How Much of this Book is Real?

Because this novel is a blend of fact and fiction, some readers may like to know which events depicted within its pages really happened and which didn’t. Some of you also may be interested to know which characters are based on real people and which are fictitious.

That was pretty much the end of things. There followed a few nerve-wracking moments when just about all of us figured that Carlson’s crazy brother would start firing on everyone. But he just dropped the weapon as soon as he’d shot Carlson and then stood on the porch real quiet, with his head bowed and his eyes downcast.

I guess I don’t need to say that we were a pretty depressed bunch of travelers as we hiked back north to Nevada City. Our first and best plan for rescuing Becky had been lost with the death of Skeeter Daniels, and we were now down to just two possible ways to reach that same end, both of them pretty questionable.

One by one we followed Lewis through the cave opening, crawling through a low passageway that led us gradually downhill. After about 15 feet I butted up against Lewis, who had stopped, causing those behind me ran smack into my backside. John proceeded to let out a couple of first-class cuss words, and Soon Hing muttered something in Chinese that probably wasn’t a compliment either.

Mokelumne Hill was a mining camp smack in the middle of trying to become a town. Tent and pole buildings were slowly giving way to one- and two-story brick structures, among them a post office, a church, three or four saloons and a whorehouse – all the makings for a prosperous California city. We stopped long enough to stock up on a few supplies, thanks to Lorenzo Sawyer’s generous contribution of $20. Then we hightailed it out of town before anyone had time to make any snide remarks about our Chinese companions.

Lewis and I had planned to start out early the next morning for Placerville, a little more than 30 miles distance. After spending the night there, we would continue on the next day and camp somewhere near Col. Alden Jackson’s digs, or maybe a little farther south if we made good time. From there it was only about 15 or 20 miles to the town of Vallecito, and we figured we could start trailing along the Roaring River at that point, looking for some trace of Skeeter Daniels.

The next few days passed with deadly slowness. There were no visits by the doctor, and Lorenzo’s two return trips to the offices of the Nevada City News revealed no further information about the mysterious Nicholas Carlson. It seemed as though he’d showed up in Nevada City one day out of nowhere, with only the sketchiest of backgrounds but wads of money to compensate. This he carried around with him and spent on various pet projects with the complete approval of the citizens. The only thing they didn’t realize, but we could see by just reading a few old newspaper articles, was that the man had slowly succeeded in taking over nearly the entire town.

Around four o’clock, I think, we were awakened by a knock on the door. Lewis and I both sat up in bed, wondering if we should answer. If it should be the doctor from the asylum, how would we explain who we were and what we were doing in Lorenzo Sawyer’s hotel room?

It seemed a luxury to be riding in a carriage for a change, and we made much better time than we ever could have done on foot. In less than 20 minutes we had, in fact, passed by our campsite of the previous night. It was about 8 a.m., and the sun was already warm as we bounced along the rough road heading north out of Nevada City.

It wasn’t long after the turnoff to North San Juan that we spotted a faint track splitting off from the main road. It appeared to lead up toward the mouth of a canyon that was very nearly hidden from the main road by a thick grove of large oaks.

Ever since the day that Becky and her family took the southern trail and I struck off west on the Smith cutoff, I’d had dreams about her. Some had been good but most were pretty bad. The night after we were told she’d been kidnapped by Indians, I had one hell of a bad one. But tonight, after learning she was locked up in a house for lunatics, I had myself the worst nightmare I could ever remember. Most of it had to do with me following Becky down long, dark corridors that seemed to go on forever. All the way down the length of these hallways on either side of me were locked doors that seemed to bulge outward into the passageway as I passed and door knockers that rapped all by themselves and shadows that reached out for me, then disappeared. And all the while a chorus of groans and hysterical screams echoed all around me.

