Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  Now it was needed, so Reed carefully peeled off the mitten, plucked the frozen speck from its unorthodox storage bin, and placed it in his mouth to thaw. When it seemed edible, he took it from his lips and gently fed it to Patty by hand. She revived, and they went on, without even the smallest morsel in reserve.

  ***

  PEGGY BREEN CHECKED ON THE SLEEPING CHILDREN one by one, holding a hand before every mouth and nose to wait for the soft exhale of breathy fog. But when she came to her James, who had been doing poorly, she felt nothing. Panic rose in her chest like a rush of rage. She called to her husband that his son was dying, pleading for his help.

  "Let him die," Patrick replied. "He will be better off than any of us."

  Even decades later, the memory of that instant was etched sharply in Peggy's mind. She said her heart stood still when she heard her husband's words. She sat stunned for a moment, then set to work, rubbing her son's chest and hands, trying to generate some circulation and breath once more. As she had when her eldest son, John, fainted and nearly fell into the fire, she broke off a piece of lump sugar and forced it into James's lips. He swallowed, moved his arms and legs a little, and then at last opened his eyes.

  26

  A Broken Promise

  From the beginning of the relief effort, the rescuers marching into the mountains carried along motives as varied as their own lives. Some men strove to save their families. Some worked to fulfill a vow to old traveling companions. Some volunteered to save utter strangers. Some asked about the pay.

  As time went on, intentions grew murkier, especially for Charles Cady and Charles Stone, two of the men whom Reed had detailed to stay at the camps and care for the survivors. The day after the main relief party walked away, Stone left his post at the lake cabins and hiked over to Alder Creek, where Cady had been stationed. Nicholas Clark, the third rescuer left at the camps, was out hunting.

  Provisions were still plentiful, and there was every reason to believe help was on the way, but Stone and Cady decided they would flee. They struck a deal with Tamzene Donner, whose three little girls were still healthy enough to make it out. Stone and Cady agreed that in return for a fee, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they would take the girls. It was an offer that Tamzene had apparently already proposed to the members of Reed's now-departed relief party, who were too over-burdened with survivors to accept.

  When the deal was done, Stone and Cady took the three little girls up the steps and stood them on the snow. Tamzene emerged and put on their cloaks—red and white for Eliza and Georgia, blue and white for Frances—then pulled the matching hoods up around their ears.

  "I may never see you again," she told them, "but God will take care of you." Georgia thought her mother seemed to be talking more to herself than to them. and chilled them. In the morning, it had to be scraped off their covers before they could get up.

  But once they were out of bed, Stone and Cady made a shocking and shameful announcement. They had no intention of taking the girls over the pass, as they had promised Tamzene. Instead, they were leaving the youngsters in the cabin and going on without any survivors at all. Their decision to flee, suspect from the beginning, was revealed as a disgrace. They were supposedly there on a rescue mission, but now they were leaving without rescuing a soul. They would not stay and care for the sick. They would not carry out a child. They were just leaving.

  ***

  TWO DAYS LATER, THE DESERTERS HAD CROSSED the pass and were walking through Summit Valley when they passed Starved Camp. Cady and Stone noticed the site, for Cady said later that they passed it at about two in the afternoon, something he would not have been able to pinpoint if they had walked by unknowingly.

  But amazingly, neither man offered to help. They did not stop and share their provisions. They did not offer to carry a child or lead a sick adult. They gathered no firewood. So far as we know, they did not even stop to offer words of hope or encouragement. Both were in relatively good condition; they were two of the three self-described "young spry men" who had gone ahead of the second relief party to reach the lake camps early. (To be fair, at some point Cady suffered frostbite on his feet, but that was a comparatively minor matter.) They had been in the mountains a relatively short time, and thus were hardly in the late stages of starvation. They had not even spent a night in the open, since the previous day when they first left Truckee Lake they had been turned back by the blizzard and retreated to the relative safety and warmth of the cabins.

  Cady and Stone had once displayed the admirable courage of all the rescuers, perhaps more. Their willingness to forge ahead of the rest of the party on the way into the mountains showed both physical stamina and personal bravery. But at some point, both men lost their moorings. Perhaps the horrors they saw at the camps overwhelmed them. For whatever reason, the same tenacity with which they first rushed into the wilderness on an errand of mercy was now displayed as they rushed out in a desperate bid for self-preservation. Maybe the real surprise is that the other rescuers didn't do the same.

  27

  Alive Yet

  On a cold night, the mountains can be as quiet as a graveyard. Unless the wind kicks up, there is nothing to hear but the voices of your comrades and the crackling of the campfire.

  Selim Woodworth and his men, however, turned their ears to something else—other voices, farther off. He sent emissaries to investigate and found the little party that had walked away from Starved Camp: James Reed and two of his children, William McCutchan, Hiram Miller, and the others. By chance, the two parties had almost literally stumbled into one another.

  Reed and the others had mostly bedded down for the night, and they were too tired to move, but they asked that some food be brought over from Woodworth's camp, and for the first time in days, they went to sleep with the satisfying feel of a meal in the belly.

