An Ordinary Woman Read online

  The trouble was that no one had much idea where they were going.

  Marsh’s instructions, based entirely on hearsay, myth, and wishful thinking, were for crossing the Rockies at South Pass, finding the Great Salt Lake, and heading west, and, incidentally, looking around along the way for somebody to guide them over the Sierra. No one had any more idea of their course than that. No one had ever gone that way before.

  There were some maps. Up in Platte County, John Bidwell was boarding with a man who had a map of the West which showed Salt Lake as larger than the Mississippi River, drained by several rivers flowing away out of it to the Pacific Ocean. On the basis of this map Bidwell packed the tools to make boats into his wagonload of supplies. He and another man were going as partners; Bidwell was supplying the wagon, and the other man the mules to draw it.

  That winter, Bidwell traveled down to Independence a couple of times to talk up the Western Emigration Society. Maybe he was at the great noisy ebullient meeting on February 1, 1841, in Independence, where Marsh’s friends in Jackson County organized themselves into a company for the purpose of emigrating to California. Of fifty-eight people who committed themselves then and there, nineteen announced that they would bring their families. One of these was Benjamin Kelsey.

  Nancy was not there. Nancy was at home having her second baby.

  She missed quite a gathering. Ben certainly told her about it, once he got back home. Independence was the jumping off place for all treks westward, and people were seasoned at the rituals and necessities of departure even if they never left the safety of the riverbank. Figuring there had to be onlookers and homebodies besides the enthusiastic fifty-eight, the crowd was considerable. The gathering must have had some of the hoopla and heady excitement of a camp meeting or a political convention, with glorious speeches and shouts from the audience, and a general atmosphere of anything goes.

  The group voted on and accepted a number of resolutions. High-minded and noble souls that they were, they resolved to go in peace.* They resolved to meet at Sapling Grove, beyond the Missouri in Kansas, on May 10, and to elect officers then, “as other companies are expected to join them.” They resolved that everybody should make his own preparations, bringing enough to eat to last “till they reach the Buffalo region at least,” and that nobody should bring liquor, “except for medicinal purposes.”

  Somebody presented them with a cannon, which (perhaps forgetful of the peace resolution) they resolved to accept, and solemnly arranged to have properly equipped (i.e., installed on trucks) and supplied with ammunition. This cannon was never mentioned again.

  They resolved to follow Marsh’s route, which led by Great Salt Lake. This was critical. Sapling Grove lay on the Santa Fe Road, and there was a route already established to California along that road, one of the most brutal overland routes on the continent. Torturous, circuitous, ruinously expensive, it was beyond the means of the ordinary pioneer.* These would-be settlers declared themselves ready to strike directly west across the continent, the shortest, hence the fastest and cheapest route possible.

  So, all resolved and ready, the group broke up and went home. Ben took back word of everything that had happened to Nancy, but for a while she paid little attention. Only a few days after the meeting in Independence, on the Kelsey farm, she bore her second child, a boy, whom they named Samuel.

  At the age of eight days, the little boy died.

  Nancy was only seventeen, all her feelings still pure with youth: the loss must have seemed deep and cold as a well. The baby’s death probably shook her confidence, too; like all mothers, she thought herself somehow to blame. She rose up from the grief of this childbed into the California adventure. There was this other work to do. She had a new start ahead of her. Planning and preparing filled up her hands and the days and distracted her from the death. The trip was another kind of commitment to replace the one to the baby that wasn’t there.

  She still had little Ann, too—Martha Ann was her full name; she was a year old, a hardy baby already beginning to do things for herself. Sometimes Nancy picked her up, just to hold her, and sang to her, the old songs that had come down with her mother and grandmother from the distant unknown homeland, songs with an undertone of sorrow. Arkansaw Traveller, Polly Von. Beneath the young mother’s apron there was an emptiness big as the world, that only she knew about.

  But they were going to California—to California!

