Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  The others climbed onward. The lake dropped away, a cobalt mirror plummeting to the floor of a great basin circled by a jagged crown of white spires. Hands rose against the glare as eyes peered down toward the water, five hundred feet below, then eight hundred, then finally a thousand, as though they had been magically whisked to the observation deck of a modern skyscraper. Smoke floated from the cabins in lazy curls, a visible reminder of the comrades whose hopes they carried.

  They had entered a mountain realm about which they knew little. Snow covered everything. It deepened invisibly beneath their feet, like water under the ice of a frozen lake, until they were walking in the sky, reaching out to touch tree branches that would have soared above their heads in summertime. Drifts rose up like cliffs, tall enough to cover the church steeples back home. Walking near the back of the file, Mary Ann Graves gazed at her companions up ahead and was reminded of "some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs." By night, they built fires on platforms of green logs, so the flames would not melt the surrounding snow and sink them all slowly into a pit.

  The reached the pass on the second day—Graves remembered it as "a very slavish day's travel"—and were met with a vista so stunning that it pierced their exhaustion. "The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice," Graves wrote. "Well do I remember a remark one of the company made here, that we were about as near heaven as we could get."

  The next day they encountered a heavy snowstorm, "wind blowing cold and furiously," according to Eddy, who was apparently keeping a journal, a document that has not survived but that two men claimed later to have seen. One of them was James Reed, who eventually published what he said was a "synopsis" of Eddy's journal, which may be close to a verbatim reproduction. The pithy entries certainly read as though they were jotted down in the midst of the journey, when there was little time for writing. On the 19th, for example, three days out from the cabins, Eddy noted merely, "Storm continued; feet commenced freezing."

  They were completely unprotected from the elements, struggling along day after day in clothes of wool and cotton that were either soaked with sweat and snow or frozen stiff as boards. They were in difficult, steep terrain and did not know where they were going. As rations dwindled, they could afford nothing but the smallest meals, if that. At night, lacking shelter, they simply stopped where they were, building their small fire and then huddling around it as temperatures plummeted and winds howled. In the morning, they simply rose and started walking.

  At one point, Mary Graves thought she glimpsed smoke in a deep gorge off to the right. Believing it might come from a cabin or at least a campfire, she convinced the men to fire the gun as a signal, but there was no answer. She began bellowing down into the canyon periodically, but that too was met with silence.

  ***

  STANTON STRUGGLED MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, as though all his past heroics had drained the sum total of his energies. Snow-blindness left him stumbling, and on the morning of the sixth day, December 21, he lingered by the fire smoking his pipe. One of the women asked if he was coming, and he responded that he would join them soon. Maybe they thought he really would follow. Maybe they knew he was finished and left him in peace. He didn't come into camp that night, and though they waited the next day, hoping that he might arrive, he never appeared. No one had the strength to go back and search.

  Stanton had reached safety once, at Sutter's Fort back in the crisp days of autumn, and it would have taken a hard man to damn him had he chosen to stay and save himself. Instead, he kept his word and went back to aid a company in which he had no family or close friends. Now, in his hour of need, he had been abandoned to his fate. There was probably no other choice. A man can't be carried all the way out of the Sierra. Stanton, like the others, had to walk or die. But as he sat in the warmth of his dying fire, the irony must have struck him. In the spring, would-be rescuers found his bones.

  ***

  BY CHRISTMAS EVE THE SNOWSHOERS HAD GONE without food for three days, maybe four. Eddy found some bear meat in his knapsack, placed there secretly by his wife, but there is no evidence he shared it. For weeks, everyone had been on starvation rations, and combined with the rigors of their journey, the lack of food for even a few days put them in a desperate situation. The women were still fairly strong, but some of the men were fading.

  Like so many stranded sailors before them, the members of the Forlorn Hope began to mull over the most extreme options. Someone proposed a fatal game of chance, casting lots to decide who would be killed and eaten.

  In a sign of their despair, at least some members of the group agreed, but it wasn't unanimous, and the idea was dropped. As an alternative, Eddy proposed that two men—it's not clear if he suggested specific candidates—each take a pistol and shoot it out, agreeing ahead of time that the loser would be consumed. But that plan too was rejected.

  A blizzard roared down out of the sky, and they hunkered down to ride it out, too weak to keep moving even in good weather, let alone a screaming gale. Their fire went out, and in the raging storm they were unable to relight it. Eddy tried to use gunpowder, but the powder horn blew up and badly burned his face and hands. On Christmas, people started to die. The first was a Mexican laborer known only as Antonio. The next, a few hours later, was Franklin Graves, the man who helped make the snowshoes that brought them over the pass. There were stories for years afterward, perhaps true, that as Graves died he urged his daughters to use his body for food.

  In a desperate attempt to find warmth, they created a makeshift tent by sitting together in a tight circle and laying blankets over their heads, letting the snow pile up above them. They avoided freezing to death, but the confined space was hellish. The blizzard howled relentlessly as they crowded together in their man-made snow cave, shoulder to shoulder, shivering and praying, blank and bony faces trading stares. Their only hope was to outlast the storm, to conquer nature's wrath with human patience, and so they sat there for three unending days, with nothing to do but try to stay alive. "Could not proceed; almost frozen; no fire," Eddy noted the day after Christmas.

