are making excellent time on the trail…the days being quite warm, but the nights are quite chill, I deduce that imperceptibly we have climbed to some higher altitude than formerly…

The country to the south of the river presents a most wondrous aspect, a series of high and cliff-like bluffs presenting the appearance of a vast walled city of towers and spires, entirely inhabited by giants, and ornamented with every order and style of architecture known to mankind. These ruinous bastions appear to rise directly from the banks of the river opposite, and at sunset this evening presented a picture of overpowering grandeur: the shadows and canyons between appeared a deep azure color, while those portions illuminated by the dying sunlight took from it a brilliant golden hue…”

“They call it Scott’s Bluffs.” Old Hitchcock spat into the dust, and his mule snorted and bridled sideways a little. “Goes on for miles. Rougher country than this.”

“I can see that,” John said. “It looks like the castle of the gods.” He and Stephens had ridden a little ahead with the two old men to pick and mark the night’s’ campsite. Moses and William Case had tagged along, hoping for a shot at an antelope or one of the amazingly long-eared and speedy rabbits who had confounded not a few of the party’s dogs.

“Who was Scott?” Moses asked, curiously. “Did he live hereabouts?”

“Naw, Sonny, he died hereabouts, round about fifteen year ago.”

“Twenty,” Old Greenwood said, and Hitchcock shook his head,

“I ran into him at Ashley’s rendezvous in ’26. He was lively enough then…heard tell he was hurt in a flight with the Blackfeet during the Bear Lake rendezvous, two year later….”

“Hiram Scott, he was one of Ashley’s brigade leaders back in the earlies…strapping young hoss, round and about from St. Louis.” Greenwood interjected. “He and his partner would bring out supplies to here and there, and take back the furs.”

“Got cut up bad at that fight in ’28, couldn’t leave out with his partner…man named Bruff, Bruffy, something like that. But Bruffy was a gonna wait for him at these here bluffs for him to catch up. Scott had two friends stayed behind with him until he was well enough to travel…trouble was, he never got much better. They built them a bullboat after he got so’s he couldn’t sit a saddle no more, and brought him down the Sweetwater a piece. But they got caught in the rapids and lost all their guns and food but what they had on them. Still managed to carry Scott all that way, although he was in a real bad way and got worse.”

“They got to where Bruffy promised to wait for them, and he’d lit out…gone on down the river.” Greenwood took up the story, sitting easy in his pony’s light saddle with his rifle crossways across his lap. “They’d had a chance to catch up, if they could only move fast… “

“Sick as he was, Scott had sand.” Old Hitchcock shook his head sorrowfully. “He told his two friends to leave him…he was dying, he said he didn’t have no chance a’tall, but they might have a chance, and he didn’t want them to throw it away.”

“But that was horrible,” Moses burst out, “To think of leaving him all alone! Didn’t they have any loyalty… no pity for him?”

“They did, sonny.” Old Hitchcock spat again. “But pity don’t come into it, in that there situation. They were good men, they knew the score, and so did he. Catching up to Bruffy’s party was their only hope. So they propped him up with a gourd of water by his side an’ a couple of blankets and promised they would come back if they could, and that was that.”

The two old men were silent for a moment, looking at the great stone pile and thinking, John was sure, of their days in the mountains.

“Did they come back for their friend, at least?” Moses asked. The sun slipped a little lower, intensifying the colors even more. They could hear the first of the wagons coming up the rising ground below them, harness jingling and the teamster’s irritable voices.

“No, sonny, they weren’t able to catch up to Bruffy for weeks, and they felt sure Scott wouldn’t have lasted long, all by himself. Will Sublette found his bones the next year, buried them proper and decent.”

“Funny thing, though,” Greenwood commented, “Sublette found him a good few miles east of where his friends said they’d left him…as if he had managed to crawl a ways by himself. Full sand and grit, that hoss…he was a ways from giving up, I reckon.”

“But he wished for his friends to save themselves,” Moses looked solemn.

“A brave and noble gesture,” John said “And a mournful fate, but a magnificent monument; perhaps not so mournful, though, to have this view as your last sight on this earth.”

“I’d sooner have a sight of Californy in front of me,” Old Hitchcock said and spat again.
Out of sudden curiosity, John asked, “So, have you seen it yourself…truly?” and the old man shook his head, regretfully.

“Don’t tell m’daughter. Izzy’d never let me see the end of it. I was trapping this side of the Great Basin, round about twenty year gone, and Joe Walker had gone, two, three times for Cap’n Bonneville. He told me all of it that he seen, so green and mild…the hillsides all gold in spring with wild mustard, or gold with tall grass in the fall…blue mountains off in the distance, and little streams tumblin’ out of the mountains, with bright shiny gravel at the bottom. Ol’ Joe, he made it sound like a paradise, and the other boys of his’n that I yarned with, they said the same.”

“Mr. Hitchcock, you have the soul of a writer of romances,” John remarked, in some disappointment, and the old man chortled richly and dropped a lewd wink.

“Allus wondered what they called it,” he said, and Greenwood remarked, “Hoss, if your yarns weren’t so entertaining, they’d call you a bald-face liar.”

“That be what they usually say,” Old Hitchcock retorted.

From Dr. Townsend’s diary: “We are no more than a few days away from Ft. Laramie. My dearest wife, as well as others are composing letters to be posted back to our loved ones, as this will be the first outpost we have reached since departing from Iowa from which such missives may be dispatched. At last, crossed over the Platte River and now travel along the southern shore of it, much plagued by mosquitoes, nothing more dangerous than that, although Mr. Murphy’s wagon was overturned in the crossing. No damage, although all their wagon’s contents somewhat wetted…

Consulted with the indomitable Mrs. Patterson, this evening, who tells me that in her judgment, Mrs. Miller is within a week or two of her time of confinement. We are advis’d this day against approaching the fort by an emissary from the commandant, Mr. Bissionette, to wait a day, that he may take council with a great assemblage of the Sioux, some four or five thousand of which are camped with their families adjacent to the fort…

“Not sure what ought to be done in this case, Doc,” Stephens remarked immediately upon reception of Mr. Bissionette’s dismaying message. The hoof-beats of his messenger’s horse still echoed, and the dust of his passing had not even settled, but the stranger from the Fort had been noticed and was being remarked upon, for heads were turning toward Stephens and John from all up and down the line of march.

“See what Greenwood will say,” John answered. Word of four thousand Sioux camped around Ft. Laramie was not particularly reassuring intelligence, even if Commandant Bissionette was correct in saying the Sioux had brought their wives and families with them. So had the wagon party, and any fool could see the emigrant party was well outnumbered, and as Old Man Hitchcock freely reiterated, the Sioux were anything but fools. John added, “Consult Old Man Hitchcock, too.  He claims to speak the Lakotah language, and he was out this way frequently, to hear him tell it.”

“Waste of a day,” Stephens grumbled. “Tell the boys, best not hunt too far from the train, tomorrow. And douse the fires after dark. We don’t need to tell everyone we’re here.”

“You think that they won’t know it already? John asked, and Stephens grunted.

“Mebbe. But we don’t need to announce ourselves with a brass band, neither. We’ll talk it over with Greenwood and Old Man Hitchcock as soon as we make camp tonight.”

Hitchcock stumped over to Stephen’s council-fire that afternoon in gleeful good humor, trailed by young Eddie, chattering away like a magpie. “… Lots of Injuns, Paw-paw? Will we have to fight them? Ma said….”

“Don’t talk nonsense, young-un,” they heard Hitchcock saying, indulgently. “Clever men work out a way not to have to fight…commonly, they look big and mean and ready to fight…so much so that they hardly ever need to….”

“I just now realized where young Eddie inherited his gift for loquacity from,” John jested quietly to Stephens, whose rare smile came quick and was gone again almost at once.

“Took you until now?” he said. Dog sat up alertly as Old Hitchcock sat down with a barely stifled groan. Greenwood was already hunkered on his heels at the fire, and Stephens gentled Dog’s ears until she lay down again at his feet.

“Hell to get old,” Hitchcock remarked, rubbing his rheumatic knee. “But on the whole, it beats the alternate.”

He and Greenwood chuckled sourly, and John recollected Greenwood remarking, ‘Seh, there may be old mountain men, and there may be bold men among them, too, but there are damn few who are old and bold.’

Now Hitchcock continued, “Well, Cap’n, I take it we ain’t going to fight the Sioux tribes? Good…they’d give us an almighty pasting an’ hardly break into a sweat.”

“We’re going to be excruciatingly polite to them, I expect,” John said. “But it would help to know how we should approach them. They are camped around the fort, and we can hardly go around them.”

“No.” Old Hitchcock scratched his stubbly jaw with a raspy sound. “No, can’t do that. Would be bad manners and look like we’re afeerd. They ain’t anything like the Kaw, back at the river. The Sioux, they’re the lords of all these here parts.”

“But what are they like?” John persisted, and Old Hitchcock scratched his jaw again.

“Proud as Lucifer,” he answered at last, “every man jack of them. Touchy for their honor, like the knights in old times. Fearless warriors. Hold their word, once they have given it, mostly, and generous when they feel like it. Good company, in the main. And handsome, straight-limbed folk. They dress well and like personal adornments, as they count such things, and their lodges are clean.”

“Our advice is to treat with the Sioux as if they were our equals,” Greenwood said, quietly, “Honorable and well-armed equals. We make no offense, or offer any unwelcome familiarity, or braggadocio, but show ourselves to be confident and courteous…and moving on, as soon as possible.”

“Cap’n Stephens, did I hear right?” Hitchock asked, curiously, “That there messenger, he did say the Sioux were all around there with their women and children, to trade and all, not lookin’ for a fight?”

“That’s what he said, several times.”

“Ah….” The old man sat back. “Then I make a suggestion, Cap’n, To show our own good will and straight intentions when we get to the fort, we send word through the commandant that we are happy to trade…and I’ll take some of our women and children  to the Sioux camp to trade with them.”

“We couldn’t possibly send our wives and children out to treat with them in their own camps!” John burst out indignantly, but he saw Greenwood nodding in sober agreement.

“They’ll come to our camp in any case,” he said. “I think there would be little risk…or no more than there is in bringing your families out here anyway…and much to be gained. No better way to demonstrate fair intentions, for a start, and to reciprocate their courtesy. Or even demand a little of it.”

“What do we have that they would desire, assuming it’s not our scalps!?” John asked, mordantly.

“All sorts of little trifles you would hardly miss,” Old Hitchcock answered, readily. “Needles, pins, and buttons. Lengths of calico, and any sort of metal. Pots and pans. I myself have a pack full of needles, and beads and other pretties that I brought this far with the intent of trading on the way, as needed.”

“And what would we be trading our bits and trifles for?” John was diverted.

“Dried meat.” Stephens answered this one. “If they would sell it to us out of what they need, come winter, and horses.”

“Moccasins and leather garments,” Hitchcock added, practically. “Cured leather and buffalo hides, and any other curios and ornaments as they choose to offer.”

“Well, I can see the advantages of trade,” John sighed, “But I do not like the thought of Mrs. Townsend and the other women walking into such a lions’ den.”

“Boldness may carry the day.” Greenwood said. “Tell her…tell any of the women who wish to trade, not to show their apprehension.”

“Put fear aside,” Stephens said, looking down at his strong, blacksmith’s hands, resting on Dog’s fawn-colored head. “And look confident, always.”

“We should call a general meeting, and let everyone know what is expected,” John suggested, and Stephens shrugged. “Your show, Doc. One thing…Greenwood, do the Crows war with the Sioux, this season?”

“Not so far,” Greenwood answered, cautiously.

“Good… remind your boys. I’ll be sending them with Hitchcock and the women.”

Angeline Morrison Letter #3

24th of June 1844

Writ from the Trail Near Ft. Laramie

My Dearest Angeline:

We have been bidden to wait for a day before approaching the fort, and so we take a day of rest such as we have usually not had since departing from the Bluffs. Our journey was much impeded by heavy rains at first, which had made the water in numerous rivers, which we had need to cross much deeper than what our Guide, Mr. Greenwood tells us was more usual. I should tell you now that my health, always of such concern to my dearest and to friends such as yourself, is presently much recovered. My dearest says it is because we are removed from the bad air along the river bottoms, that the air is very dry and clear, suited to someone with a constitutional weakness of the lungs. Others have been ill, as we journeyed, but not myself. (Dearest says that was caused by the drinking of bad water, from the river itself.)

