Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  Of the seventeen who started with the Forlorn Hope, only seven reached their goal. Two turned back the first day, and eight others died. The survivors included two men—Eddy and Foster—and all five of the women, Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Foster, Amanda McCutchan, and Harriet Pike. Among the women, McCutchan was probably the oldest, and she was only about twenty-three. The others were so young that today they would be college undergraduates.

  17

  A Low Situation

  Four days after the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake cabins, Milt Elliott appeared out of the snow like a specter from a wintry hell. More than a week had passed since Elliott and Noah James, another teamster, set off for the Alder Creek camp. A blizzard kicked up the day they left and blew for five straight days, so the logical conclusion was that they were dead. "Thinks they got lost in the snow," Patrick Breen wrote in his diary.

  But now here was Elliott, stomping the snow off his boots and turning his backside before the fire. He and James had reached the Donner family tents the day of the blizzard and stayed ten days, and then somehow Elliott managed to hike all the way back to the lake by himself. He bore sad news, for people had started to die at Alder Creek. Jacob Donner was gone, along with three young, single men: Joseph Reinhardt, Sam Shoemaker, and James Smith. The rest of the Alder Creek group was doing poorly too, "in a low situation," as Breen phrased it.

  The next day, December 21, Breen endured a severe attack of what he called "the gravel"—kidney stones. In his diary he mentioned his quick recovery, adding, "Praise be to the God of Heaven." Religion was becoming ever more present in Breen's account, perhaps because Christmas was approaching, perhaps because he was seeking comfort and fulfillment amid the harshest of ordeals. Devoid of theology in the first few weeks, his little chronicle of events now turned to faith. "Tough times, but not discouraged," he wrote at one point. "Our hopes are in God, Amen." Two days before Christmas he began to read the Thirty Days' Prayer and then ended his diary entry with something approaching a benediction: "may Almighty God grant the request of an unworthy Sinner that I am. Amen." The next day, Christmas Eve, was warm, the wind blowing up from the south, and so rather than snow there was rain. "Poor prospect for any kind of Comfort Spiritual or temporal," Breen wrote, adding, "May God help us to spend the Christ-mass as we ought considering circumstances"

  Christmas fell on Friday. The rain turned to snow, the most unwanted white Christmas in history. Breen was laid up with another attack of "the gravel" and had to rely on his two older sons, both barely into their teens, to gather wood for a fire. The family prayed together Christmas morning, but Breen couldn't shake a sense of doom. "The prospect is apalling," he wrote, "but hope in God, amen."

  In the Reed cabin, the children stood wide-eyed at the fire, watching the boiling contents of a kettle. Margret Reed had secretly squirreled away a small stash of supplies, too small under normal conditions even to make a meal, but large enough now to constitute a feast: a few dried apples, a few beans, a little tripe, and one small piece of bacon. Thrilled, the children sat down to a Christmas dinner they had not dreamed of.

  "Children, eat slowly," their mother told them, "for this one day you can have all you wish."

  For the rest of her life, no banquet of turkey and mince pies and plum pudding ever tasted so good, Virginia Reed remembered later. "So bitter was the misery relieved by that one bright day, that I have never since sat down to a Christmas dinner without my thoughts going back to Donner Lake."

  ***

  THREE-YEAR-OLD ELIZA DONNER GRIPPED her mother's hand as they approached a mysterious hole in the snow, smoke rising up like the sign of some menacing underworld. Eliza's mother, Tamzene, said reassuringly that they were there to see Aunt Betsy and Eliza's cousins, that there was a tent buried there much like Eliza's own, a little way away across the snow-filled meadow at Alder Creek, but when the little girl stooped down and peered into the chasm, she saw only darkness.

  Eliza had not seen her cousins since the snows came and the wagons stopped rolling and her parents explained that they would stay in this cold and forsaken spot until spring. Afraid to go down into the unknown depths, she called out, but the hollow faces that peered up at her were hardly recognizable as the hardy playmates she had known only weeks before. "I was glad when my mother came up and took me back to our own tent," Eliza recalled, "which seemed less dreary because I knew the things that were in it, and the faces about me."

