I tried to run, sure he would disappear before I reached him. I tried to call out, “Papa!” My voice stuck in my throat. The snow had been melting. It was soft. I couldn’t lift my legs high enough to run. I fell forward. Then he was over me, lifting me. I looked into his eyes. As he held me his face filled with fear at what he saw, and that made me afraid. I threw my arms around his neck. He hugged me close against his coat, against his chest.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” he said, “we’re okay now,” his voice soothing away my confusion, his voice sweeter than all those others I’d been hearing.
I still couldn’t talk. With my face pushed into the thick, scratchy wool of his coat I sobbed and sobbed. He held me until I got my breath and found my voice.
“I’m so hungry, papa. I’ve never been so hungry.”
“I know, darlin’. I have something for you that we baked last night.”
He set me down and fetched his pack, where he had a little cloth bag. He brought out a tiny biscuit about the size of a thimble. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. “Here ya go, darlin’. Just bite off a little bit. Eat it real slow.”
I ate that and he gave me another one. I could see the bag was full of these biscuit morsels. My heart swelled with new love for him.
“I knew you’d come back, papa.”
“You knew I wouldn’t leave my little girl behind.”
“Did you see James Junior and Virginia?”
“Yes, we did. By now they’re safe and sound in California.”
“Have you been to California, papa?”
“I sure have, darlin’.”
“Is it far away?”
“Hardly any ways at all. Where’s Tommy now?”
“He’s down below, papa. He’s sleeping. He sleeps most all the time. I tried to feed him whenever I could. But after a while …” I started to cry again. “After a while there wasn’t any more …”
The days and weeks of tears I hadn’t been able to feel came gushing forth. Again he picked me up and held me close and I felt his body shaking next to mine, like the day by the Humboldt when we cut away his hair. Then he put me down and gave me another biscuit and told me to sit still while he went below.
I sat there nibbling, each crumb a precious gift, until papa climbed back up the stairs carrying Tommy, so small against his coat he looked like a doll. Papa had been crying again, and he was trying not to. He didn’t have time to cry.
Patrick had followed him and stood at the top of the stairs. I don’t know what had passed between them in the darkness. Maybe nothing. They watched each other for quite a while.
Papa said, “I thank you, Patrick, for giving shelter to my children.”
“It hasn’t been easy here.”
“I can see that.”
“We’ve got our own.”
“I saw your boys up past the summit. They’ll be all right. Glover’s a good man.”
“They’re good boys too.”
And there they stood, meeting again, two men from Ireland who never cared much for each other in the best of days. For the first time in all these months I felt sorry for Patrick. He looked so shrunken next to papa, who’d left the company in disgrace and had now returned, weary from the climbing but in good health and vigorous after five months of constant motion, while Patrick had been mostly waiting, stiff from sitting and from nursing his kidney stones. In his eyes there was a look I now understand. His fear was that he’d be left behind, that papa bore some grudge and would rescue us but no one else. Knowing Patrick, the way his mind worked in those days, this is probably what he himself would have done, if supplies were short and there were weaker ones to contend with. The night Milt Elliott starved to death, Patrick still had meat in his cabin. Maybe he was afraid papa would find out about that.
At last papa said, “Get your family ready. We’re starting back right away, with everyone who can walk.”
He had brought along a bundle of flannel wrappings. He broke off some pine boughs and spread these on the snow, wrapped Tommy in flannel, and laid him on the boughs in the sun, saying, “It’ll be good for him.”
I have met people who still imagine we spent every minute of those months up to our necks in drifts and blizzards while we scavenged for firewood and scraps of food. Well, we had our share of blizzards, and there were more to come, but we’d had our share of sunshine too. And this was such a day. Though thick clouds had gathered at the summit, right around us the daylight was bright and clean. You could see every needle on the pines. Faraway jagged ledges of granite looked so sharp you could cut your finger if you reached out to touch them.
