Through to the San Joaquin

Little Antelope Valley, where they started.

Then this?

Are you sure it's not this way?

Wandering dazed and confused--and that's us, not Joe B.  We set out this morning with the best of intentions to find the company's starting point from Antelope Valley, near Topaz Lake on the California-Nevada border.  It all seemed reasonably clear when the large scale topographical map was laid out on the bed in the hotel, but somehow when we drove toward the mountains all the cross-referencing between the map and the territory in front of us fell apart.  Looking for the actual trail as opposed to the one on the map as described in the diaries was like a semiotic conundrum--and when we three brothers -- two holding the map and one holding the steering wheel -- began to interact, it was a rerun of ancient history to the time when we were growing up.  Freud would have had a field day, Gregory Bateson would have been nodding sagely, and a glance at the gas gauge showed that we were heading toward empty.  It was all a metaphor for the road trip.  And all this was in an air-conditioned car with full stomachs.  Take away the air-conditioning, the food, the car, and the map--it's no wonder that the company of 1841 began to fall apart.

In the previous blog, we left our company contemplating the menace of the High Sierra, with snow capped mountains in every direction.

I didn't take this one--but it looks chilly enough to suggest the mid-October panorama that confronted Joe B and the rest of the company.

 They  descended quickly from the high pass where they crested the Sierra-- down 3000 feet in six miles of trail.  By the next day, October 19,  they were at the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River. Bidwell wrote,
'Descending the stream, we found several oak scrubs which confirmed us in  the hope that we were on the waters of the Pacific.   But the route became exceedingly difficult - the stream had swelled to a river - could not approach it - could only hear it roaring among the rocks....The roaring winds and hollow murmur of the dashing waters conveyed in the darkness of the night the most solemn and impressive ideas of solitude.'   

They camped overnight, and looking around the next morning, they began to fear that they were descending too deeply into a canyon that was narrowing impossibly.  The next morning they sent out scouts to see if there was an alternative route.
'Men went in different directions to see if there was any possibility of extracting ourselves from this place without going back....Capt. B [Bartleson] also tired of waiting for the explorers to return, started down the stream, which so jaded his animals that he was obliged to wait all day to rest them before he was able to retrace his steps.  In the meantime the rest of the Company, suffering for water were obliged to travel.  We proceeded directly N. up the mountains about 4 miles, found a little grass and water - here we killed one of the 2 oxen' --Bidwell

They were now down to one single travel-worn ox as their only food supply.  Bidwell went out hunting and became separated from the rest, found nothing to shoot for food, but managed to acquire some acorn mush from an Indian boy he met on the trail.  He was still desperately hungry and now completely unsure of which direction the rest of the company had gone.  When darkness fell, he curled up under a fallen tree with a small fire to make up for the lack of a blanket or coat.  Come morning he found that he had spent the night in a grove of giant sequoias, and later in life claimed that he was the first white man to see these amazing trees.

He soon found the rest of the party and although the exact route they took is unclear, they worked their way down to the river and eventually crossed to the south side of the river, then traveled south down the South Fork canyon before crossing northwesterly to the North Fork to follow the drainage of the North Fork into the San Joaquin Valley.  It was while they were working their way out of the canyon lands that they had their only violent encounter with native Americans of the whole trip.  They had taken on a guide who, in their opinion, was mis-directing and deliberately confusing them in order to have them abandon all their goods for his companions to ransack.  They became aware that Indians were shadowing them,  looking for abandoned valuables in their vacated campsites and dismissed the guide.  Convinced that he had been trying to kill them, one of the party, Grove Cook, determined to mete out justice.

As the rest of the company broke camp on October 27, Cook stayed behind, hidden, to see if their former guide would turn up to lead his companions to ransack the former campsite.  When he appeared at the head of a small band of local Indians, Crook shot him and fled.  Fortunately for the company they were almost out of the mountains, and within three days they emerged into the great valley of the San Joaquin River, before the Indians could launch a retaliatory raid.

On the last two days of October, to their relief and delight, they found themselves traveling down the valley of the Stanislaus River where it opens into the central valley. They saw the tracks of large herds of elk, and flights of wild fowl. When they finally reached the lower Stanislaus they saw thousands of antelope. On the first of November they stopped to hunt, bagging antelope and fowl. Bidwell wrote, “My breakfast, this morning formed a striking contrast with that of yesterday which was the lights of a wolf.," while Chiles recalled, “…every man wept that night as they feasted,” safe in the knowledge that they were out of the mountains and out of danger.

It was near the end of the dry summer season in California and they observed a parched, sere, landscape.  But it didn't matter to them.  There was game, there were wild sweet grapes, and they were in the land that they had sacrificed so much to reach.  Nothing they would do later in life would be so memorable as being in the first company across the plains to California, establishing a route that would be followed by one of the biggest overland migrations in history.  Joe B. Chiles made six more trips across the plains, but this was the one that stood out in his memory.