Chapter 1 – Preparations & Partings

Third November, 1843… “With a heavy heart and much trepidation, I
am resov’d to leave this place, and remove to California, first for the sake of
my Dearest Darling….”

Under a pool of golden lamplight in the silent bedroom, John Townsend
carefully uncorked the bottle of ink in his portable writing desk, balanced
across his knees, and wrote in his tiny, careful hand:

“I fear for her health above all else. She has a delicate constitution,
and cannot bear another cold winter, or disease-wracked summer such as this
last without permanent impairment. Moses has been all talk this year past
about the marvels of fabled California and its wonderfully mild and temperate
climate. He is impatient for emigration and adventure and swears hourly to
embark in company with Allan and Sarah M. I think it is the talk of impetuous
youth but he is of that age to venture upon such bold enterprise. Of late
though, I have begun to believe that such transportation may be my Dearest
Darling’s only hope of recovery to full health. In any case, she would not bear
the thought of Moses’ attempting such a perilous journey himself and would
fret herself into an early grave…” John crossed out the last three words, and
wrote in “a decline…”

On the bedside table, a full kettle simmered over a burning spirit lamp.
Steam hissed from the spout. John set aside the writing desk. A heavy blanket was tented over the head of the bedstead, and the head and shoulders of the
woman sleeping fitfully underneath, a basin of water settled onto a pillow
close to her head, a basin in which floated a few drops of camphor oil, their
efficacy nearly spent with the cooling of the water. John emptied the basin
into the slops jar, and filled it again with steaming water, and a fresh
installment of camphor droplets.
John regarded her face, glistening with moisture and still flushed pink
with the remnants of fever, or maybe the heat of healing steam under the
blanket tent that lent a spurious look of health to Elizabeth’s face. Her blond
hair and the neck of her high-buttoned nightgown were soaked with the sweat
of a broken fever. He bent an ear towards her breathing; easy, without the
gasp and wheeze that frightened him down to his soul with the threat, that her
weak chest and frail constitution might take his Elizabeth away from him and
leave him alone in this world.

