An Ordinary Woman Read online

  In the morning, her sponge was high and bubbly, and she mixed in more flour and put the dough to rise. At least she could still make bread. And by noon, when the bread was just turning golden and aromatic out of the pan, more wagons were rolling into the camp. She stood up with the others and raised her arms and cheered until the trees rang.

  Steadily, others arrived, more every day. After three days Nancy’s tent stood near the center of a sprawling city of canvas and rubberized sheets. Men strode up and down, bellowing to each other across the camp, standing in groups waving their arms and spitting in all directions, the excited hum of their voices breaking often into high sharp laughter, or a volley of oaths. Every now and then somebody let off a rifle into the air.

  Nancy had to go much farther now to dump her garbage. The grass of the meadow, once so green and fine, was beaten down and bitten off. The animals were eating it all up; the pioneers would not be able to stay here much longer. Soon they would have to move.

  The women fell naturally into one another’s company. While Ann, testing her newly acquired ability to walk, toddled after her Kelsey cousins, Nancy and the other women went about their work. Besides Lucy and the widow Mrs. Grey, at least two other women joined them: Richard Williams had brought his wife, and his daughter, Ann.

  They compared their preparations, shared recipes for salt-rising bread and beans, admired each other’s babies. Talked over about their hopes and their fears. Like the men, they quickly found out what they needed to know about one another: which one knew herbs, and could doctor, which could cook, which knew children best, which were reliable and which could not be counted on. They, as much as the men, brought forth an order out of this gathering. In the society of the Kelsey women, Ann Williams met Zedediah Kelsey, whom she would marry in less than two weeks.*

  In the camp’s heated atmosphere, all emotions ran higher and stronger than usual. Utter strangers were friends within a few hours. Their common goal bound them, forged a community of them, a nexus of their common needs, their common hopes and fears. Nonetheless, from the beginning, there were factions, crossed wills, shortsighted and nasty arguments.

  The group divided itself into messes: the people who ate together. John Bartleson, from Jackson County, formed one mess with eight other men; Bidwell, Henshaw, and a few others formed a mess; the Kelseys formed a mess. The family tie was a strength that Nancy could count on.

  It must have been hard to wait. Maybe Nancy sometimes went to the western edge of the camp, and looked out. From Sapling Grove, the prospect looked very like Missouri: trees and meadows, where now their horses and oxen grazed. Ben might have come up beside her, and they put their arms around one another and talked about what a wonderful life they were going to have in California.

  They could not have talked much about the dangers of the trip to come, simply because they did not know what they were. They were about to step off the edge of the known. When they fell silent, words failing in the face of that enormity, they must have held each other a little tighter.

  But every day their numbers grew. People came from as far off as Arkansas. “It was a very mixed crowd,” as the amiable Nicholas Dawson remarked. There were four families, three of them Kelseys, and at least seven children. Many, perhaps most of the settlers, however, were young, single men who, footloose and uninhibited by responsibilities, could easily set off for an unknown country more than a thousand miles away.

  Nicholas Dawson, twenty-two, was typical, if any of them was really typical. Good natured and brave, at nineteen he had left his Pennsylvania home to see the world, and wandered all over the frontier from the Platte Purchase to New Orleans, cutting wood, teaching school, working as a farmhand, before he decided to go to California. He was well educated and read a lot, considered himself something of a romantic. During the 1841 trek he kept a journal.

  He was part of Bartleson’s mess, having bought a share of one of John Bartleson’s wagons. When he had paid for that he had seventy-five cents left. Few of the others had much more. The cross-grained Kentuckian Grove Cook had nothing at all, and no way to provide anything, and worked his way along by driving one of the wagons in Bartleson’s mess.

  Bidwell kept a journal too. Every evening Nancy could see him sitting by his fire, his book on his knee, scribbling away. Bidwell was interested in everything, noticed everything, wrote everything down.

