Centennial (54 page)

“I’m giving them two oxen,” Levi said, and there was such firmness in his voice that Purchas withdrew, but in a moment he was back with a sensible proposal: “If they’re headed back, let ’em take the two kids.”

Everyone but Elly agreed that this should be done, and preparations were made to transfer the children. But she began to cry and protest, and would not listen to their arguments.

In the end the decision was made by Captain Mercy. “They should go back,” he said, trying to console Elly while Levi carried the two youngsters to the turnarounds.

He delivered them to the apparent leader, then dug into his pants and came up with fifty dollars. Thrusting the money into the hands of the gaunt and weary man, he said, “This money is for the kids. When they get to St. Joe. And if you abuse them in any way, may God strike your pitiful soul.”

“It’ll be for the children,” the man said, and they drove eastward without even thanking Levi for the oxen.

When he returned to the Conestoga, Purchas said, “Did you give them thieves money, too?” Levi nodded, and Sam said, “You know they’ll kill the kids and make off with it.”

“Don’t you trust anybody?” Levi asked.

“Nobody,” Purchas said, “especially not no turnarounds. No character. The kids’ll be dead by nightfall.” Elly heard these words and that night she wrote:

July 15, Monday ... I feel as if my own children had been stolen from me. For as long as my eyes could see I watched the sorrowful wagons plodding eastward, taking my son and daughter with them, and when they passed over the final hill and were gone forever I looked about me, and in each direction to the horizon miles away there was nothing, not even a tree or a tall rock, only the road winding to the west, and I felt as if God had deserted me and that I had no friends, no hope, and I think Levi suspected how I felt over the loss of the children, and he was ashamed that he had not sided with me in the argument, and he came to comfort me but I pushed him away, and when night came I felt ashamed, for I remembered how he had given the lost ones his oxen and his money and only becau
s
e he is such an honorable man, and I went out in the night to find him, but he was wandering somewhere alone, so I came in to write these lines and the gray spots are my tears.

Early on the morning of July 16 Captain Mercy and Sam Purchas rode ahead, determined to locate a likely spot for crossing the South Platte. There was a sense of urgency about their mission, for already the party was much delayed in schedule. According to the wisdom of the prairie, by this date they should have been crossing the Continental Divide, and here they were plodding along, thirteen days short of Fort John, nineteen to reach the Divide. It was frightening, and Purchas, who had seen parties perish in snow, insisted that on this day they had to make their fording.

“How about here?” Mercy said.

“Let’s go in and test the bottom,” Purchas said.

They slipped off their shoes and stockings and waded gingerly into the river, but wherever they stepped the bottom gave way: water eddied under their toes and the gravel washed out. Within moments the water rose from their knees to their waists.

“Whole damned river’s in motion,” Purchas said, and they tested two other spots, with equal results. “Better drive one more day,” Mercy suggested, but Purchas would not hear of it. “Today we go. Time’s wastin’.”

So they compromised on a spot which was not ideal; the crossing was much too wide, at least half a mile, but it did have a fairly solid bottom. “The wagons’ll sink in,” Purchas said, “but if we keep them movin’, we can make it.”

“You satisfied?” Mercy asked.

“Not exactly, but ...”

This was not good enough for the captain and he abruptly left the guide and spurred his horse farther west along the riverbank. It was good that he did so, for at a ford which had been used before, he came upon seven wagons backed up, trying to muster courage to try the crossing. He fired his pistol and Purchas came galloping up.

“Good to see you!” the mountain man cried with unaccustomed warmth to the waiting emigrants. “Trouble?” When they explained that they had already tried to ford once, only to find the bottom giving out beneath them, he was surprisingly congenial. “Wait here. We’ll have our wagons with you before night, and we’ll all get across real easy.”

Alone with Mercy, he explained, “We need them a lot more than they need us,” and the two men galloped back to speed their wagons.

