Christmas on the Emigrant Trails: 1843 at Peachtree 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.

Joseph R. Walker, mountain man and guide to the 1843 Walker Party, about 1860, photographed by Mathew Brady's studio. Public domain.

The second wagon train to try the Sierra

In 1843 a party of about 17 men, women and children, guided by the famous mountain man Joseph R. Walker, set out to take their eight wagons across the Sierra Nevada into interior California. Only one wagon train had tried it before them.

Around October 22 they reached the Humboldt Sink, southwest of today's Lovelock, Nevada — low on food and somewhat hungry, but not yet in real danger. They waited about a week for outriders who were meant to meet them with supplies. The riders, held up by troubles of their own, never came.

So the little train moved on, following Walker south along a trapper's trail he had ridden about nine years earlier. It was a horse trail, not a wagon road.

Leaving the wagons

The trail led them far south to Owens Lake, a large body of brackish water between what are now Death Valley and Sequoia national parks. Their draught animals were failing and the emigrants themselves were half-starved. They left the wagons there and went on horseback, around the southern end of the Sierra Nevada.

On December 3 they crossed, without difficulty, the low divide now called Walker Pass. They came down into the San Joaquin Valley and followed their guide toward a welcoming place he remembered from years before, in the southern Coast Range.

Christmas at Peachtree Valley

At Peachtree Valley, in the words of the California Trail historian George R. Stewart, they "passed from famine to feast." They spent a happy Christmas Day eating the "finest haunches of venison," and restocked their food by hunting the wild horses that ran in the valley.

Soon after New Year 1844, Walker's party reached the settlements on the Salinas River. They never got their wagons into interior California. That same year, though, the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party forced its wagons up the Truckee River and over a pass that would soon carry the Donner Party's name.

Christmas on the Emigrant Trails

The series follows four winter camps:

• Christmas 1843 at Peachtree Valley, California — this page.
• Christmas 1846 at Donner Lake, California — the Donner-Reed Party, on a proven wagon trail but late, trapped by blizzards near present-day Truckee.
• Christmas 1849 at Bruff's Camp, California — J. Goldsborough Bruff, a draftsman held in the mountains on the Lassen branch of the California Trail largely by his own pride.
• Christmas 1849 at Death Valley, California — the Rev. James W. Brier and a "shortcut" across the badlands of southern Nevada.

Corrected: the article names the historian "George E. Stewart"; the author of The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes is George R. Stewart.

Sources

• National Park Service, California National Historic Trail, Christmas on the Emigrant Trails: Christmas 1843 at Peachtree Valley, California.
• Stewart, George R. 1962. The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes. McGraw Hill, New York.