Rising early the following morning, Lewis and I started hoofing it across the broad, oak-covered flat, coming after a mile or so to the top of a bluff and a steep downhill trail. A sign at the top of this steep bank said “Priest’s Grade.” There was no explanation what it meant, so we were left to imagine what priest might have trudged up this grade and why someone decided to name it after him. From this vantage point we could see our route for miles to the north. The view was of grass-covered foothills sprinkled with stands of oaks, small clumps of elms and a few pine trees thrown in here and there for good measure. All in all, pretty much the same sort of landscape we’d seen all along.

Early the next morning, we were up on our feet and out of our blankets, blinking in the bright June sunshine. There must’ve been some stray clouds overnight, because the ground was wet all around us, and little droplets of water coated the outer layer of our bedrolls. As we set about getting a little fire going and some coffee brewing, we noticed some huge clawed footprints all around our camp and Lewis guessed it had been a grizzly bear. There also were some holes where he’d scratched up the ground looking for ants and bugs.

We got up earlier than usual the next morning and found it had rained during the night. It hadn’t been a heavy rain, because the earth around our camp was just dampish, not soaked through. It was one of Morgan’s Mexicans who woke us up, shrieking some curse in Spanish as he leapt out of his tent, followed leisurely by a four-foot rattler. I figured the snake had slithered into the tent to get out of the rain and now he seemed pretty put out by the early-morning disturbance. Lewis and I had encountered our own nighttime visitors, but in our case they were nothing more than six-inch centipedes and some big hairy spiders that weren’t really much of a bother, though they made an awful crunching sound if you happened to roll over them during the night.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What would Henry Wade be doing way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“To hear how he high-tailed it out of there,” replied Sam Morgan, “I’d say the answer’s pretty clear. He was fixin’ to steal my horses."

Lewis, Sam and I were seated beside a fire in the middle of the same hollow where all the commotion had taken place that afternoon. We’d all taken so long in gathering and counting the horses that we decided to just stay there for the night. The rest of the men were either finishing up their supper or standing around in little groups spitting and cussing.

As soon as we had collected our last pay envelope from Rev. Brier, we hustled over to the office of The Star before leaving town. As we walked through the door, Francisco Ramirez told us a big bundle of northern California newspapers had just arrived in the mail. He’d already found a clue that might lead us to the mysterious “Skeeter.”

Meeting up with Rev. Brier might have made for a cordial – if not pleasant – reunion of sorts if we’d have known it was about to happen. The occasion also would have been easier for us to accept if the reverend hadn’t marched out from that back room looking so darn well-fed and prosperous. Aside from the new suit he wore, Brier was sporting a new top hat, a pocket watch and gold chain and what looked to be a diamond stick pin in his coat lapel. Both our mouths flew open when Lewis and I saw him, and it surely wasn’t an easy thing to watch. Don't get me wrong. It’s not that we hoped he’d been eaten by coyotes or anything. It’s just that here he was, this self-proclaimed man of the cloth (who, in my estimation, had caused more irritation along the trail than the sand mites in my shorts had ever done), and he seemed to have fallen into riches less than two months after escaping from the jaws of death. Whereas Lewis, who saved the whole lot of us, was walking the muddy streets of Los Angeles alongside of me, with no place to live and neither of us quite sure where our next chunk of bread was coming from. I was a little steamed.

Things went from bad to worse over the next few weeks. To start with, we couldn’t find any work in or around that little pueblo and had to move on to Los Angeles. The Bennetts trailed along with us, but we could tell they were getting antsy, and once we arrived at that ciudad, they promptly announced they were heading north with the Moodys and Skinners. I suppose this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it still hit me hard. I would sorely miss Asabel and Sally, who had been like parents to me at times during our journey.

We were a pretty bedraggled bunch of pilgrims by the time the three of us pulled ourselves away from the bar and headed back toward camp. The proprietor insisted we stay for a few more drinks on the house, and of course we had to oblige. It turned out those three trail riders had been causing pretty regular trouble in that little cantina for the past few months, and we – or I should say, John – was the first one ever to put them in their place.

