The Indifferent Stars Above
The Harrowing Saga of the DONNER PARTY
Daniel James Brown
For Sharon
Thank you
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above.
—W. B. YEATS,
A Dream of Death
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One:
A Sprightly Boy and a Romping Girl
Chapter One Home and Heart
Chapter Two Mud and Merchandise
Chapter Three Grass
Part Two:
The Barren Earth
Chapter Four Dust
Chapter Five Deception
Chapter Six Salt, Sage, and Blood
Part Three:
The Meager by the Meager Were Devoured
Chapter Seven Cold Calculations
Chapter Eight Desperation
Chapter Nine Christmas Feasts
Chapter Ten The Heart on the Mountain
Chapter Eleven Madness
Chapter Twelve Hope and Despair
Photographic Insert
Chapter Thirteen Heroes and Scoundrels
Part Four:
In the Reproof of Chance
Chapter Fourteen Shattered Souls
Chapter Fifteen Golden Hills, Black Oaks
Chapter Sixteen Peace
Chapter Seventeen In the Years Beyond
Epilogue
Appendix: The Donner Party Encampments
Acknowledgments
Chapter Notes
Sources
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the author
About the book
Read on
Other Books by Daniel James Brown
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Even well after the tragedy was over, Sarah Graves’s little sister Nancy often burst into tears for no apparent reason. She mystified many of her schoolmates in the new American settlement at the Pueblo de San José;. One minute she would be fine, running, laughing, and playing on the dusty school ground like any other ten-or eleven-year-old, but then suddenly the next minute she would be sobbing. All of them knew that she had been part of what was then called the lamentable Donner Party
while coming overland to California in 1846. Recent emigrants themselves, most of them knew, generally, what that meant and sympathized with her for it. But for a long while, none of them knew Nancy’s particular, individual secret. That part was just too terrible to tell.
Nancy Graves’s secret was just one part of many things that were too terrible to tell by the time the last survivors of the Donner Party staggered out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the spring of 1847. And for decades thereafter, many of those things were not told, except in tabloid newspaper accounts that were often compounded far more of fiction than of truth. It wasn’t until a newspaper editor named Charles F. McGlashan began to delve into the story in the 1870s that many of the real details of what had happened that winter in the Sierra Nevada started to emerge. McGlashan set about interviewing survivors, and in 1879 he published his History of the Donner Party, the first serious attempt at documenting the disaster. Since then the true stories and the fictional ones have bred and interbred in the American imagination.
In introducing his recent book, Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought, Michael Stephenson points out that our ideas about the generation that fought the American Revolution have become embalmed
by the slow accretion of national mythology.
How true. I still cannot think of George Washington without visualizing him as a marble bust. But if the generation of 1776 has been fossilized by mythology, the same is equally true of their grandchildren. The emigrant generation of the 1840s has been endlessly depicted in film and television productions, almost always in highly stereotyped ways—a string of clichés about strong-jawed men circling the wagons to hold off Indian attacks and hard-edged women endlessly churning butter and peering out from under sunbonnets with eyes as cold and hard as river-worn stones.
The emigrants of the 1840s deserve better. They were, on the whole, a remarkable people living in remarkable times. Just how remarkable they were has largely been camouflaged for us, not only by the stereotyping and the mythologizing but by the homespun ordinariness of their clothes, the commonplace nature of their language, the simple virtues they held dear, and the casual courage with which they confronted long odds and bitterly harsh realities. The men among them did, in fact, sometimes circle their wagons to defend against potential Indian attacks, though the attacks were anticipated far more often than they ever occurred. But the men also lay awake at night agonizing about what they had gotten their families into, schemed to take advantage of one another, sobbed under the stars when their children died, lusted after women half their ages. And the women did, of course, churn a great deal of butter, but they also studied botany, counseled troubled teenagers, yearned for love, struggled with domineering husbands, and made wild rollicking love deep in the recesses of their covered wagons. Like all people in all times, the emigrant men and women, as well as the Native American men and women, of the 1840s were complex bundles of fear and hope, greed and generosity, nobility and savagery.
