Carleton Emmons Watkins, Isaiah West Taber:
Mt. Hood and the Dalles, Columbia River, Oregon (1867)

"Those of us who were born in Eden …"

Few modern travelers could tolerate even a day's distance in a Conestoga wagon, especially on what passed for roads between 1840 and 1870. Especially in the earlier years, the so-called Trail was more rumor than actual, an asperation much more than a manifestation. The journey was challenging, even for those accustomed to traveling by Conestoga wagon. It was slow, even for those experienced driving oxen. It was dangerous, too, though not usually due to unfriendly Indians. The travelers themselves tended to be their own worst enemies. They insisted upon bringing heirlooms they could not bear to leave behind in the care of relatives. They brought too much frivolous stuff and not nearly enough of the essentials. They carried enough innocence to carry most more than two thousand miles across some of the most hostile and forbidding territory few of them had ever previously even imagined. They traveled The Oregon Trail.

Before 1880, every member of my Fambly that came West seeking their Eden at the end of TheTrail, came by The Trail. Not all of them survived the passage. Overall, one in ten who began the trip in St Joe failed to make it to the end. A considerable percentage turned around, some early on and others well after they really should have. In my Fambly alone, we lost one to cholera along Nebraska's Platte River. Cholera was epidemic on TheTrail some years. We lost another to childbirth, also a popular killer of emigrants, both mother and child. We lost another shirttail relative due to an accidental self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Surprisingly, few of those travelers could have been considered skilled in using firearms. Today, we imagine everyone back then carrying a sidearm and a Winchester, but most of those people were sodbusters more than gunslingers, and few were very proficient in using any firearm as a weapon. They hunted. Their inexperience proved extremely dangerous to themselves.

Very few accurately anticipated the weather. Nobody had ever imagined softball-sized hailstones capable of turning an ox team into hamburger and a Conestoga wagon into kindling in a few minutes. Nobody had ever heard of needing to soak wagon wheels overnight to prevent them from shrinking off their flat steel tires. Nobody understood what they might experience crossing through territory that hadn't seen rain in months. TheTrail might be six inches of the finest talcum powder dust, which would sift into everything as the wagons passed. Just watering the stock would sometimes prove impossible. Over time, TheTrail accumulated the detritus of every innocent assumption carried forward. By the 1860s, no mile remained that didn't contain at least one grave. Likewise, those treasured heirlooms found their places along the climb up and down South Pass. TheTrail became lined with essentially an open sewer, as years of successive passages left every emigrant’s mark. TheTrail smelled of accumulated desperation and fear. It was a 'valley of the shadow of' in stinking sharp relief.

I believe these people were brave, but they didn't see themselves as such. Some experienced uneventful passages. Others, catastrophies. Those who succeeded never looked backward. Few of those who made it to the other end of TheTrail, ever contemplated going back home. Those of my Fambly who returned home came back again, for that alluring Eden had become their obsession by then. They had already sold their reliable old cow for their pocketful of magic beans, and they would plant those beans in Eden, even if it killed them. One of my Great-great-grandfathers died shortly after finally finding his Eden for the second time. I think his surviving wife felt grateful that at least he was buried in Eden rather than back in Illinois.

These people progressed a foot at a time. The over two thousand miles from St. Joe to The Dalles passed at approximately the speed of a walking ox. The plot unfolded in generally the most mind-numbing manner possible. The initiation phase, four hundred plus miles of unchanging Nebraska horizon, ushered in the Great American Desert, where water became scarce and ramifications turned real. After the desert came mountains that humbled anything anyone there had ever imagined experiencing. The earliest resorted to winching their wagons up and over precipitous cliffs, one fucking inch at a time, only to have to winch them back down again a few short miles later. The final insult in TheTrail's almost endless humiliations was the choice made at another least convenient time. Once they made The Dalles, they had to choose whether to take Barlow's so-called road up over the mountains, another minimum two-week trek, likely through early season snowfields, and retain their wagon and team, or abandon the means that transported them to Oregon in favor of a shorter but perilous trip down the rapids of the biggest river they'd seen since they left the Mississippi—their choice.

Everyone arriving in the Eden-like Willamette Valley found it only somewhat to their liking. Even Heaven would reasonably seem a tad disappointing after such a harrowing passage. Even those whose grandfathers had been Overmountain Men found the isolation daunting. Even those whose Famblies had been striving westward for hundreds of years felt the letdown any dream coming true entails. They realized they had gained considerable potential and that their children, grandchildren, and great-great grands would most certainly reap the rewards of all their forebears' suffering. They, the emigrants themselves, mainly wouldn't. Their progeny would also inherit the subtle benefits of innumerable generations of loving, for acts of love animated the whole history, enabling any of those stories to emerge. Those of us who were born in Eden and who benefitted from their foolhardiness and courage should feel humbled by their gifts.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz