Days of '49/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
1
The reports brought by emigrants caused the Army to dispatch relief trains earlier than had been intended. Pack mules, loaded with flour, pork, rice and barley, driving beef cattle and work oxen were sent in all directions from which emigrants came, and large depots were established. From these depots the scouts pushed out with laden pack mules to meet and assist emigrants. There were not enough soldiers for the work. Miners threw aside their tools and joined the pack trains.
Hales and Burton went with the train that left Sacramento on Oct. 10th under command of Captain Hunt to assist in the relief of emigrants who came through what was known as the Carson River Route.
Captain Hunt's party left the city in the rain. The pack train struggled along through slush and mud. All the men were kept busy covering and retying the wet packs. Burton, with a kind of sullen tirelessness, the reins of his mule on his arm walked up and down the train, trying packs, pausing to retie them, slapping on the stragglers.
"What men these Californians are!" said Captain Hunt, observing him.
Thus it was that men who two or three years before had hardly known there was such a country as California were being called Californians, as if they were a new, recently found race; and they were, in a way, being of a race that had found new and unsuspected strength, generosity, courage within themselves after entering a far country. Until '49, it was the Spaniards who were called Californians.
The stories they soon began to hear from the emigrants that were coming through deeply affected the men, particularly Burton.
Cholera, which earlier in the year had wiped out over five thousand emigrants on the plains, had again appeared. Indians, growing bolder and bolder, were stealing stock and leaving families with teamless wagons, stranded in the midst of prairie wilderness. Oxen became worn and weary; household goods were thrown away to lighten the load; the roads were strewn with clothing, trunks, even guns. Wagons themselves were abandoned. The air was filled with stench of carcasses.
One James Abbey, an emigrant who got through, reported:
"I counted in a distance of fifteen miles 350 dead horses, 280 oxen, and 120 mules, and hundreds of others are left behind, unable to keep up. Vast amounts of valuable property have been abandoned and thrown away. In the last ten miles of this desert I counted 362 wagons, which in the States cost $120 each."
From the Army's relief depots the scouts, usually in pairs, with mules and what provisions could be carried, pushed out in search of the most destitute.
Hales and Burton rode together. Rain, snow, sleet fell. They at times met emigrants, many on foot, some without food, yet carrying mining tools.
"Throw them damn things away," Burton would say. "Get farms—stay away from the mines!"
He had adopted as the gospel what Hales had told him as a prophecy, that emigrants were going to find more wealth in farms than mines.
Burton and Hales pushed clear to the desert of the Humboldt Sink. They could have walked that desolate area by stepping from one dead mule or oxen to another.
There were whole families on foot, with hardly clothing on their backs and no food; men were living on the flesh of long dead mules; children were without water. Provisions were doled out by the scouts, government mules and oxen put to the wagons, and the emigrants sent on. When they reached mining camps, miners gave them money, merchants gave them food.
The emigration along the Humboldt River stopped abruptly. Those who were coming had either died or reached the foot of the mountains and were helped across. Those who had decided to wait for spring, when there would be plenty of feed, had gone into encampment near Salt Lake.
About the last of the emigrants heard of along the Carson route before the Army withdrew—and it did not withdraw as long as there was possibility of other emigrants coming—were, so the report said, two or three wagons that had ventured into what the emigrants thought was a mountain cut-off called Indian Ledge.
"We'll go see" said Burton to the officer who had received the report.
2
It was a thirty-mile ride along a mountain trail, hardly a trail. Rain was coming down; at times it turned into a mushy snow, at other times a moist sleet. He and Hales started in early afternoon with two pack mules and climbed along the trail as long as there was light. They camped in wet clothes under cut boughs, over which wet blankets were spread. The rain, warmed by some air current, tried in vain to turn itself into snow. Snow would have been more comfortable.
The next morning before daylight they were up and on their way. The rain became a miserable drizzle of sleet. The trail was a broken thread of ledge winding down a mountain. No wagon could possibly, or anything like possibly, have come through.
About noon they came upon a straggling party of four men, wretched fellows, limping along. They shouted deliriously at the sight of Hales and Burton. Miles and miles back—they had lost all count of distance—their oxen had given out, even long before the road became impassable for a wagon.
