Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  Stanton too was short on food, although his pleas for help landed on deaf ears, perhaps because of his role in the failure of the previous escape attempt. In his diary, Breen noted that some of the families had very little beef left. "Stanton trying to make a raise of some for his Indians & Self," he wrote. "Not likely to get much."

  ***

  TWO WEEKS HAD PASSED since the children's clothes or blankets had been dry, and Tamzene Donner was worried. When the family couldn't get a fire started, she kept the girls tucked into bed even at midday in hopes of keeping them warm, but the idea hardly worked if their bedclothes were soaking.

  In the tents at Alder Creek, it was getting harder and harder to maintain decent conditions. For one thing, labor was in short supply. When the axle broke on one of the Donner wagons—the accident that left poor little Eliza temporarily buried beneath a jumbled crush of household goods—George and Jacob went to work shaping a replacement. But as George Donner held the wood and his brother swung the axe, the tool slipped and came across the back of George's right hand, opening a long diagonal gash from the wrist almost to the little finger. An infection rose, and soon the arm lay useless at his side. Jacob Donner took up no slack, for he had always been sickly, and now a good many of the younger men began to fade as well. The result was that most of the work devolved to a teenager, Jean Baptiste Trudeau, a sixteen-year-old with a frontier background who had joined the company at Fort Bridger as a hired hand. It was Trudeau who searched for the animal carcasses buried under the snow, plunging downward with a long pole with a nail at one end, hoping that his improvised fishing hook might come up with a tuft of hair or hide to signify success. Memories varied as to Trudeau's work ethic—he viewed himself as a workhorse, some thought him a layabout—but whatever the details of his efforts, the relative lack of able-bodied men meant that circumstances at the Alder Creek camp suffered even more.

  Dry wood was a treasure. Fetching it was a fatiguing and sometimes impossible task, and so there were the heatless days that imprisoned the Donner daughters in their beds. On nights when a fire had been kindled, a large kettle was placed atop the coals, and the children gathered round and pressed their hands against the warm comfort of the pot.

  Tamzene struggled for a semblance of domesticity. Every morning, she took her daughters in her lap and brushed out their hair. Schoolteacher to the core, she entertained them with Bible stories as she loosened the tangles. Often she chose Joseph's faithful persistence through years of slavery or Daniel's deliverance from the fearsome horrors of the lions' den—tales of tribulation and perseverance and eventual triumph.

  ***

  FRANKLIN GRAVES MADE THE CASE PLAINLY: There was no alternative but to try again. By early December, a month into the Donner Party's mountain captivity, escape parties had been forced to turn back repeatedly, and it would have been easy to lose heart and passively await rescue.

  Graves would have none of it. He was sure they should try again to hike out, this time with better planning and equipment. Putting his Vermont heritage to use, he began to make snowshoes, sawing lengthwise through the oxbows, the U-shaped pieces of wood that fit under the necks of the oxen and attached to the yoke. The shape was suitable for the frame of a snowshoe, and by weaving strips of rawhide crosswise and lengthwise, Graves was able to fashion a reasonably effective sole.

  Going from cabin to cabin, he recruited members for the proposed new party, mounting a logical and largely indisputable case. The more people in camp, the quicker the food supply dwindled. If a contingent of healthy adults took minimal rations and made a headlong push for Sutter's Fort, the remaining supplies might be stretched—just barely—until the hikers could summon help and return. It was a risky calculus, but unavoidable. "It is our only choice." Graves insisted. In his diary, Breen recorded the preparations: "Stanton & Graves manufacturing snow shoes for another mountain scrabble."

  Two of the young teamsters, Milt Elliott and Noah James, set off on foot for the Alder Creek camp to tell the Donner families of the new plan. Stanton, industrious as always, found a small piece of paper and neatly wrote out a note to George Donner asking for a pound of tobacco and the loan of a pocket compass, "as the snow is so very deep & in the event of a storm it would be invaluable." He added that the troublesome mules were "all strayed off," and asked that if any of the animals wandered through the Alder Creek camp the Donners get news to the lake cabins as soon as possible.

