Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising by Dale L. Walker

Author:Dale L. Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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For one setting out with only a vague idea of linking the Plains tribes with future research on Pontiac of the Ottawa, there was a weird precision in Francis Parkman’s plans. Although he was trained for law, history had a hold on him, and it swirled in the wake of the steamer he took down the Ohio to the Mississippi and in the tracks of the horses he rode to Fort Laramie. Indeed, in the six weeks he took to reach that out-of-bounds place on the Laramie River, he quite literally rode into history, then made some of it himself.

This was the summer of 1846 and, only a month after the Bostonian had departed the salons, soirées, eligible ladies, and intellectual causeries of Boston and Cambridge society, a leathery, tobacco-chewing American general named Zachary Taylor fought and won two battles against a Mexican army. These occurred on May 7 and May 9 among the cactus and chaparral at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, places nobody could find on a map but that belated newspaper reports said were “just north of the Rio Grande,” and they took place a week before the United States and Mexico were officially at war.

Then, at about the time Parkman and Shaw were chatting at the rail of the steamer taking them from Saint Louis to Westport Landing, a prosperous Illinois farmer named George Donner, age sixty-two, thrice married and with thirteen children, rode out in front of an Oregon Trail caravan bound from Independence to California. Accompanying him were his newest and last wife, Tamsen, forty-five; their five youngest children; and Donner’s older brother Jacob and his family. In Springfield, Donner’s neighbor James Frazier Reed, a furniture factory proprietor who had fought with Abraham Lincoln’s company in the Blackhawk War, also set out for the Missouri border. With him were his wife, Margaret, their four children, and Margaret’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Keyes, age seventy-five. While her husband was away attending to circuit court duties, Mary Todd Lincoln and her son Robert came out to see the Reeds’ departure. James Reed had fabricated a huge “two-story” wagon fitted out with bunks and even a stove drawn by eight Durham oxen, and he had two accessory wagons stocked with “fancy goods” and liquor, plus spare draft animals and horses.

The Donner brothers had twelve yoke of oxen, five saddle horses, a small herd of milk and beef cattle, several hired hands, a dog, and a fortune of $10,000 in cash sewn into a quilt.

Parkman saw the Donner-Reed wagons corralled on the prairie beyond Fort Laramie that June as he stood on a bluff above the fort and watched other emigrant trains cross the Laramie River. He may also have encountered some of the party when he wrote of entering a log-and-mud “apartment” at the fort full of men “all more or less drunk” on Missouri whiskey apparently carried by “a company of California emigrants.” These had unencumbered the liquor at great loss to the fort’s traders, he said, and were getting rid of the rest of it by drinking it on the spot.

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