In the year 1844, these United States, for all intents and purposes, 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. 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 or mule trains 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, since most of the route lay though inhospitable desert and the hunting grounds of extremely hostile Indian tribes. 

 

But there was another trail,  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 in that general directon,  by boat, on horseback and on foot. Hearing of the rich lands in the Pacific Northwest, farmers and small tradesmen had begun to follow the siren call, also. 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 for six months, 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, spread 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, at least. 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, and intended to strike off the established trail at Fort Hall, and head for California.

 

All the other archetypal western stories are almost exclusively male domains. The writer of a romantic yard about cowboys and the open range, the Gold Rush, the mountain men, or the fighting cavalry, must go to great length to import an adventurous school-marm or a tart. However, the emigrant wagon trains, the great Mormon migration, and the post-Civil War homesteaders, they were all family matters. Stephen’s party of fifty souls included eight women and fifteen children. A little under half of them were an extended clan: Martin Murphy, and his three sons, with their wives and children. Martin Murphy himself had emigrated 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 widowed oldest daughter and her children.

 

Neither Stephens or Greenwood or Hitchcock had been all along the trail to California. It is thought  that Stephens may have had been on the Santa Fe Trail, and some hints have been found in letters written by the American consul in California that Hitchcock may have been there for a brief time during his mountain-man days. Stephens seems also to have been enormously respected by the other men; 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; 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 do so 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. 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. 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.

 

For their mothers, it was a picnic 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 those days 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. 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, and finding their own trail in the faintest of traces left from wagons who attempted the California route the year before.

The eleven wagons led by Elisha Stephens and guided by Greenwood, the old trapper and mountain-man struck off the main trail in the middle of August, following the wheel tracks of a group led the previous year by another mountain man and explorer, the legendary Joseph Walker. Walker’s party had followed the Humboldt River, a sluggish trickle of a river which eventually petered out in a sandy desert basin well short of the mountains. They had been unable to find a pass leading up into the Sierra Nevada, had gone south and eventually abandoned their wagons near Owens Lake, reaching California by going around the mountains entirely. This was a desperate and impractical solution for the Stephens Party.

 

They camped by the desert marsh; experienced frontier hands Greenwood and Hitchcock were convinced there had to be a way up into the Sierra, more or less directly west of where they were camped, and they consulted, mountain-man fashion with a curious, but seemingly friendly old Indian man who wandered into camp. They may not have known it at the time, but the old Indian was the chief of the Piute tribe, and had made the acquaintance of the explorer John C. Fremont— traveling into California with Fremont, even— and made it tribal policy to be courteous and friendly to those settlers and explorers passing through Piute lands. Communication seems to have been through sign language, and pantomime. Was there a pass into the mountain-range? Greenwood or Hitchcock modeled a range of mountains in the sand at their feet and pointed at the real mountains. The old Indian looked at it thoughtfully, and carefully remodeled the sand range to show a small river running down between two. Could there be a gateway through the mountains?

 

He seemed quite positive there was, and the next day he rode ahead towards the distant mountains with Greenwood and Stephens, while the rest of the party rested and waited for the scouting party to return. When they did, they brought the good news— there was a river, coming down into the desert, cutting a passable gateway— and the bad news— it was a hard journey across barren desert, and no water at all save for a small, bad-tasting hot-spring halfway there. Careful preparations were made; every thing that could be made water-tight was filled to the brim. They cut armfuls of green rushes and brush as fodder for the cattle and their few horses. Some accounts have them deciding to start across the desert at sundown and just to keep going, all night, the next day and into the next night. Take advantage of the night’s cool temperatures, minimize the need for water and get out of the desert as soon as possible. As much water as possible would be reserved for the oxen, on whose strength and pulling power survival depended. Perhaps the smallest children would be tucked up in the wagons for the grueling trek; everyone else would walk, stumbling half-asleep under a desert moon.

 

Dawn, morning, day… still moving. Riders led their horses to spare them; the march only paused to water the oxen, and pass around some cold biscuits and dried meat by way of food for the people. At the hot spring in the middle of the desert, the animals drink, but not with any relish. They are fed with the green rushes brought from the last camping place. The emigrants rest in the shade of their wagons for a few hours in the hottest part of the day, resuming as the heat of the day fades. Sometime early the next morning, the weary, thirsty oxen begin perking up, stepping a little faster. The wind coming down from the mountains is bringing the scent of fresh water. There is a very real danger to the wagons, if the teamsters cannot control them. Hastily, the men draw the wagons together and unhitch the teams: better for them to run loose to the water they can smell, than risk damaging the wagons in a maddened stampede. In a few hours, the men return with the teams, sated and sodden with all the water they can drink from the old Indian’s river.

