Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  Our campsite was underneath some trees. The men spread pine boughs across the snow and got a fire blazing up from big logs they laid crisscross. I was too tired to eat. I fell asleep and slept until snowflakes and a howling wind woke me, and here it came, the storm we’d all been dreading, a ferocious blizzard that caught us totally exposed way up there at seven thousand feet with nothing but our blankets.

  Everyone was yelling in the darkness, weeping and crying out and praying to God for mercy and salvation. The men rushed among the trees with their axes to gather more wood. If the fire went out we would surely perish.

  They stayed up all night feeding the fire, papa and Mac and the others on the rescue team. They used pine limbs to build a kind of windbreak, where the snow piled up as the storm kept coming, all the next day and into the next night, sleet and pelting snow and a wind more terrible than all the wolves in the Sierras yowling right beside your cabin. We’d run out of food, and you could hardly move, it was so cold. The men were exhausted and knew they needed rest. The second night they set up a watch to keep the fire going. Papa took the first round. He was nearly blind from working all day in the wind, half frozen, and weak from exposure. He couldn’t stay awake. He not only fell asleep, he fell into a coma. Mac must have been the one who found him. His voice woke me, shouting, “Jim! Jim!”

  Mac was kneeling there, shaking papa hard. He slapped him in the face. “Jim, my God, man!” He slapped him again. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Papa didn’t move. The fire was down to a few embers, with snow blowing so thick you couldn’t see. Mac was frantic. He leaned his head back and cried to the heavens. “Goddam this wind! Goddam this cold!”

  His voice scared me. I tried to sit up. I said, “Is papa sleeping?”

  Mac put his head close to mine and shouted, “Stay under them blankets, Patty! Stay next to Tom! Don’t move till I get back!”

  He disappeared into the raging darkness, and I lay there shivering, praying for papa to roll over and get up. It had been bad enough watching him ride off into the desert. It was ten times worse huddling under that awful wind, not knowing if he was alive or dead, and the snow piling up around me. It was the worst night of my life, by far, with nothing to do but lie there and wait for Mac and the others to bring the fire back.

  Later on I found out one of the men had split his hand trying to grip an axe. His fingers were so frostbit and swollen they just broke open. After that it was mostly up to Mac. He got the fire going again that night. Once it was roaring, he dragged papa in close to the heat and rubbed his face and arms until some circulation came back and his eyes blinked open. Then Mac was so tired and near frozen himself, he sat down by the fire and it burned through four layers of shirts before he felt the heat. His back was scorched and blistered, but it wasn’t a time you could stop and worry for long about a blistered back.

  The next morning, when the storm let up at last, they knew we had to push on, whichever way we could. Papa and Mac knew this. Patrick Breen, he saw it another way. All during the storm he had stayed beneath his blankets with his family, praying. Now he told papa he wasn’t going to move ahead. They would stay right where they were until another rescue party came along. Papa said anybody else in these mountains would have been caught in the same weather and there was no telling how long a person might have to wait. But Patrick had his mind made up.

  “We’ll stick it out,” he said. “We’ll hold fast.”

  “We need to stay together, Patrick. You have no food. No shelter here.”

  “We’ll hold fast.”

  Was Patrick crazy? Was he stubborn? Was he just tired of fighting the elements? Or tired of taking orders from papa? Or did he figure the next leg of this trip would be too hard on his younger children? Peggy had been carrying their one-year-old. One boy was three, another five. It was an awful decision to have to make. Every man was hurt, burnt, cut, limping from frostbite, weak from not eating. Papa still had trouble seeing. He blinked and squinted and rubbed a hand across his face like he was being assaulted by mosquitoes. Patrick too was nearly blind, his eyes half shut. He sat beneath his blanket like a mendicant monk, with his knees pulled up close, facing straight ahead, as if something out there reassured him.

  “Yessir. We’ll hold fast, that we will. Right here by these logs where it’s warm.”

  One more time I see them, under lifting clouds, at the place that would come to be called Starved Camp. And I think of how they’d looked when this journey was still new, back in Kansas, after we had crossed the Missouri, their wagons loaded and pulled along by fat oxen and their herds of cattle strung across the plains. Here they were, two stubborn Irishmen, and nothing left but the clothes on their backs, frozen stiff, arguing again about who should stay and who should go. It makes you wonder about what causes one person to stay put and not budge, what drives another to plunge ahead, and why any of us keep on going at those times when your whole being says you ought to just roll on over and give it all up.

  Papa knew we had no time to spare. He asked the others to bear witness that Patrick had decided to stay here with his family, out in the open, of his own free will. After he and Mac and the men had cut up three days’ firewood, we started off again, hoping to reach Bear Valley or meet the ones papa had sent forward, or meet the cargo team, or at least get to a cache of food. Mac carried Tommy. Papa wanted to carry me, but I saw he couldn’t stand up straight. He could barely walk. I told him I would be all right. Though I didn’t know it at the time, none of them believed I would get very far. I didn’t know how bad off I was.

