Rut

THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL (339 pp.)--George R. Stewart -- McGraw-Hill ($6.95).

George R. Stewart writes inanimate prose about inanimate heroes. His best-selling books--with titles like Storm, Fire, or U.S. 40--generally describe some vast entity of nature or engineering and its ef fect upon scores of tiny lives. His new book might have been called Rut. Its chapters are headed "1841," "1842" and "1843" and so on, as year by ox-drawn year he records the development of the overland route to California. Back and forth the reader travels, five times in the first 100 pages alone, until a pair of transcontinental grooves has been worn into the top of the brain.

But grooves like these should be worn more often. The California Trail is a proud and valuable book, researched with skill and a lifetime's attention. Its lack of flashing style can hardly defeat the record it offers. In this era of the third martini and the heart-saver chair, the story of the people in the covered wagons seems shockingly alien, as if they were someone else's ancestors.

Minor Nuisance. Many of them were kids, 19 or 20 years old, often newly married, with a couple of yoke of oxen and no fear at all. On a good day they could make 14 miles, and after two months of walking or jolting along, they still had 1,500 to go. When a baby was born, the wagon train would stop for a few hours. They were not the sort of people to die on the trail, and amazingly few did. In fact, the skeletons that are strewn all over the emigrants' path in Stewart's book are almost entirely the remains of oxen, milch cows, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Indians, he says, "were a minor nuisance, not a real hazard." A wagon trail to California was first attempted in 1841, and new tries were made each year, but no white traveler was killed by an Indian until 1845.

Later, when the Indians did strike from time to time, there is no record anywhere that they galloped around in circles twanging arrows into the ring of wagons, an absolutely pointless maneuver since the Indians would have been exposing themselves to rifle fire from protected riflemen. Instead, they laid siege, taking command of any springs or streams, until the white men's tongues turned black. But that was rare. Mainly, they hung around asking for handouts.

No Horses. No one used Conestoga wagons; they were too ungainly. Smaller ones, with boxes about 9 ft. by 4 ft., were popular. They were not called prairie schooners. When deep rivers were encountered, the bottom of the boxes could be covered with canvas or hides; off came the wheels and the vehicle became a boat. On land, they were pulled by oxen or mules, mainly oxen, because an ox cost only $25, a mule $75. No horses. Too weak.

While they were still in the relative East, they ate three-star meals, with hot biscuits, fresh butter, honey, milk, cream, venison, wild peas, tea and coffee all included in a single typical dinner. Toward the other end, they ate rancid bacon, mountain sheep, red fox, and sometimes boiled hides. When they were dying of thirst, they drank mule urine. While 47 of the 87 members of the Donner Party were dying of hunger in 1846, there was some cannibalism. "What do you think I cooked this morning?" said Aunt Betsy Donner one day. "Shoemaker's arm."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.