We are to trade with the Indians, camped around the Fort; they value such trifles as we may spare, and so in great anticipation of this expedition, Sarah and myself, and Mrs. Isabella have searched our wagons for such little things as we may offer in trade. I shall offer some blankets, a box of odd buttons, an ivory needle-case with five stout steel needles in it, and a metal kitchen-fork with a broken tine. The other ladies have all made similar collections, but I fear that only Mrs. Isabella and myself, and perhaps Miss Murphy and Mrs. Case express any anticipatory pleasure in the outing we have planned. Mrs. Isabella’s father was long engaged in trade, and has engaged to escort a party of us into the Indian camp, assuring us over and over again of our perfect safety there. My dearest and Captain Stephens join in such assurances…. Mrs. Thorp, of the Oregon party, succumbed most promptly to an attack of the vapors when it was suggested that she join us…

I know not how often the mail travels from Ft. Laramie, dearest Angeline, but it is in my hope that you should have received this missive by winter, when we are safely arrived in the pleasant paradise of California, and I may pen a fuller account of our adventures upon the trail. Until then, adieu from Thy dear Friend

Elizabeth

From Dr. Townsends’ diary:

“This day around noon approached the Fort, which presented a most curious sight. The country around has become quite sere and brown, being at the height of summer, but the meadows around Ft. Laramie remain lush and green as they are watered by many streams of sweet water, and encamped around are the conical skin lodges of the Sioux, in such numbers as to make our hearts grow faint, a veritable city of lodges and brush bowers…the fort is a rectangular compound built of packed mud bricks and a timber palisade above, with a pair of taller towers at opposite corners, and a great overhanging gatehouse guarding a commodious entrance…the gates stood open in a welcoming manner, as if there were no need to ever contemplate closing them, while the multitudes came and went.

We rolled a little beyond the fort, and chose for ourselves a pleasant open space to make our camp, being much aware that we were the cynosure of all eyes. Captain Stephens and myself accompanied by Mr. Greenwood and certain others of the party to present our compliments to Mr. Bissonette…I at least, took care to dress in the best that I possessed, and we were most received graciously by that gentleman, whom we thanked for his assistance. He in turn welcomed us to the settlement and promised to send on our invitation to trade with such individuals of the Tribes as were interested. After our reception, we wandered at will about the establishment and marveled at how freely intermingled were people of diverse races.”

John shrugged his shoulders, under his best broadcloth coat, which unaccountably felt tighter. He had not worn it since the elections under the trees, east of the great river. Stephens had dressed as he always did, and so did Greenwood, in his leather Indian jerkin and leggings.

John was painfully aware that Greenwood looked more at home here than he himself did. Stephens had preferred to return to camp, leaving John at the fort to cope with the hospitality offered by Mr. Bissionette and to see what supplies and services the fort offered. Not much, and that expensive, John decided, after a short survey of the trading post shelves.  He found the two old men sitting outside, silently watching the passing parade of humanity.

“You are correct, sir, they are absolutely splendid physical specimens,” John ventured, and Hitchcock rubbed his knee and replied “Aye.”

“They’d make the finest fighting cavalry in all the world, could they fight under discipline,” Greenwood said, regretfully.

“Aye,” said Old Hitchcock again. After a short time, he said, “Caleb, remember the very first time you came out here to the mountains?”

“Seems an age,” Greenwood replied. “And yet again, just the blink of an eye. There were places I went, where I was the first white man any of them had ever seen. Fat times and the streams all full of beaver, then.”

“Just a handful of men,” Old Hitchcock mused, “Count them on the fingers of your own hands, a couple times over, but all of this once was our’n…all the pelts you could trap, all the trails you could follow to the end, every green valley a garden of Eden, all the pretty squaws you could woo, and blood-brothers you could fight back to back with against their enemies and yours. Come back to civilization every three years with a pack of pelts, send money to your family, and then go back an’ do it again. “

“Rare times,” Greenwood said, sadly. “Rare times”

“Aye… we all thought we were made of iron, ten-foot tall and bulletproof.”

“Were? Speak for yourself,” Greenwood said with a glint of a smile, “but it doesn’t turn back the clock for my wife’s people, nor for the Lakotah. When I first passed this way, there was no fort, and now there is…and it’s been rebuilt twice…thrice? There were just tracks then, tracks of our own pack-trains, and now there are iron-shod wheels cutting ruts into the ground, more and deeper every year. In our day, it was easy enough for men like you and I to step into their world,” he jerked his chin towards the Sioux camp “and then step back to our own blood, but there were few of us, and we could take up their ways, and no one thought the worse of us, because the Tribes were all that there was out here.”

“Aye,” Hitchcock sighed, morosely. “And there’ll be more, next year, and the year after that. If I were a Sioux, I wouldn’t be a’feared of our wagons, Doc. Our wagons are here, and gone the next day. They can trade with us, steal a horse or an ox for amusement, but they’d have no reason to war against us until the day that our wagons come here… and stay. And then there will be no going back and forth between our peoples.”

“Stay, here? In this desert?” John laughed. “I cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay here but the wild Indians, and they are welcome to it, in my opinion.”

“It’s not yours to decide, Doctor,” Greenwood said. “In any case, we will be in California or singing in the choir eternal before things may ever come to that pass. Take no heed of us, just the memories and regrets of old men, lamenting a lost paradise.”

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:  “Ma and Paw-Paw said we were going to trade with the Indians at Ft. Laramie, that some of the women from the party were going to trade for dried meat and supplies, and that Sadie and I might come but we must not show that we were afraid. Paw-paw told us that we should act as if we were going to call on folk in another town, but that we should be polite and treat them just as we would our equals…

It was Ma and Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Montgomery and Ellen Murphy and Mrs. Case, that I remember, Ma and Mrs. Townsend dressed in their best and put up their hair, and Paw-Paw and the Greenwood boys, who looked so like Indians themselves, coming with us, and one of Paw-Paw’s mules to carry everything we had to trade.

I remember Paw-Paw taking me by the hand and walking with me straight into their camp—close by the fort, it was—he could speak their lingo, and none of us had ever known that! It seemed like we were expected, all their folk looking at us so curious, and Paw-Paw talking to them as calm and level as you please, and showing them what we had to trade… they came around us, so curious.

One woman, she was so took with Sadie, she set her on her lap, and was stroking Sadie’s hair, and chattering to her friends, and she asked Paw-Paw a question, and Paw-Paw, he shook his head, and held out his hand to Sadie an’ called to her, he said “Sadie, come here, child,” an’ Sadie wriggled off her lap an’ came right back to Ma an’ Mrs. Townsend, an’ hid herself between their skirts. Paw-Paw, he said to Sadie, “Sadie, stay with your Ma and Miz Townsend, you hear, child?” Then he struck a bargain for Miz Townsend, traded a fine buffalo robe for two blankets, but I noticed that he never took his eye off Sadie, not for one moment after that.

I got into a fight with an Indian lad, ‘bout my age, just then. He came up and hit me on the shoulder, just then, and I hit him back, and we took to tussling like a pair of puppies in the dust, and first I was on top and then he was, and then me again, ‘til one of the Indian men pulled us apart. He was a big, splendid man, and he and Paw-paw looked like they was no end amused, and Paw-paw said, “Go an’ play, boy”, so we did, while Ma and Mrs. Townsend and them sat on blankets and dickered for dried meat and moccasins an’ such….At the end of the day I gave the Indian boy my spinning top that I had in my pocket, and the big Indian gave me a sheath-knife with a wooden handle that I have still.

John would never admit to anyone how relieved he was to see the little trading procession return to camp, for that would mean acknowledging how apprehensive he had been for their safety…apprehensions that the women obviously did not share, for they seemed at first to be quite exhilarated by their adventure in the Indian camp and most pleased with the results, and Old Man Hitchcock was positively smug.

“A fine profit, this, a fine profit…and would have been even finer, if we had traded little Sadie to the woman with little bells sewn all over her dress…”

“Pa! How could you even think to trade our flesh and blood?!” Isabella went up in incoherent flames, while Old Hitchcock rubbed his bristles and tried to keep a smile off his face.

Elizabeth cried, “Oh, surely he is joking, my dear Isabella…Dr. Townsend, tell her that he is being a terrible tease!”

“She offered two ponies for the little one, an’ I think I could have talked her up to four,” Hitchcock said, and Isabella burst into tears.

“Mr. Hitchcock! Now see what you have done!” Elizabeth stormed, and John realized that perhaps it had been rather nerve-wracking for the women, after all. Hitchcock put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders and embraced her, saying shamefacedly, “Izzy, Izzy girl… stop crying. I was jesting with you, girl. You was always too serious….” Isabella hiccupped, and scrubbed her face with the handkerchief that Elizabeth gave her.

“Dry your eyes, that’s a good girl. Izzy, you should know about my tall tales by now.” Isabella hiccupped again,

“You’re a wicked old man, Pa, I do know that.”

“Aye, I am that,” he admitted, and Elizabeth took her hand, and said, “I do wish I could have traded for her dress, though…it was magnificent, and sewn all over with little sliver bells that chimed so enchantingly whenever she moved.”

“She’s the wife of a rich chief,” Old Hitchcock said. “Makes it easier for him to find her in the dark.”

John choked on his own laughter, and both women chorused, “Mr. Hitchcock!”

“Pa! For shame!”

“I regret that you did not trade for it, since it seems to have pleased you well,” John recovered his voice,

“What other barbaric wealth did you come away with? We had some little trading here, but all they offered were ponies…. Captain Stephens traded a box of metal scraps for two such.”

“A very splendid buffalo robe,” Elizabeth replied, “And some pairs of moccasins adorned with very pretty beadwork. Mr. Hitchcock most particularly advised us to trade for dried meats and fruit, to add to our stores. And Isabella bought some more moccasins and a pretty necklace of shells for a birthday present for Sadie… which I think must be sea-shells, but as we are thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, I cannot think how they came to be here.”

“In trade, my dearest… the same way you came to be here to purchase them. You’ve all done very well today… although I so very much regret that you felt the slightest apprehension regarding your safety.…”

“Oh, it was not so bad after the first moments,” Elizabeth laughed, “I do own, though….they kept looking at my hair, and at Miss Murphy’s, and I could not really tell if they were admiring our coloring, so unusual relative to theirs, or of they were speculating on how well it might adorn their lodges.” John laughed, a great relieved laugh,

“Brave Liz… the former, I am sure. And we shall be good guests and move on as soon as it is courteous to do so.”

Later, though, he spoke quietly to Old Man Hitchcock,

“I know you passed it as a joke to your daughter, but did you think that Indian woman was in earnest regarding trading for little Sadie?”

“I’d say so,” the old man replied, thoughtfully, “She’s younger than they usually like, when they take them into the tribe from outsiders… usually they take ’em Eddie’s age, or a little older. Old enough to not be trouble taking care of ’em, but young enough to be biddable.”

“If they wanted little Sadie, or any of the other children….” John ventured, “would they just take them, do you think? Would they dare?”

“Not from here, not at the fort…they ain’t fools and it ‘ud cause too much trouble… Naw, I think the chief’s wife just liked the looks of little Sadie, and thought she might venture an offer. She didn’t seem at all put out at being refused… but still an’ all, we’d ought to keep a close eye on all the childer until we leave.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary  “Thirtieth of June, 1844: Departed this day from Ft. Laramie, much refreshed by the rest, but with some apprehensions regarding our continued attachment to our scalps. We were treated with every courtesy by the Sioux during our short stay, but I could not shake a conviction that our slight intercourse was like to that of sharing a large enclosure with some wild and beautiful jungle cat; a cat with beautiful markings, a supple body and very sharp claws, which deigned for the moment to purr and rub its’ ears ‘gainst our hand, whilst we being always uncomfortably aware that it is, should it choose or the mood take it, capable of rending us in a trice to the very bone…

We have jointly resolved, however, to travel separately from the Oregon party, our differences being simply too great to encompass in one single company. We are in the advance, by about a day’s journey; we have arranged, however, to remain close enough to come to each other’s aid. I own it is a great deal more restful, not having to constantly intermediate between Mr. Thorp and Captain Stephens or the quarrelsome Shaw, and whoever has recently attracted his animus… .

We have traveled some 600 miles since departing from the jumping-off place, in a little more than a month and a half… excellent hunting along the Sweetwater Valley:  Moses, Allen Montgomery, Johnny Murphy and Joseph Foster went to hunt buffalo at our nooning this day, since we had seen a handsome herd close by. They intended to catch up to our caravan by nightfall, but by sundown they had not returned. Captain Stephens gave permission to burn campfires all night; Mr. Murphy and my dearest are in no little distress because of this…

“I do not see why Captain Stephens does not send out a party to search for them!”  Elizabeth spoke in a distraught whisper. She and Old Martin had been stoic all day and into the evening, even as they looked toward the eastern horizon every few minutes. Now she lay next to John in their bed in the wagon, but she was sleepless, in spite of the day’s toil.

