History

The Republic of Texas

We all know, or think we know, the story of the founding of the Republic of Texas. Rah-rah patriots think it is the story of freedom-loving Americans beating a tinhorn dictator at his own game. Add a racist component, and it becomes white efficient modern American Protestants overthrowing mixed-race backward superstitious Mexican Catholics. Anti-slavery Northerners at the time tended to think it was an example of Southern aggression in order to obtain new slave territory. The Mexican government, and modern anti-imperialists, think it was a simple case of larceny. But it isn’t as simple as any of those stories.

Late in 1820 and 1821, a banker from Missouri named Moses Austin obtained a contract from the Spanish government (which had ruled Mexico for 300 years) to settle three hundred families in Spanish Texas. He died before he could begin to execute his plans, so his son Stephen travelled to San Antonio de Bexar and received confirmation that he, as his father’s heir, could carry out the contract. The Spanish government, and Austin himself, insisted that any colonists be of reputable character and must be loyal to the government and religion of Spain. But in 1821, Mexico finally won its eleven-year struggle for independence from Spain, so Austin’s contract was now with the new Mexican government. The Mexicans honored the contract, and what followed has been called the most successful colonization movement in American history.

The Mexican government wanted the English-speaking settlers as a buffer against marauding Indians, but the colonists naturally preferred to settle where there was decent farmland and trade connections with American Louisiana. Austin found rich river bottom land between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, and his settlers began to transform an unsettled wilderness. He advertised in newspapers along America’s western frontier, more or less the Mississippi, offering land at one-tenth the cost of public land in the United States. Immigrants came. In 1825, Texas had a population of only approximately 3,500, mostly of Mexican descent. By 1829, English-speaking immigrants outnumbered native Spanish speakers.

The immigrants came, and they prospered. They found the Texas soil unbelievably fertile, and they found the plains filled with herds of wild horses and cattle, the descendants of Spanish livestock lost over the years. Merging Mexican ranching practices with their own Southern practices of livestock management, they invented a form of cattle ranching that, in the next half century, spread throughout the American West. By 1834, of a total Texas population of 38,000, fewer than 8,000 were of Mexican descent.

The Mexican government got nervous and tried to tighten its control. It prohibited slavery, reinstated a property tax, and increased tariffs on U.S. goods. The settlers (and many Mexican businessmen) rejected the demands, especially the attempt to shut down trade with the States. Mexico tried (ineffectively) to close Texas to immigration, and passed a few more unpopular laws. All this raised tensions, which might have blown over, but in 1834, General Antonio López de Santa Anna made himself dictator and began to centralize power in his own person. When he threatened to quash semi-independent Texas, Austin called the Texans to arms.

So, points to remember as we come to the revolution: The Americans came to Texas originally with the welcome of the Mexican government, which had its own reasons for wanting them. The country they settled was fertile but largely uninhabited. As settlers, they obeyed the law of the land, and prospered, until suddenly, instead of living in a country of laws, they were living in a country run by a strong man.

In the final months of 1835, armed clashes between settlers and government defeated all Mexican troops in the region. The Texans elected delegates and created a provisional government, and on March 2, 1836 (Sam Houston’s 43^rd birthday, as it happened) they declared their independence from Mexico.

In San Antonio de Bexar, there was an old mission called the Alamo, which had been turned into a makeshift fort. It extended across 3 acres, and the walls surrounding the complex were nearly three feet thick and were between nine and twelve feet high in different places. But Houston couldn’t spare enough men to mount a successful defense. Instead, he sent Colonel Jim Bowie and 30 men to remove the Alamo’s artillery and destroy the complex.

Bowie couldn’t remove the artillery, for lack of draft animals, and he became convinced that the Alamo was a vital strategic outpost. He wrote to the provisional government, asking for reinforcements. He received a pitiful few – on February 3, William Travis with 30 men, and on February 8, another a small group of volunteers that included the famous frontiersman and former U.S. Congressman David Crockett. That gave the defenders somewhere between 100 and 200 men. On the 23^rd, Santa Anna marched into San Antonio de Bexar with an army of 1,500. His Army of Operations in Texas comprised mostly raw recruits, a large number of whom were conscripts. Still, there were 1,500 of them.

