The Age of Gold (22 page)

Hugh Heiskell and William Swain followed this third route, which, not surprisingly, was called the California Trail. It encompassed the hardest going so far, largely because the river courses in the region ran north and south rather than east and west; as a result the wagons were constantly climbing out of one valley or descending into the next. A headlong pitch down to the Green River required the emigrants to lock their brakes and chain logs to the axles as land anchors against the descent. Moreover, because the rivers ran transverse to the route, for the first time the travelers were compelled to make waterless marches between streams. They were really in the mountains now, and the weather let them feel it. Days remained warm, but nights were sharply cold. The emigrants often awoke to frost on the ground and ice in the water buckets.

Yet the scenery was glorious. “The sun in magnificence rose above the mountain among the golden coloured clouds of dazzling brightness,” recorded Hugh Heiskell one typical morning. Hot springs bearing such names as Soda Springs, Beer Springs, and Steamboat Springs bubbled, gurgled, and geysered from the earth. “Going down, we found a basin underground
in the rock in which the water was agitated as a violent boiling caldron,” Heiskell wrote. Describing the same spot, William Swain said the spring “presented the appearance of a pot of boiling water and made a noise like lard boiling violently.”

Hardly less fascinating than the geography were certain of the human inhabitants. Pegleg Smith was a mountain man about fifty years old who operated a trading post on the Bear River with his wife, an Indian girl of perhaps sixteen (“who he appears to love,” remarked Heiskell). Smith’s nickname derived from a feat that amazed the emigrants when they heard of it. Some twenty years earlier Smith had been trapping when a bullet from an Indian rifle shattered his leg below the knee. He realized that only amputation stood between him and death by gangrene. Hardly hesitating, he took out his sheath knife and performed the amputation himself. Eventually he carved a wooden leg, on which he now clattered about his trading post. A socket carved in his stirrup allowed him to ride.

Hugh Heiskell found Smith “a hospitable, honest mountaineer.” Even so, he had “peculiar ideas about some things, of course, owing to his habits from so long a residence among savages.” One of these habits was a readiness to resort to violence. “Yesterday evening White & Nelse came home & told us that Pegleg had cowhided a fellow for trying to steal one of his horses.” It seemed that one of the men from the train had grown drunk and quarrelsome, and when Smith ordered him away, he left in company with some of Smith’s horses. Smith alleged theft; the accused claimed a misunderstanding. Observers were divided: “Oll and Nelse, who were there all the time, believe him guilty. The rest of us think not.” But on the Bear River, Pegleg Smith’s word was law. “At any rate they brought him back and gave him a cowhiding.”

S
ARAH ROYCE SAW
neither Pegleg Smith nor the hot springs that impressed Heiskell and Swain. The Royces had joined a company that was bound for Salt Lake City, and they decided to stay with it that far. Crossing the Wasatch Mountains west of Fort Bridger, they noted with concern the snow swirling about the ridgetops. It was mid-August, and the Sierras,
which were higher than the Wasatch, were still months away. Yet the vista from Emigrant Pass (so named by the Mormons two years earlier) almost erased the foreboding.

Despite the lateness of the season, the Royces spent ten days resting in Salt Lake City, allowing their oxen to regain strength and weight. Meanwhile Sarah and Josiah pondered what to do next. One veteran of the region claimed to know a route that led far south of the main emigrant road and would spare the travelers the Sierra snows. Yet he wouldn’t be leaving for several weeks, and this seemed to Sarah and Josiah too long to wait. The Mormon elders and their many wives, observing the presence of Sarah and little Mary, urged the Royces in the strongest terms to stay the winter. The heat of summer had scorched what little grass the Great Basin offered; the hordes ahead of them had devoured most of what survived the sun. The Royces would probably die before they reached the Sierras. But even assuming the desert spared them, they were so late that the snows of the mountains would almost certainly trap them. The grim fate of the Donner party should be an object lesson to them. Besides, everyone else had either hurried ahead or decided to winter in the city; if the Royces continued, they would be traveling alone.

