US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0024/00246.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00246}
$Pretitle{18}
$Title{The Overland Migrations
Chapter 3  The Dangerous Road To California}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{US Department of the Interior}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{california
wagons
river
fort
trail
south
way
lake
party
time}
$Volume{Handbook 105}
$Date{1980}
$Log{Sutter*0024601.scf
Joseph Smith*0024602.scf
Brigham Young*0024603.scf
Sutter's Mill*0024604.scf
}
Book:        The Overland Migrations
Author:      US Department of the Interior
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 105
Date:        1980

Chapter 3  The Dangerous Road To California

     Emigrants attracted by glowing reports about the sunny climate of Mexican
California faced barriers even more formidable than the Columbia River gorge.
First came a hot pull through the hundreds of miles of monotonous sand and
sagebrush wastes of present-day Nevada.  Their own strength and that of their
animals drained by the ordeal, they then faced the towering Sierra Nevada,
through which no river forced an opening.

     These dangers were well known to Joseph Chiles.  In 1841 he had
accompanied the 31 men and the 18-year-old woman and her year-old baby who had
tried to take nine wagons through those dreary lands - lands about which no
reliable information existed at the time.  They had ended up abandoning their
vehicles in the desert, transferring their dabs of food and gear to the backs
of their emaciated oxen, and scrambling across the Sierra half a step ahead of
disaster.

     In spite of that experience Chiles, who had returned east in 1842 to pick
up the family of a friend and machinery for a sawmill, was willing to try
again.  He concocted an ingenious plan.  As he was traveling west with the
Oregon migrants of '43, he met near Fort Laramie one of the great mountainmen
of the West, Joseph Reddeford Walker.  Walker, who had been to California in
1834, knew the key to crossing the Nevada desert.  One did this by continuing
north along the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and then following the Snake River
west for some miles before cutting back south to the Humboldt River.  Yes,
Walker admitted, it was a roundabout way, but the Humboldt bypassed the desert
that had nearly trapped Chiles before, and its valley provided grass and water
for the stock until finally the river sank out of sight in marshes a few days'
march from today's California-Nevada border.

     From the Humboldt Sink on across the middle part of the Sierra Nevada -
that was the problem.  Walker had run into so much trouble crossing with
horses in 1834 that on his return the next year he had swung hundreds of miles
south to what is still known as Walker Pass.  But that would be a weary loop
for Chile's people, who were already dangerously short of food.

     It was then that Chiles came up with his plan.  Would Walker agree, for
$300, to take the party's eight wagons, four women, five children, and enough
men for the heavy work down the Humboldt to its sink?  Meanwhile Chiles and a
strong party of horsemen - the number turned out to be 13, counting Gantt -
would skirt the northern Sierra near what is now the California-Oregon border.
The mountains behind them, they would turn south to the powerful trading post
that John Sutter had built where the city of Sacramento now stands.  There
they would pick up supplies and information and then push directly east over
the Sierra with a pack train, working out a wagon way as they traveled.  After
joining Walker at the Humboldt Sink, they would guide the party back across
the mountains.

[See Sutter: John A. Sutter]

     Unfortunately, plans drawn up on the basis of inadequate information
seldom work.  The way to Sutter's Fort through northern California was longer
and much harder going than either Chiles or Gantt realized.  When finally they
reached their destination on November 10, they were utterly exhausted.  By
that time snow had blanketed the high country, and there was no possibility of
reaching the wagons.  Walker's people waited at the sink until it was clear
help was not coming.  Forlornly then they crept south, on starvation rations,
toward Walker Pass.  Like the party of 1841 they had to abandon the wagons and
make a pack train out of the strongest animals that remained.  Again it was a
close thing, but because Walker knew where he was going, they won through.
Yet the key that would unlock the Sierra to practical wagon travel remained to
be found.

     The discovery came in 1844.  That year nearly 1,200 persons started in
three big caravans for Oregon.  By contrast 46 migrants chose California.
Their base was Council Bluffs, Iowa, and after crossing the Missouri they went
up the north bank of the Platte, a route that only a few fur caravans had used
before them.  About half the number were the children, grandchildren, and
in-laws of a 58-year-old Irish patriarch named Martin Murphy. (One daughter
and one daughter-in-law were pregnant.)  Also accompanying them was sprightly
Caleb Greenwood, who had gone overland to the Columbia with the Astorians in
1810 and who claimed, in 1844, that he was 81.  If so, he was quite possibly
the oldest man ever to follow the California Trail.  And the girl baby that
was born to Murphy's daughter-in-law near Independence Rock was among the
youngest.