For the next 10 days the two armies engaged in skirmishes, while Travis wrote letters pleading for more men and supplies, but early on March 6, the Mexicans captured the Alamo in three attacks, in the process losing about 600 killed or wounded, or one-third of those involved in the final assault. Mexican soldiers took no prisoners, bayoneting anybody that moved. They stacked and burned the Texan corpses.

Santa Anna reportedly said that the battle “was but a small affair,” at which another officer said, “with another such victory as this, we’ll go to the devil.”

They did, but not right away. The Mexican army in Texas still outnumbered the Texan army by almost six to one. Santa Anna sent several Texan noncombatants (women and children) to Gonzalez, hoping to spread panic. It did. The panic (which Texans called “The Runaway Scrape”) sent the army, the new government, and most of the settlers fleeing from the advancing Mexican Army. But it also fueled a rush to join the Texan army.

Santa Anna divided his surviving troops into three separate groups, sending 1,000 men to restore order in the towns and villages to the south. and another 800 men to the north, to cut off Houston’s army from retreat eastward. Then, with 700 men and artillery, he moved north. But on the afternoon of April 21, only six weeks after the fall of the Alamo, Houston took him by surprise and in 18 minutes won the Battle of San Jacinto, with Texan soldiers yelling, “Remember the Alamo!” Santa Anna was captured the following day, and was forced to order his troops out of Texas, and sign the Treaties of Velasco, recognizing the independence of Texas.

The war was over. But the Treaties of Velasco, which recognized the Rio Grande as the boundary of the Republic of Texas, were repudiated by the Mexican government, which promised to reclaim the lost territories. In 1842, Mexico launched two small expeditions into Texas , and twice captured San Antonio, but Mexico left no occupying force in Texas. This inability to defend itself against superior numbers played a large part in Texas’s determination to join the United States. Neither Mexico nor the Republic of Texas had the military strength to effectively assert its territorial claim to the huge, largely unsettled area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. As we saw, within a decade that disputed territory helped lead to war between Mexico and the United States.

 

Sam Houston

Sam Houston led an improbable life. Born in western Virginia in 1793, he: moved as a boy of 14 to Tennessee; ran away from home two years later; lived for a time with the Cherokee Nation; learned fluent Cherokee; and was adopted by the tribe’s chief and given the name “Colloneh” — raven. (A few years later, he would marry a Cherokee woman as his second wife.) At age 19 he returned to the white man’s world, building the first schoolhouse in Tennessee.

In the War of 1812, he went from private to lieutenant in a few months, took part in two battles, was seriously wounded, and came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, who became his mentor. Houston became a lawyer (passing the bar examination after six months of study) and practiced until he was elected to Congress in 1822. Re-elected, he declined to run for a third term, instead winning election as Governor of Tennessee.

While Houston was in Washington, DC, to expose the frauds which government agents committed against the Cherokee, an anti-Jacksonian congressman accused Houston of being in league with a couple of crooks. Houston confronted him on the street, and beat him with a hickory cane, and, fortunately for the future of the State of Texas, the congressman’s pistol misfired.. But Houston was arrested, tried and found guilty of assault. Damages were assessed at $500. Instead of paying, in December, 1832, Houston left the country for the Mexican state of Coahuila, which included Texas.

Naturally he became involved in the politics of independence. In November, 1835, the army of Texas commissioned him as a Major General, and four months later, the convention that declared Texas independent of Mexico made him commander in chief. He led the army of Texas to a quick decisive victory over Santa Anna, as we shall see, and was elected the first president of the Republic of Texas with 79% of the vote in a three-man race that included Stephan Austin. Mexico invaded twice during 1842, but Houston avoided all-out war.

When Texas joined the Union, he was elected one of the state’s two Senators, and served there until 1859. Although a slaveholder and an opponent of abolition, he was a vehement opponent of sectionalism, and was one of only two Southern Senators to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, predicting correctly that it would lead to disaster. He was a strong supporter of the compromise of 1850.

In 1859, he successfully ran for governor of Texas as a Unionist, and thus became the only person ever to win election as governor of two U.S. states. When the Texas legislature endorsed secession, he did not resist, and did not accept the offer of 50,000 Federal troops to help him keep his post. He retired to avoid precipitating Texan killing Texan.

