Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  But then Margret breathed horrifying news to her husband: Two of their children were still trapped. James Reed urged the survivors to keep going, then mustered his men and started back up the mountains. Within minutes of a reunion that ended almost five months of separation, Reed was off again, waving farewell to half his family in a frantic attempt to save the rest.

  ***

  AT THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, THE SURVIVORS were perched at a threshold of desperation. They had all endured the unendurable—months of hunger so sharp it twisted the belly, meal after meal of boiled leather, the slow deaths of comrades and family. Yet now there was hope. Rescuers had made it through once. Perhaps others would too. If only breath and blood could be kept active for a few more days, a lifetime might still stretch out ahead.

  Out in the snow lay the food they needed, buried in the shallowest of graves and preserved by the icy cold. At last someone took a knife— perhaps it was one of the Donners, perhaps it was Mrs. Murphy making good on her vow to eat Milt Elliott, perhaps it was someone else. There may have been a conversation: arguments back and forth, tears and angst, the frank necessity pitched against the age-old taboo. Or it may have been a silent consensus, a sudden and collective acceptance of the unavoidable. Someone took a knife and went out into the snow.

  ***

  IRONICALLY, PEOPLE WHO ARE STARVING can be killed by an overabundance of food. To survive a prolonged period of malnourishment, the body begins to consume itself, burning off fat and then eating through muscle. As the process accelerates, the body begins to plunder the tools it needs to process nutrients, so that eventually a person who is desperately craving food can be killed by a gluttonous feast. In recognition of such perils, modern relief workers are provided with guidelines for the gradual refeeding of famine victims.

  The potential dangers of uncontrolled gorging by starvation victims was known even amid the primitive medical knowledge of the nineteenth century, and so when the survivors reached a camp where Reed had stationed one of his men with supplies, the emaciated emigrants were doled out only limited portions. The adults recognized the necessity of this restraint, but to twelve-year-old William Hook, it must have seemed a stubborn and perplexing denial. For months he had eaten almost nothing, had watched his family members wither and die for lack of food. Now an abundant larder was being kept cruelly beyond his reach.

  As he lay awake at night, his stomach knotted with a ravenous hunger. His mouth watered at the memory of the meager meal he had been given. At some point, temptation overwhelmed obedience, and he wriggled from his bedroll and snuck quietly to the food cache. For the first time in months, he could eat as much as he wished, and he began inhaling food, gorging himself in a hushed, private feast. Within hours, he was deathly ill. He was given tobacco juice to make him vomit, but when the party was ready to move on, William was too sick to march, so he was left behind with an adult attendant and two other youngsters who could not go on. At one point, apparently sick, William went out on the snow and crouched down, resting on his hands and knees. He was approached by eleven-year-old Billy Murphy, who had been left behind with frostbitten feet. Billy put a hand on William's shoulder, speaking to him and urging him to come back into the camp. William fell over, already dead. Billy and the camp attendant took some biscuits and dried beef from William's pockets and then buried him under a tree where the snow had melted.

  Billy's shoes had been cut off, and with no extra pairs on hand, he had no choice but to walk the rest of the way barefoot. They caught the main group of survivors three days later, and four days after that—on March 7—the whole party reached Johnson's Ranch, the end of their journey. After a winter of unending white, the lowland spring seemed a riot of colors and life: the green of the grass, the varied hues of early flowers. Even the soft brown of bare and unfrozen dirt was an enlivening change. "I really thoughtT" remembered Virginia Reed, "I had stepped over into paradise."

  23

  Weeping

  George Donner looked away and wept. His three youngest children, the three little girls who remained in the bedraggled tent at Alder Creek with their parents, had been so pitifully hungry, their sunken faces so heartbreaking. Yet George and Tamzene had been unable to satisfy their daughters' pleading. No more rescuers had come to help. No hunter had provided meat.

  Out of options, they went out into the snow to dig up the shallow graves of loved ones. At first, the only body that could be found was that of Jacob Donner, George's brother, who had died back in December. His widow gave her permission, and the flesh of his limbs was sliced away.

  The girls ate, but George could not bring himself to watch. He had uprooted his prosperous and settled family and dragged them across a desiccated continent in search of a better life, and the great endeavor had come to disaster. The girls ate, and noticed their father's tears.

  ***

  THE NASAL HONKING OF GEESE sliced through the cold night air, and Patrick Breen lay in bed listening. It was early for the birds to be flying north. They might easily reach their summering grounds before spring loosed the grip of winter. They were at the forefront of their migration, as prompt as the Donner Party had been tardy.

  ***

  FROM THE SHELTER OF THE FOREST, pitying eyes peered in toward Breen's cabin. During the months of their entrapment, the emigrants had assumed they were alone, seeing no other human presence until the first rescuers arrived from California. In fact, they had been watched ever since they first drove their ox teams up into the mountains.

