Talk:Rose-Baley Party/Temp

During the spring and summer of 1858, a large emigrant wagon train became the first to traverse Beale's 35th parallel route to Mohave country. A wealthy businessman from Keosauqua, Iowa, Leonard John Rose, known as L.J. Rose, formed the party with his family of seven, his foreman, Alpha Brown, and his family, and seventeen grubstakers, workers who were not paid a salary, but given food and board in exchange for their services. Rose was born in Rottenburg, Germany in 1827; he immigrated to the United States in 1835. He identified what motivated him to form the wagon train and leave Iowa, where he had built several successful businesses: "In 1858 some miners who had just returned from California so fired my imagination with descriptions of its glorious climate, wealth of flowers, and luscious fruits, that I was inspired with an irresistible desire to experience in person the delights to be found in the land of plenty."

To finance the venture, Rose sold the majority of his assets, and after paying-off his debts was left with $30,000, then a considerable amount of money. This enabled him to finance an especially well-equipped wagon train that included an animal stock featuring two Morgan fillies and a Morgan stallion named Black Morrill; their combined value exceeded $3,000. He also purchased twenty trotting horses and two hundred head of thoroughbred red Durham cattle, which he planned to resell in California for profit. To complete the train, Rose acquired four large covered wagons and six oxen to pull them. Three were loaded with supplies, and the fourth was used by Alpha Brown and his family. Rose's family traveled in a small wagon known as an ambulance, which was pulled by a yoke of mules.

In April 1858, four families from northwestern Missouri – two Baleys and two Hedgpeths – left for California. Several factors influenced their decision to leave the Midwest, including the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which granted Nebraska admittance into the Union as a free territory and Kansas the right to determine whether they would be free or slave-holding. The resulting tensions between pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups drove conflict near the Missouri border, with Kansas earning the unofficial nickname, "Bleeding Kansas". The ensuing violence affected Missouri's western counties, including Nodaway, where the Baleys and Hedgpeths lived. The financial Panic of 1857 further contributed to instability in the region, driving many European Americans to seek a better life in California. The combined Baley-Hedgpeth outfits were led by a forty-four-year-old veteran of the Black Hawk War, Gillum Baley, and comprised eight Murphy wagons, sixty-two oxen, seventy-five head of cattle, and several riding horses. They employed half-a-dozen grubstakers to tend their stock.