By the time westward emigrants reached the Sierra Nevada, they had completed all but a hundred miles of a two-thousand-mile journey. Yet that final, brief stretch constituted a singular and frightening obstacle as testing as any they had yet endured.
Lying almost entirely within the modern state of California, the Sierra Nevada is the largest single mountain range in the contiguous United States. (The Rockies and Appalachians, although covering a greater area, are collections of geologically distinct chains.) Slathered across an area almost as large as the Alps are more than five hundred peaks that exceed 12,000 feet in elevation, including Mt. Whitney, at 14,494 feet the highest point in the country, save Alaska. Such pinnacles are the topmost portion of a vast and mostly subsurface mass of granite, actually consisting of hundreds of individual pieces but known collectively to geologists as the Sierra Nevada batholith. Millions of years ago, this underground behemoth thrust upward through the earth's surface, eventually transforming what had been a range of low hills into the majestic spires visible today. The boost was greater in the east than in the west, so that the mountains tilted as they grew, and the Sierra Nevada came to be a range with two starkly different slopes: precipitous on the east side of the summit ridge, gradual on the west. This geology mattered to the overland migration because it meant that as the wagons creaked slowly toward the final obstacle of the journey, they faced not a staircase of gently rising foothills but a dizzying cliff face of nearly vertical escarpments, some of which dropped thousands of feet from the alpine heights to the desert floor beneath.
As if to double the curse, the geological challenges of the Sierra are matched by climatic ones, for the mountains offer some of the snowiest conditions on the continent. On April 2,1772, a Spanish missionary named Pedro Font spied the peaks from 120 miles away and described them in his journal as "una gran sierra nevada"— a great snowy mountain range. The name stuck, perhaps because no cartographer could have devised a more apt moniker. Arrayed down California's spine from north to south, the mountains sit at a right angle to the prevailing westerly winds and, relative to other mountain ranges, are close to the ocean. Storms sponge up moist air over the Pacific and then are blown directly at the peaks. The clouds are pushed upward as they scrape against the western slope of the Sierra, an effect meteorologists call "orographic uplift." Air masses cool as they rise, and this cooling condenses the moisture back into water, which then plummets from the sky as rain or snow. As a result, the Sierra can experience extraordinary deluges, single storms dropping foot upon foot of heavy, wet snow.
The earliest meteorological records for the Sierra owe their existence not to a desire to measure the range's ferocity but to conquer it. When the transcontinental railroad subdued the Sierra with ties and track, Southern Pacific maintenance crews began to record weather conditions on a daily basis. Fortunately for the study of the Donner Party, the line goes right over the point at which the emigrants aimed to cross the ridge of the Sierra. Thus we have weather records for the spot dating back to 1870, the longest stream of meteorological data for any location in the Sierra.
The resulting picture is one of almost mythical snowfall. In 1938, apparently using a particularly conservative method of measurement, the railroad crews recorded a winter-long total of sixty-eight feet. Because snow compacts—the heavier new snow on top pressing down the old layers beneath—the amount on the ground at any one time is less than the seasonal accumulation, but Donner Pass can still feature extraordinary totals. It is not uncommon to have fifteen feet of snow on the level, and that is far from the maximum. In 1880, just a decade after the railroad opened, the diligent observers of the Southern Pacific recorded a depth at Donner Pass of thirty-one feet, enough to cover a three-story building.
TWO THOUSAND MILES FROM THE SLOWLY MOVING WAGONS of the Donner Party, a storm rose from the unruly waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Evaporation sent countless tons of water vapor pirouetting up into the sky, loading up the clouds like soaked sponges. Winds gathered strength until they howled across the whitecaps like a flood down a gully. The jet stream began to push the front southward, shoving it along at the speed of a hardworking freight train.
The storm smashed into the redwood forests at the mouth of the Humboldt River, almost up by Oregon, dropping sheets of rain that soaked deep down into the roots, ensuring another lush green winter at the ocean's edge. The heart of the maelstrom rushed farther south, cascading over the coast ranges, whipping through the Golden Gate, casting long and threatening shadows across Sutter's Fort. At last the clouds began their long climb up into the Sierra, aiming directly for the pass the emigrants intended to use. As the clouds rose, they cooled. Gaseous molecules condensed into liquid droplets; droplets froze into ice crystals; crystals coalesced into snowflakes. The flakes grew too heavy to resist the call of gravity. It began to snow.
THE NIGHTS WERE GETTING COLDER Early risers found the buffalo skin blankets rimed with hoarfrost and the water buckets glazed over with ice as thick as a windowpane. The peaks before them were sheathed in clouds, a sign of storms that spurred the prudent to push on as fast as possible.
Some families drove themselves harder than others, and the company again broke into pieces, the Breens and some other families in front, the two Donner clans lagging behind at the rear, an uncertain array of small groups in between. On October 31 the forward group reached Truckee Lake, a pristine swatch of blue that sits at the base of a massive, nearly vertical slope reaching more than a thousand feet straight up into the high Sierra. At the top lies the pass for which the emigrants were aiming, a notch between the peaks. If you are headed west from the lake, there is nowhere to go but up.
Snow covered the ground at the lake, the depth increasing with every added foot of altitude, but the lead families made a quick try for the summit anyway. It proved a hopeless attempt, for they had no guide. Charles Stanton and the two Indians from Sutter's Fort, Luis and Salvador, were the only members of the company who had been over the pass, but they were with some of the trailing families. Unable to follow the route through the snow, the lead group retreated to the lake and waited until the following day, when Stanton and some others caught up. They decided that the following morning they would make a try.
Some hung back, preferring the relative safety of the lake to the exposed heights above. William Foster dictated a note authorizing Milt Elliott, one of the teamsters, to buy mules and cattle in California on Foster's behalf and promising to pay for the animals once he arrived. The Breens, who had led the previous day's attempt, probably abandoned the second day's effort sooner than most. John Breen remembered them advancing no more than two miles before the heavy snows brought them to a downhearted halt. "We were compelled to retrace our steps in despair," he wrote.
Others forged on: the Reeds, the Eddys, the Graves family, Stanton and the two Indians. Lewis Keseberg went along, though he was too lame to walk. Weeks earlier, when he was out hunting geese, Keseberg had stepped on a willow stub that had punctured his moccasin and pierced the ball of his foot. As the party reached the Sierra, he still could not put weight on it, and so he made the great push up the mountains in a saddle.
Writing to her cousin a few months later, Virginia Reed remembered the start of that day's climb in almost plucky terms. "Well we thought we would try it so we started," she wrote. Rain had been falling at the lake, and some of the flatlander emigrants naively hoped that it had rained higher up the mountains as well, beating down the powdery snow and creating a firmer walking surface. Instead, they learned a hard lesson of life in the Sierra: Rain in the valleys is almost always snow at higher elevations. "The farther we went up the deeper the snow got," Virginia remembered. As on the day before, the wagons were soon abandoned in favor of pack animals, but the process was slow and troublesome, the oxen trying to dislodge the unfamiliar loads, the people grumbling and debating about what would be taken, what left behind. "One wanted a box of tobacco carried along; another, a bale of calico, and some one thing and some another," as Keseberg recalled.
One of the mules handled the drifts better than the others, so the animal was put at the head of the line to stamp down a trail, but in time it too began to pitch headfirst into the swallowing snow. Stanton and one of the Indians scouted ahead and reached the summit, but when they returned to urge a final push, they found a party collapsed in exhaustion. A campfire had been kindled on the snow, and the desperate and dispirited emigrants clung to it like a raft amid the sea. Stanton insisted that if no more snow fell the pass could be crested, but it was useless counsel. Whether from fatigue or despair, no one would move. They bedded down, intending to forge ahead in the morning.
But in the night, the storm that would prove the ultimate undoing of the Donner Party reached them at last. Snow pummeled down so heavily that it almost buried the unsheltered emigrants. Margret Reed tried to stay awake, brushing the snow from her children. Keseberg remembered waking at one point to feel a heavy weight pushing down on his chest, impeding his ability to breathe:
Springing up to a sitting posture, I found myself covered with freshly fallen snow. The camp, the cattle, my companions, had all disappeared. All I could see was snow everywhere. I shouted at the top of my voice. Suddenly, here and there, all about me, heads popped up through the snow. The scene was not unlike what one might imagine at the resurrection, when people rise up out of the earth.
Daylight brought a grim realization: The snow was far too deep to go on. Plainly, there was no chance of reaching the pass and descending the other side. Not that reaching the crest would have guaranteed their safety. A long slog down the western slope of the Sierra would have awaited, something that might have proved beyond their weakened bodies. Or they might have been trapped near the top of the pass, at high altitude and exposed to the weather's full brunt. They might have all died there, mere bones to be found the following spring.
But at least there had been some hope. At least they had still been moving forward, going in the direction of their goal. Now they could face nothing but the bleak truth. "The rest you probably know," Keseberg wrote years later, reflecting the resignation that must have suffused the group. They turned around, retraced their labored steps from the day before, and headed down toward the lake they had just left.
The bold and desperate vanguard of the Donner Party had failed the final, terrible test of the great gamble of their lives. Leaving as soon as spring allowed, marching an extra mile or two in the gathering gloom of dusk, seizing a promised shortcut in the hope of saving time and distance—all these had been aimed at a single goal, to cross the mountains and reach safety before the changing of the seasons wreaked a vengeful havoc. Now it had all come to naught. "We had to go back...," Virginia Reed remembered, "and stay thare all Winter."
James Reed reached Sutter's Fort just as his family and the others were approaching the Sierra. The first storm of autumn greeted Reed's arrival, sending a torrent of rain down upon John Sutter's keep.
At the fort, Reed found William McCutchan, the tall, bushy-haired man who had left his wife and daughter with the main party six weeks earlier to ride ahead for supplies with Charles Stanton. McCutchan had been too sick to go along when Stanton returned, but now, his health restored, he was ready to go back for his family. He talked with Reed, and the two men—both fathers with children in the mountains—decided to set out on a desperate mission of rescue. Sutter offered a discouraging assessment. Looking up at the peaks coated in white, the master of the fort declared ominously that the snow "was low down and heavy for the first fall of the season."
Sutter had fled his native Switzerland when a failed business overwhelmed him with debts. He made his way to St. Louis and then on to the West—New Mexico and Oregon and even Hawaii before finally settling in California, where in time he took Mexican citizenship. Blessed with a generous land grant from the territory's governor, Sutter built an adobe fort on a little rise near the Sacramento River, with Indian laborers to do most of the work and cannon in the guard towers to discourage marauders. He dealt in furs and cattle and brandy, and by 1846 Sutter's Fort was well established as both the end point of the overland migration and the hub of the burgeoning American community in California.
Sutter looked generously upon overland pioneers, either because he was also an immigrant or because they might buy supplies at his fort. When Reed and McCutchan resolved to launch their rescue effort, Sutter provided Indian helpers and some supplies—flour and a hind-quarter of beef. Reed and McCutchan lashed the provisions to a train of packhorses and set out as quickly as possible.