Three more men had come through the trees in their thick coats and snowshoes. You couldn’t tell by their hairy faces who they were, though one was so tall and broad he had to be Bill McCutcheon. The other men didn’t linger. They headed off toward Alder Creek, where the Donners were. I waved to Mac, and he waved a little wave to me. He didn’t move any closer. He stood back, waiting, while papa gave me two little biscuits to feed to Tommy and told me to stay right there and if the weather changed at all to wait for him down below. Then he joined Mac and they moved off toward Murphy’s cabin.
Much later I learned that Mac already knew what had happened to his little girl. Maybe that’s why he’d kept his distance. Maybe he was mourning so much he didn’t want to look at me and Tommy. Up beyond the summit, when they ran into the first rescue, Mr. Glover had explained how the cabins were laid out and who was still alive. Mac learned then that Harriet had been dead a month. I have often wondered how he took this news. Did it shock him? Or had he known it all along? Had he known in his bones that such a young one couldn’t last, and had he let her go long before he stood there with Mr. Glover and his men and the survivors, mama and Virginia among them, listening to the rushed accounts of what they’d find? I don’t think the news would have stopped Mac in his tracks. But neither would he have let her go ahead of time. No. He wasn’t that kind of man. His heart was too big. He might have bowed his head and thought about his wife waiting down at Sutter’s. But he kept on coming. That is what strikes me, as I think back. With nothing up ahead but grief and hardship, Mac kept on coming. He was like a man possessed. By the time they started off toward Murphy’s cabin he seemed to be bounding across the snow.
After a while Tommy said, “Who was that man?”
“The big tall man?”
“The man with the biscuits.”
“It’s papa, Tommy.”
“You sure?”
“He told us he’d come back, and he did.”
For I don’t know how long Tommy’s eyes had been so glazed over you couldn’t tell if he was seeing anything at all. They lit up now with the faintest shine.
“He brought this for you.” I held one of the biscuits to his mouth, and he took a small bite. I watched him swallow it. He took another bite.
“You sure it was papa?” Tommy’s voice was as fragile as a dried leaf, his body as light as breath. “Is he really here?”
I told him yes and held the biscuit to his mouth, watching him bite. I ate another one myself, real slow, and watched the path they had cut, praying they would come right back. I had almost forgotten about leaving that place. With papa there my hope was born anew. It was hard watching him go away again. I didn’t want to be left alone for long with Tommy. I didn’t understand why they had to go to Murphy’s, and I had no idea what awaited them. The fact is, many years would pass before it all came clear to me, what they found at the widow’s and what they did.
Everything that happened during those weeks took years to find out about, it seems. With the weather and the deep snow and the general fear and suspiciousness, you hardly ever knew what was going on anywhere but in your own cabin. Afterward it all depended on who you talked to and how much you thought you could believe, since they would always put themselves and their families in the best possible light, as people usually do. Some folks never talked at all, so stunned by what befell them, or so ashamed, th
ey kept their silence to the grave. The men from papa’s rescue party—the first ones to hike over to Alder Creek that day—they claimed they saw some of the Donner youngsters sitting on a log with blood running down their chins, eating Jacob Donner’s heart and liver. As you might expect, when this got down to San Francisco Bay, the paper jumped on it and bugled it around the world, just as they would today if they had the chance. Sell as many papers as you can sell—that comes first. Along the way, if someone happens to get the story right, or one-third right, well, that is welcome icing on the cake. Yet those same youngsters, after they were old enough to tell their stories, they would say they couldn’t remember any such thing. My friend Eliza Donner, who was four at the time, says the bodies of the ones who’d died at their camp were buried under so much snow no one had the strength to dig them out, even if they’d wanted to. They were like the cattle who’d been lost and covered, according to Eliza. That’s why it took so many years to piece those weeks and months together. To this very day you will hear people arguing until they are blue in the face over things they themselves could not have seen and that none of us will ever know for sure.
You take the Murphy cabin. We’ll never know exactly how things looked or what had happened in the days before the second rescue came, though by all accounts it was worse than anyone had imagined. Papa found Milt Elliott’s cut-up body outside in the snow. He could tell who it was by the face, which had not been touched. Other parts were gone. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch what such a sight would do to him. How do you look at the face of your most trusted hand? How do you look at the faces of those who cooked his flesh? When Mac and papa appeared in the cabin, widow Murphy fled. She ran out into the snow, laughing like a madwoman.
