I turned to go, making my way down through the thistles, around my great-uncle’s house, and back to the car. I drove out onto the highway and began an odyssey. To understand Sarah’s story, and to tell it well, I knew I needed to go where she had gone, to be where she had been at the time of year when she was there. I needed to go east and then follow Sarah west from where she began to where she ended.
During a series of trips over the next year and a half, I put several thousand miles on various rental cars and stayed at more cheap motels than I care to remember. I waded through waist-high prairie grass crawling with ticks, struggled on foot up dusty inclines in the Rockies, walked the salt flats of Utah in withering heat, tromped through snow up to my hips in the Sierra, following Sarah’s footsteps as closely as I reasonably could wherever she went. In all of this, I saw and felt many things that have enriched my understanding of her story and I hope have enriched my telling of it. Every step of the way, though, it has never been far from my mind that I have not experienced a fraction of the discomfort and hardship that Sarah experienced on any given day during her extraordinary journey toward the ever-declining western sun.
Part One
A SPRIGHTLY BOY AND A ROMPING GIRL
We look out upon them and are astonished to see such careless ease and joyousness manifested in the countenances of almost all—the old, the young, the strong and feeble—the sprightly boy and the romping girl….
—St. Joseph Gazette,
MAY 8, 1846
1
HOME AND HEART
The night before Sarah left Illinois for California, a full moon—as plump and promising as a pearl—hung over Steuben Township. Down in the bottomlands, the Illinois River slid silently past Franklin Ward Graves’s homestead, measuring out time swiftly and irrevocably. On the sliding surface of the water, the moonlight shimmered softly, but beneath the surface the river was black and swollen.
At 5:25 the next morning, April 12, 1846, the sun rose over the bluffs on the eastern side of the river, and, with the sun, Sarah also rose. She climbed from her bed and dressed and made her way down to the house in the bottomlands, the house where she had grown up. In her father’s farmyard, teams of broad-beamed oxen stood sullenly in their yokes, their great heads swaying from side to side in the cold, gray light of dawn, white plumes of breath issuing rhythmically from their fleshy nostrils. The oxen were yoked to three narrow farm wagons, each no more than four or five feet wide but nine or ten feet long and covered with canvas stretched on hoops to make a high canopy. Sarah’s parents and her eight younger brothers and sisters hurried about in the muddy yard, loading the last few items into the wagons. A few minutes later, the full moon slipped below the bluffs on the western side of the river, an omen, perhaps, of good things to be found in that direction. At any rate, it must have seemed that way.
Sarah was a happy young woman that morning. Just two weeks before, though, things had been very different. She had been deeply torn—in love with a young man who played the violin, but faced with the hardest decision of her young life. More than in love, she had been engaged to become the young man’s wife. But her mother and father and siblings were in the final stages of sorting through their things, giving away or discarding many of their possessions and packing the most essential and most precious items carefully into the three farm wagons in their farmyard.
They were about to climb aboard those wagons and disappear over the western horizon, bound for California, a place Sarah could hardly conceive of. If she stayed behind as planned, to marry her young man, in all likelihood she would never see any of them again—not her mother, not her father, not her eight siblings, many of whom she had helped to raise. She could still go with them, of course, but that would mean leaving behind the young man with the violin. Unlike the engagements and marriages of many of her friends out here on the Illinois frontier—some of whom were married off as young as thirteen or fourteen—Sarah’s was neither an economic arrangement nor a purely practical matter. Her heart cleaved to the young man’s heart.
His name was Jay Fosdick, and he was two years older than Sarah, about twenty-three. He and his family had arrived in Steuben Township more recently than Sarah’s family, settling along Senachwine Creek, three miles west of her family’s homestead. Like her own family, the Fosdicks were thoroughly Yankee in their origins and their ways. They could, in fact, trace their lineage back to William Brewster of the Mayflower. In New England the Fosdicks had for generations been whalers and ships’ captains and silversmiths. After the Revolution, many of them had emigrated to western New York and taken up farming. More recently some, including Jay’s parents, had come farther west to Illinois in search of better farming country than the rocky soil of New York offered. On arriving in Steuben Township, Jay’s father, Levi, had promptly gone to work planting fruit trees on his new land, creating a minor local marvel that had already come to be called “the Big Orchard” throughout the township.
