A Forebear Foreshadows Indiana Jones
Updated: Dec 24, 2024
For some months I had been trying to enliven an inherited 150-year-old manuscript describing a forebear’s adrenaline-charged adventures in Brazil and on the Santa Fe Trail and Old Spanish Trail in the 1830s and 1840s “written for the pleasure of my boys” in the 1860s. The memoir was a cautionary tale and a shoutout to Providence for having spared him on countless occasions. Though its 25,000 words neatly penned into a notebook had been transcribed by typewriter in the 1960s by my mother, only this year did I get around to digitizing her typescript. Things had come a long way over those six decades. How easily one could now do what was impossible, or at least laborious, in the pre-digital era. Likewise, I could delve online into the backstories of the numerous supporting characters, without the laborious trips to the library of yore. And I could gather illustrations to depict the pre-photographic world of the 1830s-40s.
The protagonist, my great-great uncle Dr. Jonathan Huntington Lyman (1816-1890), was the seventh of thirteen siblings, raised in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the second generation of our nation. His father and namesake was a lawyer and state representative who once was invited to give the Fourth of July oration in town. Chester Harding had painted his father’s portrait in 1822. A sister, my great-great grandmother, had been kissed by Lafayette in Northampton on his triumphal national tour in 1825. Yet no amount of internet searching could turn up an image of him, so I have settled for one likely taken in the 1850s, of his brother John Chester Lyman, the namesake of his second son.
Online research did turn up obituaries, no surprise, but little else, except this. A posting by Paul Spitzzeri of the Workman and Temple Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, outside Los Angeles, quoted Lyman from a book that had appeared in the 1840s, news to me. When I reached out to him with what I had, he suggested that we co-present Lyman’s extraordinary account at the Old Spanish Trail Association Conference, to be held in Santa Fe in November 2024. I had never heard of such an organization, let alone the trail name. Lifelong learner that I aspire to be, I enthusiastically agreed to attend. I wondered what an audience of non-family members might have to say about what Lyman called his “Incidents of Travel.”
As I was feasting on all of this, AI was earning a seat at the table, first by generating colorful images of a native American using Lyman’s own words (via Shutterstock), then by generating podcasts on his adventures using his own words (via Google NotebookLM). Yes, within minutes, a file can be transformed into a “Deep Dive”, a rollicking half-hour conversation. Noting his youthful swagger and bravado, one of the podcasts compares Lyman to Indiana Jones. When I first shared one such podcast with an audience in real-time, they were riveted. And each time I uploaded Lyman’s 25,000 words for a Deep Dive, the outcome unearthed a fresh nugget of insight. I have tried ten Deep Dives so far. In each, the digital voices, male and female, are utterly colloquial—the “hold on”, “get out!” ”no way!” “I kid you not,” even the breathless delivery. If only Hunt were here to hear them! These Deep Dives make him more relatable, more present, and his close encounters seem all the more miraculous. Here, try it for yourself. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e982dfce-9b04-48f4-a90c-1b2a63dbf7c1/audio
Lyman was the quintessential American risk-taker. Even in his teens he was eager to split off from the group, leave home, cross boundaries and explore frontiers. He was aptly nicknamed “Hunt.” Spending two and a half years in the mid-1830s in South America on what his memoir records as “all its three coasts,” especially Brazil, daredevil eighteen-year-old Hunt Lyman swam among sharks in Rio Harbor, spent the night in the jungle surrounded by snakes, leopards, jaguars and possible robbers, and survived a deadly coastal-water vortex that nearly sank a boat whose pilot was drunk. As the usually cocky Hunt put it in describing the whirlpool, “I had always felt some confidence of success, in avoiding or getting through perils, but here I had not a particle of hope.”
Subsequently, unaccustomed to champaign, the nineteen-year-old got himself plastered at the American Consul’s Fourth of July party, climbed out a second-floor window, somehow climbed into a third-floor balcony overhead, reached the roof, and proceeded to belt out “Yankee Doodle” and the Brazilian national anthem to a crowd in the plaza 40 feet below, while hurling roof tiles, miraculously killing no one, before he was subdued and given “some fatherly advice” by the Consul. Later Hunt ignored the Consul’s advice as to which ship he should board to sail home to Massachusetts; had he done so, he would have vanished to the bottom of the sea. The much-maligned captain of the ship he chose to board turned out to treat him like a son.
