Historic Trails Blog

The Pony Express

8/2/2020

Pony Express route from St. Joseph to Sacramento.

Reproduction of leather mochila used by pony express riders. The mochila was slotted to fit securely over the saddle and could easily be removed. A rider could transfer the mochila to another horse in a few seconds.

“The Last Run of the Pony Express of 1861” Artist George Ottinger, (1833-1917) George M. Ottinger, Public Domain

Roger M. McCoy

On the fourth of April, 1860 the stagecoach lines were completely snowed in across the Sierra Nevada range. A lone horseman bent low on his mount pushed eastward through the blinding blizzard. Occasionally the rider had to dismount to break a path through the deep drifts. As the day progressed the horse and rider began to descend the east slope of the range and eventually they had easier travel. At nightfall they followed a trail through a densely forested canyon until at last the rider saw lights of a town and the station ahead. Stiff and cold to the bone, the rider quickly dismounted and the station operator had a fresh horse saddled and standing by. The rider mounted with his mochila of mail and galloped toward the next station fourteen miles farther east where a new horse and different rider were waiting. The operator transferred the mochila and the new rider took off in to the night.
   This description is an imaginary account of the first eastbound Pony Express rider crossing the mountains on his way from Sacramento, California to Carson City, Nevada. The mail left Sacramento at 2 A.M. on the fourth, passed through Salt Lake City just before midnight on the seventh, and arrived in St. Joseph, Missouri at 4 P.M. on the thirteenth. The mail continued by train and four days later arrived in New York City. The nation stood in awe that mail had travel across the continent in only fourteen days, and only ten days across the “Great American Desert.”
   The men who worked the California gold fields lived in isolation from the rest of the country. Despite their rough existence of hard work, booze, and women, they still hoped to get rich and return home. They demanded overland mail service with the Midwest. The first effort was a forerunner of the Pony Express. In April of 1851 the U.S. government made a contract with two men, George Chorpenning and Absolam Woodward to carry mail once a month by horse and rider between Sacramento and Salt Lake City through Nevada along the Humboldt River. This 900 mile route, initially called the “jackass mail,” began in May 1851 and took sixteen days, and much of the time involved clearing a way through snow in the Sierras. Crossing the Sierras and following the Humboldt in winter proved such a time-consuming hardship that they began using that direct route only in the summer and changing to the Southern Route during the winter. The Southern Route followed the Butterfield Stage Route through Arizona. After four years customers demanded a return to the much shorter and faster Sierra Nevada route. Even in summer, crossing Nevada was fraught with danger and hardship from poor grass, poor water, and “an inhospitable and poisoned waste.”
   In 1855 Congress began to feel pressure to institute a more frequent mail service to California. The contract went to three private operators, William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell, three men who knew their way through government channels. They soon began the enterprise that became the Pony Express.   The concept was not new. Relay systems of couriers had been used in ancient Persia and in the empire of Genghis Khan. What distinguished the Pony Express was not the novelty but the efficiency and brilliant execution. The very image of the brave riders speeding through dark and storm and danger to make a fast, weekly mail service immediately captured American hearts.
   During the winter of 1859-60 the newly formed company established stations at 10 to 12 mile intervals along the 1,424 miles between Sacramento, California and St. Joseph, Missouri. Between Sacramento and Salt Lake City, Utah they had to build new stations. Eastward from Salt Lake City the company often used existing businesses willing to become stations. Before the first riders started riding, the company had invested about $100,000 ($3.1 million today) in the new venture. They bought five hundred of the best horses and manned 190 stations. Wherever possible the stations were constructed near military forts for added protection. Fort Kearny, Nebraska, Fort Laramie, Fort Casper, and Fort Bridger, Wyoming and Fort Bowie, Arizona are a few examples of forts near the Pony Express route.
   There were two-hundred station tenders to care for the horses and eighty seasoned riders for runs of seventy-five to one-hundred miles a day. The plan was to dispatch mail between Sacramento and St. Joseph once a week.
Each rider had a route of 80 to 100 miles on which to travel back and forth. While traveling his route a rider would change horses eight to ten times during the six to eight hour ride. At the end of his route he passed the mochila to a fresh rider who would then traverse the next segment of the route. The first rider would wait at the station for the next rider traveling in the opposite direction, then transfer the mochila (see illustration) to a fresh horse and return to the beginning of his route. The horses usually traveled at a trot or canter at 10 to 15 miles per hour, but at times they were pushed to gallop up to 25 miles per hour.
   The initial charge for letters was $5 ($155 today) per half ounce. With such a high price the customers were mainly governments, banks, and businesses. Letters were written on tissue paper with no envelopes, to lighten the load. The company soon found that the number of customers was too low to sustain a business that was in the red from the first day. Russell, Majors, and Waddell had hoped to establish the feasibility of such a year-round courier service, and that Congress would be persuaded to subsidize a daily Pony Express service, but that never came to pass.
   The Pony Express service came at a high price for the riders crossing the “Great Desert.” Besides the risk of crossing arid land there was hostility among the Paiutes, the Washoes, and the Shoshoni tribes over the intrusion into their lands. Some riders were attacked, as were relay stations. Often a rider arrived at a station only to find it in flames. With all this excitement they received high compensation—up to $125 ($3800 today) per month, very good pay for the time—unskilled laborers about $1.00 per day. Replacement of burned relay stations cost the company $75,000 ($2.3 million today). Despite all this danger only one rider is known to have been killed by raiding tribesmen. Also, reports show that two men froze to death.
   It was the threat of hostile native attacks and the split-second schedules that gave the Pony Express such a revered image in the American mind. It was clearly an unsustainable operation financially and only by its romantic image could such a short lived venture still resonate today. The Pony Express had one great moment in 1861 when riders traversed the westward route in a record seven days and seventeen hours to bring a copy of Lincoln's inaugural address to California. The Pony Express was by far the most effective way to communicate cross-country at the time.
   After eighteen months Russell, Majors, and Waddell recognized that the Pony Express was not going to be subsidized by the government. Their expenses are estimated to have been about $500,000 greater than income. It was not, however, just the financial ruin that killed the Pony Express. The end was made inevitable by the construction of lines by the Overland Telegraph Company, which merged with another telegraph company and changed its name to Western Union.
   The Pony Express played an oversized role in the popular imagination, considering its brief existence. Launched in April, 1860 it operated for eighteen months before the first trans-continental telegraph line was completed. The Pony Express officially shuttered on October 26, 1861.

Sources
Morgan, Dale L. The Humboldt: Highroad of the West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.1943.
wikipedia.org/wiki/George Chorpenning
wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony Express
history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the- pony-express
mentalfloss.com/article/537885/facts-about-pony-express

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The Middle Passage: Slave Trade Across the Atlantic

7/10/2020

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African captives being loaded and shackled on a slave ship. Anti-slavery Internationa

Roger M. McCoy

Old trading routes carried many commodities as discussed in the blog on “The Silk Road.” Usually we think of these commodities as high value goods, such as silk and spices, with sufficient profit to pay for the long journeys. It was also common for one of the commodities to be humans, and by the early seventeenth century (1619) humans were transported as captured slaves from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to North America and South America.
Slavery has existed in many cultures dating back before recorded history. The practice of owning another human began with the emergence of the stratified societies of civilization, probably about 11,000 years ago. Slavery appears very rarely in hunter-gatherer societies having little or no social stratification.
Captains of seventeenth-century slave ships acquired African slaves at various points on the African coast from Arab and West African traders. In the beginning traders brought slaves to Spain, Portugal, the island of Madeira, and the Canary Islands. When Europeans settled the Americas they built large plantations of labor intensive crops such as sugar cane, cotton, and tobacco, and this in turn created a greater need for captive slaves from Africa in the New World.
Slaves were usually captured through tribal warfare and sold to African slave dealers on the coasts, who acted as middlemen selling slaves to the European ship owners. African coastal societies benefitted from a steady supply of European textiles, ironware, and firearms—all in exchange for African captives. The firearms led to more forced capture resulting in more slaves sold to the dealers on the coast. This arrangement made it possible for ship owners to have a steady supply of slaves sufficient to fill their lower decks. From this it is clear that the Africans were considered nothing more than cargo for the next ships. As New World settlement expanded, Brazil, several Caribbean countries, American southern states, and African kingdoms all prospered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of the slave trade. Their economies relied heavily on slave labor.
Warfare and kidnapping clearly had a damaging effect on the populations that were victimized by the slave trade. Many African communities tried to defend themselves from slave raiders. Others retreated to more remote and defensible geographical regions to escape attacks and capture. This upheaval dispersed or destroyed many native African communities forever.
Nearly one-third of all transatlantic slave voyages originated in British ports. They sailed from England to Africa with merchandise, then transported ship loads of Africans to Caribbean islands before ruling the trade illegal in 1807. During that period slave trading became essential to the well-being of the British empire. Among other countries transporting slaves across the Atlantic, Portugal ranked nearly as high as Britain, followed closely by France. Some American ships also carried slaves.
The Atlantic voyage from West Africa to the New World was the middle segment of a three-part voyage with a different cargo on each part. First, ships left a European port with various manufactured goods such as cloth, whiskey, and metal utensils like pots, pans, and knives. These goods were taken to West Africa and traded for slaves, then taken to destinations in South America, the Caribbean, and North America. In those ports the ships would load sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rum, and begin the third leg of their trading voyage back to Europe. Much of the success of the these three-part voyages required an astute captain with the savvy to handle business deals, make sure the slaves survived, and return a handsome profit for the financiers back home.



