Christmas on the Emigrant Trails: 1849 at Bruff's Camp, California

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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.

Pastel drawing of Bruff's camp among tall conifers: a large tepee-like shelter with an A-frame tent joined to each side, a man standing beside it and gear scattered on the ground

Bruff's mountain camp in California. Public domain.

Left behind by his own party

Three years after the Donner-Reed Party's Christmas of 1846, on the Lassen branch of the California Trail, the forty-niner J. Goldsborough Bruff spent a rough but happier Christmas in the Cascade Mountains, north of the Sierra Nevada. A professional draftsman and a strong-willed man, he was stuck there largely through his own pride and stubbornness.

In October his company of gold seekers ran out of food almost within sight of the goldfields. Bruff offered to stay in camp and guard the company's gear while the others rode 32 miles to the settlements for supplies.

Some of them came back nine days later — without the prized horse Bruff had lent them. Eager to go and dig their share of gold, they took everything of value, and when he objected, he wrote to a friend, they were "impertinent." They suggested he leave his own things behind, his irreplaceable journals and trail sketches among them, and walk out with them. Betrayed and insulted, he refused. They shrugged and left. He stayed the winter.

A camp on a busy trail

Unlike the Donner-Reed camps, Bruff's Camp — inside today's Lassen National Forest — sat on a busy trail with emigrants passing all the time. Many who reached it were starving and sick, and Bruff helped them as much as he could, probably saving more than a few lives. Some stayed with him for a while.

Christmas 1849

On Christmas Day he had company: William Poyle, an "admirable cook." Poyle, Bruff noted in his journal, made a festive breakfast stew of scraps of ox and squirrel, with "3 deer leg bones, cracked,--for the marrow, a gill of mustard-seed, pepper, & salt. Also some dead ginger we found."

Later Poyle prised a piece of dead ox out of the snow and baked it for supper — "tender enough, but tasteless, & unnutricious," Bruff wrote. Still, the two "dined heartily," smoked their pipes, and "speculated on the affairs of the world, our future prospects, discussed ancient history, policy of England; and lastly, enquired of each other and explained, how our friends at home were now enjoying themselves."

At dusk they built a crackling fire from pieces of an abandoned wagon and spent several pleasant hours beside it, singing and telling stories to mark the day.

Pencil panorama titled "Bruff's Camp, Octr. 1849": tents under tall trees, covered wagons and people with pack animals on the trail, and in the foreground felled trees, stumps, dead livestock, a broken wheel, ox yokes and other debris

Bruff's own pencil sketch of his camp. Public domain.

Walking out

Poyle went to the settlements several times that winter and left the camp for good in February 1850. Alone and starving, Bruff set out on April 4, 1850, carrying his heavy journals and drawings in a knapsack. On the fourth day, weak and close to collapse, he met Poyle coming back to the camp with food. On the fifth he reached safety, the knapsack still with him. His published writings and sketches are now counted a classic of the California Trail.