Forget about the Hollywood version of the Wild West - the settlers spent more time trying to kill the boredom and the mosquitoes than fighting off the Comanche or the Apache, writes Frank McLynn.
The romance of the wagon train is one of the great images in the collective US consciousness but, myth and ideology apart, was there any substance to the idea of pioneers taming the wilderness? Surprisingly, it turns out, there is a great deal of truth in the notion.
Aside from Texas, which from 1836 had been an independent republic, in 1845 only 20,000 white people lived west of the Mississippi, and most of these were trappers, missionaries or land speculators. The 1840s saw the beginning of a remarkable westward expansion by Americans in pursuit of the promised land in Oregon and California.
By 1848, nearly 15,000 had trekked west to a new life, on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails, beginning in Missouri and ending at Oregon City, Sacramento and Salt Lake City respectively.
This migration was overwhelmingly a family affair, undertaken by "middling" farmers of the mid-west, who had just enough resources to be able to afford the $1,000 or so it took to buy wagons, draught animals, food, clothes and weapons for a six-month trip into the unknown. They were motivated by both the "pull" of the alleged Shangri-La in the west, where roast pigs were said to run around with knives and forks sticking out of them, and the land was flowing with milk and honey, and the "push" of economic depression and disease (especially malaria) in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois.
Although the native Indian tribes were not the formidable barrier we might think after indoctrination from the old-style Hollywood movies, the overlanders did face tremendous obstacles: steep mountain ranges, not just the Rockies but the Californian Sierras and the Blue and Cascade mountains in Oregon; new diseases such as smallpox, typhoid and relapsing fever, accidental death from the careless discharge of weapons and being run over by wagons and, most of all, drowning in the rapid, treacherous and torrential rivers the emigrants had to cross: the Kansas, the Platte, the Sweetwater, the Bear and (worst of all), the Snake and the Columbia.
Since families were the core of the overland movement, tragedy on the trail tended to have a multiplier effect. A restless, footloose man named Henry Sager took his pregnant wife and six children west in 1844. The wife died of the effects of childbirth, the husband of typhoid, and one of the children was lamed for life when run over by a wagon. The children were adopted by Methodist missionaries in Oregon, but two of them died in a massacre in 1847, when the Cayuse slaughtered the missionaries for introducing measles into the tribe and two more died tragically shortly afterwards. The story of the 1840s pioneers, then, is a family story.
The Californian Gold Rush of 1849 changed the picture utterly. Before that date most emigrants had elected to travel to Oregon. Formerly British territory administered by the Hudson's Bay Company, Oregon passed into US control after 1845 when the British government decided not to go to war over a faraway land on the shores of the Pacific. California, by contrast, was not wholly American until Mexico concluded the humiliating peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, after its disastrous defeat by "Manifest Destiny" Americans in the war of 1846-48.
When gold was discovered 40 miles from modern Sacramento in January, 1848, the story of the overland trails changed. California boasted 400 family-based migrants in 1848, but the following year there were 25,000 get-rich-quick individuals, mainly young men from the slums of the east, many of them psychopaths and vicious criminals. By the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, 250,000 people had gone west.
Considering that the western migration by the overlanders in covered wagons is one of the great American archetypes, and that it bears comparison with the Boers' Great Trek in South Africa at roughly the same time, it is surprising how poorly this aspect of the American myth has been served by the great myth factory, Hollywood. Most of what we think we know about the wagon trains from the movies is false. The pioneers and the Native American tribes rarely collided and almost never fought. Every schoolboy harbours celluloid images of whooping savages galloping round wagons formed in a tight circle, but there is no evidence such an event occurred in history. The tribes were not stupid and would not have presented such tempting targets to white marksmen. Besides, in the period before the civil war, the wagon trains were an object of curiosity to the tribes, not murderous rage.
It was not until the 1860s that Indian concern about the diminishing buffalo herds was correlated with overland travel by the white man. By the time of the classic wars on the western plains and prairies (roughly 1865-80), travel by wagon train had dwindled to a trickle. The first transcontinental railway was completed in 1869, and thereafter emigrants tended to travel either by rail or stagecoach. Besides, such trouble as there was with Native Americans in the pre-Civil War period occurred in the Pacific North-west, where tribes such as the Cayuse or the Modocs were involved. The better known tribes of the great plains - the Sioux (Lakota), Cheyenne, Pawnee and Crow - never fought wagon trains, though there were a few close encounters when the presence of hotheads could have ruined everything. Many tribes, especially the Shoshone under Chief Washakie, pursued a policy of friendship towards the white man even when it was not in their interest.
Most Hollywood movies featuring wagon trains avoid the sheer boredom of life on the trail, the buffeting by wind and rain, the shortage of water, the irritations from mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, the haggling with sharp operators at the few forts along the trail (Laramie, Bridger, Hall, Boise) in favour of sensationalised or fictitious events. Many feature massacres by the Comanche or the Apache, who would never once have seen a wagon train, since the emigration routes lay far to the north of their territories. Movies such as as Kit Carson (1940), The Last Wagon (1956) and Red River (1948) feature massacres by, respectively, Shoshone, Apache and Comanche that either did not happen or could not conceivably have happened. But historical fact produces material too weak for the silver screen. Even an oustanding novel such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie, which packed into a single fictional journey every sensational event that befell the entire aggregate of overland travellers in 1840-60, was not thought sensational enough and had to be doctored. The result was a mediocre, boring and false film, directed by Andrew McLaglen and released in 1967, full of anachronisms and inaccuracies.
As a Western buff, I can state that only one movie has conveyed something of the real flavour of the overland experience - the outstanding and poetic Wagonmaster (1950), the great John Ford's account of a Mormon wagon train.
