The greatest fear that widowed mothers shared, though, was that they themselves would die and leave their children orphaned on the trail. Usually other mothers took such orphans in. One woman, Margaret Inman, walked five hundred miles with an orphaned newborn in her arms, searching out nursing mothers who would offer the infant their breasts each night and morning. But as the emigrants got farther west and every aspect of life on the trail got harder, attitudes also hardened. When both got hard enough, nobody could count on compassion. It didn’t happen often, but more than once during the emigration years of the late 1840s and early 1850s, women who did not own or could not drive wagons were simply left behind as their companions moved on over the horizon.
It happened to a young woman named Polly Owen White. When her husband died, the family for whom he had been working refused to take her any farther without some form of payment. When she couldn’t produce it, they left her and her baby girl sitting by the side of the road. Eventually they were picked up by another family and made it to Oregon, where Polly remarried and went on to bear, improbably, four sets of twins. But everyone knew that under extreme circumstances individuals would look out first for themselves and their family members and that abandonment of the old, the ill, the lame, the helpless, or the dependent was always a possibility.
As the Graves family and their companions moved up the Platte River Valley and deeper into Pawnee country in late June, they increased their vigilance, posting guards all night, every night now. Following one day’s hard work and preceding another as they did, the stints of guard duty were onerous, so they were rotated among all the able-bodied men. Women were not expected to serve guard duty, but when Jay Fosdick’s turns came around, Sarah—with no children to attend to in her wagon—often accompanied him out into the dark.
It offered her a rare chance to be alone and unobserved with her husband, to do the things that young brides most want to do—to sit side by side with him and talk quietly about their future, to listen as he serenaded her softly with his fiddle, to tease him, to hold his hand, to lean against him and sit in the warmth of his arms. The moon had waned to a thin crescent by the third week in June, and the black velvet of the prairie sky was spangled with shimmering drifts of silver stars. When they were sure that it was safe, Sarah and Jay could sink into the prairie grass, lie on their backs, listen to the crickets, stare into the immensity of the heavens, count falling stars as they streaked across the skies, ponder what such things meant. They could pull each other close, brush warm lips, and make love quietly, lost in each other and in the vastness of the dark prairie night.
For the most part, sex in the 1840s was like sex anytime, but it involved complexities and carried consequences in 1846 that can be hard for us in the twenty-first century to fully appreciate. Sarah had come of age during one of the successive waves of evangelical Christianity that swept over the United States in the nineteenth century. Carrying strains of Puritanism, but also drawing on much older fundamentals of Western theology, the evangelical movement of the 1830s taught that sexuality in any form was essentially degrading. Virtuous people were those whose conduct was most removed from any association with the rest of the animal kingdom and the various animal appetites that could be readily seen in any barnyard—the sexual appetite in particular.
That was the official line at any rate. It was the implicit and explicit message that Sarah and her sisters and young women like them had likely heard many times at camp meetings and in country churches back home in Illinois. No doubt it profoundly affected the way they thought about sex and about themselves as women. But, of course, nature does assert itself, and sooner or later many country girls and the country boys with whom they had grown up did what country girls and boys have always done. They nestled under blankets on back porches, they crept into haylofts, or they snuck off into the woods.
The practical problem, of course, was what to do about unintended consequences. For Sarah, just married, the risk of pregnancy might not have been an issue; in fact, a first child was likely a reward that she and Jay looked forward to. But to be pregnant on the emigrant trail was to take on a very heavy burden, both literally and figuratively. It could easily mean the difference between surviving the trip and not, so conceiving a child was something that Sarah might well have wanted to postpone until she and Jay reached California. And for other young women on the trail that summer, single women who found themselves in the prairie grass or in the backs of wagons with young men that they fancied, the threat of pregnancy was an ever-present terror.
Married or not, there were options for a young woman who wanted to protect herself or who found herself compromised, but they were closely held secrets. To learn them she needed to be pulled into a circle of older women.
In the deeply paternalistic world in which they lived, and the particularly masculine world of the wagon train, the emigrant women of the 1840s had one powerful thing going for them—a covert culture perpetuated by the whispered counsel and shared confidences of other women. On the road to California or Oregon, even more than back in their frontier villages or on their isolated farmsteads, women came together every day over their common tasks. Doing laundry on a riverbank, tending to infants under shady trees, keeping an eye on older children playing among the wagons, cooking on a marathon scale around campfires, they gathered in small groups to work. And while they worked, they exchanged more than recipes. They quietly exchanged bits of information that few of their men knew, or would ever know.
They talked of pessaries and syringes and sponges. They exchanged formulas for herbal concoctions that might, or might not, alleviate female problems. They drew on knowledge that their mothers and grandmothers had shared with them when they were themselves first pulled into similar circles of women in their villages back home. Much of the knowledge was wrong, some of it dangerously so, but it was what they had to work with.
