Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  The little band reached the snow on Tuesday, February 9, six days and more than forty miles into their journey. Within hours, the mules were floundering "belly deep," and the next day William Eddy, who had somehow recuperated enough to join the rescue effort, was sent back with some of the exhausted animals. Two men were left with a cache of provisions, and the rest of the meat was divided into fifty-pound packs, a heavy load for men in deep snow.

  They struggled on, but as they climbed higher the snow grew deeper every day. On Sunday, the 14th, three of the men simply refused to go farther. That meant only seven were left, and morale plummeted. There must have been some talk of a general retreat, for Reason Tucker, who had been named by Sinclair as one of two captains of the party, decided that a drastic step was needed. "Under existing circumstances I took it upon myself to insure every man who persevered to the end five dollars a day from the time they entered the snow." Tucker was taking on a significant financial risk, but perhaps he was motivated by a sympathetic compassion: He had crossed the plains himself the previous summer, even traveling briefly with the Graves family before they joined the Donner Party. The wage guarantee worked. "We determined to go ahead," Tucker wrote in his diary.

  Each man took a turn at the head of the line, breaking trail by sinking knee-deep in the snow at every step. When the leader grew exhausted, he fell to the back, and the second man took over as pacesetter. To guide their return, they set fire to dead pine trees along their path. Every few days they hung a small bundle of meat from a tree, lightening their packs and providing a ready source of resupply on the trip home.

  The hiking was fatiguing, brutal work, but when they made camp at night they somehow had to find the strength to fell saplings and make a platform for their campfire. Daniel Rhoads remembered that they usually roasted some meat for supper, "and then throwing our blankets over our shoulders sat, close together, around the fire and dozed through the night the best way we could."

  They were extraordinarily exposed, and if a major blizzard hit, they could have been trapped as inescapably as the people they were trying to rescue. But for the most part, the weather held, and up they went, three miles on a bad day, eight miles on a good one. On the 17th, they reached the headwaters of the Yuba River, just beneath the pass, where they guessed the snow was thirty feet deep.

  The following day they crossed the pass in the morning and descended the steep eastern slope of the range, the icy flatness of Truckee Lake spread below them. They reached the lake in the late afternoon, their long shadows reaching out as if to announce their presence. They trudged on to the far shore, at the eastern end, where they had been told the cabins lay. Well supplied and with some idea of where they were going, they had completed the journey in about half the time of the Forlorn Hope, yet still it had taken two weeks.

  But where was everyone? No emigrants waved or danced or shouted gleefully to herald their arrival. In fact, no one could be seen at all. "No living thing except ourselves was in sight," Daniel Rhoads remembered, "and we thought that all must have perished." Probably they were just a little too late. Probably starvation or disease or despair had taken their ultimate toll. It was a reasonable assumption, but out of some desperate hope one of the rescuers let out a yell, "a loud halloo." Then they waited to see who, if anyone, was alive to answer.

  21

  From California, or Heaven?

  The trapped emigrants had kept a yearning vigil westward, peering off toward the mountains and squinting their eyes against the blinding white glare of sun and snow. In his diary, Patrick Breen anticipated the arrival of help. "Expecting some account from Suiters Soon," he jotted down at one point. And then a few days later: "Expecting some person across the Mountain this week." At Alder Creek, Jean Baptiste Trudeau took a more direct approach. The young Donner family worker once climbed to the top of a tall pine tree near camp—an impressive and exhausting feat given his condition—so that he might catch sight of any arriving rescue party.

  So it is ironic that when help finally arrived, no one was waiting. When the seven rescuers walked up to the lake cabins and let out their loud "halloo," the emaciated occupants were all inside their cramped and filthy quarters. As the rescuers stood waiting, hoping for a response and expecting none, Levinah Murphy finally emerged and climbed up the roughly hewn steps in the snow. She reached the surface and stared at these apparitions who had appeared in the midst of so unforgiving a wilderness. In a thin croak—"a hollow voice very much agitated," remembered one of the rescuers—she rasped out a question: "Are you men from California or do you come from heaven?"