But Levi Fosdick, with two daughters and only one other, younger, son at home, needed Jay to help him with the relentless cycles of work that a frontier homestead and a large orchard required. He did not, his neighbors would later report, cotton to the idea of his son taking off for a place like California—a place that was more than sixteen hundred miles from the United States as the crow flew and perhaps two thousand miles by wagon road, that could be reached only by passing through Indian territory, and that belonged to a foreign government at any rate. Jay would have to stay in Illinois.
So for weeks, with mounting despair, Sarah had watched her family’s preparations as their inevitable departure drew closer. It wasn’t only Jay she would have to tear herself away from if she broke off the engagement and chose to follow her family. It was also this place, where she had lived since she was six, the only place she could remember as home.
When she and her family had arrived in 1831, the Illinois River had been near the farthest western reaches of the American frontier. Both the bottomlands along the river and the wide-open prairies atop the nearby bluffs were virgin land, and a kind of wonderland for a barefoot girl of six. In spring the prairie grass up on the bluffs grew five feet tall, a great green sea in which a child could hide herself for hours. In the clearings, prairie chickens strutted and danced, kicking up dust, inflating the bright orange air sacs on their necks, booming their deep, low hoots and cackling their shrill, loud mating cries across the windswept countryside. Down along the river, the Indian corn in her father’s fields grew even taller than the prairie grass, sometimes as tall as twelve feet by midsummer. Pumpkins three feet across grew side by side with bright yellow summer squash and fat green watermelons. In the spring the woods below the bluffs trilled with birdsong. In the dappled light of those woods, Sarah could gather hazelnuts by the bushel and fill buckets with sweet, creamy pawpaws.
And then there was home itself—a one-room log cabin with a puncheon floor. It was simple and plain, but by the spring of 1846 every nook and cranny must have held sacred memories for Sarah. A large clay-and-wattle fireplace stood at one end of the room. In the fireplace, nestled among the ashes, a large cast-iron Dutch oven stood always at the ready. It was a vessel from which Sarah had likely served and eaten a thousand meals. For as long as she could remember, it had served for uses as varied as stewing venison, baking salt-rising bread, and soaking her father’s frostbitten feet on winter nights.
Trundle beds covered with homemade quilts were tucked into the corners of the room. The family’s clothes, almost all of them homespun—woolen stockings, trousers, and skirts; linen dresses, shifts, and shirts—hung from pegs along one side of the room. On the other side, Sarah’s father tacked the musky-smelling pelts of wolves and beavers and occasionally bears that he had shot or trapped. Beneath the pelts, gunnysacks full of sweet-smelling wheat and shelled corn lined the wall. A glazed window that admitted sunlight even on frosty winter days looked out on the public road that passed near the cabin. Under this window sat a chest, large enoug
h that Sarah and one of her sisters could curl up on top of it together and pass long hours in a pool of sunlight, sewing or reading or stringing glass beads on threads. Outside the window this spring, as every spring, young chickens scratched and hunted for bugs.
There were neighbors and friends that Sarah would have to leave behind as well if she set out for California. Throughout their little community—the scattered homesteads on the western side of the river and the little village of Lacon on the eastern side—Sarah and her parents were well known and widely regarded with affection. Villagers in Lacon looked forward almost every morning to the sight of her father crossing the river in his homemade canoe.
