A Wilderness Adventure — 1853

SMALLPOX, HOSTILE INDIANS. HUNGER, AND FREEZING SNOW THREATENED THE WHIPPLE EXPEDITION'S CHRISTMAS 1853

WHAT MAKES CHRISTMAS “CHRISTMAS”? A group of men camped among the pitchy trees and rocky water holes in the wilderness east of where Flagstaff now stands could once have answered that. Seven weeks before Christmas in 1853, 89 men set out for California from Albuquerque, New Mexico, across what is now north-central Arizona. Their mission: to search for a railroad route along the 35th parallel. The party included engineers, scientists, adventurers, soldiers, guides, muleteers, and servants. Lt. Amiel Weeks Whipple, 35, a tall, lean West Point graduate, commanded the expedition. Virginia native Lt. John Marshall Jones rode his mule at the head of the infantry escort. Bearded, buckskin-clad German artist Baldwin Möllhausen, 28, wrote the group's official journal. Indians had traveled that route for centuries, but few whites. All that the men knew for certain was that none of them could count on living until Christmas. Smallpox was ravaging Zuni and Hopi pueblos. And in the nearly unmapped stretches west of the Hopi mesas, 10,000 hostile Indians reportedly waited to kill travelers, or steal their mules and sheep and leave the men stranded and hungry. Indians had already murdered several members of a similar expedition along the 38th parallel. Even so, as the men prepared to leave the fandangos, music, and lights of Albuquerque behind, they thought ahead to Christmas Eve. They could see themselves sitting around some lonely campfire, completely cut off from other people.

Some tucked away what Möllhausen described only as "various dainties" probably cakes and candies.

Others decided they'd want eggnog for sure, so they carefully packed several dozen fresh eggs into a sturdy chest. Then they lodged the chest tightly into one of their 13 wagons. Into other nooks they stowed rum and wine.

Late November found the men tiredly riding their mules from water hole to water hole near today's Petrified Forest National Park. Despair was replacing their hopes for Christmas Eve. So many Hopis had died of smallpox that the Indians could send no one to guide the expedition westward along the ancient trails. Several of Whipple's men now oozed and itched with smallpox, too.

One night a delirious victim wandered around shaking the tents of the healthy, startling them awake.

Another night the mules stampeded out across the plains. "Navajos!" the men shouted to each other above the trampling hooves. However, the culprits turned out to be wolves. They had approached so close that the mules panicked and ran off.

All night it looked as if the expedition would be stranded. But four Hispanic muleteers chased the mules for 32 miles, toward the next water hole, 25 miles away. As they struggled up and down hills, a freezing wind blew volcanic dust into their eyes. Wrote Mõllhausen unhappily, "A more dreary country than we travelled through on this day can hardly be imag-ined."

By nightfall they had covered only 11 miles. They camped without water.

When they woke before dawn on December 23, the air felt icy. As they mounted their mules, snow began to swirl around them. The thick flakes fell so fast the mule tracks disappeared. Cautiously, the men rode as close together as possible. Even those who had just returned along this route grew unsure of the way. As the hours passed, the men's feet turned colder and colder.

Herds of antelope skittered by, running out toward the flatlands, as if to flee the snow.

Under different circumstances, the men might have paused for a snowball fight, but the only snowballs that December 23 were those that collected in the mules' hooves, making them stumble and slip. As the snow grew steadily deeper, it silenced the creaking wheels and clattering hooves; the only sound was the occasional howling of unseen wolves. Climbing slowly among the volcanic foothills of the San Francisco Peaks, the men finally reached the trees, then the water holes that marked their next campsite. It had taken two days to travel only 25 miles. Except for the weather, Whipple noted in his diary, it would have been an easy journey of a single day.

The snow stopped falling. The temperature dropped to 6° F., and Whipple's

risking their own lives before they finally

stopped the stampede and brought the animals back.

By now the San Francisco Peaks gleamed white with snow in the distance. The only known route around the mountains, to the north, passed through ravine-filled country too rough for wagons. On December 13, an advance party set out to reconnoiter a path around the mountains' south side to the next known landmark: Leroux's Spring.

As they watched their comrades leave, those who remained behind along the Little Colorado River thought gloomily of the Indian smoke signals they had seen rising near the mountains. Did these puffs of white offer peace, or threaten war? Twenty-five dragoons from Fort Defiance had joined the expedition's guard. But how could so few stand up to so many?

Restlessly the men waited along the Little Colorado. At night they lit huge fires on a hill to signal the advance party which direction to take. But no answering beacons ever appeared, and one night the fire made the mules stampede again.

Finally, on December 20, the scouting party returned. They had seen no Indians. They had found Leroux's Spring and a passable route for the wagons.

On December 22, all set out together Fingers froze to his brass sextant. But the re-lief the men felt at arriving safely energized them. They cleared away snow for tent sites.

They dragged fallen trees into huge piles for fires and felled other trees. They drew up the wagons and drove the animals to pools of water in deep hollows in the rock.

Working together they turned the snowy wilds into a cozy camp in half an hour.

In the twilight, the piñons, junipers, and scattered pines around them resembled Christmas trees. As the men fussed with their coffeepots, sang, gossiped, and sat wrapped in blankets by the fire, they final-ly allowed themselves to think again of Christmas Eve. No one admitted wanting to rest, but everyone agreed that the mules were too worn out to travel tomorrow.