By this stage of my cross-country journey I should have been used to surprises. But when that man Moody mentioned Mary’s name, I was as wobbly kneed as a baby trying to take his first shaky steps. All along I’d been praying that Mary and the children would make their way to safety, but I hadn’t held out much hope, especially after that wicked sand storm. Knowing the fates of Culverwell and Isham hadn’t helped much, either. But now I had actually been told that Mary and her family had come out of the desert safely. I couldn’t have heard any happier news.

Our little party was a good deal smaller now, and promised to get smaller still. Asabel was so anxious to quit this Spanish country and head north that each morning for the next several days I woke up wondering if they’d be heading off like Jean and Abigail Arcane. The only thing keeping the Bennetts here was the fact that they had no wagon, no money, no job and no prospects for getting any of the three in the near future. And so, for the time being, he and his family were in the same boat as the rest of us, “victims of the elements,” as Lewis liked to call us.

After spending a pleasant night’s rest in this lovely camp, Sally Bennett felt quite well again and was ready to travel. John’s leg also had fared better by laying over here, and he announced he was “rearin’ to hit the trail again.” In the early morning light before the rest of us had risen, Lewis had hiked ahead a few miles to scout the trail. He returned to tell us that the Jayhawkers or some other party had tramped through here some time ago. In doing so, they had done us the favor of breaking a trail through the vines and brambles that had so perplexed John and him the first time they’d come through.

We were truly on the edge of a settled country now, so close to the fertile valleys of California that we could see them in our minds when we closed our eyes. After we’d all rested at the beautiful spring for some time, Asabel suggested that Lewis take the mule and his rifle and go back to where we’d seen those animal tracks earlier that day.

Around noon, we finally came to the mouth of the canyon, exiting by way of a deep wash much like the one on the other side of the mountains. Walking out onto the alkali flats of another little saline valley, we saw that it was a little like Death Valley, but not nearly so deep or desolate or long. In this little desert basin Lewis hoped to locate the Jayhawkers’ beaten trail before the winds and blowing sand obscured it altogether.

Out of the valley of death we surely were. Up here in the mountains, away from the dry lake beds and salt pans of the sink, there was a coolness to the breeze and a crispness in the air that I hadn’t enjoyed since Becky and I shared the afternoon on that mountainside a week before we took the Smith cutoff. For the first time in a long time, I remembered it was still winter – somewhere about the first week of February, I figured. For a few hours, with that cool breeze coming down to hit us in the face, I actually found myself missing the cold and snow of winter in Michigan.

Lewis did his best to sound hopeful, but he told us that only by the grace of God had the two of them returned at all. He told us how deep the snow had appeared in the great mountains to the north of their road. He talked of black and desolate ranges to the south and of vast dry plains in the same direction.

The next week passed slowly and the mood about camp was one of shared anticipation. All eyes scanned the mountains, and all ears listened intently for a distant whistle or war whoop. At any moment our salvation might appear in the form of two men walking out of a nearby canyon or emerging from the rolling waves of heat to the south. Each day began and ended in silence; identical sunrises and sunsets surrounding 10 hours of waiting. Conversations were brief, hesitant, and filled with all kinds of attempts at optimism. My birthday fell in the middle of that week, but I didn’t bother mentioning it to anyone. It didn’t seem right to be making a fuss over one day that was no less hot, dusty or uneventful than the next.

Day turned to night and the storm raged on, finally letting up sometime in the early morning hours. All this time, I huddled inside Asabel Bennett’s spare wagon, sleeping fitfully. Late in the morning of the following day, some 18 or 20 hours after I had first crawled into the rig, it was Sally Bennett who pulled apart the canvas flaps at the back of the wagon and saw me curled up on the floorboards inside.

I awoke the next morning to a sky the color of dirty canvas. There was a strange movement of warm air all about me, little wisps of wind erratically playing with my hair and swirling around my face as I rose and stretched. Looking to the south, I didn’t at first see anything out of the ordinary, maybe just a bit more haze than usual hanging in the air. To the north, the sky was a pale yellow color, almost like a winter sky in morning when a bad squall is approaching. But the air here was warm and the sky above me blue and cloudless. There surely wasn’t any snow about to fall in these parts.