  The Washoe Indians lived in the eastern Sierra Nevada. They spent summers near Truckee Lake and winters at lower elevations, but hunting parlies would have returned to the lake even in the colder months. The Washoe had no written language, but their oral traditions recount a long observation of the strange invaders from the east. At first, the Washoe watched the wagon trains wend up the river canyons and thought the long processions looked like some giant, monstrous snake. Most of the trains disappeared over the crest of the mountains, of course, but the Washoe saw that one group stalled just at the onset of winter and then settled in at makeshift camps. The Indians had heard tales of the Spanish missions in California, where Native Americans were essentially enslaved, and so they were understandably reluctant to contact whites. But as the condition of the Donner Party slowly worsened, the Washoe's fear turned to sympathy, and on the morning after Breen heard the geese flying over, one courageous ambassador approached the cabins.

  He wore a heavy backpack and, so far as Breen could see, was alone. He approached from the lake, on snowshoes with strings made of bark. He said something the emigrants could not understand and left five or six small roots as an offering of food. Then he walked off toward the east. "Where he was going I could never imagine," remembered John Breen, Patrick's teenage son.

  The roots looked like onions and tasted like sweet potatoes, but the texture was stringy, "all full of little tough fibres," Breen wrote. Still, the emigrants devoured the gift gratefully. The Washoe never approached again. By now, they had seen things that convinced them the strangers were inhuman.

  24

  Gruesome Sights

  Climbing up into the higher elevations after leaving the members of the first rescue party, James Reed and his men began to plunge down to their waists in powder, the deep snow grabbing them like a demon from the netherworld. The men heaved themselves back to the surface, searched around for some firmer bit of footing, then launched another stride that would take them a yard closer to the summit and, almost surely, deliver them back into the depths.

  By midday the sun simmered snowfields into mushy bogs, impossible to walk on. The men lay down to take what rest they could, then rose at midnight, thinking the dependable night chill had again hardened the snow. But still the surface gave beneath their feet, so they waited another two hours and then at last resumed their climb by stars and moonlight and the coming dawn. Reed estimated the snow at thirty feet deep, the same guess Tucker made while marching in with the first rel
ief party.

  Soft snow and exhaustion again forced them into an early camp, a delay that cornered Reed into a difficult decision. He and most of the others were spent and needed a full night's rest. But three of the men— Charles Cady, Nicholas Clark, and Charles Stone—somehow found a reserve of energy. They could keep climbing through the night, they insisted, although it was now their second night with almost no sleep. The risks of separation were obvious. A splintered party could more easily fall prey to some accident, and if caught by a blizzard would have fewer bodies for sharing warmth or chopping firewood. Already the saga of the Donner Party and its rescuers was a fractured tale, small groups scattered about like icebergs calved from a glacier: some safe in California, others at the mountain camps, still others in between. To split off a small group yet again might invite disaster.

  Yet Reed also knew the desperation of those in the mountain camps, including two of his own children. He knew that for those still alive at the lake cabins and Alder Creek, the odds lengthened with each passing moment, the seconds ticking away until midnight on an executioner's clock. If Cady, Clark, and Stone could march through the night and reach the camps a few hours sooner, they might save lives. Reed told the men they could keep going, and so as he and the others bedded down on the snow, the tiny breakaway group hiked off into the dark.

  They approached within two miles of the lake cabins but then spotted a party of about ten Indians. In fact, the Washoe had given aid to the Donner Party, but the three men quickly assumed the Indians were hostile, presuming they had killed those in the cabins. They huddled together and spent the remainder of the night camped without a fire, fearing that flames might attract the attention of the Indians and invite attack.

  Morning dawned clear and pleasant, and for the second time a rescue party walked toward the cabins at Truckee Lake thinking that all those inside were already dead.

  ***

  DESCENDING THE CRUDE SNOW STEPS of the cabins, the rescuers found a gruesome sight. Some of the emigrants were still alive, but around their hovels lay partially butchered corpses, "fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of famine." Limbs and skulls littered the ground, even the hair of those who had been consumed. When they moved on to the Alder Creek site, they found the children of Jacob Donner eating his heart and liver raw, the blood still on their chins.

  At least that is the story that Reed and his men recounted in a version that first appeared in the Illinois Journal on December 9,1847, nine months after the rescues, in an article based on Reed's notes, though written by someone else. In a later retelling, Reed made no mention of discovering cannibalism, but on the other hand he never refuted the Journal article.

  Parts of the newspaper account seem exaggerated or melodramatic, as though they might have been added by a writer looking to make an extraordinary story even better. Skulls are said to have filled camp kettles, for example, although few people forced to resort to survival cannibalism actually eat the heads of their former comrades. But on the broader point—that cannibalism had occurred at both the lake cabins and the Alder Creek site—there is little reason to doubt Reed and his men. For one thing, it should come as no surprise that the survivors were eating human flesh. Cannibalism had already occurred in the saga of the Donner Party among the members of the Forlorn Hope, the survivors of which had been able to reach Johnson's Ranch only by eating the dead. Furthermore, people at both mountain camps had already acknowledged their plans for cannibalism. The Donners had told members of the first relief party that they would begin eating human bodies soon, and Levinah Murphy had told Patrick Breen of a similar strategy for survival. A week had passed since the departure of the initial rescuers, who had been able to leave few supplies, and yet no one had died.