Franklin Ward Graves cut a striking figure both in his canoe and out of it. He was a tall, lanky man with unkempt hair, and, except in the dead of winter, he seldom wore shoes and never wore a hat. But he was congenial and of a sunny disposition, and when he crossed the river, he brought things the villagers were eager to have—fresh game and cured pelts from his woods, vegetables from his garden plot. They enjoyed his warm and generous nature, his willingness to lend a hand whenever it was needed.
In the afternoon, after Franklin had returned to his side of the river, the villagers were equally pleased when Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth, took her turn with the canoe and crossed over to the village bearing honey, eggs, butter, and buckets of soft soap. She, too, was tall and lanky. Spring, summer, and fall, she almost always wore the same blue calico frock, simple cow-skin shoes tied at the tops with leather strings, and an old calico sunbonnet. In winter she made only one concession to the cold—she supplemented her outfit with the addition of a pair of blue woolen stockings. Like her husband, she seemed to wear a constant smile and was always ready to lend a hand.
Years later, when their former neighbors thought back on the Graves family, they remembered them not only as openhearted and generous but also as extraordinarily hardy people. One of those neighbors recalled a particular day during the bitterly cold winter of 1839–40. Elizabeth Graves had come by to deliver some butter, and, finding the neighbor with a newborn infant, she stayed for several hours to help with the household chores. As in every frontier community, the women of Lacon and Sparland lived within a kind of mutual-aid society—a circle of women with whom they could share burdens and confidences in a way that they could not share them with the men in their lives.
As evening drew near and Elizabeth prepared to leave, her neighbor begged her to stay. Elizabeth had her own infant with her, and the woman feared that it would not be safe for the two of them to cross the icy river in the canoe in such cold weather. Elizabeth, as usual, was wearing only her blue frock and blue stockings. But she laughed her neighbor off. She wrapped the baby in a square of linsey-woolsey, declined the offer of a shawl, and set out into the dark, saying she would return with some helpful herbs in the morning. The neighbor watched her lay the baby in the bottom of the canoe and paddle off into the frigid darkness.
That night, a storm raged across the Illinois prairies and a freezing wind howled up the river, shuddering through the chinks and cracks of the log cabins of Lacon on one side of the river and Steuben Township on the other. By the next morning, the river had frozen over, and the neighbor’s window was too encrusted by frost to allow her to see anything through it. But at about 10:00 A.M., Elizabeth Graves, still wearing her blue calico frock, came knocking at the door with a handful of herbs. She had walked back across the newly frozen river to fulfill her promise. Referring to the whole Graves family some years later, knowing what had become of them, the neighbor marveled at an irony that was by then all too apparent to her. “They were not delicate hothouse plants,” she said.
As Sarah agonized and mourned in advance the loss of either her family on the one hand or her fiancé, home, and neighbors on the other hand, Franklin Graves, at fifty-seven, saw things very differently. Like his neighbor Levi Fosdick, Graves was a New Englander, by birth and by heritage. Born in Vermont’s Green Mountains in 1789, he could trace his own Yankee heritage back nearly as far as Fosdick could. In fact, Franklin’s father, Zenas, like Levi’s father, had served as a fifer in the Revolution. After the war, Zenas had moved his family west to Dearborn, Indiana, one of thousands of his countrymen who yearned for more and better farming opportunities than could be offered by the rocky soils of New England.
Coming of age in Dearborn, Franklin had married a local girl, Elizabeth Cooper. After their first child died in infancy, Sarah was born in January of 1825. Over the next twenty years, eight more children followed. As their brood expanded, Franklin and Elizabeth Graves eventually left Indiana, doing as Franklin’s father had done, seeking cheaper land and better opportunities elsewhere. They moved briefly to Mississippi and then on to Marshall County, Illinois, in 1831.