Optimistic and confident as always, Reed hoped they might not have to cross the peaks. Perhaps the wagons had slipped through the vise just in time and were already rolling down the western slope. If only he and McCutchan could get up there with some fresh provisions, the whole bruising trial might be over. Everyone would make it after all, safe and sound, to new lives in California. Perhaps they would even forget—or at least forgive—the foolishness of the Hastings Cut-Off and the ugly trouble with Snyder.
But as they climbed the western slope, Reed and McCutchan found no trace of their families, instead encountering a stranded and starving emigrant couple from another company. Desperate for food, the couple had butchered their dog, the last piece of which was now cooking in a Dutch oven. A storm had prevented Reed and McCutchan from lighting a cookfire, so they were famished, and Reed wrote later that they quickly accepted the couple's offer of a canine meal:
Raising the lid of the oven, we found the dog well baked, and having a fine savory smell. I cut out a rib, smelling and tasting, found it to be good, and handed the rib over to Mr. McCutchan, who, after smelling it some time, tasted it and pronounced it very good dog.
They provisioned the stranded couple, then moved on through snow that grew deeper with each added increment of altitude—knee-high, then up to their waists, finally so deep that the horses would rear up on their hind legs and crash down with their front feet, sinking until only their noses and the top portions of their heads were visible. Sensing the hopelessness of the task, the Indian helpers sent by Sutter deserted in the night, and the next day Reed and McCutchan abandoned the horses and forged ahead on foot. At last, still well short of the crest of the mountains, they could go no farther, "the snow being soft and deep," and they stopped to face the unavoidable.
Both men had every motivation to fight onward; their families were stranded up there somewhere. But then again, they would hardly be much help as dead men. And for all they knew, the trapped emigrants might not be truly desperate. When McCutchan and Reed left the main party—McCutchan in mid-September, Reed in early October—the Donner Party still possessed a small but decent herd of cattle. Only later, along the Humboldt River, did the emigrants encounter hostile Indians who killed dozens of the animals. Nor did Reed and McCutchan know where the emigrants had stopped. The location could have been worse than it was—atop the pass, for example—but it might also have been better. For all they knew, their families were trying to winter over at a substantially lower elevation, and doing so with an ample larder of meat on the hoof.
At last, prudence and reality won out over the urge toward a foolish if courageous heroism. The two men took a last longing look, and turned their backs on the mountains that held their families captive. "I state," McCutchan wrote a quarter century later, "that it was utterly impossible for any two men to have done more than we did in striving to get in to the people."
The crestfallen pair retreated to Sutter's Fort, where the proprietor validated their decision. Reed described how many cattle the company possessed when he was banished, and Sutter, unaware of the later losses on the Humboldt, did some rough calculations. If the emigrants butchered the animals immediately and froze the meat in the snow, he said, they should have enough to eat until the spring thaw made it feasible to bring them out.
The families trapped in the mountains did not know it, but their last slim chance of immediate help had vanished. They were on their own.
THE FIRST NECESSITY WAS SHELTER, and so the men rummaged in their wagons for axes and saws. In the wake of their final attempt at the summit, the leading group had carefully picked its way back down the mountain face, retracing the way toward Truckee Lake. As they descended, they could peer straight down into the basin that would be their home for months to come.
It was not a hospitable place to spend the winter. Sitting at almost exactly six thousand feet in elevation, the lake averages more than fifteen feet of snow each year. And although large—roughly three miles long and a half mile wide—the lake can easily freeze over during a cold winter, as it did in 1846, when the emigrants found it impossible to successfully ice-fish.
So why did the Donner Party stop there? Truckee Meadows, the welcoming valley where Reno sits today, is thirty-five miles east and fifteen hundred feet lower, a substantial difference in the dead of winter. The wagons had come right through the Meadows before starting their climb up the Truckee River, so the emigrants knew the valley was there.
It was an option that must have crossed their minds. George Tucker, whose family was in a company just ahead of the Donner Party on the trail—a company that had itself barely slipped over the mountains in time—wondered about a tactical retreat. Tucker's family had stopped to winter at Johnson's Ranch, the first settlement west of the Sierra, but they knew the Donner Party was behind them on the trail. Looking up at the snow, just as Reed and Sutter had done, Tucker hoped that the Donners and their comrades had retraced their steps back down the river to find a location "where they could winter their stock and find some way of sustaining life til Spring."
If the Donner Party considered that alternative, no one ever mentioned it in a diary or journal or letter, at the time or in the years to come. Partly it was the triumph of hope over realism. They kept thinking that perhaps they could sneak over the mountains—maybe there would be a break in the weather or a little rest would revive their strength—and so wintering at the base of the range kept them closer to their goal. So too would they be closer to the prospect of rescue. They knew Reed, McCutchan, and Herron were on the west side of the mountains, and any or all of them might return, just as Stanton had.
Then there was simple exhaustion. After nearly two thousand miles on the trail, giving back ground must have seemed a dispiriting idea. Who wanted to keep walking—in the wrong direction—just to drop a few hundred feet? How much better to stay put, to finally take a breather from the endless marching. "We arrived here betraveled, weary, already half-starved, and almost desperate," remembered William Murphy, who was then ten. "My friends, what would you have done, indeed? ... Behind you is a desert two thousand miles uninhabited to the Missouri River; before you is—what? There is no San Francisco, no Sacramento... no nothing."
But the most significant reason for staying at Truckee Lake may have been their ignorance of the territory into which they had wandered. Back at home, Midwest winters froze noses and turned fingers numb, but a storm was fierce if it dropped three feet of snow. For the most part, the men and women of the Donner Party had no experience with the kind of mountain climate they were about to experience, no idea that snowstorms could bury livestock or buildings or a decent-sized tree. In the end the extraordinarily deep snows of the Sierra Nevada would have much to do with their suffering, but in the beginning their expectations were a blank. The families must have stayed at the lake, in other words, in part because they knew so little about it. Had they understood more about their surroundings, they might have left.
Fortunately, one cabin already existed, which may have been another reason for staying. Two years before, another party of emigrants had been forced to abandon its wagons and livestock and cross the pass on foot. One man stayed behind to guard the prized possessions, and the cabin where he passed the winter still stood. It was in bad shape; the rain poured through a roof that was nothing but boughs spread across the top of the walls. But it was better than nothing, and the Breens moved in immediately, perhaps because they were the first to come back down from the final assault on the pass, perhaps simply because they were one of the bigger families.
The other clans pulled out tools and set about building shelters from scratch. They felled trees, dragged the logs to the building sites, hewed out notches at both ends, hoisted them up as the walls rose—exhausting labor under any circumstances, let alone for people who had just walked nearly two thousand miles. The Muiphys saved themselves some sweat by erecting their cabin against a huge rock, the face of the boulder serving as one wall. The Graves and the Reeds—or really the Reeds' teamsters, since the family itself now consisted only of Margret and her children—pitched in together, building a "double cabin," a large structure with a fireplace at each end and a dividing wall running down the middle, "leaving a few chinks in the partition through which we might talk to plan a way out of this prison," as Patty Reed remembered.
The smaller families found homes where they could. Amanda McCutchan found room for herself and her infant daughter with the Graveses. The Murphys took in William Eddy and his wife and two children. Stanton and the two Indians from Sutter's Fort managed to bunk with the Reeds. Keseberg apparently wanted a roof of his own, or perhaps no one would house him, but he was still lame from his wounded heel and could manage only a rough hovel, a lean-to really, banking tree boughs against the side of the old cabin that now housed the Breens.
As neighbors, they hardly huddled up with one another. The Graves/Reed cabin was said by some to be half a mile from the others, a ready reflection of the tensions coursing through the group. "Father built his cabin where it was most sheltered from wind and storm and wood near by regardless of company interest, I supposed," recalled Mary Graves. Patty Reed seemed to think that Franklin Graves led a slightly bull-headed bunch: "he. & all of his family, had minds & wills of their own."
THE TWO DONNER FAMILIES, INCLUDING George Donner, the ostensible leader of the enterprise, were involved in none of this, for they were miles to the rear.
Coming down a steep hill well before they reached Truckee Lake, the front axle broke on one of George Donner's wagons. The vehicle tipped, and the contents scattered into a heap. The two youngest children, three-year-old Eliza and four-year-old Georgia, were riding in the wagon, and their father and their Uncle Jacob rushed to pull them free. They found Georgia quickly and pulled her out, but Eliza lay hidden in the messy jumble, not answering her father's frantic calls. The two men tossed aside items until at last Jacob found his niece. "You would not have stood it much longer," remembered her older half-sister, Elitha. The men set to work fashioning a new axle, but the delay meant that the other wagons moved even farther ahead.
When the snow came the Donners were seven miles behind the rest of the company. Tamzene wanted to push onward and make a try at the pass, but her husband and brother-in-law ruled that an impossibility, and so they camped where they were, near a small stream called Alder Creek. They made a brief attempt at building a cabin, but the walls were only four logs high when a blizzard hit, rendering work impossible. The small wagons packed with possessions offered little room or comfort, so the families pitched what they described as "tents," although these may only have been quilts, coats, and other covers spread over boughs propped against a tree. An even cruder brush structure was also erected, variously described by survivors as a lean-to, a "shed," and a "wigwam." The conditions made the lake cabins seem luxurious.
In all, eighty-one people were trapped, about three-quarters of them scattered among the three cabins at Truckee Lake, the others at Alder Creek. The wails of babies competed with the giggles of toddlers, for the camps teemed with children, a reflection of the fact that the entire overland migration was a family affair. More than half of those trapped were under eighteen, and a quarter were five or younger. There were half a dozen babies.
WILLIAM EDDY KNEW HE WAS BEING GOUGED, but what choice did he have? Franklin Graves wanted twenty-five dollars for an ox carcass, and not even a good carcass at that. Alive, the animal had been mostly hide and bones. The remains were more baleful still. Back in Independence twenty-five dollars would have bought a full yoke, two healthy oxen ready to pull a wagon across the continent. Now it bought only a pathetic, emaciated carcass. From Graves's perspective, it was just good business sense, of course. For Eddy, it was an outrage.
The high price was perhaps the most striking example of the degree to which food supplies immediately became a paramount issue for the trapped emigrants. Larders varied from family to family. The Breens sat atop a hoard, for a good many of their cattle had come through unscathed. The Eddys, by contrast, had little. William Eddy started hunting and took a coyote the first day and an owl the next. But the meat soon ran short for a family of four, so Eddy set his jaw and agreed to Graves's exorbitant price.