“Because it would be a pointless effort, Dearest,” John repeated patiently, “They are able men, and well equipped to look after themselves. Allen and Joseph are, anyway. They are undoubtedly camped for the night and intend to catch up in the morning. Moses and Johnny are as safe with them as they would be with the wagons.”  To no effect; he could almost feel the tension vibrating in her.

“Try to sleep, Dearest. You cannot help Moses by staying awake all the night.”

“He might be near to a man grown, but he is still my little brother,” Elizabeth answered, miserably. “Mama gave him to me almost as soon as he was born. ‘Here is your baby brother’ she told me. ‘You must look out for him’. She had not the strength to look after him properly, so she gave him to me, although I was only a little older than Isabella’s Nancy. And he was such a very dear baby, so much better than any doll. He said his first words to me, and took his first steps for me, and I taught him his first letters…and when Mama and Papa Schallenberger both died, and he was left to us, it was as if he were really our child….”

“Liz, he is not a child to be coddled… you cannot go around keeping him from bumping his head or skinning his knees….” John started to say, but Elizabeth turned away from him, saying, “You are heartless, Doctor Townsend, quite heartless!” and John knew that she wept, and why, and knew also that there was nothing to be done until morning. Presently she slept, and so did he, but in the middle of the night he woke alone, no Liz breathing quietly next to him.

She was at the front of the wagon, a ghostly figure wrapped in her largest shawl. She had drawn back the flap that covered the round opening, and stood looking out, with the moonlight streaming in. Outside the cattle moved restlessly. The night herd guard walked by, his footsteps crunching quietly on the ground. He spoke quietly to Elizabeth; Bernard Murphy, by the sound of his voice, although too quietly to hear what he had said, and Elizabeth replied. Far away in the hills above the Sweetwater the little prairie wolves wailed and yelped.

“Dearest… they would not have traveled through the night, and risk being shot by accident in coming to our camp at night,” he said, and she started and turned toward him. “In the morning, Liz… we’ll look to see them in the morning, not before. Come back to bed, then.”

“I know,” she answered softly, and let the flap fall. He could not see her, except as a vague shadow against the canvas, but heard the rustle of her shawl, and then a gentle movement of blankets as she slipped between them again, to lay close-curled against him. “Please don’t be cross…”

“Never… well, never for long, Dearest.”

“They returned to us at midday, leading their horses packed generously with the results of their hunt, although having to leave much of the meat to wolves that had pursued them most tenaciously. They made light of their adventure and were astonished at our worries on their behalf, saying there was no cause for it in the least…. My dearest made only a mild complaint to the lad and denied being over-much concerned. We have much to do with drying the buffalo meat. Cut in strips and hung from the wagon covers, it looks as if they were adorned with a red-brown fringe.

Third of July, 1844… three days’ travel brought us to Independence Rock, a great grey monolith recumbent upon a low sloping bank of scree, above a wide and shallow valley where we intend to rest for a day to celebrate the 4th of July. There are the faint traces of those parties who have passed this way in seasons previous; ruts worn through hard-baked soil, bare circles where campfires were set, places where branches were broken for firewood… in many places along a canyon which forced us away from the river, the water was so heavily charged with alkali salts as to be distasteful and even injurious to drink…

Moses and I, in company with the young Murphy brothers and their friends, the Sullivan boys, intended to climb up to the top of the rock tomorrow morning and paint our names and the names of our party, as Mr. Greenwood avers has been the custom for many years. We are encamped only a little way from the bottom, and I would like to sketch a small scenic view of our wagons in camp. Alas, I am thwarted once again….

At a leisurely breakfast, unencumbered by the burden of catching the horses and rounding up the teams, John set down his coffee and said, “Where is Mrs. Patterson this morning?” With the party reduced roughly by half, the wagons and campfires described a tighter circle, the spaces between campfires being much reduced. Young Nancy presided alone over the Pattersons’ campfire, with quite touching gravitas, serving up the morning meal to her brothers and Sadie and Old Hitchcock.

Sarah and Elizabeth looked at each other, and John was aware of a spark of unease. Elizabeth said, nervously, “Mrs. Miller’s time came, very early this morning. Isabella went to her at once. She told us it would be hours before you were needed, and that I should not wake you just yet, she would send as soon as it was necessary.”

“Liz! I am the doctor; I should have been called at once! I might very well not be needed at once, but I would prefer to be the judge of that myself, and not leave it to some back-country herb-wife!”

Elizabeth quailed; he so very rarely raised his voice as other husbands did, or spoke harshly to her. It felt like slapping a child, and he regretted saying so with such bluntness. But his wife and Isabella had conspired with the best of intentions to spare him from duties he was oath-bound to carry out, and it angered him. But even though tears stood in her eyes, she lifted her chin and said hardily, “I know that very well… but you are also Captain Stephens’s second, and the co-leader of this party, with very great responsibilities…which leave you very nearly wearied to death. You fall asleep with your supper half-eaten, and the fork halfway to your mouth…you are wakened by some emergency half the nights, and are on guard over the cattle the other half, and are at everyone’s beck and call in between, and if you aren’t allowed some sleep now and then, you will fall sick yourself, and who would look after us, then?” she finished illogically.

“And where would I be then, out in this wild country, all alone?” she gulped, and added in a steadier voice, “Besides, Isabella is a very good midwife, and she has borne six of her own, to boot. She says it takes simply hours and hours. She was only called a little while ago, so why you should feel like a laggard for another half hour of sleep and a good breakfast, I don’t know. You could at least finish your coffee.”

Having his gentle wife suddenly round on him like that felt as if little Sadie had suddenly grown fangs and sprung at his throat, but in the middle of his shock and surprise, John illogically felt a kind of pride that she could be so fierce on his behalf and unyielding in her defense of his welfare. Greenwood had said once of his Crow wife, ‘A good wife will re-load for you; a great one will take up a knife and slit your enemies’ throats.’ Not quite what he wanted of his Liz, exactly.

Now she said, in a very small voice, “Don’t be angry at me, Dearest. You were sleeping so very sound. And I was going to tell you before you and Moses went up to the rock.”

“Have some more griddle-cakes.” Sarah put two more on his plate, and John realized that she and Moses had been watching this all with the liveliest interest, and all his hasty anger drained away.

“Ah, darling Liz,” he sighed, and took her in his arms. ”You are right, and I have been very inconsiderate of my own welfare. The next time this happens, will you promise to tell me so privately?

“If she won’t, I will.” Moses neatly scooped another griddle-cake from Sarah’s platter, and Sarah slapped his fingers.

“Children!” Elizabeth said quellingly, in an attempt to mimic Isabella’s very tones, but it didn’t quite come off, and they all laughed, just as Eddie came around the corner of their wagon and said, “Ma says it’s time, Doctor Townsend.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary:

“Twenty-second of May, 1844  With much labor, we have crossed the Elkhorn River and reassembled our wagons and teams on the far side, and ventured out into the desert…”

From E.S. Patterson interview, University of California Local History Archival Project, 1932:

“…Oh, it was a glorious to see… I can close my eyes and see it still, mile after mile of that beautiful green grass, full of wildflowers it was, rippling in that sweet, clean wind, as if thousands of little animals were running through it. The wagons coming over the top of the hill, those canvas covers shining in the sun, and the feel of it when we children ran through it in our bare feet, with the sun on our faces, and butterflies and dragonflies all going every which way in the sunshine… Ma said I had to look after my baby sister, Sadie, but I didn’t mind; she was the closest thing to a real pet that I had, way back then.

And we had chores to do, too. My brothers and I had to get up in the dark when Ma waked us, and round up our oxen, find them where they had strayed to in the night. O’ course, they never went far; ours were as biddable as dogs. They came when we called their names. We had four yoke to start with, and they all had names…Socks and Spot, Baldy and Blackie, Fergus and Red, Corny and Star… and the milk cow, Goldenrod. My sister Nancy had to milk Goldenrod in the morning, while Ma fixed breakfast, and my brothers and I hitched up the teams. We’d have eaten breakfast and packed up everything by sun-up, and then Cap’n Stephens would have someone blow a horn. It was one of the Oregoners—had the fancy notion to bring a horn.

Later on, we didn’t have anything like that, Just the cap’n come along and say to Ma, “All ready and hitched up, Miz Patterson?” and Ma would say “Surely, Cap’n Stephens,” and then she would drive the team herself…but that was later on, after we left the Oregoners at Ft. Hall, and it was just our eleven wagons.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary:

“…our days begin very early, at 4 AM, for we must be ready for the day’s march by 5:30; wagons packed, the teams all hitched, everyone fed and ready to roll out.”

The day began with a knock of a fist against the wagon-box, close by John’s head in the dark, and the voice of whoever had the overnight watch on the cattle-herd, making the wake-up rounds.

“Doc Townsend…you awake?”

“Aye, I’m awake…” John pulled on his trousers and boots in the dark, and then shook Liz’s shoulder.

“Dearest, time to rise,”

He clambered out of the wagon, through the front, loosing the canvas apron against the morning air, and taking the lantern with him,  before he climbed down to the ground. He stumbled to the fire that his family shared with Allen and Sarah, kicked the coals apart and tossed some small kindling and some buffalo chips on them. The fresh stuff lit readily, and he took a small twig from the fire and lit the lantern from it.

He hung the lantern in its accustomed place on the first wagon-bow and, yawning hugely, set off on the short journey to the men’s privy pit. Returning from it to his wagon, he passed Mrs. Patterson, wrapped in a shawl and jacket over her night-dress, returning from the women’s privy-pit. They pretended not to see each other.

On returning, John went directly to the tent where Moses and Francis slept, pitched just outside the wagon-circle that protected the horses and mules, and opened the tent-flap. He could see Elizabeth’s shadow moving in their wagon.

“Mose… Francis… time to rouse, gentlemen, time to rouse.” Moses groaned theatrically and pulled his pillow over his head, but Francis grunted and threw off his blankets. He pulled on his trousers and shirt and padded off towards the men’s privy pit.

John gave Moses another shake, took up Ugly Grey’s bridle, and climbed over the wagon tongue, secured for the night by chains to the Montgomery wagon, in search of his horse. Ugly Grey often chose to be skittish in the mornings, prancing and dodging his master as if playing a game for some minutes, before allowing John to slip the metal bit between his teeth and pull the leather bridle over his ears; a game, a part of the morning ritual.

When they set up camp every evening, they parked their wagons in a rough oval; just far enough apart to angle the wagon tongue and chain it to the wagon ahead, securing a corral inside for the horses, and Old Hitchcock’s mules. They set their campfires and tents on the outside of the circle, with the privy pits dug close enough to be safe but distant enough to spare sensibilities, and loosed the oxen and milk cows to graze under the guardianship of two men chosen by rote to keep guard throughout the night.

Stephens adamantly insisted on a night guard and the inclusion of every man and boy old enough to participate in it, a pair of them watching from sundown to midnight, and another pair from midnight until morning reveille. There were no exceptions, not even for Stephens himself, although he was often to be found patrolling at odd hours through the night. John wondered if the man ever slept entirely through the night; he thought not. At least the fact that Stephens claimed no privilege of exemption for himself reduced the level of complaint regarding his leadership to mere background grumbling.

Moses had roused himself by the time John returned, leading Ugly Grey, and busied with taking down the tent. His and Francis’s bedrolls were already bundled up, ready to be put back into the wagon. The fire had caught nicely, a kettle already sending up steam, and Elizabeth, with her hair in an areole around her face, was grinding coffee. Sarah was mixing up a batch of dough for fry-bread, balancing the bowl on her knees. By the Patterson wagon, Isabella already had bacon on the fire, and the smell of it mixed appealingly in the cool morning air.

The camp slowly roused into waking life, evidenced by the voices of men and women, and the cries of “Catch up! Catch up!” mixed with the jingling of tack and chains, and the clatter of breakfast preparations. Women bustled in and out of the shadows around their campfires, about their morning chores, while the men pulled on their outer garments and shouldered the task of hitching up the ox-teams for the day’s travel.

