Poetry on the California Trail

Charles Christian Nahl, Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1856. Oil on canvas

Wikimedia Commons

Nineteenth century teachers made their pupils memorize and recite poetry as a form of mental exercise, meant to strengthen a young person’s intellect. It’s not surprising, then, that covered wagon diarists would often quote a line or two of long-ago memorized poetry that seemed appropriate to their circumstances along the westering trails. They liked to make up rhymes, poems, and songs of their own, too, jotting their work on the dusty pages of journals and diaries. Many such poems were sentimental tear-jerkers about homes and sweethearts left behind, or about a loved one laid to rest in a lonely prairie grave as the wagons rolled on.

Dr. Israel Lord, an Iowa physician who headed to California to dig for gold in 1849, composed 17 stanzas about a suffering, worn-out ox he watched die in the deserts west of the Humboldt River in today’s Nevada. Here are three of the verses he recorded in his journal:

Too sure they’ve left me here to die,

An old and hungry ox;

Where not a blade of grass can grow

Among the climbing rocks.

They’ve left me here to starve and die,

Without a lock of hay.

And they’ve burned my yoke and bows and gone

To Californ-i-a.

A weary life long road I pulled

Their wagons on the plains;

And all I’ve got is kicks and blows

And hunger for my pains.

If too fast they whipped, if to slow they kicked,

And followed it day by day

As if kicking and beating would carry them through,

To Californ-i-a.

They may kick and maul and beat me now,

But they’ll find it is “no go.”

For my neck will never bear a yoke,

Nor my shoulders press a bow

If an ox’s ghost e’er runs at large,

I’ll be revenged some day.

For I’ll haunt the rascals as long as they live

In Californ-i-a.

Dr. Lord was a song-writer, too. Here are two stanzas of a ditty he called “The Song of Golden Toil,” its melody, unfortunately, now unknown:

‘Tis not the work for me to hoe

The corn that towers so high

And stretching off in endless row,

Corn mingles with the sky;

But give me where the tall green pine,

Waves stately o’er the narrow lea,

And whispers to the golden mine;

Oh, that’s the work for me,

Oh, that’s the work for me.

Nor yet is that the work for me,

Which yields six bits a day,

To toil and want and misery,

In promises to pay;

But let me pick and pry and pull

The soft bed rock, where I can see

An ounce on every shovel-full;

Oh, that’s the work for me,

Oh, that’s the work for me.

• Reference: A Doctor’s Gold Rush Journey To California, by Israel Shipman Pelton Lord. Ed. Necia Dixon Liles. 1999, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.