The land across the river from the village of Columbia, later renamed Lacon, had looked good to Franklin Graves. For men like him, a generation of men with rapidly growing families, a surplus of energy, and the desire to convert raw land into an engine of wealth, the quality of a given location’s land—the depth and color of its soil—was everything when it came to deciding on a place to settle down. A village of nearly a hundred Sauk Indian wigwams sat in a hollow below the bluff, but the bottomlands appeared to be good wheat country, with deep, black, sweet-smelling soil, so he purchased a tract of the land from the Sauks. He got along well with his native neighbors at first. With so few settlers in the area, there seemed to be enough good land for him and them both, and relations were at least cordial. Recently, in fact, a local chief, Senachwine, had sat by the sickbed of one of the Graveses’ neighbors afflicted with a fever, fanning her and caring for her while her husband went in search of a doctor.
Like the few other white settlers just beginning to trickle into the area, Graves scorned the windy and wide-open prairie lands up on the bluffs and instead selected land that was down near the water and timber. It was a formula that had worked for previous generations of Yankee settlers farther east. Aside from the fact that the alluvial soil along the river was richer than the soil up on the prairies, it just seemed to make sense that one would want to be near the two essentials for building and maintaining a home—wood and water. But as it turned out, these particular woods and this particular water added up to a recipe for trouble.
From the time the first white settlers showed up in western Illinois, they had been ravaged by what they called “the ague,” or as they soon came to call it, “the Illinois shakes.” Come every spring, they would be laid low by high fevers, chills, blinding headaches, stiffness, aching joints, anemia, and, most characteristically, violent and uncontrollable shaking. Usually it would go away after a week or two, but then it would come back a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks or even years after that, and then yet again. It was relentless, and between shivering with the cold in the winter and shaking with the ague in the spring and summer, it wore a man down.
By the late 1830s, the ague was endemic to the whole Mississippi River drainage. Other plagues, ranging from yellow fever to cholera, were also popping up all over the countryside. Steamboat captains would sometimes refuse to stop at some towns for fear of contagion.
The settlers along the Illinois River, like their forefathers in New England and England, did not know what to blame for these outbreaks. They had inherited from those forefathers a general belief that damp weather and stagnant air—“miasmas,” as they called the combination—were a principal cause of the fevers. But there wasn’t much they could do about either the air or the weather. So they did what they had always done—they dosed themselves with folk remedies. They took pills made from cobwebs. They boiled quarts of water down to pints, “to make it stronger,” and then drank it as if it were medicine. They made tea of herbs like boneset (so called because the leaves are joined at the base, leading many to believe that when wrapped around broken bones they would help set the bones as well as drive off fevers). They took patent medicines laced with mercury and suffered far more terribl
y from the cure than from the cause. They bled themselves dry and wondered why they grew ever weaker and more tired.
The culprit behind the ague was one of the world’s great scourges, a nasty little parasite of the genus Plasmodium—malaria. Today half the world’s population is threatened by malaria, as many as 500 million people are infected each year, and about a million die, twice as many as twenty years ago. Most of the fatalities are children in sub-Saharan Africa, where a particularly vicious strain, P. falciparum, pre-dominates. Fortunately for the settlers of Illinois, the two strains of the malaria parasite that made their way from Africa to the American Midwest, traveling in the bloodstreams of infected slaves and sailors, were somewhat less virulent than P. falciparum. These two strains—P. vivax and P. malariae—while less likely to cause sudden death, are more likely to cause chronic problems, cycles of on-again/off-again symptoms that may continue for weeks, months, or even years. It is the relentlessly cyclical nature of the resulting fevers that takes a toll.
What all strains of malaria have in common, of course, is that they are spread to and among humans by mosquitoes, specifically female mosquitoes of the prevalent genus Anopheles. Western Illinois, because of the poor drainage that its soils and hard limestone substrata offer, was boggy country in the 1830s and 1840s. Water pooled in the lowlands, and wide fringes of swampy land bordered rivers like the Illinois. All of this provided an ideal habitat for mosquitoes. So when settlers like Franklin and Elizabeth Graves chose to build their homes near water and woods rather than on the open, windswept prairies, they chose to make mosquitoes their close neighbors and constant companions.