But he had no illusions about secession and where it would lead. On April 19, 1861, a week after Fort Sumter had been reduced, he said this to a crowd wanting to know why he did not support Texas’ entry into the Confederacy: “Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.”

And, as we have seen, that’s about how it turned out. Sam Houston was one of the heroes of conscience John F. Kennedy would cite, more than a century later, in his book Profiles in Courage. The inscription on Houston’s tomb reads:

A Brave Soldier. A Fearless Statesman.

A Great Orator—A Pure Patriot.

A Faithful Friend, A Loyal Citizen.

A Devoted Husband and Father.

A Consistent Christian—An Honest Man.

 

The 1840s and Utopia

Two generations later, in a different context, George Bernard Shaw would famously say that some people saw things as they were and asked why, but he dreamed things that never were, and asked why not. That was very like America — particularly New England America — in the 1840s. Reform was in the air. It was a new day, under new conditions, and it seemed that all the world’s wrongs could be identified, addressed, and overcome.

When scholars think of the 1840s, they think of the New England Transcendentalists, because they were the thinkers whose work bore such vigorous fruit. (We cannot stay to explain Transcendental Idealism, nor to trace its derivation from German philosophers via Coleridge and others. A fast search on the word “transcendentalist” will start you on your way.) If later generations came to think of them as perhaps a bit stuffy, that is only because time had made them “classics,” therefore “respectable,” therefore dull. In life, these men – they were mostly men – were incendiaries.

Take merely Emerson and Thoreau: Their social gospel was self-reliance. Test everything. Hold to what seems true to you, and don’t worry about what England thinks, or what contemporary American society thinks, or what your neighbors think. Every day is a new day, bringing new thoughts and new perceptions. Everyone (they would have said “every man,” meaning the same thing and being understood to mean the same thing) has equal access to divine inspiration, and must learn to trust it. And down with whatever in society revealed itself to their eye as obsolete or moribund or – particularly – unjust.

Stuffy? These men were revolutionaries, relying on an inner power more solid than the state, and stronger than gunpowder. And they met response! Emerson spoke to the Harvard Divinity School as a young man, and the corporation didn’t dare ask him back until a full generation had passed. They knew arson when they experienced it.

Beyond the transcendentalists came that literary renaissance – one might almost call it a first-birth rather than a re-birth – that included Whitman and Melville. Nothing sedate and conservative about these two, either! And behind the literary renaissance came the reform movements. The North, particularly New England, centering on Boston, radiated reform movements, or, one might almost say, the reforming mood. In the South, the perceived need to protect slavery from any possible threat generated intolerance of nonconformity. In the South (and increasingly so as the years went on and the feeling of being under siege grew stronger), you went along with the power structure or you got out. But in the North, political and economic interests were more diverse, which left room for individual conscience.

Into that society, relatively open to innovation, social reformers poured their ideas and experiments: prison reform; educational reform; attacks on the sources of prostitution and drunkenness; creation of insane asylums and orphanages, and of cooperative and utopian societies such as Brook Farm and the Oneida community, and of new religious sects such as the Mormons.

But the most widespread, most vocal, most disruptive and ultimately most successful reforms were the intertwined calls for abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. The two causes emerged together and affected each other; often luminaries in one were also active in the other.

In the early 1830s, active abolitionists had to face ridicule and even mob violence. But by the end of the decade, the nation had begun to learn a lot more about the nature of slavery in the South, and was beginning to become exasperated by Southern resistance to change, and so anti-slavery became less unpopular. Naturally, this led the movement to split into two factions, radical idealists who refused to compromise, and moderates interested in practical politics and achievable results.

Radical abolitionists tended to favor woman’s rights and believe that women should have a significant role in antislavery work. “Political” abolitionists, on the other hand, sought to elect anti-slavery candidates, and therefore shied away from “the woman question” lest it frighten people off. So, when the 1840 national convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society supported the nomination of a woman abolitionist, Abigail Kelley, to serve on the convention’s business committee, the political abolitionists walked out and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which explicitly excluded women from membership.

But women had been involved in the antislavery movement from its beginning in 1833, when they organized female antislavery societies in Philadelphia and Boston. In 1837, seventy-one delegates from eight states held the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York, issuing publications and resolutions, forming executive committees, and launching a campaign to collect one million signatures on antislavery petitions to Congress. And individual women who began as abolitionists became increasingly active on behalf of woman’s rights.