Margret Reed stood in similar straits, dickering to save her children's lives. She promised that if others provided the Reeds with one cow now they would be repaid with two later, when everyone reached California. Given that her once-wealthy family had lost almost all its possessions and that her husband had ridden away to an uncertain fate, it was impossible for her to know if she could repay the debt, but the strategy worked anyway. She got two animals each from Franklin Graves and Patrick Breen. Sadly, the half-starved beasts provided little food. After walking nearly two thousand miles, they were so thin and weak that when they lay down on the snow they could hardly get back up again.
WHEN THE FIRST STORM HIT, snow fell for eight straight days with almost no break. To flatlanders from the Midwest and the East, it was a blunt introduction to mountain winter. Most families felt trapped until spring—building cabins was a sure sign of that—but visions of escape persisted. On November 12, almost as soon as the storm broke, about fifteen of the fittest set out to walk over the pass. They were almost all young and childless, although Franklin Graves, the independent-minded, fifty-something patriarch of his clan, went along, as did a couple of other parents. Stanton joined up, and so did the two Indians from Sutter's Fort, Luis and Salvador, which meant that the group had the incalculable benefit of guides who had seen the route before. Still, for all their advantages, they made almost no progress before the snow—soft and ten feet deep—forced them to turn around.
Eddy shot two ducks on the first day back in camp, but it was the next day that he hit the hunter's mother lode. He crossed the tracks of a grizzly bear, a notoriously ferocious animal that lone hunters typically avoided. A single shot rarely fells a grizzly, and in the age of muzzle-loading rifles, the significant time required for reloading could be a fatal interval. But two ducks will not feed a family for long, so Eddy pursued his giant prey. He saw the bear about ninety yards away, nose down and digging for roots. Hiding behind a fir tree, Eddy put his one spare rifle ball into his mouth to speed reloading, then took steady aim and fired. The animal reared up on its hind legs and charged, Eddy trying to reload as fast as possible. By the time he finished, the bear was virtually upon him. He dodged around the tree to buy himself another split second, then raised the rifle and fired his last shot. The bullet hit the animal in the shoulder, disabling but not killing it. Out of ammunition, Eddy picked up a club of some sort, presumably a tree branch, and hit the bear in the head with all his might, a blow that finally ended the battle. When he examined the corpse, he found that the first shot had hit the bear in the heart, a wound that would have slowed and weakened the animal. Had the first shot been less true, Eddy would almost surely have been killed. The animal weighed eight hundred pounds, but Eddy convinced Franklin Graves to bring out oxen and drag it back to camp. They got in after dark, dividing the meat among Eddy, Graves, and William Foster, who had loaned his gun to the rifle-less hunter. Eddy claimed he also gave some to the impoverished Reed family.
Lone and weakened hunters do not normally take grizzlies with just two shots and a club, and since Eddy was the only survivor who ever recounted the tale, there were those in the ensuing decades who suspected the whole thing was a fabrication, a grab for glory by a man renowned for bragging, or at least that the animal was misidentified, and that Eddy's trophy was not a grizzly but the far smaller and less ferocious black bear. But in the 1980s, excavations at the site of the Murphy cabin, where Eddy lived, revealed bear bones among the remains of cattle. Judging by the size of a bear tooth that was found, scientists concluded that the emigrants may indeed have eaten a grizzly.
THEY LUCKED INTO A RUN OF GOOD WEATHER—the nights cold but the days clear and warmer, the snow almost melting away completely at the lake—and a week after the first escape attempt, twenty-two people marched out of camp to try again.
They reached the top of the pass, even crossed it and started down the western side according to some accounts. But finally the mules could go no farther, the snow being too soft and the animals too exhausted. The only choice now was to kill them and pack out what meat could be quickly butchered or even just abandon the beasts to their fate. Then suddenly Stanton balked. He had promised to return the mules to Sutter's Fort, where he had borrowed them from Sutter himself, and Stanton intended to keep his word. He had returned to the entire company based on nothing more than a promise, and he would abide by his vow now just as he had then. Stanton insisted that he, Luis, and Salvador would take the mules back to the lake.
Arguments erupted. Turning around now was insane. They had vanquished the mountains and were heading downhill. Food was in perilously short supply back at the cabins. It was imperative that somebody get through to California, and here was the best opportunity. They had come so far, worked so hard, and now an unbending little man was ready to throw it all away just for a promise over a few mules. Sutter wouldn't want people to die for mules; nobody would. Sutter would understand that dire circumstances demand hard decisions. If necessary, somebody else in the company would pay for the damn mules. By returning with provisions, Stanton himself had already risked his life to give them a reasonable chance at survival. Now he was heightening the odds of their demise.
Through it all, Stanton stood as immutable as the granite mountains beneath his feet. Dedication to principle had calcified into obstinacy. He and the Indians were going back, mules in tow.
The rest of the little group considered its options. They could go ahead on their own, but Stanton and the Indians were the only ones who knew the way. An unguided journey through snow-covered mountains without a known trail was a near guarantee of death. Angry and stupefied, they turned back toward the lake with Stanton.
At nightfall, they were still high in the mountains, and the wee hours turned bitterly cold. The following morning broke clear and sunny, and they reached the cabins at midnight, grateful for the shelter, frustrated at the failure, and right back where they had started.
Patrick Breen took out a few sheets of paper that had somehow survived the cross-continental journey and folded them so as to fashion a small booklet. Inevitably, human beings record the circumstances of their existence—we paint our stories in caves or write them in books or record them on film—and Breen had decided to make himself the chronicler of the Donner Party's entrapment.
What prompted this decision remains a mystery, but he proved diligent at the task, writing daily entries for more than three months, never missing a day, not even because of Christmas or illness or hellish travails that would have sapped the resolution of most men. His entries are typically short, almost always practical, occasionally revealing a deeply held religious faith or a keen observation about his fellow emigrants. Taken together, they constitute the only surviving daily record kept by a member of the Donner Party during its captivity.
The first entry was made November 20, three weeks after the initial entrapment and the day before the escape attempt that would end with Stanton's stubbornness. Breen noted that the forward party had arrived at the lake at the end of October, had tried to cross the mountains twice before settling in for the winter, and had already killed most of their cattle, "having to stay here untill next Spring & live on poor beef without bread or salt." The next day Breen noted the departure of the twenty-two hikers, and then two days after that their sad reappearance: "the Expedition across the mountains returned after an unsucesful attempt."
Remarkably, the marchers—Breen called them "our mountaineers"—were ready to try again just three days later, intending to leave on Thursday, the 26th, so long as the weather allowed. But the evening before, a low and cloudy sly let loose a blizzard, huge snowflakes falling so thickly that visibility faded to a few feet. The storm raged for days, eliminating any hope of immediate escape and reducing Breen's diary to serial images of wintry repetition.
On the 27th: "Continues to snow. . .. Dull prospect for crossing the Mountains." On the 28th: "Snowing fast.. . . Snow 8 or 10 inches deep. Soft wet snow." On the 29th: "Still snowing. Now about 3 feet deep." On the 30th: "Snowing fast . . . about 4 or 5 feet deep, no drifts. Looks as likely to continue as when it commenced." On December 1: "Still Snowing. . . . Snow about 5 1/2 feet or 6 deep. ... No going from the house. Completely housed up." It was vivid testimony to the mind-numbing stasis of a Sierra blizzard, and in time it led the emigrants to a blunt realization that mountain weather could hold them as securely as any prison. In the midst of it, Breen was reduced to summing up their immobility in a single, gripping phrase: "no liveing thing without wings can get about."
Snow finally stopped falling on December 3. The night was clear, and although the sky was cloudy in the morning, the emigrants were hopeful. "Snow lying deep all round," Breen noted in his diary. "Expecing it to thaw a little today." The optimism proved premature, and a few hours later he was forced to add an addendum of resignation. "The forgoing written in the morning. It immediately turned in to snow & continued to snow all day & likely to do so all night." The real break came the next day, when clouds raced by in the sky but neither snow nor rain pelted down. "It is a relief to have one fine day," Breen wrote.
But the blizzard had effectively cut their food supply when they could least afford it. The remaining cattle and horses had been left unstaked—another example of the emigrants' inexperience with mountain winter—and now the massive snowfall simply buried the beasts, with no way for the emigrants to find the frozen corpses. At the Alder Creek camp, one of the Donner teamsters used a long stick with a nail on the end to poke down into the drifts, hoping to strike a carcass, but he had no luck. Even Stanton's precious mules were lost beneath the muffling layer of white, a tragic irony that made the circumstances of the previous escape attempt all the more heartbreaking. His determination to keep the animals alive now seemed utterly pointless. The cabins grew buried too. As the snow depth increased to the height of a man and more, the little huts increasingly sat in holes, depressions dug out by the occupants.
The physical marks of starvation follow a set pattern, and now they must have afflicted the emigrants. Cheekbones and ribs and shoulder blades protruded. Muscle-bound arms shriveled to sticks. Joints ached. Buttocks grew so bony that sitting became painful. Skin dried and scaled to the rough texture of parchment. Around the fire or across the cabin, emigrants stared at the kind of gaunt, skeletal figure that would eventually be associated with death camps. Irritability spiked, even among those who were normally even-tempered. The cold dug deep into the bones, more painful than in past winters. Blood pressure sagged so low that someone who leapt to his feet too quickly could faint.
Often, the emigrants remained "housed up" even after the weather cleared. "The people not stiring round much," Breen wrote on the 8th, although it was a fine day. Weakened by their diminishing rations, they were finding it "hard work to [get] wood sufficient to keep us warm & cook our beef."
By the next day, at least one emigrant had grown so weak he could no longer care for himself. Augustus Spitzer, a mysterious figure about whom little is known, had been living in Keseberg's lean-to, but now he staggered down the snow-steps leading to the Breen cabin and fell into the doorway. He was too weak to get up without help, and it was obvious that the harsh conditions of the lean-to were more than he could bear. The Breens took him in, though he was so enfeebled that he required nursing just to survive.
Stanton too was short on food, although his pleas for help landed on deaf ears, perhaps because of his role in the failure of the previous escape attempt. In his diary, Breen noted that some of the families had very little beef left. "Stanton trying to make a raise of some for his Indians & Self," he wrote. "Not likely to get much."
TWO WEEKS HAD PASSED since the children's clothes or blankets had been dry, and Tamzene Donner was worried. When the family couldn't get a fire started, she kept the girls tucked into bed even at midday in hopes of keeping them warm, but the idea hardly worked if their bedclothes were soaking.
In the tents at Alder Creek, it was getting harder and harder to maintain decent conditions. For one thing, labor was in short supply. When the axle broke on one of the Donner wagons—the accident that left poor little Eliza temporarily buried beneath a jumbled crush of household goods—George and Jacob went to work shaping a replacement. But as George Donner held the wood and his brother swung the axe, the tool slipped and came across the back of George's right hand, opening a long diagonal gash from the wrist almost to the little finger. An infection rose, and soon the arm lay useless at his side. Jacob Donner took up no slack, for he had always been sickly, and now a good many of the younger men began to fade as well. The result was that most of the work devolved to a teenager, Jean Baptiste Trudeau, a sixteen-year-old with a frontier background who had joined the company at Fort Bridger as a hired hand. It was Trudeau who searched for the animal carcasses buried under the snow, plunging downward with a long pole with a nail at one end, hoping that his improvised fishing hook might come up with a tuft of hair or hide to signify success. Memories varied as to Trudeau's work ethic—he viewed himself as a workhorse, some thought him a layabout—but whatever the details of his efforts, the relative lack of able-bodied men meant that circumstances at the Alder Creek camp suffered even more.