He put back the blanket over his wife’s face, and the newly-steaming
bowl of water, and caught a glimpse of himself in the dressing-table mirror; a
broad-shouldered man with a merry, and bluntly pugnacious face. His neckcloth
was loosened, and the fine broadcloth coat that his Elizabeth insisted
that he always wear, being that he was a doctor, and had a position to keep up,
set aside. His hair also stuck up in rebellious points and curls; he had run his
hands through it too often during this latest crisis. Someone tapped cautiously
on the bedroom door and after a moment, opened it just wide enough to look
around.
“Mose, boy, you should be in bed. It’s past two in the morning,” John
chided his brother in law. Young Moses hesitated in the doorway, a gawky
boy of seventeen not quite grown to his own strength, young enough to look
heartbreakingly like his older sister with the same oval features and fair
coloring.
“You’re still awake, Doctor John,” Moses said, trying so hard to sound
gruff and manly “Is she better?”
“She’s sleeping easily; I think the crisis is past. I sent Mrs. Montgomery
off to her own home hours since. ”
John often had to speak comfortable and reassuring words to frightened
relatives; sometimes they were the words that they wanted to hear and
sometimes as it was now, the plain truth. John was glad of that for Moses’
sake. Not only was his Elizabeth a dear sister but next thing to a mother to
Moses, since their parents had died ten years ago in one of the fever
epidemics that swept Stark County, in Ohio.
They were but newly married then, but the best established of all the
Schallenberger’s children, and so Moses was left to them, a boy of six years
and all but a flesh and blood son to John. Sometimes, he reflected without
grief or resentment, that Moses was the best that he would have wished from
any child that Elizabeth might have born to him. She had brought him a son
without the agony and risk that childbirth for her would entail, and Moses was
a good lad, straight and fearless and honest. John was well-content with his
family; or would be if Elizabeth could only be well again, fit and rosycheeked,
and riding a fine horse as recklessly as she once used to do.
“Until next time,” Moses stepped a little into the bedroom, and looked
at John, eye to eye. “This miasma, these epidemics of fever; Mr. Marsh writes
about the climate in California, being bountifully temperate and healthy. If
we could but remove her from them…”
“I know, Moses. I read the same letters, and hear the same idle talk.”
John kept his voice low, and rubbed his forehead. His eyes felt like they were
full of sand. “But it is a long, dangerous journey, and to a foreign country, at
that.”
“For now,” replied Moses. “So was Texas, once. Allen talks of nothing
else, than the riches there to be had, should it fall into our hands, too.”
“It is not in our hands yet, no matter how loudly Allen Montgomery
boasts of it. And it is still a wild and savage place…” a jaw-cracking yawn
sent John’s thoughts in all directions,
“Sorry, Moses. I have not slept above twenty minutes, these last two
days. I know you are resolved on this adventure, but you are a young man
with no responsibilities, no household to think on. I have both… I must
consider carefully how to best meet them. And your sister must be considered,
also.” Another huge yawn felt as if it would split John’s face in two.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning. Well, ‘tis morning. Then after I
have slept.” He clapped Moses affectionately on the shoulder. “Go to your
bed, lad. You must be as much in need of rest as I.”
“Good night, then, Doctor John,” Moses slipped away, drawing the
door softly closed behind him. John yawned again. For the last three days, and
two nights, he had slept, if he slept at all, nearly upright in the bedroom armchair.
The armchair, cushioned with a flattened and grimy pillow and a single
blanket, beckoned to him as an old friend but under the camphor-steam
saturated blanket, Elizabeth stirred fitfully. In the silent house, in that
sickroom, that bare movement and her thready whisper sounded as loudly as a
shout.
“John?”
He lifted up the blanket; in the dim pool of lantern-light, her pupils
were huge and dark. He took her hand in his own.
“I’m here, Dearest Liz.”
She looked at him with a queer, fey expression, as if she were talking in
her sleep, and whispered, her fever-cracked lips barely moving.
“We can’t let Moses go alone,” And then her eyelids fluttered closed,
and her hand slackened in his. She slept again as if exhausted by that slight
effort. John sat back in his chair and after a moment’s thought, opened the
writing desk again. He uncorked the tiny inkbottle, and wrote;
“I do not think of myself as a gambler, but perhaps I am so, to think of
selling my house and practice, and to risk our lives and fortune on this
venture, not for such earthly riches as such men do covet, but as a means that
my Dearest Darling may recover her health and strength.”

                                                              ***

Angeline Morrison Letter #1
20th January,1844
Writ from St. Joseph
Missouri Territory,

I write imploring an answer from you with great speed, as My Dear
Husband has resolved upon departing from our dwelling here, and embarking
upon the trail for distant California in the spring. His friend, Allan
Montgomery has long been preparing his own household for transportation
hither; My Dearest tells me that he (Mr. Montgomery) has spent most of the
year previous preparing necessary gear and supplies, and is most impatient
for the trail season to open. Mrs. Montgomery, who lived in our household
since the sad loss of her parents and was only recently engaged in marriage,
is exceeding downcast by his plans.
As for myself, I am apprehensive but unlike my dear Sarah, I have the
wit to keep them to myself. Indeed, my Dearest’s stated reason for
transportation to California is that he fears for my health, so it would be most
ungracious of me- as well as casting aspersions upon his knowledge of
medicine – to object. I cannot deny that I have unwell for most of the last four
years; it is most vexing for me to never be completely recovered from one
ailment before falling to the next. To my Dearest, it is doubly so when none of
his skills can keep the malignant vapors of summer or the bitter cold of winter
from affecting me so deeply.
But, Angeline, although his concern is real, I suspect it is but a pretext
for indulging the restless spirit that has moved him ever on, from where he
was born, to Ohio and on to Missouri Territory. When he first came to Stark
County to practice medicine, it seem’d most astonishing that he had lived in
so many places before. And it almost seemed natural that upon the deaths of
my beloved parents and assuming the care of my brother, that we would of
course uproot ourselves and move to St. Joseph. There were many doctors
practicing there, and it seemed the most natural distraction from the deaths of
my dear mother and father, that we should seek solace in new horizons!
I had thought we were most content in St. Joseph, but of late he has
seem’d restless, and uninterested in civic matters that once were his most
lively interest. The question of the peculiar institution also vexes him much,
although he dislikes to speak of it, for he fears alienating friends and
associates who do not share his feelings and dreads a time when he might
have to voice them openly on the matter. Such a tangle… and I had thought
my own poor condition was the cause, but now I suspect otherwise.
I shall write to you once more, before we depart onto the trail. Please
write to me and tell me of the trivial doings, and little domesticities that I will
soon leave behind.
Ever thy friend
Elizabeth

