HARD ROAD WEST

HISTORY AND GEOLOGY ALONG THE GOLD RUSH TRAILBy Keith Heyer Meldahl

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-51962-3

Contents

Preface.....................................................xiiiIntroduction: Stardust......................................xvii1 * An American Journey.....................................12 * Between Winter's Chill Brackets.........................133 * Ascending the Plains....................................314 * Exhumed Mountains and Hungry Rivers.....................515 * Black Hills and Bent Rock...............................696 * To the Backbone of the Continent........................937 * Cordilleran Upheaval....................................1118 * Most Godforsaken Country................................1379 * The Bear and the Snake..................................15510 * A Breaking Up of the World.............................17911 * Most Miserable River...................................20512 * The Worst Desert You Ever Saw..........................22913 * Into the Land of Gold..................................25114 * Contingent History.....................................275Epilogue....................................................279Acknowledgments.............................................282Notes.......................................................284Glossary....................................................301Bibliography................................................307Figure Credits..............................................316Index.......................................................319

Chapter One

AN AMERICAN JOURNEY

As when some carcass, hidden in sequestered nook, draws from every near and distant point myriads of discordant vultures, so drew these little flakes of gold the voracious sons of men.

HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT, History of California (1884)

October was dangerously late to be crossing the Forty-Mile Desert, and Sarah Royce knew it. Only three years earlier, in 1846, October snows had doomed the Donner party in the high Sierra Nevada, and the Royces still had a long pull before reaching those mountains.

But snow was the furthest thing from Sarah's mind right now. First, they had to cross this desert. The lone wagon made slow progress through the hammering heat. Sarah, her husband, Josiah, and the three other adults in the group walked alongside the wagon to spare the oxen, while the Royce's two-year-old daughter, Mary, rode. Ahead, an ocean of salt flats and sand dunes stretched to the horizon. Beyond those lay the Carson River.

Three weeks of hard travel along the salty, foul Humboldt River had sapped the oxen's strength and nearly finished off their food supplies. Then the Royces had made a colossal navigation error. Traveling by night, they had unwittingly missed their last chance to take on water and grass before heading out onto the Forty-Mile Desert. Many hours later they had realized their mistake-and what it meant.

Turn back! What a chill the words sent through one. Turn back, on a journey like that; in which every mile had been gained by most earnest labor, growing more and more intense, until, of late, it had seemed that the certainty of advance with every step, was all that made the next step possible. And now for miles we were to go back. In all that long journey no steps ever seemed so heavy, so hard to take, as those with which I turned my back to the sun that afternoon of October 4th, 1849.

The exhausting backtrack had cost precious travel time. Now they again plodded west along the same route.

Knowing she would need her strength for the all-night walk ahead (no one camped in the Forty-Mile Desert if they could help it, and night travel conserved water), Sarah lay down for a nap in the wagon. She woke to her husband's voice, "So you've given out have you Tom?" The ox lay prostrate in the yoke. His partner was also near collapse, unable to pull. They unhitched both animals and left them to die. Four oxen remained to haul the same burden, and the Carson River now seemed even farther from reach. A guilty Sarah resolved to ride no more.

They entered the worst of the crossing as darkness fell. By hazy starlight, they passed through a gauntlet of horrors. Discarded possessions and putrefying carcasses of livestock lined the trail. Abandoned wagons loomed up in the darkness. The owners had loaded what they could onto the backs of their remaining animals and pressed on with no hopes beyond survival itself. These "scenes of ruin ... kept recurring," Sarah remembered, "till we seemed to be but the last, little, feeble, struggling band at the rear of a routed army." Amid the wreckage lining the trail, Sarah spied a small clothbound book titled Little Ella. She pocketed it, thinking it would please Mary. It was a simple gesture of faith-I will read this book to my daughter in better times ahead.

They stopped often throughout the night to rest, eat a little, and feed handfuls of stored grass to the weakening oxen. "So faithful had they been, through so many trying scenes," Sarah reflected, "I pitied them, as I observed how low their heads drooped as they pressed their shoulders so resolutely and yet so wearily against the bows."

The last of the water ran out near dawn, and with the sun arose the understanding that they would not survive the day without water. No one spoke. They trudged on, scanning the horizon in the emerging daylight for some sign of the river.

"Was it a cloud? It was very low at first, and I feared it might evaporate as the sun warmed it." They dared to hope that the smudge Sarah had spotted on the horizon might be timber along the Carson River. The oxen knew before the people could be sure. First one and then another gave a low moan and lifted his head to sniff the wind-with the scent of water and trees that it bore. Salvation. They would reach the Carson River.

TO CROSS the Sierra Nevada, the Royces had to follow the Carson River upstream and then make a steep drive to the mountain crest. With the desert ordeal behind them, the threat of October snows loomed larger in their minds. To be cut off, trapped on the east side of the mountains over the winter in a land with little game, would be to court starvation. There was nothing to do but to press on as fast as possible.

This late in the emigration season, the Royces had no reason to expect company, especially headed east. Yet that is what they saw on October 12, as they rolled west up the valley of the Carson River. Two riders descended toward them out of the mountains ahead. Sarah wrote, "Their rapidity of motion and the steepness of the descent gave a strong impression of coming down from above, and the thought flashed into my mind, 'They look heaven-sent.'"

The riders pulled up. "Well sir," they hailed Josiah, "you are the man we are after!"

"How can that be?" responded Josiah.

"Yes sir, you and your wife, and that little girl, are what brought us as far as this."

The riders were part of a relief party dispatched by the California provisional government to help late-arriving emigrants over the Sierra Nevada. The men had orders to go no farther east than the crest of the mountains; their job was to assist emigrants across the summit passes. But nearly a week earlier, on their forced backtrack in the desert, the Royces had passed another group of emigrants...