  “I laid in one hundred pounds of flour more than the usual quantity,” he wrote later. “This I did because we were told that when we got into the mountains we probably would get out of bread and have to live on meat alone, which I thought would kill me even if it did not others. My gun was an old flint-lock rifle, but a good one. Old hunters told me to have nothing to do with cap or percussion locks, that they were unreliable, and that if I got my caps or percussion wet I could not shoot, while if I lost my flint I could up another on the plains. I doubt whether there was one hundred dollars in money in the whole party, but all were enthusiastic and anxious to go.”*

  In this he was actually quite wrong. One member of the party had considerably more than one hundred dollars. Talbot H. Green, real name Paul Geddes, was on the run, wanted for embezzling eight thousand dollars from a bank. Nobody knew this; all they knew was that Green had something heavy that he lugged with him everywhere and jealously protected. He said it was lead. Probably a few of them believed him: lead was a valuable commodity on the plains, where a bullet could mean life or death.

  On May 18, the group assembled and counted heads, coming up with a total of sixty-eight people. This meeting was to lay out rules for the expedition (arrangements for standing watch at night, the order of march, and such things) and name officers. Only the men voted. Bidwell was chosen secretary. Talbot H. Green, the embezzler, who impressed everybody with his culture and address, was elected president, and the group took John Bartleson as their captain.

  This was not from recognition of his superior ability or wit. Bartleson told them flat out that if he were not made captain, he would take the eight men who had come with him and leave. This strong-arm tactic set the tone for Bartleson’s captaincy throughout the trip. He didn’t want to lead, so much as he wanted to be first.

  It betrayed, also, the divisions already forming in the group, the rivalries, dissension, and bad faith.

  Now they were ready to start. The problem was that nobody, Bartleson included, knew where to go.

  But then one of the last to arrive reported that he had seen some Catholic priests on the road. They were traveling from St. Louis toward the upper Missouri River country, where they hoped to convert the native people, and had acquired the services as a guide of none other than Broken Hand, Thomas Fitzpatrick himself. Maybe Captain Bartleson could go ask these people if they could join up.

  The pioneers were so eager to get started that many didn’t want to wait. In spite of the fact that none of them had any firsthand knowledge of the mountains some were perfectly ready to head out in that direction by themselves. In another of their now-familiar meetings, they argued this issue back and forth. Bartleson especially wanted to start off immediately, on their own. But they had no notion how to go about that, and Bartleson, obviously, was no leader. Finally, in Bidwell’s words, “we sobered down” and waited for the priests and Fitzpatrick.

  “It was well we did,” Bidwell writes, “for otherwise probably not one of us would have reached California.”* Fitzpatrick was a godsend. Nancy had heard of him: one of the great mountain men, already a frontier legend. He had been on General Ashley’s 1823 excursion into the wilderness that found South Pass; he had trailed with Jed Smith on his great expedition through California in 1824,* he had trapped the Rockies since then. Like all the free trappers he had intimate experience with the various tribes of Indians and he could survive virtually anywhere, on anything. She was glad to see the men send off an offer to join Fitzpatrick’s party.

  When Fitzpatrick came to meet them,
she liked the look of him. He was slight, fair-headed, in his thirties. Born in County Cavan, in Ireland, of a good Catholic family, he left home in his early teens and worked his way first across the ocean and then across the continent. By 1841 he had been living in the wilderness half his life. Now that the beaver were gone, and the shining times of the fur trade were over, he was cashing in on his experience by guiding expeditions into the west. The Catholic priests were among his first charges.

  These priests were just as remarkable. Their leader was Father Pierre Jean de Smet, SJ, a Belgian, who devoted his life to missionary work on the frontier and beyond. He impressed Bidwell, who commented on his “fine presence”, naming him “one of the saintliest men I have ever known.”* De Smet had already made one trip into the Northwest, in 1840, going with a band of trappers, and then trekking out again alone with just a guide. Now he was headed back, with two other Jesuits and three lay brothers, to establish a mission among the Flathead Indians in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.*

  To the priests and Fitzpatrick, the Bartleson-Kelsey-Bidwell pioneers were also something of a blessing.* De Smet had been expecting two other companies of travelers to swell the numbers of his party, but both had failed to show up. Fitzpatrick was taking along, besides the priests, only five teamsters, two men to hunt for them, and an English Lord named Romaine, who wanted to shoot buffalo, and his half-breed guide. Fitzpatrick and de Smet must have jumped at the chance to add nearly sixty armed men to their caravan.