Dry wood was a treasure. Fetching it was a fatiguing and sometimes impossible task, and so there were the heatless days that imprisoned the Donner daughters in their beds. On nights when a fire had been kindled, a large kettle was placed atop the coals, and the children gathered round and pressed their hands against the warm comfort of the pot.
Tamzene struggled for a semblance of domesticity. Every morning, she took her daughters in her lap and brushed out their hair. Schoolteacher to the core, she entertained them with Bible stories as she loosened the tangles. Often she chose Joseph's faithful persistence through years of slavery or Daniel's deliverance from the fearsome horrors of the lions' den—tales of tribulation and perseverance and eventual triumph.
FRANKLIN GRAVES MADE THE CASE PLAINLY: There was no alternative but to try again. By early December, a month into the Donner Party's mountain captivity, escape parties had been forced to turn back repeatedly, and it would have been easy to lose heart and passively await rescue.
Graves would have none of it. He was sure they should try again to hike out, this time with better planning and equipment. Putting his Vermont heritage to use, he began to make snowshoes, sawing lengthwise through the oxbows, the U-shaped pieces of wood that fit under the necks of the oxen and attached to the yoke. The shape was suitable for the frame of a snowshoe, and by weaving strips of rawhide crosswise and lengthwise, Graves was able to fashion a reasonably effective sole.
Going from cabin to cabin, he recruited members for the proposed new party, mounting a logical and largely indisputable case. The more people in camp, the quicker the food supply dwindled. If a contingent of healthy adults took minimal rations and made a headlong push for Sutter's Fort, the remaining supplies might be stretched—just barely—until the hikers could summon help and return. It was a risky calculus, but unavoidable. "It is our only choice." Graves insisted. In his diary, Breen recorded the preparations: "Stanton & Graves manufacturing snow shoes for another mountain scrabble."
Two of the young teamsters, Milt Elliott and Noah James, set off on foot for the Alder Creek camp to tell the Donner families of the new plan. Stanton, industrious as always, found a small piece of paper and neatly wrote out a note to George Donner asking for a pound of tobacco and the loan of a pocket compass, "as the snow is so very deep & in the event of a storm it would be invaluable." He added that the troublesome mules were "all strayed off," and asked that if any of the animals wandered through the Alder Creek camp the Donners get news to the lake cabins as soon as possible.
But the same day Elliott and James left, the weather turned foul, and as a diarist Breen was once again reduced to redundant invocations of helplessness. "Commenced snowing about 11 Oclock.... Snows fast," he wrote on December 9, a Wednesday. Then on Thursday: "Snowed fast last night with heavy squalls of wind. Continues still to snow." And Friday: "Snowing a little." And Saturday: "Continues to Snow." And Sunday: "Snows faster than any previous day." Finally, after four and a half days, the storm cleared, and Monday morning broke sunny and fine. "Don't thaw much," Breen noted, "but fair for a continuance of fair weather."
Elliott, who had intended to join the snowshoe party, had yet to return from Alder Creek with the much-needed compass, but the clear weather was too good an opportunity to pass up. The hikers needed to leave immediately, and so it was decided that they would not wait for Elliott's return. He and James had walked away from the lake cabins on the same day the blizzard began, after all, and it was likely they had frozen to death before they even reached the Donner family tents. The snowshoe party would simply have to forge ahead by dead reckoning, one more handicap to an already hazardous undertaking.
INEVITABLY, PEOPLE BEGAN TO WONDER about the chances of their own demise. Franklin Graves had spoken of a morose expectation that he would die in the mountains, the victim of divine retribution for driving Reed from the party and abandoning Hardcoop in the deserts of Nevada. Still, it was a remarkable fact that after more than a month of captivity, no one had actually died.
That changed the night of December 15. Baylis Williams was a young man working for the Reed family, a mysterious figure whose sister Eliza was also a Reed family employee. Years later, Patty Reed wrote that Baylis was an albino who worked by night and slept by day, a peculiar description but almost the only one we have. We know nothing of his exact condition when the party arrived at the lake, and little of his deterioration thereafter, although given that the Reed family had almost no food it is easy to imagine that he slowly faded into weakness and starvation. Billy Graves, who was then seventeen, remembered that Williams lost his mind and eventually "was insane." In any event, on the evening of the 15th, as the snowshoe party was busy preparing to depart the next morning, Williams died.
There was little time for grieving, but the death must have played on everyone's mind. When the hikers tied on their snowshoes and walked away from the cabins the following morning, they knew with more certainty than ever that the families they were leaving behind could not last much longer, that help must be fetched or everyone would die.
For all that it is usually considered an unspeakable atrocity, cannibalism has a long and rich history. People have eaten people for thousands of years and for countless reasons: to appease gods, to honor ancestors or shame enemies, to cure disease, perhaps even to set a hospitable table for guests. Some stories may be exaggerated or even false; many of the more grisly versions were reported by European explorers eager to paint the natives as bloodthirsty savages in need of Christian salvation. But modern evidence suggests that at least some accounts are indisputably true. Archaeologists have found human remains showing the apparent signs of butchery or cooking, and a few years ago scientists studying a Colorado site used by the ancient Anasazi reported that they had found fossilized human fecal matter containing digested human tissue. Somebody, for some reason, was eaten.
Far better documented are more recent cases in which people who were isolated and starving resorted to eating human flesh because they had little choice, what experts sometimes call "survival cannibalism." Seafaring disasters produced the most numerous examples. Prior to the invention of radios or electronic safety beacons or airplanes from which a search might be conducted, a shipwreck or sinking often stranded people for weeks or months. Whether they were marooned on an island or drifting in a lifeboat, their only hope of rescue was that another ship, by purest chance, might come within sight. Often, other ships failed to materialize and eating the dead became the only hope for survival. The practice became so common that one authority on the subject described it as "normal." If a stranded crew managed to survive by some other means, they sometimes felt compelled to proclaim the fact to their rescuers, lest the typical assumption of cannibalism go unchallenged. Because there were so many cases, the chronicles of sea-going cannibalism are long and varied, and they illuminate the topic's dark history in striking ways.
One of the most closely documented examples occurred in 1710, after the Nottingham Galley set sail from
London, bound for Boston. The journey was almost complete when a December gale blew up off the coast of Maine and ran the ship aground on a small rock island, barely a hundred yards long and perhaps half as wide. The mainland was visible in the distance. The crew abandoned ship, and by the following morning all that was left of their vessel was debris: wood and canvas and a little of the cheese they had been carrying as cargo. Using the ship's timbers, they built a boat in hopes of escape, but the surf smashed it to bits as they attempted to launch. Later they built a small raft and successfully put it to sea with two men aboard, but they both drowned. For nearly three weeks they survived by harvesting what little edible material they could find: a few weeds and two or three mussels per day per man. They drank rainwater or melted snow. Then the ship's carpenter died, and the awful possibility of cannibalism presented itself. With no other choice, they cut up the corpse and began to eat. Three crew members refused to join in at first, but by the next morning they all did. The captain rationed the meat, and within a few days they were rescued by a passing ship.
Other cases were more gruesome. Occasionally survivors on a derelict would take a half-eaten body and hang it in the rigging, as if in a slaughterhouse. On one ship a woman was said to have cut the throat of her recently deceased husband, insisting that if his blood was to be drunk she had the greatest right to the ghastly beverage. There are records of sailors refusing to eat human flesh, but there are also cases where cannibalism began relatively quickly, as if sailors felt no great need to delay the practice until the last conceivable moment. In 1835 the Elizabeth Rashleigh, sailing from Quebec to England, grew waterlogged and had to be abandoned by her crew, which took to the longboat. They had a store of potatoes and were rescued in nine days—an interval survived by many modern hunger strikers—but the crew had already begun eating their dead shipmates. The following year, the Hannah suffered a similar fate while sailing from Quebec to London. The survivors began eating a dead comrade on the fourth day.
If nature failed to provide a carcass, sailors sometimes killed someone specifically for food, the result of a far more complex moral calculus involving a single sacrifice for the good of all. In 1759 the Dolphin was dismasted by a storm while sailing from the Canary Islands to New York. There were only eight people aboard, and they drifted aimlessly for more than five months. They ate their supplies, then their dog, the ship's cat, even their shoes. Finally, they decided that one member of the group should be killed and eaten, so that the others might live. They cast lots to pick both the victim and the executioner. A Spanish passenger lost the draw and was shot through the head. The others ate his bowels first and then consumed the rest of the body.
One of the most famous maritime catastrophes of the nineteenth century resulted in a similar decision by survivors of the Nantucket whaleship Essex, which had been attacked and sunk by a whale, the prey turned hunter. The crew was forced into the whaleboats and bobbed on the sea for weeks. As men starved to death, the others resorted to cannibalizing the remains. When that food source ran out, the four men in one of the boats decided to cast lots to decide who would be killed and eaten, believing that otherwise they would all die. The loser was a sailor named Owen Coffin, eighteen years old and the cousin of the captain, who was also in the boat. Coffin accepted his fate and gave the others a message to be delivered to his mother. Sixteen-year-old Charles Rams-dell, who was Coffin's close friend, drew the lot as the executioner. He refused his duty for a time, but finally relented. Coffin laid his head upon the gunwale, and Ramsdell shot his friend.
As a rule, such events rarely produced feelings of shame among the participants or scorn among the public. Survivors often made no attempt to conceal the evidence of their desperation. Rescuers found partially butchered bodies in lifeboats even when the remains might easily have been thrown overboard. In one extraordinary case, survivors trapped on a derelict signaled to a passing ship by waving the hands and feet of a man they had butchered and eaten. Whether the deaths were natural or the result of a lottery, cannibalism was simply, in the decorous phrase of the day, "the custom of the sea"—a horror defensible under the circumstances, much as men's behavior might be different in wartime than in peace. Surviving cannibals could go on to distinguished careers. The captain of the Nottingham Galley—the man who oversaw the consumption of his ship's carpenter—was later made the British consul in Flanders. The captain of the Essex was given command of another whaleship and later in life became the night watchman on Nantucket Island, charged with ensuring the safety of the community's young people by enforcing the nightly curfew.