And in the end, each of them was, of course, an individual, as unique and vital and finely nuanced as you or me. So before I began to write this book, I made a vow to myself that wherever possible I would cut through the clichés and resist the easy assumptions about the men and women who went west in 1846. And I decided that I would focus on one woman in particular, Sarah Graves, and tell the unvarnished truth about what happened to her in the high Sierra in the terrible winter of that year.
Sarah hasn’t made it easy. She left little record of her own experiences, and while others who suffered through the ordeal with her that winter have left us with their own, sometimes quite detailed accounts, few of them have had much to say about her. But what accounts there are suggest that she was a friendly, sociable, and thoughtful person, well liked by many of her companions but perhaps not apt to call attention to herself. And so while I have everywhere tried to remain entirely factual in writing about her, I have at times extrapolated from what those who accompanied her reported or from the published findings of experts in particular fields to describe what she must have experienced. Knowing, for instance, that she spent a specific night sleeping on the snow, clad only in wet flannel as the mercury plummeted into the low twenties, allows us also to know with reasonable certainty what she must have experienced in terms of physical discomfort, potential hypothermia, and psychological distress. So I have gone where eyewitness accounts and expert testimony have led me in describing such experiences. Similarly, in places I have drawn on my own experiences walking in her footsteps to re-create direct physical sensations that she must inevitably have felt. So, for example, in describing her passage through tall prairie grass, I have included sensory details from my own trek through the deep grass of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Nebraska.
With that in mind, I offer this book not as a comprehensive history-of the Donner Party but as a lens through which I hope you will be able to gaze with compassion and understanding on one young woman and all that the world once was to her.
DANIEL JAMES BROWN
Redmond, Washington
September 1, 2008
PROLOGUE
In many ways this book began one hot October afternoon in the fall of 2006 when I drove up the Napa Valley searching for bones. I have an affinity for bones. I like their hard-and-fast durability, the crispness of their lines, the heft and weight of them. Most of all I like their honesty. Bones have their secrets, but they tell no lies.
I made my way slowly up the valley in a rental car, trapped in the usual weekend procession of tourists promenading from one winery to the next on Highway 29. Heat waves rippled off of the black asphalt ahead of me. A vague autumnal haze hung over the valley, and so did the heady aroma of fermenting wine. The harvest was in full swing. Crews of pickers were making their way among the vines, stooped over, lugging white plastic boxes full of dark grapes. Watching them, I was glad for the car’s air conditioner.
The wine tourists and I crept through the hot but picturesque old brick downtown of St. Helena, past the stately stone buildings of the Beringer winery, then past the Old Bale Mill. I craned my neck to see the mill, but its enormous wooden waterwheel was hidden behind a screen of redwoods. I remember the mill fondly as a shady, cool place my father used to bring me for picnics on warm days like this when I accompanied him on sales trips up the valley in the 1960s. Finally, just south of Calistoga, I pulled out of the parade and parked my car in front of a stately old farmhouse. The house is the headquarters for the Bothe-Napa Valley State Park now, but once it belonged to my great-uncle, George Washington Tucker.
I got out of the car. The house was closed for the afternoon, so I circled behind it and made my way up a little dirt path through a field of dried-out thistles and parched, waist-high grass toward what was left of a white picket fence. Sections of the fence had fallen to the ground, and the thistles had grown up tall and ragged between the pickets. Other sections still stood, leaning at odd, disjointed angles, flakes of white paint peeling from gray, weathered wood. From time to time, gusts of hot, dry wind blew down from the chaparral-cloaked Mayacamas Mountains just to the west, and the thistles rattled and scraped against the wooden pickets. Cicadas whirred in the big valley oaks fringing the field. The peppery scent of bay laurel spiced the wine-rich air.
The tumbled-down fence surrounded the remains of a derelict cemetery. Most of the tombstones were made of white marble, and many of them were cracked. Some had toppled to the ground and lay facedown among the weeds; others were missing essential parts, bearing only fragmentary inscriptions half obscured by patches of gray-green lichen. I began to wonder if I would find the one I was looking for. But then I did. Chiseled into the marble was the inscription GEORGE W. TUCKER DEC. 15, 1831–AUG. 16 1907.
He was my father’s uncle, and I was there because he is my one tenuous connection with a young woman named Sarah Graves Fosdick. I had come to commune with his bones before I began to search for hers. He was not a major figure in Sarah’s life, but once, a long time ago and far from there, he had been in her company. He was only fifteen then, she twenty-one, and they had both been setting forth on a journey of staggering proportions into, quite literally, uncharted territory. Whether they were even acquainted in the first few weeks of that trip, I do not know. They had both begun their journeys in Illinois—he in Illinois City and she in Sparland, near Peoria. A month later, on the west bank of the Missouri River, their families had met up and become friendly. It’s unlikely that she would have paid him, a mere boy, any particular heed. But I do know that they must eventually have come to know each other, thrown together by circumstances so horrifying that neither of them could have imagined anything of the kind when they first met. He had traveled where she traveled, saw and felt much of what she saw and felt. His bones had walked the same tedious trails, stretched out at night on the same patches of prairie sod, climbed laboriously through the same icebound mountain passes.
I am far from the first to commune with bones in hopes of understanding Sarah’s story. One warm August afternoon in the summer of 1849, Wakeman Bryarly, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor from Baltimore, found himself near what was then still called Truckee Lake in the high Sierra. Like so many other ambitious young men that summer—the summer when a whole world of young men seemed to pour across North America and into California—he was on his way to the goldfields. His party had encamped just east of the lake, and, with an afternoon to kill, he decided to take the opportunity to indulge in a cold bath. On his way to the lake, he hoped also to find something else that hundreds of other travelers that summer had sought out—a local tourist attraction of sorts.
He set off on foot, and just 150 yards down the road he found the first evidence of what he was looking for. In a dusty meadow full of whirring grasshoppers, dry grass, and foot-tall plants with broad gray leaves called mule ears
stood a weathered but neatly fashioned log cabin. The cabin was surrounded by some unusually tall stumps, the remains of pine trees that had been cut off ten feet or more above the ground. He examined the cabin and found that it had two entrances and two living chambers separated by a log partition. In the dirt floor of each chamber, there was a shallow depression, the remnants, perhaps, of fire pits, or burial pits of some sort. Poking about in the dry grass among the stumps outside the cabins, he found some charred logs. And then, nearby, he found what he’d been told he would.
Half hidden in the grass were piles of bones. At first most of them seemed to be the bones of cattle, but then, just to the left of these, he found a nearly complete human skeleton sprawled out on the ground with grass growing up between the ribs. He stooped and examined the remains. Then he noticed that in the grass nearby there were bits and pieces of broken wooden boxes and some faded articles of clothing. He picked up a child’s stocking and felt something rattling around inside it. He carefully turned the stocking inside out and dumped its contents into his hand—the small and perfect foot bones of a child.
Bryarly stood up and contemplated the scene before him. As a doctor, he had seen plenty of human bones before. And just recently he had seen a great many. The overland trail on which he’d been traveling all summer had been strewn with shallow graves, as many as ten per mile in some places. Most of them were the product of the devastating Asiatic cholera epidemic that had spread its way from New Orleans up the Missouri River and then westward along the trail that summer, killing hundreds of emigrants of all ages. The graves were often shallow, dug in sandy soil by grim-faced men anxious to move on and escape whatever mysterious agent was causing all these deaths. Many of the graves had been ripped open by wolves and coyotes, and in spots the road had been strewn with bones and tattered bits and pieces of mummified corpses.
Satisfied that he had seen what he’d come to see, Bryarly shook off the grimness of his discovery and continued along a pretty little creek through sparse pinewoods to Truckee Lake. There had been frost on the grass that morning, but the afternoon had grown warm and dry, as they often do on the east side of the Sierra in late summer. He was dusty and travel-weary, so he undressed and took a bath. The sheer beauty of the place stunned him. He exulted in the clarity of the lake’s frigid, crystalline water and in the drama of the stark granite cliffs and basalt crags towering above the far end of the lake.
