Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  PHILIPPINE KESEBERG CARRIED HER DAUGHTER, three-year-old Ada, for as long as her arms had strength. She had already lost one child on the journey, Lewis Jr., who had not survived to see his first birthday. Her husband was back at the lake, his injured foot precluding any walking, and it was easy to suppose he would die there. Ada might be the only family Philippine had left. Aching for a respite, she offered a gold watch and twenty-five dollars to anyone who would carry Ada, but no one accepted. Philippine recentered her resolve and marched on, but it was the daughter rather than the mother who could go no farther. Sometime that night, Ada died, the latest victim of hunger and cold.

  In the morning, the others discovered that Philippine literally could not let go of her child. She clutched the tiny corpse like a pilgrim with an icon. Her mind reeled back beyond her son's death, beyond even the beginning of the journey, all the way back to her homeland of Germany. Before the Kesebergs crossed the Atlantic, Philippine had given birth to twins, Ada and another little girl they named Mathilde Elise. The tots had barely been a year old when the family came to America, and perhaps the journey proved too much for Mathilde, for she died two months after they arrived. Philippine must have been adamant that she would not lose Ada too, and yet now she had been helpless to prevent it, even as she held the child in her arms.

  Reason Tucker stepped forward. They had to keep moving, and it was madness to carry a corpse. The child had to be left to a mountain grave. At last Philippine agreed and stumbled away with the others. Tucker bent to put the little body in the snow, covered it as best he could, and hurried to catch up. "Her sperrit went to heaven," he wrote of Ada, "her body to the wolves."

  The grim band marched in single file, just as the rescuers had on the inbound trip, the leaders breaking trail with snowshoes and the others following in their tracks. Each morning they awoke to find their clothing frozen solid. Virginia Reed remembered that even her shoestrings hardened into immovable wires. They started the day's march the minute it was light, for it was easier to walk on the snow when it was still frozen hard rather than softening under the midday sun. Unexpectedly, the sun was in some ways a curse, its glare glinting off the snow until their eyes ached, its warmth melting their frozen clothes until they were soggy and dripping. Virginia, who was thirteen, tried to think of her wet smock as clinging like a fashionable dress.

  Hunger deepened by the hour. Hopeful faces sank as they approached the food caches hung in trees by the rescuers on their way up the mountains. Animals had somehow reached many of the bags, gnawing them open and gorging on the contents. Tucker measured out what was left, dividing the rations as evenly as possible and urging his charges to be careful with the precious scraps, lest a lifesaving bite be wasted.

  The last allotment was a double ration, two small strips of dried beef, each about the size of an index finger, meant to serve as both dinner that evening and breakfast the following morning. Leanna Donner could not muster the needed self-discipline, and she feasted on both meals at once. At dawn, she had nothing, so she sat in the half-light and watched the others nibble on their breakfasts. Her older sister, fourteen-year-old Elitha, who had kept Leanna going on the first day's fatiguing hike from Alder Creek to Truckee Lake, could not stand to see the girl sit by ravenously while others savored the precious taste of food. Elitha took her own small strip of meat and divided it neatly in two. Leanna, who remembered that the tiny morsels were then "more precious than gold or diamonds," never forgot her sister's help. "How long we went without food after that," she recalled, "I do not know."

  The children scrounged desperately. Tucker's buckskin pants were frayed along the bottom, and so the youngsters began to cut off slices of the leather, crisping it in the fire and gnawing it down, in effect recreating the old meals of boiled hide that had sustained them at the lake. By their fifth day on the trail, the whole party was hungry enough to do the same. At noon, Tucker divided up some shoestrings, roasted them, and provided them to the marchers.

  There was every possibility now that they all might perish, that they might, like John Denton and Ada Keseberg, survive the ordeal only to die amid the rescue. No one struggled more than little James Reed—at five the youngest of the children who were actually walking, as opposed to being carried by someone. He plunged down into the snow up to his waist, then propped his knee on the edge and struggled from the personal crevasse he had created, thrusting his foot forward to repeat the whole process. Every agonizing step, he told the others, brought him "nigher Pa and somthing to eat." To keep him moving, the adults surely promised him that it was true. Then they must have wondered if it was.