Even when survivors admitted that no lottery was conducted before a killing, little punishment was meted out. In 1884 the British ship Mignonette sank in the Atlantic amid heavy seas, forcing the captain and three crew members into a dinghy. When the youngest member of the crew became violently ill and appeared to be dying, the captain took a penknife and cut the boy's throat. The survivors drank his blood and, over the next few days, ate his flesh. When they were rescued, the captain freely said that one man had been killed and eaten, and later he even demonstrated the technique to the authorities back in England. In a breach with tradition, the captain and one crew member were charged with murder, perhaps because they had conducted no lottery, perhaps because cannibalism by sailors was viewed by some as a relic from a bygone age. Still, most public sentiment hailed the men as heroes for having done what was necessary. The dead man's father forgave them, and they were granted bail, which was unusual for a capital case. After they were convicted, Queen Victoria commuted their sentences to just six months in prison. Shortly after their release, the British government restored their maritime credentials, and at least one of the men returned to a career at sea.
The case of the Mignonette came almost forty years after the travails of the Donner Party, but the emigrants heading west in 1846 may have known about earlier examples of cannibalism's long seafaring history. Then as now, shocking tales were a staple of journalism, and some examples had become famous around the world. Many cases had been recounted in books and poems and even songs. The Donner Party included literate, curious people, and it's entirely conceivable they were aware of the macabre imperative that had long been the sailor's last resort.
AS THE SNOWSHOE PARTY WALKED AWAY from the Truckee Lake cabins, the Breens—and perhaps a few of the others remaining behind—gathered outside to watch them go. If they braved the cold and stayed there long enough, they saw their comrades shrink until they were nothing more than a line of trudging dark spots, miniaturized against the daunting mountain escarpment up which they began to climb. Although the emigrants didn't use the term at the time, the group eventually came to be known by a poetic nickname that captured the moment's utter desperation, the idea that either this small band would succeed or everyone would die. The snowshoers, it was said, were "the Forlorn Hope."
Mostly they were the younger people, men and women in their late teens and twenties. Among the women, the oldest was about twenty-three. Several were parents forced into a cruel dilemma: stay with the children and watch them die, or abandon them for now so that they might be saved later. William Eddy left his wife and both his children, and could never forget the look on his wife's face as he departed. William and Sarah Foster left their toddler son. Two women—Amanda McCutchan and Harriet Pike—left children behind even though the fathers were no longer present, William McCutchan having gone ahead to California and William Pike having been accidentally shot and killed. Others at the lake camp promised to care for the children. The oldest snowshoer—the only one who might be counted as old—was fifty-seven-year-old Franklin Graves, who divided his family, taking along his two grown daughters and a son-in-law but leaving behind his wife and seven other children.
In all, the Forlorn Hope included seventeen people: ten men, five women, and two of the Murphy boys, thirteen-year-old Lemuel and ten-year-old William. They had only fourteen pairs of snowshoes, so one of the men and the two Murphy brothers planned to tag along at the rear of the column, hoping those in front would mash down the snow and create a firm walking surface. Limited to what their weakened bodies could carry, they each took a blanket or quilt but no extra clothing or tents. Among them, they had one rifle, a few pistols, and a hatchet.
For food, they took a little dried beef and some coffee and sugar. By strict rationing, they hoped to make the supplies last six days.
THE SNOW WAS EIGHT FEET DEEP at the lake, deeper as they climbed the mountain pass, deeper still in the drifts, and it soon became apparent that the lack of snowshoes ensured a hopeless lagging. The one adult with regular shoes, Charles Burger, who was always known as "Dutch Charley," turned back the first day along with William Murphy. They picked their way back down to the lake and eventually reached the cabins, cold and exhausted but safe.
The others climbed onward. The lake dropped away, a cobalt mirror plummeting to the floor of a great basin circled by a jagged crown of white spires. Hands rose against the glare as eyes peered down toward the water, five hundred feet below, then eight hundred, then finally a thousand, as though they had been magically whisked to the observation deck of a modern skyscraper. Smoke floated from the cabins in lazy curls, a visible reminder of the comrades whose hopes they carried.
They had entered a mountain realm about which they knew little. Snow covered everything. It deepened invisibly beneath their feet, like water under the ice of a frozen lake, until they were walking in the sky, reaching out to touch tree branches that would have soared above their heads in summertime. Drifts rose up like cliffs, tall enough to cover the church steeples back home. Walking near the back of the file, Mary Ann Graves gazed at her companions up ahead and was reminded of "some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs." By night, they built fires on platforms of green logs, so the flames would not melt the surrounding snow and sink them all slowly into a pit.
The reached the pass on the second day—Graves remembered it as "a very slavish day's travel"—and were met with a vista so stunning that it pierced their exhaustion. "The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice," Graves wrote. "Well do I remember a remark one of the company made here, that we were about as near heaven as we could get."
The next day they encountered a heavy snowstorm, "wind blowing cold and furiously," according to Eddy, who was apparently keeping a journal, a document that has not survived but that two men claimed later to have seen. One of them was James Reed, who eventually published what he said was a "synopsis" of Eddy's journal, which may be close to a verbatim reproduction. The pithy entries certainly read as though they were jotted down in the midst of the journey, when there was little time for writing. On the 19th, for example, three days out from the cabins, Eddy noted merely, "Storm continued; feet commenced freezing."
They were completely unprotected from the elements, struggling along day after day in clothes of wool and cotton that were either soaked with sweat and snow or frozen stiff as boards. They were in difficult, steep terrain and did not know where they were going. As rations dwindled, they could afford nothing but the smallest meals, if that. At night, lacking shelter, they simply stopped where they were, building their small fire and then huddling around it as temperatures plummeted and winds howled. In the morning, they simply rose and started walking.
At one point, Mary Graves thought she glimpsed smoke in a deep gorge off to the right. Believing it might come from a cabin or at least a campfire, she convinced the men to fire the gun as a signal, but there was no answer. She began bellowing down into the canyon periodically, but that too was met with silence.
STANTON STRUGGLED MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, as though all his past heroics had drained the sum total of his energies. Snow-blindness left him stumbling, and on the morning of the sixth day, December 21, he lingered by the fire smoking his pipe. One of the women asked if he was coming, and he responded that he would join them soon. Maybe they thought he really would follow. Maybe they knew he was finished and left him in peace. He didn't come into camp that night, and though they waited the next day, hoping that he might arrive, he never appeared. No one had the strength to go back and search.
Stanton had reached safety once, at Sutter's Fort back in the crisp days of autumn, and it would have taken a hard man to damn him had he chosen to stay and save himself. Instead, he kept his word and went back to aid a company in which he had no family or close friends. Now, in his hour of need, he had been abandoned to his fate. There was probably no other choice. A man can't be carried all the way out of the Sierra. Stanton, like the others, had to walk or die. But as he sat in the warmth of his dying fire, the irony must have struck him. In the spring, would-be rescuers found his bones.
BY CHRISTMAS EVE THE SNOWSHOERS HAD GONE without food for three days, maybe four. Eddy found some bear meat in his knapsack, placed there secretly by his wife, but there is no evidence he shared it. For weeks, everyone had been on starvation rations, and combined with the rigors of their journey, the lack of food for even a few days put them in a desperate situation. The women were still fairly strong, but some of the men were fading.
Like so many stranded sailors before them, the members of the Forlorn Hope began to mull over the most extreme options. Someone proposed a fatal game of chance, casting lots to decide who would be killed and eaten.
In a sign of their despair, at least some members of the group agreed, but it wasn't unanimous, and the idea was dropped. As an alternative, Eddy proposed that two men—it's not clear if he suggested specific candidates—each take a pistol and shoot it out, agreeing ahead of time that the loser would be consumed. But that plan too was rejected.
A blizzard roared down out of the sky, and they hunkered down to ride it out, too weak to keep moving even in good weather, let alone a screaming gale. Their fire went out, and in the raging storm they were unable to relight it. Eddy tried to use gunpowder, but the powder horn blew up and badly burned his face and hands. On Christmas, people started to die. The first was a Mexican laborer known only as Antonio. The next, a few hours later, was Franklin Graves, the man who helped make the snowshoes that brought them over the pass. There were stories for years afterward, perhaps true, that as Graves died he urged his daughters to use his body for food.
In a desperate attempt to find warmth, they created a makeshift tent by sitting together in a tight circle and laying blankets over their heads, letting the snow pile up above them. They avoided freezing to death, but the confined space was hellish. The blizzard howled relentlessly as they crowded together in their man-made snow cave, shoulder to shoulder, shivering and praying, blank and bony faces trading stares. Their only hope was to outlast the storm, to conquer nature's wrath with human patience, and so they sat there for three unending days, with nothing to do but try to stay alive. "Could not proceed; almost frozen; no fire," Eddy noted the day after Christmas.
In time the strain grew unbearable. Patrick Dolan, the bachelor who had traveled with the Breens, lost his head and stripped off his coat and hat and boots and ran out into the open weather, behavior that we now know might have reflected severe hypothermia. They wrestled him back into the circle, but he was too weak to recuperate. Sitting there among them, he died soon afterward. Next was Lemuel Murphy, the boy who had trudged on even when his younger brother turned back.
When the storm finally broke, Eddy climbed out of the huddle and managed to light a nearby pine tree on fire. Gathering around for the warmth, the other survivors sat there as if in shock, not even moving when burning branches fell from the tree. It was obvious they had to eat immediately if they were to survive. With the rapid succession of deaths, one of the earlier objections to cannibalism was now moot, since corpses were at hand and no one had to be killed. Still, the exact moment and manner of the decision remain a mystery. Relying on interviews with survivors, early chroniclers of the Donner Party glossed over the decision, perhaps out of a nineteenth-century sense of propriety. The first-person accounts offer a straightforward description of events, not a revelation of the emigrants' inner turmoil. Mary Graves, for example, said simply that after the snowstorm eased, the party traveled onward, "subsisting on human flesh."
The first ugly dilemma was who to eat. As a rule, people resorting to cannibalism almost always choose outsiders as their first victims, and, as much as possible, the Forlorn Hope followed form, trying to avoid the relatives of the living. Franklin Graves's body lay nearby, but his two daughters were still alive and present. One of Lemuel Murphy's older sisters was among the group. That reduced the choice to Dolan or Antonio, the Mexican laborer. Racial and ethnic minorities have often been the first victims of cannibalism, but in this case Dolan was selected, perhaps for a reason as gruesome as any that could be imagined. He had died more recently than Antonio, and in cases of survival cannibalism the relatively warm blood of the newly deceased is often the first thing consumed.
Deciding to eat Dolan's flesh was merely the beginning of a process that is almost as challenging physically as it is mentally. Human beings are large animals, and it is no easy job to butcher one. The captain of the Mignonette, forced to dismember the body of a dead crew member in a lifeboat, grew concerned that in the course of the arduous work he might actually puncture the hull of the vessel and sink it. To stay afloat, he used the boat's brass oarlocks as a cutting board. If Dolan's body was already starting to freeze, the work would only have been more difficult. In the case of a team of rugby players stranded by a plane crash in the Andes in the 1970s, the first man who tried to hack away some of the meat found that he could only slice off little strips the size of matches.