  Conditions staggered the rescuers. Emigrants whispered shallow breaths from gaunt frames, some unable to stand or walk. Bodies lay about, most buried as well as the waning strength of the survivors had allowed, though some merely covered with quilts. Inside, in the crowded cavelike cabins where the emigrants had passed three and a half months, the revolting glue of boiled hides and bones clung to grimy pots. Bedclothes reeked. Vermin flickered about. The stench overwhelmed.

  Rescuers dug into their packs and doled out what little food they had to spare—jerked beef and biscuits "made out of the coarsest flour" but to the emigrants as sweet as any baker's delicacy. Then the rescuers posted a guard over their remaining larder to prevent the famished survivors from raiding supplies needed for the return trip.

  The lake cabins were only the first stop, and the next morning three of the rescuers took advantage of warm, clear weather to set off for the Alder Creek camp. A few hours later they arrived, finding the tent-bound Donner families in conditions that were, if it was possible, even worse than those at the lake. The rescuers huddled with George Donner immediately, talking over hard decisions that had to be made almost instantly. A blizzard could roar over the peaks at any moment, dropping fresh sheets of snow that would rise up around both rescuers and victims like the walls of a prison. The return march had to begin that very day, right away in fact, but it was plain that some of the emigrants were too weak to travel. So yet again, as when the Forlorn Hope set out, families faced a horrifying and brutal triage, deciding who would make a harrowing bid for salvation and who would remain behind, very possibly to die.

  Softening the blow as best they could, the rescuers claimed that fresh parties were being raised in California, something that Sutter had promised but they did not know with certainty. They feigned ignorance about the gruesome ordeal of the Forlorn Hope, whose true experiences of death and cannibalism would have disheartened the remaining emigrants. William Eddy survived, the rescuers said, for their own expedition had been outfitted in response to his pleas, but as for the rest of the party they claimed to know nothing.

  Betsy Donner had no choice but to stay behind. Her husband, Jacob, had died weeks before, and now she was sole parent to seven children, some of whom clearly were too young for the journey. She kept her oldest son, fifteen-year-old Solomon, with her, presumably deciding to risk his life so that he might help care for his youngest siblings. The two next oldest children, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old George, she sent along with the rescuers.

  In the other tent, George Donner was plainly too sick to go. The laceration on his hand—the gash he had received while trying to fix the wagon clear back at the start of the entrapment—had grown infected, and the fetid wound had crippled him. Tamzene Donner, his wife, was healthy enough to make a try for safety, but she refused to leave her ailing husband. She sent away her two stepdaughters—fourteen-year-old Elitha and twelve-year-old Leanna, George's children by a prior marriage—but kept her own three toddlers by her side.

  The rescuers felled a pine tree, so the remaining emigrants would have firewood, and then measured out the pathetically small rations they could leave behind for each of those staying at the tents—a teacupful of flour, two small biscuits, and a few thin pieces of jerked beef as long as a forefinger. Such scraps might suffice until another rescue party arrived, and in any event common decency required some sort of allowance, even
if the recipients were doomed.

  Then, within hours of their arrival, they departed, tramping off single file toward the lake, their charges trailing behind. Sparing what she could, Tamzene Donner took some string and tied a threadbare blanket around her stepdaughters' shoulders, hoping it would serve as a shawl in the daytime and a bedroll at night.

  The drama was all so quick that it seemed a little unreal. For months the Donners, like every other trapped family, had prayed for the joyous arrival of help from across the mountains. But no trumpets heralded the great moment. Instead it was just three exhausted men bearing scant food, not much news, and precious thin hope. Tamzene's youngest daughter, three-year-old Eliza, didn't even understand what had happened. Only afterward did she comprehend the sad and brutal truth that the long-awaited rescuers had just come and gone.

