In the winter of 1849–50 a scattered company of gold-seekers, chasing a rumored shortcut to the California mines, drove their wagons off the established Old Spanish Trail and straight into the basin that one of them, looking back from its western rim, would damn forever as “Death Valley.” The long overland approach — the wagon roads, the breakup of the larger party, the fateful choice to follow a map of a cutoff that did not exist — is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries. This entry is about what happened after the wheels stopped: the families pinned in the desert with their oxen dying and no way out, and the walk that saved them.
The group at the center of the story is the Bennett-Arcan party — the families of Asabel Bennett and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Arcan (often written Arcane), with their wives and small children, plus a few single men. By the time they understood the trap they were in, late in December 1849, they were camped near a spring on the floor of the valley, their oxen too weak to haul the wagons over the wall of mountains to the west, their food nearly gone. They made a desperate plan: two of the strongest and youngest men, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, would go ahead on foot to find a settlement and bring back provisions, while the families waited at the spring.
Manly and Rogers were gone far longer than anyone had dared expect — about twenty-six days. They crossed the Panamint Range, struck out across the Mojave for nearly 300 miles, and finally reached the settled country near Mission San Fernando, north of Los Angeles, where they obtained food, three horses, and a one-eyed mule. Then they turned around and walked the whole brutal route back into the valley, fully expecting to find the families dead. They were not all dead. Most of the Bennett-Arcan people were still alive at the spring, just barely, and Manly and Rogers led them out on foot over the mountains, reaching the safety of Rancho San Francisco — near present-day Santa Clarita — in March 1850.
The death toll in Death Valley was, remarkably, very low — only one man of the Bennett-Arcan group, the ailing Captain Richard Culverwell, died in the valley itself, and the families and children all came through. What gave the place its terrible name was not a mass grave but the experience of it: the heat, the salt, the dead oxen, the weeks of waiting, and the conviction of everyone in it that they had walked into a country that meant to kill them. As they climbed out at last over the mountains, one of the party is remembered to have turned and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley” — and the name stuck to the map.
In the late summer of 1826 a young, devout, teetotal trapper named Jedediah Strong Smith led a small fur brigade south and west from the Great Salt Lake into country no American had crossed before, leaving the Bear River on August 7, 1826, with fifteen men. By the time his desert journeys were over he had made the first documented overland crossing into Mexican California across the Mojave Desert, the first known east-to-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada, and the first crossing of the central Great Basin — a string of firsts paid for in men’s lives and his own near-death from thirst.
The outbound trip took Smith and his men down to the Colorado River near present-day Needles, to the villages of the Mohave people, who fed the strangers, let them and their horses recover for some two weeks, and gave them guides across the desert westward to the missions of Alta California. They reached Mission San Gabriel in November 1826. There the Mexican governor, José María Echeandía, found an armed band of Americans deep inside his territory alarming, and detained Smith before letting him go on condition he leave the way he had come. Smith instead pushed north to trap, and when spring came he faced the problem of getting home across the mountains and deserts that had nearly stopped him on the way in.
The return in 1827 is the heart of the survival story. Leaving most of his brigade camped in California, Smith and two companions — Robert Evans and Silas Gobel — forced a crossing of the snowbound Sierra Nevada in late May and then struck east across the central Great Basin into a furnace of salt flats and waterless ranges. Smith called it a land where ‘high rocky hills afford the only relief to the desolate waste,’ the intervals between them ‘sand barren Plains.’ Their horses died, then nearly the men: Evans collapsed from thirst, and Smith and Gobel left him in the only shade they could find, pushed on, found water some miles ahead, and carried it back to revive him. They reached the Bear Lake rendezvous on July 3, 1827, as walking skeletons.
Smith’s luck on the desert routes finally broke the next year. In 1828, leading a second party back down the same southwestern road, he reached the Colorado crossing to find the Mohave’s goodwill gone, soured by violence with other American trappers in the interim. The Mohave attacked, killing ten of his men — Silas Gobel among them. Smith and the handful of survivors crossed the Mojave a second time on foot and reached California again. He was killed in 1831 by a Comanche party on the dry Cimarron crossing of the Santa Fe Trail. His crossings, recorded in his own journals and his clerk’s, opened the southwestern routes later emigrants would follow.
In the summer of 1846, with the United States newly at war with Mexico, the federal government asked the displaced Latter-day Saints — then encamped in misery on the Missouri after being driven out of Illinois — to raise a battalion of volunteers for the army’s invasion of the Southwest. Roughly five hundred men, with a handful of wives and children along as laundresses and family, enlisted. What followed was one of the longest infantry marches in American history: some two thousand miles on foot, from the Missouri River through Santa Fe and across the deserts of present-day New Mexico and Arizona to the Pacific at San Diego.
The Mormon Battalion fought no battle against the Mexican army. Its real enemies were distance, thirst, hunger, and the country itself. Under the hard command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke — who took over after the original commander died — the men hauled wagons across waterless stretches, dug and chopped a road for the wagons through the rock of a place they called Box Canyon, and marched until their shoes and rations gave out. Their one “battle,” near the San Pedro River in present-day Arizona, was against a herd of wild bulls that gored mules and men and wrecked wagons before being driven off.
Nearly all of them survived. The deaths — perhaps around twenty over the whole enlistment — came from illness, exhaustion, and exposure rather than combat, and many of the sickest were spun off into “sick detachments” sent to winter at Pueblo rather than die on the trail. When the survivors reached San Diego in late January 1847, Cooke issued an order that has become famous: “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry.” The road they cut became a wagon route to California used by gold-seekers within two years.
The march cannot be told honestly without its context. It was a campaign of the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest that would strip roughly half of Mexico’s territory and bring the homelands of the Apache, the Tohono O’odham, the Pima (Akimel O’odham), the Yuma (Quechan), the Kumeyaay, and many other nations under United States control. The road the battalion opened was also a road of dispossession.