Jack Larkin, Chief Historian for Old Sturbridge Village, puts it this way:

“The most active abolitionist women were the principal organizers and energizers of local or statewide action, and the writers who produced children’s books, hymns, and stories with an antislavery message, contributed to antislavery papers, or wrote tracts on the subject. The most unusual of them were the handful of women who spoke publicly for the cause, traveling the countryside as agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society. These women confronted a deeply ingrained tradition—the notion that women did not and should not speak in public. The first women lecturers were Sarah and Angelina Grimké. They began by addressing all-female audiences—itself a violation of custom—but soon went on to speaking before mixed groups of men and women, an even more serious offense. Such `promiscuous assemblies,’ as they were called, created controversy wherever the Grimké sisters went. In 1837, the General Association of Massachusetts, which represented the ministers of the state’s dominant Congregational church, issued a statement condemning women `who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers.’ This attack, and others made against them, spurred the Grimkés to make the equality of women a more important part of their message. They began to write and speak about the condition of woman as well as the condition of the slave—a decision which would soon help to split the abolitionist movement. But for the rest of their career as public speakers, Sarah and Angelina continued to combine the messages of woman’s rights and antislavery.

“In the process they helped lay the foundation for the woman’s rights movement which would issue its first manifesto, the famous “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Many of the women who would sign that Declaration and work to secure equality for women were also active abolitionists who believed that woman, like the slave; was entitled to equal rights.”

[For more information see: http://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-age-reform/articles/historical-background-antislavery-womens-rights-1830-1845]

The 1840s were much like the 1960s would be. In both cases, an impulse to reform caught fire, one enthusiasm sparking another, one perception of injustice illuminating another, until utopia itself seemed not quite good enough. In both cases, reform proposals blossomed into organized movements, which generated counter-pressure from conservative elements, which finally quashed the expectation of near-term reform. In both cases, few or none of the immediate goals were achieved, and yet, in both cases, the country was changed forever.

Abolition

Abolition is a large and troubling subject, the more troubling the closer you look at it, because your view of who were heroes and who were villains changes depending on context. Is a William Lloyd Garrison’s unequivocal condemnation of slaveholders really better morality than the troubled pragmatism of an Abraham Lincoln? Does the extremism that calls forth a corresponding defensive hardening of the opposing position really serve the purpose it wishes to advance? Yet, on the other hand, do not the counsels of moderation often merely prevent reform? It was a troubling, perplexing question: What was to be done about slavery in America? The subject was at the heart of the American experience, and at the heart of the issue of slavery was race.

If slavery had not existed, no one would have advocated forcibly bringing hundreds of thousands – millions – of Africans to these shores. And, on the other hand, had slaves and masters been of the same race, slavery would have died with the Declaration of Independence, if not long before. Slavery and race were intertwined in the American experience from the very beginning.

We have seen how slavery died amid the immense blood-letting of the Civil War, in which it almost seemed, as Abraham Lincoln said, that the Almighty had decreed that it continue “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Here we want to look at the changes that helped bring that war. Was that the only way we could have gotten rid of that cursed institution?

(How emancipation efforts began and spread, both before and after independence from England, we discuss in the next section, the 1700s. How slavery came to these shores and became intertwined with all levels of society among all the colonies, we leave for the 1600s.)

On August 1, 1833, the English government proclaimed emancipation throughout the empire. (Google William Wilberforce.) This event that had repercussions in the States. Although England and the United States had criminalized the international slave trade more than 25 years earlier, as we shall see, emancipating slaves throughout the world’s largest empire was a different story. Americans still looked to Britain, and the British had freed their slaves! And this included the West Indies, which to Southerners was uncomfortably close to home.

Even closer to home was another event that took place that year, when William Lloyd Garrison, evangelical minister Theodore Weld, and freedman Robert Purvis founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Now, Garrison is one of those men who is either a saint or a fanatic, something like John Brown. His weekly anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, founded in 1831, was known for its uncompromising advocacy of “immediate and complete emancipation” of all slaves in the United States. In the very first issue, he said, “I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.”