  ***

  BACK IN THE CAMPS, silent questions of conscience stole through the shelters like a rumor going around town. Even before the rescuers left, the Donners tamped down the inhibitions of taboo and broached an obvious, if forbidden, topic. If they could not find the bodies of their frozen cattle under the layers of snow, they told the rescuers, they would soon begin to eat the dead.

  The same horrifying desperation seeped through the lake cabins. The day after the rescue party left, the Breens shot their dog, Towser, and dressed out the meager body. The butchering knives pried little meat from the bones, for the animal was hardly more than skeleton and hide, but even so small and fleeting a bounty drew envy from the other cabins, half-dead neighbors begging for a chance at survival. Elizabeth Graves hobbled over from her cabin to ask for meat. Patrick Breen, whose family had long held the richest larder of the company, could see the longing inspired by his provisions. "They think I have meat to spare but I know to the Contrary," he wrote of the other families. "They have plenty hides. I live principally on the same."

  The nights turned especially cold—"froze hard last night," Breen wrote in his diary on four consecutive mornings—and the flagging emigrants could no longer guard the half-buried bodies of the dead against the wolves. The beasts edged ever closer to the cabin doors, and at night their howls rang through the shanties like the keening wails of ghosts.

  Friday, February 26, dawned clear and warm after another arctic night, a brisk wind blowing out of the southeast. Patty Reed's jaw bulged with the swollen protrusion of a toothache, but Breen pondered more agonizing matters. Pulling out his pencil, he set to work on the day's diary entry with a fretful mind. Most families now recoiled at the disgusting boiled hides, he noted, although there were enough to go around. "We eat them with a tolerable good apetite," Breen wrote. "Thanks be to Almighty God, Amen." Then Breen turned to the real cause of his vexation. The day before, he confessed to the little diary, Levinah Murphy had come to his cabin and, like the Donner families before her, acknowledged the depth of their plight. Unless the wolves took it first, she intended to cannibalize the corpse of Milt Elliott, the Reed family's faithfiil helper. "Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him," Breen wrote straightforwardly. "It is distressing."

  22

  Threshold of Desperation

  As Reason Tucker's initial relief party bulled its way up to the high camps and then started back down, James Reed was busy mounting a separate attempt at rescue, one that lagged behind Tucker's but ultimately would become intertwined with it. Discharged from his military duties after the Battle of Santa Clara, Reed rode north to the little town of Yerba Buena, which was about to shed its name for the more impressive San Francisco. He was armed with a petition informing the American naval commander that the Donner Party had been delayed "from unavoidable causes" and was now trapped. The signers, prominent local residents from San Jose, asked that the government dispatch rescuers on snowshoes immediately.

  Ushered in to see the top-ranking naval officer on the scene, Capt. J. B. Hull, Reed encountered a mixed response. Hull promised to do what he could but rejected the idea that he mount the whole expedition himself, a reaction not unlike Lieutenant Kern's at Fort Sutter after the arrival of the Forlorn Hope. Hull insisted that if he agreed to outfit the entire operation during wartime, bureaucrats back
at the War Department would balk at the expense. He was polite but firm. "His sympathy was that of a man and gentleman," Reed recalled.

  So Reed turned to charity. Local leaders called a public meeting, and the men of the town gathered in the saloon of the best hotel. People asked Reed to speak, but when he rose to make his appeal the gravity of the moment overwhelmed him, and he was unable to go on. James Dunleavy, a Methodist minister who had also come west earlier that year, stepped in to take Reed's place. Trained by the weekly rigors of the pulpit, Dunleavy appealed to the crowd's basic empathy, describing what he guessed was the sad and deteriorating condition of the emigrants. He also mentioned his own journey, which was probably crucial in giving the San Franciscans, most of whom had arrived by sea, some sense of the rigors faced by overland emigrants.

  It was a test of the mettle of the little community, and the response proved their pride. Collection jars filled with eight hundred dollars, and sailors on two American ships in the harbor pitched in three hundred more. Local leaders guessed that more money would come in soon. "This speaks well for Yerba Buena," one of the newspapers reported proudly.