Exhilarated, he started back toward his party’s encampment. And then, unexpectedly, as he passed through some dark pinewoods, he came across more evidence of what had happened there just three years before—the remains of another cabin, this one burned to the ground. Among blackened logs he found more human bones—many more. He crouched to examine them, and this time the bones shocked Bryarly, not so much for their number but for their condition. Femurs and tibias had been hacked open as if with an ax; skulls had been cut open as if with a meat saw. Whatever sense of spiritual renovation he had felt at the lake quickly faded. Looking at what lay before him, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation that the whole place was, as he wrote in his diary that night, pervaded by a sad, melancholy stillness . . .which seems to draw you closer and closer. . . .
He grew still and began to reflect on what these bones might have to tell him:
To look upon these sad monuments harrows up every sympathy of the heart & soul, & you almost hold your breath to listen for some mournful sound from these blackened, dismal, funeral piles, telling you of their many sufferings & calling on you for bread, bread.
Wakeman Bryarly had it right. To hear the only voices that can tell this story, you must almost hold your breath to listen. What they have to say is hard to hear, and harder still to come to terms with.
And so, standing in a long-neglected cemetery in the Napa Valley, I, too, held my breath and strained to listen. I pulled a manila envelope from my pocket and took out a photograph of Sarah that had been given to me by one of her relatives. I studied it, as I had done many times before. It has haunted me since I first saw it, and ultimately it is the reason I set out to write this book. At the moment when it was taken, Sarah gazed back at the camera calmly, with bright, intelligent-looking eyes. She was pretty, but only in a quiet, understated way. In the picture her hair is parted in the middle and pulled back above the ears, and she is wearing what looks to be a simple black bodice with a lace collar and a large white bow at the neck. She appears serious, almost somber, but, paradoxically, she is wearing what seems to me to be just the slightest, Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile.
It was those bright eyes and that slim suggestion of an almost-smile that first arrested my attention and that have held it ever since. In an era when people almost universally believed that a grim, even severe, countenance was the most appropriate face to present to the camera, Sarah had let a tiny glimmer of happiness, or at least apparent contentment, show through. Standing there among the rattling thistles next to my great-uncle’s grave, I wondered how I was to reconcile that hint of happiness with what I already knew about her life and death.
I turned to go, making my way down through the thistles, around my great-uncle’s house, and back to the car. I drove out onto the highway and began an odyssey. To understand Sarah’s story, and to tell it well, I knew I needed to go where she had gone, to be where she had been at the time of year when she was there. I needed to go east and then follow Sarah west from where she began to where she ended.
During a series of trips over the next year and a half, I put several thousand miles on various rental cars and stayed at more cheap motels than I care to remember. I waded through waist-high prairie grass crawling with ticks, struggled on foot up dusty inclines in the Rockies, walked the salt flats of Utah in withering heat, tromped through snow up to my hips in the Sierra, following Sarah’s footsteps as closely as I reasonably could wherever she went. In all of this, I saw and felt many things that have enriched my understanding of her story and I hope have enriched my telling of it. Every step of the way, though, it has never been far from my mind that I have not experienced a fraction of the discomfort and hardship that Sarah experienced on any given day during her extraordinary journey toward the ever-declining western sun.
Part One
A SPRIGHTLY BOY AND A ROMPING GIRL
We look out upon them and are astonished to see such careless ease and joyousness manifested in the countenances of almost all—the old, the young, the strong and feeble—the sprightly boy and the romping girl. . . .
—St. Joseph Gazette,
MAY 8, 1846
1
HOME AND HEART
The night before Sarah left Illinois for California, a full moon—as plump and promising as a pearl—hung over Steuben Township. Down in the bottomlands, the Illinois River slid silently past Franklin Ward Graves’s homestead, measuring out time swiftly and irrevocably. On the sliding surface of the water, the moonlight shimmered softly, but beneath the surface the river was black and swollen.