John hastily kissed Elizabeth and bade a hurried “Good morning, dearest Liz,” and she smiled and replied, “Good morning, dear doctor,” and no time for anything more, as he had to saddle Ugly Grey. It might be that cattle had strayed far during the night, or chosen to hide in the cottonwoods and other brush along the winding creek-bottom and the river adjacent, where they had camped the night before. As oxen were found, and yoked, and hitched to wagons, it would become clear if any had strayed.

Francis led up the first yoke, and John hastily unchained the wagon tongue and pulled it around. Now to capture Elizabeth’s buckskin pony, who tended to be even more coy in the morning. Elizabeth had finally named the pony Beau, after Beau Brummell, laughingly saying that he was a dandy, and in truth so vain that he would stand and admire his reflection in a pool of still water before dipping his muzzle into it to drink. But Beau had another vanity, a taste for sweets, and when he tired of evading the halter, he would step trustingly up and nuzzle hands and pockets.

By the time John had Beau captured and saddled, Moses had brought up the second yoke, and Francis had them hitched. Allan Montgomery was securing his lead yoke to his own wagon. Elizabeth poured him a mug of coffee, scalding hot and sweetened with molasses, and he sat with her on the wagon bench while she combed out her long hair and pinned it up for the day’s travel.

“I long for the day when our oxen are as tame as the Pattersons’ teams,” John remarked, idly. “They all come to the boys without having to be chased all over creation. Their wagon is ready to roll out whilst everyone else is still rounding up their beasts…that rowan-colored beast of Millers’ is a particular plague. He runs and hides in the brush, or over the brow of a hill, every morning without fail, and then puts on an air of innocence when he is caught.”

“For shame, Doctor,” Elizabeth chided him, laughing. “How can a mere animal express a human feeling?”

“I don’t know how he manages,” John insisted, “But he does. We find him a half-mile from the herd, strolling back and forth, nibbling a little at the grass, and I swear he is laughing at us, for the trouble he has caused.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Elizabeth said, “Oxen laughing at you, and being sly….”

“Your Beau Brummell is clever enough to have you bringing him sweetmeats,” John countered, “And you say yourself he is as vain as a peacock. Why should an ox have any less of a personality?”

Sarah, busy about the fire and the plank laid across a pair of kegs that served as kitchen, remarked, “That pony minds me of Mr. Montgomery, sometimes, always so certain that everyone is looking at him.”

“Sarah, dearest, your husband is truly among the handsomest of the younger men. No wonder that everyone should look upon him and marvel…although there is a handsomer among the older gentleman.”

Elizabeth and Sarah exchanged such a look, and simultaneously began to laugh.  John thought, Best not to know why women are laughing about men. It’s mysterious and best left unexamined; similar to all those occasions when he had to pretend not to hear Thorp’s friends in full complaint against Stephens’s rule as captain. Still laughing, Sarah handed John a plate of hot bread and fried bacon, and he accepted it with gratitude.

“A culinary marvel as always, Mrs. Montgomery. We have butter this morning, I see.”

“We shall, for as long as the cow gives milk,” Sarah replied briskly, and Elizabeth added, “We have made a marvelous discovery: a covered bucket of fresh milk hung under the wagon by the grease-bucket in the morning will have churned itself into butter by early afternoon.”

Allen accepted his plate with a surly grunt, and John frowned. It worried him more than he liked to say that Allen preferred cutting a dashing figure in front of women and favored the company of the young and unmarried men over that of his own wife. Allen and Sarah were but newly married, but still…. Above all in the world, John prized Elizabeth’s company and companionship and was as eager as a lovesick boy to spend time with her. Responsible men like Young Martin and James Miller held their wives in much the same generous affection.

Just the other day, he and Allen and James, and young Bernard Murphy had ridden out at nooning, scouting for buffalo. James was teasing Bernard about making calf-eyes at one of the girls in the Oregon contingent, saying, “How will you ever have the courage to ask her father for her hand, if you can only look at her with a moon-face and never be bold enough to speak to her outright?”

Allen laughed bitterly and said, “Pay no mind, Bernard. While women are all for marriage, it’s not clear to me that all men need be!”

It was an odd, mocking thing to say, and John wondered still, although the others had passed it off as a joke.

But it remained that Allen and Sarah oftentimes behaved like strangers to each other, and it did not escape John’s notice that Allen spread his bedroll under the wagon at night, and at meals, Sarah barely spoke to him at all.

Stephens appeared silently in the campfire-lit circle, leading a paint-pony he had bought from a party of passing Pawnee Indians, and shadowed as always by Dog. John groaned, “How many not found, this morning?” while Elizabeth exclaimed with pleasure, “Good morning, Captain Stephens…will you have some coffee?”

He looked as if to say No, but Sarah handed him a full cup of it, and he said instead, “Six… including Millers’ rowan.”

John wolfed the last of his breakfast, handed his plate and cup to his wife, and tossed Beau’s reins to Moses; this was becoming a predictable part of the morning, riding out to find animals that had strayed from the herd, beyond the easy reach of drovers and men on foot. Oxen might have been dumb, as Old Man Hitchcock pointed out, but they were creatures of habit, and some of them liked to wander far. So far, they had always been able to locate the wanderers after a brief horseback search along the riverbank, or where the grass grew with particular richness.

“Miller, that ox of yours is going to make some Sioux tribe a feast they won’t ever forget,” John said when they returned the prodigal to his impatient master and less-venturesome yoke-mate. “And I swear, I won’t mind a bit. I might just ride up and ask them for a taste.”

“When it happens, get a taste for me, too, Doc.” James Miller snapped the yoke on his errant and peripatetic property. The sky had begun to pale in the east, attended by rosy clouds whose color deepened, while the stars faded, all but the brightest and largest.

“I do believe it may rain today,” Old Greenwood sniffed the air like an ancient hunting hound. He too was mounted on a spotted pony, like those ridden by his sons.

“Keep that in mind, as you scout,” Stephens said only, and Greenwood and his two boys rode off, in the direction of travel they would take today, and John recollected how the Oregon-bound Mr. Hammer had said so scornfully, “Wouldn’t it be better to hire a man who could see the trail?”

Only later did he think of retorting, “But this is a man who can smell it!”

He and Stephens nodded to each other and then wheeled Ugly Grey and the paint-pony and rode in opposite directions around the camp, where each wagon stood hitched and ready, drivers at the alert beside their lead teams, women and children scrambling up to their places in the wagon. All the portable detritus of their camp gathered up and packed, all the disposable left behind; the campfires burning out, the privy pits with the last shovel-full thrown upon their contents, the places where the horses and the oxen had pastured, trampled and grazed over. All the water casks filled, everyone fed, the last of the loose herd gathered up, the last child, dog, and horse accounted for and in their places.

Stephens and John met at Stephens’s wagon, where his three yoke stood patiently in harness, waiting for his drover’s command. It was a marvel to John, how Stephens, with just his one silent teamster, worked so efficiently by himself in breaking camp. Like the Pattersons, he was always ready to roll out, twenty minutes before everyone else—all those years of experience on the trail to Santa Fe.

Now Stephens stood in the stirrups and waved his hat toward Thorp’s wagon; the clear silver notes of a bugle winged up into the morning sky. Who was first today? Oh, the quarrelsome Shaw, last in line yesterday, and let none forget it. Shaw’s heavy-laden wagon angled out of the camp circle, bullwhip cracking like a pistol-shot, followed by the Clemmons family, then Prather, Thorp, Jacob Hammer who preferred to depend on his visions and prayers in the conduct of the daily journey, and the other Oregoners, then Stephens, the Murphy and Miller wagons, Sullivans and Martins, Fosters, and his own, and the Pattersons, with Allen bringing up the rear, trailed by the loose herd.  Stephens would ride ahead for the morning march, in advance of the first wagon.

John wheeled back to his own wagon, where Francis stood ready, and Elizabeth impatiently waiting in Beau’s saddle, ready to be riding along in the cool of the morning with the out-riders, free of the constant jolting and dust attendant upon travel in the wagon. John himself would be riding close to the lead wagon for the day’s march, while other mounted men flanked or circled the line of wagons, which moved at a slow pace of oxen plodding, and tended to spread out as the day wore on, since the travelers were desirous of avoiding the dust kicked up by the hooves and wheels ahead.

The sun rose up from the hillside at their backs, into a blue sky flecked with milkweed puffs of cloud, in which the wagons were the only evidence of a man-made world. The only things moving in it besides themselves were birds and insects springing out of the grass, and the cloud-shadows rolling over it, that and the river, always on their left, wide, shallow, and muddy brown. John had heard the same witticism about it being “too thick to drink and too thin to plow” too often in the last couple of weeks to be amused anymore. He took it in mind to ride up to the top of the tallest rise, just ahead of the route of march, and see if he could see much of the way forward from there, as well as the entire line of wagons.

Ugly Grey cantered ahead, eager to move faster after being held to a gentle stroll. He tackled the hill as if he wanted to tear great chunks of it off with his hooves, plunging up and up until John reined him in at the crest and turned him around. Grey pranced restlessly, even so. John dismounted and stretched.

It was quiet, up here on the hill, nothing but the wind rustling in the endless grass, and a hawk on motionless widespread wings floating in circles overhead. He seemed to be an immeasurable distance from the wagons crawling below, the clamor of their passage; shouts of teamsters, and the sharp crack of whips, the voices of children, barely disturbing the enormous quiet. They would pass through this vast, deserted grassland, make their camp, and move on, leaving it to the silence of the blowing wind and the harsh cry of a hawk, nothing that would know or care that they had once passed through.

He counted the wagons as they passed below, took note of the outriders and the trailing loose herd, the gaggle of women and children, walking alongside, like goslings after their mothers. He shaded his eyes; could that be little Eddie driving the Patterson team? It must be; John recognized Eddie at a distance, from the sling on his arm. Three days before, Eddie had fallen from the moving wagon and broken two bones in his left arm. John helped Isabella set the bones and bind them up, and himself dosed Eddie with syrup of opium. This way, it looked as if his mother was keeping a close eye on her adventurous child. John didn’t think it would last: Isabella would take her eye off him for a moment, and Eddie would be off on another appalling adventure.

He looked ahead to the west, where a fast-moving horseman, a mere dot at that distance, kicked up a puff of dust on the farthest ridge-line; One of the scouts, returning. John remounted; he wanted to do a quick pen and ink drawing of the wagons as they looked to him just now, moving against the background of the river and the rolling country on the far side, with the green islands set like emeralds in the river, which the angle of the morning sunlight turned to a sheet of silver. Perhaps he might do it this afternoon, if Old Greenwood’s son was not bringing back word of some particularly laborious obstacle in their way. The horseman came over the next ridgeline: Britt Greenwood—no one else rode so like he and the horse were actually one creature.

Ugly Grey, of course, was not interested in going down the hill as fast as he had come up it. John could feel him grinding the metal bit in his teeth, and placing his feet just so. A human would be grumbling crossly under his breath. He urged him across the slope, and intercepted Britt at Stephens’s wagon.

“It’s a creek-bed, with a steep drop-off, both sides,” Britt reported, “We went upstream and down, nearly as far as the river, and it’s the same all the way.”

“Take a party ahead, and dig out a ramp, as much as you can,” Stephens ordered, “Make a start… we’ll finish it when we get there.”

On his way to pass the word, and take the pick and shovel from his wagon, he passed Elizabeth and Isabella, walking together, leading Beau with little Sadie perched in the saddle and squealing with excitement and enjoyable apprehension.

“I’m taking up road-building, at this time of my life, and I’m afraid I have need of your Beau, again,” John told his wife, “Mrs. Patterson, would you be able to send Samuel and Oliver ahead on Beau with whatever tools you can muster?”

“Of course.” Elizabeth lifted down Sadie. “Time to walk, sweeting. Beau has work to do!”

Road-building or at least, that part of it relative to creek-banks, was something they were getting to be well experienced in. John’s pioneer party, composed of all the boys and men who were not actually driving wagons or with the herd, picked a place where a side gully had broken down some of the steep wall of the creek-bed. And Patrick Martin was at it already, as John had come to expect.

The elder Patrick might have been hasty and hot-tempered but was also generous to a fault. He had the energy of two men and near the strength. No matter if it was digging out a ramp for the wagons or felling a tree to use for a wagon-brake, Patrick was first there and fastest, wielding shovel or ax in a furious storm of dirt or wood-chips.

Sweating mightily, John and the other men broke it down even more, prying rocks out of the creek-bank and rolling them to the bottom to make the foundation of a ramp. They used buckets and wash pans to carry more soil dug from the top of the ramp to fill in at the bottom, packing it down with buckets of creek-water. They had rough-finished the down-ramp and begun tearing down the bank on the opposite side for the up-ramp when Shaw’s lead wagon caught up to them.