By late the following day, I was well enough to limp around our pitiful little camp, and by the third morning I was looking pretty much normal, except for the cuts on my face. Mary had dusted these with flour, and they were starting to heal nicely. I also had a large purple bruise on my chest, but most of the pain had gone away and it was only tender with pressure.

With Lewis and John truly gone, it wasn’t long at all before some of those in our remaining party began questioning why they should stay at this weak desert spring to await their return.

“All I know is they’ll be damn fools if they come back,” said Buck Earhart after only three days had passed. Buck’s grown son Erroll was quick to agree with his father and uncle Ned.

Leaving this camp where fresh water had been so appreciated, the 20 remaining members of our party now traveled over a rocky road for about eight miles before we came to the mouth of the first rubble-strewn canyon to lead up into the mountains, possibly all the way up to the summit of the range. Feeling in pretty good spirits, Lewis decided to hike up the wash a ways and check out this passage. But after about an hour, he came walking back down out of the canyon and called to us that the route was impassable for wagons. Making matters worse, he stumbled while making his final descent down the rocky grade, and his rifle flew in the air and landed with a crash on a large rock, breaking the stock of the gun.

At about noon on the day Lewis and I had left the Jayhawkers’ and headed back to meet the wagons, we spotted two figures approaching us from the east.

As the two men neared, I recognized them immediately as Mr. Fish and Mr. Gould. Just as Jean had said they would, the two had abandoned Captain Culverwell to continue ahead on foot. When they saw us, Fish and Gould approached eagerly and asked about the way ahead.

“Where are you from, Mr. Manly?” I asked as we moved rapidly along the trail of the Jayhawkers.

“St. Albans, Vt. Eastern shore of Lake Champlain; beautiful country. Lots of pine, hemlock, maple – at least there was when I left.”

“When was that?”

“We moved west when I was eight or nine; must have been ’28, or ’29, I guess. My father and uncle sold their farms when they heard about some good bottom land in Ohio.” Lewis chuckled. “Guess folks were restless to head west even back then. At any rate, I went ahead of the others with my aunt and uncle; I can still remember my mother and father waving their hats and handkerchiefs until we were out of sight.”

He paused a moment and we walked along in silence.

When Asabel Bennett caught sight of the three of us arriving in camp that evening, he right away called us over to his wagon to hear what we’d seen on our trek up the distant butte. With Asabel was his friend Jean Arcane, and their two wives, Sally and Abigail. Above all, they wanted to know how far it was to the end of their journey.

For two days, the westerly cutoff known as the Smith Trail took our wagons steadily upgrade over rolling hills with plentiful wood, water and grass. On the third day we came to the summit of a broad-sided mountain. Juniper trees grew in bunches, and other scrubby looking pines and firs were grouped together in tight little groves. Water was scarce but could be hauled from creeks that ran along the east slope of the mountain on both sides of the trail. On the west side of the mountain lay a deep canyon, and at the edge of this gash in the land the trail we were following came to an abrupt end.

The Jayhawkers were back, all right, but not in the company of Reb Stuart or Bart Taylor. It seems the two men had decided to lay traplines in the Wasatch Mountains rather than continue on to California. At any rate, that’s what their Jayhawker pals told our company.

Captain Hunt’s newly formed Sand Walking Company departed efficiently the next morning, heading south through the meadowlands that spread out beneath the range of towering peaks that surround the Salt Lake basin. The next few days were sunny and clear and our prospects for a safe trip were high. Most everyone seemed in good spirits except the Rev. Brier, who was still steaming over the idea of following any trail that had first been passed over by a Mormon.

I was amazed when they told me I’d been delirious for 18 days. They had made up a cot in the back of the wagon once owned by Michael Dawson and that’s where I’d stayed ever since Mary discovered I was feverish the morning the company was leaving the fort. Because the two doctors who had traveled with our train along the Platte had both left the company at Fort Laramie, it fell to the fort’s company clerk to do what he could for me before our wagons again hit the trail. The clerk, half-French and half-Sioux, assured the rest of our company that he had seen others with the same disease as me.