  As the men pushed through the heavy drifts they left tracks so deep I was climbing from one to the next. I must have decided to try and cut a track of my own. I remember being in the middle of a wide white field that had no borders, and suddenly it was warm, instead of cold. The air around me was filled with light, and the light was warm, and my angels were coming back. I saw them floating across this field of white, tiny in the distance, far across the field of white, floating toward me. This time the music came from a chorus of voices, thousands of tiny angel voices filling the air while the angels surrounded me. They were the same color as the snow. They were pure white. It was a blinding white, with a pure light that shone through as they floated. This time I was floating among them. I felt like I too was an angel in the snow. I danced with them and sang with them, my voice joined theirs, as I sang out their names. They were all familiar to me. We were angels together. I knew all their names.

  I was dancing in the whiteness, whirling my arms, floating on a blanket of white angel wings. I felt no weight. It was pure light. I too had wings. When I felt strange arms wrap around me, I tried to pull away. These were not the arms I wanted, human arms bulging with cloth. I reached for the snowbright angels, but papa’s voice was saying, “Patty. Patty. Get up now, darlin’. Get up. It’s me. It’s papa. C’mon. C’mon now.”

  If I’d had the strength to cry I would have. I wanted to go with them. I could have. I was ready to. The cold came creeping in again, so cold it hurt all through my body, hurt my feet, my hands. I watched my angels float away and disappear. It was papa brought me back. He rubbed my hands and feet and neck and arms and found the last scrap of food that could be found for twenty miles in any direction. It was just crumbs, this pitiful thimbleful of crumbs and specks of leftover bread crust he had scraped from the bottom of a sack sometime before we set out. It reminds me now of things you hear people say to exaggerate how much food was consumed at a holiday dinner. “Ol’ Walter, he scraped up every last crumb on his plate and he hollered out for more.” Well, that is literally what it had come to. That’s how close we were to starving.

  Papa had stuffed a mash of crumbs about the size of a large pecan down into the end of one finger of his glove, saving it for the direst moment, which, in his view, now had come. In the hope that he could call me back toward the living he put these crumbs onto his own lips to soften and moisten and warm them. Then he placed them on my lips so I could draw
them in. I swear to you I can still recall the taste, for I had not had a morsel to swallow in forty-eight hours. It was the sweet clear taste of grain. If you know the taste of biscuits made from wheat flour without much salt and left standing a day or two—it was just a dusty whisper of that taste. I guess it reminded my body it was still alive and still had things to do.

  I opened my eyes and saw his face very close, his skin burned bright red and blistered white by the wind, his eyes bloodshot and raw and cold and strained with the fear that I would die right there in front of him. Then his eyes squeezed shut a little, toward a painful, broken smile.

  “That’s my Patty. C’mon now, darlin’, we’re going to make it now. We’re all going to make it through.”

  From then on he carried me. I was half dreaming, dozing in and out. I don’t remember much about the next few days. The men were so feeble from lack of food they moved along like cripples and often had to stop and rest. I knew we passed some others going in with another rescue team. Much later I would learn that they found the Breens at the bottom of a deep pit the fire had melted down through twenty-five feet of snow. They’d spent a week up there with no shelter and nothing to eat but the wasted bodies of Betsy Graves and her young son and one of the Donner children who’d died on the worst night of the storm.

  Poor Betsy, who’d given mama so much grief over those two pitiful cattle, she too had stayed behind, afraid to move on. She died from exposure the day after we left, then she kept the Breens alive until the third rescue got there. And who can judge them for the taking of such flesh? Surely not I.

  If things had gone another way, that could have been us at Starved Camp. That could well have been us. Another blizzard, another couple of nights like the ones we’d had—who knows what our little party would have resorted to? Who knows how close any one of us might have come to ending up like the Breens?

  Luckily papa spied some food hanging from a pine limb, left by the men he’d sent forward before we started the summit climb. More should have been stashed along the way, but bears and martens had broken into the packages. The men themselves, they were caught in the same storm that stopped the rest of us and barely got out with their lives. It was one mishap piled upon the next. All those well-laid plans had been broken into pieces by the weather and hungry animals and the awful distances you had to cover on foot and the slow pace of emaciated children, along with the unexplainable absence of the cargo team—which was not all that unexplainable once you found out what a task they’d had fighting the Sacramento River in flood time.

  Somewhere above Bear Valley we finally ran into their advance party, and from that day onward there was enough for all of us to eat. At Mule Springs animals were waiting, and relief crews. Pretty soon we were low enough on the western slope you could see patches of good green earth again. Another day brought us out to Johnson’s Ranch.

  Papa had rigged another sling to carry me on his back, and I clung to him the way I’d held to Salvador when we followed the Truckee west out of the desert. I was wishing we could ride on like that forever. We would ride to the ocean and plant vegetables and live off the land. We would take Tommy with us, of course. But mainly we would just keep on riding. I didn’t think about mama. I realize now I wasn’t letting myself think about her. In my mind I could see Virginia and James Junior somewhere up ahead, looking just as they’d looked before we left Springfield. I did not see mama.

