by Итан Рарик
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. S
till, 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.
15
The First Death
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—anothe
r 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.