Lewis Keseberg was in there, and William Eddy’s boy, James, alongside Foster’s son. They were both about Tommy’s age, in about the same condition, or maybe worse. No one had been looking after them, even though the widow was little Georgie Foster’s grandma. They hadn’t been moved or been out of bed for days, both wrapped in filthy blankets, covered with lice, and calling out for food. If things had gone another way, that could have been me and Tommy. If the Breens had not taken us in the second time, this is where we would have ended up. Maybe papa knew that. Maybe he saw Tommy in the face of Bill Eddy’s boy. Maybe Mac was seeing little Harriet.
Papa and Mac took off all their own clothes and piled them outside, so they wouldn’t get infested with the things crawling around in the cabin. They filled a pot of snow and melted it down to warm water. They washed those boys, soaped their hair, rubbed them all over with kerosene from a bottle papa had brought along, and wrapped them in clean flannel so they’d be comfortable for a while.
Keseberg watched this in silence from his own miserable heap of bedding. I imagine he was like Patrick, with a headful of doubts and dreads, now that papa had returned. I have imagined him lying there with his thorn-punctured foot thick and purple from the swelling, the man who had tried to hang papa, had tied a gallows knot in the rope and in a blighted land where no trees grew had raised his wagon tongue, the same fellow who once stole buffalo robes from the funeral scaffold of a Sioux chief, filling our hearts with panic for days thereafter. Some have said this one selfish act brought on all the misfortunes that were to follow us clear across the continent. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe curses work that way. A man alone cannot bring down a whole wagon party, though certainly a man can darken the path of his own life. Was this perhaps on Keseberg’s mind? Did he feel the doom upon his shoulders as he looked up fearfully, wondering what papa and Mac were going to do?
He always kept a rifle near at hand. Maybe he thought of using it, or brandishing it that day. He would have had no other way to defend himself. I have imagined the rescuers, white and naked in the firelight, looming over him. Mac was six foot six, big-boned and burly. Papa was not a muscular man, but he was lean and tough, and he’d been eating every day. If they’d wanted to, they could have lifted Keseberg and carried him outside and buried him up to his neck in the snow and left him there to freeze. I have imagined papa considering something along those lines, and Keseberg bracing himself.
Papa said, “Lewis, can you walk?”
The haunted eyes grew round. He couldn’t speak.
“Just answer yes or no. Can you walk?”
“No.”
“Then can you take your clothes off?”
“Look here, Mr. Reed …”
He tried to sit up, but fell back wincing.
“If you can’t, we’ll do it for you.”
“Take off my clothes?”
“Can you stand at all?”
“Have mercy, please …”
“Which way can you move?”
“I can’t. My leg.”
“Have you a crutch?”
“A crutch?”
“Try sitting, then.”
“I’m not sure. Just leave me be.”
“We’ll help you.”
“I’m a frail man.”
“We can see that. We’re going to lift you now.”
Together Mac and papa got their hands under his back and shoulders, raised him up and began to remove his clothing. He was almost as bad off as the boys had been, evidently lying there for days.
“Please. No,” Keseberg begged.
“We’re going to clean you up a bit.”
“No! You can’t!”
The grimy coat came off, the scarves, the trousers, the layering of shirts, the long underwear that hadn’t been removed in weeks. I see them in that jumbled, fetid room, in the light of glowing logs, three pale men stripped of all their clothing. I see papa regarding Keseberg’s nakedness and still marvel that he could reach out to such a man. Seeing his foot and leg, papa knew they’d have to leave him behind. Maybe he saw another father there, a man with wife and children gone and nothing remaining but his hunger and his pain. With warm water he began to soap the bony limbs, while Keseberg sat hunched on his mattress. Choking back phlegm and spittle he begged them not to do it.
“Please. Please. I cannot bear this.”
“We need to clean you up.”
“But not you, Reed. Anyone but you.”
“Be still.”
“How can you?”