Judge Baldwin rose early the next morning and walked quietly over to the Wades’ wagon to wake me. The night before, he and Colonel Barker had discussed the various options regarding the Jayhawkers and Joshua Brown’s murder. Then the two had agreed to sleep on the matter and meet again before dawn to arrive at a final solution. It was a full hour before sunrise and dead quiet in camp as I fumbled about in the darkness to retrieve my clothes without waking Mary or the children. Hastily slipping on my pants and putting on my hat, I joined the judge and a few moments later we were treading lightly across the encampment toward the wagon of Colonel Barker.

Judge Thaddeus Baldwin was a stout, silver-haired gentleman with a commanding presence and a booming baritone voice. His large, square-jawed face was framed on both sides by muttonchop sideburns and capped with bristly eyebrows that seemed to travel about his forehead with little regard for the rest of his features.

It was now mid-August and temperatures along the river had become nearly unbearable. As if the heat and humidity were not sufficient irritation, clouds of mosquitoes and sand flies plagued us without end as we moved along the monotonous road.

Cholera struck the Barker Company in early August, about the time our journey up the Platte was at its midway point. There had been no signs of the disease for the first several weeks along the river, but during the last few days we’d begun to see small wooden grave markers along the road, each of them clearly marked with the name of the victim and cause of death. Now, the first member of our own company had come down with it.

As Ben Isham and I stumbled back down the hill in the growing darkness, we were met by the sounds of children’s laughter and the aroma of a hundred suppers simmering all at once.

“Join me at the hoe-down tonight,” he said when we reached the bottom of the pathway. “Mr. Fish and I will be playing in the clearing by the bonfire. There’s even been some talk of dancing, if we can clear a floor and boot a few dogs out of the way.”

Nebraska Territory in late July was not a pleasant place to be. The trail along the muddy Platte River was hot, dry and monotonous. As we moved along, our lengthy caravan of oxen and horses and mules and wagons kicked up billowing clouds of fine red dirt, which slowly fell back to earth, leaving a gritty layer of dust on our skin, our clothes, our equipment and our food. At the outset, before the jumbled collection of individual companies had organized and spaced themselves out, more than 400 wagons extended for several miles along the river. It was as if we all belonged to one large household, one large family reunion slowly moving west.

The route before us loomed as a land of great unknown. At the St. Jo feed and grain, I’d paid dearly for a map and ever since had spent a good number of hours looking it over. But it showed me little more than I’d already known about the route we’d be taking. On this map, major landmarks such as Court House Rocks and Scott’s Bluffs were clearly marked, but there was little else to leave me with a real sense of the land ahead. Farther west, the Rocky Mountains appeared on the map as a broad band of uplifted peaks with one lone wagon route cutting through at a place called South Pass. From the Mormon stronghold at Timpanagos, or the Great Salt Lake, only a faint track of a southern route had been drawn, and the words “Sandy Desert” stretched across the rest of the map nearly all the way to the California coast. All told, I figured I’d been hoodwinked.

From author John Soennichsen:

I’d like to preface this chapter with a note about authenticity. Writers of historical fiction share one key objective: to make their plot, descriptions and dialogue as authentic and believable as possible. In doing so, there is often a clash when contemporary sensitivities to words or phrases come into conflict with the authenticity gained by using such words or phrases, which were once commonplace. Such is the case with the word “nigger,” voiced by a handful of characters in this chapter.

In the United States, the word was not originally considered offensive. It was used by many as merely a description of dark skin, originally derived from the Spanish/Portuguese word Negro, meaning black. In Victorian-era literature, the word is found frequently with no negative meaning intended. Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad (whose “The Nigger of the Narcissus” was published in 1897) used the word without racist intent. Mark Twain often put the word into the mouths of his characters, white and black, but did not use the word when writing as himself in his autobiographical “Life on the Mississippi.”

Illustrating the continually evolving connotations of words, the preferred term for blacks at the beginning of the 20th century had
changed to “colored,” as reflected in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909. For most,
this term has now assumed offensive status as well, reflecting ever-changing viewpoints and preferences over the decades.