                                                                  ***

From Dr. Townsend’s diary: “Twenty-sixth of February, 1844: Items
for the wagon, purchased from local merchants of excellent repute,
represented by them to be of superior quality and sufficient for the journey:
plain flour, eight hundred pounds. Salt bacon, six hundred pounds. Coffee,
fifty pounds. Tea, twenty pounds. Sugar, eighty pounds. Salt, forty pounds.
One barrel hard tack. Cask vinegar. Two boxes dried apples, the same of
apricots. Two crocks pickles. One hundred pounds rice, the same of dried
beans. Small box salt cod. Fifteen small jars of honey and preserves. Two
bottles medicinal whisky….”
“I have had our wagon fitted out, at some small expense, to make it
more commodious and comfortable. A false floor is installed, some eighteen
inches above the wagon bed, below which certain stores and gear may be
stowed out of the way. Three large flat-topped trunks are arranged at the
rear, with a heavy mattress on top, which serves as a most comfortable bed.
We have also attached a seat on metal springs to the front, which may afford
a more comfortable ride, and sealed the canvas cover against rain with a
generous coating of linseed oil. Mr. Montgomery has made similar
arrangements in his own wagon…
Item - purchased for the journey, one canvas tent, and a set of tin plates
and such for use on the trail…
I made the purchase of some fine china silk fabric, with an eye towards
selling it in California at a profit.”

“Fifth of March, 1844: Arranged the hire of a drover, one Francis
Deland, who journeyed hence from French Canada and is desirous of
working his passage to California for board and bread. We intend to depart a
week from today, having reciev’d notice of a large assembly at Kanesville,
up-river in the Iowa Territory, intent on Oregon, our intention being to
accompany them as far as Ft. Hall.”

“Eleventh of March, 1844… we depart upon the morrow, Elizabeth and
Moses and I, in company with our close friends, Allan and Sarah
Montgomery. May good fortune guide us, and our Heavenly Father attend
and bless our endeavors. It is so written: ‘For the Lord Thy God bringeth
thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water. Of fountains and depths that
spring out of the valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley and vines and
fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey; a land wherein
thou shalt eat bread without scarceness; thou shalt not lack anything in it.’”