  ***

  THE FIRE AT STARVED CAMP STILL BURNED, but it had fled from those it was intended to warm. Melting the snow, the flames had sunk so far down into a pit that the survivors felt little heat. Peggy Breen stared down into the hole, fifteen, twenty, perhaps even twenty-five feet deep.

  At first she must have looked with despair, but then suddenly there was a tiny moment of joy. At the bottom of the hole, she thought she could make out bare ground. If so, if the fire had burned all the way through the winter's slow accumulation of snow, then it would sink no more. If they could descend to meet it, they would once again find some warmth.

  She roused John, her teenager, and urged him to climb down. Using a felled treetop as a makeshift ladder, he did so, and then called up that she was right. He was standing next to the fire on warm, unfrozen earth.

  She climbed down herself to investigate, then ascended once more and began to shake people from their slumbers. As they woke, she urged them down toward John, and in time everyone who was still alive was down in the pit. Eleven people had to crowd in, but at least they were out of the wind. At least they had the fire again.

  ***

  WILLIAM EDDY AND WILLIAM FOSTER, BOTH OF WHOM had survived the brutal journey of the Forlorn Hope, bore a special determination to get back into the mountains. Each man hoped to save his own child. Eddy's wife and daughter had died back in early February, something he would have been told by the survivors who walked out with the first rescue party, but his son, James, might still be alive. Foster's wife had come down with him in the Forlorn Hope, but their only child, a son named George, was still back at the lake.

  Eddy had briefly joined a previous relief effort, but he had been unable to keep up with the grueling pace. Now, both he and Foster were ready to attack the Sierra, so they borrowed horses at Johnson's Ranch and swung into the saddle. They rode hard until the snow was too deep, switched to hiking, and caught up with Woodworth about the same time Woodworth collided with Reed. By this time Cady and Stone were there too, so that with the exception of Nicholas Clark, the lone rescuer still at the high camps, all the rescuers were together, both those going into th
e mountains and those going out.

  As the groups huddled together to decide what to do, Reed had good news: Eddy and Foster might be in time. When he had left the lake cabins about a week earlier, both their sons had been alive. The boys had been in dreadful condition, but Reed and his men had done what they could, bathing the youngsters and putting them in fresh clothes.

  Suddenly Woodworth, who had never gone anywhere near the high camps, was being urged from all sides to mount another relief effort. There might still be people alive at three different locations— Starved Camp, the lake cabins, and Alder Creek.

  But Woodworth would not move. He claimed to need a guide, although Reed noted that the tracks of his descending party were plainly visible. He warned Eddy and Foster of the dangers, although both men had walked out of the wilderness in the teeth of the winter with no guide, few provisions, and virtually no equipment. Both Reed and Eddy, and perhaps others too, thought Woodworth was a coward. Reed eventually provided some notes that were used as the basis for a newspaper story portraying Woodworth as a man who "quailed" in fear. Eddy told his story to one of the Donner Party's earliest chroniclers, who described Woodworth as a man who "had become tired from carrying his blanket."

  Woodworth finally relented, to a degree. He would not go himself but promised that the government, which was funding his activities, would pay three dollars a day plus a fifty-dollar bonus for any man who carried out a child not his own. Eddy and Foster later claimed they paid two of the men themselves.

  With the promise of pay, a little party came together. Remarkably, two of those who agreed to go back had just walked down with Reed: Hiram Miller, who was something of a bull, and Charles Stone, perhaps hoping to redeem himself for bypassing Starved Camp on the downward trip. Three other men said they would go too, so as soon as supplies were rounded up and stuffed into packs, seven men set out on yet another rescue effort, this one quite possibly the last. The money was an inducement, but it took real courage to go. They all knew what another blizzard could mean.

  ***

  FOR ALL THAT PEGGY BREEN WAS THE MAIN force of energy at Starved Camp, it was one of the children who first broached the obvious. Seven-year-old Mary Donner suggested that they should eat the dead bodies on the snow above them. She told the Breens that she had already eaten human flesh back at Alder Creek, perhaps lessening the strain of breaking the great taboo. Apparently the others agreed, and at some point Patrick Breen, who had regained a little strength, climbed up with a knife.

  In an account of the story largely based on an interview with Peggy Breen, the writer Eliza Faraham maintained that only Mary Donner and the remaining Graves children actually ate from the bodies, but it is simply not believable that the Breens refused. Given the length of time of their entrapment and their condition, they must also have participated in the cannibalism, as much a necessity for them as it had been for so many others in their company.

  They spent days there, enduring a gruesome tableau as awful as anything in the entire story: eleven people living in a hole, most of them children, unable to see anything but each other and the camp-fire and the sky above, someone occasionally climbing up to slice flesh from the bodies—family members to some of those below—and then returning to their claustrophobic world of ice and desperation.

  By the end, when Peggy went up to fetch more wood, she had to crawl from tree to tree, then throw the cut branches along before her as she crawled back to the pit.

