1850
Thompsontown, Pennsylvania
Sunday, June 23rd
David Boal’s stepfather cleared his throat and the room quieted. Even the younger children, clustered near their mother at the opposite end of the farm table, were silenced. John Peter Thompson bowed his head and the others followed. “Heavenly father, maker of all that is good in this world, please watch over this family. As the days grow shorter, with the harvest in the offing, may sunshine be abundant and may gentle rain bathe and nourish our crops. This family will wake every morning intent on proving ourselves worthy of Your love. Amen.” While the two youngest babbled, David’s mother and the five other children crowded round the table echoed their amens.
David looked over at his older sister, Jane. They were the two oldest “children” at the table. And really they were no longer children. He was 15 and she, 17. He could see the looks his sister was now getting in the fields and in town. With her jet black hair, and hazel eyes, men were looking at her a bit longer now. And now that his schooling was done, David worked the fields and chopped logs with the older men, his “uncles” who weren’t really his uncles.
“It’s us and them, Janie,” David had told her not long ago. Their father had died when they were both babies; neither could remember John Boal. Not long after, their mother had married John Peter Thompson. Their marriage was something of a consolidation. Boals and Thompsons, the two most prominent families along the lower reaches of the Juniata, had married before. His mother, John Peter Thompson’s wife, played her part as a farm wife, reliably delivering a new baby every two years or so
His stepfather wasn’t a bad man. A little distant perhaps, but that was true for all men. David was frustrated being called a Thompson, not a Boal. It was as if his father had never lived. The old Boal Homestead, six miles downstream, was now occupied by one of his stepfather’s brothers and his family.
This entire community was crawling with Thompsons. They lived in Thompsontown, for heaven’s sakes. John Thomson, a Presbyterian from County Antrim, had spilled his seed all over these Pennsylvania hills. Three wives. Fourteen children. And the children of these children all lived within shouting distance of one another in the valley on the north side of the Juniata. You were either a Thompson or someone who had married a Thompson. As for Janie and David, it was as if the name Boal had been whitewashed under a coat of Thompson paint.
David took some ham from the plate when it was offered. Sunday supper, the best meal of the week on the day with the lightest amount of work required. Knowing his mother was watching, he took a few green beans. The relative quiet had turned into something of a hullabaloo with the younger boys acting up. One refused ham. Others detested beans. The youngest would only eat bread.
Raising his voice slightly, John Peter Thompson intoned, “Mother, would you care to offer a reflection?” Again, the room quieted.
With her patient half-smile, Sarah Ann Boal Thompson, holding Mary Emma, the latest baby, said, “It has been said by some that children should be seen and not heard. I, for one, do not believe this. But I do expect the children at this table to be well mannered. Your father works hard to provide for us. He deserves to eat his Sabbath meal in relative peace and quiet.”
The commotion quieted to a din, with the children, even the boys, doing their best to conform to their parents’ wishes.
When the final fork was placed on stoneware, Sarah said, “Jane and David, you may now clear the plates.”
“Us and them,” David thought.
1851
Cotton Hill, Illinois
Wednesday, July 9th
“They’ve published another letter from San Francisco,” Isaac Deardorff said, looking up from the Illinois State Journal broadsheet. Lucinda, sitting in a high-backed chair opposite her husband, nodded. It was their mid-morning ritual – after the morning chores were done, before the afternoon activities commenced – Isaac would call out stories he thought might interest his wife. A form of recreation for him to break up the never-ceasing demands of the farm.
“Listen to this,” he said in a near-whisper, so as not to wake the baby, Benjamin Franklin, who slept at the foot of their bed, in a room right off the kitchen. “In a company of 200 men working on the Chagres railroad, 75 returned home disabled, 65 died on the Isthmus, and 60 went on to California. It says that the ones who made it through had ‘broken constitutions’ and were totally unprepared for life in California.”
Lucinda wondered whether her husband read these stories to convince himself he had made the right decision not to head west to the diggins. “I remain relieved that you decided not to try your hand in California.”
