MOUNT VERNON — Ambition. It can be the fuel to great things.
But maybe it should come with a warning label: “Use with caution.”
Lansford Hastings was a professional lawyer. Unfortunately for him and even more unfortunately for about 40 other people, Hastings’ ambitions drove him to recklessness. He wanted to make things happen.
Things happened, bad things: multiple deaths, starvation and cannibalism. These things all happened to the Donner Party, stranded high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains thanks to a short-cut first mentioned in Lansford Hasting’s book The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California — and personally promoted by Hastings.
How did this disaster happen? And what is its connection to Knox County?
The connection is that Lansford Hastings was born in Mount Vernon in 1819. He was the son of Dr. Waitstill Hastings and his wife Lucinda, who were among the first 50 or so families in Mount Vernon. The doctor was involved in the community, and had ambitions of his own, which included running for state senate in 1816.
Granted, there were only a few hundred people in the area at the time, but Dr. Hastings’ total of six votes landed him squarely in last place in a field of several candidates. He later did win election for a single term as Knox County Coroner the same year his son Lansford was born.
Little information survives about Lansford Hastings’ childhood in the frontier town. His slightly older schoolmate Dan Emmett took to the road as a musician while still in his teens.
Did Hastings have a similar restlessness? Or did he simply observe his father’s mostly fruitless attempts to gain power and want to do better?
What is known is that Lansford Hastings studied law, received a degree and became a lawyer. He got married and started a family. Yet something about it all must have deeply dissatisfied the ambitious young man.
In 1842, he attended a talk being given by Dr. Elijah White, an adventurer leading the first wagon train west to the Oregon territory. Seized with inspiration, Hastings joined on the spot, leaving his family never to return. Just a couple days into the trip, Dr. White’s leadership was questioned by the families on the train, and he was deposed.
Looking around for someone younger and sharper, they found a fast-talking young lawyer from Mount Vernon, with the leadership qualities they desired.
On the trail
Hastings was smart enough to hire an expert to guide the train along. Though arduous, the trip was successful. In Oregon, Hastings did legal work for the settlers and helped plot out Oregon City, the first incorporated U.S. town west of the Rocky Mountains.
But all that adventure wasn’t enough. Hastings now had an addiction to ambition, and the problem with addictions is that they’re never satisfied. He wanted to take his aspirations to a new level.
Hastings heard stories about the Mexican province just over the Oregon border, Alta California.
In 1843, he took a trip there and discovered a staggeringly beautiful land ranging from rugged forests to mountains to rich valleys all the way to the sea. Some settlers were even deciding to merely stop in Oregon, then turn south and enter California, some even traveling down to the established town of San Francisco or points further south.
The province was so remote from its national capital of Mexico City, many of these new settlers barely acknowledged it. Nor were they immediately thinking of trying to turn the place over to the United States: that capital was equally distant.
Lansford Hastings saw what they were thinking. With a quick and strong influx of settlers, the province could break off and become the Republic of California. Anyone who helped make this happen would be in a good position to take on official duties in the new country. Especially a lawyer.
Hastings reasoned that the way to get more people to make the trip west — and then south into California — was to give them the benefit of his experience with a guidebook. In 1845 The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California was published in Cincinnati and it immediately sold thousands of copies.
For the most part, it was a solid guidebook advising people how to prepare for and survive the long wagon trek to the west.
The Devil is in the details
Early on, fellow trailblazers pointed out to Hastings that there was a more direct path to California than going all the way north into Oregon only to turn south to go back down into California. Hastings didn’t have time to check out the alternate path himself, but wrote about it in once sentence in his guidebook:
“The most direct path would be leave the Oregon route, about 200 miles east of Fort Hall; thence bearing west-southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of San Francisco.”
A year after publication of the book, Hastings and a friend took the route outward from California on horseback and decided that it was a good alternative, though it would take some hard work to get through.
Hastings immediately wrote letters to be sent ahead along the Oregon Trail pointing out the advantages of what he was now calling the Hastings Cutoff, even offering to personally guide wagon trains.
In mid July 1846, Hastings led the Harlan-Young wagon train down his cutoff and left word for any other following groups to take the same path quickly. The one other group which took the path was the Donner Party.
There was much doubt about it. George Donner’s wife, Tamsen, didn’t like the tone of Hastings’ first letter and described him as a “selfish adventurer.”
Hastings later claimed that after he discovered the difficulty of getting the Harlan-Young group up the trail, he wrote a later to be sent back to the Donner Party telling them to return to the main route instead.
If such a letter was written, the proprietor of the local trading post may have supressed it in hopes of getting more business by encouraging people to take the new route, which would bring more travelers to his door. The only thing that is known for certain is that the owner of the trading post assured the wagon train that the Hastings Cutoff was smooth and easy, and water was plentiful.
Neither was true.
The route lurched over the Wasatch Range, then plunged down to the arid Bonneville Salt Flats before it climbed back up through the Ruby Mountains to join the main trail. The group had to fell trees and heave boulders to get their wagons through many areas. Along the way, they often found letters left for them by Hastings advising they try a slightly different path, because the one he had just taken the Harlan-Young party over that day hadn’t been so good.
Hastings said the salt flats could be crossed in two days, but it took the Donner Party six. Many oxen and horses died. Wagons cracked through the dry salt surface and bogged down in underlying mud up to their axles.
But no people were lost, so despite their fury at Hastings, the wagon train carried on, finally joining the main California Trail in September.
The Donner Party had survived the Hastings Cutoff. The problem was that it hadn’t saved them any time, it had in fact added a month and it was already late in the season. The earlier wagon train made it to California just before the weather broke.
The Donner Party, totaling 87 individuals, was caught by massive snowstorms high in a pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Rescue parties from California were not able to reach the stranded pioneers until February, at which time only 48 of them were still alive.
Those who survived did so by resorting to eating the flesh of wagon train members who had already died from exposure or starvation.
More schemes
The scandal became nationwide news, and Hastings was roundly criticized for his hasty promotion of a very questionable route. But since he was still the reigning authority on traveling to Oregon and California, Hastings merely revised future editions of the book to remove any reference to the fateful short cut.
The book continued to sell well, and it got thousands of settlers to the west coast safely, something that Hastings now receives little credit for.
The influx of settlers did indeed allow California to break away from Mexico. But before the idea of a California Republic could get off the ground, the United States claimed the province as a territory. The influx of new settlers included wheeler-dealers more sophisticated than Hastings, and his dreams of ambition melted away into the drudgery of standard legal work.
His ambitions returned during the Civil War, when Hastings came up with a scheme to raise soldiers in Arizona and forcibly remove California from the Union. The southern sympathizer traveled to meet with Confederate president Jefferson Davis to present his plan, and Davis encouraged it, commissioning Hastings as a major general in the Confederate army.
But before Hastings had made any real progress, the war was over.
Unwilling to live once again with crushed dreams, Hastings came up with a new project. He started a colony in Santarém, Brazil, for Confederate veterans, and wrote a book to guide them there.
Not too surprisingly, the book’s title echoes Hastings’ earlier hit: The Emigrant’s Guide to Brazil. He then offered his services as personal guide to settlers’ ships. It was on his second trip that Hastings succumbed to yellow fever and was buried in the Virgin Islands.
One wonders if in all his reckless adventuring, did Lansford Hastings ever pause to think about the world he left behind in Mount Vernon when he went off in pursuit of fleeting phantoms of ambition?
And did he ever regret leaving home?