  Both camps teemed with little ones in need of distraction, for the Donner Party was increasingly an assembly of juveniles. Most of the healthy adults departed in the Forlorn Hope, giving the hikers a better chance of reaching civilization and fetching aid, but leaving behind fewer adults to do the necessary work at the mountain camps. Then when Baylis Williams died and the sudden rash of deaths struck the Alder Creek site, the problem only worsened. There were now sixty-one people left at the two camps, two-thirds of them children. In the Graves half of the double cabin, Elizabeth Graves was alone in caring for eight youngsters. In the Murphy cabin, the only adults were Levinah Murphy and Eleanor Eddy. Between them, they were caring for nine children, five of whom were toddlers.

  Childlike playfulness occasionally broke through the tragedy. Once, Eliza spied a sunbeam shining down into their hovel, spotlighting a little patch of floor. "I saw it, and sat down under it," she remembered, "held it on my lap, passed my hand up and down in its brightness, and found that I could break its ray in two." She let the delicious warmth play upon her head and face and arm, and then set her apron beneath this mysterious treasure to capture its glorious power.

  She ran to show her mother, but when she carefully opened the folds of the apron, she was shocked to find that her little morsel of heat and light was gone. She looked back toward her play spot, only to see the sunbeam creep back up the stairs and, like so many other dashed hopes of the Donner Party, vanish.

  ***

  FOOD SUPPLIES DWINDLED UNTIL PEOPLE began to eat what would normally have been considered inedible. The hides of the slaughtered cattle were cut into thin strips, which were laid atop the coals until the hair burned off. Scraped clean with a knife, the singed strips were then boiled until they reduced to a gelatinous paste invariably compared to glue. It could be gagged down, at least by the iron-gutted, although one survivor observed later, "That kind of living weakened my knees a little."

  Chores grew ever more difficult. Gathering wood was especially laborious. When felled, tree trunks sank in the snow, requiring even more effort to heave them up and carry them to a cabin. Exhaustion and weakness deepened the isolation. Breen noted once that the weather would be delightful were it not for the maddening blanket of snow that blocked their progress and kept them prisoner, but even on sunny, clear days people were moving around less, stirring from the miserable cabins only when necessary. "Saw no strangers today from any of the shantys," he wrote on a day of cloudless mountain skies.

  "Dutch Charley" Burger, the teamster who had turned back from the Forlorn Hope on the first day and was living in Keseberg's lean-to, deteriorated faster than most and at last, on an especially cold night, died. His few possessions were inventoried: $1.50 in cash, two handsome silver watches, a razor, a gold pin, three boxes of caps, the clothes on his back. His treasure was dispersed among the other members of the Donner Party's little German contingent. Spitzer took his coat and waistcoat, Keseberg everything else.

  ***

  MARGRET REED PONDERED AN UNSPEAKABLY AUDACIOUS PLAN. Her family was once again almost out of food, and she had no way to get more. Few people had much left, and in any event she had nothing more to trade for beef or hides. She had already parted with the most valuable items she possessed—a fine watch that belonged to her husband and a medal signifying his status as a Mason. It had been hard to part with mementos of a husband she might never see again, but she had done it. Now there was nothing more she could do to get food. So she decided that she, two of her employees, and her oldest child would walk
over the mountains to California.

  In a sense, the idea was preposterous. For all she knew, the Forlorn Hope had marched off to its death, yet that group had been far stronger than her own. The Forlorn Hope had included fifteen of the strongest emigrants, most of them young adults in the prime of their physical lives, and had been equipped with the best snowshoes that the mountain-born Franklin Graves could construct. The Reed party, by contrast, would include just four people, one of them barely a teenager, who would plod off into the implacable snow with virtually no equipment of any kind. Worse still, the Forlorn Hope had left almost three weeks before, three weeks during which the remaining families had subsisted on the most meager and insubstantial of diets. Margret Reed and her family, in other words, were three weeks closer to starving to death.