“It’s just wide enough.” Stephens surveyed the work accomplished so far. “Lock wheels going down, and double-team going up.”

“You’d have to do it again, Cap’n, in another two miles, too,” Old Greenwood sat slouching in the saddle of his horse, looking down at the makeshift ramps, “but that I found the place where I came this way ‘bout ten years ago, it was, with two wagons and a pack-train…it’s rocky, but passable. I blazed the trees either side and left a trail back even a farmer can find. The water is deep in the middle, but the streambed slopes nice and gentle.”

“We’re gonna move on after this? I don’t know why you’re in such an all-fired hurry,” grumbled Shaw.

“We’ve only made six miles since hitch-up,” Stephens said, abruptly and walked away.

The old mountain-man looked at Shaw peaceably and said, “Whoever’s going to camp in the snow and eat rocks in six months ain’t gonna be me an’ my boys, seh.”

They chained a sturdy tree-branch, thrust through the spokes of each wagon’s rear wheels, locking them into place and throwing up huge gouts of dust, as each one skidded down the ramp. Then they had but to laboriously draw the wagons in pairs, two and two, out of the creek bed by double-hitching their teams. It was dusty, exhausting work, and the sun stood close to overhead by the time they were done with it.

“We’ll noon at the next creek and rest before we cross,” Stephens directed, his face masked in dust. John thought there would have been the usual rumble of discontent from Shaw and Thorp and their adherents but that they had already crossed over. He turned to remount Ugly Grey, and there was Elizabeth, bearing a canteen and a tin cup, and a towel soaked in cool water from the creek.

“We took the children a little way upstream,” she said, as John gratefully wiped his face and drank his fill.

“Eddie collected some pretty pebbles, and we saw the dearest little frogs, about the size of my thumb, hopping all around…and dragonflies with eyes like jewels. And Sarah and I picked a basket of wild cherries, which are not entirely ripe but will taste extremely fine in a pie tonight. We have found a patch of wild onions, also,” she added.

“We will feast like lords tonight, then,” John said. “I must make a note of it in my diary!”

“You had better,” Elizabeth twinkled at him, “for Mr. Montgomery ventured off the trail a little way, while waiting to cross the creek, and managed to shoot an antelope for our supper.”

“In that case, a kingly repast indeed, and well worth a long entry.” John kissed his wife and swung himself up into the saddle again, wincing slightly as he took up the reins.

He had some blisters on his palm, and an ache in his shoulders from laboring at the earth ramps—not as trail-hardened as he would like to be, obviously. Back to ranging the length of the train, keeping watch on the flanks. They were crossing Pawnee territory, Old Greenwood had told them a few nights ago.

“Not what they used to be,” Old Greenwood sounded slightly mournful. “They got cleaned out by the smallpox an’ then the Lakota ripped them up good. They won’t be looking for trouble any time soon. Good for us, I’d be guessin’.”

“Better safe ‘n sorry,” Stephens said, and John agreed most heartily with that sentiment. They reached the second creek as the sun reached the highest overhead, and heartily glad to see it, to unyoke the oxen and let them drink. A pretty place, with the poplar leaves shimmering in constant movement overhead. They dined on the cold bacon and bread left over from breakfast, but Elizabeth spread out a blanket, on a patch of grass in the shade, and brought out cool water and a shrub made with vinegar and a little of the sour wild cherries mashed with sugar.

“A picnic in the farthest wilderness,” John said gratefully, and dozed for a while in that murmuring shade, while the oxen slapped flies off their flanks with their tails, and children played along the creek banks.

After a while, he roused himself and walked upstream, slapping at an occasional mosquito. He smelt smoke, and around the gravelly bend, he came upon Patrick Martin, and Joseph Foster, Old Martin’s hired men, Ed Bray, and his own man, Francis. Patrick and Joseph had lines dangling into the water at midstream; Ed Bray had set his to one side as he deftly gutted a fat silver trout. Francis was tending the fire, and three or four more fish, threaded onto a frame of green willow twigs, were grilling gently over it.

“Speak you now softly, sor,” Patrick rumbled in his soft Irish brogue, “for the fish are still hungry. How they would be biting in the morning, with the mist on the river and all…oh, that would be a foine sight.”

“We had a longing for the taste of a bit of trout, so we did.”

Ed Bray was also Irish, wiry and weathered, and Patrick said, “Faith, and me old friend does not set as good a table as any in the land?”

Bray sighed and replied, “Well, as my wages are paid those meals…still, I had a longing to taste something else, now and again…and the rivers are so full, they fair leap out and array themselves on a griddle…speaking of which, how are they doing, Frankie?”

“Ver’ fine,” replied Francis. “Anodder few minutes, I t’ink.”

“Don’t forget the salt, Frankie,” Joseph Foster told him. He settled himself against the weather-polished trunk of a fallen tree and sighed, “Doc, this is the life, I swear to you.”

Joseph Foster was a small, spry man, cheery as a cricket, still quite young although he had already lost much of his hair. In all the weeks of travel, John had never heard a cross word from Joseph, or anything other than the greatest good cheer in the world, even when his wagon had tipped over on a steep creek down-drop a few days before. Joseph’s wheel yoke were so badly tangled in their harness that one of the oxen broke its leg and had to be dispatched.

Foster butchered the fallen ox on the spot and borrowed another from the Murphy’s spares until he could purchase a replacement at Ft. Laramie, saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. Roast beef for all tonight, and won’t it taste good after salt junk and pemmican?”

Fair-skinned and freckled, he had been much plagued by sunburn. He was blistered and reddened on his exposed face and hands, and John said, “Joe, you’d best cover yourself better from the sun. There’ll be nothing left to you but a little crisp like a bacon rind.”

“Fortunes of the trail,” Joseph replied, cheerfully. “D’you fancy a taste of fish, Doc? We only brought four plates, though.”

“The doc’s a gentleman,” said Patrick, ever genial. “Can’t ask a fine gentleman to eat with his fingers.”

“I’ve already eaten,” John protested, but Francis handed him a plate with a bit of broken, grilled trout on it, and it smelled so tempting that his resolve broke down. And it was good, slipping off the tiny white bones of it and meltingly tender.

“Good, m’sieu, no?” Francis smiled shyly.

“Marvelous…my compliments to the chef,” John replied, and Francis said, “M’sieu jests. I am not a chef, merely a hired driver.”

“You might be able to pass yourself off as one in California,” John answered. “For sure, I almost wish I had hired you as such,” and Francis protested, “No, m’sieu, Madam Montgomeree does the cooking very well…it is just that one longs for something…a touch of the different.”

“Aye, we’re only along for the fishing,” Ed Bray was laughing. “A little of that for me, Frankie…thanks. No, Doctor, sor, we are just as keen to reach California as you, just that we have not the wherewithal for a wagon and stock and supplies and all. So we’ll contract to work our way, in exchange for board, and that’s the way of it for poor men such as Frankie and meself.”

“Speak for yourself, Bray.” Joseph had pulled forth another sleek silver-gleaming trout. “I heard the fishing was grand. And so I packed my traps and set out, and if this is anything to go with, California is a land such as true anglers dream of.”

Patrick Martin caught John’s eye and laughed, and John thought it was well that some were having the time of their lives, fishing in a wilderness river in the middle of the great desert.

Now, on the move again, he squinted at the sky, off toward the south where the pretty and creamy white clouds of the morning were piling up and up and up, into a great tower, brilliantly white at the top, but flat and dark across the bottom, pressing down on the plains south of the river like a great grey flat-iron. A grey veil hung from the bottom of that cloud, and a gusty south wind brought a teasing breath of moisture and the smell of rain. John rode toward the head of the train, where old Hitchcock stumped along leading his mules, and Greenwoods’ pack pony.

“Looks like we’re gonna get wet again,” Stephens said laconically, as a bolt of blue-white lightning shot from cloud to land, too distant for any sound but a faint rumble. “Close up as much as possible, and keep a close eye on the loose stock.”
“And me with my rheumatiz,” complained Old Man Hitchcock as the thunder grumbled again…

“It looks as if it would just pass to the east of us, if we keep going,” John ventured. Although it seemed as if the cloud spread, pressing closer and closer against the earth, and there was a queer greenish cast to the air as the sunlight winked out.

No, they could not outpace this storm entirely, but perhaps they might avoid the brunt of it. Ugly Grey seemed to tremble with unease, and John could hear oxen bellowing as a mighty crack seemed verily to split the sky right over their heads. The clouds darkened to the color of lead and pressed even closer, as if twilight were falling in the very middle of the day, and a mighty gust of wind sent the wagon covers swaying and the women’s skirts to flaring out.

Down in the riverbottom, the wind-lashed trees were in a tumult of green leaves, tossing like waves in a storm at sea. Up ahead, he glimpsed Elizabeth, pulling at Beau’s reins; she must have been leading him, walking with Sarah and Isabella and the children, and now Beau pulled away from her, in a head-tossing, snorting panic, as thunder crashed again overhead. Sarah screamed, barely heard, and John raked Ugly Grey’s flanks with his heels.

“Sarah!” he shouted, when he reached the struggling women and the panicky horse. “Give me your shawl!”

She looked barely older than Sadie at that moment, her eyes huge and dark with panic. John snatched the shawl off her shoulders and threw it over Beau’s head. Unable to see, he stood, head drooping, and John took the reins out of Elizabeth’s hands and shouted, “Get in the wagon, both of you! I’ll see to Beau!” The storm was upon them, now impossible to count the seconds between the flash and the noise, while gusts of wind flattened the grass. The rain announced itself first as a growing rustle on the grass, pattering in random wet splotches. Elizabeth and Sarah picked up their skirts and ran. The first few fat drops resounded like pebbles on the wagon-top, and then the full force of it swept in, and the light pattering became a full-throated roar.

Sarah and John’s wife were safely in the wagon, and through the veil of rain he could barely make out the dim shapes of other wagons and their teams. They had all slowed or stopped as the rain swept in. A fringe of silvery drops fringed his hat, even, and suddenly something smacked his shoulder, and Ugly Grey seemed to start. The sound of the rain on the canvas, next to where he stood between Beau and Ugly Grey took on a deeper note, and the grass was suddenly full of bouncing white pebbles the size of marbles, and the rain flailing his shoulders and the horses’ backs were ice cold. Yet he seemed to be sheltered from the worst of it, and almost as suddenly as it had begun, the sky lightened, and the hail stopped.

Sarah and Elizabeth peeped out from the wagon cover, still quite shaken from the sudden violence of it all.

“Dearest, are you quite all right?” Elizabeth’s voice trembled. “You are quite soaked.”

“I am quite unharmed,”John replied, “I apologize for shouting, Dearest; the storm looked to be quite violent, and I feared for you both. I must go and see if anyone has been injured.”

“Then I will take back Beau,” Elizabeth said, with a stronger voice. “And Sarah will want her shawl returned to her.”

From Dr. Townsend’s Diary:

“Caught on the trail this aft. in a storm of some violence, with hail of some 1 to 1 and a half-inch diameter and much heavy rain, fortunately of no lasting duration. No very great injury to our party taken, but a very great fright to us all. Mrs. Thorp o’ertaken with a fit of hysterics, Mr. Magnent, the cattle-driver, sustained a great many bruises about the shoulders from the hail, and Mrs. Patterson sustained a blow on her head from a piece of hail whilst attempting to shelter her oldest son from the worst violence of the storm…”

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932,

“There was a storm we were caught in—along the Platte, I think it was—oh, an incredible sight to see it come in, across the river bottom, and worse to be caught on the trail without any shelter, lightning everywhere, and hail the size of slingshot. Ma shouted at us all to get into the wagon and button up the flaps tight, but she caught up an iron pot-lid to cover her head and went to see to the team, as my brother Oliver was driving it, and the oxen were snorting and getting to be fractious because of the hail and lightning. Ma held the pot-lid over Oliver, and she was hit on the head by a hailstone, raised a great welt the size of a goose-egg, it did. Doctor Townsend chided her, afterward, why didn’t she get into the wagon, like the other women, and Ma said right back to him, because she couldn’t think of anything except for what she could do to protect her children.”

The afternoon march dragged, seemingly endlessly; John realized that he had been struck by hailstones also, when his shoulders began to ache. The weary day’s march told on them all, in the voices of women raised, chiding fractious children, drovers impatiently snapping their great bull-whips over the backs of the teams they drove, teams that were tired and thirsty. Only Old Greenwood did not seem wearied, of all the men, slouching easily on his painted Indian pony, as he and John rode by Stephens’s wagon.

