Hardly anyone has ever heard of this particular party of men, women and children. They crossed the continent in 1844, and  blazed a trail in the wilderness, being the first to bring wagons all the way to California.  They  walked nearly two thousand miles, across plain and desert,  finally hauling their wagons up a sheer mountain cliff. They set out into country unknown to most, all for a gamble that life at the other end of the trail would be better. They are a footnote in the history books,  and  go by several different names, because no one was ever entirely sure afterwards who their leader was, or if they managed their epic trek by committee. There was a diarist, but nothing of his account of the journey has never been found, and there would never be a tireless letter-writer or professional memoirist among them. There are no extensive first-hand contemporary accounts, for they were fairly ordinary people. It was their journey which was extraordinary.

 

In the year 1844, for all intents and purposes these United States, , extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi/Missouri River. West of the rivers, two-thirds of the continental territories theoretically American were an unknown quantity. Desert, high plains, mountains, rivers… only a bare handful of explorers, missionaries and fur trappers had ever seen for sure what lay beyond the jumping-off point at Council Bluffs, Independence, St. Joseph. There was a slender and perilous established overland trail to Santa Fe, and beyond that to the thinly-populated enclave of Spanish and then Mexican territories in California. That trail wound through the scrub and deserts of the Southwest, traveled mostly by professional traders and merchants, heavily armed and escorting great lumbering Conestoga wagons packed with profitable trade goods: fabrics and glass, gunpowder and tools, for the markets in Santa Fe, and the outlaying pueblos. They were businessmen, with little interest in lingering in the inhospitable deserts along most of their way.

 

There was another trail, also— a northern track which followed along the Platte River, through deserts and mountains, and eventually terminated in Oregon. Lewis and Clarke, the fur-trapping brigades… all had gone that way, by boat, on horseback and on foot. By the 1840s, hearing of the rich lands in the Pacific Northwest, farmers and small tradesmen had also begun to follow the siren call. An agricultural depression, epidemics of malaria and yellow-fever, a bit of manifest destiny, ambition and just plain restlessness no doubt played a part. Families across what is now the middle-west sold off land and assets;. This was not a journey for the impoverished, or the reckless. Aside from a wagon, and stock to pull it, these adventurers would have to bring along supplies,  tools, clothes, bedding and cooking gear, spare parts for the wagon, perhaps seeds and roots to plant a new garden in the Willamette Valley, or by Sutter’s Fort in far California. There might be some little space in the wagon for some books, and china and other small treasures, for the wagons were small, and food took up most of the space. The larger wagons, purpose-built for the trail were about four feet wide, ten to twelve feet long, covered with waterproofed canvas stretched over four or five arched hickory bows, although many families made do with ordinary farm wagons, fitted out with a cover. The draft animal of choice was not the horse, as many would think. Horses were expensive, and the road was rough, too rough in the early days for even the toughest horse in dray harness. Mules made a good showing on the southern trail, but they were expensive. Most emigrants could better afford ox teams; four to six pair to a wagon, patient and plodding, guided by a driver who walked by the lead team and shouted verbal commands.

 

The wagons rolled on metal-tired wheels; there was no suspension system, no springs. Most emigrants walked, by choice, rather than endure jolting along in a wagon. It would take six months, easily… and in the early days there was no known road, and only two or three outposts all along that way to buy additional supplies, or to mail a letter. The pioneers looked out from the noisy clamor of St. Joseph, and Independence, and Council Bluffs, at last years tracks and ruts, overgrown with the new grass that would feed their ox teams on the first part of the journey, as soon as it was grown tall enough… at wilderness. They would step off the safe perch, on the riverbank at the edge of civilization, and swing out like a trapeze artist across the vast, emptiness, guided by their own good sense, and hard work, faith and hope and no little amount of luck.

