After a week went by and the Snowshoe Party did not return, as the earlier exploring parties had, we gave thanks that they’d made it across. At least that’s all you heard anyone say about it. No one would mention out loud that they might have got lost in one of those storms that kept us underground. It was too awful to think about. So mama and Milt calculated how much time it would take them to get back with a rescue team. Everyone had some kind of vision of their route, since Charlie Stanton had many times described his travels to Sutter’s Fort. He had figured six days to get from Truckee Lake to Bear Valley and three more to make Johnson’s. The next question was, How long would it take them to return? The first trip had taken him a month. He’d had mules to ride, of course, but then he’d also had twice as far to go. “If he’s lucky,” I heard Milt say, “he might cut that time in half.”
“Depending on the weather,” mama said.
“Depending on a lot of things,” said Milt, his crooked jaw working back and forth.
Everyone was counting on Charlie and Bill Eddy and the Indians. Some folks had given up on papa. If he was coming back, they would say with a scowl, he’d have been here by now. In my own heart I had not given up on papa. I still expected to see him any day, pushing through the trees. Meanwhile, I had another hero standing in reserve. His name was Salvador. I had his abalone amulet around my neck. Whenever the sun was out I’d keep an eye on the pass above the lake. I did not know if they would come together, or one at a time, but I knew they’d come.
In the first part of January, something happened to mama. She didn’t think she could wait for papa any longer, or for the Snowshoe Party, or for any other kind of party that might be coming toward us from the west. She was going to hike across the mountains herself, she said, and bring back help.
It was a crazy idea. We all begged her not to go, but she was frantic. We were nearly out of food. She couldn’t see how any of us could make it through a winter on the pitiful scraps remaining. Before the snow fell so thick and fast, we would sometimes capture the tiny field mice that crept into camp, and roast them, and make a soup. For a while mama had doled out strips of beef the size of your forefinger, each little strip a meal. About the time that was running out, she told us she had trapped a rabbit. It was already skinned, she said. That night each of us kids got a paw, and it was good, I have to confess. It was skinny but succulent. We sucked every last speck of meat off the little bones. We sucked the bones and held them in our mouths for a long time. The next afternoon I noticed that our dog, Cash, had been gone all day. I asked Virginia if she had seen him. I asked Tommy. We all asked mama if she had seen Cash. She couldn’t answer. She turned away as if she’d heard a noise somewhere. So we knew what she’d done, and I scolded her. I said I’d rather die than eat off the rest of Cash’s body. Virginia joined in. She was crying. “He came all the way across the plains with the family,” she said. “It’s like killing one of us!”
For all our tears and our remorse and guilt, once we smelled the next pieces cooking over mama’s fire—the skimpy legs, the ribs—we ate up every last morsel. There wasn’t much left of him, either. It still amazes me how Cash survived that long with nothing to nibble on but bits of bone and bark and who knows what else. But mama made that dog last a week. And I learned then that hunger has no boundaries. For me, at age eight, this was no different from what others would be doing in the days ahead. Cash had become a member of the family and we stood in line, James Junior and Tommy and Virginia and me, while mama served up his ears, his neck, his tongue, his very eyes.
After that we started eating hides, which boiled down to a gummy gelatin that was the worst-tasting mess I have ever tried to swallow. First you’d have to cut a hide into squares about a foot across and burn off the hair and scrape it down with a knife, then boil the pieces for hours and hours. Some people couldn’t eat it, no matter how hungry they were. It would make them gag and retch. What was worse, for us, the only hides we had were ones we’d used to cover the cabin. Not only were we reduced to eating this undigestible glue, we would soon be eating the very roof from over our heads. That’s when mama decided to try and hike out. If she took Virginia and Milt, she said, they could go for help, and it would also mean three less mouths to feed.
She had no idea what it would take to cross those mountains in January. All the food she had to carry was a few last strips of jerky she had stored away. James Junior and Tommy and me, we pleaded with her to take us too. We ganged around her, wailing and pulling on her skirts. She said we were too young to do the climbing. She said she was doing this for us.
“I’m going to bring you all back some bread,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like some warm bread to eat?”
I had forgotten what bread tasted like. All I wanted was to go wherever mama was going. How could she take Virginia along and not take me too? I hated Virginia.
“You have to be strong,” mama said to me, “to take care of Tommy and James until I get back. You’re the big sister now.”
“If I’m strong,” I said, “why can’t I go with you?”
“We won’t be gone long, Patty. We won’t be gone any time at all.”
The way she said this, my hatred for Virginia turned to terror. mama was past arguing or thinking clear. Her eyes were wild. While we three young ones stood and watched, she and Virginia and Milt moved out through the trees the way we had watched papa move out across the flatness of the hot, blank desert. I don’t have to tell you what it felt like to be that age and have both your mother and your father disappear into country that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Her crazy look was the same look I’d seen on the face of Elizabeth Graves the day Uncle Billy left with the Snowshoe Party. I realize now I knew something about Elizabeth Graves I had not known before. I knew where her screams had come from, though I myself could not yet scream.