  She must have daydreamed about what their life would be like there. She knew nothing but Missouri: in spite of what she had heard, her imaginings would have been of green hills and woods and small farms, blazing hot summers and icy winters. As she folded clothes into the chests that would go on the wagons, took down the sides of bacon out of the smokehouse, and looked for a good dutch oven, she thought of a life like the one she already had, in a place like where she already was.

  She would have familiar faces all around her, on the trip. Of Ben’s brothers who were going, Zed was still a bachelor. His younger brother Andy’s wife had just recently died. But Sam had a wife, Lucretia, whom everybody called Lucy, and three children. Lucy’s widowed sister Mrs. Grey was going too, with her child. There would be other women, then, to share the constant grind of work, to help with children, gossip, confide in.

  Lucy Kelsey was a woman of parts, too. Her uncle was Judge Applegate, and she herself was forceful and opinionated. She had taken charge of Andy’s two young children since their mother died. Nancy must have known she could rely on her. In late winter, while she and the others were busy finding their necessaries and packing, it must often have seemed as if this would all be just like moving over the hill, not such a big thing after all.

  Yet every so often, especially when Ben was selling the farm, Nancy would know what she was leaving behind. She would realize that she had no idea where she would be in three months, or six, or a year. Then maybe she gathered up little Ann and held the baby in her arms, her heart racing, half with alarm, half with a thunderous excitement.

  The baby would struggle to get down. To Ann, nothing was important except that moment, and what she was doing right then, playing with a feather from one of the chickens Ben had just given away.

  Then in March of 1841, six weeks before the rendezvous in Sapling Grove, the bubble burst.

  Another letter about California appeared in the local newspapers. This one, from a lawyer named Thomas Farnham whose travels (for his health) had taken him to Monterey,* was first printed in a New York newspaper. It reported in shocking and outraged detail the hostility of the Mexican government in California to foreigners and the harsh treatment dealt out to Americans there. Farnham’s description of the country itself flatly contradicted the rosy images of Robidoux and Marsh. Farnham said that California was a worthless wasteland, and he advised people to stay out.

  The merchants of Platte County, home of the Western Emigration Society, had already noted with alarm the prospect of losing most of their local customers in a single exodus. They happily published Farnham’s letter in the Independence newspaper and spread the bad news far and wide. People de-pledged in droves from the Western Emigration Society. In Jackson County, one of the major leaders of the whole project, Billy Baldridge, whose letter from Marsh had started it all, dropped out, along with most of the enthusiastic fifty-eight.

  This news jolted the Kelseys also. Probably they got together and talked the whole thing over, one more time at least. But Ben Kelsey was unswayable, not to say bull-headed. Once he made his mind up about something, he did not change, and his brothers supported him. They were used to the hard, dangerous life of the frontier. Ben especially was seasoned at finding his way in wild country. They all knew that rich virgin land would ask a price of work and trouble. They believed they could pay that price.

  While the men talked, the women were working, stowing away goods in the wagons.

  These were not the huge Conestogas of later times and
the movies, but ordinary farm wagons, with wooden beds about ten feet long by four feet wide, sloping sides, and a canvas cover that could be drawn closed in the back against the rain. The wheels, made of ash and tired in iron rims, were smaller in front than the back wheels, which made the wagons more maneuverable. The front wheels were rigged on a center kingpin, so that they could swivel back and forth to get around corners more easily. Nonetheless they were prone to tip on corners.

  On board Nancy had to load one hundred pounds of flour for each of the people she was packing for, “with sugar and so forth to suit”;* that meant lard, coffee, bacon, beans, potatoes. Besides herself and Ben and baby Ann, she stowed supplies for his brother Andy, who was to handle the second of their two wagons. Ben and Andy were good hunters and the whole company planned to lay in a supply of buffalo meat, once they reached the high plains.

  They could not take along a cow. This must have bothered Nancy; Ann needed milk. Nor could they take the chickens whose eggs were so useful and good. Ben had told her that the chickens, like his hunting dogs, would last only a few days on a long trek; they’d fall behind and get lost, or a wolf would pick them off.