 

Late in of May, 1844 such a party of emigrants stepped off from Council Bluffs, in company with a larger party bound for Oregon. Ten families, with as many (or a few more) wagons, with all their stock and worldly goods had elected an ex-trapper and blacksmith named Elisha Stephens as their own leader. Daringly, they  intended to strike off the established trail for Oregon at Fort Hall, and head for California.   Stephen’s party of fifty souls included eight women and fifteen children. A little under half of them were an extended clan of Irish immigrants;  Martin Murphy, and his three sons, with their wives and children. Martin Murphy had moved by degrees from Ireland, to Canada, and then to Missouri. His wife and three grandchildren had died in a malaria epidemic;. The clan sought a healthier climate, and Martin Murphy thought all the better of California— still held by Mexico— for it being nominally a Catholic country. Dr. John Townsend, very possibly the most educated person in the party, also looked to a healthier climate; his wife, Elizabeth was supposed to be in frail health. Elizabeth Townsend’s orphaned younger brother, Moses Schallenberger, counted as a man for this journey, at the age of 17. The teenaged half-Indian sons of Caleb Greenwood probably also counted as men. Caleb Greenwood had roamed all over the Rockies as a fur-trapper, twenty years before. Greenwood was thought to be in his eighties, but still hale and vigorous. Another old mountain-man, Isaac Hitchcock also felt the lure of the west, traveling with his oldest daughter and her children.

 

None of these men; Stephens, Greenwood or Hitchcock had been all along the route they intended to followl to California, although there is some evidence that Hitchock had been in California some twenty years before, and it is thought that Stephens may have had experience as a wagon-master on the Santa Fe Trail. Stephens seems also to have been enormously respected by the other men of the California bound element. There were none of the bitter divisions that fractured other parties, under the stress of moving the heavy-laden wagons an inexorable fifteen miles a day, and chivvying the stock herd, finding water and safe pasturage, of being dusty and exhausted and hungry, day after grinding day, and knowing that the hardest part of the journey was at the end of it.

 

Fifteen miles a day, more or less; this is the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must accomplish this before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on, perhaps with fatal consequences. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water and the men going to hunt for meat, that when dried over the fire and stored away might mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.

 

All accounts of the emigrant trail agree, some of them very lyrically, that the first weeks out on the trail are the most pleasant, an adventure and an extended picnic. Dr. Townsend’s journal, as he was nominated the secretary from the Stephens Party, is long gone but many others remain. The prairie grass is lush and green, the land gently rolling. The oxen are healthy and rested, the burden of travel not onerous. Elderly men and women in San Jose, or Portland, penning their memoirs early in the 20th century will look back on it as the most marvelous adventure of their childhood; running barefoot in the green grass, the white canvas wagon-top silhouetted at the top of a gentle rise against a blue, blue sky, meals around a campfire, and sleeping under the stars. They will remember seeing herds of buffalo, a sea of brown woolly backs as far as the horizon goes, the trick of scrambling up from the ground over a slow-moving wagon-wheel, and how the wagon jolted over every little rock and rut. They will remember the look of the Platte River, wide and shallow— and inch thick and a mile wide, so it was said and how they also said it was too thick to drink and too thin to plough. For small children, alive in the immediate day to day present, and innocently trusting their parents as all-wise, all-capable beings, those first weeks on the trail could only be a grand adventure, an endless picnic excursion, with something new and wonderful always around the next bend.

 

Their mothers probably did not have quite such a sunny memory, for the  picnic would be well stocked with ants, and dust and the endless chore of cooking over an open fire, of setting up camp every night, and unrolling the bedding, or carrying buckets of fresh water… and that after an exhausting day of either walking alongside the wagon or riding in it. Women’s work on a farm in the 19th century was grueling enough by our standards, but in the settled lands they had left there was a community, family, friends, an orderly routine. These eight women, and the older girls would have formed their own little community; discovering again that a bucket of milk hung from the wagon-box in the morning would have churned itself into a small lump of butter at the end of the days’ journey, and dried beans left to soak overnight in the dying heat of the evening campfire would be ready to cook the next morning. There would have been the challenge of how to contrive meals out of cornmeal and flour, dried beans, dried fruit, salt-pork, how to do at least a minimal laundry along the trail, how to glean edible greens and wild plums from the thickets in the creek bottoms. The presence of Dr. Townsend, with his medical expertise, and small range of surgical kit must have also been very reassuring, most especially as the party reached the landmark of Independence Rock, shortly before July 4th. There, Mrs. James Miller gave birth to a baby daughter, named Ellen Independence Miller. When the party moved on towards the distant Rocky Mountains and Fort Hall (in what is now Idaho), it was on a shortcut of Isaac Greenwood’s suggesting. It would later be called “Sublette’s Cutoff” and it saved them five days of travel.

 

The westbound trail split at Fort Hall. From then on, the Murphys, the Townsends, the Millers and their infant daughter, Old Hitchcock and his daughter and all the others would be on their own, finding their own trail in the faintest of traces left from a small party of wagon-train emigrants  who attempted the California route the summer before.