What Rose wrote home from Albuquerque

Leonard J. Rose did not wait for a book. Back in Albuquerque in October 1858, he wrote a long letter for a newspaper in Keosauqua, Iowa, the town he had left. The National Park Service file that prints it, Robert R. Budlong's 1938 report on emigrant names at El Morro, says Rose's son later supplied the text and that it was written October 28, 1858. The print is an old typescript with battered letters. The facts that can be read through the damage are still the closest thing we have to a leader's account of the days at the river.

Rose opens by assuming his reader has heard rumors: parties that started on Beale's route, and their return from the Colorado "on account of Indian troubles." He was in those troubles. He asks to be allowed a plain statement.

Two parties, counted in animals

He divides the first company into two parties that traveled together and camped near each other, but kept their stock separate until the trouble began. One party was Joel Hedgpeth, Thomas Hedgpeth, G. Bailey, Wright Bailey, J. Holland Daily, John Udell, their families, and probably eighteen hands. They had 125 head of oxen and cows, twelve wagons, and fifteen horses. The other party was the Bentners, Alpha Brown, S. N. Jones, Rose himself, their families, and seventeen hands, with 247 head of cattle and twenty-one horses and mules. "G. Bailey" is the Gillum Baley of later accounts. The numbers are Rose's, offered while the loss was still fresh. They are not a government census.

They left Westport, Missouri, the first of May, and Albuquerque on June 30, with E. N. Savedra as guide. Rose says Savedra had guided both Whipple and Beale. Bean and Vane, following Sherer, add that both of those expeditions had found him wanting. Rose does not say that. He does say the party got on "reasonably well" until a spring he thinks Beale called Hemphill Spring and the guide called Peach Tree Spring, where the first Indians on the route stole a mare and a mule. Three men tracked them nearly a day, were shot at with arrows in a canyon, and came back hungry. Rose puts that spring 112 miles from the Colorado, "according to Lieutenant Beale's report." He is already using the road document as a mileage table.

The people he met before the river

The next evening Savedra coaxed a group down off a mountainside. They patted their chests and said "hanna, hanna, hanna," and they used the word "Mojaves." Savedra, who Rose says understood something of the language, translated: these were Cosninos, they had the stolen horses, they had taken them from Mojaves, they would bring them back, they were good, and the Mojaves were bad. Rose did not quite believe it. He writes that Savedra said the Mojaves never came this far from their own country. The next day about twenty-six people did bring the horses in, at a place Rose calls Indian Springs, 91 miles from the Colorado. He paid blankets, shirts, pants, knives, tobacco, and trinkets, fed them, and wrote them a certificate that they had returned the horses and that he believed they had stolen them too. More people came in the morning, nearly fifty by his estimate, wanting shoes and another reward, and left around eleven saying the Mojaves were after them.

Then the stock killing started. Six head were missing. Men found four dead. From two, the meat was gone. The other two had only been killed, the watchers having warned the hunters that pursuit was close. From there to the river, Rose says, "we were continually harassed and shot at." Horses and cattle were wounded. A man sent back from Savedra's Spring to tell Mr. Brown that water was short was hit with three arrows and could not walk or ride for two months. Rose shrugs at the length of this part of the story. Compared with what followed, he calls it petty.

He is naming groups from a guide's translation and from Beale's map-words. "Cosninos" in 1850s trail speech usually points at Havasupai or at upland Yuman people travelers did not distinguish carefully. Later work summarized by Bean and Vane places Yavapai and Havasupai harassment in the Peach Springs stretch, and places the killing of the Bentner family with Walapai, among whom were seven Mojave they call renegades. Rose, writing in October, does not have that sorting. He has arrows, a stolen mare, and a guide's sentences. Treat his tribal names as what a frightened emigrant was told, not as a census of nations.

August 27, and the days after

On August 27, about sunset, they reached the top of the last mountain before the river. Rose says they had toiled two nights and days, animals without water, men worn out, the weather hot. They stopped for supper, the first meal of the day, and talked about green beans and corn, about how long the crossing would take, and about ten days then to San Bernardino. "We gave one general hurrah and again rolled on." Some Mojave met them with a melon and a little corn, which the emigrants bought. The visitors asked how many the train numbered and whether they meant to settle on the Colorado. Rose thought the second question unusual. The answer he records: they told their number, said more were coming, and said they were going to California. Through the night the Mojave seemed friendly, showing the road.

