Bloodshed, Crosses and Graves: Explore the California Trail through Battle Mountain, Nevada

By Larry Hyslop

History Traveler Series #4

The California Trail through Battle Mountain was a hotbed of Indian-emigrant altercations and battles. The emigrants’ livestock had worn out and their food supplies were low. Here, they clashed with desperate Western Shoshone who had lost their food supplies and life style.

Historian Charles Greenhaw uses research and emigrant diaries to describe the infamous river crossing, Gravelly Ford and its lonely graves, along with battles and bloodshed near Stony point and Iron Point. He debunking the myth of the famous Maiden's Grave, while describing the actual person buried there.

Maps and route descriptions help historical time travelers to visit these important landmarks along the middle Humboldt River and the overland emigrant trail.

 Stand at the Maiden’s Grave and gaze across the Humboldt River at the Gravelly Ford’s lonely graves.
 Listen to the wind among cottonwoods at the idyllic Emigrant Pass springs and Primeaux Station.
 Climb the steep, sandy hill, site of the deadly fight between the Donner Party’s James F. Reed and John Snyder.
 Look over the Humboldt’s willow thickets from Stony Point, scene of so many altercations and massacres.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Hyslop
• Release date: Dec 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301830183

Larry Hyslop

Larry Hyslop lives in Elko, Nevada, where he contributes the “Nature Notes” weekly column to the Elko Daily Free Press. He travels extensively around the West, visiting national Parks. Larry has written nature descriptions covering the landscapes of national parks, along with guides to the Ruby Mountains and Elko area. He worked with Charles Greenhaw to develop guides to the California Trail through Northeastern Nevada. Grayjaypress.com

Book preview

Bloodshed, Crosses and Graves

Explore the California Trail through Battle Mountain, Nevada

Charles Greenhaw

Larry Hyslop

Gray Jay Press

Elko, Nevada

Copyright 2006 Gray Jay Press

All Rights Reserved

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages embodied in critical articles and reviews.

All photos and maps, unless otherwise noted, are by Larry Hyslop.

For ordering information, contact:

Gray Jay Press

109 Chris Ave.

Elko, NV 89801

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Cover photo: Graves at Gravelly Ford

Back Photo: Humboldt River at Dunphy

Thanks

As always, we thank Janet and Cindy for putting up with our ideas and projects. We thank David Jamiel and Steve Dondero of the Elko BLM for their help. We thank Paul Sawyer and Robert Pearce for looking over our manuscript. We also thank Great Basin College Media Services for the cover design.

Authors’ Notes

This book is the fourth in a future series of five guides to aid commentaries on the emigrant roads across Nevada. Each book uses a Nevada town as a starting point. The first books have centered on Wells, Ruby Valley and Elko. The remaining book in the series will focus on Winnemucca.

The series is designed and written to help people appreciate the California Emigrant Trail. The trail follows along side and sometimes beneath Interstate 80 across 350 miles of Nevada. Because of Nevada’s rich historical tapestry, these books also offer other historical information unrelated to the emigrant trails.

We have one goal in mind, to get people to visit the Nevada countryside. There, they can appreciate both its wild nature and its historical depth. Hopefully, readers will use this guide to visit trail sites, gaining an understanding of the rich heritage of Nevada and the opening of the American West.

The tours in this book are meant to guide readers to important, specific sites along the trail. They are not meant as a guide to follow the California Trail across the vastness of Nevada. With this in mind, the easiest routes have been used to access historical sites. There may be other ways of getting there, perhaps by using a more historic route, or one approaching the site from the same direction as most emigrants did. Again, our system is to get people there using the easiest possible route.

Scores—even hundreds—of overland emigrants and gold rushers kept diaries. This book borrowed liberally from personal texts to enliven the tour experiences.

While this book can serve as a guide to these historical sites, it should not be the only source of information. The resource section of this book contains other sources for maps and trail guides.

Emigrant Trails West is a primary guide to the trail markers placed by Trails West, Inc. over the last 30 years. Some of these rail markers are clearly visible but the guide is helpful in finding all the markers. Each marker has a site-specific quotation from an emigrant diary, or explanation of the site’s significance. Emigrant Trails West can be purchased at the Northeastern Nevada Museum in Elko and from the Oregon-California Trails Association online store.

In this book, we employ the term Indian instead of Native American. We use the term Indian in a historical context since we are writing of the 19th Century Shoshones.

Typical rail marker placed by Trails West, Inc. They have site specific emigrant comments from diaries of the 1840s-1860s.

Carsonite marker

History Traveler Series

Entering the Great Basin: Explore the California Trail through Wells, Nevada, C&L Publishing, 2003.

Canyon, Cutoffs and Hot Springs: Explore the California Trail near Elko, Nevada, C&L Publishing, 2004.

Mountains, Grass and Water: Explore the Hastings Cutoff and Overland Trail through Ruby Valley, Nevada, C&L Publishing, 2003.

