The future holds no pity for us, but for 69 pioneers in 1841, the future was all you could think about.

~ TRANSCRIPT ~ (Note: Sources used are listed below this transcript.)

They were not the the first ones to cross over the Rockies. But they crossed in a train of wagons. They were not breaking ground, but they were trampling it with more wheels and hooves than had ever been over that ground before.

They were preceded by other pioneers, other rugged people of the new frontier. The Whitmans, Marcus and Narcissa, came before. They wanted nothing more than to create an oasis of god among the natives and to claim souls for their god. They did, until measles consumed the Indians around them, and Marcus could not save them with his medicine, and so they killed the Whitmans, who went to their god. But that was in the unknown future, in a path filled to bursting with unknowns.

Nathaniel Wyeth had come before. He was a Boston businessman, with a fortune in cutting ice, wanting to make money in the west. He failed on the first try, so he went back to Boston and did it again. And he succeeded.

They were not the first, by any means, but the 69 trampled the grass and the dirt and made way for future wagons and pioneers of the west.

They were lured west by John Marsh, a wealthy physician who owned 17,000 California acres, who told them that the soil was rich, the climate temperate, and the Indians obedient. Who told them that California was a paradise with willing servants waiting there for them.

They were led by John Bidwell. He had helped establish the Western Emigration Society, and soon he would help tend the whole nation. First he would discover gold on the Feather River, and then beccome a Mexican citizen. He would gain the title of chief in the War against Mexico, and eventually become a great statesman, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. But none of that had happened yet. He was just a pioneer, looking out into the expanse, hoping to go farther than he had gone, risking everything he had on the shiny California dream.

They were joined by Talbot H. Green, who carried with him a brick of lead. Perhaps they asked him why. Perhaps they didn’t. What he forgot to tell them was that inside the lead lay a bar of gold he had stolen from a bank.

Green would become a great San Francisco businessman and politician. Until one day, at a charity ball, when a young lady told him before all his admirers that his real name was Paul Geddes, and he had gone broke as a bank clerk and left his wife and children in Pennsylvania, just to save himself. But the pitiless future didn’t exist. There was only the now. For now he was anonymous, and well liked, and like the others in that train of wagons, he was leaving his old life behind, and trading it in for hopes and dreams.

They were not the first, but they flowed in the stream of people to go yonder when the West as they knew it was young, and edenic, and free. Everything was so free, so vast, and so promising. The future does not hold pity for us, the small creatures with brains smart enough to scheme and lay waste to ourselves. But it's still always the future. Still the future, as it was for them, the free folk with a terrible burden.

SOURCES

The Wild West. New York: Warner, 1993. Print.

article on the wagon train of 1841

Wikipedia article on John Bidwell

Talbot H. Green