Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  19

  Our Present Calamity

  Patrick Breen began the new year with a plea for divine relief: "We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present Calamity if it be his Holy will," he wrote in his diary on New Year's Day. But the failure of the Reed family escape attempt soon dimmed whatever flickering optimism the holidays had generated, and on Friday, January 8, the day after the bold little group returned to the lake camps, Breen summed up the company's situation with candid pessimism: "prospects Dull."

  A new blizzard started cascading snow upon them, and by the fifth day of steady accumulation the threatening walls of white had climbed higher than the cabins. "Must be 13 feet deep," Breen wrote. "Dont know how to get wood this morning. It is dredful to look at."

  Even the Breens' relatively bountiful supply of meat was coming to an end. Like other families before them, they resorted to increasingly desperate measures. Early in the entrapment, Patrick Dolan, who had lived in the Breen cabin until he walked away with the Forlorn Hope, threw his tobacco on some portion of his meat supply, a careless and foolish act that risked invaluable foodstuffs. In the month since Dolan left, the tobacco must have contaminated the beef in some indescribable way, but now the Breens were ready to eat nearly anything. They forced down the ruined meat but paid a price. The wretched fare sickened Peggy and Edward.

  ***

  LITTLE HARRIET MCCUTCHAN SHRIEKED in agony. Lice. The hastily erected cabins and tents of the Donner Party had never offered comfortable accommodations, and as the entrapment lengthened, conditions worsened. The interiors were crowded and dank, redolent of sweat and smoke and mildew. Survivors sometimes referred to the "inmates" of a given cabin, and the analogy was apt. Weather trapped people inside for days. So did the weakness and lethargy of slow starvation. Bathing must have been a vanished luxury, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to wash the bedding and clothes, including the diapers of the babies.

  Then there were the lice. Harriet, who was only a year old, suffered more than the others. Even decades later, Patty Reed remembered "the terrible screames of that poor little one." No parent could comfort the tot. Her father, William, had ridden ahead to fetch supplies from Fort Sutter and then been unable to return. Her mother, Amanda, had left with the Forlorn Hope, reckoning that the only way to save her child was to go and fetch help. The Graveses agreed to care for the little girl, but there wasn't much they could do about the lice. She scratched until she bled, so they tied her tiny arms straight by her sides. Then they tried to block out the fact that she was still screaming.

  ***

  MILT ELLIOTT DID NOT WANT TO DIE with strangers. As the days and weeks wore on after the aborted escape attempt with Margret Reed, he felt himself fading and thought the end might come soon. But he was living in the Murphy cabin and hardly knew the people there. Margret and her children were over in the Breen cabin, and Elliott felt a yearning to be with them. He was, after all, a Reed by feeling if not by blood, so close to his employers that he called Margret "Ma." And so he dragged his failing body over to the Breen shanty, where he lay down just to the left of the fireplace and dozed off.

  But if Elliott wanted to die in the Breen cabin, that was the one thing Patrick Breen was determined to avoid. Watching a man die might demoralize his family. They might lose heart, and heart was one of the keys to survival. Breen insisted that Elliott return to the Murphy cabin that was now his home. Breen had already taken in Margret and her children. That was enough to ask.

  Margret Reed roused Elliott and helped him toward the other cabin. Along the way, she gave him a pep talk.

  ***

  LIKE ELLIOTT, ELIZA WILLIAMS ALSO ACHED at the separation from the Reeds, her employers and surrogate family. She had found shelter in the Graves cabin, but twice she walked over to the Breen shanty. She was sent away both times. "She wont eat hides," Breen recorded in his diary. "Mrs. Reid sent her back to live or die on them."

  ***

  TWO HUNDRED MILES TO THE WEST, in the small coastal community of Yerba Buena, residents awoke to find the streets and sidewalks and lampposts glazed with ice almost a quarter inch thick. They pulled their collars tight as they hastened through their morning errands, the better to get back inside and sidle up to a fireplace or a woodstove. It was, the old-timers said, an unusually cold winter.