In organizing the crossing Purchas was invaluable, for only he was familiar with the one system that had any chance of working: “You ten men, swim to the other bank with them ropes. Two of you stay in the water about twenty feet from shore, and when a wagon reaches you, lash the ropes to it, and you other eight pull like hell and get the wheels up the slope. You men, harness sixteen oxen to that first wagon. You two fellows, can you swim? Good. You swim with the heads of the lead oxen and keep them movin’ forward. All the rest, back here with me. Now! Shove her into the water. No matter what happens, keep shovin’.”

With appalling suddenness, the wheels sank up to the hubs, but Sam was ready. Lashing the oxen and shouting to the two swimmers, “Keep ’em movin’,” he gathered a group of husky men to grab the spokes of the wheel. “Keep ’em turnin’,” he roared, and with a mighty effort the combined strength of ox and man broke the wagon free of the clutching gravel and got it started across the river.

Oxen bellowed; men cursed; a woman inside the wagon screamed as water rose about her feet; but Sam Purchas kept the wagon moving until the rope men on the other shore could pull it up the steep and muddy bank. The first emigrants were across.

Allowing no one a moment’s rest, for the trick was to keep the oxen working as long as possible, he led the beasts and the men back across the river to the next wagon. Six more times he engineered the passage, until the backed-up wagons were safely across.

“Now ours,” he said. Marshaling all the men, he tried to harness the oxen to the Fisher wagon, but the big beasts had had enough. Without losing patience with them, he told a boy from one of the other wagons, “Let them graze on this side and we’ll save them for the Conestoga.” He summoned Sergeant Lykes and told him, “We’ve got to use your mules.”

“That ain’t easy,” Lykes said.

“Get a turn on the nose of that big black one,” Purchas suggested, and when Lykes had such a grip with his tourniquet as might have wrenched the mule’s head off, he led him into the water and the others followed, dragging the Fisher wagon behind them.

“Can we work it again?” Purchas asked.

“Not with that mule,” Lykes said, “but maybe that other big one.”

This mule proved a lot more difficult, and the men struggled with the Frazier wagon for more than an hour before they could get the mules hitched to it. The mule, which had had its upper lip practically twisted off, was especially mean, and at one point Purchas asked in desperation, “Shall I shoot him!” but Lykes said, “He’s only bein’ a mule.”

At last they got the wagon across, and then they came back bone-weary, both animals and men exhausted, to try the Conestoga. “I think we can get one more trip out of the oxen,” Purchas said, and Captain Mercy, dripping and muddy, asked Elly, “Would you prefer to cross with a horse?” and she said, “Oh, no. This is my wagon,” and she sat inside, guarding the equipment lest it fall overboard.

The oxen, those great and patient animals, moved wearily into position for the last effort. Seccombe and a man from the strangers’ wagons swam from the other shore with extra ropes, then swam back. They looked exhausted, but when they reached land they organized the teams for pulling and stayed in the forefront during the next difficult minutes.

Slowly the huge wagon was let down into the water, where its heavy wheels disappeared in gravel. “Now!” Purchas bellowed, and every man exerted maximum strength while Levi urged the oxen forward. For a moment it looked as if the wagon might stick, irretrievably, but the combined force of the pullers and pushers got it moving, and just as the sun sank, the Conestoga was pulled onto the northern shore. Of this crossing Elly wrote:

July 16, Tuesday ... It was dusk when we finished, and the men, wet and muddy, went to their several wagons and collapsed. Some slept on the ground just as they fell, too exhausted to care for themselves. One of the strangers who swam the river so many times with the ropes vomited for the better part of half an hour with nothing coming up and then fainted. Levi, who swam the oxen across the river sixteen times and the mules four, had nothing to say nor could he eat, but about midnight he did a strange thing. He asked me to put on an old dress and take off my shoes and he led me down to the river and made me go in and duck my head under water and I could hear the river moving sand and gravel and even large rocks along the bottom, and Levi said,
“
It
’s
alive and it mighty near trapped us.
”

There could be no prolonged rest for the travelers, because the next day they had to hurry across the peninsula between the two rivers and let their wagons down the steep slope at Ash Hollow. When they first saw the hill to be negotiated they felt they had not the strength to accomplish this, but in the end they did.