“Two more miles, if that,” Greenwood said. He and his boys had found a good place to camp the night, a sheltered meadow, tucked into the curve of a low rise above the river, with a freshet of water coming down from the higher ground, plenty of deep green grass for the animals, and stands of trees on the low islands in the river for firewood.

“Why are the largest trees on the river islands,” John asked, curiously, “and not on the banks, as elswehere?”
“Fire,” Greenwood answered. “In the fall, when the grass is dried, these plains are plagued with fires. Sometimes they are started by lightning, sometimes by the tribes…they say it makes the grass grow more richly, but it burns everyhing before it save what is protected by the river channel.”

“Then we are fortunate to be venturing here in the spring, when everything is still green,” John said, and the old man sighed.

“You are right in that, Doctor. It is a horrible sight to see, a line of fire across the horizon, moving through the grass as fast as a man may run, and everything…everything, rabbits and antelope, prairie hens and all, leaping and running from it all, as fast as they can.”

“You must have seen many strange sights in your journeys to these desolate parts,” John ventured, and the old man sighed, remniscently.

“I have that, Doctor. I have seen many marvelous things, things that put the accounts in Old Strabo’s Geography to shame… there is a place where fountains of hot water spring up out of the ground, and natural cauldrens of mud bubble as if overflowing from the infernal regions. There are places, I have heard, where rivers run into the desert and sink without a trace into the sands.

“I have seen brave Indian warriers test themselves and worship their gods by thrusting sharpened bones through their own flesh and dangling from the roof of the council house by leather thongs attached to those bones, chanting for hours until their flesh tears loose and they drop down to the ground. I myself knew a man, a white man, who was captured, and made to run naked to amuse the warriers of the Blackfoot tribe, and he ran barefoot for a day, outdistanced them all but three, and killed them with his bare hands.

“I have seen lakes in the high mountains, as blue as sapphires and so clear you can see twenty, thirty feet down, and valleys of trees all turned wondrously to gold in the fall. I have seen sights so beautiful and terrible as to turn your heart forever away from those places our kind call civilization.”

“And yet you speak like an educated man,” John said, wonderingly. “You know Strabo, and the classics.”

“No ‘counting for taste, Doc,” the old mountain man smiled. “A wise man goes where his heart tells him to go, not where other folk think he should go. Tell you truth, though, sometimes I miss such things. Not commonly, though.”

“I have a small library,” John ventured, on impulse, “In my wagon… I could not countenence leaving them behind, since I had collected them with no little trouble. I have a volume of Byron’s poetry, and Lord Chesterfield’s letters, and others such as Heroditous’ histories and Pilgrim’s Progress.”

“Bunyan?” Greenwood chuckled. “Seems fitting… considering. I’ll think on your kind offer, but my eyes are so bad, I would need one of the boys to read it to me, and they don’t care so much for the exercise of it. But thank-ee anyway, Doc.”

As the sun slanted toward the western horizon, turning a reach of the Platte to molten gold, the first wagons reached the appointed camping place for the night. Old Greenwood’s boys had already marked the quadrants of the wagon circle, driving four sticks into the ground with a bit of cloth flagging the end, and fluttering in the light breeze. Tired men and boys unharnessed weary oxen, turning them loose for the moment to drink at the riverbank.

A party of older boys set off to cut wood, while women and older children gathered small, dry kindling from where it had fallen from trees, or from skeleton branches left scorched and bone dry by last year’s fires, flashing over the prairie and leaving nothing green above ground. The smoke from cookfires and the ringing sound of someone pounding in tent-pegs filled the grassy bowl of their encampment, along with the voices of women and children laughing.

John circled the wagons one last time and slid down from Ugly Grey, so tired that his legs fairly buckled underneath him. He barely felt strong enough to unsaddle Grey, sending him with a slap on the rump into the central corral. The chore of chaining up the wagon tongue drained him utterly, and he thought be might be trembling from the reaction of all the long day’s labors and alarms. He poured a dipperful of water over his head, and it ran down, soaking his hair and shirt again, as he took a long drink, and felt somewhat better.

Sarah and Elizabeth had busied themselves around the campfire, from which came the most extraordinarily savory smells, and Moses appeared from the river-bottom with an armload of wood. A roast sizzled on a spit arranged over it: Allen Montgomery’s antelope, and John’s mouth filled. Elizabeth hastily set aside the pie she was constructing and brought him a tin cup, a cup most marvelously cold to the hand and refreshing to drink of.

“Mrs. Patterson and I gathered a quantity of hail in a milk-bucket, before it melted,” she said, “And buried it in a flour-barrel. We thought it would be a treat, to have something so cold. Isabella thought upon making ice-cream, but there was only just enough to make some more cherry shrub for everyone.”

“A most blessed thought,” John said, and drained it with sincere appreciation. “Ahhh that was most welcome, my dearest Liz. I might just be able to stay awake long enough to dine without falling asleep into my plate.”

“You had best,” Elizabeth ordered, “Sarah and I will not have our bravest efforts go unappreciated. Not only are we dining on roast antelope, but we found wild peas along that creek were we nooned. They do not taste so well as from the garden, but they are green.”

“It smells so wonderful; might I not have a little taste?” John pleaded, and reached for the cooking fork.

“No!” Elizabeth mockingly slapped his hand away, and so he must content himself with resting a while, sitting on a box and leaning against the wagon wheel, while the women cooked, and Allen cleaned his hunting rifle, but it was all the better for having waited for it, and they ate their fill around the campfire, as the sunset colors, gold and purple and orange, faded out of the western sky and stars bloomed so large in the sky over their heads, it looked almost as if he could reach up and pluck it from the sky as one would pluck a wildflower from the grass at one’s feet.

From the direction of the Murphy campfires floated a thread of music, a penny-whistle and the complicated patter of an Irish drum. Old Murphy and one of his sons, playing to amuse his grandchildren, joined presently by a fiddle, and the merry laughter of children dancing with each other by the campfire, as the stars bloomed overhead. John leaned back against the wheel and smiled. Perhaps he would take Elizabeth by the hand and they might walk down to the Murphys’, and dance to a penny-whistle and fiddle under the stars. Or he might fall asleep, first, content to know they were another fifteen miles closer to California.

From Doctor Townsend’s journal:

“Seventeenth of May, 1844… The die is cast. We depart on the morrow, in company with Thorp’s Oregon-bound party. The grass is well-grown, we have made such last-minute preparations as are necessary, made final additions to our supplies, and sent last letters to such kin and loved ones as we have remaining behind. We have taken every care against such contingencies as we may expect, and asked His blessings upon our journey. My good and trusty friend Elisha Stephens has been elected Captain of the party…”

John sat on the wagon seat with his writing desk in his lap and the sheltering wagon cover drawn tight over the first bow. The securing flap had not yet dropped over the opening into that tiny canvas room that had been their home for a month and would be for many months yet. A few night insects fluttered around the lamp depending from the wagon bow over his head, which cast just enough light for him to write. He could look out as if through a round window, to the last of the pale color fading from the sky to the west, and the stars just winking into view.

All among the trees, yellow lantern light and candlelight glowed within wagon tops and tents, coloring them a darker gold, like the Chinese paper lanterns that a friend of his father’s, who was a tea-clipper captain, had brought from Canton and given to him when he was a boy.

Enough of looking out; he had a need to write an account of the meeting, held in the largest clearing amongst the trees and lit by lanterns hanging from the branches overhead. They had brought chairs and benches, kegs, boxes, blankets, and ground-cloths from the wagons, and roughed out some tree-trunks to serve as seats for the assembly. It was indeed like a camp meeting, as Elizabeth had foretold. John and many of the other men had put off their rough work clothes for the occasion. He himself donned his fine broadcloth coat, and Elizabeth tied his best neckcloth and adorned her own dark travel dress with a white lace collar and linen cuffs.

Stephens did not: he came in his soot-covered work-clothes, straight from the little forge. He had set that up at the edge of the camp and been kept busy ever since with mending this and that. This had resulted in Stephens becoming at least well known in the emigrant camp, if not as well-liked as he would have been if he were a more gregarious man. He had hired a single teamster to help with his wagon, a silent, wiry New Orleans Creole named John Flomboy who was as unforthcoming about himself as Stephens.

Stephens now sat next to John, Elizabeth, Moses, and the Montgomerys, his arms folded, and watched impassively.

“…speeches interminable, discussion endless, much as expected,” John wrote, “reviewing the required hours of travel per day, rotating the order of daily march, the observance of the Sabbath and the mechanics of managing the campsite; at which juncture I had my professional say regarding the situation of privy-pits at a good remove from any source of water we may hope to use, since the miasma arising from such may adversely affect the health of our party…all serving as a prelude to the serious business of selecting a leader for our enterprise, but first, another wrangle over franchise, it being manifestly clear that those who owned property, viz: a wagon, should have a clear say in deciding matters affecting the party, having the most to lose.

Much pointless discussion incited by one Mr. Hammer, a Quaker gentleman from Pennsylvania, who attempted to scrape acquaintance with me by calling on connections with my father’s acquaintances in the place of my birth; he insisted that heads of families should also qualify as voting on party matters on similar grounds. It eventually was determined that there existed no particular class among the entire party who were head of family but did not own a wagon. Mr. Hammer placated into silence by inclusion of this stipulation, although I have no notion of why he took this so vociferously, save that perhaps he is of that vainglorious breed who takes an unseemly delight in the sound of their own voices.

I had been called on previously to serve as recorder, and now fell to me the task of making a complete roll of those qualified to vote…”

John re-inked his pen and savored the memory of the consternation among Thorp and the other Oregon bound when Isabella Patterson stood up and calmly demanded to be included on the voters’ roll, indisputably the owner of a wagon, and the head of a family.

“You can’t be a voter!” cried Thorp, and an especially argumentative Oregon-bound emigrant named Shaw added, in some outrage, “You’re a woman,”

“That is not in dispute here,” Isabella returned dryly. “However…I own a wagon, being deputized by my dear husband, who is thousands of miles away from here and cannot speak for his interests himself. In his absence, I am head of my family. And I am going to California… with my wagon… and my family. Kindly explain to me why I should not be able to exercise the responsibilities deputized to me by my husband in this assembly as regards our journey to rejoin him.”

John, inwardly amused, cleared his throat and solemnly read what had been discussed and decided upon by all present.

“‘Franchise is to be held by every owner of a wagon, and/or the head of a family, along with the right to call for, and to speak in any assembly of the party.’ Gentlemen, I think Mrs. Patterson has us there.”

“And rightfully so,” Old Martin Murphy spoke up, “’Tis only right and fair, and by the rules we set for ourselves.”

That surprised John, who had no idea what would move him to be such a stout or effective ally, since when Old Martin spoke, he spoke for his sons and kin, and therefore a large part of the California-bound party.

“But what about Mr. Hitchcock, your good father?” ventured Thorp with some indignation. Old man Hitchcock took a malicious pleasure in baiting, provoking, or arguing with his daughter at every turn. He had taken his two mules and a length of canvas and had gone off to share a campfire with his old friend Greenwood and his Indian sons on most nights, although he was usually somewhere to be found about the Patterson camp during the day.

Isabella retorted, “He is neither the owner of my and my husband’s wagon, or the head of our family, just a shiftless old vagabond with two mules to his name.”

“But what of your oldest son…might he be deputized to speak for you?” bleated the luckless Mr. Thorp, but he received a glare of such concentrated and withering contempt from Isabella that John thought he must surely melt into a small and steaming puddle.

“After such an unexpected diversion,” John wrote,”We bent our energies to our original and long-expected agenda, that of electing a leader for this perilous passage. Mr. Thorp being nominated by those intending for Oregon, there was discussion in consideration of Young Martin Murphy, who has much to commend him, being in the prime of years, sober and the head of a family himself, but—and this was unspoken—unquestionably a Papist, unlikely to win much favor with the Oregon party. So I took it upon myself to nominate Stephens, as both a compromise and the man I honestly think fittest for the task, tho’ it is plain to me that I may have more faith in him than he does himself.”

So Stephens, competent, inarticulate, and solitary was overwhelmingly voted in as captain of the party, and John himself was chosen to be recording secretary for the company and implicitly Stephens’s right-hand in the running of it. Under the lamplight in the council grove, Stephens was acclaimed as captain and stood up on a crate, as John had whispered he must speak to all the company, now.