At 5:25 the next morning, April 12, 1846, the sun rose over the bluffs on the eastern side of the river, and, with the sun, Sarah also rose. She climbed from her bed and dressed and made her way down to the house in the bottomlands, the house where she had grown up. In her father’s farmyard, teams of broad-beamed oxen stood sullenly in their yokes, their great heads swaying from side to side in the cold, gray light of dawn, white plumes of breath issuing rhythmically from their fleshy nostrils. The oxen were yoked to three narrow farm wagons, each no more than four or five feet wide but nine or ten feet long and covered with canvas stretched on hoops to make a high canopy. Sarah’s parents and her eight younger brothers and sisters hurried about in the muddy yard, loading the last few items into the wagons. A few minutes later, the full moon slipped below the bluffs on the western side of the river, an omen, perhaps, of good things to be found in that direction. At any rate, it must have seemed that way.
Sarah was a happy young woman that morning. Just two weeks before, though, things had been very different. She had been deeply torn—in love with a young man who played the violin, but faced with the hardest decision of her young life. More than in love, she had been engaged to become the young man’s wife. But her mother and father and siblings were in the final stages of sorting through their things, giving away or discarding many of their possessions and packing the most essential and most precious items carefully into the three farm wagons in their farmyard.
They were about to climb aboard those wagons and disappear over the western horizon, bound for California, a place Sarah could hardly conceive of. If she stayed behind as planned, to marry her young man, in all likelihood she would never see any of them again—not her mother, not her father, not her eight siblings, many of whom she had helped to raise. She could still go with them, of course, but that would mean leaving behind the young man with the violin. Unlike the engagements and marriages of many of her friends out here on the Illinois frontier—some of whom were married off as young as thirteen or fourteen—Sarah’s was neither an economic arrangement nor a purely practical matter. Her heart cleaved to the young man’s heart.
His name was Jay Fosdick, and he was two years older than Sarah, about twenty-three. He and his family had arrived in Steuben Township more recently than Sarah’s family, settling along Senachwine Creek, three miles west of her family’s homestead. Like her own family, the Fosdicks were thoroughly Yankee in their origins and their ways. They could, in fact, trace their lineage back to William Brewster of the Mayflower. In New England the Fosdicks had for generations been whalers and ships’ captains and silversmiths. After the Revolution, many of them had emigrated to western New York and taken up farming. More recently some, including Jay’s parents, had come farther west to Illinois in search of better farming country than the rocky soil of New York offered. On arriving in Steuben Township, Jay’s father, Levi, had promptly gone to work planting fruit trees on his new land, creating a minor local marvel that had already come to be called the Big Orchard
throughout the township.
But Levi Fosdick, with two daughters and only one other, younger, son at home, needed Jay to help him with the relentless cycles of work that a frontier homestead and a large orchard required. He did not, his neighbors would later report, cotton to the idea of his son taking off for a place like California—a place that was more than sixteen hundred miles from the United States as the crow flew and perhaps two thousand miles by wagon road, that could be reached only by passing through Indian territory, and that belonged to a foreign government at any rate. Jay would have to stay in Illinois.
So for weeks, with mounting despair, Sarah had watched her family’s preparations as their inevitable departure drew closer. It wasn’t only Jay she would have to tear herself away from if she broke off the engagement and chose to follow her family. It was also this place, where she had lived since she was six, the only place she could remember as home.
When she and her family had arrived in 1831, the Illinois River had been near the farthest western reaches of the American frontier. Both the bottomlands along the river and the wide-open prairies atop the nearby bluffs were virgin land, and a kind of wonderland for a barefoot girl of six. In spring the prairie grass up on the bluffs grew five feet tall, a great green sea in which a child could hide herself for hours. In the clearings, prairie chickens strutted and danced, kicking up dust, inflating the bright orange air sacs on their necks, booming their deep, low hoots and cackling their shrill, loud mating cries across the windswept countryside. Down along the river, the Indian corn in her father’s fields grew even taller than the prairie grass, sometimes as tall as twelve feet by midsummer. Pumpkins three feet across grew side by side with bright yellow summer squash and fat green watermelons. In the spring the woods below the bluffs trilled with birdsong. In the dappled light of those woods, Sarah could gather hazelnuts by the bushel and fill buckets with sweet, creamy pawpaws.
