The Age of Gold Read Free Page B

ground,” recorded one of the Mormons. Many of the Saints were family men, and couldn’t help feeling pity for the children who died. But all were veterans of the wilderness, and like many of similar experience after such disasters, they couldn’t help thinking that the tragedy was at least as much the result of bad decisions as bad luck—which made it all the more tragic. Sutter, below at his fort, shared this view, and added to it a certain annoyance. He had gone to some pains and no little expense to send a relief party to rescue the Donner group, and was miffed at the way things turned out. “The provisions not satisfying the starving sufferers,” he afterward complained, “they killed and ate, first, the mules, then the horses, and, finally, they killed and ate my good Indians.”
    The Mormons saw snow themselves, although September had barely started. Azariah Smith, traveling with his father, Albert, wrote on September 7, “We crossed the divide, which was very high and snow in places on top.” That evening brought no new snow, but rather messengers with fresh word from home. “There was a letter read from the Twelve to the Battalion, which gave us much joy. I and Father received a letter from Mother, which gave us much more.”
    The joy was greater for some than for others. The message from the Twelve directed those veterans without dependent wives and children in Utah to return to the Sacramento. As things were, the colony at Salt Lake was already hungry; it needed no new mouths to feed, especially with winter coming on. The veterans without dependents should spend the winter in California, earning such wages as they could, saving their money, and preparing to join the rest of the Saints in the spring.
    So Azariah Smith, with a heavy but obedient heart, said good-bye to his father, who had younger children in Utah, and joined about half the company in retracing their steps west across the Donner Pass. On September 15 they arrived again at Sutter’s Fort and applied for work.
    Sutter was delighted to see them. With the two mill projects under way, he needed all the strong arms and backs he could get. He offered to pay the newcomers either by the month ($25) or by the cubic yard of earth and rock displaced (121/2 cents). Hale, confident, and zealous in their desire to help the church, they opted for the piece rate.
    Sutter was impressed with their energy and ambition, and shortly he sent them to Coloma, where Marshall had just begun work. “We was three days a going there, as we had an ox team, which was very slow,” wrote Azariah Smith. The Mormons discovered an unanticipated perquisite of the Coloma job, or what they initially took to be a perquisite. Referring to Jennie Wimmer, Smith noted, “We have a woman cook, which is something we have not had for a long time.”
    Digging ditches and piling rocks was harder than the newcomers had anticipated. “Three days this week I have worked,” Smith wrote at the end of the first week, “but my back was so lame yesterday that I did not work.” Although his back recovered, he fell ill. His malady seemed mild at first,but it kept recurring, so that from early October through mid-November he worked hardly at all. “By Thursday I thought I had got well,” he wrote on Monday, October 11, “and, anxious to procure means to take me back home [to Utah], in the morning I went to work, and worked lightly till noon, when after dinner I had a chill, and have had one every day since.” At the end of that week he wrote, “Through the goodness of the Lord my chills have left me, but I have been very weak. One night before the chills left I was very sick, and I felt bad, the thought running in my mind that likely I never should see home again, which was a perfect torment to my mind.” Three weeks later he managed to resume some light work, but as late as December 12, he wrote, “Last Thursday I had a chill and fever.”
    Smith wasn’t the only one who got sick.