“What do I say, now, Doc?”

“Not what they want to hear,” John replied, “Thank them for their vote, and then tell them what you’re going to do.”

Stephens stood awkwardly on the crate for a moment, an ugly and gangly big man, ungainly in his sooty work clothes, sweating under the pale lantern light, and John realized piercingly that Stephens was in that place he hated most of all, the middle of a crowd of people, all looking expectantly at him. Finally, Stephens cleared his throat and said, “Thank-ee for your vote, folks. I promise I’ll get you to Californy…or wherever you’re going. We’ll cross the river a week tomorrow; the grass’ll be growed proper by then. Good night t’ you-all.”

Then he jumped down from the box and shouldered hurriedly away through the crowd. John was detained by Allen, who said quietly, “Well, he don’t seem like much, John, but I think we can work with him…better than that fool Thorp, anyways.”

“I am elected recording secretary as expected, and the California party has voted to hire Greenwood and his sons as guides as far as the great Rocky Mountains, over the vociferous objects of Thorp and the Oregon faction, who object to what they term an unnecessary expense, as they insist the trail has itself been so oft traveled and clearly marked that no guide is necessary. They steadfastly refuse to share in any of the cost for his hire.”

“Dearest, why do you trust Captain Stephens so?” Elizabeth had asked sleepily, after the election meeting, when they were curled up spoon-fashioned, in their bed, that mattress laid over three flat-topped trunks and boxes in the wagon, which took up better than half the space in it.

John considered his answer carefully; truth told, it was instinct, the instinct that served him well in the practice of medicine, but difficult to put into words. He had learned through hard experience not to ask where it came from or worry about possible outcomes, just pay attention to that quiet little whisper of absolute conviction. He ignored it at his peril; it served him well to listen.

“He’s good with the animals,” he replied at last. ”And he knows what he is about, once we cross the river, better than any of us, except maybe Greenwood and Hitchcock. We…most of the rest of us, we have moved before. We have taken our wagons and our families from here to there, but there was always a road. We could often buy supplies, or another draft ox, and we were never at it for more than a month or so. This is….” He paused and thought, carefully, “When I was a boy, I was taken to an acrobatic exhibition of performers who did handstands and tumbles, hanging by their hands from swings, high above the ground. They would leap off a little stand, catch the swing by their hands, and go soaring through the air, all across the hippodrome…and at the right moment, let go and turn a somersault in the air, and catch another swing, in mid-air…all with perfect timing. We are about to step off the platform, Liz…from now on, we must be able to dare…and to trust. And we must have a trail captain who knows what it is like to be out there, for months and months.”

“I trust you, Dearest,” Elizabeth had said sleepily, and thinking of that, John looked out of their wagon through the little round opening, at the stars and the river, and wondered if she had any idea of how immense the wilderness was, or how alone they would be, once they had swung away from their perch on the river heartland.

Perhaps it was best, he decided, that she and the other women and children did not, or they would not be able to sleep so sound.

Even tonight, the night before their momentous departure, Elizabeth slept, breathing easily, her silver-gilt braid woven up for night and lying across the pillow like a bit of fine embroidery. She was happy with the buckskin pony, had petted him, and ridden him every day that they waited in camp for the grass to grow.

“I have no proper side-saddle,” she lamented to Isabella, and that formidable little woman, fresh from her victory at exercising the franchise, replied, “Then ride astride. Who is there to see you being unladylike, on the other side of that river? Besides, you won’t fall off so easily. Wear a pair of your boy Moses’ trousers under your skirt and don’t pay anyone any mind about it.”

And John had noticed how Elizabeth and Sarah Montgomery had both looked thoughtful, as if they suddenly comprehended the kind of freedoms that lay across the river, besides the much-advertised perils.

Children’s voices from the Patterson camp, sleepy and querulous; John smiled to hear them. Sadie had almost stopped sucking her thumb, and had learned to say a few emphatic words now that her mouth was not corked up by it; “Don’t! Horsie! Mine!”

Eddie alternately charmed and appalled, with his total and complete fearlessness in every situation. John felt that children being frightened was a good thing; they were kept from danger by their fears, but Isabella averred that Little Eddie feared nothing in the world, and moreover, usually walked serenely straight in the direction of any available danger, which of course, frightened the very daylights out of her.

“…We are to assemble tomorrow, before dawn, and move to the riverbank to begin crossing,” John wrote carefully, “where there is a rough landing, and a single flat-bottomed scow, to ferry the wagons over, thereby saving considerable time. Capt. Stephens plans to swim the stock, against the advice of Thorp and the Oregon party. I spend much time in vexatious dispute with these gentlemen…”

The sky had entirely darkened now, pricked by a brilliant spangle of stars. John sighed, and corked his ink-bottle; enough of this for tonight. He closed the lantern and let the canvas apron fall over the round opening, but even when he was in bed, he lay awake for a long, long time, looking up at the curving canvas roof and remembering the acrobat, soaring confidently through the air.

It did not go well in the morning, for dawn came under lowering clouds, and they packed the last of the cooking things in a fine drizzle of rain and left the cook-fire to go out of itself.

“You’re needed down at the river, Doc…you an’ the boy, too, if your man can manage your wagon hisself.” Stephens appeared out of the grey rain, his hat-brim dripping like a roof-edge. ”We’re going to start swimming the stock.”

“I shall stay in the Montgomery wagon and keep Sarah company.” Elizabeth pulled her shawl around herself. She had meant to ride, on this first day, but she gave the reins over to Moses with a certain amount of relief. They had been ready for several hours, waiting in a huddled mass of wagons and teams for their turn to cross the river. It looked to be a tedious business, unhitching two wagons at a time on the riverbank, man-handling the wagons onto the waiting ferry, and diverting the loose stock into a steadily growing herd, milling about on the riverbank.

The ferry lurched ungainly in the river, poled away from the landing by two of the Indian crew. They were entirely naked save for a brief loincloth, even to their heads, shaved of all but a long top-knot like a horses’ tail. They seemed stoically indifferent to the rain that streamed down their bodies.
“Dollar a wagon,” said Stephens, laconically. “Extra for stock. Good business, while it lasts. ”

Out on the river, the current caught the flatboat and pulled it swiftly along the heavy line strung between banks. They could just see the opposite bank, where more of the shaven-headed Indians hauled away at a long rope attached to the flatboat. A similar rope paid out from the near bank as the scow moved away, close to where Stephens and John watched.

“Dropped the rope,” Stephens remarked, as there was a flurry of shouts and gesticulating from the Indians on their side of the river. ”Current’s got it.”

“What’ll they do?”

“Watch.”

A small dug-out canoe shot out from the riverbank, two Indians digging short paddles into the muddy water, achieving a nice burst of speed, aimed at where the tow rope had dropped down into the water. One of the paddlers slipped into the river, as smooth and confident as an otter, and vanished under the surface.

“They can swim?”

“Handy thing to know, living on the river,”

The swimmer surfaced a few seconds later, bearing a loop of rope, and handed it to his confederate in the canoe. They paddled back to the riverbank, and beached it on the bank.
“Fine show for us,” Stephens remarked. “A little fun for them. Start moving the cattle toward the river. Force them as far out as you can, until they begin swimming for the far shore. You mind getting wet?”

“I can’t swim.” John pointed out, gamely.

“That horse of yours can, Doc. When he gets deep in, take your feet out of the stirrups and hold on to your saddle horn.”

But even with the assistance of men and boys on foot, shouting and waving their hats, the cattle would not go far enough into the swirling river; they turned back, and clambered over each other, bellowing frantically, or were swept down to the mud-flats below the landing, and mired to their shoulders.

Finally, nothing could induce them to venture in farther than the shallows, even as their numbers were added to, as wagons were unhitched and slowly rolled onto the ferry landing. John wearily concluded that in a brute physical contest between a two-hundred-pound man and a two-thousand-pound ox, the ox was eventually going to win out on that one. He found Stephens, helping Old Man Hitchcock and a resentful Mr. Shaw, trying to dig one of the stuck oxen out of the muck.

“Captain, I think we’re going to have to try something else.”

“Agreed, Doc.” Stephens looked around, very thoughtfully. “You know, they ain’t real bright sparks, oxen. Not like dogs.”

“Or pigs…. Real clever, pigs. I saw an elocutin’ pig once, in a traveling menagerie,” mused Old Man Hitchcock. “But an ox ain’t any great shakes, no more’n sheep, an’ they have to put a bell on the lead sheep, ’cause all the rest are too dumb to figure out how to get out of their own pen.”

Stephens suddenly lifted his head.

“Doc,” he asked casually, “Who has the most biddable, tamest ox in this party?”

“That ‘ud be Izzy,” Old Hitchcock answered right away, and John nodded agreement, “I seen her and the other children yoking them together of a morning, and Eddie driving them, an’ that lil squirt ain’t but knee-high to a grasshopper.”

“Doc… get one of Miz Patterson’s boys, ask him to bring one of theirs on a long halter, down to the landing. Hitchcock, see if you call to mind any of that Injun sign-talking, and get those two with the canoe to row a little ways out in the river.”

Hitchcock began chuckling, wheezily. “Cap’n, that’s a notion in a million… how to lead an ox to water, an’ get him in the drink.”

John spotted the saffron-yellow wagon-top easily enough, just a little ahead of his own, already unhitched by the landing. He waved to Sarah and Elizabeth, and leaned down to speak with Isabella, and the boys.

“Captain Stephens requires the loan of the most biddable of your oxen, and Oliver, with a very long halter. He has an idea to get them into the deep water.”

“Socks,” replied Isabella decisively. “He’s as tame as a kitten. He would follow any of us into a house and curl up in our laps, if he could. Oliver, find Socks and take him to Cap’n Stephens.”

Oliver took up a long halter from their wagon, and John gave him a boost up to ride behind him, into the milling herd of muddy and unhappy cattle penned by the riverbank. They located Socks, easily enough, and Oliver snubbed the long halter around his horns. He clumped readily after them, waded hock deep, knee-deep, chest-deep in the water, as Oliver tumbled into the canoe, and the two Indians slowly paddled out into deeper and deeper water. Socks followed, trustfully, swimming strongly, and Stephens commanded, “Now! Get ‘em going!”

Slowly and ponderously, other oxen moved into the water, deeper and deeper, in Socks’ wake; a few, a scattering, then as if reassured, more and more of them, a broad and threshing arrow of nostrils, horns, and backs cutting across the river. The trampled riverbank emptied, and as other teams were unhitched, they trotted obediently into the river, hardly needing encouragement from the horsemen and boys waving their hats and shouting.

Two and two, the wagons made the slow trip across. In the late afternoon, with only a portion of the wagons and most of the cattle on the other side, Stephens sent Old Greenwood and his sons across, to scout for a good camping place.  They swam the last of the loose cattle and sent a party of young men to stand guard over the cattle and horses, since they could not move the remaining wagons and families over until morning.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“We’d only gotten some of the wagons over, by the end of the day, so there we were, half and half. Ours was over, and Mr. Martin Murphy, and John Sullivan’s and one or two others. Doctor Townsend sent his foster-son and some other of the young men to mount guard, fearing that the local Indians would try and steal cattle, for they had that sort of reputation then. Amongst the guards that night was my brother Oliver, and Moses Schallenberger, the doctor’s boy, and Johnny Murphy, all bright and daring young sparks. They had pastured the cattle, and let them feed, and then rounded them up into the corral, made from chaining the wagon tongue of each wagon to the rear wheel of the wagon before, or chained them to the wagons, and around midnight they became bored with watching the cattle and the wagons, whilst all slept.

They had a mind to play a trick on John Sullivan, who was something of a sobersides, for all that he was not that much older. He was continually nervous about the Indians, and about his oxen being stolen, and he was plagued particularly as he had a very pretty sister and always had to act the part of a severe papa. She married a Mr. Sherbeck in San Francisco, eventually, but not before leading all the other single men of the party in a merry dance.

It was Oliver’s idea, and he put it to Moses, who thought it very funny, but he worried that the doctor and Captain Stephens might be angered, so they went to Martin Murphy, who was more or less in charge, and put it to him. They might not have worried, for Martin thought it a fine jest, too. They had pastured the cattle, put some of them into the corral for the night, and chained others of them outside to the wagons.

