When the West Was Young. Frederick R. Bechdolt
northern arm––a task which they are always at from year’s end to year’s end––uncover the fragments of wagons, and prospectors come upon a tire or spoke or portion of a sun-dried axle. Then they know that they are at the place where the Jayhawkers abandoned their prairie-schooners.
They killed some of their oxen at this point and divided the meat––there was so little of it that although the men were now very weak two of them were able to carry the beef from an animal. Then they started out on foot across the sand dunes toward the Panamints. Most of them still believed that feed and water lay just beyond those heights.
And now, while they were straggling along through the loose sand in single file, one of their number, a man named Fish, was seen to throw his hands above his head and pitch forward on his face. Those who were behind came upon him lying with arms outspread, dead.
The next afternoon as they were climbing toward the head of a steep cañon in the range, several of the foremost ones found a little spring among the rocks. While they were resting here they saw a man far below them. 19 He was crawling toward them on his hands and knees. One of the party filled his canteen and hurried down to meet him; but when he arrived, the other was gasping his last in the bottom of the sun-baked gorge. It was Captain Culverwell, a skipper who had forsaken the deep sea and its ships to make this journey with them in the hope of finding gold.
That evening the strongest of their number reached the summit of the Panamints and looked down the western side where they had thought to find that fertile valley which the Williams map had promised leading to the north. They saw dead mountain ranges and dried lake floors like those through which they had been traveling for months. The Mohave Desert lay in front of them.
When they were crossing those arid reaches William Isham, who had fiddled so blithely for them every evening in the Utah hills, sank down beside the trail; and the others passed him with empty canteens, unable to give him any help. Some of the stragglers buried his body a few days later on.
During the next day or two a Frenchman, whose name none of the survivors remember, went insane from thirst and wandered off into the sand-hills. No one ever saw him afterward.
So one after another of their number lay down and died or went mad and ran off toward some of the mirages which were perpetually torturing all of them with visions of cool lakes, until thirteen had perished. The others struggled on and on into the southwest; for they knew that Los Angeles lay somewhere in that direction and it offered them their only hope.
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Meantime the Bennett party went southward along the western edge of the sink where the sands lie as loose and fine as ashes between the mud flats and the mountains, until they found a little spring with a few patches of coarse grass among the mesquite thickets which surrounded it. From this point they tried escape by one route and then another, only to reach a blind wall in each case and retrace their steps to the water-hole.
In later years the mule-drivers of the borax company enlarged the well which Asahel Bennett and J. B. Arcane dug here in the sand. Otherwise the place remains unchanged, a patch of mesquite in a burning plain where heat devils dance all day long from year’s end to year’s end. The plain reaches on and on between black mountain walls, and even the mirage which springs from its surface under that hot sun throws off the guise of a cool lake almost on the moment of its assumption to become a repellant specter that leaps and twists like a flame. The Paiute Indians called the spot Tomesha, which means “Ground Afire.”
The party held a council when they had retreated here after the last unsuccessful attempt to escape. It was clear that they could not take the women and children out of the sink unless some one got food for the journey and found a route between water-holes. They appointed Manley, the young hunter, and an ox-driver named John Rogers for the venture, and the pair set out across the Panamints just north of Telescope Peak with the beef from an ox in their knapsacks, while the others sat down to await their return––or death.
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There were two wagon outfits of unmarried men among them; they had forsaken the Jayhawkers at about the time the Brier family joined that section. When several days had passed these bachelors departed to seek the trail of their former companions in the valley’s north arm. They said that the chances were ten to one that Manley and Rogers would never get through alive, and if they did they would be fools to attempt coming back. The others watched the two prairie-schooners crawling off into the gray plain until a mirage engulfed them and lifted them distorted into the blazing sky.
And now the families faced the question which these men had left with them. Would Manley and Rogers get through? They did not know what hazards lay beyond those mountains to the west, but none of them had the Jayhawkers’ faith in a fertile valley leading to the north. As it turned out Mount Whitney was the snow-clad peak to which the faulty Williams map referred and the valley was the Owens Lake country, many a weary mile from this sink.
If the pair did survive the desert, would they be men enough to face it for the second time? The marooned ones could only hope. That hope had become an abiding faith in Bennett’s wife. She had given the two young fellows a double handful of rice––half her store of grain––on the morning of their departure, and pointed mutely to her children as she placed the little bag in Manley’s hand. “They will come back,” she told the others many times.
The food was running low; the few remaining oxen could not last them long. There was a dog with the 22 Bennett wagons; he had followed them all the way from Iowa; and in this time of dire extremity some talked of killing him. But even in his starved condition he was able to wag his tail when the children came near him; sometimes he comforted them by his presence when their mothers could not. The men had not the heart to do away with him.
Hope lingered within those people like the breath in an old man who is dying hard. Rogers and Manley had gone northward on the burning plain to reach a ridge which mounted toward the Panamints. Now as the days dragged by to weary weeks, the men and women always gazed into the north where nothing lived except the hatred for the sun. But no man came, and when the weeks had grown beyond a month, they knew the time was here when they must make one last attempt to save themselves. They yoked up the oxen and set out into the south toward a spot where Bennett had discovered what looked like a gap in the mountains. Three days later they returned, half dead from thirst, and unhitched the staggering animals by the well.
There remained one shadow of a chance, as ephemeral as the mirage which came before them with the mounting of each morning’s sun. They stripped the tops from the prairie-schooners and began to make pack-saddles from them with the idea of abandoning the vehicles and following the trail of the Jayhawkers.
At midday they were sitting under the wagons for what shade they gave, working at this task. They knew it was a futile proceeding; the time had long 23 since gone when they had enough provisions to last them through that long northern route. But they were not the sort of people who can sit down and die. If they must perish it would be while they were still fighting. No one spoke. The silence of the dead land had crept over them.
That silence was broken by a shot. Unbelieving, they crept forth and saw three figures moving toward them from the north. Manley and Rogers were hurring across the flat leading a laden mule.
While the others ate from the store in the pack-sacks, the two young fellows told of their journey two hundred and fifty miles across the Mohave Desert; of the dead of the Jayhawker party whom they had found beside the trail; of the survivors whom they passed shortly before reaching a ranch near the head of the San Fernando valley where the little town of Newhall stands to-day; of great arid mountain ranges and shimmering floors of dried lakes; and of the long torture between water-holes. At the Newhall ranch a man named French had given them the mule and the provisions. With this food supply they believed the women and children stood a chance of getting through.
They slung the sacks of canvas on the gaunt oxen and placed the children in them; then they set out on their long climb up the Panamints.
Before they left the summit of the divide to go downhill into the west, they halted for one last look back. And as they stood there among the rocks gazing