They'd better stay right here to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the men decided.

Before sunrise on Saturday morning, December 24, the temperature fell to -3° F. But everyone slept late. Finally the cooks got up and heated breakfast over the camp-fires. Then they woke the others. The sky was vividly blue and clear. The sun sparkled on the snow, the trees, and the water.

After breakfast the men drifted off in small groups. Some explored ancient abandoned cave houses nearby, the Cosnino Caves. Others hunted, hoping to add turkey and deer to the Christmas Eve feast, but they encountered no game; the men would have to eat roast mutton again. One young man found a bear trail, but the paw prints were so large that he returned speedily to camp.

Everyone was thinking of the celebration ahead, and by midafternoon, people were drifting expectantly back into camp. Goodies that had ridden untouched in saddlebags and wagon crannies for seven weeks emerged. Incredibly, those eggs that had jostled across 373 miles of hills and plains had survived intact. So had whatMöllhausen called the "well-preserved bottles of that which makes glad the heart of travelling man."

Lieutenant Jones took charge of the drinks and ordered one of his men to beat the eggs into a froth. Wrote Möllhausen, "A huge camp-kettle hung bubbling and steaming over the fire in front of the tent,and near it a large pail for mingling the various ingredients of the festal drink."

The invitation went out: after supper "all gentlemen" were to bring their tin drinking mugs to Lieutenant Jones' tent.

When stars appeared above the snow-laden pine boughs, the scientists, officers, and engineers gathered and thrust their tin cups into "the jovial pail." Meanwhile, Hispanic expedition members celebrated As the snow grew steadily deeper, it silenced the creaking wheels and clattering hooves; the only sound was the occasional howling of unseen wolves.

CHRISTMAS 1853

by shooting their guns in salvos, shaking the snow from the trees. They also set fire to some resin-filled junipers and pines, creating fireworks that showered sparks spectacularly and threw patterns of light and dark onto the snowy mountains and rocks. Then they enacted Los Pastores, an ancient folk play about the shepherds watching their flocks the night of Christ's birth. One watcher grumbled that it wasn't as fine a performance as those in San Diego in which women played the shepherds.

As the sentries called out the passing hours, what had started as two separate celebrations one for the "gentlemen," the other for servants, herders, packers, and the rest gradually became one joyous hubbub of songs, jokes, gunshots, fireworks, and drink. When it was their turn to lead the singing, the Anglo members of the party sang "favourite Negro melodies." Then two servants who had lived with the Navajos performed a Navajo dance. Later a Crow Indian servant and a herder performed a popular Southwest ritual. In an improvised duet, they made lighthearted fun of one listener after another.

The night air at their backs measured only 16° F., but the campfire, drink, and excitement kept the men warm. One old-timer observed that this would be a good time for the Indians to attack. The others ignored him.

"As the night advanced, the store in the mighty bowl drew to an end," reported Mõllhausen. "The ranks round the fire began gradually to thin; one after another vanished behind the curtains of his tent, and by the time the fire had burned low, deep stillness reigned over the camp. The watch fires alone still blazed, and now and then a tree, that had been caught by the flame, would flare up, but soon went out again, and left woods and mountains enveloped in darkness."

After the uproar of Christmas Eve, the men spent Christmas Day quietly, thinking of their homes far away and the church bells ringing there. Lacking both Catholic priests and Protestant pastors, they listened instead to the birds singing in the sunshine. No doubt some men gave thanks silently that they were still alive.

"We looked up at the sublime summits of the San Francisco Mountains, and needed no temple made with hands wherein to worship our Creator," Möllhausen wrote. In his journal, Whipple added, "Christmas has come and all, even to the mules, seem to enjoy it."

Three months and numerous dangers, misfortunes, and uncertainties followed before the expedition reached Los Angeles and disbanded. Lieutenant Whipple went on to become a major general in the Union Army, only to die in the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Lieutenant Jones joined the Confederate Army and was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in 1864. But Mõllhausen survived into old age.

After returning to Germany, he used his journal and notes to write a nonfiction classic, the two-volume Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coasts of the Pacific, published in 1858. In his anecdotes and descriptions, he re-created for readers the experience of traveling across Arizona in the 1850s. Diary of a Journey also marked the beginning of a long writing career. Over the next 45 years, Möllhausen wrote seven collections of short stories and 39 novels, many of them based partially on his experiences with Whipple and on two other trips through the U.S. West. Filled with romantic tales of haciendas, lost treasures, hidden silver mines, and ancient Indian ruins, they earned Möllhausen the title "The German James Fenimore Cooper."

Möllhausen's fiction also made him one of Germany's most popular writers of his day. Today's readers, however, have forgotten him, and he receives little notice in standard texts of German literary history. But Möllhausen lives on in Arizona history as the author of one of the finest accounts of Christmas celebrated on the trail. No marker identifies the site of that long-ago Christmas Eve, but if you drive past the Cosnino Caves and Turkey Tanks on Forest Service Road 505 on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, think of the men who sat there singing and laughing in the wilderness 142 years ago. And think of the bearded, rifle-toting, buckskin-wearing German who preserved those men and their Christmas merriment for us and those who come after us.