  ***

  AT TRUCKEE LAKE, SNOW STARTED FALLING again a little after sunrise on Friday, January 22, the flakes ghosting down in the half-light of dawn. By 10:00 AM. Breen had concluded that another blizzard was upon them. By nightfall the wind was screaming, the snow swarming down in a storm as horrific as any they had yet encountered. It kept up for the better part of four days, and when the storm finally broke for good, Philippine Keseberg walked over to the Breen cabin to say that her son, Lewis Jr., who had been born along the trail during the soft days of summer, had died three days before. If there was any comfort to be offered the grieving mother, it was that her daughter, Ada, was still alive.

  ***

  ON THE NIGHT OF A FEROCIOUS BLIZZARD, Virginia Reed lay awake in her bed, listening to the howling storm. "I could not sleep," she recalled, "was lying there in that little dark cabin under the snow, listening to the pitiless storm, so cold and hungry." Physical measures suggested the hopelessness of their plight, so she turned to the spiritual.

  Back in Illinois, she had been drawn to the local Catholic church, preferring its candlelit solemnity to what she regarded as the feigned and theatrical spiritualism of her family's tent-revival creed. The attraction deepened as she watched Patrick Breen read Catholic prayers by the glow of a lit piece of kindling, a visual echo of the luminous and shimmering Mass she remembered. Now, as the storm raged outside, she found herself on her knees, vowing that if the God to whom the Breens prayed so fervently would allow her to survive, she would join the Catholic church they cherished.

  ***

  LANDRUM MURPHY HAD BECOME THE MAN of his family. At the journey's beginning, he had been a mere teenager, two older sisters and their knowledgeable husbands above him in the family pecking order. But his brother-in-law William Pike had been killed in a firearms accident back on the trail, and then his two older sisters and his remaining brother-in-law, William Foster, risked everything with the Forlorn Hope. Land-rum was left as the closest thing to an adult partner for his harried mother, now the caretaker for Landrum, three younger siblings, and three grandchildren.

  Two weeks after the entrapment Landrum turned seventeen, an age when a boy's chief ambition is to become a man, and surely he took it upon himself to do what he could, to labor with the heaviest camp chores and comfort the smallest children. No longer a mere uncle to toddlers, he had become the surrogate father to a family.

  The work wore on him. By mid-January, Breen noted in his diary that Landrum was "crazy last night." Two days later, the young man was "very low, in danger if relief dont come soon." A week after that, he was bedridden. His desperate mother walked over to the Breen cabin and pleaded with Peggy Breen for a little meat to give the boy. Breen consented, but by the time Levinah Murphy returned with the precious morsel, her son was too far gone to eat. A little past midnight on the last day of January, just a week after the Keseberg baby's death, Landrum Murphy slipped away.

  ***

  IT HAD BEEN THREE MONTHS since they were trapped, and deaths came now in rapid succession, like the steady striking of a clock. Every two or three days word went around camp of some new fatality: Landrum Murphy on January 31; the McCutchan baby on February 2; the Eddy baby on the 4th; Eleanor Eddy, grieving her baby's loss, on the 7th; Augustus Spitzer on the 8th; and then Milt Elliott, still amid the strangers with whom he did not wish to die, on the 9th.

  Survivors struggled to dispose of the corpses. Proper graves were out of the question—digging down to soil was unimaginable—so instead the bodies were merely hauled outside and covered with snow. The baby Margaret Eddy's tiny body lay in the cabin for three days, surrounded by people who were barely
alive themselves, until finally her mother died and someone decided they should be buried together. John Breen, a teenager who had himself been ill, roused the necessary energy and laid them to rest. Margret Reed told her children that when she and Levinah Murphy removed Milt Elliott's body from the cabin, they were so weak they had to drag it by the hair.