He arrived home, he writes, “in the full vigor of health and weighing 160 pounds. I at once entered upon the study of medicine and after two years of close and intense application to my studies, received my diploma from the University of Pennsylvania.” Dr. Lyman set up shop in Enfield Massachusetts (a town that a century later was doomed to become part of Quabbin Reservoir), “but with a broken constitution and suffering from pleuritic adhesions and with a jaundiced body weighing only about 128 pounds,” he realized that he must act boldly to regain his health.
Seeking a warmer climate, with money in his pocket and an appetite for adventure, in the summer of 1840, Hunt closed shop and headed out West. As he puts it, “My only companions for the two years occupied in reaching the coast of the Pacific were wild Indians, semi-civilized Mexicans, and a class of white men, trappers, etc. from Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas, who were well known to us during our [recent Civil] war as ‘Border Ruffians.’ But as slavery had not then become the vital issue in our politics, I found those white men, with one or two exceptions, friendly and perfectly reliable in every emergency. Still they were a hard set, with no fear of God or man before their eyes.”
After reaching St. Louis by rail and crossing the then-westernmost state, Missouri, by stagecoach, Hunt hired a guide and mules to catch up with a wagon train that had left some days earlier for Santa Fe. He headed out into the open prairie. On his very first night, he experienced the most violent thunderstorm of his life, from which there was no shelter. After six days of hard riding for some 200 miles, he finally caught up with the caravan of 12 men and 6 wagons, exhausted.
Hunt shares with his sons that moment: “The Captain asked me if I had had any supper. Upon replying in the negative, he told one of the men to fry me some bacon. The man went to the end of a wagon, to a box containing wrenches, grease, tools, etc., for repairing the wagon, and took out a piece of bacon, cut off a slice, and without washing it, fried it and gave it to me. I ate it— and wanted more. Then, as an act of politeness to his guest, the Captain gave me his best bed chamber, for, pointing under the wagon, he said to me, ‘Doc, you may sleep there’—and I did sleep there, a long sweet sleep, with no fear of wolves or Indians all the night.”
Hunt stayed with the wagon train for three months. He often rode ahead alone, recklessly. One time, he was nearly unsaddled by a buffalo charging at him and frightening his mule. Another time, when the caravan was camped, he headed out alone on foot along a small river: he approached several buffalo heading into the water, hoping to bag one, “every nerve in my body strung to the highest pitch of intensity,” only to step on a rattlesnake. “The tremendous leap I gave was only equalled by the jump of those buffalo up the bank.”
“When within eight or ten days of the Rocky Mountains, four of us left the caravan and proceeded on to Santa Fé by a short route through the mountains; a distance of nearly 300 miles. We met a party of trappers who told us the route we were on was full of Comanches, and advised us to proceed with the utmost caution.” And so they did, building a campfire at dusk “to deceive any Indians that might be watching us from among the prairie knolls. It is their way to mark out where small parties camp and then, about midnight, to come down and spear them. After dark, we would silently get up, resaddle our mules and strike off a mile or more into the prairie, at right angles with our line of travel…and there, unsaddling our mules again, we would lie down and sleep quietly in perfect safety. On one of those nights, when sleeping comfortably, off one side of our track, we were suddenly awakened by a thundering noise and shaking of the ground as by an earthquake. We sprang to our feet and found that a large drove of wild horses, alarmed by Indians or something else, had rushed down in our direction…shaking the ground in the act, and worse, as we thought, stampeding our mules. Fortunately our mules, being well hobbled, did not escape.”
After three months on the trail, Hunt arrived in Santa Fe and, he writes, “had gained wonderfully in health, strength, flesh, and was then informed by my companions that the night I joined them they had said to one another, that they would soon have to put me under the sod.”
