When the West Was Young. Frederick R. Bechdolt
men there were nearing middle age and doubt showed on the bearded faces of the great majority; doubt and disappointment, for they were eager to see their journey’s end and that Williams map had aroused high hopes. Here and there a woman stood beside her husband, listening anxiously to what he said, watching his eyes as he harkened to the talk of those about.
But there was one portion of the circle which stood out in marked contrast to the rest. The men here were for the most part in their early twenties; their faces were serene, their eyes untroubled by any doubt; and there were no women with them. While the others stood weighed down by uncertainty, they lounged full length on the ground basking in the heat of the flames, or sat in groups on near-by wagon-tongues, laughing and whispering jests among themselves. Several of them were wearing bits of Indian finery, after the manner of the guides, and this sprinkling of buckskin shirts, fringed leggings, and beaded moccasins, together with an occasional crop of thick hair that reached to a pair of broad young shoulders, gave a dash of savage picturesqueness to their section of the audience. They were a company of bachelors from Illinois and called themselves the Jayhawkers. Their end of the camp had been the scene of wrestling matches and frolic every night 8 since the train had left Salt Lake City; and, as one might expect, it was one of their number who had gotten that map of the Williams Short Route. They were unanimous in advocating it.
Now Ed Doty, their captain, stepped forward into the open space by the fire. Fixing his bold young eyes on John Hunt, whom he addressed rather than the audience, “We haven’t found the country yet,” he said, “that could stop us and we’re not afraid of that over there.” He pointed out into the darkness where the summit of the divide showed black against the western sky. “We’re going to try the Williams Short Route.”
Hunt nodded. “All right,” he answered quietly, “and if the rest try it, I’m going through with you if I have to pass through hell to reach the other end of the trail. But if one wagon sticks to the San Bernardino road I’ll stay with that wagon, for I passed my word to take you that way.”
It was sometime near midnight when the crowd left the fire, but the sun was barely up the next morning before the wagons were lined out along the side hill. Far ahead of them where the trail forked, John Hunt stood waiting alone.
The white-topped prairie-schooners came on slowly toward him from the northward through the sage; the heads of the long-horned oxen swinging low from side to side before their heavy wooden yokes. The first span reached the solitary figure of the captain and went straight on south; the wagon rumbled by and Hunt knew by its passing that he must keep to the San Bernardino trail.
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But the second driver halted his team and leaned out from his seat to take the hand which Hunt extended him. “We’ll try the short route,” he said.
“Good-by,” the captain bade him; “good luck.” The man called to his lead span; the great yokes creaked and the front wheels whined against the wagon-box as the animals swung the prairie-schooner to the west.
And now wagon after wagon halted briefly while its occupants exchanged a brief farewell with the bearded man beside the road; then the outfit struck out straight westward up the long steep slope; until, when Hunt turned to rejoin his remnant of a following, three quarters of its members had forsaken the Sand Walking Company.
The prairie-schooners of the seceders made a slender white line in the wilderness of sage which reached on before them, up and up. Beyond the crest which rose gray-brown against the cloudless Indian summer sky, the desert waited silent as Death itself.
They traveled for three days up that long steep slope and when they reached the summit to look down upon the other side they discovered that the Williams map was worthless as a guide. Here, where it promised easy going, a steep-walled cañon led down from the north blocking their road. Beyond, a wilderness of sandstone pinnacles and naked cliffs dropped away and away to depths invisible.
Then most of the drivers turned back their oxen to follow Captain Hunt and overtake him on the San Bernardino trail by which he led his company in safety to Los Angeles. But twenty-seven wagons remained 10 parked among the twisted junipers, their occupants biding the return of scouts whom they had sent ahead to seek a pass. Although the map had proved of no value when it came to showing a road, they still believed in the snow-clad peak which it had promised, somewhere before them in the hidden west. They were determined to find that landmark and strike out for it.
The scouts came back on the fourth day and reported a pass far to the northward around the cañon head. But before the prairie-schooners lined out on the ridge to make the long detour, the unmarried owners of outfits banded together in a company, advising those with families to return to Captain Hunt. They did not care, they said, to be responsible for the lives of women and children in this unmapped wilderness. The advice was not taken and the train set forth in two sections, twenty wagons belonging to the Jayhawkers and their bachelor companions and seven owned by men who traveled with their wives and little ones.
The scouts had picked an easy route through rolling hills where bunch-grass stood in thick clusters among the tall gray sage; the oxen cropped the rich feed as they went along. Clear streams ran noisily in most of the ravines. The train passed the cañon head, and one day, after considerable aimless wandering, it turned westward to cross a succession of wide tablelands where feed was good and water still plentiful.
The Indian summer season was at its height now, clear balmy days and cloudless nights. Their progress was steady for some time, uninterrupted by ill luck of any kind. When they halted for the midday meal it was like a great picnic in the soft warm sunshine, and 11 when evening came the Jayhawkers rollicked around their fires or gathered where one of their number had tuned up his fiddle. William Isham was his name, a great bearded fellow who hailed originally from Rochester, New York; he would sit by the hour on the tongue of his wagon playing “Oh Susannah” and other lively airs, or strike up a jig tune while Negro Joe, who had fled from slavery in Mississippi, did a double shuffle in the firelight. The children slipped away from their mothers to set peeps at the fun from the edges of the crowd or play hide and seek in the shadows of the sage-brush; there were ten of these youngsters in all.
Many of these evenings would find a number of the older men clustered around the wagon of Asahel Bennett, an Iowa pioneer whose outfit included a young hunter by the name of William Manley. For Manley went ahead nearly every day to spy out the country and these men were eager for tidings of the snow-clad peak which lay before them hidden in the west.
Now gradually as they went onward the country began to change; the sage-brush became more stunted, the grass tufts sparser; the streams ran smaller and smaller. Until there came a day when they traveled from dawn until long after sunset before they encountered any water; and this lay lukewarm in hollows of the sandstone, accumulations from rains of long ago. The earth was hard and dry and there were stretches where there was no earth at all, only a rubble of sharp rock fragments radiating heat-waves under the glaring sun.
There was no rollicking about the camp-fires any more. When evening came the men were weary from 12 hurrying their wagons over rugged ground or climbing lofty buttes to look ahead for signs of water. Isham the fiddler left his violin in its case; he never took it from that case again. The oxen had grown gaunt from lack of feed and drink; they wandered about the night camps nibbling disdainfully at what growth there was, low bitter sapless weeds.
The change in the country had come so imperceptibly that they did not realize the presence of the desert until they were confronted by an-appalling revelation one afternoon.
All that day and all the day before the drivers had been goading the failing oxen while they peered with reddened eyes out on the glaring plain, from which arose a series of isolated cone-shaped buttes. For the water in the barrels was running very low and they were always seeking some sign of stream or pool.
Then one of them uttered a loud cry and at that shout the others saw, two miles or so off to the right where the plain opened out between the cone-shaped hills, a lake whose waters were bluer than any they had ever looked upon. A little breeze was stirring its surface, and on the further bank there were some trees whose branches were moving as if perhaps the wind were stronger