The Age of Gold (24 page)

Yet even in death there is life. The largest river of the Great Basin, the Humboldt, was the one stream absolutely essential to the Forty-Niners. To easterners it hardly rated as more than a creek, and a poor one at that. It meandered infuriatingly; at a stage of the journey when time meant everything to the emigrants, and every extra mile wasted their time, the Humboldt wandered across the desert floor as if it had all the time in creation.

But if the Humboldt was hard to love, it was harder to leave. The three-hundred-mile stretch of desert it spanned would have been impossible to cross without it. Some religiously minded emigrants thought Providence had placed the river along their path; those whose faith was less firm concluded, by the river’s bitter end, that heaven was playing them a bad joke. Until they reached the Humboldt, the emigrants could choose among different trails and cutoffs; after they left the Humboldt, they again had choices. But for crossing the northern part of what would become Nevada, there was only the Humboldt.

Hugh Heiskell’s party reached the headwaters of the Humboldt in early September. At first encounter, and after weeks of struggling across the alternating ridges and valleys north of the Great Salt Lake, the Humboldt was a welcome sight. “The road this evening has been one of the finest we ever traveled on, level as a floor and not traveled enough to make the dust very deep,” Heiskell recorded. The next day was more pleasant still. “Decamping at half past 7 we continued down the bottom, the road better than the finest MacAddamized road in the world.” As to the scenery: “This is a beautiful valley—a line of willow running through the middle, the branch [that is, the river] in this season of the year in places winding among them, at others sinking in the sand.” The latter phenomenon—the sinking into the sand—would become distressing, but for now it was merely a curiosity. The livestock enjoyed themselves as much as the emigrants did. “The cattle are feeding on excellent pasture, grass in seed but not parched.”

Yet all depended on the river, a vital thread stretched thin. “The river here about 20 feet wide, an average depth of 2 feet,” Heiskell noted. Soon the thread showed signs of fraying. “Marching eight miles, we camped on
the river, here affording less water—an ugly stream, pools along it nearly stagnant.” Parts of the broad valley were still a healthy green from the willows, but larger parts were sickly pale, and pungent. “The whole plain is covered with alkali, the grass of a yellow color being impregnated with it, and pools of water standing are the color of lye. A strong odor of lye you smell as you ride across.” William Swain, traversing the same stretch, was even less complimentary: “The river here is nothing more than a mud ditch winding through the alluvial deposit of the valley in the most crooked course that could be marked out for it.”

The wretched river supported—after its wretched fashion—what seemed a wretched people. Regardless of the emigrants’ perception of the character and customs of the Sioux and Pawnee of the Great Plains, they couldn’t help being impressed by those Indians’ stature, demeanor, and general presence. For the Digger Indians of the Great Basin, however, the emigrants had little but disdain. “Dent & Crocker were riding along the river hunting & came across three Indians (Diggers) in the willows,” Hugh Heiskell wrote, “one of which they brought to the road, a poor miserable specimen of humanity, miserably dirty, with a shirt of fox skins—hair turned inside—which came nearly down to the knees. Naked from there down and barefooted.” Goldsborough Bruff, the emigrant from Washington, added a pseudoscientific gloss to his loathing. On the large map he carried, he indicated the Great Basin and wrote: “Range of the Pah Utahs [Paiutes], the original & most numerous class commonly called the Mountain Diggers, perfectly untameable & the lowest species of the genus Homo, next to them is the baboon.”

The Diggers’ diet of grubs, insects, and snakes put off the emigrants as much as the natives’ appearance did; equally damning in emigrant eyes was what the whites took for the Indians’ treachery and theft. The Diggers rarely confronted the travelers directly, instead circling about the wagon trains, stealing cattle by night or shooting an arrow into an ox, knowing that the emigrants, in their hurry, would have to leave the animal behind. Nor was the cost confined to the livestock killed. To minimize depredations, the trains set guards at the sides of the trail and posted pickets at night. The extra effort wore into minds and bodies already taxed by fatigue, poor nutrition, and the overall strain of three months on the road.

The danger from the Indians disappeared only when the Humboldt led the travelers into country so barren even the locals avoided it. “We no longer see any traces of Indians,” Hugh Heiskell wrote on September 28. “The country is too poor for even the miserable Digger Indians to live. The valley has opened out to an expansive level, covered with sage and not a spear of grass. The immediate bottom, narrow and ten or twenty feet lower than the common level, is now parched…. There is a ridge or range of mountains bounding the plain and parallel with the river, which produce the shrubby sage alone. We have noticed there is not a spring or stream emptying into the river since Martin’s Fork [passed thirteen days earlier]. Our water here has an alkaline taste, which increases daily.”

The travelers had entered the worst stretch of the entire journey. The last 150 miles of the Humboldt River took them through some of the driest, bleakest, most difficult country in North America. Water was short and bad, grass for the stock nonexistent. Days were brutally hot, nights numbingly cold. Nearly every river the emigrants had ever encountered grew stronger with each downhill mile; in this strange land, precisely the opposite occurred. The Humboldt (by now often damned as the “Humbug” River) grew weaker, as did those people foolish enough to follow it down. From their guidebooks they knew the river was about to expire in the Humboldt Sink—a concept they had had trouble envisioning when they first read or heard the term, but which now they envisioned all too easily. And, all too easily, they envisioned themselves expiring with it.

S
O DAUNTING WAS
the Humboldt Sink, and the desert surrounding it, that the emigrants were driven to desperate measures to avoid it. In its death throes the Humboldt turned south; at the last bend, ninety miles above the sink, some travelers struck away from the river, to the west, on the reasoning that nothing could be worse than the sink.