“We would do it for anyone. We all need cleaning up.”
Tears spread across Keseberg’s cheeks while papa bathed him and Mac oiled him with kerosene, just as they had bathed and oiled the boys, the same tenderness, taking care with each limb, attending to every inch of skin, the lice-infested places and places fouled with feces.
“Please, Mr. Reed. I cannot permit it.”
“Be still, man. We’re almost done.”
“I do not deserve this.”
Overcome, bewildered, he asked again and again, “How can you? How can you?” as they wrapped him in flannel and eased him back onto his bedding.
THEY LEFT SOME food, as much as they could spare—a cup of flour, half a pound of beef—for Lewis and the bedridden boys and the widow hiding somewhere in the trees like a coyote waiting till these strangers went away. Papa left two men to help with the boys until another rescue party arrived. He expected them to show up at any moment, a contingent from the cargo team with more provisions brought up from the river.
Over at Alder Creek George Donner was failing now and too far gone to travel. He had said his good-byes to his children. He was ready to say good-bye to his wife. But Tamsen still insisted she would never leave her husband alone. To this day I wish she had come with us. She was a woman with ambition. She wanted to open a school in California. She was smart and brave and still strong enough to make the crossing. George begged her to go. So did papa. But she said no, her duty was there by her husband’s side. All papa could do was leave another man at Alder Creek.
On the morning we started out it hadn’t snowed for quite some time. You could see old tracks through the forest and cut along the edge of the lake. This time I was not going to be sent back. I was goin
g to make my own way or fall over dead trying. Papa carried Tommy in a sling and gave me a hand when he could. Other men had younger ones to carry. In our party there were fourteen children. The grown-ups, Patrick and Peggy and Mrs. Graves, were so feeble they could barely stagger along. Papa hoped to be over the pass that first day. We only made two miles, about as far as Mr. Glover got before he split our family up.
The next day was a little better. We made four miles, which brought us to the end of the lake and the foot of the pass. But now we were a day behind, and food was already running low, after what they’d left at the camps. A cold south wind cut through us. Clouds were heaping high around the peaks. Papa knew what a risk it was, starting for the summit under such a sky. But there was nothing to go back to. The only hope lay ahead of us, hope that we’d meet the next rescue party before our supplies ran out, and that the darkening skies would get no darker.
Papa sent three men ahead to bring food back from one of the stashes higher up. That left four men from the rescue party and seventeen very weak survivors. I don’t know how we climbed that pass. I thought I was already cold. It got colder as we climbed. Every step was agony for me. Whenever I fell someone would pick me up. “C’mon, little darlin’,” papa would say, “we’ve almost got ‘er licked.”
I don’t remember reaching the top, though we did, sometime after noon. I wish I’d looked back. I’d spent so much time watching that pass from down below, I deserved a moment to turn and see where we’d been for all those weeks. At the time I couldn’t see anything but the next step and the next step and the next…. In my mind now I can pause and look out from that high promontory that had stopped us in November and nearly stopped us that day in early March. I gaze down from the summit at the icy ring of Truckee Lake, the one they now call Donner, and it’s odd to think that neither George nor Jacob ever got anywhere near the lake that is named for them. For that matter, they never got within a day’s ride of the famous pass that has made their name a household word—neither George nor Jacob nor Jacob’s wife, Elizabeth, nor Tamsen, who nursed her husband to the end. It tells you something about the way things get remembered. Hundreds of others climbed out that year and got through the mountains in pretty good time. But the party they have named it for is the one that almost didn’t get out at all. If they asked me, I would have named the pass for someone else. Maybe I would call it Charlie Stanton Pass. He and Mac were the first ones from our party to cross. Charlie crossed again to bring back those mule loads of provisions that got us out of the desert. He crossed it a third time before he lost his life trying to lead the Snowshoe Party to the other side. Isn’t that the kind of grit you name some place in the mountains for? And by saying this I don’t mean to take anything away from Uncle George, since he was a capable leader until his wagon broke down and he tore his hand open building a new axle. But it does make you stop and wonder about how things get named.
Snow Mountain Passage Page 31