  ***

  SHE HEARD THE RESCUERS BEFORE SHE SAW THEM. Her vision blurred by weakness, she had climbed up from the pit and sensed something coming toward her on the snow. She caught the undecipherable fragments of voices in the distance, and then at last heard someone say, "There is Mrs. Breen alive yet, anyhow."

  On the snow lay three corpses, all crudely butchered. Survivors had begun by eating the bodies of the two dead children—Isaac Donner and Franklin Graves. From the body of Elizabeth Graves, they had eaten the breasts, heart, liver, and lungs.

  The pit itself must have been appalling. Reed had departed five days earlier. Given their condition, most of the survivors had probably found it impossible to climb out unaided, and thus it's likely that one corner of the pit had been designated as a latrine. Although the depth of their fortress protected them from the wind and perhaps gave them some warmth, they were in other ways exposed to the elements. Snow must have sometimes cascaded down from the trees above. At night the cold would have seeped in. During the day the sun shone down mercilessly.

  Still, in one sense it was a remarkable success story. When Reed and his men departed, there were thirteen people left alive at Starved Camp. The fact that eleven of them survived almost a week, essentially without shelter, in the middle of the Sierra, at high elevation, in winter, is astonishing.

  There was no guarantee they would survive the trip out of the mountains, however. Most of them could not walk, and the deep snow made it impossible to bring in pack animals. Nor could all seven men of the relief party be expected to help. Eddy and Foster, understandably focused on plucking their own children from the high camps, kept going toward the pass, taking two other men along with them.

  That left three rescuers staring down into the pit at Starved Camp. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley each picked up a child and started walking, arguing that given their party's limited manpower, the best they could do was save a handful of the survivors and abandon the rest. The third rescuer, however, balked at such a brutal triage.

  John Stark's ancestors bequeathed him a streak of toughness. His father hewed a life from the wildlands of Kentucky; his mother was a cousin of Daniel Boone. Like many of those involved in the rescue efforts, he too had been an emigrant in 1846, going west with his wife and children and her extended family. His father-in-law and brother-in-law helped in the early stages of the relief effort, although neither ever made it to Truckee Lake. Stark was a big man—he weighed 220 pounds, a giant for the day—and stubborn in the best sense of the word.

  As his colleagues walked away, he faced the seemingly impossible task of rescuing nine people single-handedly: all seven members of the Breen family and the two older Graves children, Nancy and Jonathan. Perhaps he pondered the strength of his pioneer ancestors. Perhaps he just refused to give up on a job. Perhaps he thought of his own overland migration and realized that with a little bad luck it might be he and his wife and his children looking up from the pit.

  He decided he would not simply pick up a child and leave the others to die, as his comrades had. He would bring them all in. He would carry the little ones, encourage the older ones, bolster the adults, drag the whole party down out of the snow.

  So he launched an extraordinary one-man relay. Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process. Again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough. When they asked about his stamina, he said that once they were out of the snow he would eat something and take a rest. Somehow, he even coaxed or cajoled or bullied Patrick Breen down from the camp, although initially everyone thought that the family patriarch could not walk. In the end, all the survivors from Starved Camp made it down to safety.

  The Breens treasured Stark's heroism, then and for the rest of their lives. When the party finally got down out of the snow, Peggy Breen was astonished to hear Woodworth take credit for the rescue. "I thank nobody but God and Stark and the Virgin Mary," she replied. Years later, Billy Graves, who heard the story, noted that she put Stark second, behind only God and ahead of the Madonna. "I think he deserved it," Graves wrote.

  28

  None for Tears

  Nicholas Clark, the sturdy rescuer detailed by James Reed to stay with the Donner families, made sure he was out of earshot of the tents. He was outside
with Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who had also been taking care of the Donners. Clark confided that he planned to leave, perhaps at the arrival of the next rescue party, perhaps even sooner. Nobody could blame him. George Donner was already half dead, and surely incapable of ever leaving the mountains. The three little Donner girls had been sent off with Stone and Cady, and Clark, who was at Alder Creek, had no way of knowing that the tots had been abandoned at the Truckee Lake cabins. The girls' mother, Tamzene, was healthy enough to go whenever she wanted. The only other people at Alder Creek were Betsy Donner and two of her children, Samuel and Lewis, but they too were all but dead. For Clark to stay any longer would be to risk his own life just so he could chop firewood for people who were going to die anyway. He admitted he was afraid he might starve to death, a reasonable fear given the struggles faced by the other rescuers in getting back down to civilization.

  Trudeau had an even stronger case. He had been healthy enough to leave with either of the first two relief parties but had been prevailed upon to stay and help care for the Donners. Like Clark, there wasn't much more he could do by staying, so he vowed that he too would leave at the first opportunity. "I have been here four months," he told Clark, "and it is my turn if anybody's."

  The two men set out for the lake cabins, and when they arrived were astonished to find the three little Donner girls. For days, Clark had been assuming that Cady and Stone had fulfilled their pledge to Tamzene Donner and taken her daughters over the mountains. Instead, here they were, stuck in a cabin with Keseberg and the Murphys. Clark stayed the night, then went back the next morning to Alder Creek to tell Tamzene that her daughters remained in danger.