The Death Valley ’49ers — the Bennett-Arcan Party, 1849

Summary

In the autumn of 1849 a long, dust-caked wagon train gathered near Salt Lake City, arriving too late in the season to risk the snowbound Sierra Nevada. They hired Captain Jefferson Hunt, a Mormon who had already walked the Old Spanish Trail, to lead them south and west toward Los Angeles — a longer road, but one that would not bury them in the high passes. For a while the plan held. Then a rider caught up to the train carrying a crude map that promised a shortcut straight west across the mountains, a line that would supposedly cut weeks off the journey. The pull of the gold diggings did the rest. Roughly a hundred wagons broke away from Hunt to chase the cutoff.

Most of the deserters soon lost their nerve at the rim of an impassable canyon and straggled back to the safer road. But several knots of families, along with a restless band of young men who called themselves the Jayhawkers, pressed on into country no emigrant wagon had ever crossed. They were not, as the legend sometimes implies, the first people to lay eyes on this ground. They were walking into the homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone, who had lived in and around the valley for centuries, moving with the seasons between the cool pinyon-pine heights and the mesquite groves of the valley floor, and who knew exactly where the springs were. The emigrants, lost and parched, did not.

By late December 1849 the Bennett and Arcan families — led by Asabel Bennett and John Arcan, traveling with their wives, small children, and a handful of single men including the young teamster William Lewis Manly — found themselves stalled on the floor of a salt-crusted basin walled in by mountains on every side. They could find no wagon route out. Their oxen were wasting to bone and hide. Their food was nearly gone. What followed became one of the most remarkable survival stories of the overland migration, and it ended, against every expectation, with nearly everyone alive.

The valley claimed only one confirmed life among the Bennett-Arcan party during the weeks they were trapped. But the ordeal — the aimless wandering, the thirst, the slow slaughter of the work animals for meat, and the roughly 300-mile walk two men made to bring back rescue — branded the place forever. When the last survivors finally climbed out through the western mountains, one of them looked back at the basin that had nearly swallowed them and, in the telling that Manly later set down, gave it the name it has carried ever since.

The Departure

The party that would become the Death Valley '49ers did not start as a single doomed company. They were ordinary gold-seekers — farmers, tradesmen, families with children, single young men — who had reached the Salt Lake valley in the fall of 1849 with the season already turning against them. Going on to California by the northern route meant gambling on the Sierra passes, and the memory of the Donner Party three winters earlier was still raw. So a large group put their faith in Jefferson Hunt, paid him to pilot them down the Old Spanish Trail toward southern California, and rolled out in early October behind a man who actually knew the road.

The trouble came when a packer named Captain Smith overtook the train with a map showing a tempting cutoff — the so-called Walker route — that seemed to slice straight west to the goldfields. Hunt warned them plainly against it. By most accounts he told the emigrants that if they followed the map he feared they would all be lost. But gold fever is a poor listener. At a fork in the trail the great majority voted to try the shortcut, and roughly a hundred wagons swung west away from Hunt, who kept his word and continued on toward Los Angeles with the few who stayed loyal.

It did not take long for the cutoff to show its teeth. The would-be shortcut led the wagons up against a deep canyon they could not cross, and there the great splinter party fractured again. Most turned around in disgust and hurried back to find Hunt's tracks. But a stubborn remainder — the Bennetts, the Arcans, the Wades, a German company, the young men of the Jayhawker faction, and others — refused to give back the miles they had won. They struck off into the unmapped desert to the west, certain that California lay just beyond the next range. Behind them the safe road faded out of reach.

The Route

What lay ahead was not a shortcut but some of the most pitiless terrain in North America: an endless washboard of north-south mountain ranges and dry basins, each ridge promising a green valley on the far side and delivering only more sand, salt, and rock. The companies splintered further as they went, each group choosing its own line, sharing scraps of rumor about where water might be. They burned their wagon beds for cooking fires, butchered failing oxen, and learned to ration every swallow. The Jayhawkers, traveling light and fast, pushed north and west and eventually clawed their way out, though not without losses. The slower family parties, weighed down by women and small children, fell behind.

The Bennett-Arcan group descended into the great trough that would later bear the valley's grim name sometime in late December 1849. It is the lowest, hottest, driest place on the continent — Badwater Basin lies more than 280 feet below sea level — and even in winter it offered the emigrants little. They wandered the valley floor searching for a pass to the west and found their wagons hemmed in by the sheer wall of the Panamint Range. Water came from scattered springs and seeps, some of them so bitter and alkaline that drinking did as much harm as good. They had no way of knowing that the Timbisha Shoshone had thrived in this same country for generations precisely because they did not try to cross it in a wagon; they followed the water and the seasons instead, gathering mesquite beans and pinyon nuts and retreating to the highlands in summer's worst heat.