  ***

  IT WAS SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY how the Reeds' little lapdog Cash had survived this long. He was the last of the family's five dogs, the same animals that saved their masters' lives by providing a warm-blooded blanket against the cold winds of the Great Salt Lake Desert. With food supplies dwindling, there was nothing to spare for the little creature, and yet here he was, still barking and panting and nuzzling against the youngsters on the cold nights. Patty Reed thought that perhaps he had survived by catching crickets in the vermin-infested cabins. But in time, the family was faced with the unavoidable necessity, and Cash himself was sacrificed for the greater good. "We ate his head and feet & hide & evry thing about him," Virginia Reed remembered later. The grim canine stockpile lasted a week, and then the ever-struggling Reeds once again faced starvation. At times they ate an unappetizing mush produced by taking the bones from which the Breens had gnawed their sustenance and boiling them for days on end.

  The Breens still had a little meat, but by and large they refused to share it, understandably calculating that it would be needed for the paramount goal of their own survival. Peggy Breen ached with anxiety, "very uneasy for fear we shall all perrish with hunger," as her husband put it in his diary.

  The Graveses worried too. Breen noted in his diary that Elizabeth Graves seized the Reeds' scanty remaining property as collateral against some unspecified debt, presumably Margret Reed's purchase of two cattle weeks before. The seizure probably didn't mean much, since the Reeds had virtually nothing left and were no longer occupying their half of the double cabin they had once shared with the Graveses, but it was plain evidence that collaboration had irreversibly dissolved, that the Donner Party was beset with the petty imbroglios that invariably afflict any group of people confined together amid trying circumstances. Elizabeth Graves eventually took her bickering to a ludicrous level, insisting to Breen that his predictions of warmer weather were a sort of jinx, an ironic guarantee of continued freezing. Apparently she meant this quite seriously, since the normally ungrudging Breen wrote succinctly, "she is a case."

  Nobody could hold out much longer, as Patrick Breen clearly understood. For weeks he had been hoping for a thaw, whether to aid the arrival of the rescuers or the escape of the emigrants. Again and again he had recognized what he thought were the signs of a changing season— the chirping of birds, the caress of the sun—only to be disappointed when the blizzards returned. Now, as if in recognition of their perilous state, he seemed to lower his goal, to aim not necessarily for ultimate salvation but merely for a fleeting victory over the snow that had so long held them captive. "We hope with the assistance of Almighty God," he wrote, "to be able to live to see the bare surface of the earth once more."

  Part 3

  Salvation

  20 Fellowbeings

  In the modern world, rescue is often a relatively easy affair. Discover that some unfortunate band of adventurers is trapped in the wilds— isolated by the natural confines of mountain or island or jungle—and usually a helicopter can whirl down and disgorge medics and guides and helpers of every ilk. There are exceptions, of course. It has been said that the upper reaches of Mt. Everest might as well be the moon, for all the hope of sudden deliverance from afar. But most of the time, if sufferers can be found, assistance can be delivered with astonishing speed. Sailors are saved from turbulent seas; climbers are plucked from cliffs. Even if those in need cannot be reached, they can often be located, so that a crackly voice on the radio or the steady beep of a transponder can serve as the target for a parachuted cache of calories that preserves life until the motor-powered cavalry roars over the hill.

  The nineteenth century presented more intractable dilemmas. In the case of the Donner Party, learning the precise location of the stranded party provided no guarantee of its salvation. The helpless travelers faced a mountain range all but impassable on foot or in the saddle, yet would-be rescuers shared precisely the same means of transport. And if getting in is just as hard as getting out, if you cannot reach them for precisely the same reasons they cannot reach you—then how the hell do you save their lives?

  AT FIRST, EVEN THE POTENTIAL HELPERS needed help. When the seven surviving members of the Forlorn Hope struggled down out of the mountains in mid-January, the little settlement they found at Johnson's Ranch was too small to mount a rescue mission. So the first task was not to head east to aid the victims, but south and west to summon men, equipment and supplies from Sutter's Fort, forty hazardous miles away.

  Winter rains had deluged Northern California. Rivers strained against their banks, floodwaters surged over fields, mud seized hooves and feet and wagon wheels and held them with an unbreakable grip. The countryside, one man remembered, was "one vast quag mire."

