Chapter Twenty-Six
In the hour before dawn, March first, 1836, the vehicles bound for the eastern part of Texas began to assemble in a field behind the town of Willow Grove, South Carolina. Groups of family and friends had gathered to wave the wagon train off, and some stores and shops were open for last-minute purchases or for their owners to bid farewell to longtime customers they were not likely to see again. There was a festive air about the occasion, mixed with melancholia and concern. On February twenty-third, the Mexican general Santa Anna and his troops had laid siege against a garrison of 187 Texians bivouacked in a mission called the Alamo on the San Antonio River. Their commander was one of their own, a South Carolina boy born in Saluda County named William Barrett Travis. Alongside him was his cousin, also of South Carolina, James B. Bonham. The Alamo had been under siege seven days, and the Charleston Courier held out little hope that the brave defenders—the South’s Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie among them—could hold out until reinforcements arrived.
Among the most solemn groups waiting to say their good-byes were the Wyndham and Warwick families and beloved members of their household staffs. Missing were Elizabeth and Morris Toliver, but standing in their stead were Cassandra and Lazarus, holding a still-sleeping Joshua. In a last-minute decision, Silas had freed the elderly couple to stay behind with his mother and brother, and they watched on with eyes still swollen from tears of relief and gratitude. Willie May and Jonah stood with Carson, Eunice, and Michael, and Jeremy’s two brothers and father had brought along the Negro nanny who’d cared for all Warwick sons as infants.
A cub reporter from the Charleston Courier, pen and notepad in hand, moved amidst the din and activity and, by the light of the moon and stars and campfires, attempted to put on paper his thoughts and impressions of the scene he described as “a sight to behold and a memory to hold.” His first pages recorded the awesome cost of pulling up stakes for the uncertain promise and dubious success of driving the same stakes into soil in hostile territory thousands of miles away.
“Six to eight hundred dollars to assemble a basic outfit of wagon and oxen, goods and equipment—a fortune,” he informed the reader. He went on to apprise his reading audience that the Willow Grove wagon train would consist of approximately two hundred people, counting the slaves, and an undetermined number of conveyances because the tally changed weekly. They were of all sorts, sizes, and value, ranging from expensive Conestogas and prairie schooners (a lesser version of the desert camel) to market wagons, buggies, carriages, traps, carts, and pack mules. Many would walk, sleeping under wagons or under the stars, and take their food from the land. It was estimated the train could make ten to fifteen miles a day.
Managing this conglomerate group, the reporter wrote, were the wagon masters he described as sitting their horses like princes commanding minions whose trust in them was as clear as the day breaking over the remarkable sight. “Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick wield the whip of leadership like men born to authority with the knowledge and skill, if not the experience, to enforce it,” his notes read. “Upon their shoulders rests the responsibility to get the travelers where they are going as safely as possible.” He quoted Jeremy as declaring, “We have studied every map and chart of the terrain, perused every article and guidebook, read every letter shared with us from correspondents in Texas, and interviewed dozens of people who have been there. We are as informed as we can be to guide the train successfully to our destination. The rest is up to God.”
Silas declined to be interviewed, but the reporter followed on his heels and furiously jotted down the wagon master’s orders, calmly but firmly delivered. The leader would give his group two hours to settle down their families and animals, attend to last-minute details, say their good-byes, and take their designated place in line. Those who were late in doing so would be left behind. He would tolerate no dawdlers or laggards. A personal item of interest crept into the reporter’s notes when the wagon leader went to collect his son to place in the care of the driver of his Conestoga, one of Queenscrown’s most trusted slaves. The reporter quoted Joshua as saying, “Please, Papa. Can’t I ride with Jessica and Tippy?”
Silas Toliver obliged the tearful plea and, carrying his son, strode to Jessica Wyndham’s—Mrs. Silas Toliver’s!—matching Conestoga, where she sat, dressed like a peacock among sparrows, on the wagon seat with her strange-looking pixie of a maid and a young colored boy named Jasper. The wagon master repeated his son’s request to his wife, who said happily, “Of course,” and, almost too slight for the boy’s weight, took him into her arms. “Don’t worry, Silas, we’ll look after him,” she said, and smiled into Joshua Toliver’s droopy eyes. “It’s nap time for you, young man,” she said further, and without another word to her husband, spirited the boy away under the spanking white canvas.
The reporter noted that Silas Toliver’s stern features relaxed a little as he walked away, and the writer for the Courier admitted to himself he would have given a month’s salary to know the thoughts of a man who had yet to consummate his marriage to his wife, so gossip had it, but tittle-tattle had no place in serious journalistic reporting. Instead, the young man fixed his courage on getting Carson Wyndham to answer from a father’s perspective the question of how he felt about his daughter going to Texas.
“How do you think I feel?” the formidable cotton baron and business tycoon snapped, and, with a glare, stalked off with his wife and son before the reporter could position his pen to record his reply.
At the fixed moment for departure, a bugle sounded. The wagon masters were already in position at the head of the two motley lines of conveyances, farm animals, slaves, and those who would walk in the dust of churning wheels. As the last notes struck the cold morning air, both Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick raised a leather-jacketed arm and signaled forward. The wagon train was off.
The cub reporter, along with those remaining behind, watched the cavalcade pull away to the cacophony of creaking wheels, suspended pots and pans banging from the sides of wagons, babies crying, dogs barking, and livestock mooing, bawling, clucking, and bleating—“the sound of the westward movement,” he would ascribe to the spectacle in his article. The young man wished them well. In a week he would report on the fall of the Alamo in Texas and then later the revenge of the Texians at San Jacinto where, under the leadership of Sam Houston, they would defeat Santa Anna and his army and pronounce the territory independent from Mexico. The Willow Grove wagon train was headed toward the newly declared Republic of Texas.