In late November of 1840, hoping to avoid being snowbound, Hunt headed south for Chihuahua, with a Mexican servant and packed mules, and a pouch of the gold dust and doubloons, considerably more capital than the locals needed to carry with them. On the evening of the third day, reaching the village of Algodones, as his servant corralled the mules, he walked over to see the Alcalde, the village head man, who was surrounded by unsavory characters and promptly arrested him. The corrupt New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo in Santa Fe had sent a courier ordering his return to Santa Fe, dead or alive, on trumped up charges. The Alcalde and his thugs knew that Hunt had gold on him, and confiscated his shotgun and mustang, but kept their distance from him, as he also had two pistols on him.
They held him under house arrest for three days before he realized that his “detention was owing to a plot between an American gambler named Lee and Governor Amijo, to rob me. That Governor was one of the foulest and most treacherous men I ever met. He came into power though assassinations under his orders.” And Stephen Lee was no better—the Kentucky-born trapper and distiller of Taos Lightning knew that Hunt had $900 on him, because Hunt had been repaid that sum by one Tayon after Hunt lent it to him for a specified short period, but Tayon had to borrow from Lee to repay Hunt, and since Tayon was now unable to repay Lee, Lee had decided to go after Hunt’s gold instead, conspiring with Governor Armijo, who ignored an order from the American Consul Manuel Alvarez to release Hunt, and instead ordered Hunt’s detention and dead-or-alive transfer back to Santa Fe.
Only after bribing the Alcalde with two gold doubloons, plus a ring as a keepsake for the Alcalde’s wife, did Hunt secure his release and recover his gun, mustang and Mexican servant, and resume his journey to Chihuahua. But two days later, another courier from Santa Fe caught up with him, with a message from a friend urging him to come back and clear himself of false charges. Consul Alvarez had “scared the Governor and compelled him to send an order to the Alcalde to release” Hunt. Returning to Algodones, Hunt confronted the Alcalde’s wife, who reluctantly returned the gold ring.
Back in Santa Fe, Hunt came across Lee in the Plaza and confronted him, but Lee fled, “a thoroughly bad man.” Hunt now corralled Consul Alvarez to confront Governor Armijo, who sent for the Algodones Alcalde, who returned Hunt his doubloons, to which Hunt said, “Now pay me another doubloon for staying at your house eating your dinners” and threatened “a still more severe punishment to be inflicted—but only to scare my humble friend.”
The Algodones incident was a wakeup call: “a quiet New England boy” wet behind the ears and on his own in the Wild West was an easy mark for corrupt officials and hostile tribes alike. Indeed, three Apaches “on the war path” soon surrounded him, one of them seizing his horse near the bit, demanding gunpowder in Spanish, to which Hunt replied in Spanish, “No powder for you, let alone the bit,” and seized the Indian’s wrist, gave it a wrench and so loosened his hold on the bridle, and pressed forward some thirty rods in a walk, acting unfazed, with an unseasoned companion.
“But I confess,” Hunt continues, “that during the time we were going that thirty rods, I felt every instant, spears, bullets and arrows sticking all over my back, and I feel them to this day, when I read of Apaches in our daily papers.” Hunt records that Apache animosity toward Anglos went back to a massacre of them in 1837 by duplicitous Anglos looking for bounty from the Mexican Governor. As Hunt sees it, “We curse the Apache for his fearful cruelties. Who shall curse those white men, the actual cause of the unutterable sufferings of hundreds of innocent white men and women? God is the Adjuster.”
By 1841 Hunt spent much time in the camp of trapper and distiller William Workman, ten miles south of Taos. One day, in utter recklessness, he rode off alone on his mustang for Taos. “I heedlessly took no weapon with me,” and sure enough, he ran straight into a band of hostile Utes and “was instantly surrounded by 50 or more young warriors who made many hostile demonstrations. Weapons then could have done me no good…they surrounded me and compelled me to go with them,” toward Taos. “I kept firm grip on my bridle rein, determined to make a dash for life while on my horse—my only hope.” Miraculously, just as the band rode by an adobe compound, Hunt noticed a Mexican acquaintance peering over a wall, wondering what the commotion was all about. “As we approached his gate I called out to him in Spanish to open his door for me as I passed, intending to dash my wild mustang through any opposition, get into the yard, and then trust to Mexican diplomacy. All happened as I hoped and much to the annoyance apparently of the Indians.” That was not all the socializing Hunt enjoyed that day in Taos. After nightfall, as he headed back to Rowland’s camp, sure enough he ran into more Utes.