Once more they handled the strangers’ wagons first, then used those men to help lower the Fisher and Frazier wagons. Finally they got to the Conestoga, but in easing it down, the ropes broke, the wagon rushed ahead and the left rear wheel collapsed. It was completely shattered, and the ten wagons had to lay over a day, with all the men trying to improvise a substitute. In the end the Conestoga was able to limp along.

It was now July 18, and although the Mercy party was two and a half weeks behind schedule, they did have before them a hundred and fifty miles of the finest part of the road. It was level, well packed, free of any obstacles or difficult crossings, and passed through some of the finest scenery in all of North America. To travel this section in midsummer, with the days hot, and the nights bracingly cool, was a spiritual adventure; on some days the exhilarated travelers would do twenty miles, looking in amazement from side to side as new wonders unfolded. Now buffalo were plentiful and steaks chopped out of the hump were more tasty than beef, while a roasted tongue was a delicacy that the women travelers relished. Levi Zendt, thrifty butcher that he was, thought it shameful to kill a two-thousand-pound buffalo and then eat only six pounds of it, casting aside the rest of the carcass as useless, but as Sam Purchas pointed out, “Hell, you could kill five thousand of them critters and not leave a dent. They ain’t like cattle. They’re more like ants, and who cares if he steps on a passel of ants?”

On July 23 the column came in sight of the first great monument of the trail, a pile of whitish rock, standing in such a way as to resemble some dignified building of antiquity. Court House Rock the formation was called, and from a distance it did resemble the massive courthouse of some important city, but each traveler saw in it such comparison as his education permitted. In later years, after the gold rush, it would be fashionable to depict all emigrants as defeated persons, or as people who could not get along back east, or as the scum of our industrial cities, cast out by a society they could not understand and with which they could not cooperate. It may be instructive, therefore, to lift from the diaries of those who passed Court House Rock in summer of 1844 brief passages to show what this particular group of emigrants thought when they saw the impressive monument:

VERMONT HOUSEWIFE. It looked to me like the Temple of Sargon, huge and heavy and close to the ground and very Persian except that it had no carved lions.

BOSTON PHYSICIAN. While others said that it did indeed resemble the courthouse of their home county, I could not drive from my mind the image of Karnak, for this was most Egyptian, save for the columns. I think no man could view these ruins without recalling the impressions of his early reading.

MR
S
. FISHER,
OF
MISSOURI
. It reminded me of the picture in my Bible of the Tower of Babel. I am satisfied that the buildings of Babylon must have looked much like this.

MIC
HI
GAN FARMER. The emperors of Rome had buildings like this. Looked exactly like the buildings in my schoolbook.

OLIVER SECCOMBE, OF OXFORD. Precisely like the sketches of Petra, but of a less reddish color. If these ruins were in Europe they would be world famous.

ELLY ZENDT, OF LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA .
.
. I was ashamed to tell the others what I thought for fear they would laugh at me, but do you remember, Laura Lou, that framed picture that hung in our schoolroom where Miss Histand taught? Of the Acropolis? And how we used to promise each other that when we grew up we would go see Athens and the first to get there would write and tell the other? Well, I have seen Athens, on the Platte. It is not white as we thought but grayish, and it is not surrounded by men in togas, but Indians on ponies. But the look is the same, and the buildings are even more beautiful than we imagined. I think it may be because the sky is so very blue and so unbroken, not even a cloud showing anywhere. For six hours as we traveled I watched the Acropolis, and from whatever position we were in, it was magnificent. I am sure that when you get to Greece and tell me of the real building it will be something to remember. But I shall not see it, for my Athens lies in the west.

Then came Chimney Rock, a needle pointing skyward; and Scott’s Bluff, shame of the west, where early trappers had been accused of abandoning a sick partner named Scott, leaving him to die alone; and then the vast and open land where Indians were on the move.