People don’t do their best thinking when motivated by fear or greed. They just hunker down. That’s what happened in the South, in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion, which all too many Southerners blamed on The Liberator, and on mythical Northern conspiracies to incite slave rebellion. After a certain point, Southerners ceased to apologize for their peculiar institution, and began to convince themselves that it was necessary, and right, and in fact mandated by God. Northern teachers suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. In 1835 alone abolitionists mailed over a million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the south. In response southern legislators banned abolitionist literature and the U.S. Postmaster General refused to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South.

The Liberator had a subscription list of only about 3,000, three-quarters of them black, but it drew a vehement reaction in the South. His critics believed he advocated the sudden and total freeing of all slaves, and considered him a dangerous fanatic. (Actually, he called for “immediate emancipation, gradually achieved,” which meant immediate repentance and a system of gradual emancipation.) After Turner’s slave rebellion, a North Carolina grand jury indicted Garrison for distributing incendiary material, and the Georgia Legislature offered a $5,000 reward for his capture and conveyance to the state for trial.

Historians distinguish between moderate antislavery reformers, who concentrated on stopping the spread of slavery, and radical abolitionists, whose demands for unconditional emancipation often merged with a concern for black civil rights. Most Northerners favored a policy of gradual and compensated emancipation, recognizing that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene to end slavery in the South. But as the Anti-Slavery Societies spread throughout the North, and as more and Northerners began to speak of the evils of slavery (noticeably influenced by the publication and wildfire success in 1852 of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Southerners began to lose the ability to make distinctions.

You know you have lost the ability to make distinctions when you can’t distinguish John Brown, trying to lead a slave revolt, from William Lloyd Garrison, calling for immediate emancipation, or Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian arguing that the South must end slavery, or Abraham Lincoln, conceding the South’s Constitutional right to preserve slavery, but demanding that it spread no farther. To more and more Southerners, any shade of opinion that did not say that slavery was good and justified constituted abolition sentiments. Their Northern opponents were not anti-slavery, or anti-slavery-expansion, but always “abolitionists.” A little later, the new Republican Party was never the Republicans but, always, Black Republicans.

And of course fear generated hatred, and hatred generated counter-hatred, and so fanatics on all sides generated and fueled the forces that they feared.

Southerners resisted containment of slavery; they got John Brown. They rebelled against Abraham Lincoln; they got General Sherman. Abolitionists rejected compromise and moderation; after a while, they got Civil War.

 

The telegraph

We just call it the telegraph, forgetting that at one time the term referred to other forms of long-distance signaling. But it was a big day when men learned to use electrical impulses to send coded text messages through strung wires (or, later, by radio). The electromagnetic telegraph, which sprang up with the railroad, and became indispensible to it, changed everything. Within a few decades, people were communicating from one end of the continent to the other, and then, via undersea cable, across the North Atlantic. The era of electronic mass communication was on its way.

The system that eventually emerged built upon many inventions, including many that worked but were commercially impractical. Not going into it here, though a brief run through is very interesting. (A Wikipedia search will tell you anything you want to know.) The world’s first commercial telegraph was developed in England, patented in 1837, and put into operation (a 13-mile line) on the Great Western Railway in 1838. Telegraph operations became standard on British railways, then became a form of mass communication there when the instruments were installed in post offices across the country.

In that same year of 1837, in the United States, Samuel F.B. Morse independently developed and patented an electrical telegraph, and devised the Morse Code to communicate letters and numbers as combinations of short and long electrical impulses. He sent the first telegram in the United States on 11 January 1838, across two miles of wire. The message that everyone knows he sent, “What hath God wrought,” came six years later, in a demonstration along a transmission line strung between Washington and Baltimore. (Only 40 miles apart, the two cities in 1844 were connected by poor roads and otherwise accessible to each other only by a circuitous passage by ship.) In America, as in Great Britain, railroads immediately saw the necessity for some means of communication within its system that moved faster than the engines , which themselves moved at speeds never before seen.

Everybody knows that the Mormons are centered in Utah. Few know how they got there, or why. It wasn’t in order to establish the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

The Mormons entered history in 1830, in upstate New York, when a man named Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon and founded the Church of Christ. The little church attracted converts, and Smith sent out missionaries. As it grew, Smith moved it westward, relocating first in Ohio, then in Missouri. But soon Mormons and their neighbors were feuding, and in the fall of 1838, the church – now numbering some 8,000 – was forced to leave Missouri and relocate in Illinois, where they promptly began to build the city of Nauvoo. The church grew rapidly, fueled in part by immigration from Europe. But again, within a few years, there was trouble with their neighbors. In 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob.