“Unluckily they were on the trail that I ought to take—the ground towards the prairie being full of little ravines or gulches from two to four feet wide. But there was no remedy. I must trust to the sure feet of my half wild mustang and dash off, in the twilight, into the prairie, off the trail—or be captured again, which might have been fatal indeed.
“I gathered up my reins, dashed my heavy iron Spanish spurs into my pony, and away I went over ditches made by the rains, over rabbit holes, sage and I don’t know what else. The Indians, as soon as I started, chased after me and we did indeed have a time that would have beaten old Tam o’ Shanter. Fortunately they—the Indians—were returning from buffalo hunting, and their horses were not us fresh as mine. How long the race continued I don’t know. I soon found I could keep ahead, and then I took it quietly…
“Soon after when in Santa Fé I met the American Company that had fought these Indians, and they considered my escape most remarkable. Humanly speaking, I was booked for another world and with no pleasant transit. The Indians had just been defeated by white men and were sure to seek revenge.”
In mid-1841 John Rowland and his business acquaintance William Workman, trapper and merchant, spent months co-preparing for an exodus of many locals to California, prompted by rumors that they were collaborating with the Republic of Texas to seize much of New Mexico, incurring the wrath of Governor Armijo. More likely, it was the prospect of either continued misrule by Governor Armijo or annexation by Texas that alarmed the group planning to accompany Rowland and Workman. Hunt decided to join those 64 people: 27 men, 7 with families or servants. In California, they could escape persecution, or worse, and begin life anew. In the fall, they set out on the Old Spanish Trail, which covered 1000 miles, crossing Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, heading down the Colorado River, and crossing deserts before reaching California—no trip for the faint of heart.
As the exodus crossed the Navajo hunting ground, Hunt and others from the expedition encountered “one of the handsomest Indian chiefs I ever saw.” In Spanish they asked him his name and tribe, to which he answered, “Walkara, Ute.” He was a member of the Timpanigos [Great Salt Lake] Utes, who were friendly to Anglos and enemies of the Taos Utes, with which Hunt had sparred outside Taos. Walkara was riding alone deep in what was, for him, enemy territory, because a relative had abducted one of his wives and fled to the Comanches, and he wanted her back, but was now returning from the chase without her. Hunt’s group offered to escort Walkara through the Navajo country, and he accepted, “in full confidence of our hospitality,” giving Hunt a chance to get to know him.
When a rough North Carolinian in Hunt’s party aimed his rifle at Walkara, telling him to move his horse from where he was staked for the night, the chief “moved slowly and most majestically towards his horse, and, with the utmost calmness, led him towards those of the rest of our party. The superb scornfulness of his manner must, I think, have unnerved the brute. If he had fired, I believe we should have shot him. I went up to him and warned him to beware, and verily think I should have been tempted to shoot him on the spot myself.” Walkara “continued very confiding and friendly to us till we parted within the borders of his own country, but he treated the North Carolinian with utter and contemptuous indifference.”
Walkara probably neglected to confide that he made a business of stealing horses in California to bring back to New Mexico and enslaving Paiutes and Navajos to sell to Mexicans. He sometimes partnered with his Anglo brother-in-law Peg Leg Smith, whom Hunt considered “a perfect specimen of the Rocky Mountain Trapper—fearless, reckless, and indifferent to suffering—a hard drinker and the wildest of carouses”—even after a leg amputation far from anesthesia, requiring him thenceforth to wear a peg-leg, his with a barbed hook that fastened to his belt but once came loose and accidentally tore the flesh in his armpit.
Hunt traded with the Navajos, and marveled at their unrivalled blankets, for which they tended large flocks of sheep. As he shared with author Thomas J. Farnham for his ponderous book Life, Adventures and Travels in California (1847), “I have now in my possession one of these blankets which I purchased of the Navajos soon after I entered the Taos Mountains, and which, during two years’ encampment in the wilderness, did me most valuable service. Throughout very many nights of incessant mountain rains it was my only shelter; and never, in a single instance, was any part of my clothing wet which was covered by it.”