In the wee hours, Oliver quietly unfastened John Sullivan’s cattle and drove them into the woods, and after some minutes, Moses and Bernard gave the alarm. John Sullivan sprang up and gave chase after his property, and after some brisk exercise and listening for the jingle of their chains, recaptured them and brought them back to his wagon, where he chained them to the wheels again, and returned to his bedroll. In a little while, Oliver loosed them, and drove them farther into the woods, and Moses giving the alarm. John Sullivan sprang up with some uncomplimentary words about the pesky Indians and gave chase again.
This time Oliver had driven them much farther away, and when John Sullivan stood himself up on a fallen tree to listen for the jingling of chains, Johnny Murphy was hiding close by and fired off a shotgun, both barrels full of bird-shot into the air. John Sullivan went running back to camp, shouting that the Indians had shot at him, and talked ever afterward of the narrow escape he had. Meanwhile, Oliver and Moses brought back his cattle, circling around from another direction.

Over the next days, Captain Stephens made mention of their determination and skill at retrieving John Sullivan’s animals twice…and then remarked at how odd it was that no one else’s stock had been disturbed. But my brother Oliver spoke up and said it was that John Sullivan’s cattle were white, and thus were better seen in the dark, and Captain Stephens, he smiled a little. I think he knew, or guessed something of what had really happened, but he said naught else on the matter, even when John Sullivan told the tale again of how the Indians had tried to steal his oxen and shot at him.

The Doctor did give a great lecture several days after to the corporals of the guard, and all the young men, about the seriousness of their duties, and not to give way to the temptation of larks and practical jokes…”

From the Diary of Dr. Townsend: “We are at last over the first obstacle on our journey, at some cost, having lost some cattle to the river, being swept away, or stuck in deep mud and drown’d…this also being the cause of some lack of amity between’st ourselves and the Oregon party.

I was called to attend to Mrs. Thorp, she being ill, and Mr. Thorp himself blaming Capt. Stephens for his insistence upon haste…. Much contention from Mr. Hammer, who insists on being solely guided by divine revelation revealed through his dreams, and Mr. Shaw, guided by a penchant for troublemaking, who seems to have quarreled with one and all.

We must now make preparations for crossing the Elkhorn River, by constructing a boat from two wagon-boxes waterproofed with hides sewn closely over all. Capt. Stephens revealing peculiar foresight by having provided his wagon with a number of stout metal pulleys, such as are used on ships of the line, and a great quantity of good rope…. The contents of each of our wagons and the wagons themselves must be thus laboriously transported… My Dearest Darling and the other women went aside from the scene of our toils to perform their own toils, viz. laundry, it for one being a fine, fair day with abundant sunshine…”

Elizabeth carried a large bundle of bedding, packed into her washtub, leading her pony along the riverbank, toward where the women of the party had set up an open-air laundry under the poplar trees. She recognized Mrs. Thorp, and some of the other Oregon-bound, a little farther along at the water’s edge, where the water ran clear over a clean gravel bottom, as if they were holding themselves a little apart from the Murphy women and the out-spoken Isabella. She had two more bundles of clothes and bedding tied to her horses’ saddle. Laundry day, such as it was, and perhaps a chance to properly dry out some things that had been damp and musty, seemingly for weeks. A day not to spend in the saddle, or in the wagon, not to be incessantly moving.

A warm breeze rustled the ever-trembling poplar leaves, and cloud-shadows chased each other over gentle-rolling hillsides of grass. Sheets and blankets were already spread out to dry on the sweet clean grass, the prairie grass they had waited for till it grew and could feed their cattle.

There was the sound of laughter, as merry as school-girls, under the trees, and Elizabeth unaccountably felt old. Dear Isabella was the only woman older than she, and Sarah, just lately wed, the only one without children, and sometimes Elizabeth felt quite alone…alone and isolated by her husband’s profession and stature. It had not mattered so much, back in St. Joseph, where there were many other women, where she had affectionate and longtime friends, and neither Sarah nor Isabella would have been counted amongst them, then, except in the most cursory fashion.

But today she had put on a faded old washdress, with the hem turned up, and she had brought a bucket of soap, and gone to seek the company of other women, and Isabella looked up from her scouring to smile, and exclaimed, “My dear Elizabeth…you are an angel, I had wondered how we were to carry all this back with us… and you have brought more soap, and another tub! We are boiling water to scrub everything as clean as can be, and the girls are rinsing it all in the shallows. We may not have such another chance for weeks, so Mr. Greenwood has told us.”

She gave another vigorous scrub at her washboard and tossed the results to her daughter Nancy, who stood in the water with her skirts kirtled up above her knees, along with Helen Murphy and Mary Sullivan. The girls were rinsing the laundry clean in the shallow current, splashing back and forth with joyous energy. Eddie and Willie Miller, and Willie’s stair-step cousins, Martin Murphy’s little boys, were spreading out the clean rinsed laundry over the prairie grass to dry.

They had kindled a fire, over which a number of steaming kettles were set. Sarah, and Mary Miller and the Murphy brother’s wives, Annie and Mary-Bee, had placed their washtubs close together. Elizabeth placed her own next to Sarah, regarding it with faint loathing. She did not much care for doing laundry, but it was a woman’s lot, and she might as well do it with a fair face, and in good company. Eddie magically appeared with a bucket of water, dipped from the river, and ran back and forth alternately with kettles from the fire and buckets from the river, until her tub was full enough to begin.

“I think it very well that I was advised to make all our trail bedding from dark calico,” remarked Isabella. “This will all smell quite fresh, and at least I can think it clean for a while yet, without the evidence otherwise that only white bed linen would present.”

“God tempers his winds to the shorn lamb,” remarked Annie Murphy. Her black hair gleamed in the speckled sunshine with a bluish luster like a blackbird’s wing. “I can only hope that He (and she crossed herself, hurriedly) is doing the same with regards to our bedding, and taking away something of our sense of….”

“Smell?” said Mary-Bee Murphy: she was young Martin’s wife, and their four little boys were distinct among the children as they had her own dark-auburn hair and unfortunate freckles. ”I dearly hope so, since the smell of salt-junk makes me so ill in the morning of late.”

“You are not… truly….” said Mary Miller, laying a hand on her belly, which, while generous, barely showed, under her loose wash-dress and full apron.

“I think so,” Mary-Bee Murphy sighed, “I have not had my courses since we left home, and I thought it was worry… and no little grief at leaving the little one…”

Annie reached over and patted her hand, comfortingly. Elizabeth already knew from John, how Old Martin’s wife and Young Martin’s and Mary-Bee’s baby daughter had all perished together in the worst of the epidemics, some two years ago; and now this new grief, of leaving their graves behind.

“Perhaps the blessed Virgin will grant this one be a girl,” Annie said softly and Mary-Bee smiled a little tearfully, and answered, “I do hope so. Those imps of mine need a sister to tease and torment them.”

Isabella had the absorbed face of a woman rapidly doing up sums. “My dear, do you realize, your child shall be born when we are just arrived in California; such good fortune for you both that we will have a doctor among our company.”

Mary-Bee looked a little cheered, and Isabella whispered to Elizabeth, “You should tell your husband, my dear Elizabeth, I have served as a midwife on many occasions and will be more than happy to be of assistance…. Mary will be brought to child-bed in the next two months, I judge. On the trail, but a blessed event, nonetheless. You are not hoping for such for yourself, then?”

“I might yet,” Elizabeth said, tranquilly. “My husband has been very tender of my poor health until now, and would not permit me such a risk…but they say the air in California is marvelously healthy…so healthy, I vow the very thought of breathing it has made some improvement. I have not had one of my sick headaches for some weeks, now.”

“You are out in the fresh air, every day…indeed, we can scarce avoid fresh air,” Isabella said, robustly, and the other women laughed,

“And I think if you did not lace your corsets so very tightly, you might find you can take in more of that good air.”

“I should then have no shape at all,” Elizabeth protested, “And what of the support that tight lacing lends to a woman’s weak bones?”

“It hardly matters to your weak bones, if custom demands that women be laced so tightly that a woman of fashion cannot walk across a room without fainting,” Isabella replied.

“Why, Mrs. Patterson, I believe you are an advocate of rational dress?!” Elizabeth exclaimed, and Isabella giggled like a schoolgirl and lifted the hem of her stout dark-colored washdress to reveal a pair of voluminous, baggy pantaloons of the same material, gathered at the ankles. Elizabeth clapped her hands,

“How very, very clever, and completely modest… but you must be very brave to wear such a daring garment. Mrs. Bloomer insisted that such things would be very, very comfortable and healthy. But I would fear the laughter of all. What does Mr. Patterson think of this?”

“He has more sense than to care for such matters,” Isabella replied, “But Oliver liked to die of embarrassment, and Samuel and John made much sport of my Turkish trousers, until I challenged them all to a footrace and won.”

Elizabeth had a sudden mental vision of the tiny woman, limbs pumping madly and her hair falling out of her pins, hurtling across a meadow in a blur of rational costume, just ahead of her teenage sons.

“And at the end of it, I leaped over the fence, with perfect modesty,” Isabella added smugly. “Not a word from any of them, after that but I made my skirts just long enough to cover them. I have not Mrs. Bloomer’s capacity for absorbing ridicule…but out here, they can ridicule away.”

“I believe they have no time for anything but the teams and wagons,” remarked Mary. “Mr. Miller has barely spoken to me in days. He attends to Willie and the girls for a little while in the evening and falls asleep where he sits, with his plate in his hand. Were it not for him snoring in bed, and his dirty shirts, I would scarce know I had a husband at all.”

“And for that, also….” Annie roguishly glanced at Mary’s bulging apron-front, and they all dissolved in shrieks of laughter, which only stilled when the old trail-guide, Mr. Greenwood, appeared silently in the grove, almost within their circle.

“Good morning, ladies….” He looked around, nodded to them all and spoke softly.”Just to let you know…my boys are standing watch on us all, yonder, from the top of that hill…the country round here is safe enough, commonly, but it’s best to practice keeping watch now, for the odd ruffian.”

“Oh, we are safe enough,” Isabella said firmly, and from a basket of clean laundry at her side, she produced an ancient dragoon pistol. The corners of Greenwood’s mouth quirked, and Isabella added, “It’s loaded, and I keep it near me always. Mr. Patterson had me practice with it, before he went to California. For all I must use both hands, I am quite a fair shot.”

“Doubtless,” Old Greenwood answered, with dry amusement. “It relieves my mind, ma’am, knowing you had thought on certain precautions for this journey.” He nodded at them all again and departed as quietly as he had appeared.
“Does he not frighten you a little?” asked Mary with a shiver. “He dresses so like a savage himself, I am sure he is gone over to them entirely…and the boys are hardly any better.”

“He does not frighten me,” Elizabeth answered, thoughtfully. “He speaks well, like an educated man, now and again. He may dress like a savage, but I don’t think he is one at heart. He is rather more like a hero in a Leatherstocking tale.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Isabella snapped. “He is just one of those silly men who wanted to go wandering around in the wilderness, instead of settling down and working at a good trade to support his family.

The other women were a little taken back by her vehemence, and it was a few moments before Mary-Bee ventured, “Still…have you noticed? He is quite a handsome man, for all of his considerable years.”

“He is, that,” agreed Annie. ”Curious, isn’t it, that most men are handsome in youth and decline from that, as they age, but there are some who are plain youths but make handsome and vigorous old men.”

“Quite vigorous,” agreed Mary, coloring a little. “He claims to be fourscore, at least…but his sons are just barely out of boyhood….” She blushed even more deeply, as her sisters and Sarah giggled, and drew a shocked rebuke from Isabella.

“Mrs. Miller! Consider the girls! Little pitchers have big ears!”

Elizabeth bent over her own scrub-board, to hide her own smile, as Sarah said, “Whatever tonic Mr. Greenwood has taken all these years, I hope then that my own husband never partakes of it!”

“Mrs. Montgomery, for shame!” said Isabella, scandalized, and Elizabeth hid another smile, and wrung out one of John’s shirts, thinking as she did so, that in such company,  this journey might just not as terrible as she had feared.

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932:

“There was always much to do, with crossing rivers, and it seemed like we were forever having to stop and cross one. Sometimes the men could double-team a wagon through a shallow river, since enough of the oxen would have their feet on the river bed to keep it steady and moving. Captain Stephens turned out to be good at organizing river crossings; he was a fair hand at judging if we could just go straight over, one at a time, or if we might have to set up a ferry as we did on the Elkhorn. There had been a lot of rain that spring, and the rivers all remained higher than most years for many, many weeks.

For a lot of us, this established him as a good leader almost at once, but Mr. Thorp and the others in the Oregon party were galled by his leadership and contested his every decision. It was often up to Dr. Townsend to intervene and smooth things over….”