Once the butchering is begun, it often follows a grotesque pattern. A common first step is to disfigure the corpse, eliminating the grim reminders that survivors are about to eat a fellow human, perhaps a friend or relative. In lifeboats, the heads might be cut off and thrown overboard, sometimes the hands and feet too. If decapitation is not performed, the eyelids might be closed to avoid the disturbing blank "stare" of the dead. The heart and liver are often cut out and eaten immediately. Pieces of flesh can usually be cut from the arms or legs or torso, either to be cooked or consumed raw. To preserve the meat, thin strips are often dried, either over a fire or simply by laying them in the sun. Brain matter has been swallowed raw. Lungs have been eaten. Marrow has been sucked from bones cracked open with a rock.
The members of the Forlorn Hope cut pieces of flesh from Dolan's arms and legs and cooked them over a fire they managed to kindle. If their experience was like that of other groups forced to the same extreme, they ate the first small pieces haltingly, in silence, each person deep in private contemplation. The taboo dispelled, they moved to the other bodies after Dolan, eating some of the abominable meat and drying the rest so they could carry it with them. When they finally departed the camp on December 30, two weeks had passed since they walked away from the lake. Five members of their little band had died, almost all subsequently consumed as food. The Forlorn Hope was now reduced to just ten people, five men and five women.
By Eddy's estimate, they made four miles the day they broke camp and six the following day, which was New Year's Eve. They must have noted New Year's Day, but Eddy made no mention of it in his journal, recording only that they "passed a rugged canon," perhaps the deep crevice carved by the North Fork of the American River. At some point that day they had to climb the side of a gorge so steep that they grabbed plants growing from the near-perpendicular walls and pulled themselves up. They were wandering, heading generally to the west but uncertain exactly where they were or where they should go.
When their supply of human flesh ran out, they began eating the rawhide strings of their snowshoes. Then Luis and Salvador vanished, almost surely out of justified fears that the group might kill and eat them.
On January 5, Franklin Graves's son-in-law Jay Fosdick died and was cannibalized. His wife, Sarah, the oldest Graves daughter, forged onward through her grief. Eddy shot a deer the same day, but the venison seems not to have lasted long. They had been walking for three weeks, and now they were thoroughly lost, plodding through the confusing welter of canyons and ridges and ravines that constitute the Sierra's western slope. With Stanton dead and Luis and Salvador fled, no member of the group had ever been over the territory. About the only thing they could do was try to head both west and downhill. The result was agonizingly slow progress, and within days they once again faced the ultimate crisis: They were out of food.
THE LATE STAGES OF STARVATION ARE DIFFICULT to study, since obviously people cannot be denied food indefinitely purely to advance scientific research. Yet remarkably, some highly detailed observations about the effects of starvation have been made by individuals who were themselves starving. Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, produced an impressive study of the hunger they experienced and saw around them every day. So did British doctors held in Japanese internment camps.
Along with obvious physical changes such as weight loss, the doctors noticed striking psychological effects, among them a stark pattern of apathy and listlessness. Starving people simply lost their desire to act. They lay in bed, their faces pale, blank masks. Often, they were unable or unwilling to get up even to eat. In some cases, people died with food in their hands.
Ironically, enervation is often combined with irritability, as if starving people can find energy only for conflict.
In a landmark study conducted in 1944 and 1945, thirty-two volunteers at the University of Minnesota agreed to lose about a quarter of their body weight over a six-month period. All were conscientious objectors who had already shown themselves to be "sincere and upright" in civilian public service projects before the experiment. But as the volunteers' hunger deepened, scientists monitoring their behavior found that minor differences led to major disagreements. The men "blew up" at one another or grew annoyed with the kitchen staff, suspicious that perhaps the cooks weren't measuring the rations correctly. Some men refused to sit with others at the dining tables. Once, when one man licked his plate of every last morsel, another man told him that he sounded like "a damn cow" and stormed off. To gauge their social skills, they were invited to parties, but their behavior grew boorish. To measure their motivation and abilities, they were asked to perform tasks, but their patience and commitment dwindled. One man quit his job of walking a small child to nursery school each day because he found her behavior so infuriating and worried about his own decreasing level of self-control. Some of the men began stealing food or, in one case, items associated with food: china coffee cups. Many of the men had hoped for spiritual enlightenment, but instead, according to a summary of the experiment, "Most of them felt that the semistarvation had coarsened rather than refined them, and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be."
Desperate to keep moving and stay alive, the starving members of the Forlorn Hope fought off lethargy, but like the subjects of the Minnesota study, they fell prey to anger and division. Their cohesiveness as a group disintegrated. Near the beginning of their effort, they had waited, however briefly, for Stanton to rejoin them. They had also rejected the initial proposals for cannibalism, including those for a lottery or a fair fight. When they finally resorted to eating human bodies, it was only the flesh of those who had already died.
But now, suffering both the mental and physical ravages of extreme hunger, they began to contemplate murder. Accounts differ as to the precise plots, but it is clear that killing and eating each other seemed increasingly acceptable. The Graves family maintained for years afterward that Eddy had tried to lure Mary Graves away from the others so he could kill her, while Eddy insisted that the only other surviving man, William Foster, had suggested murdering three of the women for food. Eddy said he refused but threw Foster a stout club and then advanced on him with a knife, apparently trying to forcibly implement his earlier suggestion of a fight to the death, with the loser to be eaten. Some of the women separated the men before anyone was hurt.
When they came across tracks left by Luis and Salvador, all scruples vanished. Finding the two men collapsed and near death, Foster took the gun and advanced. He shot both men in the head, trying to justify the murders by insisting that the men would have died soon anyway, which might be true. No one intervened, and afterward the two bodies were butchered and eaten.
The deaths of Luis and Salvador were the only time during the ordeal of the Donner Party that anyone was killed to be eaten. The two Indians, about whom not much is known, probably had little choice but to accompany Stanton on his relief mission, but their courage is not lessened by that fact, and it is indisputable that they helped save the Donner Party before they were killed by one of its members. Several versions of the incident eventually appeared, including an account in an early Donner Party book almost surely based on Eddy's testimony, but in none of the stories was Foster condemned. He never faced legal punishment for his act, echoing the history of similar cases at sea.
The survivors had now lost enough altitude to be out of the snow, but even so it was difficult to keep moving. Eddy was shuffling so badly that when he came to a fallen tree, he couldn't find the energy to step over it. Instead, he bent down, put his hands on the log, and rolled himself across. They rested every quarter mile.
Finally they staggered across a trail and followed it to a small Miwok Indian village, where the startled residents provided acorn bread for these emaciated figures wandering out of the impassable mountains. Eddy could not tolerate the acorns, so he ate grass instead.
Even with help from the Indians, most of the group soon collapsed and could go no farther. Indomitable, Eddy willed himself ahead. Accompanied by Miwok guides, he walked eighteen miles in a single day, bloody footprints marking his path. A little before sunset, he approached Johnson's Ranch, the first American settlement on the western side of the mountains, and walked up to the small cabin of Matthew Dill Ritchie, who had brought his family over the mountains just a few months before. Eddy saw Ritchie's daughter and asked her for bread. She looked at him, registered his horrible condition, and burst into tears. It was January 17, exactly a month and a day after the members of the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake camp.
Fighting the coming darkness, men from the little community at Johnson's Ranch rushed out to find the other survivors, sometimes backtracking along Eddy's bloody footprints. The others were fed and then, the following morning, brought down and reunited with Eddy.
Of the seventeen who started with the Forlorn Hope, only seven reached their goal. Two turned back the first day, and eight others died. The survivors included two men—Eddy and Foster—and all five of the women, Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Foster, Amanda McCutchan, and Harriet Pike. Among the women, McCutchan was probably the oldest, and she was only about twenty-three. The others were so young that today they would be college undergraduates.
Four days after the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake cabins, Milt Elliott appeared out of the snow like a specter from a wintry hell. More than a week had passed since Elliott and Noah James, another teamster, set off for the Alder Creek camp. A blizzard kicked up the day they left and blew for five straight days, so the logical conclusion was that they were dead. "Thinks they got lost in the snow," Patrick Breen wrote in his diary.
But now here was Elliott, stomping the snow off his boots and turning his backside before the fire. He and James had reached the Donner family tents the day of the blizzard and stayed ten days, and then somehow Elliott managed to hike all the way back to the lake by himself. He bore sad news, for people had started to die at Alder Creek. Jacob Donner was gone, along with three young, single men: Joseph Reinhardt, Sam Shoemaker, and James Smith. The rest of the Alder Creek group was doing poorly too, "in a low situation," as Breen phrased it.
The next day, December 21, Breen endured a severe attack of what he called "the gravel"—kidney stones. In his diary he mentioned his quick recovery, adding, "Praise be to the God of Heaven." Religion was becoming ever more present in Breen's account, perhaps because Christmas was approaching, perhaps because he was seeking comfort and fulfillment amid the harshest of ordeals. Devoid of theology in the first few weeks, his little chronicle of events now turned to faith. "Tough times, but not discouraged," he wrote at one point. "Our hopes are in God, Amen." Two days before Christmas he began to read the Thirty Days' Prayer and then ended his diary entry with something approaching a benediction: "may Almighty God grant the request of an unworthy Sinner that I am. Amen." The next day, Christmas Eve, was warm, the wind blowing up from the south, and so rather than snow there was rain. "Poor prospect for any kind of Comfort Spiritual or temporal," Breen wrote, adding, "May God help us to spend the Christ-mass as we ought considering circumstances"
Christmas fell on Friday. The rain turned to snow, the most unwanted white Christmas in history. Breen was laid up with another attack of "the gravel" and had to rely on his two older sons, both barely into their teens, to gather wood for a fire. The family prayed together Christmas morning, but Breen couldn't shake a sense of doom. "The prospect is apalling," he wrote, "but hope in God, amen."
In the Reed cabin, the children stood wide-eyed at the fire, watching the boiling contents of a kettle. Margret Reed had secretly squirreled away a small stash of supplies, too small under normal conditions even to make a meal, but large enough now to constitute a feast: a few dried apples, a few beans, a little tripe, and one small piece of bacon. Thrilled, the children sat down to a Christmas dinner they had not dreamed of.
"Children, eat slowly," their mother told them, "for this one day you can have all you wish."
For the rest of her life, no banquet of turkey and mince pies and plum pudding ever tasted so good, Virginia Reed remembered later. "So bitter was the misery relieved by that one bright day, that I have never since sat down to a Christmas dinner without my thoughts going back to Donner Lake."
THREE-YEAR-OLD ELIZA DONNER GRIPPED her mother's hand as they approached a mysterious hole in the snow, smoke rising up like the sign of some menacing underworld. Eliza's mother, Tamzene, said reassuringly that they were there to see Aunt Betsy and Eliza's cousins, that there was a tent buried there much like Eliza's own, a little way away across the snow-filled meadow at Alder Creek, but when the little girl stooped down and peered into the chasm, she saw only darkness.