  It was forty miles from Johnson’s to the ranch where they were staying. I didn’t see her until we reached the gate. She’d been waiting there for days, and her eyes were brimming over with relief and love and pain and heartache. Some ranch hands lifted me out of the sling. She scooped me up. It wasn’t forgiveness I felt. There was nothing to forgive. I guess I was wiser than I had been. In that instant I knew her. I knew all she had endured. A great warmth poured through me, sadness and gratitude all swelling together.

  While mama held me, a cloud of ducks flew past. It was the middle of March. Weak as I was, it made the spirit soar to see all that green, flat country, so well watered, right on the edge of bursting forth, with living creatures everywhere you looked, or so it seemed to me. It could have been the first day of creation, and that flock of ducks had just been born among the tules. In the whole history of the world they were the first ducks to swarm up from the banks of the wide river and try their wings.

  SOONER OR LATER we all straggled down out of the snow, the families who’d survived, and the pieces of families. Six months earlier there’d been eighty-seven in our wagon party. All told, forty-eight had come through the winter, among them Patrick and Peggy and their seven kids. After the third rescue team helped them get to Sutter’s, they sat still again, while they built up enough strength to move. There’d been days when I hated Patrick, but I see now I’d already left my hatred back in the mountains that had set so many demons loose. Everyone knew the grim details of how they’d fed themselves at Starved Camp. It was another story the reporters could not leave alone. Around the fort people would watch them with covert eyes or sometimes stare with shameless and undisguised fascination. “It’s awful to think about,” you’d hear someone mutter. “Still, you got to give ‘em credit. They brought every last one of their young’uns through, they surely did.” Before long the Breens were heading south, away from so many questioning eyes, to a warm valley where a Franciscan padre befriended them, gave them a sheltered place to camp and heal.

  The last one to leave the cabins was Lewis Keseberg. When the fourth and final rescue team reached Truckee Lake, they found him alone, still nursing his infected foot, surviving on the remains of those who’d died around him, various children, the widow Murphy, and Tamsen Donner too, who’d stayed with her husband to the end. The fellows who brought Keseberg out described detestable sights inside his den, kettles where flesh was cooking, arm and leg bones strewn indoors and out. During his weeks of solitude, they said, his humanity had slipped away, he had become a monster, addicted to his ghastly diet. Once they all got back to Sutter’s, Keseberg disputed these charges, claiming his only other choice was death by starvation. But few listened. He became an outcast. Boys threw rocks and called him “cannibal.” He felt safer on the river, for a while working as a schooner pilot, thanks to Captain Sutter, who took pity on him, perhaps because they both spoke German and had relatives back in Europe.

  It was a season for pity. Everyone, it seems, found a benefactor. The rancher who took us in said we could stay through the summer if need be, and for a month or so it looked like we would. The trek out had nearly broken papa’s health. For two weeks he was laid up, his toes frostbitten, his hands bent like claws. He’d lost some sight in one eye. For that matter we were all laid up. Tommy almost died. He was like a campfire that dwindles down to the last dim glow of the final ember. Little by little, mama brought him back, though for months he couldn’t walk more than fifteen or twenty minutes before he’d lose his breath.

  About the time we all got to where we could hobble around and take short hikes across the field, a wagon appeared in the yard one afternoon. It was something like the wagons we’d left in the Salt Desert, a mule-drawn Conestoga with canvas curving over high hoops. The driver said he’d come to carry us to Napa Valley, where a friend of papa’s awaited our arrival. He referred to the miller who’d helped papa put his rescue team together, the one who’d dreamed in advance of people held captive by the mountain snow. Though he had never been near those mountains, he had dreamed this vivid dream three nights in a row and forever after felt bound to papa and to our family, since he knew without a doubt that we were the very ones revealed to him in his vision.

  The miller had got word of our whereabouts. He wanted to help out any way he could. He too was inviting us to stay as long as we needed, and papa took him up on it. With so much coming and going right there around the fort, drifters and refugees and other families like ours wondering what was going to happen next, papa figured there’d be more room at the miller’s ranch, as well as
more peace and quiet.

  The next morning we were pioneers again, riding along in a covered wagon, almost like when we’d started out from Springfield, rolling across the Sacramento Valley toward another mountain range, on one more leg of our trip to California, except this time it wasn’t papa’s wagon or papa’s mules, and we didn’t have anything to load but our bodies and the clothes we wore and a few odds and ends brought from the lake camp and one big canvas tent papa bought on credit from Captain Sutter.

  Just like he promised, we had made it through at last, our whole family. I owed my life to him, and it was heaven to be together again, though I can’t forget, as I think back, that if it weren’t for papa we would never have found ourselves split apart in the first place and in such a dire fix. And saying that doesn’t mean I love him any less. I don’t love him any less. I don’t. You couldn’t have stopped him. Or stopped them. Or stopped any of it. Not with an army division and a long row of cannon on the banks of the Missouri River telling everybody to turn right around and go back home. It was his own desire and refusal to be thwarted that had put us on the trail and led us up to that high altitude and also brought him back into the mountains to carry on the journey, and right in there somewhere is the very nub and mystery of it all.