  So, on May 19, a Wednesday, they started out, in a single file along the road. The priests went first, riding horses, with their supplies in four little two-wheeled mule carts, called Red River carts, and their wagon. Their mules were hitched in tandem, one behind the other. After that came the eight horse-drawn wagons of the pioneers, and last the five wagons drawn by oxen, much slower than the horses.

  Nancy rode her horse, holding Ann on her lap. When Ann squirmed and fretted at being held so still, Nancy would have taken her down to walk in the powdery dust of the road and pick the wildflowers growing up through the grass. She held the child right beside her, keeping her out of the way of the wagons, and watching for snakes. Ann pulled her along, excited to be on the move at last.

  Chasing the little girl around, Nancy might have stopped, and craned her neck, peering ahead, trying to see into the west—into the future. She couldn’t see much. Here, at the eastern margin of the plains, great stands of trees grew all along the many little streams, blocking the long view. But they were on their way now. They had left the United States. Somewhere out there California lay, and a new life. What came between she would endure, for the sake of the new life. Her spirits high, she went after Ann among the prairie flowers.

  * The sources clearly state that Sam and Lucy brought five children along on this trek, but Sam and Lucy in 1841 had only three of their own; these other two must have been Andy’s orphaned daughters.

  * Although perhaps they knew each other beforehand. These Williamses must not be confused with Reverend Joseph Williams, of whom more anon.

  * Bidwell III.

  * Bidwell III.

  * Smith got the there by circling south of Salt Lake to the Colorado and the Virgin Rivers, ending up in Southern California.

  * Bidwell III.

  * De Smet’s mission was a success. The Indians admired and liked him and he was able to mediate between them and the encroaching whites; in 1868 he negotiated a truce between the whites and Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa chief who led the last great defense of the Dakota Territory. De Smet even earned the respect of the Blackfeet, the most feared people in the country.

  * De Smet wrote that “our journey had even well nigh been indefinitely postponed” if they had not made company with the settlers. Letter I, Nunis.

  CHAPTER 3

  Quickly the trek settled into a routine. The first day, they went twelve miles, following the Kansas River Valley, open grassland save where the river meandered along through its undulating strip of riparian forest. The Santa Fe Road was well marked, rutted and seamed with wagon travel. The sun beat on them from a sky like an oven lid. Nancy rode her horse and carried her child ahead of her on the saddle; probably she made some kind of sling to make sure Ann could not tumble off.

  The child slept much, but certainly not all the time, and when she was awake, keeping her confined to the saddle would have been a battle. Nancy must have gotten down now and then and let her little girl run and play; then she could let her pony graze a little, too, and forage as she went along for wild berries, birds’ eggs, nuts, and for wood for the fire when they camped.

  Even picking berries and gathering armfuls of wood, she would not fall behind their wagon. The slow trudge of the oxen carried it along at a pace that even a baby’s stubby uncertain legs could match. Nancy watched all the while for snakes. She had seen some already, lying dead by the road like gaudy pieces of rope, their heads snapped off by the bullwhips of the wagoneers in the train moving ahead of her. Whenever the child wandered more than a few yards away, Nancy ran and got her and pulled her back close. There were coyotes, too, and Indians, and poison ivy.

  Every now and then, walking along beside the wagon, Nancy lifted her head, her eyes straining toward the horizon, already aching for something new to look at.

