This is the story of a little girl
who in 1849 rode all the way from Ohio to California
in an emigrant wagon. Polly Elliott has grandchildren
of her own now, but she remembers very well the spring
morning when her father came home and said to her mother,
“Lizzie, can you get ready to start for the
land of gold next week?” She hears again her
mother saying, “Oh, John, with all these little
children?” She says her father answered by swinging
her, the eleven-year-old Polly, up to his shoulder
and calling out, “Here’s papa’s little
woman; she’ll help you take care of them,”
as he carried her round the room, laughing.
This was “back East,”
as Polly Elliott, now Mrs. Davis, says, in
Ohio, where they had a pretty white house set round
with apple and peach orchards all white and pink that
May day. Her mother cried because they must leave
the house, and because they had to sell all their
furniture and the stock except Daisy, the pet cow,
and Buck and Bright, the oxen, who were to draw the
wagon. A round-topped cover of white cloth was
fixed on the big farm-wagon. Then they piled into
it their bedding in calico covers, a chest or two
holding clothes and household goods, a few dishes
and cooking things, and plenty of flour, corn meal,
beans, bacon, dried apples and peaches, tied up in
sacks.
Polly says she supposed the trip would
just be one long picnic, while the four children thought
it fine fun to “sit on mother’s featherbed
and go riding,” as they said. So they started
off for California. A long, long ride these emigrants
had before them; a weary trip, plodding along day
after day with the patient oxen walking slowly and
the burning sun or pelting rain beating down on the
wagon cover. There was a train of other wagons
with them, some pulled by horses but more by yoked
oxen, and the men walked beside the animals and cracked
long whips. A few men were on horseback, but
all kept together, for Indians were plenty and were
often hiding near the road, watching for a chance
to cut off and capture any wagons lagging behind the
party.
Day after day, Polly told me, they
travelled westward to the setting sun. They left
the orchards and shady woods of Ohio and Indiana far
behind them, and crossed the wide prairies of Illinois
and Missouri also. When they came to rivers they
drove through shallow fording-places, where Polly
and the children used to laugh to see the little fishes
swimming round the wagon wheels. Sometimes the
rivers were deep, and the wagons were ferried over
on a flatboat that was fastened to a wire rope, while
oxen and horses swam through the water behind them.
If it did not rain, the children and all were happy,
and it did seem like a picnic. But Polly says
she never hears the rain pouring nowadays as it did
then, and that there were many times when they were
wet and cold and miserable, and because the wood and
ground were wet they could not even have a fire.
At night the teams were unhitched
and the wagons left in a circle round a big camp-fire,
where supper was cooked. Polly says her mother
used to bake biscuits in an iron spider with red-hot
coals heaped on its iron cover, and these biscuits
with fried bacon and tea made their meal. They
always cooked a big potful of corn-meal mush for the
children, and this, with Daisy’s milk and a little
maple sugar or molasses, was supper and breakfast
too. Then the women and children cuddled up in
the wagons for the night, while men slept, wrapped
in blankets, around the camp-fire or under the wagons,
with one always on guard against danger from prowling
Indians or wolves.
Every man or boy carried a rifle or
shotgun, and killed plenty of game. Deer and
antelope were always in sight after they crossed the
Missouri River, and the meat was broiled or roasted
over the coals of their campfire. Wild turkeys
and prairie-chicken tasted much better than bacon,
Polly said, and she learned to cook them herself.
When the emigrants reached Nebraska,
they were in the “buffalo country,” and
great herds of big, shaggy, brown or black buffaloes
were feeding on the grassy plains. The animals
were larger than oxen, and the Indians depended upon
the flesh for food and the thick, warm skins for robes
or blankets. The emigrants shot thousands of buffalo
cows and calves, and what meat could not be eaten at
once was cut into long strips and hung in the sun
or over the fire to dry. This was called “jerking”
the meat. On jerked buffalo or venison and flour
pancakes many emigrants lived all the way across.
Game was so plenty and so easy to shoot, that by stopping
a few days, a good stock of meat could be laid in
while the oxen were resting. So they travelled
through Nebraska, and for weeks and weeks saw nothing
but long grass waving in the summer winds, and yellow
sunflowers miles and miles of sunflowers.
Polly grew very tired of the hot sun blazing down on
the close-covered wagon, and of the dust raised by
the long wagon-train.
About this time she remembers that
her father bought her a little Indian pony, and from
that happy day the child rode beside the wagon, and
could keep out of the dusty trail, or ride a little
way off on the prairie, if she liked. The pony
carried double very well, so a small sister or brother
was often lifted on behind for a ride. One night
the Indians, who were always prowling round and coming
as near the wagon-train as they dared, frightened
the horses and got away with ten of them. All
the women and children cried, Polly says, for they
were afraid the redskins would come back and kill
them. In the morning Polly’s father and
some of the men found the Indians’ trail and
tracked them to a wooded canon. The hungry thieves
had killed one horse and were so busy feasting on
it that the white men surprised them and shot all
the Indians but two or three. The lost horses
and Polly’s pony whinnied to their masters from
a thicket, where they were tied, and were taken back
to camp.
On and on over the great plains of
Wyoming the wagons carried these emigrants. Many
found the trip grow tiresome, while the oxen and mules
would often lie down in their traces and refuse to
go any farther. A few days’ rest, and the
rich bunch-grass to crop soon set the stock all right,
and the white-topped wagons crawled ahead again.
Soon the emigrants saw blue, hazy mountains, far off
at first, then nearer and nearer, till at last their
road led through a pass between the peaks.
Then Polly remembers riding through
Utah, with its queer red cliffs and high rocks carved
in strange shapes by winds and weather; the stretches
of sandy desert; and beyond those, grassy meadows and
streams fringed with green willows. After a while
Great Salt Lake lay sparkling in the sun and looking
cool and blue. All around it were alkali deserts
or wide plains, hot and dusty and white with salt or
soda. The “prairie schooners,”
with their covers faded and burnt by the sun, went
very slowly over these desert wastes, Polly thought,
and Nevada, with its dusty gray sage-brush land on
either side of the road, seemed not much better.
“Papa’s little woman”
had her hands full now; for her mother was so ill
she seldom left the wagon. All the cooking fell
to Polly’s share, and then she would ride along
for hours with a little sister on her lap and fat
brother “Bub” behind her on the saddle-blanket,
so that her mother might rest and be quiet.
But soon the clear green Truckee River
ran foaming and fretting beside the road, and off
in the west rose the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains. Then the people began to laugh and
to sing, for they knew that California, the land of
gold, was almost in sight and that their weary journey
was nearly ended.
And one day they said joyfully to
each other, “We are in California at last;”
and it was a happy company that travelled down through
the pines of the mountain sides and the oak trees
of the foot-hills. Many emigrants left the train
when they got to the great Sacramento River valley,
and settled here and there to farming. Polly’s
father with others kept on to the gold-diggings and
camped there. He built a log-cabin soon, for
it was almost winter and time for the rains, and Polly
says she was glad to have a house at last. They
finally took up farming land near what is now Stockton,
as gold-mining did not pay.
Mrs. Davis, who is straight and strong,
and still a hard worker, says her five months’
trip across the plains was almost like a long picnic
after all, for she has forgotten many of the trying
and disagreeable things.