Humboldt hell

We can leave Joe B and the others at the foot of the Sierra for the time being and consider the fate of those who followed in his wake along the Humboldt where my brothers and I drove today.  Where Joe B's company had the disadvantage of being the first and not knowing where they were going or how much time or distance would be involved, the followers in later years, particularly during the Gold Rush of 1849-50, experienced all the difficulties in competition with thousands of others, all trying to get food and especially water in this desert which bordered the Humboldt River.  This was a journey that Joe B also completed in 1848 and 1854.

Pardon my dust

If all went well, they reached the Humboldt in late August or early September, after the hot dry summer had reduced its flow.  The emigrants expected a typical river from the eastern US, and instead found a stream that meandered, warm and soapy with alkali, down weaving channels, twisting and turning along loops and turns called oxbows because they resembled the yoke that fitted over the necks of the oxen who pulled the wagons on the trail.  The river was constantly creating new oxbows and cutting off old ones, leaving standing water in oxbow lakes, called sloughs by the emigrants.  Wary companies did not allow their animals to approach the dangerous river bottoms to drink, but instead took water and feed to them.  Many an ox or mule sank into the muddy margins of the river and drowned trying to reach the murky, soapy water for a drink.

A Humboldt slough

The channels were lined with their bloated bodies, combining their smells with that of carrion and waste to create an odor that tortured the emigrants--along with the exposed, dreary landscape and the caustic alkali dust that burned the skin and eyes.

'The heat is fiery, intense, sultry, oppressive, suffocating, parching and scorching  earth, and water and air and every green thing'  --Israel Shipman Lord, 1849

Forty mile desert

Discomfort, hunger, annoyance and exhaustion sharpened the emigrants' nerves to  a razor edge.  In one of the better documented episodes, this was the place where James Reed of the Donner Party killed a fellow emigrant and was banished into the desert.  From Winnemucca, where we stayed last night, the Humboldt begins to arc southwest into 45 miles of trail with worse water, more dreary brown hills, deeper dust, and diminishing forage for the animals.  Emigrants who had been disgusted by the local Indians' diet were now hunting for the same lizards, coyotes, squirrels or whatever they could find to eat.

'I killed and skinned and gutted about fifty frogs an inch and a half long and fried them with our hawk this noon and eat them....shot a fisher [heron] and had him and his gravy for dinner with burned-biscuit coffee very good.'  --Charles Darwin, 1849

I have noticed several dead horses, mules and oxen by the roadside, that had their hams cut out to eat by the starving wretches along the road.' --Eleazer Ingalls, 1850

'The farther we traveled the worse [the river] became.  During the last eight or ten days it seems to have been mixed up with everything nauseous...This is the end of the most miserable river on the face of the earth.'  Margaret Frink, 1850

But now the emigrants started across something even worse, the Forty-mile Desert, a hot griddle of dry expanse,  with no shade and a crust of salt and silt crunching underfoot.  The emigrants would start into it in the evening, hoping to cross the main part before the sun came up.  On moonless nights they would light their way with burning abandoned wagons, whose illumination reflected the eyes of the dead oxen, mules an horses who lay still attached to their traces.

'At intervals could be seen wagons...with two to four yoke of cattle lying dead, with the yokes on their necks, the chains still in the rings, just as they fell and died, most of them with their tongues hanging from their mouths.'  -- Gilbert Cole, 1852

'But no one stopped to gaze or help.  The living procession marched steadily onward, giving little heed to the destruction going on, in their own anxiety to reach a place of safety.'  -- Margaret Frink, 1850

The final stretch were the Carson or Truckee dune fields, a dozen or 15 miles of deep, loose sand that sucked at hooves and wheels, while the animals scented water and desperately strained to reach it.  California traders hauled water out from the Carson River and sold it to desperate immigrants for a dollar [$30] or more a gallon.  Some emigrants, having reached the rivers, transported water back to struggling family, friends and strangers.  For most the worst was now over, and they had only to breach the high Sierra which rose in their path like a towering wall of rock.

Today, an endless succession of forty to sixty foot trucks, and countless cars, roll along the interstate at seventy or eighty miles an hour, covering the same distance and terrain that cost the emigrants so dearly, in less than an hour.