Faith and Betrayal (9 page)
The first disaster struck the group when they came to what she called a “slough,” or a hollow part of the prairie where the rain settled, “a perfect bog” extending for miles. It became necessary to double- or triple-team the wagons to get them across. As one of Jean Rio’s wagons was crossing, the animals revolted and struggled to break free, pulling the wagon toward two women who were holding infants. The oxen stampeded and the wagon ran over one of the women at her waist and the other just above her ankles. Jean Rio’s son William rushed to grab the babies, who were uninjured, and then returned to help his mother lift the women out of the bog. “The weight of the wagon was completely forced down on them into the soft mud and providently they had no bones broken,” Jean Rio wrote. “Had it been on the hard ground nothing could have saved them from being crushed.”
They laid the women side by side on Jean Rio’s bed in the wagon and finished crossing. Once safely installed on solid ground they assessed the women’s injuries. Mrs. Margett, whose legs had been run over, was sore but otherwise all right. The other victim, Mrs. Bond, was in great pain and unable to move. But even so grave an accident did not detain the group, which was increasingly apprehensive about meeting up with the other Saints. Though the group rarely traveled on Sunday, the leaders now made an exception and decided to push on.
By noon on May 25 they had reached the mouth of the Sheridan River, a daunting body to cross, with a strenuous ascent on the other side. Rainstorms dogged them, slowing their progress, and when an axle on one wagon broke and a wheel of another smashed into the riverbank, they were forced to stop for two days to repair the vehicles. While waiting, the women stocked their wagons with peaches and plums from nearby trees heavy with the fruit and swatted at the latest menace—mosquitoes. Next on their map was the White Breast Creek, which they found to be a “roaring torrent” instead of the small tributary they were expecting. Beginning at four a.m., the men worked in a downpour to build a bridge across the creek, which was rising at the rate of one foot an hour. Four wagons managed to cross before the newly built bridge washed out. It would be hours before a new bridge could be constructed and the remaining wagons conveyed to the other side.
Twelve miles later there was another creek to be forded, and yet another shortly after that. One wagon toppled onto its side but was righted without excessive damage. The group camped, and members picked enough gooseberries “for a pudding” and found mushrooms “four inches long.”
On June 3 they traveled one mile before reaching another stream, which took them six hours to cross. Two days later the trail had become virtually impassable, and they camped. Jean Rio walked a half mile to a farmhouse where she hoped to purchase butter. The rains became so heavy she could not return to the camp, “the waters being in the hollows higher than my knees,” the thunder and howling wolves so terrifying her that she spent the night with the settlers. “We have had thunderstorms every day for four weeks,” she wrote in her diary upon returning to her family.
Three days later they were within view of the tiny settlement of Mount Pisgah, so named by the Mormon prophet and apostle Parley P. Pratt, who, in an Old Testament parallel, likened the spot to the biblical site where Moses envisioned the Promised Land. By this point in the journey, Jean Rio was fatigued and dispirited, her daily entries now successive jottings about creeks and streams all brimming to flood-stage levels; omnipresent thunderstorms; harsh, muddy terrain; waterlogged wagons; and disagreeable traveling companions. “A miserable day altogether,” she wrote on June 10. “Got 16 miles, crossed five ravines and four creeks, upset three wagons, got my own bedding wet through, and encamped by ourselves. Surely this is anything but pleasant.”
Bickering broke out among the weary Saints. Tempers flared and the children were now irritable and uncomfortable, their clothing and bedding soggy and cold. Two of the families that had joined Jean Rio’s party in Alexandria struck out on their own in six wagons—“much to the satisfaction of us all”—and now the crossing of streams required unloading all belongings from the wagons and carrying them across by hand. “We are reduced to 6 wagons (division having entered among us, the rest have left us at different times).” Four of the wagons belonged to Jean Rio, one carrying her piano, Regent Street finery, and personal items from her London home, the others the furniture and daily necessities for the overland journey. One of the other wagons in the train belonged to the “captain” and one to a family named Jones.