      If the Atlantic served as the slave trade’s central artery, the networks of roads, paths, and waterways in the Americas that transported enslaved people from ports to plantations, mines, and cities were the capillaries—much the same as the slave routes on the African interior had brought them to the coastal port cities.
Each slaving voyage outfitted in London, Bristol, or Liverpool required a network of financial connections. British ships were usually financed by a group of investors in London. Manufactured goods bought on credit were loaded onto ships bound for West Africa. Because the entire venture was based on credit there were huge time lags before the manufacturers making the goods received payment from the financiers. Slave ships were away from their home port for a year or more. New World planters sending their harvests to London also had to wait long periods for payment for their produce. Financially the system was a success, but the human side of it was a disaster which the British outlawed in 1807.
British merchants and the captains of the slave ships developed their own contacts in Africa and in the Americas. Ship captains soon learned what manufactured goods were preferred by particular African traders and found which planter agents in each New World port could be relied on for the best deal on cotton, sugar or tobacco. Investors relied wholly on slave-ship captains to care for their investment in expensive ships and cargos and who were expected to have the experience needed to provide profits for the enterprise. A successful captain was paid handsomely in wages and bonuses at the end of a successful trip.
  By the time the British abolished slave trade, their slave ships alone had completed voyages carrying more than 3.2 million Africans on the middle voyage from Africa to the New World. First the British ended the Atlantic slave trade, and the next year the United States also stopped importing slaves. After America ended importation of slaves plantation owners were able to rely on the natural increase among slaves. Slavery in the United States officially ended in 1862 with the Emancipation Proclamation, but not until June 19th, 1865 (Juneteenth) did all locations actually stop the practice. In the 1850’s Britain attempted to stop the Atlantic traffic of slaves to Brazil, but the importation continued until 1888 when Brazil became the last country in the New World to outlaw slavery.
The Atlantic crossing of a European slave ship constituted a traumatic experience for the millions of Africans. The slave ship was in effect a floating dungeon. Before the Atlantic crossing even began, some slaves suffered months of confinement as the ship lingered on the African coast while the captain waited for enough captives to make the voyage profitable. Africans who made the journey had to survive disease, malnutrition, crowded space, not to mention the trauma of of being uprooted, whipped, and confined in a ship.
Although the British and Portuguese dominated the Atlantic slave trade, the the third-ranking French also shipped about one million Africans to Haiti in the late eighteenth century.
Of the 12.5 million Africans loaded onto 35,000 Atlantic ships by American and European slave traders, there are a few firsthand accounts of the slaves’ experience. One such account was published in 1789 by an African-born man living in London, titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, (London, 1789). The author, Olaudah Equiano, detailed his life journey from African captivity, the Atlantic crossing, life in slavery, and eventual freedom. Equiano’s book presented a body of evidence that supported the cause against transatlantic slaving by Britain.
In his biographical book, Equiano vividly described the experience of fear and confusion in the Africans as he at the age of eleven, and his sister, were captured, walked for several months from trader to trader until they finally reached the coast where they were loaded onto ships. He described in detail the role of the white traders and the African chiefs in capturing and selling slaves.
The role of the African chief was to capture neighboring tribes through warfare in which he put himself at risk of capture. Equiano wrote, “…if he prevails and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them, but if his party be vanquished, and he falls into the hands of the enemy, he is put to death.” After some bargaining the chief “…accepts the price of his fellow creatures’ liberty with as little reluctance as the merchant.”
Equiano had never seen white people, sailing ships, nor even imagined anything comparable to the stinking holds of a slave ship. Equiano wrote that he and all the other Africans were “in another world,” and indeed they were. Equiano later described his first experience on the ship.
“I was soon put down under the decks, and here I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. “…the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died.”
   Slave ships became known for the stench they emitted. Some sailors claimed they could tell a distant ship was a slaver by the downwind smell. Unfortunately many slaves did not survive. The main causes of death among slaves at sea was malnutrition, and disease due to the dreadful sanitation conditions below decks.
   Equiano’s life from that point took a far different course from most slaves who were sold to plantation owners. In 1754, he was purchased by Lieutenant Pascal, an officer in the Royal Navy. Pascal sent Equiano to London for schooling, then later sold him to a ship captain where he learned sailing. The captain eventually sold Equiano to an American planter named Robert King. Equiano’s rudimentary education provided him with some basic skills and prompted King to put him to work in marketing rather than in the fields.
After three years Robert King allowed Equiano to purchase his own freedom. As a free man, Equiano found employment using his sailing experience to earn a living in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Obviously Equiano’s experience was far different from the much harsher life of most slaves brought to the New World.
   American slaves working on plantations experienced varied treatment by their owners. Some were sold away from their own families to other regions, some were beaten or forced into sexual relationships with owners, while some were treated fairly and even given rudimentary education. Many recent publications recount these experiences.
Over more than 300 years the Atlantic trade routes carried 12.5 million African men, women, and children to the New World. Approximately 1.5 million (12 %) did not survive the dreaded middle passage voyage.

Sources
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself. Hollywood, FL: Simon and Brown. 2018.

Wikipedia. History of slavery. Retrieved from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

Hazard, Anthony. The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you- Retrieved from: ed.ted.com

Mustakeem, Sowande M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2016.

UNESCO. Transatlantic Slave Trade: Middle Passage. Retrieved from: slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/index.cfm?id=A0032.

UNESCO. Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slave Trade Routes: British Slave Trade. Retrieved from: slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0096.

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Pilgrimage Trails

6/17/2020

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Chaucer's pilgrims enroute to Canterbury.

The scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Route markers along the way display the symbol and pilgrims walking the trail tie a shell to their clothing.

Roger M. McCoy

We often visit places associated with a famous and respected person such as Washington’s home or Lincoln’s home. Sometimes we travel to places of great historical significance such as Gettysburg or the Normandy beaches. People often visit places considered to be sacred for their association with religious history, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, or Bodh Gaya, India, where the Buddha received enlightenment. In addition to these major destinations, there are innumerable other religious sites honored by many different beliefs.
   Journeys to these places of significance may be no more than an item on your travel checklist. For many people, however, travel to such sites has special significance, which defines a pilgrimage. Long ago people began making pilgrimages to holy sites and certain routes begun in medieval times are still in use today.
   Author Joseph Campbell points out that religious pilgrimages to the Holy Land began as early as the fourth century. Except for a two-hundred year disruption due to Islamic conquests, the number of pilgrims continued to grow over the years. By the eleventh century single expeditions often had as many as 12,000 people.
   Medieval pilgrims traditionally carried little food, water, or possessions other than the clothes they wore. Usually they had a walking staff, a purse or bag to hold bread, and a clay water container attached to a strap. Typically they wore a hat, a cloak, and leather shoes. People along the way often offered food to pilgrims believing it would bring blessings to themselves.
Following are accounts of two religious pilgrimage routes in Europe.

The Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury, England
   In mid-twelfth century England King Henry II appointed a friend named Thomas Becket to the important post of Lord Chancellor. In this job Becket enforced the payment of taxes from all landowners, including churches, and became a trusted subject to the King. Becket and the King also formed a strong friendship and often hunted and played chess together.
   When the then-current Archbishop of Canterbury died, the King appointed Thomas Becket as the new archbishop. Because Becket was not even a priest in the Church, ordination to the priesthood took place a few days later, followed the next day by ordination to archbishop—a leap from tax collector to archbishop in ten days. Henry II felt confident that having a loyal ally would help in his plan to weaken the English church’s allegiance to Rome and establish himself as the authority. King Henry II persuaded the other bishops to align with his plan to move away from the influence of the pope, but Becket refused to sign the document that would put the king before the pope. Becket seems to have experienced a religious conversion and shifted his loyalty to the Church—not the King.
   Henry summoned Becket to appear before a great council to answer allegations of contempt of royal authority. After conviction on the charges Becket stormed out of the trial and fled to the protection of King Louis VII of France. Henry tried to force Becket to return to Canterbury through treacherous schemes, but Becket retaliated by threatening the King with the direst measure: excommunication—meaning the King would never be able to receive the Church’s sacraments. After six years in France and serious negotiations Becket returned to Canterbury. Upon his return Becket excommunicated three noblemen who had been his most bitter foes.
   At this point King Henry became enraged and is said to have uttered the notorious words, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” [Several variations on this statement have been debated by scholars.] The knights who heard King Henry make this statement took it as a royal command and four of them immediately left for Canterbury to murder Thomas Becket. The abbey monks tried to make Becket take shelter, but he refused and knelt at an altar while the knights broke into the doorway. It is recorded by eyewitnesses that the knights cracked open his skull, spilling his brains onto the cathedral floor. Killing an archbishop was indeed a dire crime and Becket immediately became a national martyr. Within days a Becket shrine was established in Canterbury Cathedral and soon became the most important pilgrimage destination in England.
   King Henry was horrified when he heard the news and realized his words had caused Becket’s death. As an act of penance he donned sackcloth and ashes, and ate nothing for three days. The king then performed a public act of penance at Canterbury. He publicly confessed his sins, and then allowed each bishop present to give him five blows from a rod, then each of the eighty monks of the monastery with Canterbury Cathedral gave the king three blows. The king then offered gifts to Becket's shrine and held a vigil at Becket's tomb.
   Pilgrims began to converge on Canterbury to pay homage to the martyred Becket. Although pilgrims arrived from any direction, the preferred starting point was the cathedral city of Winchester—153 miles from Canterbury—requiring fifteen days of travel. Henry II came from his royal castle in Normandy to a port on the south coast and thence to Winchester to begin his own pilgrimage to Canterbury.
   The well-known work written in 1400 by Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales,” tells of a group of twenty-nine pilgrims of all social classes traveling from London to Canterbury, twenty-four of whom tell a tale written in rhyming verse.

Ready to start upon my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, full of devout homage…
…Some nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry persons who chanced to fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all…
…It seems to me accordant with reason
To inform you of the state of every one…

Each of the twenty-four pilgrims telling a story is identified by trade or profession, including a knight, a miller, a cook, a friar, a merchant, and a physician, plus eighteen others. Historians and literati value Chaucer’s work for its view of life in late fourteenth-century England and the expertise of his writing.

The Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago de Compostela)

A second example of pilgrimage routes is the road to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Legends tell that the Apostle James's remains were carried by boat from Jerusalem to northern Spain, where he was buried in what is now the city of Santiago de Compostela. Roads from many parts of Europe converge on a road in northern Spain that follows an earlier Roman trade route westward to the Atlantic coast.
   The legend holds that Saint James preached in Spain where he saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. He later returned to preach in the Holy Land and was beheaded by Herod in 44 A.D. His followers then took his body by ship to Santiago de Compostela, Spain for burial as a martyr.
   Where there is a martyr there is soon a shrine and a pilgrimage. One unusual aspect of this particular pilgrimage is its association with the scallop shell. One legend explaining the importance of the shell says that the ship wrecked just offshore and Saint James's body was lost. Some time later his body washed onto a Spanish beach covered with scallops.
During the medieval period a scallop shell was worn as proof of completion of the pilgrimage. Today’s pilgrims wear a scallop shell on their clothing or backpack during the trek to Santiago de Compostela. The shell also appears on sign posts marking the route.
   The daily needs of pilgrims on their way to and from Compostela were met by a series of hospices with lodging and care for travelers and usually run by a religious order and under royal protection. The hospices expected a donation from the travelers but many poor travelers had little to offer and some had such bad health they could barely complete a day’s journey between hospices.
   Pilgrims walked the Way of Saint James for months to arrive at the great church in the main square of Compostela and pay homage to St. James. Traditionally pilgrims touched the pillar just inside the doorway of the cathedral and the pilgrimage was complete. So many pilgrims have now touched the pillar that the stone is partially worn away.
   Typically pilgrimages involve a journey to a significant place where a person may experience renewed understanding of themselves. To many, however, the journey itself, not the place, is the significant action.

Sources
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. Joseph Campbell. 1973.

The British Pilgrimage Trust. The Pilgrims Ways to Canterbury. Retrieved from website: https://britishpilgrimage.org/portfolio/pilgrims-way-to-canterbury/

Becket Controversy. Retrieved from website:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becket_controversy#Aftermath

Henry II of England. Retrieved from website:
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry II of England

Camino de Santiago. Retrieved from website:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino de Santiago

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Stagecoach Trails

5/25/2020

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This drawing from the Tombstone Epitaph in 1886 was part of an advertisement promoting the stagecoach service from Tucson, Arizona to Tombstone, Arizona.

The Butterfield stage route originated from Saint Louis with a later branch to Memphis.

Roger M McCoy

The first mention of a coach was in an English manuscript from the thirteenth century. The first known stagecoach route in Britain began much later, in 1610, and made a short run from Edinburgh to Leith, Scotland a distance of only three miles. This small beginning was soon followed by a proliferation of other routes, and by the mid-seventeenth century, a basic stagecoach infrastructure was in place in Great Britain. With infrastructure in place the stagecoach then became the primary means of carrying mail and passengers between cities. In 1649 Edward Chamberlayne wrote admiringly about this new transportation in England.

“Besides the excellent arrangement of conveying men and letters on horseback, there is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both
for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns in
the country, that the like hath not been known in the world, and that
is by stage-coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any
place, sheltered from foul weather and foul ways; free from
endamaging of one's health and one's body by the hard jogging
or over-violent motion; and this not only at a low price (about a shilling*
for every five miles), but with such velocity and speed in one hour, as
that the posts in some foreign countries make in a day.”

(*NOTE: One shilling in 1650 was equivalent to $8.25 in today’s dollar. Today a shuttle from my house to the Tucson airport costs $49 or about $10 for every five miles. Coincidentally, that shuttle is called Stagecoach Express.)

In support of this growth in stage lines, coaching inns developed as stopping points for travelers on longer routes as between London and Liverpool. These inns became stopping points or stages in the journey that provided food and drink for the passengers and a change of horses. The business of running stagecoaches or the act of journeying in them was known as staging—hence the name stagecoach.
   During the American colonial period, the stagecoach was the primary carrier among the New England colonies. In the early nineteenth century railroads began to be built in the United States and by 1845 were built as far west as Saint Louis, but there was still no way to send mail to San Francisco except by a long voyage by ship around South America.
   In 1850 a ship from New York took about 200 days (6.5 months) to sail to San Francisco. The discovery of gold in California led to a rapid increase in population in the west and created a strong need for a shorter communication time with the west coast. To this purpose the United States Congress authorized a contract in 1857 for overland mail service from Missouri to California via horse-drawn conveyances. This far-reaching contract was awarded to New York businessman John Butterfield.
The visionary John Butterfield developed a grand scheme for a stagecoach route to carry mail and passengers from the railhead in Saint Louis to San Francisco in only twenty-five days. It took a year to work out the details, and Butterfield decided on a southern route, south from Saint Louis via Arizona to avoid bad weather. In addition, he refused to carry gold or silver in an effort to cut down on attacks by highwaymen. Butterfield built 139 relay stations along the 2,795-mile route, about twenty miles apart with meals and horses at each of the stops. For the twenty-five-day trip, the Butterfield stages did not stop for the passengers to sleep. Their only choice was to sleep on the moving stage.
   In New Mexico and Arizona the Butterfield trail passed through Apache territory, and for two years the Chiricahua Apaches permitted safe passage by an agreement under which the tribe would be compensated and also provide firewood for the stage stations. This arrangement came to an end when an army lieutenant had an angry exchange of words with the Apache chief, Cochise, and the lieutenant put Cochise in jail. This unfortunate event led to hostilities between Apaches and Arizona settlers for the next twenty-five years.
   In 1860 the Pony Express, a single rider on horseback, began carrying mail over a central route and shortened mail delivery time even further. The following year, the Butterfield Overland Mail route was discontinued and the Pony Express joined forces with Wells Fargo, which began in 1852 as an express and banking service.
   Stagecoaches became such a fixture for travel that it is worth looking at them in some detail. Among several variations and sizes of stagecoach, two stand out as most used in the western United States. One was the Concord Coach, originally built in Concord, New Hampshire. This coach could hold six passengers inside with a few more sitting on top. Usually four horses were sufficient, but often six were used. The inside of the Concord style coach measured four feet wide and about four and one-half feet high. The seats were boards with padded leather upholstery, which were said to be harder than a bare board. The walls had cloth coverings.
   A second type of stagecoach, built in Concord and Albany, was the celerity (swift) wagon. This lighter-weight wagon was designed by John Butterfield for use on his mail route. To decrease weight, the celerity wagon had canvas instead of a wooden top and larger window openings with canvas roll-down curtains. The larger windows reduced weight but gave less protection from constant dust. For extra stability the wheels were farther apart with longer axles. Wider steel rims on the wheels served well for traveling on sandy roads. Some stagecoaches had seat backs that let down to create a flat bed so passengers could sleep. However this feature was of limited use if the coach was full of people. Luggage was stored in a compartment on the back as the canvas roof could not bear weight.
   One Butterfield passenger, a Mr. Ormsby, wrote in 1858 about his efforts to get some sleep while bouncing along in a celerity wagon. “Perhaps the jolting will be disagreeable at first, but a few nights without sleeping will obviate that difficulty, and soon the jolting will be as little disturbance as a rocking cradle.” Ormsby added that, “White pants and kid gloves had better be discarded.”
   Other stagecoach routes took a more direct route west from Saint Louis to San Francisco passing directly through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains across Wyoming. In 1870 Mark Twain made the trip by stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to Virginia City, Nevada, site of the famous Comstock gold lode, where he worked for a newspaper. Twain kept an account of his travels by stagecoach across the West and published a detailed and interesting account of the trip titled Roughing It.
   Twain’s description of a stagecoach station in the middle of the prairie is particularly interesting as it shows the adaptions and meager life style in the vast grasslands with no timber for building.
The station buildings were long, low huts made of sundried, mud-colored
bricks, laid up without mortar. The roofs, which had no slant to them worth
speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer
of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass.
It was the first time we had ever seen a man ’s front yard on top of his
  house. The buildings consisted of barns with stables for twelve or fifteen
  horses, and a hut used for an eating-room for passengers.

Twain wrote that the station’s window was a square hole with no glass and the floor was hard-packed earth. By the door outside was a tin wash basin, a pail of water and a piece of yellow soap, but no towel. A mirror hung in one corner with half a comb hanging by a string. The few three-legged stools provided seats at the table, which was a greasy board on stilts. A battered tin plate, a knife and fork and a tin pint cup were at each man’s place. Twain wrote, “We could not eat the bread nor drink the the “slumgullion.” (Slumgullion is a thin stew with little substance.)
   Because the stagecoach stopped only for eating and changing horses, all passengers managed to catch what sleep they could while bouncing along in the coach. Mark Twain gave a vivid account of traveling through the night without stop.
We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in
the original positions, and got up at once, thoroughly refreshed, free of soreness and brim full of friskiness. After breakfast we bathed in
Horse Creek [Wyoming]—an appreciated luxury, for it was seldom
that our furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of
that kind. We changed horses ten or twelve times in every
twenty-four hours—rather changed mules—and did it every
time in four minutes. It was lively work. As our coach rattled up to
each station six harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable;
and in the twinkling of an eye, almost, the old team was out and the new one in and off and away again.

After getting accustomed to the bouncing ride of the stagecoach, Twain wrote, “Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels.”
   Although the mail and passenger service by stagecoach lasted only a short time the stagecoach routes played a major role in connecting the east and west of the continent before the railroad and hold a prominent place in the history of the West.

Sources
Ahnert, Gerald T. Butterfield Overland Mail Company stagecoaches and stage (celerity) wagons used on the southern trail. Syracuse, New York: Gerald Ahnert. 2013.

