US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0024/00244.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 22KB | 365 lines

$Unique_ID{USH00244}
$Pretitle{18}
$Title{The Overland Migrations
Chapter 1  The Fever Catches}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{US Department of the Interior}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{missouri
long
oregon
west
wagons
new
animals
country
fe
independence}
$Volume{Handbook 105}
$Date{1980}
$Log{Waterfront*0024401.scf
}
Book:        The Overland Migrations
Author:      US Department of the Interior
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 105
Date:        1980

                      Overview of The Overland Migrations

Thousands of families and individuals trekked across the country to find new
homes in the West.  In addition to chronicling spirit and hardships that these
pioneers underwent, this book serves as a guide to the principal sites that
illustrate the journey made by the people who risked everything for their
dreams.

Chapter 1  The Fever Catches

     The busy outfitters of the neighboring towns of Independence and
Westport, Missouri - merchants, innkeepers, blacksmiths, saddlers, and the
rest - had never before seen such a crowd of "movers" as the one that poured
through their muddy streets in the spring of 1843.  Not that the frontier
businessmen weren't used to travelers.  Each spring for the past 20 years
specially built freight wagons had been traveling from Missouri along the
famed Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico and, some of them, on south as far as
Chihuahua.  But the sinewy roustabouts and the Mexican and American
proprietors of those caravans were entirely male - adventurers, not settlers
seeking new homes.  By fall most would be back with the bars of gold and
silver bullion, the jingling silver pesos, the sacks of coarse wool, and the
herds of fine Spanish mules that were the fruit of their bartering.

     This influx was different.  Numbering close to a thousand persons, it was
composed for the most part of families.  Members ranged in age from an
occasional grandfather and grandmother down to a scattering of babes - even
unborn babes to judge from the appearance of a few of the women.  They planned
to journey to the Pacific Coast - more than twice as far as Santa Fe - in
ordinary farm wagons covered with flimsy roofs of canvas.  What was more, none
of those setting forth that year intended, at least at the outset, to come
back again.

     When news of this gathering reached New York, Horace Greeley, editor of
the influential Tribune, picked up his pen in amazement.  Years later, Greeley
would advise the youth of the nation, "Go west, young man, and grow up with
the country."  In 1843, however, he wasn't ready for so radical an idea.
Instead he wrote scornfully, "This migration of more than a thousand persons
in one body to Oregon wears an aspect of insanity."

     It was not a sudden insanity.  The forces that mingled to produce 1843's
Great Migration, as it came to he called, had been building ever since Lewis
and Clark had returned in 1806 from their epochal journey to the Pacific.
Inspired by that trip, a New York fur dealer, John Jacob Astor, had dispatched
parties by land and sea to build posts along the Columbia River, but had lost
them to British traders from Canada during the War of 1812.

     That war settled nothing about the ownership of the area.  After months
of squabbling, diplomats of Great Britain and the United States had wearily
agreed that for the next 10 years the citizens of both nations were to have
equal rights of commerce and settlement throughout the Oregon Country, a name
then applied to the whole vast region between Russian Alaska and Spanish
California.  When those 10 years failed to produce an agreement, the
arrangement was continued indefinitely, in spite of objections from American
patriots who resented sharing territory with a country their nation had fought
twice since 1776.

     Meanwhile, news about Oregon was percolating slowly eastward. Important
fur traders had ghost writers turn out books about their adventures.  Hopeful
merchants like Nathaniel Wyeth, crackpot propagandists like Hall Jackson
Kelley, government agents like William Slacum, sea captains, and even
geographers sitting at home in their studies - those people, too, put down
their opinions in print.  But the big impact came from the widely read letters
and reports of missionaries to the Indians who during the 183()'s crossed to
the far side of the continent.  In some instances their wives went with them,
a point noticed by many a farmer dissatisfied with conditions at home.  Women
could make the trip!

     Most of the reports were filled with praises for the distant lands. The
climate of Oregon - and of California, too - was said to be mild and
healthful.  There was no snow to keep a person locked in his cabin throughout
the worst of the winter.  Malaria, a plague in the Midwest, was unknown.
Livestock needed no hay, and the rich, deep loam in the valleys produced
bumper crops that could be sold to the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver
beside the Columbia and - so the writers speculated in Russian Alaska or
perhaps even Asia.  To Midwestern farmers still suffering from the glutted
markets and ruinous prices caused by the depression of 1837, such tales made
poignant reading.

