to their fellow whites, east of the Mississippi: White women—white families—could cross the continent. Indeed a wagon could be pulled across most of it. Unwittingly, the Whitmans were at the vanguard of America’s great westward migration.
In 1841, sixty-nine emigrants—including five women—crossed the continent by wagon. Their original goal was California, though half of the party ultimately would decide to veer north for Oregon. In 1842, a group of about 100 ventured to Oregon. The year 1843 marked the first large-scale crossing: 1,000 emigrants herding 5,000 head of cattle.20
As it had for Narcissa Whitman, the buffalo played a central role in the frontier experience of other early emigrants—both symbolically and practically. If spotting the first buffalo signified arrival on the frontier, killing a buffalo—for food or otherwise—was a veritable right of passage for any man who traveled west. William Marshall Anderson, traveling near the present-day Nebraska–Wyoming border, recorded his first kill with near biblical zeal. “This evening, about 5 o’clock, I felled a mighty bison to the earth. I placed my foot upon his neck of strength and looked around, but in vain, for some witness of my first great ‘coup.’ I thought myself larger than a dozen men.”21
A powerful psychology took grip that no man seemed able to resist. Captain Howard Stansbury, who led a group of emigrants near the South Platte, recorded the following after the party’s first encounter with a large herd of buffalo: “The effect upon our hunters, and, in fact, upon the whole party, was that of a sudden and most intense excitement, and a yearning, feverish desire to secure as much as possible of this noble game.” A pioneer named Josiah Gregg described the scene after his party sighted their first herd:
Pell-mell we charged the huge monsters, and poured in a brisk fire, which sounded like an opening battle; our horses were wild with excitement and fright; the balls flew at random … One [buffalo] was brought to bay by whole volleys of shots; his eyeballs glared; he bore his tufted tail aloft like a black flag; then shaking his vast and shaggy main in impotent defiance, he sank majestically to the earth, under twenty bleeding wounds.
In summarizing the iron grip of this buffalo fever, Gregg stated simply that “[s]uch is the excitement that generally prevails at the sight of these fat denizens of the prairies that very few hunters appear able to refrain from shooting as long as the game remains within reach of their rifle.” Such hunters were called “plinkers” for the potshots they fired as they rolled along the trail.22
Once the initial excitement faded, some pioneers found the buffalo so numerous as to be an irritant. Women waved aprons to shoo the beasts away from cooking fires, and wagon trains sometimes were delayed for days at a time by herds that refused to be hazed from the path.23 A pioneer named Obadiah Oakley, who traveled to Oregon from Peoria, described herds “as thick as sheep ever seen in a field” and complained that animals “moved not until the caravan was within ten feet of them. They would then rise and flee at random, greatly affrighted, and snorting and bellowing to the equal alarm of the horses and mules.”24
When not alarmed, horses and mules sometimes fell under the spell of their wild brethren and ran off with the buffalo. Explorer John Fremont described how one of his mules “took a freak into his head, and joined a neighboring band of buffalo today. As we were not in condition to lose horses, I sent several of the men in pursuit … but we did not see him again.”25
In the early years of western emigration, the numbers, at least, still favored the buffalo.
A total of no more than 10,000 pioneers traveled to Oregon and California during the years 1841 to 1846.26
Soon though, successive waves of enticements began luring more and more Americans west. In 1847, Mormon leader Brigham Young established Salt Lake City as a western haven for his beleaguered tribe. In 1848 came the earth-shaking discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California. In the early 1850s, Congress began to give away free land to encourage settlement in the territories of Oregon and Washington. This modest homesteading program was expanded dramatically when President Lincoln, on May 20, 1862, fulfilled a campaign promise by signing the Homestead Act. Six weeks later, even as his army failed in an attempt to end the Civil War by taking the Confederate capital of Richmond, Lincoln affixed his signature to another bill. The law it created would transform the West to a greater degree than any measure that came before it. From two poles, Sacramento and Omaha, began the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.
A pioneer woman with a load of bois de vache
Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society.
IN 1869, LESS THAN SEVEN YEARS AFTER LINCOLN LAUNCHED THE building of the transcontinental railroad, trains from east and west came together on a windswept butte in Utah. Leland Stanford, an executive of the Central Pacific Railroad, drove a golden spike into a waiting tie, and with this final fall of the sledge, America’s manifest destiny had been fulfilled. East and West had been connected.
In addition to the main line between Omaha and Sacramento, numerous other lines were being built or planned. In 1870, the Kansas Pacific Railroad connected Kansas City and Denver. In the same year, construction began on the Northern Pacific, a railroad to connect the Great Lakes with the Puget Sound. All along the main Union Pacific, meanwhile, rails branched out in the form of spur lines to connect the dots bypassed in the first wave of construction. All told, a remarkable 35,000 miles of new track were laid between 1866 and 1873.27
Certainly the benefits of the new railroads were incalculable. Psychologically, as historian Stephen Ambrose pointed out, the Civil War had united the country North and South, but it took the completion of the railroad to bind the nation East and West. A more quotidian benefit, of course, was the dramatic decrease in the time and expense of transportation. Before the railroad, coast-to-coast transportation by wagon was measured in months of arduous travel. By train, the journey took seven days. In the wagon train era, pioneers might pay $1,000 for the equipment and provisions to cross the continent. In June of 1870, a third-class “emigrant” ticket cost $65. For any location reachable by train, wagon travel virtually ceased. As George Bird Grinnell discovered in his trip west only fourteen months after the driving of the golden spike, the old pioneer trail already had grown over with flowers for lack of traffic.28
Few changes so dramatic, however, come without a price. Arthur Ferguson, a young man who thought about the future as he worked to survey the route for the railroad, wrote in his 1868 journal that “[t]he time is coming and fast too, when in the sense it is now understood, THERE WILL BE NO WEST.”29 A bit of hyperbole, perhaps. Yet clearly the railroad accelerated the transformations—positive and negative—of the nineteenth century.
FOR THE GREAT HERD OF BUFFALO THAT ONCE ROAMED THE PLAINS IN AN unbroken mass from Mexico to Canada, the impact of humankind had been significant even before the earliest waves of California and Oregon emigrants. John James Audubon was not the only early western traveler to notice the diminishing numbers of the herd. A trapper named Osborne Russell kept a journal from 1834 to 1843. Writing about the buffalo, he warned that “it will not be doubted for a moment that this noble race of animals, so useful in supplying the wants of man, will at no far distant period become extinct in North America.”30 Painter George Catlin, whose dramatic images helped to create the nation’s visual consciousness of the West, also warned of the buffalo’s demise in the 1830s. “It is truly a melancholy contemplation for the traveler in this country, to anticipate the period which is not far distant, when the last of these noble animals, at the hands of white and red men, will fall victims to their cruel and improvident rapacity.” 31
Catlin’s journal—consistent with other contemporaneous documents—hints at
