September 13, 2012

WE EXPECTED THAT OUR 100 MILE DRIVE south to Rock Springs would offer little of interest to us, but as we drove south we saw a sign marking one of the original pony express stops. You may recall that Buffalo Bull (AKA Buffalo Bill) was supposedly a pony express rider. While all amateur historians attest to his adventures as a pony express rider, most professional historians note that the only evidence of his pony express days was Buffalo Bill. Despite its prominence in text books, the pony express was in existence for only 18 months before it was supplanted by telegraph. Across the street from the marker for the pony express, two old boys were sitting eating huge ice cream cones.  Since Carole is fond of ice cream, we went into the old store behind the men and purchased a couple of cones. The “single scoops” were the size of softballs. Segueing into my Indiana personality, I went outside to join my wife who was standing near the old boys. Both men were from Utah, our destination for tomorrow. Like all of the male residents of Utah and Wyoming, they were hunters and gave us some tips on viewing wildlife in Utah.

It suddenly dawned on me that we must be fairly close to South Pass, the gap in the Wind River Range of the Rockies which was used by thousands of wagon trains to Utah, Oregon and California. I asked the men our distance from South Pass. One of the men pointed and said, “It’s down the road a piece, about 20 miles.”  We couldn’t miss such an important part of American history and drove down the road “a piece.”  

Prior to the early 1820s, it was widely believed that settlement of the far West would never involve large numbers of people. Unlike the East, where the Ohio River or the Great Lakes provided water routes into Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, there were no water routes leading west.  As Lewis and Clark discovered, the mountains prevented rivers from flowing past the continental divide. However, in the early 1820s, a huge, flat gap through the Wind River Range was discovered and promptly named South Pass.  During the next forty-five years, around 200,000 emigrants would stream though South Pass.

South Pass was of particular interest to me because two of my ancestors, Lafe Mackey and Rees Morgan came through the pass in 1852 on their way to the gold fields in California. There is no evidence that either man found any gold. Of course, there is the possibility that they did find gold, but buried it in one of the cornfields north of Streator, Illinois. When I was in high school, I read a letter Lafe had written to his family back in Illinois. I don't remember what he said, and the letter has disappeared.  Rees did Lafe one better; he kept a journal of his trip to “Hangtown,“modern day Placerville, California. While the actual journal disappeared sometime in the 1960s, a number of people in my hometown read the original journal. Everyone who has read the journal, or excerpts from it, was impressed with Rees’ writing, describing it as both witty and grammatically correct.

Fortunately, one of the men who read the journal was Lyle Yeck, an educator and an expert on the early history of LaSalle County, Illinois. At some point in the 1960s, he prepared a short monograph on Rees’ trip west. Yeck wisely allowed Rees to tell the story; most of the monograph consists of lengthy quotations from Rees’ journal. The publication, The Perilous Road to Hangtown, with Rees’ vivid descriptions, reads like the script for a John Ford western. His journal is peppered with entries describing the biggest threat to the emigrants: “Saw 9 more graves today – Cholera.” The feared Indiana attacks were few and far between; but cholera killed thousands of travelers. Rees described frontier justice in one entry. A member of the wagon train murdered other man. He was tried one day, and hanged on the following day. Because the wagon train was in a tree-less area when the murder occurred, the pioneers used some creativity for the hanging. They dug a pit and tied two wagon tongues over the pit. Attaching a rope to the wagon tongues, they dropped the killer toward the pit. It was a different time.

Ironically, we didn’t see any tourists driving along the route to South Pass; one of the quintessential areas in the history of the West, but somehow ignored by tourists.  At the end of the day, we saw more bears. These bears were not grizzly bears, but Chicago Bears; and the Packers did to them what they usually do to them.