Free The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards Page B

therefore, were the infant cities of the West, where transients were plentiful and the sewage and water systems were inadequate. St. Louis lost one-tenth of its population. Almost as hard-hit was Cincinnati. Even harder hit was Sandusky. No one, however, understood what caused the disease. No one realized that it was due to a deadly organism,
Vibrio comma,
entering the body through the mouth and causing an infection in the small intestine. No one realized, moreover, that the incubation period was up to five days and thus many healthy-looking people were already deathly ill. President Zachary Taylor attributed the epidemic to “the Providence of God” and set aside August 3 as a day of prayer. Others blamed it on the national diet, “soft” water, strong drink, night air, or whatever their pet peeve might be. One Harvard doctor insisted that cholera was linked to limestone in the soil. Some emigrants on the Oregon Trail blamed it on beans and got rid of their entire bean supply. 25
    The Oregon Trail was probably ideal as a breeding ground for deadly organisms spread by diarrhea, vomiting, flies, and contaminated water. The steamboats that fed the trail with emigrants came from St. Louis and other towns along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers where cholera was rampant. The gold seekers then carried it westward, leaving it in abandoned camps and water holes, to be passed on to the next group that followed them. As a result, the trail was soon marked with hundreds of wooden crosses bearing only a name and the word “cholera.”
    The Royce wagon train added two more crosses. The first victim was an older man, the oldest in the company. He complained of intense pain, and the Royces had him lie down in their wagon, as it was large and had a comfortable bed. He became worse, much worse. They rushed the man to a doctor, in another camp up ahead, and the doctor said it was cholera. A few hours later, the old man died. Sarah Royce was then left with the nasty task of cleaning the wagon. She washed and aired everything and hoped for the best. Three days later cholera struck down two more. One died that night; the other slowly recovered. They had no more cases, but they saw plenty of crosses as they moved west and heard of many deaths in the companies that followed them.
    The Royces remained part of the wagon train until the last Sunday in July. On that day, they decided to honor the Sabbath, to rest and pray. Joining them was one other family, which consisted of a husband and wife and three small boys. For the next month the two families traveled together, protected by just two men, rather than the usual forty or more. Once they reached the Great Salt Lake, the two families parted. This wasn’t unusual. Salt Lake was the place where companies invariably broke up, some members going one way, others another. At Salt Lake every man seemingly made new arrangements for his wagon. New companies thus were formed.
    At the time the Royces arrived, there was much talk about a hotshot guide who was organizing a wagon train that was scheduled to leave a month or two later by a “new and better” southern route. The Royces decided not to wait. They also decided not to take the new southern route that was being highly touted. They chose instead to follow an old route, one that crossed the forbidding desert immediately west of the Great Salt Lake and then followed the Humboldt River to the Sierras. The only person willing to accompany them was an old man, in bad health, who was desperate to get to California. He had nothing to contribute except an ox. Nonetheless, with his help, off they went on August 30. They were soon joined by two young men who had nothing to contribute but their youth.
    The Royces, moreover, no longer had Frémont’s
Travels
to help them. Their only guide now “consisted of two small sheets of paper, sewed together, and bearing on the outside in writing the title ‘Best Guide to the Gold Mines, 816 miles, by Ira