Eliza had not seen her cousins since the snows came and the wagons stopped rolling and her parents explained that they would stay in this cold and forsaken spot until spring. Afraid to go down into the unknown depths, she called out, but the hollow faces that peered up at her were hardly recognizable as the hardy playmates she had known only weeks before. "I was glad when my mother came up and took me back to our own tent," Eliza recalled, "which seemed less dreary because I knew the things that were in it, and the faces about me."
Both camps teemed with little ones in need of distraction, for the Donner Party was increasingly an assembly of juveniles. Most of the healthy adults departed in the Forlorn Hope, giving the hikers a better chance of reaching civilization and fetching aid, but leaving behind fewer adults to do the necessary work at the mountain camps. Then when Baylis Williams died and the sudden rash of deaths struck the Alder Creek site, the problem only worsened. There were now sixty-one people left at the two camps, two-thirds of them children. In the Graves half of the double cabin, Elizabeth Graves was alone in caring for eight youngsters. In the Murphy cabin, the only adults were Levinah Murphy and Eleanor Eddy. Between them, they were caring for nine children, five of whom were toddlers.
Childlike playfulness occasionally broke through the tragedy. Once, Eliza spied a sunbeam shining down into their hovel, spotlighting a little patch of floor. "I saw it, and sat down under it," she remembered, "held it on my lap, passed my hand up and down in its brightness, and found that I could break its ray in two." She let the delicious warmth play upon her head and face and arm, and then set her apron beneath this mysterious treasure to capture its glorious power.
She ran to show her mother, but when she carefully opened the folds of the apron, she was shocked to find that her little morsel of heat and light was gone. She looked back toward her play spot, only to see the sunbeam creep back up the stairs and, like so many other dashed hopes of the Donner Party, vanish.
FOOD SUPPLIES DWINDLED UNTIL PEOPLE began to eat what would normally have been considered inedible. The hides of the slaughtered cattle were cut into thin strips, which were laid atop the coals until the hair burned off. Scraped clean with a knife, the singed strips were then boiled until they reduced to a gelatinous paste invariably compared to glue. It could be gagged down, at least by the iron-gutted, although one survivor observed later, "That kind of living weakened my knees a little."
Chores grew ever more difficult. Gathering wood was especially laborious. When felled, tree trunks sank in the snow, requiring even more effort to heave them up and carry them to a cabin. Exhaustion and weakness deepened the isolation. Breen noted once that the weather would be delightful were it not for the maddening blanket of snow that blocked their progress and kept them prisoner, but even on sunny, clear days people were moving around less, stirring from the miserable cabins only when necessary. "Saw no strangers today from any of the shantys," he wrote on a day of cloudless mountain skies.
"Dutch Charley" Burger, the teamster who had turned back from the Forlorn Hope on the first day and was living in Keseberg's lean-to, deteriorated faster than most and at last, on an especially cold night, died. His few possessions were inventoried: $1.50 in cash, two handsome silver watches, a razor, a gold pin, three boxes of caps, the clothes on his back. His treasure was dispersed among the other members of the Donner Party's little German contingent. Spitzer took his coat and waistcoat, Keseberg everything else.
MARGRET REED PONDERED AN UNSPEAKABLY AUDACIOUS PLAN. Her family was once again almost out of food, and she had no way to get more. Few people had much left, and in any event she had nothing more to trade for beef or hides. She had already parted with the most valuable items she possessed—a fine watch that belonged to her husband and a medal signifying his status as a Mason. It had been hard to part with mementos of a husband she might never see again, but she had done it. Now there was nothing more she could do to get food. So she decided that she, two of her employees, and her oldest child would walk over the mountains to California.
In a sense, the idea was preposterous. For all she knew, the Forlorn Hope had marched off to its death, yet that group had been far stronger than her own. The Forlorn Hope had included fifteen of the strongest emigrants, most of them young adults in the prime of their physical lives, and had been equipped with the best snowshoes that the mountain-born Franklin Graves could construct. The Reed party, by contrast, would include just four people, one of them barely a teenager, who would plod off into the implacable snow with virtually no equipment of any kind. Worse still, the Forlorn Hope had left almost three weeks before, three weeks during which the remaining families had subsisted on the most meager and insubstantial of diets. Margret Reed and her family, in other words, were three weeks closer to starving to death.
But anything was better than sitting around waiting to die, so Reed set about the unimaginable task of dividing her family. The three youngest children—eight-year-old Patty, five-year-old James, and three-year-old Thomas—were too small to go, so their mother made the rounds of the cabins to ask if someone could take them in. Nobody wanted more mouths to feed, but to their great credit the Breens and the Graveses consented. James simply moved across the dividing wall that ran down the center of the cabin in which he had been living, switching from his family's territory to that of the Graveses. Patty and Thomas hiked over to the Breen cabin.
That left the four who would make the attempt at crossing the mountains: Margret, thirteen-year-old Virginia, and two of the family workers, Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams. They dried the family's meager supply of remaining meat and then bid an anguished farewell to the three younger children. "We could hardle get a way from them but we told theme we would bring them Bread & then thay was willling to stay," Virginia remembered.
The little band trudged off late on a Monday morning, January 4, the weather so fine that it seemed the spring thaw might be coming. The hikers paralleled the flat lakeshore, then made the long climb up toward the pass. Like many people in mountain terrain, they soon experienced the leaden despondency that comes from climbing to the top of a ridge, then gaining the crest and realizing that it is followed not by a gentle downward slope but merely by more of the same terrain, ridge after ridge after ridge stretching away to the horizon. "It was so discouraging," Virginia Reed wrote. At night, they would bed down wherever darkness found them.
Eliza Williams gave out after only a day, returning alone to the lake cabins, but the other three forged ahead,
Virginia at times crawling on her hands and knees. They finally stopped for a day in an overdue effort to make snowshoes, but eventually they too realized the hopelessness of the attempt and turned back. Virginia, by far the youngest of the group, had done well so long as the hope of salvation—and food—lay ahead, but once they began to retreat, her strength faltered. She nearly collapsed and one of her feet became badly frozen, but she persevered, and four days after they set out they once again reached relative safety at the lake.
But now they had no real place to live. There had been no time to build proper roofs when the company was first trapped, so the cabins had simply been covered with the hides of the butchered oxen. Cupboards bare, the Reeds had been forced to begin eating hides sooner than most families, and the only way to get them was to pull down their own roof. Margret Reed left a hide for her younger children to eat when she tried to escape, but it must have been one of their last, for by the time she returned the family's half of the double cabin was roofless, and thus uninhabitable. They had literally eaten themselves out of house and home.
Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams finagled housing where they could— Elliott with the Muiphys and Williams with the Graveses—but the rest of the Reed clan took shelter in the Breen cabin. The family's separation during the escape attempt had taken its toll, and the reunion was cherished all the more. "We could sit by the same fire, sleep under the same roof, kneel on the ground togeather and pray," Virginia Reed wrote later. "I never even think of that Cabin but what I can see us all on the ground togeather praying, some one holding the little pine Candle. I was very fond of doing that, and while we we[re] giving him light we were receiving light."
The Breen cabin was now more crowded than ever, but occasionally camaraderie flowered. The two families chatted, sometimes passing "pleasant hours" that leavened the sheer horror of their lot. "We used to sit and talk together and sometimes almost forget oneself for a while," Virginia Reed recalled. The few books they possessed went from hand to hand, read again and again to stave off boredom. Occasionally, even food was shared. The Breens still had some meat, and while Patrick Breen was apparently determined to hoard the precious victuals for his family, his wife, Peggy, could not help but slip tiny nibbles to the Reed children. In at least one case she thought it a gesture of compassion rather than utility, a way to ease suffering rather than sustain life. She was so convinced of Virginia Reed's impending death that she took Margret Reed up out of the cabin and onto the snow, out of earshot of both women's children, to suggest that Margret prepare for her daughter's demise.
As Margret Reed and her children fought for their lives, her husband was involved in a more literal fight. By the time James Reed arrived in California, the United States and Mexico were at war.
Beginning in the 1820s, American settlers hungry for cheap land poured into Texas, which was then a part of Mexico. The Mexican government, eager for growth in what had been a dusty backwater, welcomed the influx, but in time tension developed. The Americans chafed under Mexican laws that required Catholicism and prohibited slavery, provisos often ignored by the Protestant, slaveholding settlers. In turn, Mexican officials resented the truculent independence of the newcomers, who soon outnumbered the Mexicans. In 1830 the Mexican government prohibited further American settlement, angering the Americans who were already there. By mid-decade, the Americans were in revolt, and in 1836 they defeated the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won their independence.
For the better part of a decade the Republic of Texas trundled along, but the idea of American annexation loomed up inevitably, in part because the Texans were happy to be absorbed. Mexico had never recognized Texan independence, however, nor was there even agreement as to where the border lay. When negotiations on these issues faltered, President James Polk ordered American troops into the disputed border region, a provocative act sure to enflame Mexican sensibilities. In April 1846 a skirmish predictably broke out between Mexican and American troops, a minor incident that was seized on by Polk as justification for war.
Word of the outbreak of war reached the area around Independence, Missouri, in May, just as the Donner Party was setting out, but after that the emigrants had no way of getting news. They must have wondered what was happening, since their intended destination of California was part of Mexico, and thus as Americans they might be received as citizens of a hostile power.
When Reed reached Sutter's Fort in late October, he found that the war had in fact spread to California, and that newly arrived American settlers were organizing a volunteer military effort against the Mexicans. He and William McCutchan launched their valiant two-man rescue attempt, but when they returned to the fort and accepted the impossibility of an immediate winter rescue, Reed joined the war effort.
He rode south for San Jose, an old Spanish settlement below San Francisco, where he took time first for a little personal business. Optimistically laying the groundwork for his family's future life, he walked into the magistrate's office at the Pueblo de San Jose and forged his wife's name on a land claim. (He also submitted a forged claim for Baylis and Eliza Williams, two of his snowbound employees.)
By Christmas, as Margret was thrilling her children with their "feast" of dried apples and tripe, James was serving as the first lieutenant to a volunteer cavalry unit of American settlers. On January 2, as Margret was planning her desperate escape attempt, James and the other Americans engaged several hundred Mexican loyalists—probably themselves volunteers—in what came to be known as the Battle of Santa Clara. The Americans won the first skirmish, chasing the Mexicans from a grove of trees, although the Mexican cavalry soon regrouped and charged the Americans "in beautiful style." "They are, indeed, fine-looking horsemen," wrote Reed, who had so cherished his own acclaim as the owner of the best mount in the wagon train. The Mexicans alternately retreated and charged until finally the Americans found themselves at the bank of a small creek, their horses knee-deep in mud. "The enemy were popping away in fine style," Reed recalled, "and I do assure you we returned compliments without much delay." The Americans had the only artillery piece—"Every now and then the cannon would discharge at them," Reed said—and it seems to have made a difference. The Mexicans broke ranks, and that night sent a white flag into the American camp to ask for terms of surrender.