Ely, Glen Sample. The Texas frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail. 1858-1861. Norman: Oklahoma University Press. 2016.

Helmich, Mary, A. Stage styles: Not all were coaches. California Department of
Parks and Recreation. 2008. Retrieved from https://www.parks.ca.gov/? page_id=25449.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Hartford Connecticut: American Publishing Company. 1873. (Many newer editions are available.)

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Life on the Cattle Trail

4/15/2020

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Cattle drive sculpture by Paul Moore at the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center, Duncan, Oklahoma

The chuck wagon moved ahead of the herd to the next campsite and began preparation of the evening meal. Photograph by Erwin Smith ca. 1912.

Roger McCoy

Herding cattle over long distances was an arduous job. Most of the time it was also a tedious job, but the tedium was occasionally broken abruptly by emergencies such as storms, swollen rivers, and stampedes. Storms in particular were dangerous because the lightning and thunder could frighten the cattle and cause a stampede. The men themselves also feared for their safety during such storms. G. W. Mills wrote of a sudden hailstorm so intense the men’s hands and backs were covered with welts, and the hail was four inches deep on the ground. Following that storm, “We had no supper nor breakfast; when we got to camp the next morning, we found the cook fixing to leave, thinking surely that all the men had been killed by the hail.”
The drovers lived spartan lives as they carried just enough goods to be self-sufficient for two months. Each drover usually carried a change of clothes and a blanket or tarp for bedding. His saddle became a pillow but a tent was out of the question. Drovers carried no medical supplies so if one became sick or injured he could only hope for a quick recovery or quick death. The most common cause of illness was contaminated water drunk from streams on the trail. The still-popular red bandanna was tied around a cowboy’s neck, to be pulled over his nose and mouth when the dust clouds swirled around the herds.
One drover, J.C. Davis, wrote to his girlfriend that they had a string of bad luck with “1 killed, 1 with his back broke, 1 collar bone broke, & I came near getting drowning in the Canadian River yesterday.” Jack Bailey wrote in his journal about the loneliness and isolation after weeks on the trail, “i was such a fool to come on this trip. one consolation is that I am not afraid to die.”
River crossings could be as routine as wading through shallow water, but it was extremely dangerous when the herd had to swim across a river. Once in the water, cattle tended to start milling in circles or trying to turn back. Several drovers had to be on the opposite shore to keep them moving after crossing and not block the way for other cattle. In 1877 J.M. Nance wrote of crossing the Brazos River in Texas with 2,100 head of cattle swimming the swollen river. “It looked as if I had no cattle at all, for all I could see were the horns,” he wrote.
Nance later wrote of crossing the Canadian River at flood in Indian Territory. After waiting several days for the river to lower, he began moving the herd across. He wrote, “The cattle were started across and were going fine, when it came a terrific hailstorm and the hail began pelting us. One of the men was on the other side, naked, with his horse and about half the herd.” They delayed the crossing until the next morning when Nance wrote, “The naked man reported he had a good saddle blanket which kept him ‘warm enough’ during the night.”
A chuck wagon, earlier called a mess wagon, carried food enough for the journey. Incidentally, one of the many meanings for the word chuck is “food” or “provisions.” The chuck wagon usually carried flour, bacon, coffee, dried peaches, grits, beans, pickles, and black pepper. Meals were simple but hearty and the menu was repetitious, consisting of bacon, beef stew, beans and biscuits. If dried fruit was included in the chuck wagon provisions, cowboys could also expect an occasional pie. A cast-iron Dutch oven was essential for camp cooking. A shallow pit was dug in the ground with a hot fire built at the bottom; the Dutch oven with the stew or beans inside was lowered into the pit, and hot coals placed on the lid. This cooked for hours to create tender meat or beans. Biscuits and pies were also baked this way. Cast-iron skillets cooked bacon over an open fire.
At night the cattle were kept close together and allowed to graze. Riders rode around the herd in shifts to prevent straying and to keep predators at bay. It was during the nighttime that riders sang to help keep cattle calm. Probably most cowboys sang without a real tune or lyrics, “Git Along Little Dogies” was first mentioned in a journal from 1893. The first reference to the song “The Old Chisholm Trail” is from a diary in 1870. Both these songs were based on Irish and English songs dating back to 1640. It is unclear how the American cowboys adapted the lyrics to their situation. Western singers such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers sang it as part of their regular repertory. Go to YouTube for audio versions of the songs.

The lyrics to “The Old Chisholm Trail” ring true to the trail drover’s experience.
“Well, come along boys and listen to my tale
I'll tell you all my troubles on the ol' Chisholm Trail
chorus:
Come a-ti yi youpy, youpy yea, youpy yea
Come a-ti yi youpy, youpy yea.

I started up the trail October twenty-third
Started up the trail with the U-2 herd
chorus:

On a ten dollar horse and a forty dollar saddle
Started out punchin' them long horn cattle
chorus:

With my seat in the saddle and my hand on the horn
I'm the best dang cowboy that was ever born
chorus:

It's cloudy in the west and lookin' like rain
And my danged old slicker's in the wagon again
chorus:”

“Git Along Little Dogies” This song depicts the cowboy driving cattle to Wyoming. A dogie is an orphaned calf.
“As I was walking one morning for pleasure
I spied a cowpuncher riding along
His hat was throwed back and his spurs were a-jingling
And as he approached he was singing this song
chorus
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.
It's your misfortune and none of my own.
Whoopie ti yi yo, git along little dogies
You know that Wyoming will be your new home.

Early in the springtime we round up the dogies
Mark 'em and brand 'em and bob off their tails,
Round up the horses, load up the chuck wagon,
Then throw the little dogies out on the long trail.”
chorus:

Despite the many books, movies and songs about the cattle trails, we can never fully know the experience of herding cattle in nineteenth-century conditions.

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COWBOY CULTURE

3/25/2020

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Mexican vaqueros wore chaps, high boots and tall hat. Notice the silver ornaments on chaps and stirrup. The Mexican vaquero was the forerunner of the American cowboy.

Chuck wagon at mealtime.

Dutch oven with embers on the lid.

Texas Longhorn cattle.

Sue McCoy

   We should remember that today there are enormous cattle ranches in the southwest, and that daily life on a ranch today is not too different from life for the nineteenth-century ranchers. There are still chuck wagons to feed cowboys out in the field, and the clothing and gear are much the same. Here are some details about the cowboys’ traditional clothing and gear, which was derived from the vaquero in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. The Spanish word for cowboy is vaquero, based on the word vaca or cow.

BOOTS
   Western cowboy boots in the nineteenth century were adapted from the Mexican vaqueros, whose clothing was based in turn upon Spanish ranchers' clothing and boots. Following the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico were Spanish cattle ranchers working in northern Mexico and regions of the present American southwest: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and later in California.
Leather boots were worn in many ancient cultures in Europe and Asia because riding horseback was the transportation for both peace and wartime. Over time the style of leather boots, saddles, and leather clothing was adapted to local needs. The vaqueros and the cowboys were usually working in deserts with cactus, snakes, dirt, and mud, making a high-top leather boot more useful.
By the nineteenth century in the southwest, stirrups were common on saddles. The cowboy boot has tapered, rounded, or squared-off toes that make sliding the boot into a stirrup easier, and it has a higher heel so the boot “hooks” onto the stirrup securely. Cowboys were not rich, so they required a sturdy leather boot that was as cheap as possible. The fancy tooled boots of today developed later as cowboy boots moved into more fashionable, less utilitarian modes.
   A cowboy was proud of his spurs, and often made his own, with leather straps to attach to his boots. Spurs were necessary as cowboys did not own their own horses, and had to ride different horses during the long cattle drives. Some horses were less docile than others, some just broken to the saddle, so using spurs occasionally was necessary to keep the horse under control. Also, cowboys in the Texas region were herding longhorn cattle, a boisterous, difficult breed to round up and contain. Skill in riding and roping was essential.

SADDLES
The exact date of the domestication of horses is in dispute, but could have possibly occurred as early as 4000 BC. The first known saddle-like equipment was used by the Assyrian cavalry around the year 700 BC. This equipment was a type of cloth padding attached around the horse with a girth or surcingle. It typically included breast straps and cruppers (a strap attached to the saddle back and looped under the horse’s tail) to aid in keeping the pad in place. These saddles were unearthed in a burial site in Siberia. They date back to 500-400 BC.
   The first stirrup was a leather strap in which the rider could place only the toe. The modern day open-strap stirrup was gradually developed; it offered greater support and was essential for warfare. The stirrup was widespread across China by 477 AD and then spread into Europe.
   The design of saddles slowly changed and developed over centuries of horseback riding all over Europe and Asia. Wooden saddles were brought to Europe by the Huns, a fourth-century AD nomadic fighting people, and were common through the Middle Ages. As leather working developed, and soft, durable hides were created, the saddle ‘tree’ (the wooden frame) was first covered in leather, and by the nineteenth century, the wooden tree was completely removed and the saddle was made entirely of leather with padding. A saddle blanket is placed under the saddle.
   The Spanish introduced horses to the North American Indians of the southwest. Today’s western saddle is an adapted version of the Spanish conquistadors' saddle to the vaquero’s working saddle. Saddle design was changed to suit the needs of ranchers, vaqueros, and cowboys. The primary addition was the saddle horn, developed to hold the cowboy’s lariat (from Spanish riata, or lariat), and the higher cantle (back of saddle seat) for strapping gear behind the saddle.
   Cowboys owned their saddles and they were valuable because a cowboy owning a saddle could more easily find work. The saddle served the cowboy as a pillow at night under the stars. They carefully kept the leather soft and supple by waxing it regularly.

