The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party — 1844, First Wagons Over the Sierra

Summary

Two years before the Donner Party left its wagons and its dead in the snow at a high Sierra lake, another company of emigrants stood at the foot of the same granite wall and faced the same weather. They were the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, about fifty men, women and children — ten families — who in the autumn of 1844 became the first emigrants ever to bring wagons all the way across the Sierra Nevada into California. Where the Donner story is remembered for horror, theirs deserves to be remembered for the opposite: a company that met every disaster the mountains could offer and did not lose a single soul.

In fact they arrived with more people than they started with, for two children were born along the way. They had left Council Bluffs on the Missouri with about fifty and reached Sutter's Fort as fifty-two. The party was a study in plain competence and luck made out of good decisions. Their elected captain was Elisha Stephens, a taciturn blacksmith and former trapper; the company hired the seasoned mountain men Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock to help guide them. Among the families were the Murphys, a large Irish Catholic clan led by the widower Martin Murphy Sr. that alone made up some twenty-six of the company, and the household of Dr. John Townsend, a physician whose name, with Stephens's and Murphy's, attached itself to the party in later memory.

What sets their crossing apart is that they were inventing the route as they went. There was no California Trail in 1844 — only the Oregon road to Fort Hall, then a near-blank. From the Humboldt Sink, where earlier opinion said wagons must be abandoned, they followed the advice of a Northern Paiute leader the emigrants called Truckee and struck west up the river that still bears his name, into the highest, most broken country in the range. At the summit they did what conventional wisdom said could not be done: they unloaded and dismantled their wagons, hauled them up a granite cliff, and reassembled them on the far side.

Then winter caught them, as it would catch the Donners, and the party split and improvised its way to survival — some on horseback to Sutter's Fort, some pushing wagons over the snow, three young men left to guard the goods at the lake, and one teenaged boy, Moses Schallenberger, left utterly alone for months and living to tell it. By February 1845 the whole company had come through. Their wagon road over the pass became, almost unchanged, the way the world would later pour into California in the Gold Rush.

Timeline

The Departure

The party assembled in the spring of 1844 near Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the Missouri River, the staging ground for that year's overland emigration, and rolled out on or about the sixth of May. They were a modest company by later standards — eleven wagons and somewhere around fifty people, ten families with a strong contingent of women and small children, traveling at first in the company of a larger Oregon-bound train. The Murphy family alone accounted for much of the roll: Martin Murphy Sr., a widowed Irish immigrant, traveled with his grown sons and their wives and a swarm of grandchildren, a multi-generational household moving west together. Dr. John Townsend brought his wife Elizabeth and her young brother, a seventeen-year-old named Moses Schallenberger who would earn his own chapter in the story before the winter was out.

From the start the company made the two decisions that would save it: it elected the right leaders and trusted the right guides. Elisha Stephens, chosen captain, was no orator but a calm and stubborn man who held the party together through every argument. Just as important were the veteran mountain men they leaned on — old Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock — who knew that the conventional terror of the Sierra could be beaten by people willing to work, and who knew enough to ask those who actually lived in the country which way the water ran.

They rolled west along the established Oregon Trail through the spring and early summer — up the Platte, past Fort Laramie, over South Pass, the broad sandy saddle of the Continental Divide. In the Green River country they took the Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff, a hard, nearly waterless forty-mile shortcut that saved days, and pressed on to Fort Hall on the Snake. At Fort Hall the Oregon-bound majority turned northwest toward the Columbia. The Stephens party did not. They were bound for California, and beyond Fort Hall the map ran out; past the Humboldt there were no tracks at all.

The Route

Below Fort Hall they cut southwest to the Humboldt River — the "Mary's River" of the early emigrants — a sluggish, alkaline stream that drains into the desert and simply disappears. For days the wagons crawled down the Humboldt's barren valley, the grass thinning, the water turning bitter, until they reached the Humboldt Sink, where the river sinks into the sand and dies. Ahead lay a waterless desert and, beyond it, the unbroken granite rampart of the Sierra Nevada. Earlier travelers had reached this point and concluded the mountains were impassable to wagons; the Chiles party the year before had been forced to abandon theirs.

It was here that the party's openness to native knowledge proved decisive. An old man of the Northern Paiute came into their camp, and through signs and a few words the emigrants gathered that there was a river to the west, coming down out of the mountains, with grass and timber along it, that would lead them up toward a low place in the range. The emigrants could not render his name and called him "Truckee"; in gratitude they gave that name to the river he pointed them to, and the Truckee River carries it to this day. Acting on his guidance, they struck west across the desert and found the stream exactly as described — cold, clear water running down out of the heights, the first good water in days.