JUNE 14: The storm began about 11 last night and has continued without intermission till nearly noon today. I cannot describe the thunder; it is unlike any I have ever heard. As to the rain upon our wagon covers, I can only compare it to millions of shot falling on sheets of copper. Sleep is out of the question, as well as conversation, for though Aunt [Mary Ann Bateman] and I were in the same wagon it was with difficulty we could make each other heard. Of course there is no chance of proceeding, so I made up my mind to do a day’s needlework. Being on top of a hill we are not inconvenienced by the surrounding water. We are 45 miles from human habitation, but we are as merry as larks, and our now small company much happier than when there were so many of us. Our long anxiety is whether we shall be too late to go to the Valley this year.
A stranger from Virginia on horseback joined their camp and told them there were no wagons within seventy miles to the east, so any prospect that others would catch up with them and increase their ranks was diminished. On June 18 Jean Rio saw “a traveler on foot without a coat approaching on the opposite side of the creek.” He explained he was walking to St. Louis and had left Council Bluffs two days earlier. There, he told her, two hundred wagons were waiting. “So we shall not be too late at last,” wrote Jean Rio.
They pressed on with urgency, but the topography was no more hospitable than before. Crossings now required nine and sometimes twelve yoke of oxen to each wagon, and even then they were obliged “to stop every few minutes for the cattle to recover breath.” Once, traveling through darkness, they navigated a “deep serpentine ravine” by the illumination of the lightning. For days they waited for yet another river to recede, and on Sunday held their first prayer meeting in eight weeks. “It seems to have put new life into the men,” Jean Rio observed. On June 24 they met a young man traveling from Council Bluffs to Pisgah who imparted the “startling information” that Indians in the near distance were refusing to let Mormons pass through their territory.
Next came a creek seven miles long and too deep to cross, and there was no timber in the area with which to construct a bridge. “Concluded to lay stringers across and draw the wagons over by hand; the oxen could swim over.” The teamsters and bullwhackers—hired hands adept at driving teams— surrounded the animals, shouting and whipping, until the recalcitrant beasts finally entered the water. On June 27 the travelers reached the first farm they had seen in more than a hundred miles, and they were given lettuce and spring onions by its owners. Over the next few days they passed more farms, where Jean Rio purchased butter, milk, eggs, and several cows with their calves for thirty dollars, and a “whole sheep for a dollar.”
Finally, on July 2, the party reached Council Bluffs, where Jean Rio spent two days meticulously restocking her outfit with enough provisions for the remaining trek to Zion. The party then crossed the “Missouri Bottom,” which she described as four miles wide and submerged underwater from the recent heavy rains—“most of the distance the water was running over the axles of the wagons.” On July 5 they reached the main camp, where they convened with their shipmates from England who had been met in New Orleans by church leaders who ushered them to Council Bluffs, as well as several more Saints converging from New York, Ohio, and Illinois. The well-known John Brown, who had traversed the plains numerous times, was appointed captain of the entire outfit of forty-two wagons, with four other lieutenants assigned as sub-commanders of ten wagons each, or “tens.” The leaders organized the emigrants, mediated disagreements, and determined camp locations. Eager to start, having waited several weeks for them, Captain Brown allowed Jean Rio’s party no time to rest before moving out on the final journey. Still, she was so relieved to have joined the large company that a lighthearted optimism overtook her, and the new fear of Indians and other perils as yet unknown temporarily subsided.
