Across north-central New Mexico and Arizona, along the line of Route 66, now Interstate 40, there first ran a little-known wagon trail called Beale's Wagon Road, after Edward F. Beale, who surveyed it for the War Department in 1857. This survey became famous for employing camels. Not so well known is the fate of the first emigrants who the next year attempted to follow its tracks. The government considered the 1857 exploration a success and the road it opened a promising alternative route to California but expected such things as military posts and developed water supplies to be needed before it was ready for regular travel. Army representatives in New Mexico were more enthusiastic.
In 1858 there was a need for an alternative. Emigrants avoided the main California Trail because of a U.S. Army expedition to subdue Mormons in Utah. The Southern Route ran through Apache territory, was difficult for the army to guard, and was long. When a party of Missouri and Iowa emigrants known as the Rose-Baley wagon train arrived in Albuquerque, they were encouraged to be the first to try the new Beale road. Their journey became a rolling disaster. Beale's trail was more difficult to follow than expected; water sources and feed for livestock harder to find. Indians along the way had been described as peaceful, but the Hualapais persistently harassed the emigrants and shot their stock, and when the wagon train finally reached the Colorado River, a large party of Mojaves attacked them. Several of the emigrants were killed, and the remainder began a difficult retreat to Albuquerque. Their flight, with wounded companions and reduced supplies, became ever more arduous. Along the way they met other emigrant parties and convinced them to join the increasingly disorderly and distressed return journey.
Charles Baley tells this dramatic story and discusses its aftermath, for the emigrants, for Beale's Wagon Road, and for the Mojaves, against whom some of the emigrants pressed legal claims with the federal government.
Disaster at the Colorado
Beale's Wagon Road and the First Emigrant PartyBy Charles W. BaleyUtah State University Press
Copyright © 2002 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-438-3Contents
Preface.....................................................................viiChapter 1 The Roster.......................................................1Chapter 2 The Santa Fe Trail...............................................13Chapter 3 A New Road West..................................................23Maps following page.........................................................34Chapter 4 Westward Ho!.....................................................35Chapter 5 Little Water-Many Indians........................................45Chapter 6 Battle at the Colorado...........................................58Illustrations following page................................................76Chapter 7 The Long Road Back...............................................77Chapter 8 A Cold Miserable Winter..........................................98Chapter 9 California at Last...............................................109Illustrations following page................................................130Chapter 10 The Legal Battle................................................131Chapter 11 The Later Years.................................................146Appendix A Roster of the Rose-Baley Wagon Train............................169Appendix B Letter from John Udell to His Brothers..........................172Appendix C Indian Depredation Claim of Leonard J. Rose.....................176Notes.......................................................................180Bibliography................................................................204Index.......................................................................210
Chapter One
The Roster
"I thought it was preposterous to start on so long a journey with so many women and helpless children, and so many dangers attending the attempt."
This is how John Udell described the decision of his fellow travelers to leave the old established road and follow a new and completely untested and unproven route that promised to get them to California a few days sooner. But the lure of shorter routes and cutoffs often proved irresistible to emigrants, as it did with Udell's companions.
Udell and his wife, Emily, were members of a California-bound wagon train from Iowa and Missouri that had arrived at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in June of 1858. Here, they heard about a newly surveyed road (Beale's Wagon Road) that would run from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to San Bernardino, California. The proposed road at that time was little more than a survey trail, traveled previously only by a few experienced and well-equipped explorers. Some day it would become a major east-west highway. But the time was not yet.
Udell's fellow travelers were a diverse group with little in common other than a desire to establish new homes for themselves and their families in California. Emigrant trains crossing the western plains were usually named after the largest or the wealthiest property owner, or owners, in the group. That is probably why this emigrant party would become known as the Rose-Baley wagon train, after its two wealthiest members, Leonard John Rose and Gillum Baley, although some of its members might have objected to this name. The two companies, the Roses and the Baleys, did not start the journey together but joined along the way, a common practice as there was greater safety in large numbers.
Leonard John Rose, better known as L. J. Rose, was by far the wealthiest member of this group. He was thirty years of age, and a resident of Van Buren County, Iowa. Traveling with him was his wife, Amanda, age twenty-five, and their two children, Nina Elizabeth and Annie Wilhelmina, ages four and one. Also traveling with the Rose family were Mrs. Rose's father and mother, Ezra M. Jones, age fifty-five, and Elizabeth Burgett Jones, age fifty-four, and the Joneses' eighteen-year-old son, Edward C. Jones. All were from Van Buren County.
L. J. Rose was born in Rottenburg, Germany, on May 1, 1827. When he was eight years old, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister. The father had come to this country sometime previously and was operating a small store in New Orleans. After a short stay in New Orleans the family moved to Waterloo, Illinois, where they purchased another store. The younger Rose finished school in Waterloo and attended one year at Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois. He then returned to Waterloo and went into business with his father.
Father and son did not get along well together in business; the elder Rose was slow in becoming Americanized and held onto his old country ways, while the son, with an American education, had a better understanding of American merchandising methods. The two quarreled frequently until, finally, the younger Rose could take no more and left the business to strike out on his own. He invested his share of the money from the partnership in apples, which he packed in barrels and freighted down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, where he quickly sold the consignment at a favorable price. Looking around for an opportunity to reinvest his money, he observed that there was an oversupply of draft animals in Louisiana, and they were selling at a much lower price than what they would have sold for on the Illinois market. He bought all the horses and mules his funds would allow, then shipped them up the Mississippi River to his home in Illinois, where he sold the animals for a substantial profit. He repeated this process until he had saved enough money to open a small store of his own.
In 1841, at the age of twenty-one, Rose moved to Keosauqua, Iowa, where he purchased a general store. Here, he met Amanda Markel Jones whom he married in 1851. By 1857, through hard work, good luck, and excellent management, the young man accumulated a sizable bank account. With things going so well for him, one might wonder why he wanted to pull up stakes and move himself and his family halfway across the continent to a place he knew nothing about. Rose supplied the answer to this question in an article he wrote in 1892 for a magazine, The Californian:
In 1858 some miners who had just returned from California, so fired my imagination with descriptions of its glorious climate, wealth of flowers and luscious fruits, that I was inspired with an irresistible desire to experience in person the delights to be found in the land of plenty.
After selling most of his property and settling his debts, Rose had a net worth of more than $30,000, a small fortune in those days. With this substantial sum of money he was able to put together one of the best-equipped outfits ever to travel the western plains. He purchased a herd of 200 of the best cattle on the market, mostly thoroughbred Red Durhams. He knew he could sell these animals in California for a hefty profit. For driving the loose stock, and for scouting and hunting, he purchased twenty of the finest horses that he could find in Iowa and Missouri, including a Morgan stallion, Black Morrill, valued at $2,500, and two matched Morgan fillies valued at $350 each. To manage this huge herd of livestock, and to perform the myriad duties of camp life, he obtained the services of seventeen young single men. For the most part these young men were grubstakers, receiving no salary or other...