CHAPS
   The concept of chaps was introduced by the Spanish to protect their legs from cactus, brush, and thorns. They called them “chaparreras,” which meant leather breeches or "leg of iron". The first chaps were just large pieces of cowhide attached to the saddle; later they were detached to wrap entirely around the legs, called “shotgun” chaps because they looked like a double-barreled shotgun. After the cattle industry reached California, vaqueros often used goat, sheep, wolf, bear, or mountain lion pelts with the fur left intact. Chaps covered the thighs, providing warmth in cold and wet weather.
Chaps today are often made from hides with showy skins, fringes, or silver ornaments, and are laced on. There are different shapes of chaps as well, some are straight and some curved with a flared side, called “batwings.”

GLOVES AND SCARVES
   Buckskins, waterproof gloves with high pieces covering the wrists and lower arms, were often called “gauntlets.” They protected hands from rope burns and the rein straps, as well as other hard-usage, and for cowboys, protected shirt cuffs from fraying so readily. Gauntlets were in common use in Europe for centuries. Cowboys had kerchief squares tied around their necks to pull over mouth and nose in dusty conditions. These were always in bright colors. The famous red cotton “bandanna” was the neck scarf used by cowboys, and is still popular today. (The word “bandanna” is from the 18th century, probably from Portuguese.

HATS
   The wide-brimmed cowboy hat (later popularized by the Stetson company) was patterned after the vaquero’s hat. The misleading term “ten-gallon hat” does not mean that it held ten gallons of liquid. The term “tan galán” in Spanish translates in English to "so handsome." It's worth noting that the Spanish word “galón” translates as “braid” in English. One staple of many cowboy hats is a narrow leather hatband wrapped around the base crown, and was thus called the “braided hat." It's possible that cowboys may have overheard Spanish speakers referring to western-style hats as handsome or braided and misheard their words as "ten-gallon.”
   The wide-brimmed and water-proofed wool or leather hats were good protection from sun and rain. The curved brim allowed rain water to run off down the back.

RAIN GEAR
   Long water-proofed or oiled cloth coats, split up the back for wearing in the saddle, gave some protection from rain. Inner straps held the two lower pieces around the legs for riding.
   Heavy canvas tarps carried rolled behind the saddle could serve as makeshift tents over sleeping bags or blankets. Either rolled around blankets, or partly under the blanket and propped over the head and shoulders, canvas gave a little protection for saddle and cowboy at night.

CHUCK WAGONS AND COOKING
On ranches today and on the nineteenth-century cattle drives, the chuck wagon carried a portable kitchen, supplies for two months, equipment, and was the cook’s bed. The eighteenth-century word “chuck” meant food. These were horse-drawn covered wagons, with curved staves stretched over the wagon bed and covered with a canvas. When camped, the canvas was removed from the wagon staves and stretched out like a tent behind the wagon, covering the kitchen cabinet on the rear of the wagon and making a covered cooking and serving area.
The kitchen portion was a cabinet with storage areas for food supplies and small tools, with cast-iron pots and skillets hanging on the sides. There was an iron grill on legs, several feet wide, to be placed over a fire pit to hang pots or place skillets.
   Basic supplies were: flour, sourdough starter, salt pork, dried beans, lard, bacon, potatoes, coffee beans, molasses, sometimes dried fruit for pies. Meals were usually coffee, beans cooked with salt pork, bacon, beef stew with potatoes, and sourdough biscuits. Breakfast was coffee, bacon, biscuits, maybe beans. Cowboy coffee was ground coffee beans boiled in a huge coffee pot of water until the right color…and strength. Plates and mugs were made of tin, knives, forks, and spoons were the “eatin’ irons.”
   Richard Nowlin, a cowboy and rancher in central Texas for 45 years, said this about the cook’s life: “…Then, of course, in a cow camp, … you just eat when you get to it. There’s always somethin’ there to eat —he always keeps somethin’ there to eat when you get in. But he had a pretty rough time of it!”
The cook rode ahead, setting up the wagon, and cooking the beans or stew that required hours of cooking. Making a long pit in the ground, a fire was built and allowed to burn down into hot coals, adding fuel as needed. The long metal grill was set over this fire pit. The ‘dutch oven‘ used for most cooking was a a large cast-iron pot with short legs, a bail handle, and a rimmed lid. This could either hang over the fire by a hook from the grill, or be sunken into a small fire pit by itself with coals on the lid, thus creating a small oven in the ground. Biscuits were cut and placed into this dutch oven to bake over the fire, sometimes fruit pie with a crust was baked in the pot. It took some skill to prevent food from burning over a hot open fire! Skillets were used on top of the grill to cook bacon, and sometimes biscuits.

RODEOS
   With the fencing of the open range in the late 1880s, the cattle industry changed to a more confining job for the range cowboy. When communities sprang up, social occasions like the Fourth of July celebrations gave cowboys a chance to challenge the bronc riding and roping skills of cowboys from other ranches. Riding, roping, and branding, and even the word rodeo ("roundup") originated with the vaqueros as they worked in areas where there were stray cattle and horses. Soon local contests became annual events.
   Since the cowboy's work was often seasonal, some cowboys also signed up to exhibit their skills with wild-west shows such as the first one William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) staged in his home town of North Platte, Nebraska, on the Fourth of July, 1882. Wild-west shows led exhibitions of rodeo skills in the East and eventually in Europe. By the 1890s rodeo had become a spectator event in the West. Rodeo became an annual event in many places. Two of the earliest rodeos on record were held in Pecos, Texas, in 1883, the first to give prizes, and in Prescott, Arizona, in 1888, the first to charge admission. The first indoor rodeo took place at Fort Worth in 1917. By the late 1920s rodeo had become an annual event in some places in the East. In New York City, the Madison Square Garden Rodeo often lasted for thirty days. It was followed by a two-week rodeo in Boston. This gave rodeo national publicity. Rodeo became viewed as entertainment by the public and in 1929 the Rodeo Association of America was organized by several rodeo committees (the people who put the rodeos on, not the cowboys) to standardize rules, establish a point system to determine world champions, monitor judges, and establish a fair practice in advertising and awarding prize money. Although the RAA helped correct some of the problems in rodeo, the idea of the cowboys' having their own organization surfaced at different times, but no permanent organization occurred until October 30, 1936, when sixty-one cowboys voted to strike in protest of the prize money offered at Boston. As a result, the cowboys were given their "fair share of the prize money."

Women were included in less dangerous skills, such as barrel-racing. Rodeo clowns were important to rush in and distract violent animals when cowboys fell. Barrels were always on the field for the clowns to jump into when threatened by raging bulls. Recently the question of whether animals suffer from their treatment in rodeos has resulted in less attention to the rodeos themselves.

THE ROMANCE OF THE COWBOY
   Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s did much to romanticize the cowboy culture. None of the movie cowboys would have made the grade in 1860 Texas. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers created the famous “singing cowboy” image, with songs written about the west and ranching, such as “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Home on the Range.” Later films and TV shows built on cowboy lives and ranchers’ issues, “Bonanza” was one such show.
   In the 1980s Cowboy Poetry was brought to the attention of the country through annual festivals held in Elko,Nevada where real cowboys read their poetry. One definition of cowboy poetry is:
"It [is] a jazz of Irish storytelling, Scottish seafaring and cattle tending, Moorish and Spanish horsemanship, European cavalry traditions, African improvisation, and Native American experience, if also oppression. . . . the songs and poems of the American cowboy are part of that old tradition of balladry." —Western Folklife Center Archive
As cowboys spend hours alone on the range, they naturally turn to making up stories or poems about their lives. The particulars derive from the American West: horses, cattle, fire, prairie storms, mythic figures of cowboys and ranchers, and the sublime wilderness. The use of forms such as ballads and odes and of poetic devices such as mnemonics and repetition sets cowboy poetry apart from the majority of contemporary poetry and relates it more to the Homeric tradition of oral poetry.
   Elements of cowboy dress and life entered into Country and Western Music, the Grand ‘Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee broadcast on radio in the 1940s to audiences in the southeast and southwest, bringing a different aspect of cowboy romance. Square-dancing and line-dancing promote cowboy and western clothing styles, although the dances themselves originated in the English Border countries and Ireland, and were brought to America in the eighteenth century by the emigrants to Appalachia.

Sources:
Cochise Leather Company. History of Western Leather, Spurs, Chaps and Saddles. retrieved from cochiseleather.com/leather-history.aspx

Academy of American Poets. Retrieved from poets.org

Additional websites: grizzlyrose.com; quarterhorsenews.com; lonehand.com; www.horse.com; www.thc.texas.gov (Texas State Historical Assoc.)

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Cattle Drive Trails

3/11/2020

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Painting of cattle drive. Date and artist unknown.

The four most used trails from 1866-1890

Cattle drive at high water river crossing.