The advice failed. “We heard it, we coolly talked it over, and yet, so perverse were we, that on the 30th day of August, a solitary wagon, drawn
by three yoke of oxen, and in charge of only two men [Josiah and an elderly fellow the family picked up], left Salt Lake City, bearing, as its passengers, one woman and one little child, and for freight only so much provisions as might last us till we could scale the mighty Sierras and reach their western feet.”

A
LTHOUGH LEWIS MANLY
was even less eager than the Royces to winter with the Mormons, Charles Dallas had no such compunctions, and before his train reached South Pass, he informed Manly and the other drivers that he was going to halt for the season in Salt Lake City. They could stay or not, but he couldn’t afford to pay them during the idle winter months.

“This was bad news for me,” Manly recalled, “for I knew the history of the Mormons at Nauvoo and in Missouri, and the prospect of being thrown among them with no money to buy bread was a very sorry one.” The other drivers shared Manly’s fears, and the group called a council, to which they invited Dallas. Evidently they hoped to make him reconsider his decision, perhaps by threatening a strike, which would have left him in the middle of the wilderness with no drivers. He resented this attempt at pressure. “He became quite angry at us, and talked some and swore a great deal more, and the burden of his speech was: ‘This train belongs to me and I propose to do with it just as I have a mind to, and I don’t care a damn what you fellows do or say.’ ” He then stalked off, leaving the drivers to their grumbling.

For several days Manly and the others weighed their options. Going back east was ignominious and perhaps impossible, given their lack of supplies and money. Going forward to Salt Lake City was hardly more appealing, given what they assumed to be the Mormons’ animus against unbelievers. “We began to think that the only way to get along at all in Salt Lake would be to turn Mormons, and none of us had any belief or desire that way.” As gentiles, they might not even survive the winter among the Mormons. “If we were not very favored travelers”—and they would not be, given their unemployment and penury—“our lot might be cast among the sinners for all time.”

Crossing South Pass into the country where the rivers ran toward the Pacific, Manly started formulating a solution to his and the other drivers’ predicament. By the time they reached the Green River, the first sizable stream flowing west, he was quietly talking it over with them. “We put a great many ‘ifs’ together and they amounted about to this: If this stream were large enough; if we had a boat; if we knew the way; if there were no falls or bad places; if we had plenty of provisions; if we were bold enough to set out on such a trip, etc., we might come out at some point or other on the Pacific Ocean.”

As though in answer to Manly’s second question, a boat suddenly appeared. At one time someone had operated a ferry at this crossing of the Green River; all that remained was an abandoned boat—just large enough to hold a single wagon—filled with sand and lying on the bank. Manly and the others dug the boat out and employed it to float the Dallas train and a contingent of U.S. soldiers, their recent companions on the trail, across the Green. In the process Manly asked the unit’s surgeon and the commanding officer about the river. Was it passable? Where did it go? Both men said its waters eventually reached the Pacific, and though it contained some cataracts, there were no waterfalls.

This made up Manly’s mind. He would try the river. Somewhat to his surprise, Dallas presented no objection—probably because they were close enough to Salt Lake City that he could get along without his full crew of drivers. Dallas offered to buy Manly’s horse for $60, and he agreed to sell Manly some flour and bacon, two ropes, and two axes.

Six others joined Manly in trading their whips for oars. Together they watched Dallas and the army party disappear to the west. “Each company wished the other good luck, we took a few long breaths, and then set to work in earnest to carry out our plans.”

