Seeing the Elephant: Cholera, Graves & Wolves on the Platte River Road

"'Tis awful when you see an acquaintance at noon well and in the enjoyment of health and learn in the evening that he is a corpse."  Jon Nevin King, letter to his mother, June 16, 1850

Cholera, a disease which was endemic to the Indian subcontinent, found its escape route with the British tea trade in about 1817.  From England it spread to Europe and then hopped across the Atlantic Ocean to North America where it followed the Erie Canal, Cumberland Gap and other frontier trade routes.  By 1849 it was raging at the jumping off points for the Overland Trail and it followed the emigrants all the way out to California and Oregon.   

Cholera is a nasty disease.   Symptoms start without warning half a day to five days after ingestion of the bacteria.  The symptoms are simple:  diarrhea and vomiting of clear liquid -- 3 to 5 gallons of it. The results: sunken eyes, dry mouth, clammy skin, wrinkled hands and feet, labored breath, muscle cramping and weakness, seizures, coma and death.  A man can wake up feeling fine in the morning and be dead by night.  No wonder.

The disease is transmitted by contaminated food or water caused by poor sanitation.  By late May 1849, Fort Kearney, the first army emigrant aid post on the Platte River, reported that over 2,000 people and 10,000 cattle, mules and horses were passing each day.  The river, of course, was used by all for drinking, cooking, bathing, laundry and more.

On June 9 of that year, after a 3-day illness, my third great grandfather,  Captain Pleasant Gray, tough frontiersman that he was, "saw the elephant" (euphemism for experiencing hardship & death on the trail) in far western Nebraska.  How do I know this?  The diary keepers.

Since there was a paucity of road signs and an abundance of death, many diarists assiduously & worriedly recorded trailside graves.  Bernard Joseph Reid, Joseph Sedgley and J.G. Bruff all recorded my grandsire's grave as they passed it within days of each other on the well beaten trail.  Sedgley's account is the most detailed:

Tuesday, June 19.  Morning pleasant.  Left camp....we traveled over a fine road but found neither wood nor water.  We camped at six near the south fork of the Platte...we just escaped a heavy shower; lightning struck within a few feet of camp, tearing up the ground.  Passed the grave of Capt. C. of Texas [a mis-reading of the grave sign, "C." for "G."].

Wednesday, June 20.  Morning cloudy. Wolves are howling about our camp and some have ventured in.  We left camp at seven.  After going two miles we came to the ford of the south fork of the Platte [actually the Lower Crossing of the Platte near present day Hershey, Nebraska].  ....Mosquitoes numerous and annoying.

Lower Crossing, South Platte river near Hershey, Nebraska

Of course, most of the graves along the Overland Trail have long since disappeared, including Pleasant Gray's.  Nevertheless, I retrieved some stones near the Lower Ford of the Platte in Hershey and added them to my collection of trail rocks.  When I get home, I will put the stones on the grave of Pleasant Gray's son, Michael Gray, who made it to California and was buried in 1906 in the Mason's cemetery in San Francisco (later all San Francisco cemeteries were moved to Colma, CA).  

More on graves and wolves....

"We have past some 12 graves & I am told there is a burying ground near here of 300 graves.  If so it must be a general camping ground for near these I find the most graves.  I see some painful sights where the wolves have taken up the dead & torn their garments in pieces & in some instances the skulls & jaw bones are strewed over the ground."  Lucena Parsons, July 18, 1850

Drawing by Capt. J. Goldsborough Bruff, one of the diarists who recorded Pleasant Gray's grave