     By following Walker's wagon tracks the party made its way from the valley
of the Snake River to the sink of the Humboldt.  There Greenwood located a
friendly Paiute Indian named Truckee with whom he could converse by means of
sign language and maps scratched into the gritty earth.  The encounter turned
the migrants due west across 55 miles of parched desert to another key stream,
this one plunging out of the Sierra from the direction they wanted to go.  In
gratitude they named it Truckee.

     Getting wagons up the Truckee's narrow canyon was a hellish struggle
against boulders, down timber, briars, and icy water.  When the main stream
turned south, they kept stubbornly westward up a tributary to a spruce-
bordered lake whose loveliness they scarcely noticed, for it was November and
the first light snows were whitening the branches.  Martin Murphy's pregnant
daughter was near her time.  And just beyond the lake rose a wall of granite a
thousand feet high.

     They had 11 wagons - too many to manhandle over the pass.  They decided
to leave six - three husky young men promised to build a cabin near the lake
and guard the vehicles' contents from Indian plundering throughout the winter
- and go ahead with five.  It was a frantic struggle, but they made it and
were started down the far side when snow halted them just as Murphy's daughter
went into labor - another girl.  So it became necessary to build a second
cabin and leave the women, children, and some men behind with a supply of
freshly butchered beef while the strongest floundered ahead in search of
Sutter's Fort and help.

     Eventually everyone got out, and in the spring, when there was time to
work on the road, all wagons were retrieved and brought on into the Sacramento
Valley.  At last there was a wagon way into California. Troublesome, yes, but
it showed that the Sierra could be crossed.

     In 1845, a year when approximately 3,000 people went to Oregon, 50 wagons
reached California.  "A trying time," one woman recalled, "the blood from
their [the oxens'] feet and knees staining the rocks they passed over the men
swearing at their teams, and beating them most cruelly, all along that rugged
way."  Fortunately snow was exceptionally light that year - so light that two
parties of horsemen, both of whom deserve special mention, were able to make
the crossing as late as December.

     One group was a party of government explorers under John Charles Fremont.
They had just traveled across Colorado to the south shore of Great Salt Lake
and then had pushed across sterile salt flats and dry sage valleys to the
Humboldt River.  Nothing to it, Fremont said, to the surprise of the veteran
mountainmen who heard him.

     The other group consisted of 10 riders led by Lansford Hastings. Hastings
had gone to Oregon in 1842 and then had moved to California.  He was a land
promoter with political ambitions whose fulfillment depended on an influx of
settlers.  To further his plans he returned east in 1844 and published a book
called The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California.  In it he mentioned
casually what was apparent to anyone who had traveled in the West:  Fort Hall
lay north of the direct route to California; a much shorter way would be to
head southwest from the vicinity of Bridger's Fort to Salt Lake and then west
across the desert to the Humboldt River.  He did not take himself seriously,
however, for when he rode back to California he took the normal Fort Hall
route.

     In California he talked to Fremont.  Instantly his speculations about a
shortcut blossomed into a dazzling plan.  Here was a way to bring in settlers!
In the spring he persuaded a small party of eastbound travelers to join him in
retracing Fremont's trail from the Humboldt River to the south side of the
lake.  There he left Fremont's route and blazed his own way through the
tumbled, trackless breaks of the Wasatch Mountains to Bridger's Fort.  In
spite of its hazards he reached the main trail in time to give his sales pitch
to the trail-weary people moving slowly westward.

     Helped by Jim Bridger, who would sell more supplies if his post became a
jumping-off point for a new trail to California, Hastings persuaded the
drivers of 66 wagons to try his shortcut. (Three times that many refused.)  He
himself went with the first contingent as guide, across the upper reaches of
Bear River and down rugged Echo Canyon to the Weber.  Hoping that the latter
stream would provide easier going than the rough country he had threaded on
his ride east, he plunged blindly down its constricted gorge. The experience
was so frightful that he returned a few miles and left a note beside the trail
suggesting to latecomers that if they sent a messenger after him he would
return and point out a better way.  But when an emissary from the last party
of all overtook him, he did nothing more than ride to the top of a hill and
gesture vaguely off towards his original eastward route.

