A bull-whacker.
The loaded whip was used in two hands
and was twenty feet long, or more, in the
lash. In some cases it had a horseshoe-nail
in the end of the snapper.
During the ten years immediately following the discovery of gold in California, the main-traveled road across the continent was what was known as the Platte River route. Starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa, a town then famous as the "jumping-off place" for California emigrants, the adventurers crossed the Missouri by a rope ferry and clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the site of the modern city of Omaha. The only building of any considerable dimensions in the early fifties was a large, unpainted, barn-like structure, which, we were proudly told, was to be the capitol of the Territory of Nebraska, the Territorial organization of which was authorized by Congress in 1854.
The trail from the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake valley grew more and more difficult as we approached the rocky fastnesses of the Wahsatch range of mountains, that defends the land of the Latter-Day Saints on its eastern border. Leaving the valley and skirting the northern end of Great Salt Lake, the route followed the general course of the Humboldt, crossed the dreadful desert which takes its name from the river, and we finally caught sight once more of civilization in Honey Lake valley, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada. Here the trail began a toilsome ascent of the gigantic mountain wall, and scaling the roof of the world, as it seemed to us, slid down into the valley of the Sacramento through the wooded ridges of the Plumas mining region.
The average cost of a journey to California in those days did not greatly vary whether one took the water route by the way of Cape Horn or the land route by the trail just described. In either case the emigrants usually clubbed together, and the cost per man was therefore considerably reduced. A party of overland emigrants, supplied with a team of horses or oxen,—preferably the latter,—and numbering four or five men, were expected to invest about five hundred dollars for their outfit. This included the cost of provisions, clothing, tent, wagon, and animals, and a small sum of ready money for emergencies by the way. The necessaries of life were few and simple. The commissariat was slender, and included flour, dried beans, coffee, bacon, or "side-meat," and a few small stores—sugar, salt, baking-powder, and the like. In those days the art of canning goods had not been invented, and the only article in that category was the indispensable yeast-powder, without which bread was impossible. The earliest emigrants experimented with hard bread, but soft bread, baked fresh every day, was found more economical and portable, as well as more palatable.
But, after all, beans and coffee were the mainstay of each well-seasoned and well-equipped party. In our own experience, good luck (more than good management) furnished us with enough of these two necessaries of life to last us from the Missouri to the Pacific. The coffee, it should be explained, was bought in its green state, and was browned and ground as occasion required. That variety of pork product known as side-meat was a boneless slab from the side of a mast-fed porker, salted and smoked. In western Iowa and Missouri we usually found this meat corded up in piles after it had been cured. Corn-meal, that beloved staff of life on the Western frontier, was an unprofitable addition to the stores of the emigrant. It was not "filling," and its nutriment was out of all proportion to its bulk. Hot flour bread, made into the form of biscuits, and dipped in the "dope," or gravy, made by mixing flour and water with the grease extracted from the fried bacon, was our mainstay.
Does the imagination of the epicure revolt at the suggestion of so rude a dish? To hundreds of thousands of weary emigrants, trudging their way across the continent, spending their days and nights in the open air and breathing an atmosphere bright with ozone, even ruder viands than this were as nectar and ambrosia.