  Most important, some of the survivors later described their cannibalism, including Mary Donner, two weeks shy of her eighth birthday, and Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who was doing much of the work at the Donner camp. Perhaps most convincing of all is the un-adorned candor of Georgia Donner, who had just turned five. It was Georgia who remembered her father crying and turning away, and she also recalled a macabre moment in which her aunt, Betsy Donner, asked, "What do you think I cooked this morning?" and then answered her own question, "Shoemaker's arm." Georgia seems to have resisted any temptation to embellish her tale, for she was frank in admitting what she did not know. "When I spoke of human flesh being used at both tents, I said it was prepared for the little ones in both tents. I did not mean to include the larger children (my half sisters) or the grown people, because I am not positive that they tasted of it."

  Such plain and apparently reliable testimony later came into question as doubts were raised about the practice of cannibalism at Alder Creek. Chiefly, these came from Eliza Donner, who turned four in the midst of the events and who later developed an iron determination to disprove allegations of cannibalism by her family. She wrote her own account of the Donner Party's ordeal, and her great triumph came during an interview with Trudeau when he recanted his earlier testimony. But this occurred decades after the entrapment, and he was telling his interviewer exactly what she yearned to hear.

  The controversy cropped up again in 2005, when an archaeological team excavated the Donner families' cooking hearth and tested some of the bone fragments found there. When none of the bones proved to be human, many casual followers of the tale concluded that this finding repudiated the possibility of cannibalism. But in fact, it would have been astonishing to find archaeological evidence of cannibalism at Alder Creek. In the acidic soil of the conifer forests of the high Sierra, uncooked bone disintegrates quickly. The only bones found by the archaeologists—the only ones still there to find—were cooked. But the likelihood is small that the families at Alder Creek would have cooked any human bones. In typical cases of survival cannibalism, the desperate sufferers slice flesh from the cadavers and cook only this gruesome "meat." Not until after the supply of flesh is exhausted are the bones boiled, so they too can be eaten.

  But at Alder Creek, cannibalism would have occurred for no more than a week. There were four full-grown adult bodies at hand (al-though it's possible that one or two had been lost in the deep snow), and it is unlikely that the handful of survivors would have stripped away all the flesh, requiring the cooking of bone. This is even more true if Georgia Donner's account is correct, since she suggests that the adults may not have participated. It seems unlikely that a few small children and a single teenager would have eaten all the flesh off even a single body in less than a week. So there is a high probability that when the archaeologists scrutinized their diggings for physical proof of cannibalism, they were searching for something that no longer existed. And there is an equally high probability that when James Reed and the other men of the second relief party arrived at the high camps, they saw the plain evidence all around them.

  ***

  WHEN REED EVENTUALLY REACHED THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, he walked up to the Breen cabin to find his daughter Patty sitting on the roof, her feet dangling on the snow. In the shanty he found his son Tommy, and knew that at least for now all the members of his family were alive.

  "Informed the people that all who ware able Should have to Start day after tomorrow," Reed wrote in his journal. "Made soup for the infirm... and rendered evry assistance in our power."

  The next morning, Reed and three of his men hiked over to the Alder Creek camps, where agonizing decisions had to be made. Betsy Donner allowed the rescuers to buy the personal property of her late husband, Jacob, whose partially cannibalized body lay nearby. No one recorded her motive, but perhaps she thought that the money would help her children, especially if she too died and left them orphaned. Boots went for $4 a pair, cordovan shoes $3, silk handkerchiefs $1.25 each. Donner's knife, the one item that wasn't some sort of garment, brought $1. A careful record was kept—subtotals for each man, the sums accurate to the penny—and in all the sale raised $118.81, presumably to be paid when the party reached California.

/>   The harder decision for Betsy Donner must have been to divide her family yet again. Two of her children had gone out with the first relief, but five remained with her. The two smallest, Samuel and Lewis, were too weak to go, as was their mother, but she sent the three oldest, Solomon, Mary, and Isaac.

  In the other Donner tent, the decision was more vexing. The three little girls were in relatively good health—"Stout harty children," Reed called them—and so was Tamzene, their mother. But George Donner, beset by the infection from his injured hand, was too weak to move. Tamzene would not leave her husband alone, and Reed told her honestly that he expected another rescue party shortly—the group led by Selim Woodworth, the naval officer whose well-supplied expedition had been moving toward the Sierra when Reed entered the wilderness. Promised that more help was on the way, Tamzene decided to stay where she was and keep her three children with her. Having done what he could, Reed bundled up Betsy Donner's children and hiked back to the lake, where his own two youngsters waited.

  Since being sent back from the group that escaped with the first relief, Patty Reed had become something of a surrogate mother for her little brother Tommy, and her father seemed to recognize her new status. Before leaving for Alder Creek, he had told her that she could have flour from the rescue provisions to make bread. Patty, who had just turned nine, knew the value of the foodstuffs lugged in by the rescuers, knew that none could be wasted, knew that lives might depend on the wise use of every morsel, and yet now her father was trusting her with the precious stores. She thought herself "quite a little woman." She beamed with pride.