  But anything was better than sitting around waiting to die, so Reed set about the unimaginable task of dividing her family. The three youngest children—eight-year-old Patty, five-year-old James, and three-year-old Thomas—were too small to go, so their mother made the rounds of the cabins to ask if someone could take them in. Nobody wanted more mouths to feed, but to their great credit the Breens and the Graveses consented. James simply moved across the dividing wall that ran down the center of the cabin in which he had been living, switching from his family's territory to that of the Graveses. Patty and Thomas hiked over to the Breen cabin.

  That left the four who would make the attempt at crossing the mountains: Margret, thirteen-year-old Virginia, and two of the family workers, Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams. They dried the family's meager supply of remaining meat and then bid an anguished farewell to the three younger children. "We could hardle get a way from them but we told theme we would bring them Bread & then thay was willling to stay," Virginia remembered.

  The little band trudged off late on a Monday morning, January 4, the weather so fine that it seemed the spring thaw might be coming. The hikers paralleled the flat lakeshore, then made the long climb up toward the pass. Like many people in mountain terrain, they soon experienced the leaden despondency that comes from climbing to the top of a ridge, then gaining the crest and realizing that it is followed not by a gentle downward slope but merely by more of the same terrain, ridge after ridge after ridge stretching away to the horizon. "It was so discouraging," Virginia Reed wrote. At night, they would bed down wherever darkness found them.

  Eliza Williams gave out after only a day, returning alone to the lake cabins, but the other three forged ahead,

  Virginia at times crawling on her hands and knees. They finally stopped for a day in an overdue effort to make snowshoes, but eventually they too realized the hopelessness of the attempt and turned back. Virginia, by far the youngest of the group, had done well so long as the hope of salvation—and food—lay ahead, but once they began to retreat, her strength faltered. She nearly collapsed and one of her feet became badly frozen, but she persevered, and four days after they set out they once again reached relative safety at the lake.

  But now they had no real place to live. There had been no time to build proper roofs when the company was first trapped, so the cabins had simply been covered with the hides of the butchered oxen. Cupboards bare, the Reeds had been forced to begin eating hides sooner than most families, and the only way to get them was to pull down their own roof. Margret Reed left a hide for her younger children to eat when she tried to escape, but it must have been one of their last, for by the time she returned the family's half of the double cabin was roofless, and thus uninhabitable. They had literally eaten themselves out of house and home.

  Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams finagled housing where they could— Elliott with the Muiphys and Williams with the Graveses—but the rest of the Reed clan took shelter in the Breen cabin. The family's separation during the escape attempt had taken its toll, and the reunion was cherished all the more. "We could sit by the same fire, sleep under the same roof, kneel on the ground togeather and pray," Virginia Reed wrote later. "I never even think of that Cabin but what I can see us all on the ground togeather praying, some one holding the little pine Candle. I was very fond of doing that, and while we we[re] giving him light we were receiving light."

  The Breen cabin was now more crowded than ever, but occasionally camaraderie flowered. The two families chatted, sometimes passing "pleasant hours" that leavened the sheer horror of their lot. "We used to sit and talk together and sometimes almost forget oneself for a while," Virginia Reed recalled. The few books they possessed went from hand to hand, read again and again to stave off boredom. Occasionally, even food was shared. The Breens still had some meat, and while Patrick Breen was apparently determined to hoard the precious victuals for his family, his wife, Peggy, could not help but slip tiny nibbles to the Reed children. In at least one case she thought it a gesture of compassion rather than utility, a way to ease suffering rather than sustain life. She was so convinced of Virginia Reed's impending death that she took Margret Reed up out of the cabin and onto the snow, out of earshot of both women's children, to suggest that Margret prepare for her daughter's demise.