  ***

  REASON TUCKER WAS A BIG, RANGY VIRGINIAN with an uncompromising desire to help the stranded emigrants. When William Eddy first stumbled down out of the mountains, Tucker was among the handful of men who saddled up horses and rode out into the night to bring in the trailing members of the Forlorn Hope. And then, in the early stages of the rescue mission, it was Tucker who personally guaranteed the men's wages, a promise that preserved the whole expedition from collapse. Tucker had no relatives in the Donner Party, nor even, so far as we know, any particularly close friends, and yet he never balked at the dangerous business of deliverance.

  But as Tucker led the survivors away from the Alder Creek camp and back toward Truckee Lake, the enormity of the experience overwhelmed him, and the vigor that had brought him so far sheered away like an avalanche sheeting down a mountainside. "On the road back I gave out," he confided to his diary, although he displayed characteristic pioneer stoicism and offered no more detailed explanation. In time, he recovered and trudged onward through the dimming light of late afternoon. He reached the lake cabins at sundown, narrowly avoiding the nocturnal cold that might have transformed him from rescuer to victim.

  Trailing in Tucker's wake, twelve-year-old Leanna Donner struggled even more. Even at the start, she was so weak that others doubted she would reach the crest of the first hill. As the day wore on, she began to cry, then sat down on the snow, refusing to go farther. Her older sister, Elitha, urged her on, promising that the cabins of the lake camp were just over the next hill. Leanna struggled to her feet, plodded to the crest of the rise, and saw nothing. Again she collapsed and wept. Again Elitha pushed her forward. The cycle repeated until at last they saw the smoke curling upward from the cabin chimneys, a magical lure that drew them on. "When we reached the Graves cabin it was all I could do to step down the snow steps into the cabin," Leanna remembered later. "Such pain and misery as I endured that day is beyond description."

  She had gone seven miles; now she had to cross the Sierra.

  ***

  PATRICK BREEN PUT AWAY HIS DIARIST'S PENCIL, for the sudden presence of strangers in camp meant the first chance for fresh conversation in months. On the two days after Tucker and the others returned from Alder Creek, Breen scratched out the most meager of entries: "pleasant weather" the first day and "Thawey warm day" the second.

  People were moving around again, rejuvenated by the knowledge that the snow and the mountains and the winter could be conquered. "The sight of us appeared to put life into their emaciated frames," one rescuer wrote. Yet there wasn't much to do. To rest the rescuers, it had been decided that they would not begin the return journey until Monday, four days after their arrival. In the meantime the survivors at the lake cabins filled the dreary hours with the same heartrending calculus that had already occurred at Alder Creek: families assessing the cold odds of life and death and deciding who would make the Herculean effort to escape and who would stay and wait.

  Back in December, the Forlorn Hope had consisted almost entirely of adults, several of whom were parents with children back at the cabins. The remaining adults could care for the youngsters, and without provisions the trip was just too risky for the young. So the adults left and the children stayed.

  Now it was the other way around. Most of the adults were dead, too sick to travel, or forced to remain in camp to care for children so young they could barely toddle. The new group would be led by relatively healthy adults—the rescuers—with at least some basic provisions, so the parents of the Donner Party took the opportunity to send away their older offspring. Patrick and Peggy Breen sent away two of their seven children. Elizabeth Graves chose the three oldest of her brood to go. Levinah Murphy dispatched two of her three remaining children and one of her two remaining grandchildren. Lewis Keseberg was still hampered by the injured foot that had rendered him a mule passenger during the futile assault on the mountain pass in the fall, but his young wife risked the attempt with her only surviving child, whom she planned to carry. Margret Reed, desperate as always to reach her banished husband, declared that she and all four of her children would flee.

  The resulting roster was astonishingly juvenile. As the column marched out of camp, the seven rescuers were pursued by twenty-three skeletal emigrants, most of whom were fourteen or younger, a good many with no parent accompanying them. It was a procession that would today be considered a school parade: two fourteen-year-olds, two thirteen-year-olds, three twelve-year-olds, an eleven-year-old, a ten-year-old, two eight-year-olds, a five-year-old, and, carried in the arms of others, three three-year-olds.