                                                              ***

In the early dark, just as the pale dawn lightened the sky, the oxen
stamped restlessly, and blew out their hay-scented breath, and Allen
Montgomery hardly bothered to lower his voice,
“Good lord, what’s keeping the woman? Fix your bonnet and come
away, your ladyship. Time’s a-wasting. We should be on the road to
Kanesville by now.” John bent his head over his saddle girth, pretending to
check the adjustment of his stirrups and tactfully affected not to hear but out
of the corner of his eye could see the embarrassment on Moses’ face. Moses
was no-doubt coloring up like a girl. He admired Allen enormously, and tried
to copy his manner; a thing of which John did not wholly approve, although
he wisely kept from saying so. John also liked Allen, even if he was the most
hot-headed and tactless man in three counties. Francis, hunkered patiently
down on his heels next to the lead ox gave no indication of impatience, or
even of having understood.
His pretty and feisty wife, little Sarah Armstrong she had been,
orphaned at fifteen and come to work for John and Elizabeth until she had
married the handsome gunsmith, snapped
“She’s saying goodbye to the house. House… you know, that place
which women keep, until their husbands drag them away?”
John strenuously pretended not to have heard that, either. Just as well
that the two of them were well-matched in being about equally tactless.
He himself had sold the house and practice, furniture and fittings,
everything that could not be packed in straw, or stuffed into a trunk in the
wagon. Which aside from some bits and pieces, amounted to a case of
surgical implements, his books and Masonic regalia and the set of china that
Elizabeth had inherited from her great-grandmother and an assortment of
trinkets, bedding, linens and clothing.
Everything else that had adorned their home, everything dear and
familiar, from the pictures on the wall and the inlaid bedroom furniture, to the
parlor piano that had given his Elizabeth so much joy, and pride in showing
off their home to her friends, all to be left behind, all now someone else’s
property. Oddly enough, it gave him a feeling of curious relief, a feeling of
freedom, of being able to float unbound by material possessions, like that of
the early monks, with their attention focused on the divine.
A few hesitant piano notes floated out from the empty house, a stave of
Mozart, clear and pure as a trickle of spring water. Allen swore under his
breath, and gave some vent to his exasperation by slapping his hat against his
knee.
“I’ll go and fetch…” Moses ventured, miserably embarrassed, just as
Elizabeth appeared in the doorway, like a ghost in a dark merino travel dress.
She tied her bonnet strings neatly under her bravely lifted chin, and pulled the
door gently closed.
“I’m ready,” she said, simply, and took John’s hand. Moses reached
down from the wagon-seat, and between the two of them they boosted her up
and over the great wooden wheel—one foot on a spoke, the other to the
footrest, before she scrambled over the side of the wagon-box in a flurry of
skirts and calico petticoats, to seat herself next to her brother, her hands
folded on her lap. She nodded to him when she was settled, and he swung up
into the saddle; John’s horse pranced sideways a little, tossing his ugly grey
head until the bit jingled.
John swore, under his breath. He regretted selling the trusty old gelding,
Pouncer, who had faithfully carried him or drawn his trap around his medical
rounds in St. Joseph, and before that in Stark County, for the best part of a
decade. Pouncer had faultless manners, gentle enough for Liz to ride, even.
But John had quietly listened to the counsel of outfitters and merchants who
dealt in trade with the yearly caravans to Santa Fe, and understood
immediately that Pouncer was too old, and unsuited to a rugged journey
through wilderness. He would need something young, strong, and spirited,
and the new grey gelding was all that, but John hadn’t warmed sufficiently to
give it a name or think of it as anything but “the Ugly Grey”. He disciplined
Ugly Grey, and waved his hat in the air.

Allen cracked his whip, and whistled shrilly to his team, and they
leaned stolidly into their yokes. Francis stood up without any apparent
urgency, and seemed to whisper to the lead team beasts… then he whistled
too, a low whistle, and all three yoke hitched to the Townsend wagon stepped
forward, almost eagerly. With a great creak and groan, the wagon lurched
forward, the linseed-proofed canvas cover swaying like a bellied sail. John
reined in Ugly Grey, who seemed determined to prance like a racehorse and
gaily called up to his wife, who looked ahead with somber mien.
“The greatest journey starts with a single step, Dearest Liz… and I vow
that we have just taken that step!”
That, as he hoped, coaxed a smile, and she called back,
“’Tis a very… jolting step, Dearest… can I hope to become more
accustomed to it?” She was, John noticed with approval, not looking back.
Brave Liz. “If not,” he promised expansively, “I shall buy you a horse to ride,
before we depart from Kanesville. I had planned on purchasing another horse,
and two more yoke, depending on how the rules of our party with respect to a
herd of spare beasts are decided.”
“Why would that be?” Elizabeth reached up and straightened her
bonnet, as a particularly deep rut jarred the whole wagon again, “Wouldn’t we
wish to take as many extra animals as we can afford?”
“Then we have the extra burden of herding them along behind, and
finding extra food. It might be worth the extra effort, or it might not be. We
should have another horse, regardless. Mr. Chiles ever spoke of being able to
hunt, along the trail.”