Mama had parceled us out among the other families—James Junior to the Graveses, Tommy to the Breens, and me to the Keseberg cabin. We had never been split up like this, with the whole family broken into pieces. mama had told me to look out for my baby brothers, but they, too, soon disappeared, carried away to the other cabins, and I was alone, shivering in the snow, too scared to descend into Keseberg’s cave. No one had seen him for weeks. Maybe he was dead. I imagined his corpse lying down there in the darkness, and I could not move. Finally his wife Phillipine came up the snow stairs and said something in German and beckoned with her hands. Her eyes were full of grief, but she had a sweet and motherly smile, so I climbed down the steps behind her.
In the dim light I could see him lying under a pile of filthy blankets. His face was to the fire and his eyes were open, but he did not speak. I slunk down next to the wall, as far from him as I could get, which wasn’t more than a few feet, since their cabin was smaller than ours, just a lean-to built against one side of Breen’s cabin. I watched him a while, thinking maybe he had died with his eyes open. Then I saw his beard move. His blond beard had grown down to cover his throat. He was wheezing like an old dog underneath the porch. Later on, when he got up from his bed to relieve himself, he groaned and whimpered. The thorn he had stepped on, way back by the Humboldt, had festered until his foot was too big to fit inside his boot. It was dark and swollen and wrapped in rags. He could barely hobble across the room, let alone get up and down the stairs. I heard him pee against the wall. He staggered back to the bed and fell into his heap of blankets.
The foot couldn’t bear any weight at all. So Phillipine was doing everything. She brought in the wood and split the kindling. She brought in snow to melt for water. I helped her as much as I could. Their young child, Lewis Junior, was pale as chalk. He wasn’t quite a year old. Their daughter, Ada, age three, was sickly too and whimpering like her daddy. Poor Phillipine was at her wits’ end. I can still see her trapped inside that lean-to with Keseberg, who had often beaten her while we were on the trail, as everyone knew. She was only twenty-three, a small woman, and still pretty in spite of all she had endured. Every
one of us had traveled a good way to reach this stark rendezvous at Truckee Lake, but no one in the party had traveled farther than Phillipine. She had left a prosperous town somewhere in Germany to follow her husband across the Atlantic Ocean and clear across North America, hoping to make some kind of new start in life, only to end up in this smoky igloo with one child dying and another sick, and a gloomy tyrant filling up the room.
If he had any feeling for her, it didn’t show while I was in their care. His own pain seemed to occupy his full attention. He was too frail to hurt her much, but she still bore her fear of him and served him as if to ward off beatings later on, if he got his strength back.
Once in a while he would speak to her in German, in a gruff, demanding voice. He never spoke to me. Not one word, the whole time I was with them. I thought it had something to do with papa. I knew the two of them had argued. On the day they tried to hang papa, Keseberg had carried the rope. I remembered that rope. I remembered his hungry grin. I thought he hated me for being papa’s daughter. Much later I would understand that he would have treated anyone the way he treated me. He didn’t want any stranger in his lean-to seeing him so helpless, nor did he like a stranger anywhere close to his stash of meal and jerked beef. All we had to eat, my brothers and I, were pieces of hide, which I boiled every day over Keseberg’s fire. Tommy would come from Breen’s cabin next door and join me to choke down some of the sticky gelatin, and then I would take a gob over to the Graveses’ cabin for James Junior. A couple of times, while the Kesebergs were eating, Phillipine passed me little bits of meat, and he looked at her as if she had just stolen all his money.
I WAS ONLY with them four days, though it seemed like four months. One afternoon we heard a voice calling, “Help us! Help us!” a thin, cracking voice that would break your heart no matter who was doing the calling.
Phillipine and I scrambled up the ice steps and out into the snow, and there was mama stumbling through the trees, with Milt behind her carrying Virginia. I ran out and threw my arms around mama’s waist. She fell against me, just collapsed, and we both tumbled into the snow. I lay there waiting for her to move, but she didn’t. I wriggled out from under and said, “C’mon, mama, get up, get up. You made it back. You’ll be all right now, mama. C’mon, get up.”
She didn’t answer. I tried to lift her, but I had no strength. Thank goodness Phillipine was there. Between us we half raised her. By that time Milt had put Virginia down. He came and lent a hand, and we dragged mama to the cabin.
All three of them were near dead from exposure and exhaustion, too cold to talk, too cold to cry. Later on we would learn how they made it to the summit and a little way past, then lost the trail and wandered off for two days through drifts and crags. They had run out of food and slept three nights in the snow, tormented by the howls of timber wolves. One morning they woke up at the bottom of a bowl of snow. The fire they’d built had melted through the crust and made a hollow, and during the night they’d all slid to the bottom of the bowl. By sheer will they scratched and scrambled their way to the top. Virginia’s feet were frostbitten. She couldn’t walk. They saw then how impossible it was and so turned back. Providence had a hand in this, I know. If they had stayed one more night up there, or if they’d made it to Truckee Lake just one hour later, all three of them would have died in the worst week of blizzard we’d seen so far.