  But the same day Elliott and James left, the weather turned foul, and as a diarist Breen was once again reduced to redundant invocations of helplessness. "Commenced snowing about 11 Oclock.... Snows fast," he wrote on December 9, a Wednesday. Then on Thursday: "Snowed fast last night with heavy squalls of wind. Continues still to snow." And Friday: "Snowing a little." And Saturday: "Continues to Snow." And Sunday: "Snows faster than any previous day." Finally, after four and a half days, the storm cleared, and Monday morning broke sunny and fine. "Don't thaw much," Breen noted, "but fair for a continuance of fair weather."

  Elliott, who had intended to join the snowshoe party, had yet to return from Alder Creek with the much-needed compass, but the clear weather was too good an opportunity to pass up. The hikers needed to leave immediately, and so it was decided that they would not wait for Elliott's return. He and James had walked away from the lake cabins on the same day the blizzard began, after all, and it was likely they had frozen to death before they even reached the Donner family tents. The snowshoe party would simply have to forge ahead by dead reckoning, one more handicap to an already hazardous undertaking.

  ***

  INEVITABLY, PEOPLE BEGAN TO WONDER about the chances of their own demise. Franklin Graves had spoken of a morose expectation that he would die in the mountains, the victim of divine retribution for driving Reed from the party and abandoning Hardcoop in the deserts of Nevada. Still, it was a remarkable fact that after more than a month of captivity, no one had actually died.

  That changed the night of December 15. Baylis Williams was a young man working for the Reed family, a mysterious figure whose sister Eliza was also a Reed family employee. Years later, Patty Reed wrote that Baylis was an albino who worked by night and slept by day, a peculiar description but almost the only one we have. We know nothing of his exact condition when the party arrived at the lake, and little of his deterioration thereafter, although given that the Reed family had almost no food it is easy to imagine that he slowly faded into weakness and starvation. Billy Graves, who was then seventeen, remembered that Williams lost his mind and eventually "was insane." In any event, on the evening of the 15th, as the snowshoe party was busy preparing to depart the next morning, Williams died.

  There was little time for grieving, but the death must have played on everyone's mind. When the hikers tied on their snowshoes and walked away from the cabins the following morning, they knew with more certainty than ever that the families they were leaving behind could not last much longer, that help must be fetched or everyone would die.

  16

  The Forlorn Hope

  For all that it is usually considered an unspeakable atrocity, cannibalism has a long and rich history. People have eaten people for thousands of years and for countless reasons: to appease gods, to honor ancestors or shame enemies, to cure disease, perhaps even to set a hospitable table for guests. Some stories may be exaggerated or even false; many of the more grisly versions were reported by European explorers eager to paint the natives as bloodthirsty savages in need of Christian salvation. But modern evidence suggests that at least some accounts are indisputably true. Archaeologists have found human remains showing the apparent signs of butchery or cooking, and a few years ago scientists studying a Colorado site used by the ancient Anasazi reported that they had found fossilized human fecal matter containing digested human tissue. Somebody, for some reason, was eaten.

  Far better documented are more recent cases in which people who were isolated and starving resorted to eating human flesh because they had little choice, wha
t experts sometimes call "survival cannibalism." Seafaring disasters produced the most numerous examples. Prior to the invention of radios or electronic safety beacons or airplanes from which a search might be conducted, a shipwreck or sinking often stranded people for weeks or months. Whether they were marooned on an island or drifting in a lifeboat, their only hope of rescue was that another ship, by purest chance, might come within sight. Often, other ships failed to materialize and eating the dead became the only hope for survival. The practice became so common that one authority on the subject described it as "normal." If a stranded crew managed to survive by some other means, they sometimes felt compelled to proclaim the fact to their rescuers, lest the typical assumption of cannibalism go unchallenged. Because there were so many cases, the chronicles of sea-going cannibalism are long and varied, and they illuminate the topic's dark history in striking ways.