CHAPTER SIX
The Crossing
KANESVILLE—ALSO KNOWN AS Winter Quarters, and later called Council Bluffs—had been the command post for Mormon migration west since the spring of 1846. Despite an official treaty between Mormon leader Brigham Young and Missouri officials, hostilities there had escalated, culminating in Young’s announcement to his followers in February 1846 that it was time to “flee Babylon by land or by sea.” That month, thousands of converts then residing in Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio had begun preparations for the trek to a new Zion in the west. Young had dispatched intermediaries to Washington, D.C., to request government approval for the Saints to settle in Oregon Territory. While in the nation’s capital, the Mormon men obtained a copy of John Charles Frémont’s report of his recent explorations. That report, one of the first published accounts about the geography, topography, and Indian tribes west of the Missouri River, was a coveted document to the Mormon leader.
Young had heard tales from other explorers about the land around the Great Salt Lake in America’s immense Great Basin. “Buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, mountain sheep and goats, white and grizzly bear, beaver, and geese [are] in great abundance” in the area, one of his scouts told him, as well as freshwater streams and a plentiful supply of salt and minerals. Young had procured rare maps of the area and a copy of Lansford W. Hastings’s
The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California.
He had become attracted to the region near the Great Salt Lake, the site of the vast prehistoric Lake Bonneville. “In the cove of mountains along its eastern shore, the lake is bordered by a plain where the soil is generally good, and a greater part fertile, watered by a delta of prettily timbered streams,” Frémont had written. Young had been drawn to its natural isolation, surrounded as it was by snowcapped peaks, salt flats, and high-altitude desert. He saw it as a perfect haven for his persecuted followers.
Even more appealing to Young was the fact that the several thousand square miles of land he intended to claim for his planned nation-state belonged to Mexico, and were therefore outside the dominion of what one of the apostles had called “the bloodthirsty Christians of these United States.”
On January 14, 1847, Young had revealed his first, and only recorded, supposed divine revelation, which concerned the thousand-mile pilgrimage to the Great Basin. Called the “Word and Will of the Lord,” the prophesy elaborated in specific detail how the emigration should proceed. The emigrants would move not as a whole but as a procession of companies—organized with military precision into hundreds, fifties, and tens—advancing at three-hundred-mile intervals along a chain of far-flung way stations called the “Camp of Israel.” Likening his flock to the children of Israel and himself to Moses leading the exodus from Egypt, Young had assured his followers that the angels of God would protect them. Early companies had built roads and bridges along the way for the Saints to follow, and had sown crops to be harvested by later parties.
The first group of 148 Saints, including Brigham Young, had left Winter Quarters in what is now Omaha in the spring of 1847. By July 24 of that year the hardy band had reached their new Jerusalem in the Great Salt Lake Valley. “Zion shall be established in the tops of the mountains and exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it,” one of the first emigrants proclaimed upon arriving in the valley, quoting the Old Testament prophet Isaiah.
Now, exactly four years later, Jean Rio Baker joined with dozens of fellow converts for the final trek to the Promised Land. What had been a relatively lonely and improvised journey thus far now became more methodical and disciplined, an almost military advance. Jean Rio welcomed the extra security as well as the knowledge and experience of the leaders, versed as they were in the location of troublesome Indians, the severity of upcoming obstacles, and other details of the route. Captain Brown had at his disposal rudimentary devices such as sextants and telescopes with which he guided the group by planets identified in the Bible—Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades. Primitive barometers and thermometers helped him anticipate weather conditions, and a device that measured the number of revolutions of the front wagon wheel—an inventive Mormon had recently calculated, with amazing accuracy, that 360 revolutions represented one mile—helped him establish his position.