  Organizers agreed that the expedition would split in two initially. Reed would head for Napa and Sonoma, forty miles north, to raise more funds and recruit more help, while the bulk of the supplies would be sent up the Sacramento River on a donated schooner commanded by a young naval officer named Selim Woodworth, who volunteered for the job. The two parties would rendezvous at the confluence of the Sacramento and Feather rivers, and from there proceed on foot into the Sierra.

  As Woodworth and Reed prepared to leave, a launch arrived from Sutter's Fort with the startling news that some of the trapped emigrants— the surviving members of the Forlorn Hope—had materialized from the wilderness. For the first time, San Franciscans learned that a preliminary relief expedition—the one led by Tucker—was already being mounted. But they also learned the true horror of the ordeal: starvation and death and cannibalism.

  Surprisingly, given later coverage of the tragedy, these first public discussions were remarkably muted and sympathetic. The members of the Forlorn Hope apparently made no attempt to hide their cannibalism, and the first newspaper reports treated the issue as simply one component of the ordeal. Two papers broke the story on the same day, February 13. The Californian mentioned cannibalism in only one plain-spoken sentence: "the survivers were kept alive by eating the dead bodies." The California Star said nothing of cannibalism until the middle of a long dispatch, and then the account was hardly sensationalistic. The paper noted calmly that members of the Forlorn Hope considered conducting a lottery to determine who should be killed for food, but also reported that a game of chance proved unnecessary. "But at this time the weaker began to die which rendered it unnecessary to take life, and as they died the company went into camp and made meat of the dead bodies of their companions." Far from portraying the Donner Party as a collection of ghouls, these early stories seemed designed to generate sympathy for the emigrants and support for the rescue efforts. Later, stories far different in tone would appear.

  Aware that Tucker's initial relief was already on the way, Wood-worth delayed his departure from San Francisco while fund-raisers worked the town for more cash. The idea now was not merely to rush ahead with food but to set up a base camp partway into the mountains and then to resupply the emigrants thoroughly. In the end, private contributors donated thirteen hundred dollars, and Captain Hull loosened his purse strings enough to add four hundred dollars in government support. Supplies of every type soon filled the hold of Woodworth's vessel: fifteen barrels of flour, four hundred pounds of sugar, seventeen pounds of tobacco, six frying pans, two axes, two hatchets, a shovel, a tea kettle, twenty-four blankets, forty-eight pairs of woolen socks, two pounds of thread, four packets of needles, twelve pairs of women's stockings, twenty-four pairs of pantaloons, thirty red flannel shirts, fifteen pairs of children's shoes, a dozen pairs of adult shoes, four pairs of mittens. Everything was finally stowed on Sunday, February 7, so, without waiting for the passing of the Sabbath, Woodworth weighed anchor, set a spread of sail, and coasted upriver toward the mountains.

  Reed went north on his fund-raising and recruiting expedition, successfully rounding up horses and men. But when the party arrived at the confluence of the Sacramento and the Feather, Woodworth was nowhere to be found. The young naval officer had encountered headwinds, so he and his crew had to warp the vessel—attaching ropes for pulling, the lines spitting off water as they were heaved taut, the boat literally dragged upriver against the twin enemies of wind and current. Progress slowed, and when Reed arrived, Woodworth was still well downriver.

  Flush with winter rains, the Sacramento ripped along its bank. Without Woodworth's boat, Reed had no way to cross, so he found an elk herd and had his men shoot two of the animals. He intended to stretch the hides over wooden frames to make skin boats, the quickest way to construct some sort of vessel that would float. Crossing a pounding river in the fragile boats would have been treacherous, especially with horses and equipment, and Reed and his men were saved the trouble when a small launch suddenly appeared and offered to help. Reed crossed first with his horse, climbed into the saddle, and hustled off to the last settlement before the mountains, Johnson's Ranch.