Trekking into the unknown is, perhaps, a quintessentially male experience, especially since we know that most women were not initially enthusiastic about uprooting hearth and home in the mid-West, though most of them did their best to make a virtue out of necessity once actually on the trail. In recent years, not surprisingly, considerable attention has been focused on the female overland experience: an entire academic industry of womanly archetypes has arisen, featuring not just the Mormon Sister in a Sunbonnet, but Earth Mothers, Petticoat Pioneers, Loose Ladies, Calamity Janes, Feisty Pioneers and Fighting Feminists. Yet, there is remarkable unanimity on the overall findings. Men had an easier time on the six-month trek because their heavy labour could be balanced by male camaraderie, the exhilaration of the buffalo hunt, the freedom of the wide, open spaces and the perception of being foundingfathers.
Women, by contrast, had been catapulted from the domestic scene to face the perils of the unknown, with the fear of being scalped, raped or murdered by Indians uppermost in their minds. They had had to give up kith and kin in the extended family to travel with the nuclear family on a quest whose outcome and utility they often doubted deep down. Worst of all, their work was literally never done. They could not eat their dinner, then relax, smoke and yarn round the campfire. On their shoulders was a crushing burden of cooking, washing, mending and childcare.
The only means of escape literate women possessed was to keep a diary, in which they confided their deepest feelings. Vast numbers of these diaries were later published, and they reveal some consistent running motifs: they reflect practical and down-to-earth concerns such as health and safety; they contain numerous reflections on the natural beauty encountered on the way west; they worry particularly about the threat (largely imaginary) from Indians and rattlesnakes; and they express considerable anger at husbands, brothers and fathers. Particular animus was entertained towards the patriarchal leaders who would not or could not understand the necessity for numerous laundry stopovers (which was a back-breaking chore performed simply with pumice stones and running water), were insensitive to the implications of hygiene and childbirth and would not construct proper latrines with some way of cutting down on the foul stench which emanated from the open-trench sewers. At times it seemed to the hard-pressed female emigrants that the very forces of nature conspired against them; this was especially the case when their voluminous dresses became filled with mosquitoes. On top of all this, they had to put up with male behaviour which back home they would have regarded as unacceptable. They had to turn a blind eye to fighting and fisticuffs, to crudeness, spitting and hawking, to swearing and even obscene oaths.
Since the tragedy of the Famine in Ireland did not precipitate mass emigration from Ireland to the US until the late 1840s, there were few Irishmen and women present during the pioneering phase of the covered wagon (i.e. before the Californian Gold Rush), although the Catholic Church was well represented on the first emigrant journey to California in the form of Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, a Jesuit missionary from Belgium and one of the great figures of the early west.
In 1844, the Irish came to the fore when a party under a man named Elisha Stephens broke away from the main Oregon-bound wagon train to blaze a trail to California. The so-called Stephens-Murphy party became the first group of emigrants to take wagons across the formidable barrier of the Sierra Nevada mountains down into the Californian plain. The Murphy clan consisted of the grandfather and patriarch Martin, Martin Murphy the younger and his siblings, Daniel, Bernard, Ellen and John, plus a cousin named James. Other Irish Catholics in the party were Patrick Martin and his adult sons, Dennis and Patrick, John Sullivan and his younger brothers, Michael and Robert, and Edmund Bray, a single man. Both James Murphy and the younger Martin Murphy had their wives with them, together with five children; John Sullivan was also accompanied by his wife, Mary. The dozen Irish Catholics attracted a lot of attention because of their "deviant" faith, for the mid-west was (and indeed still is) the preserve of biblical fundamentalists. But their importance in frontier history -as the first to take wagons to California -is assured.
One of the questions often asked about the overland migration, at least before the California Gold Rush, is why some people chose to go to Oregon and others opted for California. One persuasive theory is that Protestants, with their notorious work ethic, content with small returns from industrious farming, plumped for Oregon, whereas the hedonistic, the gambler and the footloose, looking for quick returns, preferred California. There was the additional consideration that the ethos in the former British territory of Oregon was Protestant while that in California, originally part of the Spanish empire and then inherited by independent Mexico in 1821, was Catholic.
Some historians take this seminal idea further and suggest that the paradigm of conservative Oregon and experimental, novelty-seeking California can be extended to give a complete social explanation for differential emigration. Thus, aristocrats go to Oregon, Jeffersonian radicals to California, deists to Oregon, Methodist revivalists to California, and so on. When Oregonians asked the US Congress for statehood, they referred indirectly to California as a land for "the reckless and unprincipled adventurer . . . the Botany Bay refugee . . . the renegade of civilisation from Polynesia, and the unprincipled sharpers from Latin America".
The real threat to the overlanders always came, not from hostile native tribes, but their own stupidity, arrogance and complacency. Nearly 100 people perished in the central wastes of Oregon in 1845 when a mountain man named Stephen Meek promised to guide the emigrants to journey's end via a short cut. This was pure opportunism: he had not explored the route, got hopelessly lost, brought the entire caravan of 1,500 souls within an inch of total disaster, and was lucky to escape before being lynched.
The Donner Party in 1846 fared even worse. Tarrying on the way, they arrived at the Californian Sierras much too late in the year, were caught in deep snowdrifts and had to exist all winter in crude shelters until help came. The thin veneer of civilisation soon manifested itself: several people were murdered and at least half a dozen individuals, including children, survived through cannibalism; one wretch even got to the point where he preferred roasted human flesh to the animal variety.
The history of the overland trails, and especially in its darker episodes such as the Donner party, reveals a perennial truth. There are almost no depths of infamy to which human beings cannot sink but they are also capable of godlike courage, nobility and self-sacrifice.
Wagons West - the epic story of America's overland trails, by Frank McLynn, is published by Jonathan Cape. Price: £20 sterling