     Those who listened most eagerly were a class called "movers."  Ever since
colonial times a hunger for land had possessed the immigrants who were pouring
out of the British Isles and northwestern Europe in search of the dignity and
hope of profit that came from owning a bit of earth.  They passed the desire
on to their children, and in time this constant quest for land became almost
an instinct, thrusting the forerunners of the frontier ever westward.

     At the far edge of Missouri the pioneering drive was brought to an abrupt
halt.  There were two barriers.  One was the changing nature of the land.  The
movers were used to forests; they even judged the productivity of the soil by
the size of the trees it supported.  Just west of Missouri, however, treeless
prairies began and, according to trappers and Santa Fe traders, the climate
grew steadily drier.  Zebulon Pike and other early explorers had declared in
print that such a country was fit only for wandering Indians who grew no crops
and lived off the buffalo that shared the plains with them.  Not until a
person neared the Pacific Coast, it was said, would he again find familiar
patterns of forest and rainfall.  From this belief sprang the second barrier:
a deliberate policy by the government to turn the arid reaches into a huge
Indian reservation closed to white settlement.

     And so for a time the frontier halted.  But if a short hop to a new farm
was not possible, what about a long jump?  As the tier of States just beyond
the Mississippi began to fill, pressures mounted.  Emigration societies formed
to exchange information and to enroll members who wished to go West.  Partly
as a result of the work of one of them, the Western Emigration Society, some
60 emigrants started west from Independence in the spring of 1841.  En route
they predicted the future in a way they could not have recognized at the time,
for in southeastern Idaho the party split. Half the people went to Oregon,
half to Mexican California.

     Agitation by the emigrant societies also helped push the Federal
Government toward a more active assertion of American rights in the Oregon
country.  In 1841 and annually thereafter Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri
introduced bills into the Senate to extend American laws to United States
citizens living in Oregon and to give generous amounts of land to families who
would risk going there - 640 acres to every male citizen over 18 and 160 acres
each to his wife and children, if he had them.  To people who were used to
paying $200 for a 160-acre plot of government land, the price at the time,
this gift was like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  In the little
crossroads towns people talked about it by the hour, even though Congress
voted down Linn's first bills as an affront to Great Britain.

     Little straws hinted that the wind might be shifting, however.  In 1842
Lieutenant John Charles Fremont was ordered to lead a column of Army explorers
as far as the Oregon border, then at the Continental Divide in today's
Wyoming.  In addition a former missionary, Elijah White, was appointed
subagent to the Indians of Oregon.

     As White made ready for his trip during the winter of 1841-42 he talked
about Oregon to whatever audience would listen, in churches, meeting halls,
homes, even on street corners.  Many were stirred, but it was too late that
year for most to sell their farms and ready their equipment for the journey.
As a result White left Independence in the spring of 1842 with only 112
people.  But next year. . .

     In February 1843, Senator Linn's newest bill squeaked through the U.S.
Senate by a vote of 24-22.  The House did not act before adjournment, and the
legislation died.  But many were convinced now that the day of passage was
near.  As a result of that belief, many hitherto unvoiced yearnings emerged
into the open.  Small farmers in southern Missouri decided to escape from the
growing competition of slave-operated plantations.  Lonesome housewives saw an
escape from isolated cabins in the dank woods.  Patriots felt that here was an
opportunity to bring American institutions into an unsettled land and thus
strengthen their country against Great Britain.  Health would improve; there
would be no frozen cowsheds to contend with during the long winters.  Hunting
and fishing were said to be superb.  And for young men who hoped to get west
by hiring on as stock tenders and wagon drivers there was the bright lure of
adventure.

Preparing for the Long Jump

     In dozens of scattered households, most of them in Arkansas, Missouri,
Kentucky and Illinois but in others as far removed as New York, plans took
shape.  This was no reckless decision.  The great majority of the migrants
were farm people who had already moved their possessions by dint of their own
effort from at least one undeveloped homesite to another.  When they sold
their property to raise money for this trip, they were familiar with much of
what they would be facing.  They knew from experience what tools they would
need along the way for road building and wagon repairs and for starting new
homes on reaching Oregon.  They knew which utensils were indispensable and
which could be sacrificed for lightening the load.  Their hesitations came
over beloved keepsakes - painted china, spool beds, or heavy tables with fine
clawed feet.

     If a large family could afford to do so, it took two or three wagons.
Although sturdy new vehicles could be and were occasionally purchased at
Independence or Westport, most movers preferred to assemble their own.  A
local wagon shop put together the running gear, that is to say, the tongue,
the iron-tired wheels, the axles, the reach that connected fore part to rear,
and the hounds that lent rigidity.  That way the owner could be sure that
well-seasoned wood of the right sort was used, fortified with strap iron
wherever strain was likely to fall hardest.