It was the Paiutes [“Paiuches”] who truly brought out the anthropologist in Hunt, and tested his humanity. Their people were relegated to lands of almost desert barrenness, in constant famine, as he shared with Farnham, “almost entirely destitute of clothing to protect them from the inclemency of winter, what more could be expected of them than an equality with the brute creation?...[T]heir long untrimmed hair, instead of hanging in flowing masses over the shoulders, like that of the other American Indians, is thickly matted with dirt, stands out on the head in hard knots, alive with vermin; which latter are eagerly sought after by them, as an article of food…Without knowledge, without shelter, without raiment, food, water, fit for man, they are born and live and die among these terrible deserts, the most miserable of men, yet contented with their lot. But every man’s hand is against them. The New Mexicans capture them for slaves; the neighboring Indians do the same, and even the bold and usually high-minded old beaver-hunter sometimes descends from his legitimate labor among the mountain streams, to this mean traffic.”
“Notwithstanding their horrible deficiency in all the comforts and decencies of life, these Indians are so ardently attached to their country, that when carried into the lands of their captors and surrounded with abundance, they pine away and often die in grief for the loss of their native deserts. In one instance, I saw one of these Paiuches die from no other apparent cause than his home-sickness. From the time it was brought into the settlements of California it was sad, moaned and continually refused to eat till it died.
“In this description of the Paiuches I have been governed by my own personal observations made during the three months I was occupied in traversing their country. I have been rather minute, because I am not aware of any other correct account having been given of them. And although one is disgusted with their personal filth and mental degradation, yet his strongest sympathies must be excited by this shocking degradation, which the character of the country they inhabit promises to perpetuate. They were the innocent cause of a great deal of suffering to myself and two companions. Four New Mexicans attached to our party captured on the banks of the Colorado an adult male and female with one child, whom myself and two friends tried to induce them to liberate. But as the Americans of our company would not aid in our effort, the majority was found against the movement and it failed. Our humanity raised such prejudices against us, that dissensions arose which resulted in a determination on the part of three of us to have no more connection with the party, and to prosecute our journey ‘on our own hook.’ The other Americans, as desirous as ourselves for the liberation of the captives, but, as it proved, more discreet, remained with the Mexicans. So off we started by ourselves, three lone men, and travelled thirty-five or forty days, and endured the most excessive fatigue, and deprivations of food and water, much of which would have been avoided if we had smothered our objections to our companions’ conduct in this affair, and been guided by their greater experience over those dreadful wastes.”
Hunt’s memoir mentions a close call that his companion Benjamin Davis Wilson still recalled three decades later. “One day, when traveling with two companions on the San Juan—one of the headwaters of the Colorado river, I noticed a peculiar eddy in the stream, and told my friends if they would go on a short distance only and camp, I would catch a Cat fish for supper. I always carried a hook and line in my bullet pouch. So tying my horse to a tree, I descended the bank to fish, and there I remained till nearly dusk when I had a grand nibble—at the same time a bullet from the bushes across the stream struck the water close to me. My first impulse was to spring up the bank to my horse and cover—just then I had a big bite, which was too tempting.
“I determined to have that fish, and very soon I did have him, a splendid fine flavored Cat fish nearly two feet long. I at once wound up my line and then slowly walked up the bank, tied the fish to my saddle, took up my rifle and mounted, giving an eye all the time to my concealed neighbor in the opposite bushes. Probably that bullet was his last shot, for I heard no more from him.
“I followed after my companions, and, instead of finding them close by as I expected, it was long after midnight before I saw their campfire, and fortunately without any other unpleasant incident occurring.” No more such shots came their way.
“One evening we camped in an open plain, just beyond the great [Grand] Canyon of the Colorado. For miles about us there were no signs of vegetation of any kind, except at one spot. The whole country seemed to have been blasted with lightning. The ground was hard and sterile, and the rocks of the spurs, which cropped out here and there were black and scorched as by fire. It happened to be cloudy weather, thus making the whole scene dark and gloomy in the extreme.
“At one spot only were there signs of life. In a depression of the general surface we found marsh or saline grass growing, over an area of only about a half dozen rods. By digging in it we found a very little brackish water—not more than a pint could be obtained in, perhaps, a half hour’s waiting. But the most remarkable feature were the ruins close by of the walls of an ancient town, in the shape of a parallelogram. The walls had crumbled and formed a ridge beveled on both sides and about six or eight feet high.