The first days down the Green River caused Manly and the others to congratulate themselves on their boldness and perspicacity. The river was smooth and swift, and though its direction was south rather than west, their speed—estimated by Manly, who had been elected captain by the other six, at thirty miles a day—far outpaced the plodding to which they had grown accustomed on the trail. Besides, river travel was exhilarating.
Whenever the sun grew hot overhead, a man had only to splash himself with the cold water to feel as though all was well in this beautiful world. By every indication, they had got the better of the bargain with Charles Dallas. “It looked as if we were taking the most sensible way to the Pacific,” Manly wrote, “and we wondered that everybody was so blind as not to see it as we did.”

Subsequent challenges simply added to the zest. They spied an encampment of Indians where a tributary joined the Green. The Indians beckoned the boaters to come to shore, as if warning against some danger below; but Manly guessed—and the others agreed—that this might be a ruse, and so they feigned ignorance and floated by. In the swiftest stretches two men pulled oars and the other five manned stout poles, cut from saplings on the shore, to push off from rocks. Manly, standing in the bow, gave a mighty heave against one especially large boulder, only to have his staff lodge in a crevice beside the big rock, and the rebound of the staff catapult him out of the craft and halfway across the stream. He landed with a great splash and disappeared beneath the surface. Briefly the men wondered if they had lost their leader, but Manly, a strong swimmer, came up laughing, and the men waved their hats and cheered for their intrepid captain.

Although the provisions purchased from Dallas were modest in quantity and boringly bland, nature opened her larder to the travelers. Antelope and other animals came to the river to drink, and Manly, drawing on his experience as a professional hunter, bagged more than the men could eat. One massive elk weighed in—by the estimate of a crew member named Rogers, a butcher by trade—at more than five hundred pounds. The antlers spanned six feet, and when the skull was suspended upside down by the antlers, Manly could walk beneath the arch they formed. The men spent an entire night cutting the meat into strips and drying it over a fire, to reduce its bulk for transport.

For several days the river traced a route through wide canyons, where the mountains sloped gently back from the banks; but then the mountains drew nearer and the canyons began to close in upon the boaters. At one point Manly, tired from his hunting and his general responsibilities, was napping in the bow when the men awoke him abruptly. Dead ahead rose a
wall of rock many hundreds of feet high. Where the river went at its foot, none could see. Manly recalled a map the army party had used, which marked something called “Brown’s Hole.” Unfamiliar with the terminology of the mountain men who had christened the landmarks in this vicinity (a “hole” was simply a sheltered canyon), Manly grew alarmed that the river was about to disappear down a hole in the ground. “I told the boys I guessed we were elected to go on foot to California after all, for I did not propose to follow the river down any sort of a hole into any mountain.” At the last possible moment, when the boat was about to be dashed into the base of the towering rock cliff, the stream turned sharply to the right, into a hitherto invisible gash of a canyon. The sky, so broad just moments before, now shrank to a sliver of light far overhead. The sun disappeared; the river ran in perpetual shadow between walls forbidding and dark.

Nor was the scenery all that changed. In many places rocks the size of houses had crashed—eons ago, or perhaps just yesterday—from the cliffs to the canyon floor, where they blocked the river and forced the waters to either side. Time and again Manly and the others had to get out of the boat and, with great effort and no little hazard, lower it by rope through the rapids. Where before they had glided down a smooth pathway, now they stumbled down a turbulent, treacherous flight of giant stairs. Their pace had been measured in miles per hour; now it was hours per mile.

The work was wearing; the men grew hungry. And the game all but disappeared. Only a few mountain sheep, scampering impossibly on the precipices above, far beyond the reach of Manly’s rifle, gave sign that any animals lived within the canyon walls.

The travelers became disoriented. Unable to find the sun, unable to keep track of the twists and turns of the river, they had no idea which direction they were traveling, or how far. They didn’t know if they were still within the bounds of the United States. (They were, but only because the Senate had ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, bringing the entire Southwest under American rule). Manly, in an effusion of patriotism—and to leave a record lest they never escape the canyon—climbed to above the high-water mark and, in letters of gunpowder mixed with grease, wrote in large capitals: CAPT. W. L. MANLY, U.S.A.