     Meanwhile the mover built the bed himself - a shallow box approximately
10 feet long, 4 wide, and 2 deep.  Sometimes the sides were offset above the
wheels to provide extra space at the cost of top-heaviness, but just as often
they weren't.  Many people put in a false bottom divided into foot-deep
storage compartments.  The top was frequently made at home - and just as
frequently was purchased at the starting place.  In either case the bows that
supported the canvas were made high enough so that a person could stand
upright in the center of the arch.  The canvas covering was of double
thickness and waterproofed with a coating of paint or linseed oil.  Often it
was lined on the inside with storage pockets.  The goods were packed about 4
feet high on either side, with a narrow passage down the middle.  The passage
eased the problem of getting at stored items and furnished space for carrying
a sick or injured person.  For the most part sleeping would be done outside in
tents.

     Because Independence and Westport had long been jumping-off places for
fur traders and Santa Fe wagons, it was natural for the first migrants to
congregate there in search of companions.  Those who lived along the western
fringes of Missouri drove to the rendezvous in their wagons.  But in April
melting snow and spring rains were likely to flood the State 5 unbridged
rivers and turn the earth into bogs.  Accordingly people from a distance
traveled by steamboat up the swollen Missouri River.

     The gathering place for people from the East, and especially from
Kentucky, which sent hundreds of pioneers west, was the hustling river port
town of St. Louis, located a few miles south of the point where the turbid
Missouri flows into the Mississippi.  By 1843 the city fathers were proudly
calling the place "The Gateway to the West" - and with reason.  The waterfront
streets below the bluffs where the residential section was located were jammed
with warehouses for holding furs from the Indian country, with wholesale
emporiums selling every kind of article a Santa Fe trader or Oregon-bound
company might want, with inns, billiard parlors, and saloons. A constant din
of languages assailed the ear - French, Spanish, English, several different
Indian tongues, Southern drawls, and Yankee twangs.

     Tall-chimneyed, impressively painted paddlewheel and stern-wheel steamers
from three great rivers, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri, clanged
their bells and blew their whistles as they maneuvered into and away from
their slips.  For emigrants the magic word was "Missouri."  After locating a
boat whose advertisements proclaimed that it would depart for that river at
such-and-such an hour, the travelers made what arrangements they could for
space and then, at the appointed time, went aboard, wide-eyed.  Decks and
holds were jammed with partly disassembled wagons, draft animals, plows,
churns, and chicken coops, mixed haphazardly with bales of merchandise
consigned to frontier stores and Santa Fe caravans.  Independence Landing came
first.  Westport Landing, long since swallowed by Kansas City, was 8 miles
farther on but preferred by many because the lower landing had never fully
recovered from an earlier battering by floods.

[See Waterfront: This is the St. Louis waterfront in 1858. Steamboats crowd
the wharves, and goods are piled high on the levee. Before the day of the
railroad, steamboats were the principal means of transport in the West. Many
emigrants rode them to the jump-off towns of Independence and Westport. The
historian Francis Parkman was a passenger in 1846. On board, he wrote, were
"Santa Fe traders, gamblers, speculators, and adventurers of various
descriptions, and her steerage was crowded with Oregon emigrants, 'mountain
men,' negroes, and a party of Kansas Indians. . . . Thus laden, the boat
struggled upward for seven or eight days against the rapid current of the
Missouri, grating upon snags, and hanging for two or three hours at a time
upon sandbars. . . . In five or six days we began to see signs of the great
western movement that was taking place. Parties of emigrants, with their tents
and wagons, were encamped on open spots near the bank, on their way to the
common rendezvous at Independence."]

     At either place getting off the boat was pandemonium.  Animals brayed and
bawled.  Powerful black stevedores jostled and strained.  Migrants swore and
quarreled as they tried to push their own packages out ahead of the rush.
Meanwhile the wagons were being rolled down the gangplanks and reassembled.
Goods were tossed in - repacking would come after the final purchases - and
the canvas tops were fitted over the bows and tied down, unless those items
were also to be bought in town.

     Steep roads climbed to the ridgetops that led to the towns proper, each
of them 4 miles or so from its landing.  Both towns looked prosperous:  brick
store buildings and substantial residences under tall shade trees. But the
streets!  They were jammed Indians in blankets, Mexicans in peaked sombreros,
hunters in buckskin, townspeople in tall beaver hats and long frock coats, and
gawking emigrants in homespun hickory, which was a tough cotton material of a
hard weave.  Cattle crowded against each other, eyes rolling in fear.  Voices
rose and fell, wheels crunched, anvils clanged.