  One of the most closely documented examples occurred in 1710, after the Nottingham Galley set sail from

  London, bound for Boston. The journey was almost complete when a December gale blew up off the coast of Maine and ran the ship aground on a small rock island, barely a hundred yards long and perhaps half as wide. The mainland was visible in the distance. The crew abandoned ship, and by the following morning all that was left of their vessel was debris: wood and canvas and a little of the cheese they had been carrying as cargo. Using the ship's timbers, they built a boat in hopes of escape, but the surf smashed it to bits as they attempted to launch. Later they built a small raft and successfully put it to sea with two men aboard, but they both drowned. For nearly three weeks they survived by harvesting what little edible material they could find: a few weeds and two or three mussels per day per man. They drank rainwater or melted snow. Then the ship's carpenter died, and the awful possibility of cannibalism presented itself. With no other choice, they cut up the corpse and began to eat. Three crew members refused to join in at first, but by the next morning they all did. The captain rationed the meat, and within a few days they were rescued by a passing ship.

  Other cases were more gruesome. Occasionally survivors on a derelict would take a half-eaten body and hang it in the rigging, as if in a slaughterhouse. On one ship a woman was said to have cut the throat of her recently deceased husband, insisting that if his blood was to be drunk she had the greatest right to the ghastly beverage. There are records of sailors refusing to eat human flesh, but there are also cases where cannibalism began relatively quickly, as if sailors felt no great need to delay the practice until the last conceivable moment. In 1835 the Elizabeth Rashleigh, sailing from Quebec to England, grew waterlogged and had to be abandoned by her crew, which took to the longboat. They had a store of potatoes and were rescued in nine days—an interval survived by many modern hunger strikers—but the crew had already begun eating their dead shipmates. The following year, the Hannah suffered a similar fate while sailing from Quebec to London. The survivors began eating a dead comrade on the fourth day.

  If nature failed to provide a carcass, sailors sometimes killed someone specifically for food, the result of a far more complex moral calculus involving a single sacrifice for the good of all. In 1759 the Dolphin was dismasted by a storm while sailing from the Canary Islands to New York. There were only eight people aboard, and they drifted aimlessly for more than five months. They ate their supplies, then their dog, the ship's cat, even their shoes. Finally, they decided that one member of the group should be killed and eaten, so that the others might live. They cast lots to pick both the victim and the executioner. A Spanish passenger lost the draw and was shot through the head. The others ate his bowels first and then consumed the rest of the body.

  One of the most famous maritime catastrophes of the nineteenth century resulted in a similar decision by survivors of the Nantucket whaleship Essex, which had been attacked and sunk by a whale, the prey turned hunter. The crew was forced into the whaleboats and bobbed on the sea for weeks. As men starved to death, the others resorted to cannibalizing the remains. When that food source ran out, the four men in one of the boats decided to cast lots to decide who would be killed and eaten, believing that otherwise they would all die. The loser was a sailor named Owen Coffin, eighteen years old and the cousin of the captain, who was also in the boat. Coffin accepted his fate and gave the others a message to be delivered to his mother. Sixteen-year-old Charles Rams-dell, who was Coffin's close friend, drew the lot as the executioner. He refused his duty for a time, but finally relented. Coffin laid his head upon the gunwale, and Ramsdell shot his friend.

  As a rule, such events rarely produced feelings of shame among the participants or scorn among the public. Survivors often made no attempt to conceal the evidence of their desperation. Rescuers found partially butchered bodies in lifeboats even when the remains might easily have been thrown overboard. In one extraordinary case, survivors trapped on a derelict signaled to a passing ship by waving the hands and feet of a man they had butchered and eaten. Whether the deaths were natural or the result of a lottery, cannibalism was simply, in the decorous phrase of the day, "the custom of the sea"—a horror defensible under the circumstances, much as men's behavior might be different in wartime than in peace. Surviving cannibals could go on to distinguished careers. The captain of the Nottingham Galley—the man who oversaw the consumption of his ship's carpenter—was later made the British consul in Flanders. The captain of the Essex was given command of another whaleship and later in life became the night watchman on Nantucket Island, charged with ensuring the safety of the community's young people by enforcing the nightly curfew.