Ugly Grey pranced ahead, giving John the opportunity of taking a good
look at his three yoke, considered so carefully before purchase for strength
and docility, working together under the burden of moving a heavy-laden
wagon. They moved well under Francis’s direction, he thought; they merely
walked, easily pulling their burden without any special effort. He rode ahead
of Francis, striding next to the lead yoke, and the Frenchman caught his eye
and gave a smile and a mock-salute, tipping his hat-brim with the stock of the
whip that he seemed to hardly use.
A good man, that; John could forgive practically anything of a man who
was good with animals, who ruled them with a light hand. He had doctored
animals in his time, as any medical man must, when a man’s livelihood might
depend on the health of his horse or cow, as much as on his own.
Ahead of them, Montgomery’s team plodded stolidly on, around the
long gentle bend in the road that paralleled the river, north and west of town,
the crate of chickens lashed to the back of it bouncing to every jolt of wheels,
accompanied by noisy complaints and flurries of chicken feathers. Allen’s
single horse and milk cow were tethered on long leads, side by side to the
back of his wagon.
They would soon be out of the township, out among strangers who
knew them not, floating as free as bubbles on the river, having cut the
connection that bound them to a farm, a place, a town; bubbles on the river surface, joining with other bubbles, and drifting purposefully west. John
reined Ugly Grey back again, and fell in beside his wagon, and smiled at Liz:
“I wonder how long Mrs. Montgomery will preserve her chickens on
the trail… they do not seem in a humor conducive to laying eggs.”
“Chickens are adaptable,” Elizabeth replied, with a ghost of her old
spirit,” They will provide eggs, or a good chicken dinner, one or the other.
Sarah… Mrs. Montgomery did not consent to this… expedition in the same
spirit that I did, my Dear Doctor. She cannot forget how her family was
dragged hither and thither, how her mother protested and her father insisted,
and they moved on from one home to another, until they both perished and
she was left in our care… and then out of her marriage to Mr. Montgomery,
had her very own little house… but on Mr. Montgomery’s insistence, she
must leave it. And I fear that perhaps we did not serve her truly as friends,
with her true interests at heart when we encouraged her to accept Mr.
Montgomery’s offer of marriage.”
“He’s a good man, with a good trade, and a handsome devil to boot,”
John said, “A man like that must have a wife, and she was lucky to make such
a fine match.”
“Oh, certainly,” Elizabeth replied, with a strained smile, “But a woman
can be fortunate in her marriage, and yet not be wholly happy in it.”
“Are we happy, Liz?” Impulsively, John stood in his stirrups, and
reached out to take her gloved hand in his, over the turning and mud-caked
wheel. “Are we truly happy, to the end of this trail and all the world
encompassed in it?”
“We are,” Elizabeth half rose, leaning down to briefly grasp his hand
and the wagon rolled over another rut, and she sat down heavily—which
knocked her bonnet askew once more.
“I am happy, and you are my husband. Where you go, I go also… and
so must Sarah Montgomery with her husband. But she is too high-spirited to
submit gracefully when she must, and too young in marriage to know how to
appeal to his good nature and change his mind.”
“I cannot imagine anything to make Allen change his mind, once he is
set on it,” Moses spoke up sturdily, “Not even Sarah, and I look on her as
fondly as another sister. But wives are not supposed to question their
husbands,” and he looked abashed and puzzled when John and Elizabeth
exchanged a wry look and burst out laughing.
And the sun rose at their backs, brushing the newly green treetops with
a touch of gold, and sending elongated shadows of team and wagons, horse
and rider running ahead of them, stretching out towards the west.