  Reed started slaughtering cattle while Johnson ordered his Indian workers to grind flour in hand mills. They worked round the clock for two days, the crackle of the drying fire and the creaking of the flour mills keeping time with their labors. Reed's men soon arrived, and on February 23 they headed up into the mountains. Woodworth was somewhere behind, presumably coming on as fast as he could.

  Hoping to keep the pack animals from floundering in the snow, Reed left behind spare equipment and supplies, trying to create the lightest possible loads. When they cinched the packs down, each animal carried a mere eighty pounds, less than the lightest of jockeys. Even so, when they reached the snow, hooves plunged downward like rocks tossed into a pond.

  They broke camp early the next morning, hoping that the snow would still be frozen from the night and thus would bear up under the animals. But again, as the day before, the horses lurched and sank, every step a trial. After only two hundred yards, the animals heaved and sweated in the dawn chill.

  Calling a halt to the barely moving column, Reed must have pondered a perplexing and challenging decision. He knew the first relief party led by Tucker had taken this same route more than two weeks earlier, but he had no way of knowing their fate. Perhaps they had never reached the cabins at the lake. It was entirely possible they had been caught in the open by a blizzard at the higher elevations and frozen to death. From the stories of the Forlorn Hope, Reed knew the desperate straits of the trapped emigrants, including his own wife and children, and if no relief had reached them, death could be imminent for all. But if the animals could not go forward and he pushed on without substantial supplies, how much help would he be? He might arrive at the lake cabins virtually without food. Or his own men might be stranded for days by a storm, with few provisions to tide them over. The last thing anyone needed was yet another party in need of rescue. Standing there in the snow and cold, looking at Reed and waiting for his decision, the men grew silent.

  Faced with his staring troops, Reed accepted the bald fact that the animals could no longer negotiate the deepening snow. Resolving to push onward anyway, he decided to shift the loads to the humans and leave the horses behind. So after the initial and pathetic two hundred yards of the morning march, the men slid the packs off the animals and began rearranging provisions. When they shouldered the loads, the uncertain silence that Reed had noted melted away, the presence of a definite task lightening their spirits even as the packs weighed down their backs. "The hilarity Commenced as usual," Reed wrote in his diary.

  The long upward miles stretched out into the afternoon, until at last they saw two figures coming toward them, spots against the snow. They hurried forward and discovered two members of the first rescue pa
rty, detached and sent ahead for supplies. Questions pierced the cold mountain air: Were there survivors among the emigrants? What were the conditions at the camps? Who was walking out? Reed learned that his wife and two of his children were among those on the trail ahead and quickly sent two men forward with provisions.

  The two men Reed sent ahead reached the long file of marchers that afternoon, shortly after the Tucker party had been reduced to a noon meal of roasted shoestrings. With fresh provisions at hand, a fire was quickly kindled and a meal of dried beef devoured by the famished survivors. Two parties were now only a few miles apart and headed directly toward one another—Tucker and his rescued emigrants heading west, Reed and the other men of the second relief party heading east—but night fell before they could close the gap and find one another. As both parties pitched camp, they knew of each other's presence, though certainly not their exact location, and they also knew that a sudden storm could transform the smallest distances into the largest obstacles.

  Reed passed what must have been a fitful night, then roused his men early so they could make good time on the still-frozen snow. After only four miles, they began encountering survivors strung out along the trail. Death-mask faces pressed around the rescuers, pleading paupers desperately chanting, "Bread. Bread. Bread, Bread." Bakers had been at work in anticipation of the moment, so the rescuers dug into their provisions and offered sustenance to the bony, grasping hands. In his diary, Reed referred to the survivors as "the poor unfortunate Starved people."

  A shout went up for Margret Reed, and then another to promise that her husband was among the rescuers coming up the trail. She fell to her knees in joy and relief. Virginia Reed ran to embrace her father, fell again and again, then at last folded herself into his arms. Little James Reed Jr., who had vowed that every step brought him nearer to his father, must have celebrated his vindication. It was February 27, the first time the Reeds had seen each other since the patriarch's banishment from the Donner Party back in the russet days of autumn. "The meeting was very affecting," one witness wrote with nineteenth-century understatement.