  Even when survivors admitted that no lottery was conducted before a killing, little punishment was meted out. In 1884 the British ship Mignonette sank in the Atlantic amid heavy seas, forcing the captain and three crew members into a dinghy. When the youngest member of the crew became violently ill and appeared to be dying, the captain took a penknife and cut the boy's throat. The survivors drank his blood and, over the next few days, ate his flesh. When they were rescued, the captain freely said that one man had been killed and eaten, and later he even demonstrated the technique to the authorities back in England. In a breach with tradition, the captain and one crew member were charged with murder, perhaps because they had conducted no lottery, perhaps because cannibalism by sailors was viewed by some as a relic from a bygone age. Still, most public sentiment hailed the men as heroes for having done what was necessary. The dead man's father forgave them, and they were granted bail, which was unusual for a capital case. After they were convicted, Queen Victoria commuted their sentences to just six months in prison. Shortly after their release, the British government restored their maritime credentials, and at least one of the men returned to a career at sea.

  The case of the Mignonette came almost forty years after the travails of the Donner Party, but the emigrants heading west in 1846 may have known about earlier examples of cannibalism's long seafaring history. Then as now, shocking tales were a staple of journalism, and some examples had become famous around the world. Many cases had been recounted in books and poems and even songs. The Donner Party included literate, curious people, and it's entirely conceivable they were aware of the macabre imperative that had long been the sailor's last resort.

  ***

  AS THE SNOWSHOE PARTY WALKED AWAY from the Truckee Lake cabins, the Breens—and perhaps a few of the others remaining behind—gathered outside to watch them go. If they braved the cold and stayed there long enough, they saw their comrades shrink until they were nothing more than a line of trudging dark spots, miniaturized against the daunting mountain escarpment up which they began to climb. Although the emigrants didn't use the term at the time, the group eventually came to be known by a poetic nickname that captured the moment's utter desperation, the idea that either this small band would succeed or everyone would die. The snowshoers, it was said, were "the Forlorn Hope."

  Mostly they were the younger people, men and women in their late teens and twenties. Among the women, the
oldest was about twenty-three. Several were parents forced into a cruel dilemma: stay with the children and watch them die, or abandon them for now so that they might be saved later. William Eddy left his wife and both his children, and could never forget the look on his wife's face as he departed. William and Sarah Foster left their toddler son. Two women—Amanda McCutchan and Harriet Pike—left children behind even though the fathers were no longer present, William McCutchan having gone ahead to California and William Pike having been accidentally shot and killed. Others at the lake camp promised to care for the children. The oldest snowshoer—the only one who might be counted as old—was fifty-seven-year-old Franklin Graves, who divided his family, taking along his two grown daughters and a son-in-law but leaving behind his wife and seven other children.

  In all, the Forlorn Hope included seventeen people: ten men, five women, and two of the Murphy boys, thirteen-year-old Lemuel and ten-year-old William. They had only fourteen pairs of snowshoes, so one of the men and the two Murphy brothers planned to tag along at the rear of the column, hoping those in front would mash down the snow and create a firm walking surface. Limited to what their weakened bodies could carry, they each took a blanket or quilt but no extra clothing or tents. Among them, they had one rifle, a few pistols, and a hatchet.

  For food, they took a little dried beef and some coffee and sugar. By strict rationing, they hoped to make the supplies last six days.

  ***

  THE SNOW WAS EIGHT FEET DEEP at the lake, deeper as they climbed the mountain pass, deeper still in the drifts, and it soon became apparent that the lack of snowshoes ensured a hopeless lagging. The one adult with regular shoes, Charles Burger, who was always known as "Dutch Charley," turned back the first day along with William Murphy. They picked their way back down to the lake and eventually reached the cabins, cold and exhausted but safe.