  The first obstacle was the Bear River, pounding along too high and too fast to ford. Two pine logs were lashed together with strips of rawhide, and the next morning the haphazard raft was shoved out into the roaring current, an Indian messenger named Indian Dick hanging on for dear life. The little vessel remained intact long enough to ferry its passenger to the opposite bank, where he took off his shoes, rolled his pants up above the knee, and set off on his lonely slog through the floodlands. Remarkably, he reached Sutter's Fort that night and raised the alarm about the desperate, trapped emigrants.

  Heading into the Sierra in the dead of winter was a life-threatening enterprise, so recruiting participants posed a problem. With a war on, John Sutter had briefly lost control of his own fort, which was now under the command of an army lieutenant named Edward Kern. Kern had no authority to pay a rescue party, but he made a vague promise that the federal government would do something for the men, then fired off a quick letter to his superiors seeking retroactive approval and guidance. Kern's amorphous promise fell short. Only three men came forward, too few to even begin the journey. Then Sutter stepped in and proved that an established local man often has more credibility than the federal government. Along with John Sinclair, whose Mexican title of alcalde made him something akin to a mayor, Sutter said he would guarantee the rescuers three dollars a day, a hefty paycheck. With Sutter and Sinclair backing the finances, four more men volunteered, enough to make the core of an expedition.

  Rescuers said later that money was not their incentive, and it's hard to discount their courage. "Finally it was concluded that we would go or die trying," wrote Daniel Rhoads, one of two brothers who agreed to go along. "For not to make any attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us and to California as long as time lasted."

  Whatever their motivations, a party of about a dozen men was raised, many of them fresh emigrants who had themselves crossed the plains only months before. They gathered at Johnson's Ranch to make preparations. Sutter and Sinclair built on their earlier generosity by providing provisions and horses, but still it took days to ready the supplies. Cattle were slaughtered and the meat dried. Rawhide strips were cut so they would be ready later for making snowshoes. Saddles posed such a supply problem that two local women loaned sidesaddles for the rescuers' use.

  By early February, a little less than three weeks after Eddy stumbled down out of the mountains, the party was ready to leave. Sinclair arrived to take down the names of the rescuers for the official record and to bid them farewell. They were doing a noble thing, he said, and should not sacrifice their own lives in the effort. But neither should they flinch. They were "never to turn their backs upon the Mountains until they had brought away as many of their suffering fellowbeings as possible." A few of the horses had gone astray, and by the time they rounded up the loose animals much of the day was gone, so they delayed their departure until morning. A forbidding sly hinted at a brewing
storm, and that evening the clouds loosed a downpour, "one of the heaviest hurricanes ever experienced on the Sacramento." In the higher elevations the rain would be snow, and as the men of the rescue party drifted off to sleep, they must have wondered if the attempt to save other lives would cost them their own.

  ***

  FROM THE SAFETY OF THE LOWLANDS, Caleb Greenwood raised his eyes to the seductive white peaks and the ominous winter skies, calculating the odds. Greenwood had spent a lifetime in the mountains of the West, as trapper, guide, hunter, explorer. He was in his eighties, but his sinewy strength and vigor suggested a younger man. His worn buckskins looked as though he had not taken them off for years. A Crow Indian wife shared his household. Grown sons, universally referred to in the ugly argot of the day as "half-breeds," joined in his adventures.

  Greenwood had stayed alive by respecting the countless agents of death that populated the wilderness: beasts and disease and enemies and, perhaps most of all, ruthless winter. He knew what awaited a handful of men, mostly rubes fresh from the East, with no real guide, trudging off into the teeth of the Sierra in the dead of winter. Greenwood proposed a hard but realistic wager: None of the rescuers would ever be seen alive again. Nobody took the bet.

  ***

  FROM THE MOMENT THE RESCUERS LEFT Johnson's Ranch, the squelch of mud served as the drumbeat of their march. The trail was so sodden that frequently they had to unburden the pack mules, drag them out of the muck, then reload the beasts and continue on. Within days, the men and equipment were so soaked that they needed an entire day of immobility just to dry out. There was no rain the next day, although they encountered a creek so swollen that the animals had to swim across. The provisions were tied to a log and floated over.