Christmas on the Emigrant Trails: 1849 at Death Valley, California

Most overland emigrants had finished their journey weeks or months before December 25. A few, stranded or lost on the way, spent their first Christmas in the West in winter camps far from any settlement. This is one of their stories.

Panamint Valley. NPS photo, Death Valley National Park.

The shortcut

The Rev. James W. Brier, a Methodist preacher from Ohio, wanted to reach the California goldfields in the worst way — and took the worst way there was: a "shortcut" across the untracked badlands of southern Nevada.

Brier, his wife Juliet and their three small sons, aged 9, 6 and 4, reached Salt Lake City on the California Trail in October 1849. Afraid it was too late in the year to cross the Sierra Nevada safely by the Truckee Route — the Donner disaster had been national news only three years before — they and other forty-niners joined a hundred-wagon train heading south to meet the Old Spanish Trail near present-day Parowan, Utah. That well-worn mule-packers' route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles passed south of the Sierra and its blizzards.

On the way, a stranger showed the emigrants a hand-drawn "trapper's map" that led straight to the diggings and claimed to cut about 500 miles off the journey. The train's captain, the Mormon frontiersman Jefferson Hunt, tried to talk them out of it. As the forty-niner William Manly later told it, Hunt "very much doubted if a white man ever went over it," and thought the unknown road no place for men with wives and children. Hunt, a man of few words, is said to have put it more bluntly: "Gentlemen! All I have to say is that if you take that route, you will all be landed in Hell!"

Illustration from the San Francisco Call's Christmas article "Our Christmas Amid the Terrors of Death Valley." Public domain.

The Lost '49ers

Brier was not afraid of hell. He helped persuade other families, and several parties of single young men, to try the shortcut. On October 9, 1849, near today's Enterprise, Utah, some 80 wagons left the Old Spanish Trail and struck due west into the untracked desert. Within days most of them turned back, rejoined Hunt's train and reached Los Angeles about seven weeks later. The Briers, three other families and a number of single men pressed on — not guessing they would be remembered as the Lost '49ers.

Hunger, terrible thirst and exhaustion wore them down in the barren country of southern Nevada. They broke into at least six groups trying different directions, splitting, sometimes rejoining and splitting again. Some killed oxen, burned their wagons as firewood, dropped their belongings and went on foot. The youngest Brier boy, hardly more than a toddler, had to be carried. The middle son, John, remembered finding a muddy pool in the dry channel of the Amargosa after many days, and on December 23 reaching the top of a pass with empty canteens and "no water, no grass, no fuel."

Christmas at Travertine Spring

On Christmas Eve morning, Brier saw a green spot in the distance. The family hurried toward it all day, desperate for water, and reached the springs — one hot, one cold — at about 3 o'clock on Christmas morning. The place, at the mouth of Furnace Creek Canyon in Death Valley National Park, is now called Travertine Spring.

Long afterwards, in her eighties, Juliet Brier told the San Francisco Call: "This was a Christmas none could forget." Her children had no thought of Santa Claus. The men killed an ox, but its flesh was "more like poisonous slime than meat," without a scrap of fat; they boiled the hide and hoofs for whatever nourishment was in them and ate the little blood the carcass held. She had one small biscuit, but there was plenty of coffee, which she thought kept them alive. There was no music or singing — they were too far gone — and little talk, though she knew everyone was thinking of home and its Christmas cheer.

To lift the day, Brier gave his boys a Christmas lecture on the importance of education, which John remembered as funny. William Manly arrived in time to hear it. In Death Valley in '49 he wrote that it seemed very strange to hear "a solemn discourse on the benefits of early education when, it seemed to me, starvation was staring us all in the face." None of them knew where they were, when the journey would end, or when real help would come.

Nusbaumer's Christmas

In another camp, Louis Nusbaumer's party of forty-niners and families watched an ox failing; without it they would have to leave their wagon and carry what was left. On December 24 Nusbaumer wrote that the prospects looked dismal again, but that they would not despair on the eve of the Saviour's birth; they had come about fifteen miles through "abominable alkali swamps" and camped without water or grass.

On Christmas Day — "in the mountains of California," though they were in fact in Nevada — the ox could go no further, and they had to throw out much of their goods to lighten the load. "There is quite a difference between Christmas days in different states," he wrote. "In some of them you receive presents, in others you must throw things away." He hoped his wife was having a happier day, and wrote that if he never returned and the journal reached her, she would know she had never been far from his thoughts.

Death Valley

Ahead lay the salt flats of a great sink, where the Lost '49ers would wander from seep to seep for about two months. The survivors named it Death Valley.

At least 13 emigrants died on the detour. William Manly and a companion finally got out of the valley, reached a Spanish rancho, and, given provisions, went back to lead the others waiting in the desert to safety. On February 12, 1850, the Briers and some of the single men walked up to the same rancho and were taken in by its kind owners. Nusbaumer's group reached the settlements on March 1, and his wife later joined him in California. The shortcut had taken them about four months.

The Lost '49ers leaving Death Valley. Public domain.

Christmas on the Emigrant Trails

• Christmas at Peachtree Valley, California — Joseph Walker's party, which left its wagons at Owens Lake.
• Christmas 1846 at Donner Lake, California — the Donner-Reed Party, trapped by blizzards near present-day Truckee.
• Christmas 1849 at Bruff's Camp, California — J. Goldsborough Bruff, wintering alone by the Lassen Trail.
• Christmas 1849 at Death Valley, California — this page.

The article dates Juliet Brier's interview in the Call to Christmas Day 1898 in its text and to December 25, 1889 in a picture caption.

Corrected: the article's "Armargosa" is the Amargosa.

Sources

• National Park Service, California National Historic Trail and Death Valley National Park, Christmas on the Emigrant Trails: Christmas 1849 at Death Valley, California. A trails map on a commercial basemap and a stock-style wagon photo are left out.
• Manly, William. Death Valley in '49.
• Koenig, George. 1974. The Lost Death Valley '49er Journal of Louis Nusbaumer. Death Valley '49ers Inc., Death Valley, Calif.