   The movie industry has burned into our memories the image of nineteenth-century cattle drives. Movies such as Red River (1948) with John Wayne, or the TV series Lonesome Dove (1989) with Robert Duval each give a somewhat blurry picture of the cattle drive experience. Today tourists can have a taste of life on the cattle trail offered by companies that try to simulate the experience. The comedy City Slickers (1991) with Billy Crystal portrays the urge to play cowboy. The “blurry” part of the picture is the emphasis movies make on gun fights, Indian raids, and natural disasters. Most actual accounts tell of a long, dusty, hazardous trip on a very long trail. The raids and natural disasters occurred, but less often than the movies would have us believe.
     The origin of trails from south Texas to central Kansas can be partly attributed to a sharp drop in cattle prices in the South. When the Union army advanced into the South, access to those markets was interrupted and a surplus of cattle in Texas south rose significantly. After the war cattle could not be sold for more than two dollars a head in Texas, and In 1866 there were an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 surplus cattle available.
     At the end of the Civil War a new market opened when Philip Danforth Armour opened a meat packing plant in Chicago known as Armour and Company. With this expansion of the meat packing industry, the demand for beef increased significantly. In 1866 cattle could be sold in the north for as much as forty dollars per head, making it profitable for cattle from Texas to be herded long distances to market. To accomplish this they needed some designated routes to follow. The map shows several trails that developed at that time, and two of the most used were the Chisholm Trail and the Goodnight-Loving Trail.
   The southern terminus of the Chisholm Trail was a trading post near the Red River in north Texas, and the northern terminus was a trading post near Kansas City, Kansas. Both trading posts were owned by Chisholm. The main source area for the Texas cattle was in the area south of San Antonio and Houston down to the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande River.
     The trail was established by a Delaware scout/cattle rancher named Black Beaver and his friend Jesse Chisholm, who was a merchant. Although the trail laid out and named by Black Beaver and Jesse Chisholm began at the crossing of the Red River into Indian Territory, present day Oklahoma, common usage often considers it beginning in south Texas and extending into Kansas. A trail certainly existed for the entire distance. The difference lies in deciding where to begin calling it the Chisholm Trail.
     The first major effort to drive cattle from Texas to the nearest railhead for shipment to Chicago came in 1866 when Texas ranchers banded together to drive their cattle to the closest point with a railroad, which at that time was Sedalia, Missouri, eighty-five miles east of Kansas City. The route to Sedalia, called the Shawnee Trail, passed through farming land in Kansas and Missouri but resistance from farmers upset by tick fever brought with the cattle forced the cattlemen to use a more westerly route.
     On typical drives lasting about two months, the cattlemen faced many natural obstacles. They crossed major rivers such as the Arkansas River and the Red River and many smaller creeks, yet often completely lacked water for long distances. The weather was also a major factor. The drives typically needed to start in the spring after the rains brought green grasses for the grazing cattle. The spring rains also created higher water levels in streams and thus more dangerous river crossings.
   In 1867 cattle shipping facilities were built in Abilene, Kansas, by Joseph G. McCoy. Jesse Chisholm marked out a route through Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and the tribes allowed the cattle herds to pass for a toll of ten cents per head. Conflicts were few. Historians usually point out that only the trail north of the Red River and through Indian Territory is actually the Chisholm Trail. Generalists use the name Chisholm for the entire distance from south Texas to Abilene.
     One of the earliest drives was made by cattleman M.A. Withers in April 1868. He rode north out of Lockhart, Texas (near San Antonio), with a herd of 600 Longhorn steers, eight hands, and a cook, headed for Abilene, Kansas where facilities had opened the previous summer. Withers rode several miles ahead of the herd and was near the site of present-day Wichita, Kansas where he stopped to water his horse. When his horse suddenly jerked to attention and Withers looked up, he saw seven mounted Osages galloping straight toward him. There was no chance of escape so he had no choice but to face them. The Indians, all well armed, raced right up to Withers and reined to a stop. After an uncomfortably long pause the Osage leader held out his hand and asked for tobacco. Withers, still thinking perhaps his time on earth was about to end, handed over all the tobacco he had. Much to his surprise and relief the Osages abruptly whirled and raced away.
Dodge City, Kansas became the chief shipping point for another trail west of the Chisholm Trail. This so-called Western Trail brought Dodge City to particular prominence as the typical western “cow town.” By 1877 Dodge City alone had shipped 500,000 head of cattle to Kansas City and Chicago.
     A drive usually consisted of 1,500–2,500 head of cattle, a trail boss, ten to fifteen hands, a horse wrangler who handled spare horses for each hand, and a cook who drove the chuck wagon with food and carried the bedrolls. The chuck wagon provided meals of bread, meat, beans with bacon, and coffee. When the cattle were sold at the end of the drive each man received wages amounting to about forty dollars a month—about eighty dollars per man after a two-month drive. A typical pay for the trail boss was ninety dollars per month.
     The men drove and grazed the cattle most of the day and shared watching them at night. The drive was held to ten or twelve miles per day to assure that the cattle had sufficient time to graze and maintain weight throughout the route. At the end of the drive, after months of monotonous days, uninteresting food, no alcoholic drinks, and no women, the cowboys were paid and free to do what they pleased. They usually started with a bath and shave, along with some new clothes and gear. The local businesses anticipated their needs and hardware stores, clothing stores, barbers, and prostitutes thrived when the cattlemen arrived. The saloons especially did a thriving business when drovers came to town. The traditional price for a twenty-five ounce bottle of cheap whiskey in a cowboy saloon was twenty-five cents. Whiskey was not sold in one-ounce shots, but typically in a four-ounce glass for five cents.
     At the end of a long drive the cowboys’ celebration often involved rowdiness that could get them in trouble with the law. Their violence and ebullient spirits gave rise to the need for more law officers to help keep the peace—some of whom became famous. James Butler Hickok (in Hays, Kansas among other places), Wyatt Earp (in Wichita, Kansas), and Bat Masterson (Dodge City, Kansas) were among the best-known cattle town marshals. The TV series Gunsmoke was a popular depiction of the town marshal with Matt Dillon (Dodge City) as the lawman.
     The cattle trails began to change after 1871 when Abilene lost its preeminence as a shipping point for Texas cattle. In 1883 an extension of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway opened to Caldwell, Kansas (south of Abilene near the Kansas border), isolating Abilene. This only lasted until the 1890’s when railroad lines were built to southern Texas near the main source area for cattle. These rail shipments brought an end to long cattle drives over dusty trails.
     At the same time meat packing plants moved closer to major ranching areas and the railroads carried meat rather than cattle, with better profits for all. Another aspect leading to the end of cattle drives was that the trails had become over-used and grazing was inadequate. Also ranchers and other settlers began to move into the western plains and used barbed wire to enclose their land. Ultimately all these factors: overgrazing, barbed wire fences, and expansion of railroads brought the cattle drive era (1866-1890) to an end.
     The drovers traveled the trails for two months or more every year of their working lives. These men worked day and night at very hazardous jobs, yet they returned every year for another cattle drive.

Sources
Hunter, J. Marvin. The Trail Drivers of Texas: Interesting Sketches of Early Cowboys. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. (original 1924)

Ludwig, Wayne. The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 2018.

https://www.historynet.com/know-ol-chisholm-trail.htm

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The Royal Roads

1/21/2020

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Three Spanish Royal Roads originating in Mexico City and allowing exchange of goods and resources throughout their northern empire.

  How did the early North American trails come to be? A few were built after Europeans arrived, but most trails already existed in some form. Some trails were made by buffalo herds that led to the best places to ford rivers or pathways to find water at any time of year. When the early Indians arrived they naturally used the buffalo trails as part of their extensive network throughout the continent for trading goods such as maize seeds, obsidian knives, shells, and tobacco.
   When the Spanish came to North America they soon began exporting its resources, especially precious metals. Spanish miners used existing trails, along with newly built ones, to silver mines for hauling in the supplies and bringing out the silver ore. Spain’s main goal was to extract the silver and other mineral wealth of Mexico and ship it to Spain. The roads within Mexico linked the seat of government in Mexico City with mines, farms, missions, and military outposts.
   Under Spanish colonial rule any road under the direct jurisdiction of the Spanish crown was considered to be a camino real (royal road). They
began improving the trails using the labor of soldiers, Indians, and any other help they could coerce. They cut and filled the roughest places and placed rocks alongside as markers.
   Despite their grand name the Spanish royal roads were nothing fancy. Often they were no more than a series of crosses blazed into tree trunks or stone markers along an old Indian trail, showing travelers the right way to go, with no ferries or bridges crossing the rivers. Eventually Spain had a fragmented web of roads linking Mexico with Nacogdoches in East Texas, Santa Fe in New Mexico, and San Francisco in California. By 1779 a mail service was begun that delivered letters 1,138 miles from Mexico City to Nacogdoches in three months.
   Once Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 the roads were no longer called Royal Roads but they continued to be important trade routes. Later in the twentieth century California reintroduced the term Camino Real along certain highways to promote tourism.
   Three important examples of early Royal Roads are: the Royal Road of Texas, the Royal Road of Interior Lands, and the Royal Road of California.

Royal Road of Texas (El Camino Real de los Tejas)
   In the eighteenth century Spain utilized Indian routes to move goods from Mexico City to settlements in Spanish Texas. Such roads provided routes for settlement from Mexico to lands north of the Rio Grande River. In the late seventeenth century the Spanish governor of Coahuila and Tejas promoted the route for the purpose of destroying a French fort established on what he considered to be Spanish lands. In 1718 he built a fort (presidio) along the route to guard the Mission of San Antonio de Valero and the surrounding settlement of San Antonio which became the first of many communities along the route to Nacogdoches. The old fort and mission church (the Alamo) can still be seen in the city of San Antonio.

Royal Road of Interior Lands (El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro)
   Another trail used by indigenous tribes was a route from the Valley of Mexico (present day Mexico City area) into present day New Mexico for trading such goods as turquoise, obsidian, and salt. As early as AD 1000, a flourishing trade network existed from Mesoamerica to the Rocky Mountains.
   In the early sixteenth century the Spanish began expanding their domain for the purpose of increasing wealth for the Crown. The northward trails led them into the area they called Tierra Adentro (interior lands).
   In 1598 a military contingent led by Juan de Oñate, the newly appointed governor of the province of Santa Fe, was seeking the best route for crossing the Río del Norte (Rio Grande River). Along the way his group became seriously lost and only with the help of a local Indian did they eventually reach El Paso del Norte (present day site of El Paso, TX) which is one of the safest crossings along the Rio Grande River. This trail became the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, connecting another distant outpost to Mexico City.
   From El Paso del Norte Oñate continued northward to the site of the present town of Española, about twenty-six miles north of Santa Fe. He declared this the capital city of the new province. Twelve years later the capital was moved to Santa Fe.
   To help promote trade the Spanish Crown established trade fairs along the route, major events that attracted merchants, craftsmen, and Indians from the region. Fairs in Jalisco, Saltillo, and Taos became important annual events where the Indians from the plains and Rocky Mountain areas traded their goods with the Spanish for weapons, ammunition, horses, and agricultural products. The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro remained of great importance for the next three hundred years. Today hundreds of trucks daily carry Mexican goods into the United States along highways that approximately follow each of the Royal Roads.