  Mostly she saw the dust of the wagons going on before her up the valley. During the day’s march the group straggled; the oxen were much slower than the horses and mules, and the riders especially found it impossible to keep down to the pace of the great cattle. Also, the men on horseback, as they traveled, ranged around looking for game. By the end of the day, Nancy and Ben and Andy, and the others with ox carts, were more than half a mile behind the leaders.

  Somewhere up there, at the very front of the long loose chain of travelers, was the mountain man, Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, riding along with his rifle over his saddlebows, picking the trail and watching for trouble. As the day wore on he would be keeping an eye out for a good place to camp. Clearly he knew so well what he was doing that from the very beginning even Bartleson yielded to him.

  At noon, that first day, having come twelve miles, they stopped and camped in the trees by the river. When the Kelseys’ wagons finally pulled in, Fitzpatrick had them park with the others in a hollow square; the tongue of each wagon was fastened up to the back of the one in front of it. Just inside their big wagon, Nancy spread out the ground cloth and raised the tent, and got to work on her bread. All around the inside of the wagon square, the other women were rushing to the same chores.

  Some of them had fancy reflector stoves. But Nancy had seen, back in Sapling Grove, that the bread baked just as well in a good dutch oven in the coals, and the reflector stoves were always hard to set up. She could hear them fussing with one now, across the way, and she already had her bread sponge mixed.

  Ben had gone off to hunt; some of the other men were already back, with hares and a deer. Nancy gathered up Ann and her dirty diapers and went off to the river.

  On her way back, she felt the air turn suddenly cool, and saw heavy clouds bundling up into the sky. She picked Ann up and started for the tent. Within a few steps, she was running, as the sky darkened like the fall of night. The other people in camp were diving for their tents. The first great drops of rain slammed into them. Nancy crept into her shelter, Ann clutched in both arms, and then it seemed as if somebody overturned a wagonload of stones on their tent.

  The crash was deafening. The tent sagged. Through the front opening Nancy could see the air turning thick and white with falling hail. White stones like peas and bigger were bouncing up knee-high above the ground. The tent slumped again and she bolted out and hauling Ann along screaming inaudibly in the uproar of the storm she crawled underneath the nearest wagon.

  Out there people were shrieking; but the thunder of the hailstorm was fading. The crashing stones softened into the pattering of heavy rain. And the air was lighteni
ng again, day was coming back. Nancy soothed the baby; under the wagon, the ground was still dry.

  Outside, the hail turned the ground white. But it was melting; here came a rivulet already, snaking through the dust toward her, and she crawled out from under the wagon into the last few drops of rain, and stood up.

  All over the camp, tents were flattened. From one huge hapless canvas wreck across the way came curses and screams. The other pioneers were rising up slowly, shaking off the water, watching the sky as if it might all suddenly happen again.

  Black clouds still crowded half the sky, but now the sun broke through them. The ground began to steam. The air felt hot and moist as a washhouse.

  The canvas covers of the wagons were weighted down with hail. Nancy calmed the baby and went to fix the covers and make sure that the wagons hadn’t leaked. The canvas covers kept most of the weather out, but if they did leak, if the flour got wet, for example, it was a disaster.

  But then here came Ben and Andy, with a fat deer, and soon they had a good dinner of beans and bread and venison. Nancy had rescued their bedding from the muck after the rain, Ben set the tent up again, and they slept inside. In the morning, she built another fire and cooked another batch of bread, while Ben rounded up the oxen and the horses, and they ate as they moved out.

  So it went, for days and days.

  That first day, they stopped early. Afterward they pushed on later in the day; when they made camp, usually the daylight was already dwindling, and Nancy was in a rush the whole time to get everything done. While Ben tended to the animals, she unpacked their camping gear, set up the tent, hauled the water in for cleaning up. She made the sponge for her bread and put it to rise. When the men had brought in game, she helped dress it and make it ready for cooking; often she helped other families cut up carcasses, in return for some of the meat. For the dinner she had the last of the day’s bread, plus whatever meat or bacon there was available, and the beans she had been soaking all day in the back of the wagon. For the first few days, they had some cider left, and they had coffee.