They did not reach the woods until after eleven the next morning, still a mile from the water, and had to unyoke exhausted oxen and drive them in. Near the river the manner changed. Rose and his wife were walking. A man stepped between them, spoke in bad English and Mexican, and put a hand on her. Rose pushed him off. The man laughed. At Alpha Brown's wagon, a little apart, Mrs. Brown and the children wanted a drink. Rose says the men around the wagon laughed and told her they would bring water if she gave them her dress. She offered other goods. They would not take them. They took hold of her little boy and said they were going to take him. Rose had the wagon hauled in with the others. Brown came back with water. Had an attack come then, Rose writes, the camp would have been easy. Not five people were awake. The men had lain down under the trees and gone to sleep.

He says cattle were killed and driven off, and that people caught at it laughed and cooked meat in sight of camp. Evening came and the visitors went home. The next morning the camp moved to the bank. Someone looked for a crossing, someone for grass, and both succeeded. About noon "one of the chiefs" came with men. Told that his men had taken cattle, he spoke to them "evidently not very earnestly," and said it would stop. He asked again whether the emigrants meant to settle. Told they were going to California, "he gave us a very searching look, as if not half believing it." Rose gave blankets, shirts, pants, knives, tobacco, beads, rings, bells, and looking-glasses. The man distributed them and said the party could stay and cross when it liked. Rose describes him as stout and tall, painted, feathered, belled. He does not give a name. Later writers guess. The letter does not.

About four they moved a mile downriver to the place they meant to cross. Grass was excellent. Cottonwood was "plenty" for building a camp. Rose does not say the trees were a gift. He says they were useful. That silence is the letter's largest gap. Mojave use of those cottonwoods, for shade, for house posts, for the inner bark, is not something Rose explains, because he does not seem to know it. Bean and Vane, drawing on Sherer, supply the other side: the grass the cattle rolled in was field, not a vacant meadow, and the trees were property. You cannot get that from Rose. You can see, in his pleasure at the grass and the wood, exactly the acts the other account treats as the offense.

The fight he was in

The next morning only two men came, looked, and left. About ten the camp counted more than 250 people crossing the river. Savedra said the behavior was suspicious. Rose sent word to Brown to herd the cattle close. He still "had but little fear of an attack," and he was uneasy about Mr. Bentner, who was supposed to come in from the mountains that morning.

The Bentner situation is easy to misread if you only know the later phrase "the Bentner family was killed." Rose explains it. The first party, and Bentner from Rose's party, had left wagons, families, and most of their men in the mountains, afraid the animals could not pull loads all the way to the river. They had driven stock loose. Rose had his own wagons at the water. Bentner, who had mules, expected to recruit faster and wanted to be with Rose's company for the crossing. Rose meant to send men back to look for him after dinner.

During the meal one man looked in and left. A boy said many people nearby had told him a steamboat was coming, and had pointed to where the sun would be when it landed. The camp got excited, then decided it was too good to be true. After dinner two of Rose's men left to look for Bentner. About half an hour later, "the Indians came running from every quarter, out of the brush, completely surrounding the camp." They came within fifteen feet of the wagons. Rose thought they expected a quicker killing than they got. The men in camp were armed. All but the two who had gone for Bentner got in. "Some of the enemy being killed, they retired to a safe distance." Arrows continued nearly two hours. Part of the attackers drove off the stock except a few animals near the wagons, and then everyone left.

The two men returned. They had found Miss Bentner killed, her clothes torn off, her face disfigured. They did not search further. Someone on the far bank shook scalps on a pole. From that, Rose writes, "we supposed that they had all been killed." Alpha Brown was killed in camp, "dying in camp without a struggle." They buried him in the Colorado. "Eleven more were wounded, who have all since recovered, or nearly so. There were about 25 men in the fight."

Count what is actually counted. One man dead in camp, Brown. Eleven wounded. About twenty-five men on the emigrant side of the fight. Miss Bentner dead, and a supposition, not a burial count, that the rest of her family was dead. Rose does not give a number of Mojave dead beyond "some." A figure of seventeen, which appears in later summaries, is not in this letter. Do not import it.