The options for trying to avoid pregnancy in the first place were particularly limited. Condoms in the 1840s were still handmade of sheep gut. As a consequence they were expensive and had to be carefully washed, dried, and cared for between uses. Few men had the patience for such things, so country women seldom saw them. Married women like Sarah sometimes tried to time their sexual encounters to avoid their most fertile periods, but their men were frequently unaccommodating in that regard. And even when their men cooperated, the women’s own understanding of the biology behind their cycles was sketchy at best and fundamentally flawed at worst, often causing them to have sex during what were in fact their most fertile times.
So they tried other things. They cut sponges into small pieces, attached ribbons to them, moistened them with water or with mixtures they thought to be spermicidal, and inserted them prior to sex. Afterward they douched with fluids of all sorts, anything they thought might kill or immobilize the “amicules” that brought on pregnancy. Many of the douching mixtures were made from common ingredients—vinegar and baking soda in particular. Others were more exotic herbal concoctions or chemical solutions made with sulfate of zinc, boric acid, bichloride of mercury, or carbolic acid. To the extent that they changed the pH of the vagina, some of these may have been minimally effective, but as often as not, the application of the douche simply had the effect of forcing the sperm deeper into the vagina, closer to the cervix and to the ovum.
When it came to terminating unwanted pregnancies, though, women of the 1840s had one practical advantage over women today, and it was, paradoxically, a product of their ignorance. Little was understood of the biology of conception and gestation. Pregnancy was not generally thought to commence until the “quickening” began—the time at which a woman began to feel movements of the fetus within. As a practical matter, this meant that a woman often did not consider herself assuredly pregnant until the second trimester. The changes that attend early pregnancy—swelling of the breasts, tenderness, nausea, and particularly the cessation of menstruation—were generally attributed simply to a “blockage” of the woman’s repr
oductive organs. Certainly, many women in this situation knew that they were in fact pregnant, but the “blockage” theory allowed them a certain amount of leeway to act aggressively to undo what had been done without wrestling with the moral implications. To restore menstruation they drank herbal teas, soaked their feet in hot water infused with herbs, or mixed herbs with mustard plasters and applied them to their breasts and bellies. They often tried vigorous exercise—particularly anything likely to strain and jostle the abdomen, such as horseback riding. If these remedies failed to produce results, they resorted to ingesting strong purgatives and cathartics to promote severe cramps and vomiting. Some of these came in the form of the patent medicines that were just then beginning to become popular in the United States. More often they were homemade. Either way, many of them contained ingredients that were outright poisons—nightshade, oil of tansy, aloe, oil of savin, foxglove, mistletoe, and oil of cedar among others.
One of the most common and powerful of these agents was oil of hemlock, which in small doses was used to treat everything from sore throats to aching bones. In larger quantities, though dangerous, it was known to clear “blockages”—to induce miscarriages. It is one of the things that we know that Elizabeth Graves carried with her on the road to California. She might well have brought it along primarily to treat minor ailments, but with a bevy of teenage daughters in tow, she might also have thought of it as a wise precaution against potential trouble of a greater sort.
As Sarah and her family made their way up the Platte River toward Fort Laramie, the country gradually grew drier and less forgiving. Dust afflicted them now—dust so deep it sometimes came up to their ankles as they walked alongside their wagons, so fine that plumes of it rose behind their wagons and hung in the air, blinding everyone except whoever was lucky enough to be driving in the lead that day. When the wind blew, as it almost always did, the dust swirled around them in clouds so thick that they could not see the fronts of their own teams, let alone the wagons farther ahead. In the midday heat, it filled their nostrils; at night it settled on their food and made it taste like earth. It clung to their hair, infiltrated their clothes, stuck to their sweaty skin, became almost a second skin to them.
In far western Nebraska, trees and shrubs began to give way to sagebrush, and firewood soon became scarce and then all but nonexistent. Sarah and her mother and sisters had to build their cooking fires at night using dried buffalo dung for fuel. The shallow water along this section of the Platte was slow and sluggish and often stagnant, but they had no choice except to use it for drinking and for cooking. Sometimes they had to dig holes in the sand alongside the river to get reasonably clear water, but even then it often tasted bad and smelled foul. Small, low-growing cacti began to appear among the sagebrush, and walking with bare feet—as the travelers often preferred to do to save their shoes—became nearly impossible. Rattlesnakes also began to appear, slithering across the road or coiled up in the shade under sagebrush, something new for mothers to worry about.
Far to the west that same week, on June 25, the Oregon Spectator reported that an angry meeting of settlers had taken place at a hotel in Oregon City ten days before. The Oregonians had gotten wind of Lansford Hastings’s plan to divert Oregon-bound emigrants to California, and they were furious about it. They had resolved to send express messengers to meet the emigrants, “in order to prevent their being deceived and led astray by the misrepresentations of L. W. Hastings….” The messengers were to carry testimonials bearing witness to Oregon’s fertility and benign climate, the comparative aridity and sterility of California, the ambition and duplicity of Lansford Hastings, and the hornet’s nest of trouble that he seemed bent on stirring up with the Mexicans in California. The Spectator quoted from one of the testimonials of someone who had met Hastings in California.