And then there was home itself—a one-room log cabin with a puncheon floor. It was simple and plain, but by the spring of 1846 every nook and cranny must have held sacred memories for Sarah. A large clay-and-wattle fireplace stood at one end of the room. In the fireplace, nestled among the ashes, a large cast-iron Dutch oven stood always at the ready. It was a vessel from which Sarah had likely served and eaten a thousand meals. For as long as she could remember, it had served for uses as varied as stewing venison, baking salt-rising bread, and soaking her father’s frostbitten feet on winter nights.
Trundle beds covered with homemade quilts were tucked into the corners of the room. The family’s clothes, almost all of them homespun—woolen stockings, trousers, and skirts; linen dresses, shifts, and shirts—hung from pegs along one side of the room. On the other side, Sarah’s father tacked the musky-smelling pelts of wolves and beavers and occasionally bears that he had shot or trapped. Beneath the pelts, gunnysacks full of sweet-smelling wheat and shelled corn lined the wall. A glazed window that admitted sunlight even on frosty winter days looked out on the public road that passed near the cabin. Under this window sat a chest, large enough that Sarah and one of her sisters could curl up on top of it together and pass long hours in a pool of sunlight, sewing or reading or stringing glass beads on threads. Outside the window this spring, as every spring, young chickens scratched and hunted for bugs.
There were neighbors and friends that Sarah would have to leave behind as well if she set out for California. Throughout their little community—the scattered homesteads on the western side of the river and the little village of Lacon on the eastern side—Sarah and her parents were well known and widely regarded with affection. Villagers in Lacon looked forward almost every morning to the sight of her father crossing the river in his homemade canoe.
Franklin Ward Graves cut a striking figure both in his canoe and out of it. He was a tall, lanky man with unkempt hair, and, except in the dead of winter, he seldom wore shoes and never wore a hat. But he was congenial and of a sunny disposition, and when he crossed the river, he brought things the villagers were eager to have—fresh game and cured pelts from his woods, vegetables from his garden plot. They enjoyed his warm and generous nature, his willingness to lend a hand whenever it was needed.
In the afternoon, after Franklin had returned to his side of the river, the villagers were equally pleased when Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth, took her turn with the canoe and crossed over to the village bearing honey, eggs, butter, and buckets of soft soap. She, too, was tall and lanky. Spring, summer, and fall, she almost always wore the same blue calico frock, simple cow-skin shoes tied at the tops with leather strings, and an old calico sunbonnet. In winter she made only one concession to the cold—she supplemented her outfit with the addition of a pair of blue woolen stockings. Like her husband, she seemed to wear a constant smile and was always ready to lend a hand.
Years later, when their former neighbors thought back on the Graves family, they remembered them not only as openhearted and generous but also as extraordinarily hardy people. One of those neighbors recalled a particular day during the bitterly cold winter of 1839–40. Elizabeth Graves had come by to deliver some butter, and, finding the neighbor with a newborn infant, she stayed for several hours to help with the household chores. As in every frontier community, the women of Lacon and Sparland lived within a kind of mutual-aid society—a circle of women with whom they could share burdens and confidences in a way that they could not share them with the men in their lives.
As evening drew near and Elizabeth prepared to leave, her neighbor begged her to stay. Elizabeth had her own infant with her, and the woman feared that it would not be safe for the two of them to cross the icy river in the canoe in such cold weather. Elizabeth, as usual, was wearing only her blue frock and blue stockings. But she laughed her neighbor off. She wrapped the baby in a square of linsey-woolsey, declined the offer of a shawl, and set out into the dark, saying she would return with some helpful herbs in the morning. The neighbor watched her lay the baby in the bottom of the canoe and paddle off into the frigid darkness.
That night, a storm raged across the Illinois prairies and a freezing wind howled up the river, shuddering through the chinks and cracks of the log cabins of Lacon on one side of the river and Steuben Township on the other. By the next morning, the river had frozen over, and the neighbor’s window was too encrusted by frost to allow her to see anything through it. But at about 10:00 A.M., Elizabeth Graves, still wearing her blue calico frock, came knocking at the door with a handful of herbs. She had walked back across the newly frozen river to fulfill her promise. Referring to the whole Graves family some years later, knowing what had become of them, the neighbor marveled at an irony that was by then all too apparent to her. They were not delicate hothouse plants,
she said.