The Lassen Cutoff, as the western route was called, was truly a leap of faith. The horrors of the Humboldt were known—from the emigrants’ own experience by now, and from the tales of earlier emigrants and explorers. Next to nothing was known for sure of the Lassen route.

To William Swain, the principal attraction of the Lassen route, besides the fact that it wasn’t the Humboldt, was that it headed west, in the direction of the goldfields. Unfortunately this attraction faded after a couple of days, when the trail descended from the Antelope Hills to the edge of the Black Rock Desert, an enormous dry lake bed, or playa. To cross the playa compelled the travelers to veer toward the north.

The weather during the third week of September was beastly. Daytime temperatures soared well above 100 degrees; nights plunged below freezing. Between the two, the cold seemed better for the crossing, which required a forced march without water.

The jumping-off point for crossing the Black Rock was a place called Rabbit Hole Springs. Doubtless the name inspired thoughts of respite for the dry and weary. The reality was shockingly different. Goldsborough Bruff, just ahead of Swain on the Lassen trail, described what the thirsty travelers found:

On this grim note, the emigrants set out upon the playa. Swain’s party left at half past eight in the evening. “The moon was some two hours high,” Swain wrote, “the night cold with a fresh wind blowing from the
northeast.” That wind would be painful by dawn, but for now it injected new life into animals and men. “Our cattle walked quickly along, and our train moved more gaily than for weeks past.”

The gaiety dissipated as the rising moon revealed the desert’s toll. “A destruction of property beyond my conception lined the road,” Swain recorded. “Wagons and carts were scattered on all sides, and the stench of dead and decaying cattle actually rendered the air sickening.” Several cattle from Swain’s party staggered, stumbled, and were left to die.

The trail across the playa was uncertain, and the captain went ahead to scout. In the dark he got lost—or the rest of the party did. Whichever was the case, the main body trudged forward with little idea where they were going. By observing the North Star, Swain noted that they were turning ever farther north. He kept looking for tracks leading off to the left, back toward the west, but never saw them.

Through the small, desperate hours they pressed on—thirsty, frozen, losing livestock with each mile, wondering if they were losing ground as well. Not till the first faint light of dawn did their spirits rise. Five miles ahead, looming in the grayness, appeared the Black Rock for which the desert was named. At its foot was a spring, which meant their survival.

Only in such a hellish place would such a spring have been welcome. The water came out of the ground boiling hot and laced with minerals. Before cattle or men could drink it—nearly expiring from thirst though they were—they had to let it cool. But there was plenty, and all drank their fill.

Along the creek that drained the spring grew some grass, which infused faint life into the surviving cattle. The animals needed to rest, but with October approaching and the Sierras still far distant, every hour told. To Swain’s continued dismay, the trail remained northerly. But there was no choice. To get past the Black Rock Range they had to traverse the aptly named, and north-trending, High Rock Canyon. “The bottom was level, probably three hundred feet wide, and covered with thick, fine grass,” Swain wrote.

The oxen, by the evidence of their weariness, didn’t share the glee of the boys, and despite good grass in the canyon bottom, the animals continued to weaken. To lighten their burden, Swain and his fellows jettisoned items that had seemed essential back on the Missouri, and might yet seem essential in California, but that threatened to anchor the wagons amid the sage and greasewood. Out went a blacksmith’s anvil, the heaviest item aboard. The anvil’s ouster eased the ejection of related tools and supplies (what good would they be without an anvil?): a pair of bellows, a large vise, hammers and tongs, a five-foot bar of cast steel. Also overthrown were saddles, ropes, chains, casks, and barrels.

With each day the nights grew only colder. “The ground was frozen this evening, and ice formed over the little brook by our camp,” Swain wrote on October 7. The next day he noted, “This morn we put on our underclothes and rigged for winter, as the air is cold and the frost severe.”

Yet that very afternoon the company caught a glimpse of salvation. “Today is the first time we have seen any timbered hills, except for some fir and juniper groves, since leaving South Pass…. This evening a mountain range covered with evergreen trees is to be seen eight miles to the north. The sight is indicative of a better country than that passed, and tells a pleasing tale of a clime far away. Today I had my first view of the summit range of the Sierra, from which we are sixty-five miles distant.”

S
ARAH ROYCE AND
her family refused the Lassen Cutoff in favor of the Humboldt Sink. They did so because they thought they knew more about that treacherous region than they really did.

There was reason for their false confidence. In Salt Lake City, Sarah and Josiah had acquired a handwritten guidebook authored by a Mormon who had recently made the trip to California. The book detailed the best route across the Great Salt Desert and down the Humboldt River, identifying waterholes, pastures, and campsites. The proof of its value was the safety and comparative ease with which the Royces crossed the fearsome Salt Desert. The guidebook was less specific regarding the Humboldt Sink and the waterless stretch between the Sink and the Carson River, the first stream beyond. But the Mormons who gave the book to the Royces— largely out of pity for Sarah and her little girl—assured them that before they got there, they would encounter a Mormon party returning from California, who would fill them in on that difficult stretch.

The Mormon party arrived on schedule. Its leader drew the Royces a map in the sand. Starting from the Humboldt Sink, he showed them how they should turn off the main road onto a wagon trace to the left, at two or three miles from the sink, and how this would take them, after another two or three miles, to a grassy meadow unknown to most emigrants and therefore still providing feed. Moreover, this meadow contained several shallow wells lately dug by the Mormons, and also unknown to the emigrants. Having just come from there, the mapmaker said the water was sweet and plentiful. To maximize the flow, the Royces might deepen one or two of the holes; overnight these would fill with fresh water.