When the swarms of insects became unbearable, the settlers built smoky fires in their houses to drive them out, then crawled back into the houses on hands and knees, under the smoke, and closed their doors against the pests. But because the settlers lacked even a basic understanding of germs, let alone the concept of how insects act as vectors for the transmission of those germs, they never thought of the mosquitoes as anything more than highly irritating nuisances.
Bad as they were, the endless cycles of ill health that plagued the settlers along the Illinois River were not the only reason that Franklin Graves was ready to pick up and leave Steuben Township by the spring of 1846. Things had been hard all around. He had bought his land to grow wheat, and grow it he did. The soil was so fertile that the wheat fairly burst out of the ground in the spring, rising up tall and green and rank. By midsummer the stalks were golden and bowed over, the heads heavy with grain. But forces soon came into play that rendered all that bounty more or less useless. These forces worked silently and from a great distance far to the east of Steuben Township, but they were inexorable, and like the ague they ground a man down.
In the spring of 1837, six years after Sarah and her family arrived in Illinois, the United States suddenly found itself at the beginning of a depression so deep that it would eventually rival the Panic of 1893 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The causes were complex, but they revolved around rampant speculation in real estate. Serious investors and mere speculators had begun to contemplate and then fantasize wildly about the opportunities that new railroads and canals like the recently completed Erie Canal would open up in the West, particularly in the Mississippi River Valley. They bought up land in towns that did not exist, except in their imaginations. They bought into potential railroads that carried phantom passengers from one imaginary town to another. The speculative fever rose and spiraled out of control. The result was the catastrophic collapse, in April and May 1837, of 343 of the nation’s 850 banks. In New York alone, commercial establishments lost almost $100 million within weeks, and the effects spread across the nation with devastating results.
As Franklin Graves and his neighbors watched helplessly, the markets for anything they might produce dried up and disappeared. By 1842, wheat that cost Graves fifty cents a bushel to produce fetched a mere twenty-five cents, and then only in the unlikely event that he could find a buyer. If he grew corn instead and used it to raise hogs, he learned that pork that had once brought $4.20 per hundredweight now brought less than a dollar. In some ways Graves and his neighbors were still better off than when they had arrived in this country ten years before, with little more than ambition and what they could carry in a farm wagon. At least they now owned their own land. But many of them were reduced to subsistence-level farming, hunting, and a barter economy, depending on themselves and on one another for nearly all the necessities of life while they watched and waited to see whether things would ever improve.
As they waited, they began to dream again of a better place, a place where the climate was dry and healthful, a place without disease-spawning miasmas, a place free of frostbite and killing blizzards, a place where hard work would yield a crop of ready cash. And in all that, they were about to be obliged. As far back as 1840, the St. Louis newspapers had begun publishing glowing descriptions of a Mexican territory in the far West called Alta California. That same year the novelist Richard Henry Dana Jr. had published Two Years Before the Mast, in which he painted a vivid and romantic portrait of a fertile and bounteous California, replete with
fine forests in the north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate, than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!
And when a book titled The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California was published in Cincinnati in 1845, word of the promises it contained spread through the hamlets and homesteads of the Mississippi River Valley like a messianic message.
The author of The Emigrants’ Guide, Lansford Warren Hastings, was a tall, dashing, and energetic figure, given, when traveling through the West, to dressing as a mountaineer, in fringed buckskin suits trimmed with plucked beaver fur. He was also a lawyer. From Mount Vernon, Ohio, originally, Hastings had traveled extensively through Oregon and California in 1842 and 1843 with the particular goal of sizing up those territories for potential American settlers. In the process he hoped to build a reputation, and perhaps a political career for himself in one of the new lands. A pair of inconvenient facts—that Oregon was at the time jointly and uneasily claimed by both Great Britain and the United States, and that California was sovereign Mexican territory—held little sway for Hastings and the other Americans nosing about in the West.
A number, in fact, had already taken a chance and settled in Oregon. A few had even put down roots in California. Among the latter, an even smaller number had complied with the Mexican government’s requirement that they obtain official immigration documentation and become naturalized Mexican citizens. Most simply ignored both the Mexican government and its requirements and thus became California’s original illegal immigrants.
What Hastings had to say about California in The Emigrants’ Guide mesmerized many of the settlers in Illinois and Missouri. He told of the “vast extent of its valleys and plains,” the “unexhausted and inexhaustible resources,” and “the extraordinary variety and abundance of its productions.” He assured his readers of California’s “salubrity of climate.” And he forestalled concerns about the rights of the Mexican Californians by painting them as little more than savages.
The higher order of Mexicans, in point of intelligence, are perhaps about equal to the lower class of our citizens…. More indomitable ignorance does not prevail among any people who make the least pretensions to civilization; in truth they are scarcely a visible grade, in the scale of intelligence, above the barbarous tribes by whom they are surrounded.
As for the “barbarous tribes,” the California Indians, Hastings pointed out that many of them were already conveniently dead, mostly as a result of diseases introduced by the whites.