     The animals and the 200 persons he led through the desert suffered
dreadfully from thirst on the long, waterless stretches.  They spent more time
reaching the Sierra than did the 600 or so traditionalists who went around by
Fort Hall.  By the thinnest of margins they broke through.

     The last party did not.  It consisted of 87 persons in 23 wagons led by
brothers George and Jacob Donner, prosperous Illinois farmers who were weary
of Midwestern winters and eager for California's balmy climate.  They wore
themselves out rolling boulders and chopping brush.  Their oxen all but
perished on the dry jornadas.  There were quarrels and murders.  A man sent
ahead to Sutter's Fort for food returned with seven loaded mules and two
Indian helpers, but the relief came too late.  Storms roared down on the party
as it straggled toward the lovely lake - Donner Lake now - where the
pathfinders of 1844 had abandoned six of their wagons.

     What followed has become an ineradicable part of the story of America's
westering.  Before the pitiful survivors were brought out of the mountains in
the spring of 1844, nearly half the party had died and their bodies had
furnished food for the living.  Memory of that horror brooded over the trail
throughout the rest of its history - and perhaps helped save many lives when
tens of thousands of wayfarers were stampeding to California for a share of
the gold that had been discovered in the Sierra's western foothills.  For the
lesson was clear:  neither desert nor mountains were to be attempted without
thorough preparation.

The Mormon Way

     No group of western emigrants ever took to the trail with greater hope
than did the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Since
the founding of their church in 1830 those "peculiar people," as they called
themselves, had been driven by hostile neighbors from Ohio to Missouri and
from Missouri to Illinois, where they built a city called Nauvoo on the east
bank of the Mississippi.  What followed was an invitation to disaster.
Complaisant Illinois legislators, eager for Mormon votes, granted the city a
charter that made it virtually independent of State laws.  Non-Mormon
neighbors resented this preferential treatment as well as the Mormons'
assumption that they alone possessed the key to the Kingdom of Heaven.  They
feared Nauvoo's private militia of 4,000 carefully drilled men, were jealous
of the prosperity of the rapidly growing city, and were outraged by rumors
that church leaders secretly practiced polygamy.  When a quarrel between
antagonistic factions within the city itself resulted in the imprisonment of
the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, a yowling mob of non-Mormons took advantage
of the situation to storm the jail and murder him.  After that, violence grew
so extreme that the Mormons, led now by Brigham Young decided their only
escape was to move once more.  Their goal this time was the vicinity of Great
Salt Lake, a place so remote from other settlements that they dared hope they
would at last be free to follow the kind of life they had chosen.

[See Joseph Smith: Joseph Smith]

[See Brigham Young: Brigham Young]

     The exodus began during the icy weather of February 1846.  By the end of
the year roughly 16,000 persons were either strung out in different camps
across Iowa, farming and building temporary businesses, or were bivouacking in
miserable huts at what they called Winter Quarters, located where a suburb of
Omaha, Nebraska, now stands.

     How could such a multitude be transported through a thousand miles of
wilderness?  How could the first arrivals be sustained during the time it took
them to create new homes far from the kind of resources that had been the
salvation of the first American farmers to reach Oregon and California?

     As the leaders under Brigham Young pondered the problem, war broke out
between the United States and Mexico.  This enabled 526 men to enlist as the
Mormon Battalion in the Army of the West, which had been ordered to drive
through New Mexico to California.  The new soldiers turned their pay and
clothing allowances - about $50,000 - over to the church to aid the financing
of the mass movement to Utah.  Money, however, could not buy food where none
existed, and so later in the year it was decided that as soon as the weather
opened in 1847 a party of selected men would hurry west and plant crops that
could be harvested by the first of the big wagon trains that would follow.

     Rendezvous for the advance party was set for mid-April on the west bank
of the Elkhorn River, which flowed into the Platte about 35 miles northwest of
Winter Quarters.  Group by group, 144 men assembled there. Three were blacks
listed in the records as servants.  A few, it seems, were not members of the
church at all.  Homogenity was further shaken when Lorenzo Young, one of
Brigham's brothers, insisted on taking along his wife Harriet and her two
small sons by a previous marriage.  Brigham then decided that he might as well
have a wife, too, as did apostle Heber Kimball.  A bit later one of the
original party turned back because of illness.  Thus the group that on April
17, 1847, started its slow crawl up the north bank of the Platte River
consisted of 148 persons, four more than the mystical 12 times 12 that had
first been contemplated.