They cried out ravenously for food, snatched what was given them, ate hysterically, chattering, cursing, praying, demanding to know how much farther. They expected to have the pack mules to ride.
"Who's behind you?" asked Hales.
"Fellow named Taylor—'bout ten mile. His oxen went down after he struck the worst of the road. Woman an' two children"
Burton, in the very gesture of doling out food, threw the food on the ground and cursed them. They shrank from him. He was dangerous. They tried to explain. What could they do? How help? There was no food. The oxen had been only skin and bones, and there was no food for anybody. They now, said these wretched men, could hardly walk. How help other people? And why merely stay by them to die and watch them die?
Burton would not listen to explanations. He cursed them with deep-throated sullenness, jammed food into his saddle bags, mounted his mule.
"I'm going ahead," he told Hales. "Sometimes it's minutes that count."
He rode off.
The half-starved men begged for more food than Hales rationed them.
"It would be merely extra weight to carry. Soon as you got tired you'd fling it away. That's enough to see you through."
They begged for the pack mules, for at least one.
"No," Hales told them. "Not while there are women and children to carry out."
Driving the mules before him Hales went on. The sleety rain continued.
A rock turned under a mule's foot; the mule slipped, came down on its knees, and arose. Hales dismounted, examined the injury, took off the pack, put it to one side of the trail, then shot the mule.
3
Late in the afternoon he met Burton, coming back through the sleety rain, bowed, marching up the trail. He was on foot; one child was on his arm, the other was strapped to his back. He led his mule. A woman, huddled forward as if more than half-dead, was strapped into the saddle, with canvas wrapped about her.
"Here, you take this pack mule," said Hales.
"No, the man's down. Can't walk. I told him you'd be along. He's a man. Said take out his wife an' chilern—never mind about him. By God, I'll get them out an' afore morning!"
Hales swung from his saddle.
"Here, take my horse."
"No. Make better time afoot. I know the trail. I'm goin' straight through an' get these people under cover."
He would not parley. He went on. Broad, powerful, grim and generous, pouring out his strength for a woman and children whom he did not know, and whom he would probably never see again after that thirty-miles climb over a mountain trail, through the rain, in the night.
Hales turned and looked after him amid the penciling of rain. Great in strength, great-hearted. "Californian," Captain Hunt had called him. One of the new race. Californians. Other forms and figures of this new breed drifted across Hales' thoughts—Judge Deering, thundering at an angered mob. Wallace B. Kern, more proud of having been a miner than of having been a Senator in New York. Clay Freeman, ex-butcher, rude and crude, but clean-hearted, honest. Dr. Perle. Yank and the surly Joe. Maw Jones, Gubbins, and Maria the indomitable. Ezekiel Preble, street preacher and prophet. Nameless scores of miners, soldiers, merchants. Californians. No longer did the name mean a dark-eyed, pastoral people.
A mile or two farther on Hales came to a wagon. How it had got that far up the mountains was difficult to imagine. But it was empty except for a gaunt, bearded, weak man, who lay with motionless peering.
"Will they get through?" he shouted at Hales, weakly.
"Yes. Give that fellow a child to carry—he'll go through hell."
"Don't curse," said the man Taylor. "It doesn't sound right to curse now."
"I wasn't cursing," said Hales. "I was just telling you about that man."
Hales took an ax from the pack, cut into the wagon to get dry wood, made a small fire under the wagon, made tea, fried bacon, fed the man Taylor, who was, in spite of his unkempt appearance, plainly a man of some refinement.
"If they get through I don't care what happens to me," he muttered broodingly.
"I guess you're one of the new breed all right," said Hales, looking at him.
The man stared questioningly, but Hales did not explain. He was looking hard, then, doubtfully:
"Your name's Taylor—Samuel Taylor?"
"Who—who are you?"
"Dick Hales."
"You—Dick Hales! Oh, oh!"
Taylor grasped him, hung to him, staring at him.
The last time they had met was years before when Hales, on a visit to the East, had stood near his brother in an old New England church while a beautiful girl, innocent, shy, had received upon her finger a ring and promised to love the man by her side until death did them part; and this was the elder brother of that girl.