Up the Truckee they climbed, fording the icy, boulder-strewn river again and again as the canyon narrowed and the walls closed in. The going grew brutal: the wagons had to be wrestled over rocks and through the riverbed dozens of times, oxen failing, the air thinning, the autumn turning cold. Near the head of the canyon the party reached a long, beautiful lake cupped beneath the summit — the lake the Donner Party would camp at two years later, today called Donner Lake. Above it the mountain rose in a sheer granite headwall to the pass. It was here that the route, and the party, would be tested to the limit, and here that the weather, already threatening snow, began to close in.

The Crossing

On the fourteenth of November, with snow already in the high country, the company divided. Six people — among them Elizabeth Townsend and three of the Murphy young people — set off on horseback up the Truckee toward Lake Tahoe, becoming, on November 16, the first known emigrants of European descent to stand on its shore before pushing on; they reached Sutter's Fort on December 10. The main body stayed with the wagons and faced the wall. The pass above — what we now call Donner Pass — rose in a granite face no team could pull a loaded wagon up. At the lake the party left six of its eleven wagons and committed the rest to the summit.

What they did next became the heart of the story. The men emptied the wagons and carried the goods up by hand; the empty wagons were double- and triple-teamed up the lower slopes through snow that, by Schallenberger's later account, reached the oxen's chests. At the final cliff, where even empty wagons could not be drawn, they found a cleft in the rock, led the unyoked oxen up through the gap, and then hauled the dismantled wagons up the face with chains and makeshift tackle and main strength, reassembling them on top. It took five days; they stood on the summit on November 25, 1844 — the first wagons ever brought over the Sierra Nevada.

Then the food ran low and the snow deepened, and survival came down to improvisation. Three young men — Moses Schallenberger, Allen Montgomery, and Joseph Foster — built a rough cabin near the lake and stayed to guard the six abandoned wagons. When holding out grew hopeless, Montgomery and Foster struck out over the pass on crude rawhide snowshoes; Schallenberger, seventeen and crippled by cramps, could not keep up and turned back alone. What followed is one of the quiet epics of the overland story. He lived alone at the snowbound lake for roughly two months through the heart of the winter, the same lake where the Donners would starve, surviving chiefly on the foxes he trapped — the coyotes, he said, were too lean and rank to eat — and reading the few books in the wagons to keep his mind from breaking in the silence. In February 1845 Dennis Martin, one of the emigrants who had reached safety, came back over the pass on snowshoes, taught the boy to make a proper pair, and brought him out alive. Meanwhile two babies had been born to the company on the journey, one of them a Murphy daughter; the party that set out with about fifty arrived with fifty-two, every original member still living.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

By February 1845 the entire Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party had reached the Sacramento Valley and Sutter's Fort, having lost no one and gained two. It was a result so unlike the disasters that bracket overland memory that it has been half-forgotten — there is no great monument at the lake to the company that crossed it and lived, only to the one that crossed it and died. Yet their achievement was the larger one: they had proved that a family with a loaded wagon could get over the Sierra Nevada, and they had left a usable road for others to follow. Within two years hundreds of wagons would come the same way.

The people of the party scattered into the founding of American California. The Murphys became one of the most prominent families of the region; Martin Murphy Jr. acquired vast ranch lands in the Santa Clara Valley, and the town of Sunnyvale later grew on his holdings, while the family's name endures across the South Bay. Dr. John Townsend became one of San Francisco's first physicians and one of its first civic officials before dying in the cholera epidemic of 1850. Moses Schallenberger, the boy who wintered alone at the lake, lived a long life as a respected San Jose farmer and citizen, and the narrative he gave his daughter preserved the party's story for history.

Four years after they crossed, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill turned their lonely wagon track into the most traveled road on the continent. The pass they engineered over the granite headwall carried the Gold Rush, then the first transcontinental railroad's snow sheds, then the Lincoln Highway, and finally Interstate 80 — all funneled through the gap that an old Paiute man drew for a few worried emigrants at the edge of the desert. The Donner Party is the name the mountain remembers, but the road belonged first to the company that got everyone home.

Lessons

References

• Stephens–Townsend–Murphy Party Wikipedia
• The First Pioneer Wagons Crossed the Sierra Over 160 Years Ago Truckee-Donner Historical Society
• Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party California Trail Interpretive Center
• California Trail Wikipedia
• Stephens – Townsend – Murphy Party of 1844 Historical Marker The Historical Marker Database