     Generally the newcomers, self-consciously clutching their long rifles,
passed straight through town to outlying meadows already dotted with tents and
grazing animals.  After setting up camp, the menfolk rode back into one
village or the other to meet fellow migrants and learn what they could about
additional preparations for a trip bound to last from 5 to 6 months.

     Food, for instance.  Go light on rice and beans, they were told; those
commodities took too long to cook when the Train was on the move and were
useful only during layovers.  Mainstays were wheat flour - say 200 pounds per
person - corn meal, hard tack, and about a bushel per adult of dried fruit for
warding off scurvy.  Bacon, yes, if it could be kept from going rancid by
being packed inside a bed of bran.

     A milk cow or two were desirable, especially for children.  Any milk left
over from evening and morning meals could be put in a churn in the wagon and
turned to butter by the jouncings of the trail.  Salt, sugar, coffee, arid tea
should be packed for safety in double cloth sacks.  Farther along the way
there'd be buffalo steaks and meat that could be cut into thin strips and hung
on the sides of the canvas tops to dry as the wagons moved along under the
burning sun.  For variety there would be catfish in the prairie streams and
trout in the mountains. And in case of emergency, some items could be picked
up at high cost from fur-trading posts scattered along the way - Laramie and
Bridger at opposite ends of what is now Wyoming, Hall and Boise in Idaho,
Whitman's Mission and Fort Walla Walla in Washington.

     Other items included stout chains that hooked the lead animals to the
wagon tongues, ordinary ropes for picketing horses and mules, and heavier ones
for holding wagons steady on steep or sidling hills.  Rubber ground cloths
kept the earth's dampness from beds.  Standard medicines were essential, and
there was nothing like a sprightly fiddle at the close of day to lift drooping
spirits.

     No one ever settled the perennial argument about the best kind of draft
stock.  Some favored oxen as being cheap and less likely than mules to
stampede or be stolen by Indians.  Others swore by mules; they were faster,
stayed fat on thin feed, and had sounder hooves.  Horses, the consensus was,
could not last out the long haul on the dry prairie grass.

     Different kinds of animals called for different modes of travel.  A man
with mules used reins and had to sit in the jouncing wagon hour after hour,
except when he could trade off with his wife or older children.  He had to
stay alert.  Sometimes mules were sulky; sometimes they shied at a noise or
even a shadow and ran wildly away.  Oxen were less likely to do that, but a
man drove them by walking beside them, cracking a long bull whip mostly for
the sake of the pistol-like noise it made.  He controlled the animals with
shouts - Giddap, Haw, Gee, Whoa!  The easy way, of course, was to let hired
hands do the driving - if they were along.  Then the head of the household
rode a saddlehorse and was free during most of the day to visit along the line
and join the buffalo hunts.

     In the end it was probably low cost and ease in handling that led the
bulk of the emigrants to rely on young, chunkily built oxen.  Although two
yoke (four animals) could pull a wagon, three yoke eased the work and lessened
the risk of eventual exhaustion.  And if one of the six died or was injured,
the others could still do the job, helped maybe by the milk cow.

     Far harder to decide about than draft animals or food was the choice of
leaders.  The movers were, in the main, assertive, aggressive, self-reliant,
and ingenious at "making do."  They'd not have been undertaking such a trip if
they weren't.  But they were also undisciplined, quarrelsome, and quick to
resent anything that seemed to threaten their cherished freedom to act as they
saw fit.  They realized, however, that so ambitious an adventure as they were
undertaking demanded cooperation, and cooperation in turn required that each
family surrender some of its individual initiative to the common good.

     They had examples before them.  Fur caravans and Santa Fe trains moved
west under captains and sergeants who prescribed the order of march and the
rotations of guard duty.  The leaders settled quarrels and often met with a
council of veterans to decide on how to handle emergencies.  The procedure
worked fairly well in those caravans because they were homogenous units
supported in large part by hired hands who either had to take orders or get
out.

     By contrast, the movers were a mixed lot, each family a unit to itself.
There were relatively few hired hands, but a large number of women not averse
to speaking out concerning decisions that went against their liking.  A
build-up of jealousies and cliques was almost inevitable, and this meant that
rigid discipline could not be imposed for long.  Yet the American penchant for
democratic elections was such that for years every company that hit the trail
regularly elected officers whom they felt perfectly free to disobey whenever
circumstances seemed to warrant.  But at least the electors allowed themselves
this much seasoning:  they did not vote until the train had progressed a
hundred miles or so to the west and they'd had an opportunity to measure each
man's capabilities.