Sarah Royce

Hello, I am Sarah Royce. I came to California by a very long and often dangerous route cross county.  

We started our journey in April of 1849 from Indiana. What an adventure we were to have.  My husband, my infant daughter and my self traveled with several other families. We worked as a team. The women all learned such things as hitching oxen, driving teams and on some occasions assisting at shoeing oxen and horses.

On rough stretches of trail, we mothers had to walk, carrying our babies in our arms for hours at a time. I was a little luckier, I could ride horseback with my baby in my lap. The infants’ necessities were suspended from the pommel, canteen and changing cloths in a saddlebag on one side, a little pail on the other, the weight of the child on one arm, and me clinging to the pommel with the other.

Those ended up being the minor difficulties. We had to cross many a rushing river and stream. Sometimes we built rafts to float the wagons on. With water rushing so fast we could not hear the voices of others five feet away. We had to deal with death in all forms, some dying from thirst, many from disease, and some from sheer exhaustion.

Interestingly we learned how to barter with the Indians, the Plains Indians being the most dangerous. Most of the Indians were not dangerous.  I think the hardest part of the journey was crossing the great salt plains. Day after day nothing but hot blinding sun. After I lost my horse, there were times that I thought I could not walk another step. That’s when I tested my faith in God.

We were nearing the mountains when the weather started to get cold. Our party started to split up. Several groups without family with elderly or young children went ahead, fearing bad weather.  The rest of us had to do a slower pace and by the time we reach the top of the Sierras we were in danger of being snowed in and would have been if one young couple hadn’t told a troop of solders what path we would be taking.  If not for them I fear we would not have made it.   We saw many impressive sights on the way overland, the most impressive of all was the ending of the journey, the first view of California from the summit of the Sierras, a soft haze, a warm rosy glow, the golden magic of the Sacramento Valley.

All of the experiences of this great adventure, made my husband and myself strong enough to survive the floods, fires and diseases we faced in the first year of our new life in Sacramento City.