The Bidwell-Bartleson Party — 1841, First Wagons for California

Summary

The Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841 holds a peculiar distinction: it was the first organized company of American emigrants to set out from the Missouri frontier specifically for California, and it succeeded mainly by luck, grit, and the willingness to throw away almost everything it had brought. They had no maps worth the name, no guide who had been where they were going, and only the vaguest idea of the geography between them and the Pacific. That they got through at all marked the rough, improvised opening of the California Trail.

The company grew out of "California fever" stirred up in Missouri by glowing reports of the Mexican province, much of it secondhand or exaggerated. A schoolteacher named John Bidwell helped organize a Western Emigration Society whose membership swelled and then collapsed when the rumors soured, leaving only a hard core willing to actually go. When they gathered at the rendezvous point in May 1841, perhaps sixty-some people were ready to start — and not one of them knew the way. Their salvation, early on, was that a party of Catholic missionaries under Father Pierre-Jean De Smet was traveling the same direction with a genuine guide, the veteran mountain man Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick.

The two groups traveled together up the well-worn fur-trade corridor — the Platte, Fort Laramie, the Sweetwater, South Pass — as far as Soda Springs in present-day Idaho. There the company split. The missionaries and about half the emigrants turned northwest for the relative safety of Oregon. The remaining contingent, around thirty-some people, turned southwest toward a California they could not find on any reliable chart, leaving the guide behind. What followed was a months-long ordeal across the Great Basin: wagons abandoned one by one in the desert, oxen and mules eaten as the food ran out, a near-blind crossing of the Sierra Nevada on foot, and a final stumble down the western slope into the San Joaquin Valley.

They reached the ranch of John Marsh, near Mount Diablo, in November 1841 — starving, ragged, but alive, every one of the California-bound party having survived. Among them was Nancy Kelsey, the eighteen-year-old wife of Benjamin Kelsey, who made the entire crossing carrying her baby daughter and is often remembered as the first Euro-American woman to enter California overland. The party blazed no clean road and left no easy route behind them, but they had proved the thing could be done, and John Bidwell's account of it became one of the founding documents of the California emigration.

Timeline

The Departure

In the winter of 1840–41, a wave of enthusiasm for California ran through the Missouri frontier, fed by letters and travelers' tales describing the Mexican province as a land of perpetual spring and easy abundance. John Bidwell, a young schoolteacher, became a chief organizer of the Western Emigration Society, which signed up hundreds of would-be emigrants. Then countering rumors spread — that California was poor, lawless, dangerous — and the membership melted away almost entirely. By the time the appointed departure came, only a stubborn remnant remained committed.

Who went west tells its own story: farmers and tradesmen and young families betting everything on a country none of them had seen. The company that gathered at Sapling Grove, near the Missouri border, in May 1841 numbered perhaps sixty-nine people, including a handful of women and children. They elected John Bartleson captain — reportedly because he commanded a sizable group and threatened to go alone otherwise — while Bidwell did much of the real organizing and, crucially, kept a journal. Not one member of the party had ever traveled the route, and they possessed no accurate knowledge of the land beyond the mountains.

What they left behind was the settled edge of the United States; what they aimed at was a foreign province at the far end of unmapped desert. They went, as so many did, for land and a fresh start and the lure of a kinder climate — but unlike the Oregon-bound, they had almost no proven trail to follow and no firm idea where California even lay. It was less an expedition than a leap of faith dressed as a wagon train.

The Route

Fortune carried them through the first half. Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missionary, was leading a small party toward the Flathead country of the northern Rockies that same season, and he had engaged Thomas Fitzpatrick — "Broken Hand," one of the most experienced guides in the West — to pilot it. The Bidwell-Bartleson emigrants attached themselves to this group, and so spent the dangerous early months on a known road and in capable hands. They followed the fur-trade corridor up the Platte and North Platte, past Fort Laramie, along the Sweetwater, and over South Pass — the same landmarks the Oregon and California Trails would make famous.

