Cholera On The Trail

In the early years of the California gold rush, cholera invariably struck each spring at the thronging jumping-off towns along the Missouri River where thousands of gold seekers and Oregon-bound emigrants gathered to outfit. Jumping-off towns were the towns along the border of American frontier settlement where emigrants completed their outfitting for the journey across the Plains during the 1840s and 1850s. Cholera is “a severe diarrheal disease caused by bacteria (Vibrio cholerae). It spreads through contaminated water and can be fatal within hours if not treated. Researchers estimate that there are 1.3 to 4.0 million cases and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths from cholera worldwide each year.” On the Westward trails, the deadly disease often claimed many settlers’ lives before the victims even had a chance to start across the prairies of Kansas or Nebraska. Many lives were lost along the trail corridor to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, as well as in American Indian encampments and villages.

Cholera, being an intestinal bacterial infection, causes severe diarrhea and kills its victims through dehydration. The bacteria spreads through water and food contaminated by human waste. These days, cholera is treated by rehydrating the patient with salty solutions, making it much less deadly, but in the Old West, the cause, means of transmission, and treatment of the disease were unknown. The Westward travelers actually spread the infection among the already unsanitary outfitting towns and carried it west from campground to campground and waterhole to waterhole. The emigrants tried using pain medications such as camphor; the oil of the Asian camphor tree; and laudanum, a bitter-tasting, addictive tincture made from opium. Nevertheless, the victims often died within a matter of hours…healthy in the morning and dead by noon. It was a devastating situation. “For four hundred miles the road was almost a solid graveyard. At one campground I counted seventy-one graves,” recalled George Tribble, who traveled to Oregon in 1852. Of ten Tribble family members who started west, only five reached Oregon.

Of the many trailside cholera grave, most remain unmarked. One exception is that of twenty-five-year-old George Winslow, who died on June 8, 1849, near present-day Fairbury, Nebraska. The symptoms of cholera struck poor Winslow as his party crossed Kansas, not long after jumping off onto the trail. The party Winslow was with kept moving, carrying him in a wagon for the next six days. As they went, Winslow seemed to improve, but when a violent thunderstorm struck, bringing rain and cooler temperatures, Winslow took a chill. For another week he hung on, but then, as a companion, Bracket Lord, sadly wrote, “George is dead— —his body lays here in the tent but his spirit has fled — Our company feel deeply this solemn providence. I never attended so solemn funeral — here we were on these plains hundreds of miles from any civilized being — and to leave one of our number was most trying.” I’m sure that expressed the feeling of anyone who had to leave friend or loved ones behind in the grave.

Winslow was on the trail without his family, who was to join him later. His friends buried him deep on a grassy hillside, marked his grave with an inscribed sandstone slab. Then they sent word back to his wife and family in Connecticut. The Winslow family didn’t relocate to the west, but many years later Winslow’s sons relocated the gravesite and erected a beautiful monument beside the trail ruts. Owners of the family farm where the grave lies have protected it and the ruts since 1873.

Another sad cholera story is the one about Rachel Pattison. “Rachel taken sick in the morning, died in the night,” said twenty-three-year-old Nathan Pattison in reference to the death of his wife of two months, Rachel Warren Pattison. Nathan and Rachel were married April 3, 1849, in Randolph County, Illinois. The adventurous newlyweds decided to take the Oregon Trail one week later, and they set off with Nathan’s immediate family. On June 18th, they reached Ash Hollow and stopped to do some repair work. The next day, Rachel was taken with Cholera and died just 12 hours later. She was just 18 years old. Her trailside grave was the beginning of this pioneer cemetery known as Ash Hollow Cemetery. Cholera made traveling the trails dangerous.