Canyon, Cutoffs and Hot Springs: Explore the California Trail near Elko, Nevada, Gray Jay Press, 2004.

Bloodshed, Crosses and Graves; Explore the California Trail through Battle Mountain, Nevada, Gray Jay Press, 2006.

Contents

California Trail

Battle Mountain

Dispossessed People

Gravelly Ford

Emigrant Pass and Gravelly Ford Tour

Dunphy, Argenta and Stony Point Tour

Valmy, Stone House and Iron Point Tour

Area Towns

Battle Mountain in Journals, Diaries and Books

References

Resources

About the Authors

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The California Trail

"I cross the Laramie Plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes, the buttes,

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless, sage-deserts.

I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great mountains,

I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains . . .

I pass Promintory, I ascend the Nevadas,

I scan noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,

I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,

I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe,

I see forests of majestic pines,

Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains,

I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows."

Walt Whitman, from Passage to India, enthusiastic about the world union created by the California Trail and Pacific Railroad.

Bloodshed, Crosses and Graves

The Humboldt Basin between Emigrant Pass and Iron Point became notorious in the 1850s for altercations between desperate Indians and exhausted emigrants.

The stealth warfare against the emigrant intruders occurred in a desert with no white settlements within hundreds of miles. In l847, Mormons founded Salt Lake City (270 miles east), and, in l849, San Francisco began a meteoric rise to become a major city. Before the 1860's, no permanent settlement existed between the Mormon capital and the Carson Valley and far western Nevada.

Hordes of travelers and untold thousands of livestock moved through the isolated land. Emigrants, 1500 miles into their journey, were still 300 miles from the Sacramento Valley. They were weary and their stock worn out. Here some of them began to clash with the destitute Western Shoshones, who had been reduced to begging for food. Shoshones had seen much of their domain grazed relentlessly and pounded by countless hooves. They sought revenge, stole needed food and clothing. They shot poisoned arrows into oxen and then used the abandoned animals for food. They also drove off corrals of livestock.

The assaults escalated as the non-equestrian Shoshones began to ride horses. Some emigrants believed that white Indians were sometimes behind attacks, adding a sinister aspect to the hostility. The fighting intensified as Indians from other lands pillaged small wagon trains.

Most emigrants passed through the war zone with little or no hostility, but all were edgy and anxious. Many grieved over family and friends who had died on the overland journey. Both emigrants and Indians were killed near present Battle Mountain in scattered fighting and small group massacres. We will never know the extent of casualties because emigrant journals contain second-handed reports and exaggerated numbers--especially of dead Indians.

The words of our title seem particularly appropriate. The Humboldt route, with the trail running both north and south of the river, was a dangerous road. In some places, around Gravelly Ford and Stony Point, there were mass burials of unknown people, emigrants and Indians. By the Civil War era, the trail was dotted with isolated graves with makeshift crosses. The forgotten graves contain the remains of travelers who died from arrows, accidents, and natural causes. Only a few sagebrush and wagon board crosses survived into the 20th century, almost all with names faded beyond recognition.

250,000 Emigrants

Estimates vary considerably about the number of California emigrants. From the late l840s until the opening of the transcontinental railroad in l869, about a quarter of a million people seems to be the number favored by trail historians.

Numbers of Overlanders on the California Trail and Its Variants, 1841-1863

(Does not include gold rushers returning east.)

Brief Chronology

California Trail

1828---In November, a fur brigade of the Hudson’s Bay Company, led by Peter Skene Ogden, enters present Nevada near Denio. They cross the Santa Rosa Range at Paradise Hill Pass and camp in the Little Humboldt River basin northeast of Winnemucca. On November 9, Ogden discovers a stream apparently never seen before by white men. By whatever means it becomes known as Mary’s River, perhaps after a trapper’s Indian wife. Ogden also calls it the Unknown river and, later, Paul’s River to commemorate Joseph Paul, a trapper who dies and is buried near Carlin. John Fremont names the stream the Humboldt in l845 as a memorial to Alexander von Humboldt, a famed German scientist.

1828---Ogden’s mobile community, the Fifth Snake Country Expedition, traps beaver along the river as far east as present Halleck. They make the first non-Indian tracks along the Humboldt, although Ogden notes that a horse road existed. They leave the river basin carrying more than 1,000 beaver pelts, via Secret Pass and trek to a winter rendezvous northeast of the Great Salt Lake. Ogden is under British orders to trap out the Humboldt Basin, leave it a fur desert and try to stave off American incursions. His brigade returns in l829 and traps beaver along the tributaries and the main stream of the Lower Humboldt.

1833---Capt. Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville takes leave from the U.S. Army to form a fur company. He makes Joseph Walker his chief lieutenant. Walker, a mountain man,

leads a company of trappers west along Ogden’s River (Humboldt) to California. The venture is the first Euro-American crossing of