The parting of ways came at Soda Springs, in the bend of the Bear River in present-day southeastern Idaho. From there Fitzpatrick and De Smet's party, with about half the emigrants who had decided Oregon was the safer bet, turned north and west for the Columbia. The California-bound remnant — roughly thirty-some men, plus Nancy Kelsey and her baby — struck out on their own to the southwest, toward the Great Salt Lake and beyond, into country no guide among them knew.

The geography ahead was the cruelest in the West. South and west of the Great Salt Lake lay the Great Basin: salt flats, waterless stretches, and the long valley of the Humboldt River, which leads not to the sea but to a sink in the desert. Beyond that rose the granite barrier of the Sierra Nevada. The party groped its way across this landscape by guesswork, often searching for water and the next patch of grass, edging south of the lake to avoid being trapped against it, and finally striking the Humboldt and following it west — the very corridor that would, within a few years, become the main line of the California Trail.

The Crossing

The crossing became a slow shedding of everything that slowed them down. The wagons, hopeless in the broken desert and mountain country, were abandoned one after another in the Great Basin — left standing in the sage with the goods still in them — until the emigrants were reduced to packing what little they could on the oxen and mules. As the provisions gave out, they began killing and eating the pack animals themselves, which in turn left them with less to carry the load. John Bidwell's journal records the grinding hunger and uncertainty: men scattering to look for water, the gnawing fear of being lost, the steady subtraction of their means of travel.

The Sierra Nevada nearly finished them. Sometime in late October the famished party reached the eastern wall of the range and forced their way over it on foot and by leading their remaining animals, with no pass charted and winter pressing close behind. They struggled down the western slope in the canyon country of the Stanislaus River, exhausted and starving, killing the last of their oxen, at times eating coyote and whatever else they could find. That they were not caught by the snow as the Donner Party would be five years later was a matter of timing and luck as much as endurance.

Through all of it Nancy Kelsey carried her infant daughter. Years later she recalled the ordeal with characteristic plainness, saying she had been able to endure the hardships of the trail because of where she was going and who she was with — "where my husband was, was home to me." In early November 1841 the survivors stumbled out of the foothills into the San Joaquin Valley and reached the ranch of John Marsh near Mount Diablo. They were gaunt and in rags, but the entire California-bound party had come through alive — a far gentler ending than the trail would grant some who followed.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

The Bidwell-Bartleson Party left no clean trail behind it — they had wandered and improvised too much for that — but they had proved that American emigrants could reach California overland, and the route they roughly traced along the Humboldt would within a few years harden into the main line of the California Trail. Their crossing is the conventional starting point of the wagon-emigrant era in California history, the rough first chapter before the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy company got wagons over the Sierra in 1844 and the Gold Rush turned the trickle into a flood.

The people scattered into the small American community already taking root in Mexican California. John Bidwell became one of the most prominent men in the state: he worked for John Sutter, took part in the Bear Flag affair and the American conquest, struck it rich in the Gold Rush, founded the town of Chico, and ran for governor and president in later life. His memoir, often published as "A Journey to California" and "Echoes of the Past," preserved the company's story and made him its chief chronicler. Benjamin and Nancy Kelsey moved restlessly through frontier California for decades; Nancy, who had crossed with a baby in her arms, is remembered as the first Euro-American woman to make the overland journey into California.

What the party demonstrated mattered more than what it built. In a single hard season, a group of ordinary people with no guide and no map showed that the continent could be crossed to California by emigrants on their own. Everything that came after on the California Trail — the wagon companies, the Gold Rush multitudes, the cautionary disaster of the Donner Party on much the same ground — followed in the dust of the few dozen who walked out of the Sierra and into John Marsh's ranch in the autumn of 1841.

Lessons

References

• Bidwell–Bartleson Party Wikipedia
• John Bidwell, 'A Journey to California, 1841' Library of Congress
• The Bidwell-Bartleson Party (New Perspectives on the West) PBS / The West
• Nancy Kelsey Wikipedia