Brigham Young, who had been a close associate of Smith’s, and who was senior apostle of the Quorum of the Twelve, assumed the leadership of what was now called the Latter Day Saints, and decided to move west yet again, in an attempt to get beyond the reach of further persecution. He led them first to Nebraska, then, in 1847, to the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake, which he named Deseret, and which we know as Utah.

It was a meticulously planned operation. Young’s group was small and fast-moving, selected from among those in the temporary settlements they had constructed in Nebraska and Iowa. When he had selected their new site, he sent another 2,000, bidding them to do the work needed to support the thousands yet to come. So, they established farms, grew crops, and in general established preliminary settlements.

And then the Mormon community began to gather from all ends of the earth. Beginning in 1848, trains of emigrants followed the California Trail and the Oregon Trail to Fort Bridger in Wyoming, then took the trail to the Great Salt Lake. The Mormons organized a complete evacuation from their previous homes, leaving no one behind. By 1860, more than 43,000 Mormons had traveled this route.

The Westerns that portray wagon train emigrations never show people pulling or pushing handcarts, and yet about 3,000 of the Mormon pioneers came west doing just that. Those carts, pulled or pushed by two, three or four people, could carry up to 100 pounds of food, bedding, etc., and were no slower than the ox-drawn wagons that accompanied them carrying more food and supplies. These handcart pioneers, once they arrived in the valley, were given jobs and accommodations by individual Mormon families until they could become established. (One feature of their migration that shows both their sense of community and their enterprising spirit is the system of ferries run by the Mormon pioneers along the Mormon Trail. The ferries were free for Mormon settlers, but others paid a toll.)

Having failed to build Zion within the confines of American society, the Mormons began to construct a society in isolation, based on their beliefs and values. The cooperative ethic that Mormons had developed over the last decade and a half became important as settlers branched out and colonized a large desert region now known as the Mormon corridor. The Mormon villages were governed by bishops and were viewed as commonwealth. From 1849–52, the Mormons greatly expanded their missionary efforts overseas, and Young’s presidency (1847–77) saw more than 70,000 converts arrive.

But the country the Mormons had left behind caught up with them. After the Mexican War, the New Zion was no longer beyond the borders of the United States, but was again included within U.S. territory. Year by year, tensions between Mormons and their neighbors escalated, largely as a result of accusations involving polygamy and Young’s theocratic rule, until in 1857, President James Buchanan sent an army to Utah. A brief, mostly bloodless, conflict ensued, and was resolved by Young agreeing to step down as governor and be replaced by a non-Mormon. But of course he remained the power behind the throne until his death in 1877.

The one thing everybody knows or thinks he knows about Mormons is that they practiced polygamy. But what they may not know is that every wife was established in her own house, and no man was allowed more wives than he could afford to maintain. For single women without brothers or fathers to support them, plural marriage made economic sense, and in a culture strongly rooted in a sense of communality, it made social sense as well. However, the practice of plural marriage was never universal, and was finally abandoned in the years between the Civil War and the end of the century.

 

 

Before the transcontinental railroad, before the Civil War, before the Mexican War, Americans were moving toward the Pacific. How we came to acquire our share of the Oregon territory is a story we will tell below, but for now we’ll just talk about the days when the only overland route between the Missouri River (and points east) and the fertile lands of Oregon was a 2,000-mile wagon route through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho. Today, I- 80 follows the trail for a good way, and many of the towns it passes through grew up with the trail.

The first wagon train to take to the trail (which at that time extended to Fort Hall, Idaho) was organized in Independence, Missouri, in 1836, while the Texans were winning independence from Mexico. Year by year, more wagon trains came, starting variously in Missouri or Iowa or Nebraska and linking up with the trail somewhere along the lower Platte River Valley in Nebraska. And, year by year, the trails were cleared farther west, until they reached all the way to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In time, the trail grew branches: the California Trail, the Bozeman Trail, and the Mormon Trail.

From first to last, between the 1830s and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, about 400,000 people traveled the Oregon Trail — settlers, ranchers, farmers, miners, and businessmen, and their families. Notice that last word. Unlike the stampede to California, which was mostly young single men, Oregon’s was a migration of families.