  Nancy packed up her collection of herbs, carefully gathered and dried, pennyroyal and willow and coneflower, old wives’ remedies for coughs and bruises, fever and thin blood and diarrhea. She found a stout box for her scissors and her precious stock of needles, thread, and buttons.

  Their two wagons were drawn by oxen. She and Ben would ride their horses. Nancy had her favorite horse, “a fine racing animal,” as she described it proudly later. They would herd some extra stock along, as well, a few head of oxen and horses. Nancy folded the quilts from their bed and put them into the wagon; she gathered Ann’s diapers up. The wagons had seemed large at first but as she loaded them she realized how small they were—how little she was able to take with her.

  And now, suddenly, somehow unexpectedly, they were going.

  What did she leave behind? The framework of her life. Her old bed, the bed where her babies had been born. The table where she had served her husband’s meals. The fireplace, each stone different, like a familiar face. Other things, ordinary, irreplaceable. She saw them with new eyes now, those things she had taken for granted, and which soon she would never see again. Suddenly they must have seemed beyond price to her: the view out her cabin door, and the creek where she cooled her feet in the heat of the summer; her garden, which she should have been hoeing up even now, getting ready to plant. Only last fall she had been thinking what to plant this spring, and now the whole thing was a tangle of weeds: she would never see it bloom again.

  There were the apple trees, whose crop she had made into the jugs of cider she was taking along. Her husband’s old hunting dogs, lying in the dusty sunlight of the yard. The patch at the back fence, under the tree, where beneath a little marker her firstborn son lay.

  And thinking that, her resolve hardened; if this farm was a good place, yet it wasn’t the best place; if this was all she knew, yet there was much more to know than this. One morning in the fine Missouri spring she turned her back on everything and with the wagons behind her, and Ben beside her, took the road to Sapling Grove.

  * People left for the West in mid-May, when the grass was green. If they left earlier, their stock would starve; leaving later, they risked wintering in the mountains.

  * Ben Kelsey had a recurring ague of some sort.

  * Bidwell III

  * It’s unclear what they thought the alternative was. But note the cannon.

  * It also took people to the least hospitable part of California, physically and politically.

  * Farnham witnessed the end of the so-called Isaac Graham Affair. Graham was an American trapper who had “retired” to the easy life of Monterey. He made the mistake of boasting that he and a few friends could take California for the United States. He and everybody he knew were promptly rolled into jail by the California authorities and marched in irons off to Mexico, where they were only released through the good offices of the British consul.

  * Bidwell III.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Kelseys followed the rivers west, from their front doorstep to the very Pacific. In Jackson County they took a road that led upstream along the southern bank of the Missouri, broad and brown and ridden with snags, a great coiling water rushing eastward toward its union with the Mississippi at St. Louis. At Westport, just beyond Independence, the great river course bent around to the north and west, and here the Kansas River ran in from the west, with the Santa Fe Road along its southern bank. Behind their slow-plodding oxen, the Kelseys moved, at first, along a smooth and traveled path.

  Before they had gone far, his brother Sam joined them, with his wagons, and his wife and three children and Andy’s two children,* and another brother, Zed. They added their extra animals to Ben and Nancy’s herd; they made a sizable procession, as they went along, and as they passed, people on the road shouted and applauded, and the Kelseys waved back, like heroes in a parade.

  “Where are you going?” people would call.

  “California! California!”

  So easy to say it. Ahead of them lay half the broad continent. In 1840, nobody really knew what was out there. A few expeditions had poked around in the wilderness—Lewis and Clark in 1803 along the Missouri and the Columbia, Zebulon Pike farther south. The Santa Fe Trail flanked the southern edge of the Rockies, crossing through desert, and it ended in the desert, and the Gila Trail, which led on to the West, and went through some of the worst desert in the world. Since Lewis and Clark’s time, fur trappers had been roaming through the central and northern stretches of Rocky Mountains, looking for beaver; by 1841 they had found and named South Pass, Bayou Salade, Jackson Hole, the Green River. From South Pass, a rugged trail led on to Oregon along the Snake River. Some settlers and missionaries had already followed it out to the Willammette Valley.