  In time the strain grew unbearable. Patrick Dolan, the bachelor who had traveled with the Breens, lost his head and stripped off his coat and hat and boots and ran out into the open weather, behavior that we now know might have reflected severe hypothermia. They wrestled him back into the circle, but he was too weak to recuperate. Sitting there among them, he died soon afterward. Next was Lemuel Murphy, the boy who had trudged on even when his younger brother turned back.

  When the storm finally broke, Eddy climbed out of the huddle and managed to light a nearby pine tree on fire. Gathering around for the warmth, the other survivors sat there as if in shock, not even moving when burning branches fell from the tree. It was obvious they had to eat immediately if they were to survive. With the rapid succession of deaths, one of the earlier objections to cannibalism was now moot, since corpses were at hand and no one had to be killed. Still, the exact moment and manner of the decision remain a mystery. Relying on interviews with survivors, early chroniclers of the Donner Party glossed over the decision, perhaps out of a nineteenth-century sense of propriety. The first-person accounts offer a straightforward description of events, not a revelation of the emigrants' inner turmoil. Mary Graves, for example, said simply that after the snowstorm eased, the party traveled onward, "subsisting on human flesh."

  The first ugly dilemma was who to eat. As a rule, people resorting to cannibalism almost always choose outsiders as their first victims, and, as much as possible, the Forlorn Hope followed form, trying to avoid the relatives of the living. Franklin Graves's body lay nearby, but his two daughters were still alive and present. One of Lemuel Murphy's older sisters was among the group. That reduced the choice to Dolan or Antonio, the Mexican laborer. Racial and ethnic minorities have often been the first victims of cannibalism, but in this case Dolan was selected, perhaps for a reason as gruesome as any that could be imagined. He had died more recently than Antonio, and in cases o
f survival cannibalism the relatively warm blood of the newly deceased is often the first thing consumed.

  Deciding to eat Dolan's flesh was merely the beginning of a process that is almost as challenging physically as it is mentally. Human beings are large animals, and it is no easy job to butcher one. The captain of the Mignonette, forced to dismember the body of a dead crew member in a lifeboat, grew concerned that in the course of the arduous work he might actually puncture the hull of the vessel and sink it. To stay afloat, he used the boat's brass oarlocks as a cutting board. If Dolan's body was already starting to freeze, the work would only have been more difficult. In the case of a team of rugby players stranded by a plane crash in the Andes in the 1970s, the first man who tried to hack away some of the meat found that he could only slice off little strips the size of matches.

  Once the butchering is begun, it often follows a grotesque pattern. A common first step is to disfigure the corpse, eliminating the grim reminders that survivors are about to eat a fellow human, perhaps a friend or relative. In lifeboats, the heads might be cut off and thrown overboard, sometimes the hands and feet too. If decapitation is not performed, the eyelids might be closed to avoid the disturbing blank "stare" of the dead. The heart and liver are often cut out and eaten immediately. Pieces of flesh can usually be cut from the arms or legs or torso, either to be cooked or consumed raw. To preserve the meat, thin strips are often dried, either over a fire or simply by laying them in the sun. Brain matter has been swallowed raw. Lungs have been eaten. Marrow has been sucked from bones cracked open with a rock.

  The members of the Forlorn Hope cut pieces of flesh from Dolan's arms and legs and cooked them over a fire they managed to kindle. If their experience was like that of other groups forced to the same extreme, they ate the first small pieces haltingly, in silence, each person deep in private contemplation. The taboo dispelled, they moved to the other bodies after Dolan, eating some of the abominable meat and drying the rest so they could carry it with them. When they finally departed the camp on December 30, two weeks had passed since they walked away from the lake. Five members of their little band had died, almost all subsequently consumed as food. The Forlorn Hope was now reduced to just ten people, five men and five women.

  By Eddy's estimate, they made four miles the day they broke camp and six the following day, which was New Year's Eve. They must have noted New Year's Day, but Eddy made no mention of it in his journal, recording only that they "passed a rugged canon," perhaps the deep crevice carved by the North Fork of the American River. At some point that day they had to climb the side of a gorge so steep that they grabbed plants growing from the near-perpendicular walls and pulled themselves up. They were wandering, heading generally to the west but uncertain exactly where they were or where they should go.

  When their supply of human flesh ran out, they began eating the rawhide strings of their snowshoes. Then Luis and Salvador vanished, almost surely out of justified fears that the group might kill and eat them.

  On January 5, Franklin Graves's son-in-law Jay Fosdick died and was cannibalized. His wife, Sarah, the oldest Graves daughter, forged onward through her grief. Eddy shot a deer the same day, but the venison seems not to have lasted long. They had been walking for three weeks, and now they were thoroughly lost, plodding through the confusing welter of canyons and ridges and ravines that constitute the Sierra's western slope. With Stanton dead and Luis and Salvador fled, no member of the group had ever been over the territory. About the only thing they could do was try to head both west and downhill. The result was agonizingly slow progress, and within days they once again faced the ultimate crisis: They were out of food.