     Their 72 assorted wagons and carriages were pulled by 211 horses, mules,
and oxen.  Their most significant innovation was a large leather boat named
the "Revenue Cutter" that had a wagon all to itself.  They also dragged along
a small piece of artillery in the hope that its roar rather than its dinky
cannonballs would frighten off hostile Indians.  It was not used.  Except for
some thieving Pawnees, the few Indians they encountered were friendly.

     Everything was carefully prescribed - bed hours, the exact length of the
noon rest, turns at guard duty, and the rotation of places in the column so
that all would spend equal amounts of time breaking trail and choking on dust.
Nothing could be done, however, about the heavy pulls through sand, the time
consuming detours to find fords through tributary streams, the hard climbs
across bluffs that crowded against the river bank. Quarreling, complaining,
and profanity increased with distance.  Cards and dominoes appeared inside the
wagons after bed hours.  One Saturday night before the usual Sabbath layover
fiddles came out and the men clapped and spun together through backcountry
hoedowns.

     This slackening in discipline led Brigham Young to climb into the leather
boat on the wagon bed and deliver a blistering reprimand."Suppose the angels
were witnessing the hoe-down the other evening, and listening to the hawhawing
the other evening, would not they be ashamed of it? I was ashamed. . . .  I
think it will be good for us to have a fast meeting tomorrow and a prayer
meeting to humble ourselves and turn to the Lord It was a chastened group that
moved on in better order to Fort Laramie, where they picked up a few men and
women who had been discharged from the Mormon Battalion during its march
through the Southwest and had come north to join them.

     Near Fort Laramie the roughness of the country led them to cross the
Platte to the regular trail along the south bank.  This meant that they had to
recross the stream, swollen with snow melt, when they reached the vicinity of
today's Casper, Wyoming.  As usual they used the "Revenue Cutter" for ferrying
their goods to the far bank and then built a raft on which to transport their
wagons one by one.  By the time the ferrying was done they had achieved an
efficient system, and so eight men and a blacksmith were delegated to stay
behind and earn some badly needed dollars by operating a ferry for the
non-Mormon trains crowding along behind them toward Oregon and California.  It
was the beginning of what became the Overland Trail's extensive system of
ferries, most of them operated by Mormons for the benefit of their own people
but available, at a stiff price, to others.

     After crossing South Pass they met more members of the Mormon Battalion
hurrying east from conquered California.  Some continued on to find their
families at Winter Quarters; others stayed to help thrust the wagons through
the heartbreaking stretch of the Wasatch Mountains that had so fatally delayed
the Donner Party the year before.  Adding to the difficulties of the work was
a flare-up of fever that afflicted many of them, Young included.  They called
the excruciating headaches and the agonizing pains in their joints "mountain
sickness."  Its exact nature is still a mystery.

     Counteracting that distress was the sudden glimpse of Great Salt Lake,
gleaming like silver in the tawny distance.  Exuberantly one man wrote in his
diary, "I could not help shouting hurrah hurrah hurrah . . . here is my new
home at last."  By July 23 most of them were camped beside what is now City
Creek and had begun plowing nearly 50 acres for buckwheat, corn, oats, beans,
potatoes, and garden truck.  On August 2 they began building, out of adobe
bricks, several houses surrounded by a stockade.

     On August 2, also, small companies began going back over the rough road,
some to inspirit the people who would have to stay in Iowa for the time being
and others to help the caravan that had already departed from Winter Quarters
on their track.  That caravan needed help.  The draining away of more than 650
able-bodied men for the Mormon Battalion and the advance party had left the
new migrants woefully short of strength, and as a consequence several sturdy
young women had to act as teamsters and herders.

     Church figures say with firm exactness that 1,553 men, women, and
children made the jump.  They had 556 wagons.  Work oxen, horses, milk cows,
sheep and hogs numbered 3,617.  There were 716 chickens.  The train started
its march in sections and then, as travel grew more strenuous, split again and
again into ragged segments spread out over more than 30 miles.

     Except for a wild time recovering cattle that mixed with a herd of
buffalo, their difficulties, bickerings and jealousies were like those
experienced by tens of thousands of others.  Brigham Young, returning to Iowa,
met them high on Sweetwater River, sized up their problems of morale, and
poured out on them one of his blazing combinations of scolding and pep talk.
Abashed, they took the rest of the way in better form and between September 24
and October 2 rolled in rejoicing groups out of the last canyon to the
greening fields between the mountains and the lake.  Their success and that of
the 2,400 people who followed in 1848 guaranteed the permanence of the
settlement - and provided a haven of no small importance for the gold rushers
who began flooding across the West in 1849, attracted by electrifying news of
major strikes of the precious metal in California.