Their first day on the trail took them through country inhabited by Omaha Indians and was marred by a dangerous gorge crossing at the notoriously unsound “Pappea Bridge” nine miles from the Elkhorn River, where several wagons belonging to one of the families were severely damaged. Now reduced to a total of fifty-one wagons—ten were left behind for repairs—they followed what was being called the Mormon Trail, 1,032 rugged miles from Council Bluffs to Salt Lake City, blazed by early trappers and traders. On July 8 they ferried over the Elkhorn, a tributary described by one traveler as “9 rods wide and 3 feet deep.” One of the men caught his hand in a chain, breaking a finger and opening a wide gash—an excruciatingly painful injury. With the calmness and efficiency that would come to characterize her, Jean Rio immediately took responsibility for sewing up the wound—the first of many such episodes. Like other women before and after her who made pioneer journeys along the rugged trails of frontier America, she found inner resources and abilities that her previous life had never called upon. Many tasks unthinkable to her as a London matron, tasks daunting to the mostly younger women on the journey, fell to this forty-one-year-old mother of six. If she felt in any way intimidated by the challenges, hesitant to take charge of sometimes life-threatening situations, if the sight of blood and the grimaces or screams of a friend in pain unnerved her, she never even remarked on them in her diary. Like the other women in the wagon train, she found how she could best contribute to the benefit of the common party, and she approached her duties with the poise and command for which she would become known.
Enduring monotony and adversity by turns, and now followed by ravenous mosquitoes, which left angry, itching welts, the party made its way to the Platte River, where they saw their first Indian grave. They camped on the riverbank in what is now eastern Nebraska (named for the Oto Indian word
nebrathka,
meaning “flat water”). They would traverse this most desultory of rivers dozens of times over hundreds of miles in the weeks to come. “A nothing river,” the novelist James Michener describes it. “Too thick to drink, too thin to plow.”
The party halted for an entire day so that the men could repair damage to the axles of several wagons while the women “took the opportunity to wash up our dirty linen.” When they proceeded the weather had turned unbearably hot, the trail a sandy loam that swallowed the wheels. Passing another Indian grave, the emigrants became increasingly nervous, mindful of rumors they had heard about a great convocation among Indian tribes determined to settle territorial issues among themselves and with a U.S. government that had exacerbated tension and violence on all sides. The chiefs and warriors of the Pawnee, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa nations were converging that summer from all directions to meet at Fort Laramie, most of them camping nearby at various locations along the Platte.
On the evening of July 12, the emigrants stopped beside a small lake. Jean Rio ventured into the countryside to gather a “red root” that tasted like spinach and that she boiled for her family. She had taken to venturing alone into the countryside, so compelled was she by the landscape; her outings became so routine that Captain Brown always made sure she was back among them before moving the wagons out. After dinner a group of wagons approached the camp from the west, the travelers asking if they could accompany the Mormon entourage. “We now number 54,” she wrote that night, “three others have joined us since we left the Missouri River. These newcomers had started for Oregon, but had been attacked by Indians who had stolen some of their oxen and driven away the rest.”
The next day the party came upon ten of the “strangers’ missing cattle, which was quite a God-send to them.” One of the men shot a ten-pound fish in a nearby stream; it fed Jean Rio’s entire family. “We are now on the Plains in the Pawnee country,” she noted on July 14. They reached the site where the Indians had attacked their new companions, and found abandoned yokes and bows that would serve as welcome replacement parts for her damaged carriages.
Crossing deep chasms and swamps, climbing steep riverbanks to camp on high ground, the party was plagued yet again by violent thunderstorms. Jean Rio rose on the morning of July 18 to the sound of a raging river that required the men to build a bridge. Several wagons were damaged in the crossing; the party was forced to halt for two days to fix them. One of the women who had traveled with Jean Rio from London died suddenly, though she had seemed to be in perfect health only days before. Jean Rio and her sister-in-law, Mary Ann, “laid her out and sewed her body up in a sheet.” The party climbed to the summit of a nearby hill to bury the woman at sunset, and there found the graves of five other people who had died in the same locale.
For days the party continued across the wearisome prairie, lumbering along like a tiny moving village, the tedium broken only by “frogs, hares, and doves.” Jean Rio came upon an elk skull with an ominous message written in pencil, a warning to be on the lookout for Indians who were preying on emigrant parties. The wagon train proceeded slowly against a blasting headwind, all of the livestock suffering now from the heat and exertion. On July 24, “the hottest day we have had,” one of her oxen dropped dead. Halfway across what would become Nebraska Territory they came to Fort Kearny, named for the general who had commanded the American army in the Mexican War, which had ended three years earlier. There, for thirty dollars, Jean Rio was able to purchase a new ox.