AFTER THAT MAMA was different. After she thawed out, the craziness left her. I never saw that look in her eyes again. She knew there was no way for any of us to leave that place, and there was nothing else to do but wait. It was a kind of waiting that was different from giving up, and in my mind this is a very big difference. When a person gives up, the spirit goes out of the body, a last gleam goes out of the eyes. By this time we had all seen someone die that way, not only from lack of food, but from hopelessness. They say this is what happened to George Donner’s older brother, Jacob, in the camp at Alder Creek. He just stopped eating, sat for days with his head in his hands, and finally gave up the ghost.
Given what faced us after she came back, I don’t know where mama found her reserves of hope. With half the hides gone from the roof, our cabin leaked so bad it was useless. We had to move in with somebody else. In that little snowbound world we were suddenly destitute, begging for shelter where there wasn’t near enough to go around. Keseberg had nothing but a lean-to. The widow Murphy still had eleven in her cabin, plus Bill Eddy’s wife and their two children. The cabin next to ours was filled up with fourteen members of the Graves clan, and Elizabeth was delirious half the time, calling out for her husband and accusing people of all manner of deception and treachery. Every day or so she would accost mama and demand payment for those two scrawny cattle she had sold us. Her eyes had sunk back into her skull. “You owe me!” she would cry. mama would walk away from her, and Elizabeth would shout mournful predictions into the wind. “Am I supposed to wait until my children waste away? You owe me, Margaret Reed! And God will punish you for all your sinful deeds!”
Mama knew she would not last five minutes in the same cabin with Elizabeth. So it was Patrick Breen who took us in, Patrick who had not wanted to see papa hang but had allowed him to be banished into the wastelands of Nevada. He said he’d let us in on two conditions. First, he did not have room to take Milt Elliott, who would have to fend for himself. Second, the Reed children should never have to see what the Breens had to eat. Patrick was a prudent man, who had seen right away what the future held in store. He had slaughtered all his cattle early, and jerked the beef, and started in eating the hides before his stock of beef was gone. As the third month of our isolation began he still had some beef and a bit of flour and some tea. “It’s our family’s food,” he told mama. “It’s God’s will that a man feed his own family first. But I would spare your young’uns the pain of watching others eat.”
Their cabin was sturdier than the others, built back in 1844 by another bunch who got stranded at that same spot. It was bigger than the others too, though not by much. Sixteen feet wide and twenty long, with a fireplace and chimney at one end. The Breens and their seven children were already packed in there like cordwood, and along came the five of us, filing through his doorway with our bedding and our patchwork bundles. A sheet was hung midway between the walls. On nights when we dined on snow water and the foul-tasting glue of boiled hides, we could not see their meat, but we could smell it, and we could hear their jaws working, as they muttered among themselves.
Some have written of Patrick Breen’s penurious ways and called him selfish and heartless for hoarding food while all about him people were slowly starving to death. Others have praised his generous spirit during those dark weeks, as a man who did as much as he could do with what he had. “Be thankful for this shelter,” mama would tell us. “Without it we would all be frozen stiff.” Still, you have to wonder what it does to a man, watching another’s children shrink while his own have food—especially in such close quarters. By that time we were so skinny there was no flesh on our lips. We could see the line of one another’s teeth behind the skin. I remember once I counted Tommy’s teeth while his mouth was closed.
IN THE BREENS’ cabin there would be two or three days at a time when you couldn’t get outside. We’d just sit tight, mama and the four of us kids, Patrick and Peg and their seven. As long as the fire was going, we could stay warm. The piling snow was a good insulator. It held in other things besides the heat, of course. Lice liked the warmth as much as we did. We all had lice in our hair and in our clothes. And the smells—I don’t want to linger on how things smelled inside that cabin with fourteen of us in a space the size of a chicken house, and Peggy’s youngest only one year old. It is just awful to think about now, with no way for anyone to bathe and sometimes no way to get outdoors to do your business.
We did a lot of sitting and scratching and waiting. mama would read to us when she could, though her headaches had come back and might keep her laid up for half a day. Somewhere along the way Patrick started rec
iting a Thirty Days Prayer. He would recite it both morning and night. The Breens were the only Catholic family in the party. Something about the dim light and Patrick’s voice made his cabin feel like a church, a little chapel in the wilderness. His readings had an eerie power that worked on me, and I know they worked on my sister, Virginia.
All we had for light were short pieces of kindling that we kept burning on the hearth like little candles. She would sit next to him while he read and hold up one of the pieces of kindling so he could see the pages. He had a high, reedy voice with an Irish lilt to it. After all these years I can still hear Patrick reading:
Ever glorious and blessed Mary, Queen of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, hope and comfort of dejected and desolate souls, through that sword of sorrow which pierced thy heart whilst thine only Son, Jesus, our Lord, suffered death and ignominy on the cross; through that filial tenderness and pure love He had for thee, grieving in thy grief, whilst from His Cross He recommended thee to the care and protection of His beloved disciple, St. John, take pity, I beseech thee, on my poverty and necessities …
Between prayers Patrick would read passages from the Bible. Sometimes he would read the same verse over and over and over again, as if trying to commit it to memory. One day he was reading from the story of John the Baptist.
“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight.”
Snow Mountain Passage Page 24