Chapter I
Prologue
A woman folding a shirt before packing it into a trunk. A man counting coins on a wooden table. A young girl refusing to say goodbye to her friends. A restless horse standing beside a freshly repaired wagon. A family gathered around a lamp, discussing whether they had enough money to buy the animals needed for the journey.
No one looking at those scenes would have seen the beginning of a tragedy.
For great misfortunes rarely begin where they end. Beforehand, there is ordinary life, made of small worries, imperfect affections, and hopes that seem reasonable. There is a world its inhabitants believe they know—a world that, without their realizing it, is about to vanish.
This is the story of some of those travelers.
It begins long before they ever reached Utah, back when California was still a promise and the West stretched before them as a land where everything seemed possible.
It begins in Arkansas, during a spring in which no one in the Whitcomb family could have imagined what the future held in store for them.
Part I — The Departure
Chapter I
The Last Spring
Arkansas, April 1857.
The morning Samuel Whitcomb decided he would leave Arkansas, he found a dead swallow on the threshold of the schoolhouse.
The previous night's rain had left it there. The tiny body lay on its side, its wings matted in the mud and its beak half open, as though the bird had tried to say something before it died. Samuel bent down to pick it up. For a few moments he held it in the palm of his hand, surprised by how light it was. Then he placed it beneath the old oak tree growing by the fence and covered the body with a bit of dirt.
When he stood up, he saw two of his students watching him from the doorway.
"Is it dead, Mr. Whitcomb?" the younger one asked.
"Yes," Samuel replied. "The rain shows no mercy to the small ones."
The children said nothing. Samuel walked into the classroom and stood for a long time in front of the empty desks, counting the springs he had spent within those walls. Then he dismissed the students on the pretext of a day off, locked the door, and set out for home with his hat in his hand.
Eleanor was hanging sheets in the backyard, her back turned to him, as the wind tugged at the cloth.
"You're home early," she said without turning around.
"I've closed the school."
She paused, holding the sheet.
"For today?"
Samuel rested his hat on the railing.
"No. For good."
Eleanor finished securing a corner of the sheet before looking at him. There was no surprise on her face, and that absence of surprise troubled Samuel more than any protest would have.
"How much time do we have left?" she asked.
He knew she wasn't asking about the week's money.
That night they dined on beans, cornbread, and a piece of bacon Eleanor had saved for Sunday. Ruth talked about a classmate who wanted to give her a blue ribbon before the school term ended. Samuel listened without interrupting, aware that every detail of that conversation belonged to a life they were perhaps about to leave behind.
After dinner, while Ruth washed the dishes, he pulled a multiply folded sheet of paper from a drawer.
"I've heard about a wagon train being organized near Harrison," he said. "There are families traveling to California. They're gathering to prepare for the trail at the end of the month."
Eleanor wiped her hands on a cloth.
"Who told you that?"
When Ruth went off to sleep, he opened the drawer where he kept his journals. He selected one with dark covers, barely used, and wrote the date on the first page: April 18, 1857.
Beneath it, he wrote:
We must leave. I do not know if California will give us what we seek, but I know that remaining here means accepting that nothing will ever change.
He paused, reread the sentence, and added:
Eleanor is right to distrust promises. Perhaps that is why I need to make this journey with her.
He closed the journal.
Among those who would join the wagon train at Harrison, there would be people he would never truly know, and others whose memory would remain with him until the end of his days.
At that time, however, the West was still a promise.
And promises, when one needs to believe in them, can look a great deal like the truth.