  Before long it was plain that two of the Reed children—eight-year-old Patty and three-year-old Thomas—could not go on. Aquilla Glover, along with Tucker a co-captain of the rescue party, recognized the hard truth and told Margret Reed that two of her children would have to go back. He would see them safely to the cabins, he said, then hustle back to catch up. Reed balked. She declared that she too would return to the lake and stay there with Patty and Thomas, letting her two other children go ahead with the party.

  Glover took her gently to task, arguing that her return would only add to the number of mouths to feed at the lake. By forging on, she could help Virginia and James, the two older children, and she could effectively conserve the limited provisions that would have to sustain everyone at the cabins. Glover even promised that if they met no other rescue party, he would return and bring out the children, a courageous commitment that could have cost him his life. Reed pondered the unimaginable choice before her, then asked if Glover was a Mason like her husband, a distinction in which he took great pride. Glover said he was, and Reed asked him to back up his vow by tying his commitment to the honor of the fraternal society. Glover gave his word as a Mason, and Reed bent to bid two of her children farewell.

  "Well. Ma." said Patty, "if you never see me again, do the best you can."

  ***

  STRUGGLING BACK TO THE LAKE CABINS, the two Reed children were hardly greeted with glee. They would have to return to the Breen cabin, where they had been living before they left with the rescuers, and the Breens were understandably reluctant to share their sparse provisions with two more hungry mouths. They had already housed the Reed family for weeks, and now it was presumed they would feed and shelter two of the children longer still. Resentment welled up, and initially they refused to let the children enter.

  Two rescuers who had brought the youngsters back lobbied for the Breens' forbearance. Fresh relief parties would arrive shortly, they insisted, with more supplies and a renewed determination to pluck the remaining survivors from the mountain prison. Slowly, grudgingly, the Breens relented. Patty and Thomas padded down the snow steps they had climbed only that morning, back into the dark and wretched cabin they had briefly escaped.

  ***

  MARGRET REED MUST HAVE TURNED IT OVER in her head a thousand times. She had just walked away from two of her children, leaving them to a fate she could not fathom or predict, and now she had nothing to do, save walk and walk and walk.

  The third day out from the lake, an Englishman named John Denton crumbled. Denton was a likable figure, a man who had proven himself han
dy around camp. When Sarah Keyes died back at the Big Blue River, it was Denton who hefted a chisel and carved her name on a tombstone. As the company endured its winter captivity, he bore up better than most of the other young single men, the majority of whom were long since dead. But the journey toward safety sapped his last reserve. He struggled to keep pace, pushing himself with desperation, but in time it became plain that he could not go on.

  Not wanting to hinder the others, he asked to be abandoned, so they built a fire on a small platform of green logs, chopped some extra firewood, and left what food they could spare. Reason Tucker laid a crude bed of evergreen boughs next to the fire and provided a blanket to ward off the worst of the cold. Putting up a brave face for a man he was forced to abandon, Tucker vowed to send back help soon, but he knew it was a pointless promise. Denton knew it too. He gave Tucker a brace of pistols he was carrying and told him to keep them in case the worst happened. Tucker's bluffing confidence fooled little James Reed Jr., who asked to be left with Denton and the warmth of the flames. His mother refused, of course, and James and the others gathered up their meager provisions and moved on.

  Alone, Denton made himself as comfortable as possible, then took out a pencil and a small journal. He began to write, revising as he went by rubbing out lines with a small India rubber eraser. Surrounded by endless white snow, his mind returned to verdant boyhood summers back in England: gazing at a brook, wandering through fields, sitting beneath "the old witch-elm that shades the village green"—joys now impossibly distant. He finished his composition, and waited.

  Weeks later, rescuers found his body sitting against a snowbank, his head down upon his chest.

  ***