At a spring near the foot of the mountains the families made what Manly's account calls their long camp, and there they faced the hard arithmetic of survival. The oxen, their only food and their only hope of hauling the wagons, were nearly spent. Manly wrote that the animals were so poor there was scarcely marrow in their bones. To go forward as a body was impossible; to stay was to starve slowly. The grown men were strong enough that they might walk out and save themselves, but the women and children could not. After bleak debate, the camp settled on the only plan that gave the families a chance: two of the youngest, hardiest men would go ahead on foot, find the settlements, and come back with food and pack animals.

The Crossing

The two who volunteered were William Lewis Manly and John Rogers. They set out on foot — given, by some accounts, about two weeks' supplies and thirty dollars to buy relief — leaving the families waiting at the long camp with a promise to return. What followed was an astonishing feat of endurance. The pair walked nearly 300 miles across the deserts and ranges of the Mojave to reach the California settlements, finally arriving at Rancho San Francisco, near present-day Santa Clarita — country that had no roads, few springs, and no margin for a wrong turn. They obtained provisions, three horses, and a one-eyed mule (most of the horses died in the rough country on the way back), and then they turned around and retraced the entire brutal route to the families they had left behind, completing the round trip in about twenty-six days.

When Manly and Rogers finally walked back into the long camp, roughly twenty-six days after they had left, they feared the families had already died — the wagons sat silent, with no one in sight. Manly fired his rifle into the air, and the survivors stumbled out of their shelters; in the cherished telling, Sarah Bennett cried out that the boys had come back. But along the back trail the rescuers also found evidence of those who had not made it. Manly discovered the body of Captain Richard Culverwell, an older man who had tried to walk out on his own and died of thirst and exhaustion before help could reach him. He is the one confirmed death of the Bennett-Arcan party within the valley itself, a sober reminder of how thin the margin was. Manly's published memoir, Death Valley in '49 (1894), remains the central firsthand record of the ordeal, written plainly and without melodrama by a man who had carried children and lifted dying oxen and walked the whole terrible distance twice.

With the rescuers' supplies, the families abandoned their wagons, packed what they could on the surviving animals, slung the smallest children in saddle-pockets, and walked out of the basin on foot. The climb over the Panamint range and down the long western slope to the ranch was itself a punishing march, and more than once they nearly failed. But they made it. In Manly's telling, as the rescuers paused on the rim and looked back down on the sink that had nearly killed them all, they bared their heads and gave the basin its name. "Just as we were ready to leave and return to camp," Manly wrote, "we took off our hats, and then overlooking the scene of so much trial, suffering and death spoke the thought uppermost saying:—'Good bye Death Valley!'" The name stuck to the place forever. Out of a party that had every reason to perish, almost all of them lived.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

The survivors reached Rancho San Francisco on March 7, 1850, and then pushed on to the coast and the goldfields, scattering as emigrants always did once the danger was past. They had set out to get rich quick on a shortcut and had instead lost their wagons, their oxen, and nearly their lives — but the families had come through almost intact, an outcome that still seems improbable given how completely the country was against them. Asabel Bennett and John Arcan and their wives and children lived to tell the tale, and the bond forged between the families and the two men who walked out for them lasted the rest of their days.

William Lewis Manly never forgot it. Decades later, in 1894, he published Death Valley in '49, a memoir that became the defining account of the episode and one of the great survival narratives of the overland trails. It is largely because of Manly's plain, careful writing — naming the people, recording the springs and the dead oxen and the walk — that we know the story at all, and that historians can separate what happened from the tall tales that grew up around it. John Rogers, his quiet partner in the rescue, shares the honor of having saved an entire party of families on foot.

The place kept the name the survivors gave it. Today Death Valley National Park protects more than three million acres of the basin and ranges the '49ers struggled through, and the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe — federally recognized in 1983, with a homeland inside the park — still lives there, as they have for far longer than the trail history that draws most visitors. The valley that the emigrants experienced as a grave was, and remains, someone's home. Both truths belong to the story.

Lessons

References

• Death Valley '49ers Wikipedia
• Death Valley in '49 (full text by William Lewis Manly) Project Gutenberg
• The 49ers Death Valley Conservancy
• William Lewis Manly: Death Valley, Rescue Mission & Pioneer Encyclopaedia Britannica