“With the rod of my rifle, I dug into the ruins and found several fragments of glazed pottery, resembling the specimens or ancient Etruscan ware, sometimes found in Italy. When and by whom was that ruined town occupied, and when and how was the surface of the country changed, destroying its fertility, drying up the springs of water, and making all that region desolate and uninhabitable as the plains of Sodom?”
Hunt shared with Farnham that the ruins were about four hundred miles up the Colorado River, a short distance from its northern bank, thirty miles from the closest fresh water. He reckoned they were about one mile long by three-quarters of a mile wide, with entrances on the center of each of the four sides. No Anasazi ruin visible today comes close to that size; perhaps it is submerged under Lake Mead.
Hunt’s narrative for his sons largely omits what he, Benjamin Davis Wilson, and the one other companion endured beyond the ruins on the way to California, but he shared it with Farnham, who wrote, “When Dr. Lyman passed this desert, the sands were drifting hideously, and he was only guided in the right path across, by the carcasses of the horses which had perished in previous attempts to pass it. And such appeared to be the saline character of the soil, and so destitute of moisture was the atmosphere, that the flesh of these carcasses, instead of being decomposed, was dried like the mummies of Egypt!”
Farnham also observed, “Doctor Lyman suffered so many hardships and privations while traveling down the Colorado, that he, as well as his animals, barely lived to reach the green fields and pure waters of the Californian Mountains.”
As Hunt wrote Farnham, “[W]e travelled many successive days along the Colorado, over sandy deserts, subsisting on a daily allowance of a few mouthsful of thin mush, and a little nauseous and bitter water wherewith to wet our mouths once in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. No druggist ever compounded a draught more disgusting than the green, slimy or brackish waters which we were compelled to drink. Finally our little stock of provisions was consumed to the last grain; and starvation was staring us in the face; but relief was not denied us; the sight of the wooded mountains of Upper California inspired us with new strength and courage and soon after we fell in with a river of pure waters coming down from them; more delicious than the streams of olden fable; and our thankfulness and delight—who can measure it? It was ecstasy—such feelings I believe have no words. In those beautiful mountains we surfeited ourselves on the rich meats and fruits there abounding; prudence was cast to the winds; we could eat, and therefore did so; but ere long we suffered bitterly for our imprudence.“
Hunt spared his sons the harrowing details, putting it this way: “My…second winter [out West] was spent in the semitropical region about Los Angeles, in California, where grapes, oranges and figs, peaches, pears, and nectarines grew, in great profusion, and were large, luscious and perfect in flavor.
“This excellence was all the more real to me, as I had but just emerged from those fearful deserts of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, and from among the great canyons of the Colorado, where I and three [two] companions had wandered nearly two months, and endured great hardships before we reached the pure waters of the Mohave.”
Farnham quotes Hunt recalling this poignant moment: “We were not a little gratified, however, on arriving at the settlements on the sea-shore to learn that after we left the camp of these New Mexicans, our countrymen who remained with them, secretly in the night time loosed the Paiuche captives and sent them to their desert homes.”
Hunt shares this much with his sons:
“The hardships I had endured in the desert, followed by a profusion of fruits and food of the coast, had thrown me into a fever, a few weeks after arrival, and after those little bills were created. For many days I was dangerously sick, and for weeks was helpless. My life was probably saved by the kind and gentle care and nursing I received from an old woman, poor as myself—a perfect stranger to me. She staid by me faithfully, till I was able to go out, and she shared with me her last chicken. I suppose I was the means of saving the lives of two of her children subsequently, but I never could repay her in full the debt of gratitude I owed her. Good old Dona Fernanda.”
“Being destitute of money on reaching the shores of the Pacific, I was compelled to remain there many months, practicing my profession, till funds were replenished.” He learned the hard way that his patients must pay up before he dispenses medical advice, after being stiffed by leading ranchero Don José Carillo and others.
Years before the gold rush, in 1842 Hunt came close to learning the location of a major placer, through trader Abel Stearns, a transplanted Bay Stater, who in late 1841 had invited him to dinner and shown him a quart bottle of gold dust and now invited him to join him on an expedition with a native chief from the Sierra region to the location of the placer gold, only to have the chief’s fellows talk him out of showing them.