Why Oregon? Because early explorers, having seen few trees and little surface water on the great plains, had termed it the Great American Desert, and it didn’t seem a promising place to settle. Besides, until after the Civil War the plains were reserved for the Indians, and settlement there was illegal. In Oregon, land was fertile, free for the taking, and it came with tremendous natural resources, a climate free of the yellow fever and malaria then prevalent in lower latitudes, and only a few (nominally but certainly not rabidly) British settlers.

The first three wagons to reach the Columbia River by land, two families traveling together, arrived in September, 1840. In 1841 an emigrant group set out for California, but about half the party went instead to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, the first members of an organized wagon train to do so. The following year, another organized wagon train brought more than 100 pioneers. And then, in 1843, an estimated thousand emigrants set out for Oregon. A man named Marcus Whitman volunteered to lead them to Oregon, wagons and all. He believed the wagon trains were large enough that they could build whatever road improvements they needed. They made it as far as Mount Hood, then disassembled the wagons and floated them down the Columbia River and herded the animals over a rough trail. They nearly all arrived in the Willamette Valley by early October. The settlers organized land claims within the Oregon Country, allowing unmarried settlers to claim up to 320 acres and married couples up to 640 acres (one square mile, which was called a section). This was merely provisional, but the claims were eventually honored by the United States in the Donation Land Act of 1850.

In 1846, a road was completed around Mount Hood, thus completing a 2,000-mile wagon trail from the Missouri river. Over the years ferries were established on many rivers to help get the wagons across. These ferries increased the cost of traveling the trail by roughly $30 per wagon but could reduce transit times by a month, as well as preventing death by drowning at river crossings.

The Oregon Trail led to the development of the prairie schooner. Half the size of the larger Conestoga wagon the prairie schooner weighed about 1,300 pounds empty with about 2,500 pounds capacity and about 88 cubic feet of storage space in a box 11 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 2 feet high, and could easily be pulled by four to six oxen or six to ten mules.

The wagons cost between $85 and $170 new. One wagon could carry enough food for six months’ travel for four or five travelers as well as a short list of household and luxury items including clothing and ammunition. More than two thirds of the wagons were pulled by oxen, and most of the rest by mule teams. Although an ox team was about 10 percent slower than a mule or horse-pulled wagon (about 2 to 3 miles per hour) they were cheaper to buy ($25 to $85 per yoke versus up to $600 or more for six horses), easier to train, could pull more, survived better on the sparse grass often found along the trail, did not require oats or grain, and were often tamer and easier to handle after they were trained. (Novices could usually learn to handle a trained ox team in about a week.) They could be turned loose at night and easily rounded up in the mornings. Indians were usually less interested in stealing them. Ox drivers walked alongside the left side of their oxen team and used the voice commands “gee” (right) and “haw” (left) and a whip to guide them, snapping them in the air to get the animal’s attention.

The cost of traveling over the Oregon Trail and its extensions varied from nothing (if you hired on to help drive the wagons or herds) to a few hundred dollars. About 60 to 80 percent of the travelers were farmers and as such already owned a wagon, livestock team, and many of the necessary supplies. This lowered the cost of the trip to about $50 per person for food and other items. Families planned the trip months in advance and made many of the extra clothing and other items needed. If you had capital, you could buy livestock in the Midwest and drive it to California or Oregon for profit.

The number of deaths on the trail is not known with any precision. Estimating is difficult because of the common practice of burying people in unmarked graves that were intentionally disguised to avoid them being dug up by animals or Indians. Graves were often put in the middle of a trail and then run over by the livestock to make them difficult to find. Disease was the main killer of trail travelers; cholera killed up to 3 percent of all travelers in the epidemic years from 1849 to 1855. Indian attacks increased significantly after 1860 when most of the army troops were withdrawn and miners and ranchers began fanning out all over the country, often encroaching on Indian territory. Other common causes of death included hypothermia, drowning in river crossings, getting run over by wagons (believe it or not), and accidental gun deaths. Significant numbers suffered from scurvy, because of their typical diet of flour and salted pork/bacon. Some believe that scurvy deaths may have rivaled cholera as a killer, with most deaths occurring after the victim reached California.

For details of life on the trail, Google the Oregon Trial.