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There were incredible marches, incredible hardships, equally incredible battles. Volunteers had almost no discipline. Early in the war, "the depots and bases filled with whores, sutlers, and gamblers, were already a continuous jamboree and vicious with crime." One Maryland regiment "suffered attrition from delirium tremens." A Kentucky regiment had to be "ordered to the rear in disgrace, for rape."
The story of Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's conquest of the Southwest is more epic and just as robust. Kearny had volunteer trouble too. As he boarded a steamboat before the start of his expedition, he ordered the sentry not to let the volunteers follow him. But they stormed the gangplank. Cried one of the new conquistadors, slapping his commander on the back: "You don't git off from us, old hoss! For by Ingin corn we'll go plum through fire and thunder with you. What'll you drink, General? Don't be back'ard! Sing out!" Kearny shocked his volunteers by ordering wine.
By the Waters of Sugar Creek. Among the book's most successful sections are those in which Utah-born Bernard DeVoto describes the exodus of the Mormons from the time they were driven from Illinois. The flight from Nauvoo ("The city of the Lord God Jehovah King of Kings. ... In February, 1846, it was fallen—that great city") is memorable. "Acres of ice" floated in the Mississippi. "The ferries were jammed with men, women, children, horses, oxen, cows, swine, chickens, feather beds, Boston rockers, a miscellany of families and goods hastily brought together in the fear of death. The boats dumped them on the Iowa shore and turned back for other, identical freights—American refugees fleeing a city under threat from an enemy. . . .
"Nine miles inland they reached a timbered stretch, on Sugar Creek, and here they pitched a camp. . . . Winter night came up beyond the grove. Supper was whatever you had brought with you. . . . Afterward, they sang hymns, prayed, and listened to instruction from the elders. . . . That night on Sugar Creek nine babies were born. . . ."
The Great Migration had started the year before. But there were enough emigrants in 1846 so that their trains stretched for hundreds of miles across the Great Plains. Among them was a group later to be known as the Donner party. Few of the Donners ever reached California, but they became more famous than most of the settlers who did.
Villain of the piece was an unscrupulous publicity man, Lansford W. Hastings, the original California booster. Hastings had written the book of the year, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California. In it he had said: "The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco." Says DeVoto: "When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage . . . neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate man. . . ."