***

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History
Archival Project 1932:
“My name is Edward Sidney Patterson, and I was born near Batavia,
Clermont County Ohio, in September of 1837, to Samuel Laurens Patterson,
and Isabella Hitchcock Patterson. Which would make me 95 and old enough
to know better, you would think. I had three older brothers and an older
sister, when my father decided that we should go west to seek a better fortune
for ourselves in California. He left in the spring of 1841 to go out in advance
of the family.
He sent back a letter to us, which we did not receive until mid-summer
of 1843, to let us know that he had arrived safely and that my mother should
sell the farm and all the fittings and prepare to follow him. In fall of the year
that he had departed Ohio, my mother had given birth to my little sister,
Sarabeth, whom we called Sadie, and her own father, whom we called “Paw-
Paw” had come to live with us.
Paw-Paw had been in the fur trade as a young man and we were given
to understand that he had traveled extensively in the west. In fact, Paw-Paw
had had fixed it for Pa to travel out to California through connections and
friendships which he had among the Santa Fe traders. Ma was not pleased
about this development: she thought he was of a light character, and was
deeply unhappy about this whole prospect.
But in obedience to my father, she sold the farm, and accepted Paw-
Paw’s advice about a wagon and necessary supplies. She and Paw-Paw knew
through friends, that there was a party of emigrants assembling in the spring
of the following year at Kanesville, in the Iowa Territory, intending for
Oregon and California, and so we made preparations to join them. She took
some small things that she treasured, and fitted out a stout farm wagon that
Paw-Paw approved of with a canvas cover. She had four yoke of oxen, and a
milk cow from the farm.
She bought sufficient supplies for the journey out of what she had for
selling the home place, and took us to Iowa to take the trail to California in
obedience to my father’s directions. Ma was a tiny woman; she would have
come hardly to your chin, missy, but there wasn’t a thing she feared in this
world… ”

                                                                  ***

Some weeks later, when the Montgomery and Townsend wagons were
still a little short of Kanesville, the Ugly Grey threw a shoe, and lost it in the
deep mud. It had rained all morning, but now the clouds were breaking up
into innocent fluffy white clumps scattered across a clear and pale sky. The
two wagons had been much inconvenienced by rain, since it made the road a
swampy, muddy morass, and brought the river far enough up to cover the
trunks of trees on the riverbank. Francis and Allen Montgomery waded kneedeep in churned muck, and they were forced to the expedient of keeping dry firewood in the wagon, so that it would burn well enough in the evenings for
Elizabeth and Sarah to cook a meal over it.
John dismounted immediately, almost the minute that Ugly Grey began
to favor his left rear leg, but there was no finding the missing shoe in the mud,
not with the way other wagon wheels and other hoofed draft animals had
turned it over and over again. Allen and Francis halted the wagons, while he
did a quick search. The driver of a heavy horse-team dray wagon coming the
other way saw them by the side of the road, and called out.
“What kind of trouble are you having, friend?”
“My horse lost a shoe… How far are we from Kanesville? Can you
recommend us to a blacksmith there?” On the clear horizon ahead of them
hung a hazy smear of wood smoke, too large for a single farmstead.
“Not far… three, four miles… That where you’re bound?”
“For today… we mean to join an emigrant company there, for
California. Did you just come from there? Do you know where they are
camped?”
“Out west of town, in a grove of trees by the river, waiting for the river
to go down,” Replied the drayman, slapping his reins, “And there’s a good
few blacksmiths there… but there’s a man with a little forge set up half-a-mile
back, if you ain’t keen on walking all the way to Kanesville.”
“Thank you, for your good words,” John tipped his hat, and told Allen
and Francis, “Heard that? I’ll stop at this roadside forge, and catch up with
you at the campsite.”