For villages of fifty or even a hundred of these huts are frequently seen…which are now abandoned, the ground at and all around which is covered with human skulls.
Hastings, in fact, had personally contributed to the mortality in 1843, en route from Oregon to California, when he and the party he was leading had massacred somewhere between twenty and forty Native Americans along the way.*
By the spring of 1846, the American economy had finally pulled out of the doldrums enough to bring some renewed interest in the farmlands along the Illinois River and the products of those lands. So when one George Sparr showed up in Steuben Township that spring looking to buy some land, and with the hard cash to do so, Franklin Graves jumped on the opportunity.
On April 2 he went to the courthouse across the river in Lacon and signed the papers granting Sparr all five hundred acres of his land in exchange for three dollars an acre, fifteen hundred dollars in cash. When he had the money securely in hand, Franklin Graves went home and took an auger and bored a series of holes in a pair of wooden cleats. Then he slipped the greater part of the money, almost all of it in silver coins, into the holes and nailed the cleats under one of his three farm wagons. Looking at them, no one would know that the cleats had any purpose other than supporting the wagon.
The coins within the cleats, a very substantial nest egg for a frontier family of the 1840s, were of various currencies—Mexican pesos, French five-franc pieces, U.S. half-dollars, Spanish dollars, a Bolivian dollar, and a Saxon five-mark piece—some dating back as far as 1806. Neither Franklin Graves nor anyone else on the Illinois frontier was fool enough to take government paper money in exchange for land. With California beckoning and a cache of silver hidden in his wagon, he mus
t have felt as if the whole world were finally going his way.
And if her father had reason to exult on April 2, Sarah had even more. On the day that Franklin Graves went to the courthouse to sign away his land, Sarah went with him. So did Jay Fosdick. Together they stood before Justice of the Peace David Dickinson and were married. They had resolved to go to California together, to build their new life there. Mrs. Jay Fosdick, as she could now call herself, had all she could hope for: her young man, her beloved family, the prospect of a home of her own in a place said by many to be a sort of paradise on earth, and an opportunity to see a world far wider and far more exotic than the narrow confines of the damp river bottoms in which she had grown up.
Sixteen hundred miles to the west, though, something else was afoot that would soon affect Sarah and Jay in unfathomable ways. Lansford Hastings had been talking to John Sutter—a Swiss immigrant who more than matched Hastings for outsized ambitions and a sometimes casual regard for the truth.
Since arriving in California in the summer of 1839 with a retinue of Hawaiian laborers, Sutter had begun to unfold a grand plan in the Sacramento Valley—first to build a substantial fort as a defense against the local Indians and second to found a colony called New Helvetia. The colony, he hoped, would be populated by future waves of Swiss immigrants—artisans and farmers who would produce a wide variety of products to enrich the settlement and its proprietor.
Over the past several years, Sutter had systematically brought the local Miwok Indians under his control, blending diplomacy and generosity on the one hand with brutal discipline on the other. Hundreds of Miwoks had been engaged in building thick, high adobe walls around the fort. A select few had been enlisted into Sutter’s homemade personal army, dressed in green-and-blue Russian uniforms and set to drilling in the central courtyard of the fort.
From time to time, when factions among the neighboring Indians had grown too bold and threatened to steal his horses, Sutter had meted out violent, preemptive justice. In a dawn raid on a nearby encampment of Miwoks in 1840, Sutter and his men had opened fire with cannons and small arms, killing about thirty people without warning. For minor transgressions he relied mostly on imprisonment and whippings, though he also sometimes ordered executions. An admiring visitor, William Wiggins, commented that Sutter was “the best Indian tamer and civilizer that I know of.”
Now Sutter and Hastings had been contemplating what Sarah and thousands like her would mean to them and their personal fortunes. Hastings had been bending Sutter’s ear, telling him that thousands of American emigrants, perhaps twenty thousand or more, were on their way to California, largely as a result of his book. Many of them, he said, were Yankee farmers, men of substantial means, men with capital to invest in California real estate, a commodity that Sutter possessed in vast quantities.
What Lansford Hastings had to say struck a chord with John Sutter. By early April, Hastings had finished helping Sutter lay out the site of a future town—Suttersville—on a patch of Sutter’s land located on a bluff three miles southeast of the fort. In exchange for Hastings’s help, some trade goods, and additional unspecified services, Sutter had promised to build Hastings a large home and a general store and to give him title to a portion of the lots in the new metropolis.
First, though, Hastings had something urgent to take care of. In The Emigrants’ Guide, while he had made California out to be virtually a land of milk and honey, he had also sung the praises of Oregon, a destination that many of the emigrants felt was more easily and more safely reachable than California. He had written his paean to Oregon, however, before he had worked out his arrangement with Sutter. Emigrants who went to Oregon would not be interested in driving the Mexicans out of California, nor in purchasing lots in Suttersville. Hastings needed to divert them.