Here is Hunt’s counterfactual: “Had Stearns and I been permitted to discover it, while that country belonged to Mexico, the fame of the placer would have spread abroad and led to the discovery of other gold fields, and California would today, probably, be a Mexican province. For the twenty million dollars, war expenses, which our Government claimed after General Scott entered the City of Mexico, and which that country could not pay but compromised by giving us California instead—those twenty millions, five times told, Mexico could easily have borrowed of English capitalists, by pledging that province, if she had only known of the rich placers that were under its soil or even of that rich one where Stearns and I went and which Providence did not permit to be revealed, till the sovereignty of the land had passed to a Protestant power.
“If that Indian had dealt fairly with us—as he originally intended to do—I should have been instrumental in revealing to the world, the golden wealth of California and that province would today belong to the Spanish race and to the Papal Church, two conditions that, for three hundred years, have been a hindrance to human progress. But the existence of those wonderful gold fields, being concealed till the Anglo Saxon and a Protestant race assumed the sovereignty, a great empire is growing up there, to send forth civilization and human liberty through the isles of the Pacific, and throughout Asia, on westward to the home of the Saxon race in Western Europe, thus girdling the earth with a pure civilization and a pure Christianity.” Whoa, there, Hunt! We may now beg to differ with such overreach. If Hunt were with us now, I am sure his thinking would have dramatically evolved.
With funds replenished, after twelve months in California, Hunt “sailed from the port of San Diego, in a Spanish brig loaded with mules, for Mazatlan on the coast of Mexico, below the Gulf of California, a distance of over 1200 miles.”
“Seeing a beautiful brig in the harbor I went on board. Finding it was about to leave for the Sandwich Islands, over 3000 miles due west, I concluded to take passage. My destination was Siberia, and I was told that once a year, a vessel from the United States touched at Honolulu, on its way to Kamchatka and she would be at the Islands in a few weeks.” In Honolulu, receiving his first letter from home in three years, written two years before, “gave me my first twinge of homesickness.” The fact that the letter had been sent to Oahu indicates that Hunt had been planning to reach there from the beginning, destination Siberia. “I had not had wild life enough. I fancied a trip across Siberia.”
Waiting for a ship to take him there, Hunt mingled with the natives. Thanks to missionaries, he noted that “there was as much decorum and quietness all that Sabbath day, throughout the town, as in any of our New England villages on Sunday.”
He enjoyed a particularly memorable evening. “I was invited one evening to go to the house of a foreigner and play whist. On arriving there and entering the room, I found present, two Americans and a native of the island, a stout, dark skinned, but well-dressed man, who was introduced to me in Yankee style as ‘Kamehameha III, King of the Sandwich Islands’.
“We were requested to take seats at a table and the game commenced. Soon my partner shocked me, by his tone of familiarity in addressing the King, who was seated at my left and was slow in following my play. He said to him, ‘Come, King, it is your play’. His majesty took the hint as a most natural thing. I reflected upon such regal quietness for a while, and then thought I would see how it felt to hurry up a King. So, when he again delayed his play, I called out, ‘Come, King, we are waiting.’ Instead of seizing a spear and transfixing me on the spot—the Monarch heeded my request—and played. Why should I fear? Was not I a sovereign also?
“I took a long walk with the King that night. He had but one attendant, who was in the rear of us. The King could speak English, and was intelligent and practical in his conversation…
“After waiting a long time for the Siberian ship and no signs of it appearing and having received an invitation to take passage on the ‘Boston’ around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, I concluded to accept the invitation especially as I was a little homesick.” The ‘Boston’ had just frightened off British warship HMS ‘Carysfort,’ commanded by Lord Paulet who had threatened to bombard Honolulu “unless certain outrageous demands were immediately conceded to the Englishman.” Now the “Boston” was headed home by way of the Society Islands—Tahiti.