Just as the drayman had said, there was a wagon and tent back from the
muddy road, in the middle of a little grove, with a well-established fire in a
scratch enclosure of blackened bricks, sending up a straight line of smoke.
Half-dozen cattle browsed in the damp meadow close by. A solitary man in a
leather apron worked over an anvil; they could hear the clear regular ring of
metal on metal, long before they saw him.
“If I don’t catch up on the road, I’ll meet you in camp,” John smiled at
his wife, silently resolving to buy another horse, after enduring the constant
lurch and jolt of the wagon for the last half-mile. He felt bruised and sore to
his very bones after just this little way, whereas poor Liz had been patiently
enduring it for weeks; So much for the comfort of the metal-sprung wagon
seat. He unhitched Ugly Grey from the back, waved to Allan and Francis, and
walked into the trees to the little campsite.
“Good morning,” John called, when he was in earshot, “My horse lost a
shoe a half-mile back. Might you be of assistance?”
“I can.” The smith set his bit of work back into the fire, and turned to
look at John. He was a big, grim-looking fellow with the enormously muscled
shoulders and forearms of his trade, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and leather
apron flecked with tiny cinder burns. His face and hands were blackened with
sooty grime and smoke, appearing like a gargoyle mask fringed with chinwhiskers, out of which a pair of clear, pale grey eyes the color of water sized
up John and his limping horse. Something nudged at John’s thigh, and the
smith remarked placidly,
“Don’t you be moving sudden-like, she’ll think you mean harm.”
Quite startled, John looked down; not very far down at that, at one of
the largest dogs he had ever seen, a huge fawn-colored mastiff bitch with a
dark face. She sat quietly at his feet, regarding him with intelligent golden
eyes.
“Dog,” said the smith quietly, and made a quick gesture with his
fingers. The mastiff bitch nudged John again, as if reminding him to be on his
best behavior then, because she would have an eye on him, and obediently
trotted away to settle herself underneath the wagon. From there she still
regarded John and her master with those unsettlingly intelligent golden eyes.
She had a clownish white splotch on her nose, and another at the end of her
tail, and all of her toes on each foot were white, as if she wore dainty gloves.
“Elisha Stephens, late of the Pottawattamie Indian Agency” her master
introduced himself. “That’s Dog; and you would be?”
“John Townsend… Doctor John Townsend, late of St. Joseph,
Missouri, soon to be on the trail to fabled California.” John extended his hand,
but Stephens regarded him levelly and did not respond in kind.
“Beg pardon, my hands is powerful dirty. California? Heard me some
talk. Tie the hoss up to this here tree, so’s I can get to work.”

Stephens rummaged among his tools, and a box of metal oddments,
tossing a roughly shaped horse-shoe into the heart of the fire. He worked the
bellows until the coals glowed cherry-red, incandescent. While the metal
softened, glowing as red as the coals, Stephens shoved his shoulder into Ugly
Grey’s barrel, and expertly forced the gelding to allow him to pick up his
unshod foot, and rasp off some of the hoof with a great metal file. John
watched with interest; this was a man who knew his trade. Ugly Grey’s eyes
rolled nervously, showing some white, but not as much as expected.
When the shoe was softened enough, Stephens took the tongs and
brought it out of the fire, laying it on his small anvil, and deftly pounding it
into the right shape. He plunged it into a tub of dirty grey water, which
bubbled up in great gouts of steam. When the new shoe had cooled enough,
he took it up, filling his mouth with nails and hefted a small hammer in one
hand. Just as before, he shoved his powerful shoulder into Ugly Grey, and
took up the horses’ unshod hoof. While bracing Ugly Grey’s hoof in his
leather-aproned lap, he spat nails into his free hand, one by one, and deftly
tapped them into place, securing the new shoe.
“What do I owe you, Mr. Stephens?” John spoke with honest
appreciation.
It was one of the greatest pleasures in life, to watch an expert do their
work, especially if they were so very good that it all appeared effortless. And
Stephens was truly that, as serene and self-contained as great artists are in the
middle of their creations.
“Nothing,” Stephens’ pale, unreadable eyes gleamed in his dark face.
“Pay me back with doctoring, on the trail mebbe. I’m away to California
myself, in a couple days.”
“But why have you not joined the encampment with the other
emigrants?” John asked, surprised out of countenance for once.
“Not one for crowds,” Stephens replied simply.
“Then… my most sincere thanks and appreciation,” John nodded.”
Most certainly, we shall meet again, and I am glad of that. A blacksmith is a
good man to have along on the trail.”
Stephens nodded inscrutably, and replied
“So’s a doctor. But we won’t be leaving for a good two weeks.”
“Why?” John was about to put his foot in stirrup, but something of the
certainty in Stephens’ simple statement held him back.
“Grass is not grown tall enough yet. Three weeks.”
“You’ve been out on the trail before?”
“Some.” Stephens answered, “Some there. Some on the Santa Fe.”
He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, or even feel the need to. John
swung up into his saddle, and said
“I’ll look forward to seeing you again… by the time the grass is grown
tall enough.”
“I’ll be there,” Stephens replied.

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