  ***

  THE LATE STAGES OF STARVATION ARE DIFFICULT to study, since obviously people cannot be denied food indefinitely purely to advance scientific research. Yet remarkably, some highly detailed observations about the effects of starvation have been made by individuals who were themselves starving. Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, produced an impressive study of the hunger they experienced and saw around them every day. So did British doctors held in Japanese internment camps.

  Along with obvious physical changes such as weight loss, the doctors noticed striking psychological effects, among them a stark pattern of apathy and listlessness. Starving people simply lost their desire to act. They lay in bed, their faces pale, blank masks. Often, they were unable or unwilling to get up even to eat. In some cases, people died with food in their hands.

  Ironically, enervation is often combined with irritability, as if starving people can find energy only for conflict.

  In a landmark study conducted in 1944 and 1945, thirty-two volunteers at the University of Minnesota agreed to lose about a quarter of their body weight over a six-month period. All were conscientious objectors who had already shown themselves to be "sincere and upright" in civilian public service projects before the experiment. But as the volunteers' hunger deepened, scientists monitoring their behavior found that minor differences led to major disagreements. The men "blew up" at one another or grew annoyed with the kitchen staff, suspicious that perhaps the cooks weren't measuring the rations correctly. Some men refused to sit with others at the dining tables. Once, when one man licked his plate of every last morsel, another man told him that he sounded like "a damn cow" and stormed off. To gauge their social skills, they were invited to parties, but their behavior grew boorish. To measure their motivation and abilities, they were asked to perform tasks, but their patience and commitment dwindled. One man quit his job of walking a small child to nursery school each day because he found her behavior so infuriating and worried about his own decreasing level of self-control. Some of the men began stealing food or, in one case, items associated with food: china coffee cups. Many of the men had hoped for spiritual enlightenment, but instead, according to a summary of the experiment, "Most of them felt that the semistarvation had coarsened rather than refined them, and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be."

  Desperate to keep moving and stay alive, the starving members of the Forlorn Hope fought off lethargy, but like the subjects of the Minnesota study, they fell prey to anger and division. Their cohesiveness as a group disintegrated. Near the beginning of their effort, they had waited, however briefly, for Stanton to rejoin them. They had also rejected the initial proposals for cannibalism, including those for a lottery or a fair fight. When they finally resorted to eating human bodies, it was only the flesh of those who had already died.

  But now, suffering both the mental and physical ravages of extreme hunger, they began to contemplate murder. Accounts differ as to the precise plots, but it is clear that killing and eating each other seemed increasingly acceptable. The Graves family maintained for years afterward that Eddy had tried to lure Mary Graves away from the others so he could kill her, while Eddy insisted that the only other surviving man, William Foster, had suggested murdering three of the women for food. Eddy said he refused but threw Foster a stout club and then advanced on him with a knife, apparently trying to forcibly implement his earlier suggestion of a fight to the death, with the loser to be eaten. Some of the women separated the men before anyone was hurt.

  When they came across tracks left by Luis and Salvador, all scruples vanished. Finding the two men collapsed and near death, Foster took the gun and advanced. He shot both men in the head, trying to justify the murders by insisting that the men would have died soon anyway, which might be true. No one intervened, and afterward the two bodies were butchered and eaten.

  The deaths of Luis and Salvador were the only time during the ordeal of the Donner Party that anyone was killed to be eaten. The two Indians, about whom not much is known, probably had little choice but to accompany Stanton on his relief mission, but their courage is not lessened by that fact, and it is indisputable that they helped save the Donner Party before they were killed by one of its members. Several versions of the incident eventually appeared, including an account in an early Do
nner Party book almost surely based on Eddy's testimony, but in none of the stories was Foster condemned. He never faced legal punishment for his act, echoing the history of similar cases at sea.

  The survivors had now lost enough altitude to be out of the snow, but even so it was difficult to keep moving. Eddy was shuffling so badly that when he came to a fallen tree, he couldn't find the energy to step over it. Instead, he bent down, put his hands on the log, and rolled himself across. They rested every quarter mile.

  Finally they staggered across a trail and followed it to a small Miwok Indian village, where the startled residents provided acorn bread for these emaciated figures wandering out of the impassable mountains. Eddy could not tolerate the acorns, so he ate grass instead.

  Even with help from the Indians, most of the group soon collapsed and could go no farther. Indomitable, Eddy willed himself ahead. Accompanied by Miwok guides, he walked eighteen miles in a single day, bloody footprints marking his path. A little before sunset, he approached Johnson's Ranch, the first American settlement on the western side of the mountains, and walked up to the small cabin of Matthew Dill Ritchie, who had brought his family over the mountains just a few months before. Eddy saw Ritchie's daughter and asked her for bread. She looked at him, registered his horrible condition, and burst into tears. It was January 17, exactly a month and a day after the members of the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake camp.

  Fighting the coming darkness, men from the little community at Johnson's Ranch rushed out to find the other survivors, sometimes backtracking along Eddy's bloody footprints. The others were fed and then, the following morning, brought down and reunited with Eddy.