Royal Road of California (El Camino Real de California)
   Unlike previous routes discussed here, the purpose of the Royal Road of California was to connect about thirty-four Spanish missions established to convert the natives to Christianity. It stretched 1,250 miles along the west coast from Mexico City to the present San Francisco Bay Area with another branch from the southern end of Baja California. Many other regional routes in Florida and Mexico were also used by the Spanish to build missions for the conversion of native peoples.
  Between 1683 and 1834 Jesuit and, after 1768, Franciscan missionaries operated the missions coercing the tribes to live in settlements around the mission, adopt Christianity, and become farmers. The missionaries introduced European methods of raising fruits, vegetables, cattle, and horses, and construction skills. This move purposely disrupted the Indians’ normal way of life and made them substantially dependent on the Europeans.
   Although the experiment lasted about 150 years, the results seemed to be good from the Spanish point of view but poor for the Indians. The missions have been accused by critics, then and now, of various abuses and oppression.
   One important function of the Camino Real de California was to maintain communication among all the missions as well as with the authorities in Spain. They were placed a days’ horseback ride apart, or approximately thirty miles. The route between missions also stayed near the coast except where coastal cliffs prevented it.
   Some of the original Camino Real de California has been continually upgraded until it is now part of the modern California highway system (US 101 and State highways 1 and 82) and is roughly traced by a series of state commemorative bell markers.

Sources:
Crump, S. California's Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays. Del Mar, California: Trans-Anglo Books. 1975.

Green, Carl R. The Mission Trails in American History. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: Enslow Publishers. 2001.

Palmer, G. and S. L. Fosberg. El Camino Real de Tierra Dentro. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bureau of Land Management. 1999.

Sundby, Edie. The Mission Walker. Nashville, Tennessee: Littlefield W. Publishing. an imprint of Thomas Nelson. 2017.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The Kings' Highways. Austin, Texas. 2019. (Website: tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/highways/kingshighways)

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Accident and Illness on the Trails

11/6/2019

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Sketch of Crossing North Platte River in 1859 , Artist unknown.

Upset Wagon on Oregon Trail in Wyoming, Photographer unknown

Site of Quintina Snodderly’s grave near the North Platte River east of Casper, Wyo. The fence and marker were erected by the Oregon-California Trails Association. Randy Brown photographer.

Roger M McCoy

   Life on the westward trails was very difficult even in the best of conditions. Weather was an adversary with extremes of heat or torrential rains and flooded streams. Along with environmental hazards there was the ever present danger of life-threatening illness, especially cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.
   Wagon trains usually had no trained doctor and most treatments for diseases consisted of home remedies and a prayer, neither of which gave a reliable outcome. Most people in the nineteenth century had some knowledge of remedies for various diseases and books provided a complete list. One such book of home remedies included the two recipes below:
A recipe for “Cough Surrup” was: Boil the lickrish root to thick molasses. Take 1 fluid oz Balm Gilead buds, 1 gil vinigar, 1 gil strong sirrip of skunk cabbage root, ½ fluid oz tincter libelia. Take a tea spoon full or so as often as the case requires to keep the plegm loos to rais easy.
Another called “Mother’s Relief” was a mixture of herbal extracts: including partridge berry vine, unicorn root, blue cohusk, spikenard, bayberry bark, birthroot, raspberry leaves, witch hazel leaves and lady slippers. This was recommended for women to ease the labor of childbirth.
   At least one expectant mother had neither time nor need for making childbirth medicines. Mary Richardson Walker wrote a diary entry on the day of her birth labors:
March 16, 1842: Rose about five. Had early breakfast. Got my work done about 9. Baked six loaves of breads, made a kettle of mush and have now a suet pudding and beef boiling. I have managed to put my clothes away and set everything in order. May the Merciful be with me through the unexpected scene. Nine o’clock p.m. was delivered of another son. [Her statement about the “unexpected scene” was probably a prayer that nothing unexpected would arise.]
Other remedies carried by most migrants in the mid-nineteenth century:
Essence of peppermint for stomach aches.
Pine tar and turpentine for coughing, sore throat, and croup.
Laudanum is an alcoholic solution containing morphine made from opium and used as a
narcotic painkiller. It eased pain and many thought it would also treat cholera, but it was
of no help with diseases.
Whiskey was considered a cure-all, but had little real benefit except for the “feel-good
factor.” It may have helped some with pain.
Hartshorn was made from red deer antlers and was used successfully for insect bites and unsuccessfully for snake bites.
Quinine tea was a treatment for malaria.
Chamomile tea was used for stomach problems and muscle aches. It is still used as a
refreshing drink today.
Vinegar was taken for cholera, but was ineffective.
Castor oil or “Physicking” pills used as a laxatives.

Hazards of Travel
  Migrants encountered many natural hazards on the westward trails. Weather hazards included thunderstorms with high winds, dangerously large hailstones, lightning, and tornadoes. Intense summer heat on the Great Plains caused wood to dry and shrink, and sometimes wagon wheels had to be soaked in rivers at night to keep their iron rims from falling off during the day. The dust on the trail itself could be two or three inches deep and as fine as flour. After a heavy rainstorm the dust turned to mud and slowed movement. Ox shoes sometimes fell off and hooves split. The emigrants’ lips blistered and split in the dry air, and their only remedy was to rub axle grease on their lips. River crossings were probably the greatest danger.
   Add to these hazards the high potential for accidents. Accidents were caused by negligence, exhaustion, guns, animals, and the weather. Every wagon carried at least one gun and the owner sometimes inadvertently shot himself, a friend, or perhaps one of the draft animals when a gun discharged accidentally. Drownings, being crushed by wagon wheels, and injuries from handling domestic animals also led to accidental deaths on the trails.
   Almost ten percent of the migrants on the western trails did not survive the trip. The primary cause of death was disease followed closely by accidents. Cholera was the worst of the illnesses, but dysentery and typhoid were close behind. All three ailments were carried by contaminated water in streams and poor sanitation. Cholera was especially fast acting. A person could feel normal in the morning, in agony by noon and dead by evening. If death did not occur within the first twelve to twenty-four hours, the victim usually recovered. Children and the elderly were most vulnerable to any of these diseases. Martha Freel wrote of losing most of her family in the summer of 1852, …”we have lost 7 persons in a few short days, all died of Cholera.”
   Deaths along the trail, especially among young children and mothers in childbirth, were the most heart-rending of trail tragedies. The hazards of accidents and disease created a constant awareness of death and resulted in great sorrow and grief for many migrants. The numerous graves dotting the prairies were the evidence of these tragedies. Over a twenty-five year span approximately 65,000 deaths occurred along the western overland emigrant trails, an average of 2,600 per year.
   Accidental death was as almost as great a hazard as illness. One traveler wrote about witnessing a child’s accidental death, “Mr. Harvey’s young little boy Richard 8 years old went to git in the waggon and fel from the tung. The wheals run over him and mashed his head and Kil him Ston dead he never moved.”
   River crossings were probably the most dangerous thing pioneers did. Swollen rivers could upset wagons and drown people and oxen. Such accidents could cause the loss of life and most or all of valuable supplies. Animals could panic when wading through deep, swift water, causing wagons to overturn. Even if the current was slow and the water shallow, wagon wheels could be damaged by unseen rocks or become mired in the muddy bottom. Enterprising men ran ferries at large river crossings and charged a fee for carrying wagons
and teams to the other side.

Disease and Death on the Trail.

  The most common deadly diseases on the western trails were caused by poor sanitation and contaminated water. Along the trails there were few opportunities for bathing and laundering, and safe drinking water frequently was not available in sufficient quantities. Human and animal waste, garbage, and animal carcasses were often discarded in close proximity to available water supplies. If these waste materials were contaminated with typhoid, cholera, or dysentery bacteria, those diseases could be transmitted to every wagon train that came along.
   In 1852 Lydia Rudd wrote, “We have not moved today. Our sick ones not able to go. The sickness on the road is alarming – most all prove fatal.” A Mr. Page wrote, “You were OK in the morning, but dead by noon. There really wasn’t much you could do for cholera.”
   Trail deaths meant heartbreak and hardship for survivors, but little time was allowed for grieving. A grave was hurriedly prepared beside the trail and a prayer offered. Someone might volunteer to read a passage from the Bible, or "say a few words," after which the journey continued. Occasionally the dead were simply abandoned beside the trail, or the grave was dug in the trail itself to help conceal it. Death due to contagious disease meant increased haste to complete the journey before more calamity hit.
   Graves were usually shallow to save labor, and often located in a natural depression. As much soil was scooped out as possible, and earth and rocks were mounded over the remains. Sorrowing relatives sometimes transplanted prairie sod and wild flowers, and set up some type of wooden marker, probably with the thought of returning some day to provide a more permanent memorial. Few did, however, and only a small percentage took time to erect a headstone. Many migrants graves are still preserved today, thanks to local and state historical societies.

Sources
Bagley, Will. With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West
   1849-1852. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2012.
Bromberg, Erik. Frontier Humor: Plain and Fancy. Oregon Historical Quarterly,
September 1960
Werner, Morris W. Emigrant Graves on the Oregon and California Trails in
Kansas. (no date). http://www.kansasheritage.org/werner/emigrave.html
Larsell, O. The Doctor in Oregon. Portland: Binfords. 1947.
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/disease-death-overland-trails/2/

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Food on the Trail

10/15/2019

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The Dutch oven was essential for cooking. For baking the oven would be set on the coals with additional coals on the lid.