  18

  Taking the Field

  As Margret Reed and her children fought for their lives, her husband was involved in a more literal fight. By the time James Reed arrived in California, the United States and Mexico were at war.

  Beginning in the 1820s, American settlers hungry for cheap land poured into Texas, which was then a part of Mexico. The Mexican government, eager for growth in what had been a dusty backwater, welcomed the influx, but in time tension developed. The Americans chafed under Mexican laws that required Catholicism and prohibited slavery, provisos often ignored by the Protestant, slaveholding settlers. In turn, Mexican officials resented the truculent independence of the newcomers, who soon outnumbered the Mexicans. In 1830 the Mexican government prohibited further American settlement, angering the Americans who were already there. By mid-decade, the Americans were in revolt, and in 1836 they defeated the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won their independence.

  For the better part of a decade the Republic of Texas trundled along, but the idea of American annexation loomed up inevitably, in part because the Texans were happy to be absorbed. Mexico had never recognized Texan independence, however, nor was there even agreement as to where the border lay. When negotiations on these issues faltered, President James Polk ordered American troops into the disputed border region, a provocative act sure to enflame Mexican sensibilities. In April 1846 a skirmish predictably broke out between Mexican and American troops, a minor incident that was seized on by Polk as justification for war.

  Word of the outbreak of war reached the area around Independence, Missouri, in May, just as the Donner Party was setting out, but after that the emigrants had no way of getting news. They must have wondered what was happening, since their intended destination of California was part of Mexico, and thus as Americans they might be received as citizens of a hostile power.

  When Reed reached Sutter's Fort in late October, he found that the war had in fact spread to California, and that newly arrived American settlers were organizing a volunteer military effort against the Mexicans. He and William McCutchan launched their valiant two-man rescue attempt, but when they returned to the fort and accepted the impossibility of an immediate winter rescue, Reed joined the war effort.

  He rode south for San Jose, an old Spanish settlement below San Francisco, where he took time first for a little personal business. Optimistically laying the groundwork for his family's future life, he walked into the magistrate's office at the Pueblo de San Jose and forged his wife's name on a land claim. (He also submitted a forged claim for Baylis and Eliza Williams, two of his snowbound employees.)

  By Christmas, as Margret was thrilling her children with their "feast" of dried apples and tripe, James was serving as the first lieutenant to a volunteer cavalry unit of American settlers. On January 2, as Margret was planning her desperate escape attempt, James and the other Americans engaged several hundred Mexican loy
alists—probably themselves volunteers—in what came to be known as the Battle of Santa Clara. The Americans won the first skirmish, chasing the Mexicans from a grove of trees, although the Mexican cavalry soon regrouped and charged the Americans "in beautiful style." "They are, indeed, fine-looking horsemen," wrote Reed, who had so cherished his own acclaim as the owner of the best mount in the wagon train. The Mexicans alternately retreated and charged until finally the Americans found themselves at the bank of a small creek, their horses knee-deep in mud. "The enemy were popping away in fine style," Reed recalled, "and I do assure you we returned compliments without much delay." The Americans had the only artillery piece—"Every now and then the cannon would discharge at them," Reed said—and it seems to have made a difference. The Mexicans broke ranks, and that night sent a white flag into the American camp to ask for terms of surrender.

  It was hardly the bloodiest engagement in martial history—the Mexicans eventually reported three dead and five wounded, while one American took a minor head wound—but it pleased the ever-proud Reed. "I am heartily glad that I had such an opportunity to fight for my country," he wrote ten days later to John Sutter. "I feel by so doing I have done my duty and no more, but I am still ready to take the field in her cause, knowing that she is always right."

  More than pride, the little battle seems to have won Reed a promotion. In the wake of the victory, Reed was appointed by American naval officials to take command of the mission at San Jose. He took up his duties, but he also found time to improve his land claim by planting some pear and apple trees and even a little barley. Then he sat back and awaited what he hoped would be an early California spring. Warm weather would help the barley to sprout, of course, but far more important, it would give Reed another chance to try to reach his family.