It was hardly the bloodiest engagement in martial history—the Mexicans eventually reported three dead and five wounded, while one American took a minor head wound—but it pleased the ever-proud Reed. "I am heartily glad that I had such an opportunity to fight for my country," he wrote ten days later to John Sutter. "I feel by so doing I have done my duty and no more, but I am still ready to take the field in her cause, knowing that she is always right."
More than pride, the little battle seems to have won Reed a promotion. In the wake of the victory, Reed was appointed by American naval officials to take command of the mission at San Jose. He took up his duties, but he also found time to improve his land claim by planting some pear and apple trees and even a little barley. Then he sat back and awaited what he hoped would be an early California spring. Warm weather would help the barley to sprout, of course, but far more important, it would give Reed another chance to try to reach his family.
Patrick Breen began the new year with a plea for divine relief: "We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present Calamity if it be his Holy will," he wrote in his diary on New Year's Day. But the failure of the Reed family escape attempt soon dimmed whatever flickering optimism the holidays had generated, and on Friday, January 8, the day after the bold little group returned to the lake camps, Breen summed up the company's situation with candid pessimism: "prospects Dull."
A new blizzard started cascading snow upon them, and by the fifth day of steady accumulation the threatening walls of white had climbed higher than the cabins. "Must be 13 feet deep," Breen wrote. "Dont know how to get wood this morning. It is dredful to look at."
Even the Breens' relatively bountiful supply of meat was coming to an end. Like other families before them, they resorted to increasingly desperate measures. Early in the entrapment, Patrick Dolan, who had lived in the Breen cabin until he walked away with the Forlorn Hope, threw his tobacco on some portion of his meat supply, a careless and foolish act that risked invaluable foodstuffs. In the month since Dolan left, the tobacco must have contaminated the beef in some indescribable way, but now the Breens were ready to eat nearly anything. They forced down the ruined meat but paid a price. The wretched fare sickened Peggy and Edward.
LITTLE HARRIET MCCUTCHAN SHRIEKED in agony. Lice. The hastily erected cabins and tents of the Donner Party had never offered comfortable accommodations, and as the entrapment lengthened, conditions worsened. The interiors were crowded and dank, redolent of sweat and smoke and mildew. Survivors sometimes referred to the "inmates" of a given cabin, and the analogy was apt. Weather trapped people inside for days. So did the weakness and lethargy of slow starvation. Bathing must have been a vanished luxury, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to wash the bedding and clothes, including the diapers of the babies.
Then there were the lice. Harriet, who was only a year old, suffered more than the others. Even decades later, Patty Reed remembered "the terrible screames of that poor little one." No parent could comfort the tot. Her father, William, had ridden ahead to fetch supplies from Fort Sutter and then been unable to return. Her mother, Amanda, had left with the Forlorn Hope, reckoning that the only way to save her child was to go and fetch help. The Graveses agreed to care for the little girl, but there wasn't much they could do about the lice. She scratched until she bled, so they tied her tiny arms straight by her sides. Then they tried to block out the fact that she was still screaming.
MILT ELLIOTT DID NOT WANT TO DIE with strangers. As the days and weeks wore on after the aborted escape attempt with Margret Reed, he felt himself fading and thought the end might come soon. But he was living in the Murphy cabin and hardly knew the people there. Margret and her children were over in the Breen cabin, and Elliott felt a yearning to be with them. He was, after all, a Reed by feeling if not by blood, so close to his employers that he called Margret "Ma." And so he dragged his failing body over to the Breen shanty, where he lay down just to the left of the fireplace and dozed off.
But if Elliott wanted to die in the Breen cabin, that was the one thing Patrick Breen was determined to avoid. Watching a man die might demoralize his family. They might lose heart, and heart was one of the keys to survival. Breen insisted that Elliott return to the Murphy cabin that was now his home. Breen had already taken in Margret and her children. That was enough to ask.
Margret Reed roused Elliott and helped him toward the other cabin. Along the way, she gave him a pep talk.
LIKE ELLIOTT, ELIZA WILLIAMS ALSO ACHED at the separation from the Reeds, her employers and surrogate family. She had found shelter in the Graves cabin, but twice she walked over to the Breen shanty. She was sent away both times. "She wont eat hides," Breen recorded in his diary. "Mrs. Reid sent her back to live or die on them."
TWO HUNDRED MILES TO THE WEST, in the small coastal community of Yerba Buena, residents awoke to find the streets and sidewalks and lampposts glazed with ice almost a quarter inch thick. They pulled their collars tight as they hastened through their morning errands, the better to get back inside and sidle up to a fireplace or a woodstove. It was, the old-timers said, an unusually cold winter.
AT TRUCKEE LAKE, SNOW STARTED FALLING again a little after sunrise on Friday, January 22, the flakes ghosting down in the half-light of dawn. By 10:00 AM. Breen had concluded that another blizzard was upon them. By nightfall the wind was screaming, the snow swarming down in a storm as horrific as any they had yet encountered. It kept up for the better part of four days, and when the storm finally broke for good, Philippine Keseberg walked over to the Breen cabin to say that her son, Lewis Jr., who had been born along the trail during the soft days of summer, had died three days before. If there was any comfort to be offered the grieving mother, it was that her daughter, Ada, was still alive.
ON THE NIGHT OF A FEROCIOUS BLIZZARD, Virginia Reed lay awake in her bed, listening to the howling storm. "I could not sleep," she recalled, "was lying there in that little dark cabin under the snow, listening to the pitiless storm, so cold and hungry." Physical measures suggested the hopelessness of their plight, so she turned to the spiritual.
Back in Illinois, she had been drawn to the local Catholic church, preferring its candlelit solemnity to what she regarded as the feigned and theatrical spiritualism of her family's tent-revival creed. The attraction deepened as she watched Patrick Breen read Catholic prayers by the glow of a lit piece of kindling, a visual echo of the luminous and shimmering Mass she remembered. Now, as the storm raged outside, she found herself on her knees, vowing that if the God to whom the Breens prayed so fervently would allow her to survive, she would join the Catholic church they cherished.
LANDRUM MURPHY HAD BECOME THE MAN of his family. At the journey's beginning, he had been a mere teenager, two older sisters and their knowledgeable husbands above him in the family pecking order. But his brother-in-law William Pike had been killed in a firearms accident back on the trail, and then his two older sisters and his remaining brother-in-law, William Foster, risked everything with the Forlorn Hope. Land-rum was left as the closest thing to an adult partner for his harried mother, now the caretaker for Landrum, three younger siblings, and three grandchildren.
Two weeks after the entrapment Landrum turned seventeen, an age when a boy's chief ambition is to become a man, and surely he took it upon himself to do what he could, to labor with the heaviest camp chores and comfort the smallest children. No longer a mere uncle to toddlers, he had become the surrogate father to a family.
The work wore on him. By mid-January, Breen noted in his diary that Landrum was "crazy last night." Two days later, the young man was "very low, in danger if relief dont come soon." A week after that, he was bedridden. His desperate mother walked over to the Breen cabin and pleaded with Peggy Breen for a little meat to give the boy. Breen consented, but by the time Levinah Murphy returned with the precious morsel, her son was too far gone to eat. A little past midnight on the last day of January, just a week after the Keseberg baby's death, Landrum Murphy slipped away.
IT HAD BEEN THREE MONTHS since they were trapped, and deaths came now in rapid succession, like the steady striking of a clock. Every two or three days word went around camp of some new fatality: Landrum Murphy on January 31; the McCutchan baby on February 2; the Eddy baby on the 4th; Eleanor Eddy, grieving her baby's loss, on the 7th; Augustus Spitzer on the 8th; and then Milt Elliott, still amid the strangers with whom he did not wish to die, on the 9th.
Survivors struggled to dispose of the corpses. Proper graves were out of the question—digging down to soil was unimaginable—so instead the bodies were merely hauled outside and covered with snow. The baby Margaret Eddy's tiny body lay in the cabin for three days, surrounded by people who were barely alive themselves, until finally her mother died and someone decided they should be buried together. John Breen, a teenager who had himself been ill, roused the necessary energy and laid them to rest. Margret Reed told her children that when she and Levinah Murphy removed Milt Elliott's body from the cabin, they were so weak they had to drag it by the hair.
IT WAS SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY how the Reeds' little lapdog Cash had survived this long. He was the last of the family's five dogs, the same animals that saved their masters' lives by providing a warm-blooded blanket against the cold winds of the Great Salt Lake Desert. With food supplies dwindling, there was nothing to spare for the little creature, and yet here he was, still barking and panting and nuzzling against the youngsters on the cold nights. Patty Reed thought that perhaps he had survived by catching crickets in the vermin-infested cabins. But in time, the family was faced with the unavoidable necessity, and Cash himself was sacrificed for the greater good. "We ate his head and feet & hide & evry thing about him," Virginia Reed remembered later. The grim canine stockpile lasted a week, and then the ever-struggling Reeds once again faced starvation. At times they ate an unappetizing mush produced by taking the bones from which the Breens had gnawed their sustenance and boiling them for days on end.
The Breens still had a little meat, but by and large they refused to share it, understandably calculating that it would be needed for the paramount goal of their own survival. Peggy Breen ached with anxiety, "very uneasy for fear we shall all perrish with hunger," as her husband put it in his diary.
The Graveses worried too. Breen noted in his diary that Elizabeth Graves seized the Reeds' scanty remaining property as collateral against some unspecified debt, presumably Margret Reed's purchase of two cattle weeks before. The seizure probably didn't mean much, since the Reeds had virtually nothing left and were no longer occupying their half of the double cabin they had once shared with the Graveses, but it was plain evidence that collaboration had irreversibly dissolved, that the Donner Party was beset with the petty imbroglios that invariably afflict any group of people confined together amid trying circumstances. Elizabeth Graves eventually took her bickering to a ludicrous level, insisting to Breen that his predictions of warmer weather were a sort of jinx, an ironic guarantee of continued freezing. Apparently she meant this quite seriously, since the normally ungrudging Breen wrote succinctly, "she is a case."
Nobody could hold out much longer, as Patrick Breen clearly understood. For weeks he had been hoping for a thaw, whether to aid the arrival of the rescuers or the escape of the emigrants. Again and again he had recognized what he thought were the signs of a changing season— the chirping of birds, the caress of the sun—only to be disappointed when the blizzards returned. Now, as if in recognition of their perilous state, he seemed to lower his goal, to aim not necessarily for ultimate salvation but merely for a fleeting victory over the snow that had so long held them captive. "We hope with the assistance of Almighty God," he wrote, "to be able to live to see the bare surface of the earth once more."