Sugar was molded into cones or loaves. The darkest variety, not shown, was so little refined that molasses oozed from it.

Bacon slabs were often carried in kegs of sawdust to keep it from spoiling in the heat on the trail.

Roger M McCoy

Emigration Fever in the Midwest
   The awareness of the great open west following the 1849 Gold Rush in California inspired thousands of people to seek new horizons. By 1852 few went for gold, as the gold fields had become overcrowded and the easy placer gold was mostly gone; the bigger interest was farm land, commercial enterprise, or perhaps adventure.
   In 1852 the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper wrote that the state was being depopulated…that the finest farmers were leaving for Oregon or California for gold or new land. They complained that many homesteads and small towns were nearly abandoned. “In Indiana excellent farms are offered for sale all over the state by persons intending to seek the Gold Land. What will be the end of these things? It is a grave question.” The Cincinnati Gazette wrote that mass departures were ruining local business. Fully equipped and stocked farms were available at sacrifice prices because of the movement west. The Saint Joseph Gazette in Missouri wrote that four hundred emigrants came into Saint Joseph in a single day, “…the road is crowded with teams, and hundreds more are daily crossing the Mississippi at various points.” Supplies in those towns became “scarce…as to almost clean out the place.”
   One writer estimated the number of emigrants in the peak year of 1852 to be twice the population of Chicago. (The population of Chicago in the 1850 census was just under 30,000.) Several contemporary estimates held that 60,000 people emigrated in 1852: 50,000 to California and 10,000 to Oregon in that year. In addition, 10,000 Mormons headed to present day Utah in that period. This amounts to nearly a 0.3% shift of the U.S. population (23,192,000) into the west during that one year alone. That percentage of today’s population would mean about one million people moving to California and Oregon in one year. After 1852 the number of migrants slowly declined.
   The daily sights as migrants traveled the trails included crowds of people, with a few pretty rough characters, many wagons, massive herds of bison, dead oxen by the roadside, and too many fresh graves. Contact with Indians was infrequent and usually peaceful, despite the impressions we have from many movies. One factor preventing some Indians from contact with wagon trains was the diseases the migrants carried with them. (More on disease in another blog) That is not to say there were no contacts with Indians, there were enough attacks to keep the migrants alert. Indians were particularly interested in horses but many other items the migrants carried were also attractive to them. It was not uncommon for migrants to encounter Indians coming to trade or beg for migrant’s clothing. One migrant wrote, “…they do not stop asking for everything that they see. They ask for money, for clothes, etc, etc. One has an old hat, one has an old wesket [waistcoat], another a chemise [shirt], another with handerchiefs [sic] around his neck. although they wear buffalo skins, they are each one covered with ear rings, necklaces, medals, bells, and different ornaments the like of which you never seen.”
   Some migrants wrote of seeing vast herds of buffalo, but often the presence of the wagon train scared the buffalo away. John Clark wrote that he saw piles of buffalo chips and places where the ground was white with their bones, but he complained that he “did not see a single one of the creatures.”
   The skull of the buffalo was smooth and white, and often used by emigrants for transmitting news and general information. Travelers wrote messages on skulls and set them by the roadside. Sometimes emigrants would just write the names of the people in their party and leave it in an easily visible place by the road.
   Not all migrants in the 1850’s were moving west to find good land and a new home. Many went intending to set up a commercial business in California or Oregon. One report tells of a brave soul who drove a flock of two thousand turkeys from Missouri to California. The source sounds as though he drove the turkeys like cattle, but that is a bit hard to imagine. I wish I had details on just how he managed that, but I assume he had them in crates or at least confined in wagons. Another man took seven wagonloads of chickens in custom-built wagons with several levels and sold them in the goldfields at magnificent profits.

Food on the trail
   A previous blog (Preparations for the Trail, 9/26/2019) told a bit about the food migrants packed into their wagons at the start of the trip. It is useful now to see how they used those supplies on the trail.
   Baking bread was a daily and necessary activity and it was baked in a cast iron Dutch oven. Therefore flour was probably the most critical item in the emigrants' wagons. Nathan Putnam took the time to write his parents in Kentucky saying that the flour they brought turned out first-rate bread, he also wished he could send the home folks a delicious “hump ribb of Fat Young Bufalo.” (Buffalo was not regular fare for the migrants, but when a herd was near, a few men rode out to kill some.) Most mentions of flour in the migrants’ diaries and letters do not say if the flour was white, brown, wheat, rye, or corn, but it certainly was not the bleached white flour that we see today. That process did not appear until the early twentieth century. Grocery store ads of the mid-nineteenth century said they sold “middlings, bran, and shorts.”
   The term “shorts” regarding flour was defined in Catherine Beecher's 1848 book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. She described shorts as "the coarser part of wheat bran.” Flour called shorts was a cross between wheat bran and very coarse wholewheat flour. Sometimes it was known as unbolted, or unsifted, flour. But in contrast to today's wholewheat flour that has all contaminants removed, "shorts" was a dense, coarse type of flour that needed sifting to remove impurities. “Middlings” is a byproduct of the wheat milling process that is not flour. It is a good source of protein and other nutrients, and is used to produce foods like pasta and breakfast cereals.
   Migrants brought a supply of saleratus (soda) for use in baking, but if they needed to replenish their stock they used water from soda springs in central Wyoming. Joel Palmer’s guide book told that water from those springs was strong enough to raise bread equally as well as yeast. Lodisa Frizzel wrote that the saleratus looked like “frozen snow forming a crust around the edge of the water.” She said she was satisfied with water from the soda springs for raising her bread. “…it made it quite light, but gave it a bitter taste.”
A second commodity of only slightly less importance than flour was sugar. Every migrant wagon carried sugar for pies, cakes, and sometimes jam when berries were found along the trail. Sugar was available in many forms. In 1846 the Berthold and Ewing grocery store in St. Louis, Missouri advertised New Orleans and Havana sugars either as crushed sugar in boxes or a loaf sugar. Advertisements in St. Joseph, Missouri offered molasses in barrels and sugar as brown, clarified, crushed, powdered, or loaf sugar. Sugar came from Louisiana and Cuba in large cones or loaves and was broken down by the refineries into the smaller loaves sold in grocery stores, hence the name “loaf sugar.” Small loaves were often molded into cones that looked like pointed hats. Such loaf sugar was traditionally wrapped in blue paper, from which a thrifty person could extract blue indigo for dye. The sugar had to be ground and sifted to remove impurities before use.
   The sugar loaves included both white and brown sugar, with most of the white on top. The brown sugar in the 1850’s was a raw, lumpy, sticky product that still contained molasses. In hot weather the molasses would ooze from the brown loaf. Crushed sugar had much of the brown sugar removed, but it was still not pure white like today’s sugar. Recipes of the period called for "pounded loaf sugar" or "finely-pounded loaf sugar.”
   Bacon was one of the primary meats and was often served twice a day. Abigail Scott claimed, "A piece of bacon placed between two pieces of bread actually tastes better than the best of cakes and pies at home.’' Some migrants complained that the menu was limited to bacon and bread. Helen Carpenter wrote, ”But then one does like a change and about the only change we have from bread and bacon is to bacon and bread." One minor variation was bread dipped into bacon grease which was called "hot flour bread.”
   Because of its high fat content, bacon readily spoiled and was one of the items frequently thrown away. Alonzo Delano graphically described a piece of bacon ready for the trash bin. “We discovered that we had been imposed upon in St. Louis in the purchase of our bacon, for it began to exhibit more signs of life than we had bargained for. It became necessary to scrape and smoke it, in order to get rid of its tendency to walk in insect form.”
   In the middle of the nineteenth century the term bacon was a broad category of meat referred to either as sides, hams, or shoulders. It was bought or put up as "cured side bacon" in slabs and sliced as needed. It had a little resemblance to the neatly packaged slices of pork fat with thin slivers of meat that we see today.
   Migrants carried a good supply of dried corn from which they could make cornmeal or parched corn. Parched corn is dried kernels roasted in an oven…like corn nuts. Corn, as either meal or parched corn, was a favorite among migrants because it was tasty, nutritious, did not spoil, and could be fried, roasted, or cooked to a mush. One source recommended crushing corn to a coarse meal in a mortar, then mixing it with water, sugar, and cinnamon, making it “quite palatable.” A half-bushel of parched corn per person was “sufficient for thirty days,” according to a guidebook.
   Another essential commodity was coffee, which actually has some nutritional benefits besides the boost provided by caffeine. Coffee is a source of several B vitamins plus magnesium and phosphorus. If you have ever made camp-fire coffee, you know the satisfaction of the coffee aroma and flavor as you stand around the fire. Emigrants carried green coffee beans which they roasted as needed in a frying pan, then ground for boiling in a big campfire coffee pot. Any leftover coffee was saved for the noon break.
   Migrants also carried dried food of various kinds. Meat biscuits were popular in the 1850’s…dried meat compressed into a small loaf. One pound of meat biscuit contains the nutrition of five pounds of the best fresh beef, and one ounce will make a nutritious soup. Also the meat biscuit would keep without spoiling for any length of time. It was packed into tin canisters or casks. A different way of treating meat was a mixture they called “portable soup,” which was made by boiling meat with the bones into a rich broth until it was thick like jelly. The "jelly," a very concentrated, gelatinous substance, was then set in pans or cups and allowed to dry until it was hard. When a bit of dried meat cake was added to boiling water, one had instant soup.
   The arduous work of travel in the 1850’s, during which most migrants walked from twelve to twenty miles per day, required a lot of nutritious, high energy food to keep the wagon trains moving. Meat, bread, and dried fruit carried them through.

Sources
Bagley, Will. With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West 1849-1852. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2012.

http://www.oregonpioneers.com/FoodChoices.htm

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