Nevada Nightmare on the Humboldt

Having made good their escape from the Salt Lake basin, the company of 32 men, one woman and a child, now wagon-less, footsore and hungry, trudged wearily west.  The menacing drama of the landscape could only have heightened the tension of being lost in the desert.  It was mid-September.  The days were still hot, but the temperature dropped ominously at night to freeze the water in the buckets.  Ben and Nancy Kelsey abandoned their wagons near present-day Lucin, Utah.  The others followed suit four days later at Oasis Nevada.  As they tried to fashion packsaddles for their mules, horses and oxen, they were visited by an ancient Indian who told them by gestures that he had dreamed of their coming.  While they set aside the goods they could not transport, they gestured that he should help himself--to which the elderly man responded with a lengthy prayer of thanks.  It was a meeting marked by a sadly unusual level of good will, not reflected in many other exchanges in the years to come.

'We signed to our aged host that the wagons and everything abandoned were his, all his, and left him circumscribing the heavens--the happiest, richest, most religious man I ever saw'--Nicholas 'Cheyenne' Dawson, 1841

The old Indian must truly have thought he had happened on to some strange beings as he watched them depart, with their animals, unused to being saddled with goods, twitching and bucking under the weight of their burdens.  The first few miles toward the Ruby mountains saw loads being shed and much re-packing accompanied by significant profanity.

Bidwell noted in his diary,
It was but a few minutes  before the packs began to turn; horses became scared, mules kicked, oxen jumped and bellowed and articles were scattered in all directions.  Dawson added grimly, 'There was one thing we had no trouble to pack--our provisions'

East of the Rubies

The company tacked anxiously south, west, and south again until they found themselves at the foot of the Ruby Mountains.  They had been warned to not go too far south--or north.  Blindly, they pushed  on into the mountains, over Harrison Pass, following the creek at the bottom of the twisting canyon which led to a west-flowing river.  Although they did not know it, this was the south fork of the Mary's River [soon to be renamed the Humboldt] that they had been seeking. 

Entry to Harrison Pass through the Ruby Mountains

Up over Harrison Pass through the Ruby Mountains

But no sooner had they started to follow the river, than it appeared to be dwindling and drying up.  They had been expecting it to swell with tributaries and guide them, said Nicholas Dawson, 'to the plains of California and on to the Pacific, where our troubles would end, and where we could eat, eat, eat...'

The slow moving Humboldt River

More Humboldt River

Here their solidarity began to seriously fracture.  The owners of the horses and mules could move faster than the oxen, but the oxen were all  the food remaining.   After a few days of tracking the winding Mary's River, eight men of the party seized the lion's share of the meat from one of the freshly butchered oxen, mounted up and made for the the mountains, leaving their companions staring after them in the desert.  The remaining 26 emigrants had found some local Paiute guides who had a limited knowledge of the desert ahead.  The party plodded onward with the remaining cattle, past the place where the river disappeared into the sands.  Next they made their way across the desperate 40-mile desert and turned south toward the west fork of the Walker River, running parallel to the wall of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  On October 15, with the winter advancing day by day, they camped at the foot of the Sierra, hoping to get a foothold into the mountain fastness.  During the night, their Indian guides, unable or unwilling to take them any further, slipped off into the night...