He also does not date the fight "August 30" in so many words. The chain is: sunset August 27 on the last mountain; the woods the next morning; a night; a move to the bank the next day with a noon visit; a four o'clock move; the fight the morning after that, after dinner. Counted forward from August 27, the fight falls on August 30. That is how the day is dated in later reconstructions, including this site's short history. The letter itself gives you the chain, not the numeral.

The retreat, and the help he names

They decided to go back the way they had come. Enough cattle remained to pull one wagon, and two mules for a carriage. They loaded food and clothing and left the loads of five wagons. "Out of nearly 400 head of cattle, we saved 17 head, and out of 37 horses, probably ten." His own cattle later died on the rocky road because their feet gave out. He thought a few days' rest at the river, and no rock on the California side, would have taken them through. That is a stockman's judgment, not a claim about Mojave intentions.

In the mountains they found the families safe, and another Iowa party: Caves, Jordan, Perkins, and Davis, with families and about thirty men, already hurt by the Cosninos and short of stock. Rose says that without them he could not have gone ten miles. Women and children walked. Travel was mostly at night, to reach water. A distance made in a day on the way west now took two. Fifteen men sent ahead with loose stock were attacked at Indian Spring and fought half a day. A false report that they had all been killed reached the main party five miles out. One man in the advance party was wounded by a ball, "the Indians having one rifle among them," and one by an arrow. Rose says it took him eighteen days to make ninety-one miles.

At Indian Spring they met E. O. and T. O. Smith, who "divided their provisions to the last mouthful," killed cattle, hauled women and children, and lent stock. Part of the combined parties reached Albuquerque with mule teams. Rose thanks the Army officers at the post and says supplies were sent out to meet the rest, including two more loads for those still back with Smith's train. He ends with the people who had been going to a son in California, or who had spent what felt like an independence, and who were now "living beggars, or on the bounty of kind people." He tells the editor to print the letter as it is, or not, and if not, to send it to a man in Central City, Illinois. "I have no time to revise it."

What to do with a letter like this

Rose is a participant writing within weeks, to people who knew him in Iowa. He is precise about stock, wages of presents, and the order of camps. He is a poor witness to names, to what the cottonwoods meant, and to who killed the Bentners. He infers a family massacre from a body, a pole of scalps, and fear. Bean and Vane, citing Sherer and the Mojave narrative of Chooksa Homar recorded by A. L. Kroeber in 1903, place that killing with Walapai and a few Mojave, apart from the fight Rose was in, and they place the decision to fight the camp with militant leaders who overruled elders. Homar's account is a memory told forty-five years later, through an interpreter. Rose's is a letter dashed off for a mail close. They do not cancel each other. They answer different questions. One is best on the emigrant sequence and the losses he could count. The other is the only detailed Mojave explanation of why a fight seemed necessary to some leaders and wrong to others.

John Udell, age 63, carved his name at El Morro on July 6, 1858, and called himself the first emigrant. Rose carved his on July 7. Udell's published journal is the daily book. This essay does not quote it, because the pages were not in front of me. Rose's letter was. The novel puts invented journal lines in Udell's voice and says so. It also invents a role for Cairook in the attack. Rose never uses that name. If a scene in the book needs Cairook at the wagons on the day Brown died, that scene is fiction.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• L. J. Rose, letter written on his return to Albuquerque in October 1858 and sent to a newspaper in Keosauqua, Iowa, reprinted in full in Robert R. Budlong, "Romance of Emigrant Names at El Morro," Southwestern Monuments Special Report No. 23, supplement for May 1938, a National Park Service file. PDF. The reprint says the letter was written October 28, 1858. A later note in Bean and Vane records publication in the Missouri Republican, November 29, 1859.
• Bean and Vane, Mojave chapter (2002), citing Sherer, Bitterness Road (1994), and A. L. Kroeber and C. B. Kroeber, A Mohave War Reminiscence, 1854-1880 (University of California Press, 1973), for the Mojave account narrated in 1903 by Chooksa Homar (Jo Nelson) and for the argument that Walapai, not the river camp fight, killed the Bentner family. NPS history copy.
• El Morro inscriptions recorded by Budlong: "John Udell Age 63 July 6, 1858. First Emigrant"; "L. J. Rose. Iowa July 7, 1858"; "Isaac T. Holland July 8, 1858."

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