by Итан Рарик
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 descendin
g 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."
14
This Prison
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 ha
d 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.