Hunt experienced rapture over cosmic spectacle and natural wonder. “During the three weeks passage, we had, nearly every night the magnificent spectacle of that huge comet, with its enormous train spanning the southern heavens. It was so vast and so luminous as to cause the beautiful constellations of the south to look pale through the shadow of its nearer and brighter light…The view of Tahiti, that gem of the ocean, as seen from the deck of our ship, was beautiful beyond description…The center of the island was crowned with lofty volcanic peaks, along the base of which were other hills, with rounded tops and gentle and graceful slopes, which skirted the higher peaks, like an emerald setting—and all appeared to be clothed in various shades of green; the deep valleys among the hills, by their darker shading, contrasting beautifully with the lighter colors of the more prominent crests…The sight was exceedingly soft and pleasing to the eye, and the effect was intensified by those grand volcanic pinnacles shooting high up through the midst, like giant sentinels guarding the paradise at their feet. The firm white shell beach, reflecting the bright sunlight from the crests of countless ripples of water seemed to surround the whole view with a circlet of burnished silver. Even under the water of that pretty little bay, nature’s beautiful handiwork was seen, in the forests of gracefully branching coral—both purple and white—with brilliant colored fishes, playing among the branches. In all my tropical wanderings, I have never seen any spot so lovely as Tahiti.”
By August 1843, emerging from the dreary winter waters of the southern hemisphere, the ‘Boston’ anchored in Rio Harbor, Hunt’s old shark-defying swimming waters. He debarked for a short nostalgic sojourn, remarking, “Nowhere else have I seen such a variety and abundance of beautiful birds and flowers and gorgeous insects, and even of snakes.
“Nature seems to have exhausted her powers in her efforts to cloth[e] those creations of hers in the richest and most splendid combinations of colors. But, alas, she did not discriminate between the evil and the good, and she also failed to endow them with those qualities which, under less favored climes and bright skies, she has bestowed on the birds and flowers of our own northern homes.
“With us we usually find the more modest the clothing of the bird and flower, the sweeter the song and the fragrance. But in Brazil we almost always find the more gorgeous the plumage of the bird the less he has of the spirit of song—the more splendid the flower, the less the sweetness of the fragrance.
“As to those serpents, gliding about, under every green tree the more dazzling and brilliant the silver and gold and coral rings that encircle them, the more deadly is the venom under their tongues.”
On that cautionary note, Hunt’s Incidents of Travel draw to a close. He returned to civilization, married, and sired three sons, two of whom lived to adulthood. As they reached their mid-teens, in the late 1860s, he decided to write up his Incidents of Travel “for the pleasure of my boys.” When one of them took up medical practice in San Francisco in 1877, Hunt returned to the land of his adventures, and looked up Benjamin Davis Wilson, one of his two companions who with him had crossed the desert. Having decided against a voyage to China in 1842, Wilson instead became a leading rancher—Don Benito, elected the second mayor of Los Angeles in 1851. One of his grandsons was to be General George Patton. It is a good thing Wilson survived that perilous journey.
Farnham’s lengthy book on California (1847) included two maps which label the Old Spanish Trail as “Dr. Lyman’s Route.” The author summed up what his “excellent friend, Dr. Lyman,” had shared: “An eventful journey—through an unexplored country of untamed savages, which the Doctor’s scientific attainments and interesting style amply qualify him to detail to his countrymen in a manner that would forever connect his name with the border literature of America. But to this end, I fear he can never be persuaded.”
Likewise, from a letter of March 19, 1887, handed down with the manuscript, we know that Hunt’s sister Sally enjoyed reading his Incidents of Travel so much that she wanted to see it published. She had met Benjamin Davis Wilson in California: “[He] told me of your reckless daring and the sharpies and villains who tried to provoke you at Santa Fé & of the success you had in winning them by your defiant tone. Your Honolulu and Tahitian experiences were delightful. Your Brazil scenery picturing exquisite. Indeed, we have had a treat & why should not others?…I want to see it all in print.”
The manuscript passed from “Dear Hunt” to his sister, my great-great grandmother, and so by a direct ancestral trail to me. Perhaps at long last his narrative will earn its rightful place after all. A young American with guts, resilience and decency forges ahead of the crowd and experiences countless dangers so deeply etched in his mind that he can recall them vividly a quarter of a century later. That speaks across the generations. Lyman’s recent audience in Santa Fe loved it. Why should not others? I want to see it all in print and podcast.
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