  Between those two routes, the Santa Fe and the Oregon Trails, lay an enormous empty expanse on the map, and the area between the Rockies and California was a huge blank. A few of the mountain men, those inveterate wanderers, had tried to explore the country beyond the Rockies, but there were no beaver, no valuable fur of any kind, no reason to overcome the fearsome desert. Those men who did come out alive did not go back again.

  East, in the settled United States, opinion was divided. Some people believed that hardy men could cross the continent, but mere women and children would never survive. It was tantamount to murder to take a woman on such a trip. (That some missionary women made it was God’s Providence.) In any case, the West was worth nothing: a desert, littered with rocks, infested with Indians. Other people claimed that the trip was a lark, a mere matter of following the sun.

  To the Kelseys, just leaving home, it did seem a lark. People cheered them through Westport, where they picked up the Santa Fe Road. The oxen trudged along at their steady two miles an hour, the men on horseback or walking along by their flanks; Nancy rode along with Ann before her on the saddle. Everything was going wonderfully, until they pulled into sight of Sapling Grove.

  “Well,” somebody must have said, “maybe they’re all just late.”

  Sapling Grove was empty. On the green meadows of grass nothing grazed but a few rabbits, two yoke of oxen, and an ancient mule. Where they had expected to find dozens, maybe hundreds of people, wagons, campfires, herds of stock, there was only John Bidwell and his new partner.

  Bidwell greeted them with his unquenchable enthusiasm. He introduced his new partner, George Henshaw, and they shook hands all around. Henshaw was getting on in years, and had a weak constitution; he was going west for his health. This decision was fortunate for Bidwell, who had begun the enterprise with another partner.

  That man had promised to supply the team if Bidwell would come up with a wagon for them to draw. Bidwell found the wagon, but on the news of Farnham’s letter, his partner abruptly quit, le
aving Bidwell with an outfit and nothing to pull it. At the last moment, Henshaw appeared. He had come from Illinois to join the expedition. He was riding a fine black horse, and Bidwell persuaded him to swap the fine black horse for a pair of oxen to draw the wagon and a decrepit mule for Henshaw to ride. So Bidwell and Henshaw had reached Sapling Grove, and now the Kelseys had too.

  They must have welcomed each other, on first meeting again, as if they were long lost friends. Shouted and laughed especially loudly, to make up for the fact that there were so few of them. To have arrived and found so few alarmed them. They had left with such fanfare: How could they go back home again? They settled down to wait.

  Ben and Nancy spread out a ground cloth, and set up their tent, and she laid a fire. The grove was pretty enough. Spring flowers bloomed all through the bright grass, and the scattered trees were hazy with new green. Ann fell asleep and Nancy set about making her bread. While the women did their outdoors housekeeping; the men gathered to talk things over, sound each other out, shape a sort of order of going.

  Everybody knew that they had to have more people to go west. The Plains along the Kansas swarmed with Pawnee and Kaw and sometimes Comanche. To a Plains war party, five settler wagons and sixteen people, seven of them children, would be one quick snap. The settlers needed more men and more rifles, or they would have to go back home.

  The Kelseys had no home to go back to. Right now, all the home they had was a ground cloth and a tent between two loaded wagons. Nancy had soaked some potatoes in water; now she squeezed out the fermented mush for her bread sponge, catching the juice in her best bowl. She took the stinking potato mush as far from the camp as she could, downwind, and dumped it. That was the worst part of making this kind of bread: the smell of the potatoes. Back at the camp, she beat in the flour and cornmeal, sitting with the bowl tilted on her lap, and her arm going around until it ached.

  Where would they go, if they couldn’t go to California?