As Sarah agonized and mourned in advance the loss of either her family on the one hand or her fiancé, home, and neighbors on the other hand, Franklin Graves, at fifty-seven, saw things very differently. Like his neighbor Levi Fosdick, Graves was a New Englander, by birth and by heritage. Born in Vermont’s Green Mountains in 1789, he could trace his own Yankee heritage back nearly as far as Fosdick could. In fact, Franklin’s father, Zenas, like Levi’s father, had served as a fifer in the Revolution. After the war, Zenas had moved his family west to Dearborn, Indiana, one of thousands of his countrymen who yearned for more and better farming opportunities than could be offered by the rocky soils of New England.
Coming of age in Dearborn, Franklin had married a local girl, Elizabeth Cooper. After their first child died in infancy, Sarah was born in January of 1825. Over the next twenty years, eight more children followed. As their brood expanded, Franklin and Elizabeth Graves eventually left Indiana, doing as Franklin’s father had done, seeking cheaper land and better opportunities elsewhere. They moved briefly to Mississippi and then on to Marshall County, Illinois, in 1831.
The land across the river from the village of Columbia, later renamed Lacon, had looked good to Franklin Graves. For men like him, a generation of men with rapidly growing families, a surplus of energy, and the desire to convert raw land into an engine of wealth, the quality of a given location’s land—the depth and color of its soil—was everything when it came to deciding on a place to settle down. A village of nearly a hundred Sauk Indian wigwams sat in a hollow below the bluff, but the bottomlands appeared to be good wheat country, with deep, black, sweet-smelling soil, so he purchased a tract of the land from the Sauks. He got along well with his native neighbors at first. With so few settlers in the area, there seemed to be enough good land for him and them both, and relations were at least cordial. Recently, in fact, a local chief, Senachwine, had sat by the sickbed of one of the Graveses’ neighbors afflicted with a fever, fanning her and caring for her while her husband went in search of a doctor.
Like the few other white settlers just beginning to trickle into the area, Graves scorned the windy and wide-open prairie lands up on the bluffs and instead selected land that was down near the water and timber. It was a formula that had worked for previous generations of Yankee settlers farther east. Aside from the fact that the alluvial soil along the river was richer than the soil up on the prairies, it just seemed to make sense that one would want to be near the two essentials for building and maintaining a home—wood and water. But as it turned out, these particular woods and this particular water added up to a recipe for trouble.
From the time the first white settlers showed up in western Illinois, they had been ravaged by what they called the ague,
or as they soon came to call it, the Illinois shakes.
Come every spring, they would be laid low by high fevers, chills, blinding headaches, stiffness, aching joints, anemia, and, most characteristically, violent and uncontrollable shaking. Usually it would go away after a week or two, but then it would come back a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks or even years after that, and then yet again. It was relentless, and between shivering with the cold in the winter and shaking with the ague in the spring and summer, it wore a man down.
By the late 1830s, the ague was endemic to the whole Mississippi River drainage. Other plagues, ranging from yellow fever to cholera, were also popping up all over the countryside. Steamboat captains would sometimes refuse to stop at some towns for fear of contagion.
The settlers along the Illinois River, like their forefathers in New England and England, did not know what to blame for these outbreaks. They had inherited from those forefathers a general belief that damp weather and stagnant air—miasmas,
as they called the combination—were a principal cause of the fevers. But there wasn’t much they could do about either the air or the weather. So they did what they had always done—they dosed themselves with folk remedies. They took pills made from cobwebs. They boiled quarts of water down to pints, to make it stronger,
and then drank it as if it were medicine. They made tea of herbs like boneset (so called because the leaves are joined at the base, leading many to believe that when wrapped around broken bones they would help set the bones as well as drive off fevers). They took patent medicines laced with mercury and suffered far more terribly from the cure than from the cause. They bled themselves dry and wondered why they grew ever weaker and more tired.
The culprit behind