[See Sutter's Mill: Sutter's mill, shortly after the discovery]

Gold Fever

     One of the extraordinary features of the 1849 stampede across South Pass
to California is the fact that most of the people who began the journey lived
to finish it.  The sheer weight of their numbers - roughly 23,000 persons all
told - turned crucial river fords into chaos.  Their 60,000 animals clotted
the campgrounds and competed ravenously for the limited grass of the desert.
For the first time in the short history of the migration a major epidemic
stalked the trail.  Unusually heavy rains turned the eastern sections into
quagmires, and unusually early snowfalls whitened the Sierra.  To compound the
problems, the majority of the wayfarers were city folk, inexperienced with
animals, wagons, axes, and shovels.  Yet most got through.

     The dominant goal of early emigrants to Oregon, California, and Utah had
been new homes.  That urge still held in '49, but far stronger was the hunger
to make a quick fortune in the newly discovered goldfields and return home
with money enough to resume, in style, familiar ways of living.  As a result
of this changed way of regarding the West, most of the argonauts of 1849 left
their dependents at home.  In round figures only a thousand of the travelers
were children, 2,000 were women - and 20,000 were men.  (The figures do not
include the 2,000 or so assorted Mormons who marched doggedly to Utah just as
though nothing were happening in California, nor the paltry 400 who chose
Oregon that year.)  It is significant, moreover, that the majority of the
family groups that sought California were from the farming counties of western
Missouri; they intended to stay on the coast once they had made their pile.

     Long before grass was high enough for livestock, the hordes began pouring
into the river towns of Independence, Westport, and St. Joseph, the last a new
settlement about 50 miles north of Independence on the east bank of the
Missouri.  Some arrived in battered wagons; more sent spanking new ones up the
river in steamboats; and still more hoped to buy what they needed at their
jumping-off places.  About 1,500 of them planned to make the 2,000-mile
journey with saddle horses and pack mules.

     Memories of the Mexican War were still fresh throughout the Nation, and
so it seemed logical to many of the stampeders, particularly those in the
East, to band together in military-style companies and dress themselves in
fancy uniforms.  Others felt that inasmuch as they were headed for the Wild
West, they might as well look the part.  After seeing obvious greenhorns
decked out in peaked sombreros, buckskin coats decorated with porcupine
quills, red flannel shirts, spurs with 5-inch rowels, and bowie knives 20
inches long, one diarist sniffed scornfully, "The boys took pains to make
themselves ridiculous."

     Ridiculous or not, most were far less quarrelsome than their
predecessors, and they carried their lightheartedness with them along the
trail, often in the face of appalling difficulties.  For they were young,
resilient, and excited by the prospect of adventure.  They painted gay names
on their wagon - Wild Yankee, Rough and Ready, Banner Company - visited
constantly back and forth, swapped endless misinformation about routes and
procedures, boomed out songs around the campfires, and drank more than they
should have while waiting for the prairies to green.

     As April dragged out, numbers grew so huge that it became obvious there
would be keen competition for grass along the Platte and beyond. Accordingly,
the best prepared of the companies began edging out ahead of the others onto
the prairies, feeding their stock grain in lieu of grass. By May when natural
feed was ready at last, some had traveled 200 miles.  Others, by contrast, did
not leave until July, when it was clear to all except themselves that they
would be unable to go farther that year than Salt Lake City.

     The early start proved to be a mixed blessing.  Spring thunderstorms
bowled over tents, scattered stock, and liquefied the ground.  As the pace
slowed and livestock tired, realization dawned that practically all the wagons
were overloaded.  Even before they reached the Platte, many of the migrants
had begun a process that would continue, by fits and starts, to the top of the
Sierra - tossing out superfluous items.  First went such things as lead for
bullets, unnecessary tools, patented gold-washing machines. Later guns, books,
clothing, and fancy food items followed.  The rest areas around Fort Kearny, a
new Army post on the south bank of the Platte, and Fort Laramie, recently
purchased by the Army from its civilian owners, were so littered with
discarded goods that they looked like urban junk yards.