Peter, their toddler, tumbled about in the children’s room (“the barn,” Isaac called it). The four older children, from the twins on down, were out in the cornfield playing hide and seek.
“I’m a farmer, not a dreamer. And I don’t need to go to California to do that.” What he didn’t say was that there were 120 acres of soybeans and corn and a few pigs that demanded his attention each and every day.
Now, for every story in the paper about a man, a family, a company, heading west, there were at least five about those who had gone to see the elephant, who hoped to restart their lives in Springfield. The difficulties of the journey, the back-breaking work, the monotony, for what? A few got an outsized reward; most failed to get even a commensurate return.
“Have you seen George McClatchen since he got back?” Lucinda asked about the butcher who lived in their section, just back from California.
“No, not yet,” Isaac bit his lip. “It’s not like I can go back to the old days. What am I going to do, strip my business from John Ward, the man who stayed behind? I never did understand the story of the Prodigal Son.”
Lucinda knew it was one of those mornings when it was best for her to stay quiet.
Isaac had soured on California long before the reports of the find at Sutter’s Mill and President Polk’s announcement. He remembered seeing the advertisement “WESTWARD HO!” that George Donner, a man from Clear Lake Township, had placed in the Journal in the spring of ’46 looking for eight men to round out a party headed to California. He could still remember its words, “you can have as much land as you want without costing you a thing.”
“A fatted calf,” Isaac mumbled. If only the Donners and James Reed had had one of those.
Lucinda didn’t say a word.
In the summer and early fall, letters from George Donner, his wife, and other members of their party appeared at irregular intervals in The Sangamon Journal. Isaac had read to Lucinda about the group’s progress up the Platte River Valley. Mrs. Donner writing about magnificent buffalo and prairie flowers; George describing breakfast with Sioux braves and their ornaments from California.
Back then, Isaac had wondered, was it his charge to keep heading west? His own family had headed in that direction. His father was born in Virginia about the time George Washington took the oath. His father’s father had pushed the family north to York, Pennsylvania and then on to the new town of Columbus, Ohio. It was there that Isaac’s father had taken a bride and where Isaac had been born in 1815. And Columbus, obviously, had not been the last stop. The lure of land grants compelled Isaac’s father to head to Sangamon County and Cotton Hill, just south of Springfield, following Illinois’s admission into the Union. Peter Deardorff used just about all his savings and bought 120 acres of property.
Then, in November, The Sangamon Journal published a letter from James Reed from Fort Bridger, not far from the Great Salt Lake, that he had penned in the summer. A couple of oxen had died after drinking the alkaline-laced water of the desert. Then, there was no word at all about the families from Clear Lake until the following fall when the horror in the mountains was revealed.
Cotton Hill, less than 15 miles south of Clear Lake Township, was Isaac Deardorff’s home, his world. For twenty years now, he and his two brothers, working alongside their father, had cleared this land, tilled its soil, increased its yield. If he stood up from his chair, Isaac could see his father’s house to the north, and that of his remaining brother to the east. If he craned his neck and looked past his father’s chimney, he could have seen the simple home his sister had made with Silas Mathew, the village cooper. Sometimes, the courageous thing is stay put.
Isaac didn’t read his wife the advertisements that filled The Journal, but he glanced at them. A fancy headline for a new anti-cathartic mixture right to the usual ad for a diarrhea curative that “should be kept in the house of every family in town and country.” He completely passed over the three line advertisement that ran for Lincoln and Herndon, Counsellors and Attorneys at Law. Since Isaac, his father Peter, and his brother George had no intention of adding to their acreage, he had no need for the services of the one term Whig congressman, one for whom he had cast his ballot, who had returned to Springfield to take a satchel full of legal cases.
In the other room, Benjamin Franklin Deardorff stirred. Lucinda scooped up her child, hoping he would latch quickly on to her bosom. Isaac looked out at the gray clouds forming in the west as his children weaved between the stalks of corn. “Children, best come inside,” he called out. “Rain’s coming.”
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