Luckily, from his point of view, in The Emigrants’ Guide, he had inadvertently given the California-bound emigrants an extra incentive to head his way—a shortcut to California, a road that would shave several hundred miles off the trip.
The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of St. Francisco, by the route just described.
At the time he had written about it, the mention of the potential shortcut probably hadn’t meant much to Hastings. At some point while composing his book, he had evidently contemplated one of the vaguely drawn maps of the American West then in circulation and noted that the current route to California looped inefficiently to the northwest to reach Fort Hall in present-day Idaho, before dropping down to the latitude of what we now call Donner Pass, where it entered California. Why not, he must have thought, go southwest from what is now western Wyoming to the south end of the Great Salt Lake and then more or less directly west to intercept the established route to California? It must have seemed a self-evident improvement to the Fort Hall road.
The problem—and it was a substantial one, as he was just beginning to realize—was that Hastings had never taken his own shortcut, which ran directly through the Wasatch Mountains. In fact, except for a few trappers and a mounted expedition under the command of John C. Frémont and Lieutenant Theodore Talbot the previous fall, no one had ever attempted the route, certainly no one riding farm wagons laden with twenty-five hundred pounds of goods drawn by teams of plodding oxen. Anyone who had done so would not likely have suggested it to anyone else. But Lansford Hastings had made many promises in California, and, for him at least, the shortcut offered an opportunity to seal his reputation as a trailblazer, his potential leadership role in a California free from Mexican control, and now his immediate financial interests as well.
And so on April 11, 1846, Lansford Hastings was already in the saddle in California’s Sacramento Valley. He was riding east through green foothills toward the still snowcapped Sierra Nevada Mountains, setting out to meet Sarah and what he expected to be vast legions of emigrants like her, to show them the way to Suttersville.*
The next morning, April 12, Sarah took one last, long look at the place that had almost always been her home. Then Jay flicked a switch at the rump of one of the oxen and gave a shout. The oxen leaned into their yokes, and the wheels of the wagon turned—the first slow revolution of thousands to come—and Sarah and her family, walking alongside their wagons, began to climb out of the cold, wet bottomlands along the Illinois River, one footstep at a time.
2
MUD AND MERCHANDISE
In 1846 spring came slowly to the Illinois River Valley. All through March and the first half of April, an iron-gray sky sat over the bottomlands like the close-fitting lid on a Dutch oven. Day after day relentless rain and snow and sleet slanted down out of the opaque heavens. The countryside was boggy, the Illinois River swollen and spilling over its banks.
The Graves family’s initial objective was to get to St. Joseph, Missouri, where they could count on purchasing all the supplies they would need for the long overland trip and where, equally important, they could count on meeting up with other emigrants to form a traveling party. St. Joe, as it was just then beginning to be called, had the advantage over the other principal jumping-off place—Independence, Missouri—of being sixty miles closer to the Great Platte River Road, the established route to the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains. St. Joe lay to their southwest, but they began by going northwest to a tiny hamlet called New Boston, where a ferry transported their wagons across the Mississippi River. Then they began to travel west and southwest, cutting across southern Iowa and slanting down through northern Missouri.
It was slow going. The whole country seemed to be underwater. Six days after they left, the Illinois Gazette, back home in Lacon, noted that a particularly long siege of rain had finally ended, but it also noted a most unusual event—the Illinois River now was high enough “to float steamers of the largest class.” With the rain, every stream or low spot Sarah and her family came across presented an
obstacle that would have to be overcome. Wagons had to be double-teamed to get through boggy spots, small creeks had to be bridged or scouted for places where they could be forded, larger streams had to be searched for a ferryman willing to hazard the crossing, and with a ferry big enough to accomplish it. If a ferry could not be found, the only way across was to build a makeshift ferry of their own, or swim the livestock across and then caulk the beds of the wagons and use them as rafts, a hazardous and arduous endeavor at best.
Mud was their constant companion—it squelched under the heavy feet of the oxen, it plastered the withers of their saddle horses, it flew out from under the turning wagon wheels, it splattered their clothes and their hair and their faces. They scraped mud from their boots, they daubed it from their eyes, they combed it out of their hair, they dug it out from under their fingernails, they tasted it in their food, and they cursed it all the while.
There were thirteen of them, divided among three wagons: Franklin and Elizabeth likely drove the wagon containing their household goods and the hidden coins. Jay and Sarah, a household unto themselves now, drove a second wagon. A young man named John Snyder who had moved to Steuben Township from Ohio the previous winter drove the third. Snyder, at twenty-three, was muscular, strikingly handsome, and notably genial. He had a buoyant, carefree way about him that put others at ease. Hearing that the Graves family was bound for California, he had asked if he might travel with them. Franklin Graves, at fifty-seven, knew that he could use the muscle power of another young adult male, so he struck a deal with Snyder—he could drive the third wagon and perform other chores in exchange for his board until they reached California.