As they crept their way west they came upon their first herd of the legendary buffalo that were said to turn the prairie black. The animals were every bit as magnificent as lore had suggested, but they added yet another bit of trepidation to a company whose nerves were frayed. Stampedes, random and chaotic in their disastrous consequences, were among the most feared of all hazards on the trail, and the presence of buffalo was but one more threat to a jittery team of oxen, horses, and mules that routinely spooked at unknown elements. “Our Encampment . . . was called to pass through one of those Horrid scenes to day which are so much dredded by all Emigrating Companies,” Mormon apostle Wilford Woodruff had written the previous summer.
No person who has not Experienced or witnessed one of those dredful scenes cannot form any Correct idea of them . . . for to behold 30 or 40 ox teams [with] from 2 to five yoke of oxen in each team attached to a family waggon of goods & women & Children All in an instant . . . each running their own way, roaring, bellowing rolling & tumbling over each other waggons upsetting smashing their wheels Exles & tongues spilling the goods women & Child in the street, for the next teams to trample under their feet as they roar & charge on their way with their yokes bows & chains flying in evry direction. Little can be done at such times ownly for each one to dodge the best He can & save his own life if possible.
Captain Brown, who had crossed the plains five times, told Jean Rio that he had seen herds numbering more than ten thousand. One of her sons shot a young buffalo, and the party enjoyed their first fresh meat in weeks. But the meal could not compensate for the trouble caused by the herd. “Stragglers are apt to run in among our cattle,” she wrote, “terrifying them very much, and it has been all the horsemen could do to prevent their doing mischief.”
On July 30 they approached another company, which was made up of 115 wagons. Jean Rio recognized two of her former shipmates, and she swapped tales of the trail with them. The other party had had a much more trying journey, their cattle stampeded by Indians and a woman among them run over and killed. The two companies advanced on the trail within a mile of each other, hoping to find strength and protection in numbers. The men and boys in Jean Rio’s party killed a buffalo one evening, but darkness fell before they were able to cut up the animal. They returned at first light to find the entire carcass picked clean by wolves, only a few bones remaining. But that morning they shot two more, and Jean Rio would carry the hides with her to Utah, where she would turn them into sumptuous blankets. The abundant buffalo dung (or “bois de vache,” as they called the chips), objectionable at first, was soon seen as welcome fuel, burning clean and quickly and eliminating the sometimes impossible task of finding firewood.
The flat land gave way to sand hills crawling with “thousands of lizards, snakes, and grasshoppers,” the oxen tripping in the dirt, kicking up dust into the faces of the emigrants. Jean Rio found the landscape “wild and romantic,” and often wandered off by herself to bask in the inspiring sight. The wagons forged up the Platte River valley through the gently rolling hills of sand, making their way to the upper Missouri Basin. She saw two more graves and, noting the names of the deceased in her journal, she wondered how those pioneers had died. The possibilities seemed endless. She knew that most injuries were caused by wagon accidents, often involving women and girls whose unsuitable dresses, cumbersome hoops, and long petticoats became caught in the wheel spokes, pulling them to gruesome deaths. The American feminist Amelia Bloomer had been advocating full trousers—known as bloomers—worn under shorter skirts. But such reformed fashion—called the “Move toward Rational Dress”—was far from acceptable in the patriarchal Mormon society.
Still more travelers were kicked or gored by oxen, poisoned by rattlesnakes or spiders, or stricken by the most dreaded disease of all: cholera. Women died in childbirth and newborns failed to thrive. Children were jostled off the wagons’ box seats to be run over by the wagons. Drowning in raging torrents often occurred, and dehydration afflicted the less sturdy. The most dangerous animal of the American continent, the grizzly bear, also was responsible for human casualties.