 

It is the most beautiful river anyone has ever seen, spilling down from the mountains, cold with the chill of snow-melt even in fall, even more beautiful after the desert. All the way on that first scout, the old Indian kept saying a word which sounded like “tro-kay” to Greenwood and Stephens; it actually means “all right” or “very well”, but they assumed it was his name, and baptized the river accordingly as the Truckee River. They follow it towards the looming mountains, hurrying on a little, because it is now October. At mid-month they are camped in meadowlands, just below where the canyon cuts deep through the mountains, the last but most difficult part of the journey. There is already snow on the ground, and they have come to where a creek joins Truckee’s River. The creek-bed looks to be easier for the wagons to follow farther up into the mountain pass, but the river might be more direct. The decision is made to send a small, fast-moving party along the river, six of the fittest and strongest, on horseback with enough supplies, to move quickly and bring help and additional supplies from Sutter’s Fort. Four men and two women, including Elizabeth Townsend ride out on the 14th of November, 1844.

 

The fast-moving horseback party followed the river south, as snow continued falling. In two days they were on the shores of Lake Tahoe, working their way around the western shore to another small creek, which led them over the summit, and down along the Rubicon River, out of the snow, although not entirely out of danger in the rough country. The eastern slope is a steep palisade, the western slope more gradual, but rough, cut with steep-banked creeks. They reached the safety of Sutter’s Fort early in December, while the main party still struggled along the promising creek route. They came at last to an alpine valley with a small ice-water lake at the foot of a canyon leading up to the last and highest mountain pass.

 

At times, the only open passage along the creek was actually in the water, which was hard on the oxen’s feet. By the time they reached the lake, there was two feet of snow on the ground and time for another hard choice; a decision to leave six of the wagons at the lake, slaughter the worst-off of the oxen for food, and cache everything but food and essentials. Three of the young men, Moses Schallenberger, Allan Montgomery and Joseph Foster would build a rough cabin and winter over, guarding the wagons and property at the lake and living from what they could hunt. The rest of the party pooled the remaining ox teams and five wagons and moved on, up into the canyon towards the crest of the Sierra Nevada, up a slope so steep they had to empty out the contents and carry everything by hand, doubling the ox teams and pulling up the wagons one by one. A sheer vertical ledge halfway up the rocky slope blocked their way. A desperate search revealed a small defile, just wide enough to lead the oxen and horses up it, single file. The teams were re-yoked at the top, and hoisted up the empty wagons by ropes and chains, while men pushed from below, and the women and children labored up the narrow footpath, carrying armfuls of precious supplies.

 

By dint of much exhausting labor, they reached the summit on November 25th, and struggled on through the snow, while the three volunteers returned to the lake. They hastily built a small cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, roofed with ox-hides and settled in for the winter, not knowing that the winter would be very much harsher than back east.

The main party struggled on; although they were over the pass, and gradually heading downhill, they were still in the high mountains. With snow falling, cutting a trail and keeping the wagons moving was a brutally laborious job. A week, ten days of it was all that exhausted men and ox teams could handle. They set up a cold camp on the South Fork of the Yuba River, and made a last, calculated gamble on survival for all. They would build another cabin, make arbors of branches and the canvas wagon tops, and butcher the remaining oxen. The women and children would stay, with two men to protect them, while the remaining husbands and fathers would take the few horses and as little food as possible, and continue on to Sutter’s Fort, returning as soon as possible with supplies and team animals. So they made the bitter decision before changing weather, and diminishing food supplies forced worse circumstances upon them. Before the men rode away, the wife of Martin Murphy’s oldest son gave birth to a daughter, who was named Elizabeth Yuba Murphy. It was nearly two months before a rescue party was able to return to the survival camp on the Yuba River, just in the nick of time, for the women and children were down to eating boiled hides.

 

Meanwhile, twenty miles east, the snow had piled up level to the roof of the little cabin by the ice-water lake. The three young men realized that the game they had counted on being able to hunt had all retreated below the snow, far down the mountains. What they had left would not be able to feed them through the winter. From hickory wagon bows and rawhide, Montgomery and Foster contrived three sets of snowshoes and packed up what they could carry. In one day, they had climbed to the top of the pass, but the snowshoes were clumsy things and the snow was soft, and young Schallenberger— only 17 at the time— was not as strong as the other two. Agonizing leg cramps left him unable to take more than a few steps. Continuing on was impossible for him, survival at the cabin impossible for three. He returned alone, living for the next three months on the food supplies they had not been able to carry, and trapping coyotes and foxes. Fox was almost edible, coyote meat quite vile, but he kept the frozen coyotes anyway, lest the supply of foxes ever run out.

 

When the rescue party came to the winter camp in late February, one of them, Dennis Martin continued on snowshoes over the pass, hoping to find young Schallenberger still alive. With a hard crust to the snow, the two of them had an easier time of it, and caught up to the main party on the Lower Bear River.

Two years later, the little cabin in which he spent most of the winter would shelter families from the Donner party who were caught by winter at about the same time of year, in the same place. A fractious, bitterly split party would meet a ghastly and protracted disaster… and yet, everyone has heard of them, and the pass through the Sierra Nevada, that the Stephens party discovered and labored successfully to bring wagons over, while increasing their strength by two born on the journey… is named for the group who lost half their number to starvation in its’ shadow.