The eleven wagons led by Elisha Stephens and guided by Greenwood, the old trapper and mountain-man struck off the established trail towards Oregon, sometime  in the middle of August. They were following faint wheel tracks of a group led the previous year , the Bidwell-Bartleson Part, who had  followed the Humboldt River, a sluggish and marshy trickle which eventually petered out in a sandy desert basin well short of the mountains. They had been unable to find a pass leading up into the Sierra Nevada, had gone south and eventually abandoned their wagons near Owens Lake. They reached  California by going around the mountains entirely. This was a desperate and impractical solution for the Stephens Party.

 

The Murphys, the Townsends and the others all camped by the desert marsh, no doubt consulting over what they should do next. Experienced frontier hands Greenwood and Hitchcock were convinced there had to be a way up into the Sierra, more or less directly west of where they were camped. They consulted, mountain-man fashion with a curious, but seemingly friendly old Indian man who wandered into camp. The old Indian was the chief of the Piute tribe, and had made the acquaintance of the explorer John C. Fremont— traveling into California with Fremont, even. The chief made it tribal policy to be courteous and friendly to those settlers and explorers passing through Piute lands. Communication seems to have been through sign language, and pantomime. Was there a pass into the mountain-range? Greenwood or Hitchcock modeled a range of mountains in the sand at their feet and pointed at the real mountains. The old Indian looked at it thoughtfully, and carefully remodeled the sand range to show a small river running down between two. Could there be a gateway through the mountains?

 

He seemed quite positive there was. The next day he rode ahead towards the distant mountains with Townsend and Stephens, while the rest of the party rested and waited for their return. When they did, they brought the good news; there was a river, coming down into the desert, cutting a passable gateway. Thy also brought the bad news; it was a hard journey across barren desert, and no water at all save for a small, bad-tasting hot-spring halfway there. But the party had no choice, other than chance the unknown desert and the mountain pass which might or might not be there. Careful preparations were made; every thing that could be made water-tight was filled to the brim. They cut armfuls of green rushes and brush as fodder for the cattle and their few horses. Some accounts have them deciding to start across the desert at sundown and just to keep going, all night, the next day and into the next night. This would take advantage of the night’s cool temperatures, minimize the need for water and get them out of the desert fast. As much water as possible would be reserved for the oxen, on whose strength and pulling power survival depended. Perhaps the smallest children would be tucked up in the wagons for the grueling trek; everyone else would walk, stumbling half-asleep under a desert moon.

 

 

It is the most beautiful river anyone has ever seen, spilling down from the mountains, cold with the chill of snow-melt even in fall, even more beautiful after the desert. All the way on that first scout, the old Indian kept saying a word which sounded like “tro-kay” to Greenwood and Stephens; it actually means “all right” or “very well”, but they assumed it was his name, and baptized the river accordingly as the Truckee River. They follow it towards the looming mountains, hurrying on a little, because it is now October. By mid-month they are camped in meadowlands, just below where the canyon cuts deep through the mountains, the last but most difficult part of the journey. Snow has already fallen, remaining on  the ground, and they have come to where a creek joins Truckee’s River. The creek-bed looks to be easier for the wagons to follow farther up into the mountain pass, but the river might be more direct. The decision is made to send a small, fast-moving party along the river, six of the fittest and strongest, on horseback with enough supplies, to move quickly and bring help and additional supplies from Sutter’s Fort. Four men and two women, including Elizabeth Townsend ride out on the 14th of November, 1844.

 

The fast-moving horseback party followed the river south, as snow continued falling. In two days they were on the shores of Lake Tahoe, working their way around the western shore to another small creek, which led them over the summit, and down along the Rubicon River, out of the snow, although not entirely out of danger in the rough country. The eastern slope is a steep palisade, the western slope more gradual, but rough, cut with steep-banked creeks. The fast party  reached the safety of Sutter’s Fort early in December, while the remainder with their wagons and children still struggled along the promising creek route. They came at last to an alpine valley with a small ice-water lake at the foot of a canyon leading up to the final summit.