When we left California for Oregon, Lansford W. Hastings started to meet the emigration from the states, to try to persuade them to go to California. He told us publicly that he and Capt. Sutter intended to revolutionize the country, as soon as they could get sufficient emigrants into California to fight the Spaniards; this plan was laid between Capt. Sutter and L. W. Hastings before said Hastings published his book of lies….
Hastings was in fact closing in on his rendezvous with the approaching emigrants. He and Jim Clyman had labored across the salt flats of Utah and made their way tortuously through the narrow canyons and brush-choked valleys of the Wasatch Mountains on mules and horses, arriving at Fort Bridger, a squalid trading post in southwestern Wyoming, on June 7, only to find it deserted. There they had separated. Clyman was by now thoroughly disillusioned with Hastings’s so-called shortcut, but Hastings himself was still determined to intercept any Oregon-bound emigrants he could find and divert them to California via his new route, though he must surely have seen that it was nearly impassable for wagons.
On June 27, Clyman, traveling eastbound, arrived at Fort Laramie. That same day the Donners and the Reeds and those traveling with them—still about a week ahead of Sarah and her family—also arrived at the fort. Clyman was an old acquaintance of James Reed’s from the days of the Black Hawk War, when they had both served in the same company as Abraham Lincoln.
When the two men sat down together, Reed asked Clyman about the route ahead, and in particular about the cutoff he had read of in Hastings’s book. Clyman was unambiguous. He told Reed to “take the regular wagon track and never leave it—it is barely possible to get through if you follow it—and it may be impossible if you don’t.” Reed protested that the established road was too far out of the way, so Clyman elaborated on the difficulty of the country he had just passed through—the confusing maze of canyons in the Wasatch Mountains, the nearly impenetrable brush, the devastating heat and aridity of the Great Salt Desert, and the snow and granite cliffs of the Sierras. But Reed was unconvinced. “There is a nigher route,” he said, “and it is of no use to take so much of a roundabout course.” The next day they parted, Reed and the Donners moving on west toward Laramie Peak and the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains, Clyman heading east, continuing to meet the last stragglers of the 1846 emigration.
By now Sarah and her family had entered an audacious landscape. They had crossed the bleak and tinder-dry hills between the south and north forks of the Platte, descended into a relatively lush glen called Ash Hollow, and begun working their way up the North Platte. Large bluffs and improbable rock formations sculpted by wind and ancient floods began to appear. Many of the rock formations were famous landmarks that Sarah and Jay had heard about along the trail. All of them seemed exotic and romantically beautiful to wide-eyed midwesterners like themselves, who had never in their lives seen anything taller than a fair-size hill. In the evenings, as the sun set and the sky flared orange and red and then deepened into violet and indigo, the rock formations all but glowed, bathed in shades of tangerine and burgundy.
They passed stately, monumental Courthouse Rock. Then, from miles away, long before they arrived at its base, they began to get glimpses of perhaps the most famous landmark on the trail, Chimney Rock, a thin stone spire arising from a conical base and soaring nearly five hundred feet above the surrounding desert. Finally they arrived at the largest of the landmarks, the fortresslike promontory called Scotts Bluff.
That evening they met Jim Clyman south of the bluff. There, in the gloaming, under the great peach-colored stone ramparts of the bluff, Clyman made it clear to Franklin Graves, as he had to many of the California-bound emigrants he’d met on his way east, that he thought California a poor place to settle. Whatever he said, or did not say, about Hastings’s cutoff that night was never recorded, but it’s likely he told Graves what he’d told all the others—that it was a poor route.
By July 2, a hot, humid day following a night in which thunderstorms had rumbled and flashed above the rock formations just to the northeast of them, Sarah and her family were approaching Fort Laramie. The next day was her sister Lovina’s twelfth birthday, and that afternoon they arriv
ed at the fort, a stopping point that provided Sarah and her family with both a welcome relief and a considerable spectacle.
The fort itself was not particularly impressive—a square structure, perhaps 130 feet to a side. It stood on a low bluff in an oxbow of the Laramie River, just a few dozen feet back and uphill from the water. Its walls were made of adobe and rose fifteen feet tall, with blockhouses at the corners and a gate at the front entrance. The walls surrounded an inner plaza lined with storerooms, a blacksmith shop, and simple living quarters for the staff of the American Fur Company, who maintained the establishment. What those who were there that first week in July 1846 later remembered and wrote home about, though, wasn’t the fort but the scene surrounding it.
A war party of more than two thousand Sioux had been moving toward the fort for days, on their way to do battle with their rivals the Crow. They had brought their families and their entire villages with them, dragging their possessions on sleds called travois, pulled by ponies and dogs. They were now encamped all around the fort, hundreds of their tepees set up in the groves of ash and cottonwood trees that bordered the Laramie River and offered shady relief from the bone-dry hills surrounding the fort. Smoke from their campfires mingled with that of dozens of fur trappers and mountain men who were also encamped here on their way into or out of the Rockies. The trappers, especially, were sometimes hard to distinguish from the Sioux. Mostly French Canadians or Yankees, some of them wore buckskins and their long hair braided, and many traveled in the company of their Native American wives and children.