     More serious was the forced abandonment of wagons.  Many vehicles and
many animals had left the Missouri River in poor shape.  The ruggedness of the
road, the wood-shrinking dryness of the high plains, and the inexperience of
the owners soon combined to immobilize many an outfit.  The crisis was met in
two ways.  The easiest was to join forces with another hard-luck group,
abandon the worst vehicles, and add their erstwhile draft animals to the teams
of still functioning wagons.  The riskier way was to knock a decrepit wagon
apart, build pack saddles from its wood and harnesses, and continue as a pack
train.  But this worked only when enough saddle horses were available for the
people.

     Adding to the strain on the emigrants' nerves was the dread of cholera.
The disease was widespread in the Midwest during 1849 and the early 1850's.
It probably struck the wagon trains no harder than it did the cities; indeed,
it skipped many trains entirely.  But persons in unfortunate caravans were
terrified.  They saw a victim wracked by cramps, violent diarrhea, and
uncontrollable vomitings.  They watched him collapse into alternate chills and
fever, turn blue, and often die within 24 hours - or else, if he recovered, be
so weak that the next several days were agony for him and those who, lacking
almost all facilities, had to make room for him in a crowded wagon and care
for his needs as it lurched along over the rough terrain.

     There seems to be no way of knowing how many emigrants actually perished
from the disease.  Estimates range from 200 to 5,000.  One authority on the
medical aspects of the trail, George Groh, argues in his book Gold Fever that
a figure of 1,000 would not be far wide of the mark.  Nor was '49 the only
year of terror.  Other virulent outbreaks occurred in subsequent years, but at
least the travelers could expect this relief:  the disease burned itself out
and disappeared once they had reached the sun-smitten hills west of Fort
Laramie.

     Beyond South Pass the trail divided into several routes.  Because little
information about the merits and disadvantages of the different roads existed,
companies were faced with agonies of decision that often broke the already
disintegrating caravans into still smaller sections.  In the end more than
half of the migrants dragged along the well-trodden oxbow curves that led
south through Fort Bridger, north past Fort Hall (it, too, became an army post
in 1849) and finally south again to the Humboldt River. Others eliminated Fort
Bridger by striking due west across the harsh sagebrush wastes that separated
South Pass from the Green River - a difficult ford there - and then the Bear.
Another shortcut, rough and twisting, eliminated Fort Hall - but also
eliminated the opportunity, slim though it was, of resting there and
replenishing supplies.

     Those in gravest need of new equipment followed the Mormon Road to Salt
Lake City.  There they swapped such dry foods as beans, rice, and oatmeal for
fresh vegetables, perhaps traded two heavy wagons for one light one or up to
six exhausted oxen for a single pair of fresh animals.  Then on again, around
the north side of the great lake on a stupefyingly monotonous trail that had
been worked out only the year before.

     The roads came together again in the Humboldt Valley, and the pressure on
the thin stands of grass grew acute.  Although many parties traveled by night
to escape the sledgehammer heat, the half-starved animals frequently
collapsed from overwork.  More and more possessions were abandoned; more and
more wagons fell apart.  In final desperation many wayfarers, including some
women, loaded the barest of essentials onto their own backs and set out to
finish the journey afoot, keeping themselves alive on occasion by carving
steaks from the carcasses they passed.

     Further divisions occurred as the Sierra drew near.  In search of a
lower, easier pass than the one where the Donners had been trapped, many
followed the new Lassen Trail out of the Humboldt Valley north almost to
Oregon, not realizing that the grim desert and the 135 extra miles would prove
even more taxing than the mountains.  Meanwhile those who kept on down the
Humboldt to its sink were faced with taking either the Donner route up the
wheel-wrenching Truckee Canyon or making a hazardous crossing of the
Forty-Mile Desert to the easier Carson Trail around the south side of Lake
Tahoe.

     Perhaps 10,000 persons were still struggling with the mountains when
winter closed in.  Fortunately the first persons to reach California warned
the authorities that a major catastrophe was shaping up behind them.  The Army
appropriated $100,000 for relief work, accepted donations of help and money
from private individuals, and sent rescue parties out along each of the
trails.  Thanks to the heroic work of those men, few lives were lost to the
early storms that swept the land.

     Was the ordeal of the crossing worthwhile?  In terms of gold dust it
probably wasn't, except for a lucky few.  But all who finished were able to
look back in pride on what they had achieved.  And for the foresighted ones
who started well prepared and traveled light, who fished and hunted and
relished the natural wonders along the way, it was, many said afterwards, the
most exhilarating experience of their lives.