In short, many words used throughout this novel are an attempt to mirror the language actually used in the historical period this book covers. Also keep in mind the character traits exhibited by the people in this book who use offensive words the most. If use of certain words makes readers feel somewhat uncomfortable, this is a good thing because we should encounter their use as a discomforting experience.

We spent the rest of that first day in Kanesville looking for someplace where Mary and the children could stay while Henry and I made the trip to Saint Joseph, Mo. There we planned to buy a yoke of oxen and any supplies found wanting in Iowa. If the animals were available right away and a long stopover wasn’t needed, we’d return in 10 days or less, then hitch the oxen to our new wagon and depart for the trail head at Kanesville Crossing. This, we were told, was some eight miles north at a wide, easily forded spot in the river.

Nestling between low hills that line the banks of the Missouri, the town of Council Bluffs sits at a point where Iowa sidles up alongside Nebraska. When we arrived there in the first few weeks of July 1849, the place was still called Kanesville. But city fathers had already started talking about legally changing the town’s name to commemorate a pow-wow held between Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and a whole slew of Indians back in 1804. Their hope was that a new name might bring more settlers and a railroad to the growing river town.

Throughout the two weeks we spent crossing Iowa, the weather was warm and the skies clear. All I can really recall about this new state was its muddy rivers, fields of corn and small, shabby farm towns. It was the mountainous west – the rugged peaks of the Rockies and forested slopes of the Sierras – that beckoned to me. But these ranges and the vast dry country east of Nebraska seemed as far away now as they’d been when a Michigan innkeeper first described them to me scarcely three days out on the road.

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Back in the summer of 1845, a man named John Louis O’Sullivan wrote these words for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. I remember Miss Winslow reading the article to us that fall and using a long wooden pointer to identify distant points on a map of America and the western wilderness. She was trying, I guess, to give us some sense of how important this movement west really was, but I was only 10 at the time and couldn’t be bothered with anything weightier than buying a new slingshot at the mercantile or sloshing through the creek bed with Johnny Hawkins, looking for crawdaddies.

January 1, 1849. Like a collicky newborn, the year arrived with a kick and a holler. We rose that morning to the sound of northerly winds brushing across the logs of our cabin, sweeping their rough-hewn surfaces free of snow. For the next three months we would stand at the window, our breath frosting its cold surface as we watched one frigid nor’wester after another surge over the northern Michigan landscape in waves.

By the first part of February, deep drifts imprisoned the frozen ground. So much moisture had the winds drawn out of the lakes, that a dense shell of ice now encased the banks of white. When March came round, tree limbs and saplings were snapping from the weight of the snow. And as it continued to fall, the three of us huddled inside with little more to do than wait until the storms let up.

Despite the towering drifts outside and blasts of icy winds that winter, I can’t say I harbored any special fears as the season's fury unfolded around us. Having spent my entire boyhood in Michigan territory, I had grown comfortable with long stretches of bad weather each year. Fact is, only when Ma and Pa began taking great pains to reassure me, did I begin to regard that winter with new suspicion. Perhaps they saw my silence as a sign of apprehension. Maybe they hoped to reassure themselves through their own words. But it also was possible they had sensed the resounding changes this new year was about to usher in.

All I know is what I recall, and the image that lingers longest is that of Pa, edgy and preoccupied, stopping at the window for long moments at a time to gaze at the mounting drifts through the fog of his own breath.

The time is late. The last few embers have nearly burned themselves out and the room has grown cold. I should stop gazing out the window and rise from my chair to tend the fire, but images have already begun to appear on the etched surface of the frosted panes. Memories are stirring to life and rising from beneath the drifts of snow just outside my door. Once again I find myself thinking back to that remarkable year, as I have done so many times before. And though the winter of 1849 is decades behind me, events that began to unfold with that season still live in my mind. And so, I sit unmoving in my chair, thinking back to that singular year and wondering at the way my life could have changed so greatly in so little time.