 

At times, the only open passage along the creek was actually in the water, which was cruelly hard on the oxen’s feet. By the time they reached the lake, there was two feet of snow on the ground and time for another hard choice; a decision to leave six of the wagons at the lake, slaughter the worst-off of the oxen for food, and cache everything but food and essentials. Three of the young men,  Allan Montgomery, Joseph Foster and Moses Schallenberger, who was barely seventeen years old, volunteered to remain. They would build a rough cabin and winter over, guarding the wagons and property at the lake and living from what they could hunt. The rest of the party pooled the remaining ox teams and moved on with five wagons, up into the canyon towards the crest of the Sierra Nevada. They encountered a slope so steep they had to empty out the contents and carry everything by hand, doubling the ox teams and pulling up the wagons one by one. A one point, a sheer vertical ledge halfway up the rocky slope blocked further progress. A desperate search revealed a small cleft through the rock, just wide enough to lead the oxen and horses up it, single file. The teams were re-yoked at the top. They hoisted up the empty wagons by ropes and chains, while men pushed from below, and the women and children labored up the narrow footpath, carrying armfuls of precious supplies. By dint of much exhausting labor, they reached the summit on November 25th, and struggled on through the snow, while the three volunteers returned to the lake. There, the two men and teenaged boy hastily built a small cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, roofed with ox-hides and settled in for the winter, not knowing that the winter would be very much harsher than back east.

 

The main party struggled on. Although they were over the pass, and gradually heading downhill, they were still in the high mountains. With snow falling, cutting a trail and keeping the wagons moving was a brutally laborious job. A week, ten days of it was all that exhausted men and ox teams could handle. They set up a cold camp on the South Fork of the Yuba River, and made one last, calculated gamble on survival for all. They would build another cabin, make arbors of branches and the canvas wagon tops, and butcher the remaining oxen. The women and children would stay, with two men to protect them, while the remaining husbands and fathers would take the few horses and as little food as possible, and continue on to Sutter’s Fort, returning as soon as possible with supplies and team animals. So they made the bitter decision before changing weather, and diminishing food supplies forced worse circumstances upon them. Before the men rode away, the wife of Martin Murphy’s oldest son gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Yuba Murphy. It was nearly two months before a rescue party was able to return to the survival camp on the Yuba River, just in the nick of time, for the women and children were down to eating boiled hides.

 

Meanwhile, twenty miles east, the snow had piled up level to the roof of the little cabin by the ice-water lake. Foster, Montgomery and Schallenberger realized that the game they had counted on being able to hunt had all retreated below the snow, far down the mountains. What they had left would not be able to feed them through the winter. From hickory wagon bows and rawhide, Montgomery and Foster contrived three sets of snowshoes and packed up what they could carry. In one day, they had climbed to the top of the pass, but the snowshoes were clumsy things and the snow was soft. Young Schallenberger was not as strong as the older men, and agonizing leg cramps left him unable to take more than a few steps. Continuing on was impossible for him, survival through the winder at the cabin impossible for all three. He returned alone, living for the next three months on the food supplies they had not been able to carry, and trapping coyotes and foxes. Fox proved almost edible, coyote meat quite vile, but he kept the frozen coyotes anyway, lest the supply of foxes ever run out.

When the rescue party came to the winter camp for the women and children in late February, one of them, Dennis Martin continued on snowshoes over the pass, hoping to find young Schallenberger still alive. With a hard crust to the snow, the two of them had an easier time of it, and caught up to the main party on the Lower Bear River.

 

Two years later, the little cabin in which Moses Schallenberger spent most of the winter would shelter families from the Donner party who were caught by winter at about the same time of year, in the same place. A fractious, bitterly split party would meet a ghastly and protracted disaster… and yet, everyone has heard of them, and the pass through the Sierra Nevada, that the Stephens party discovered and labored successfully to bring wagons over, while increasing their strength by two born on the journey… is named for the group who lost half their number to starvation in its’ shadow.

 

(My first novel, To Truckee's Trail was based on the story of the Stephens-Townsend Party, and came out in mid-2007. I have since exchanged emails with a descendent of Isaac 'Old Man' Hitchcock, who was terribly pleased with how I had portrayed his ancestor, although he had one small quibble. He had found evidence in a letter written by the American consul in Monteray and archived in the Library of Congress that Hitchcock had indeed been all the way to California, and had spent some months there, years before coming over the mountains with his daughter and her children.)