Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  Tamzene bent over the bed of the husband she had nursed for months. He drifted toward death every day now, weaker and weaker. She detested the idea of leaving, for it was obvious that he might die while she was away, but there was simply no choice but to go and make some arrangement for the girls. She bundled herself up in the warmest of the tattered clothes she had left, took one last look back toward George's sickbed, and headed for the lake.

  ***

  THE LITTLE RESCUE PARTY LED BY William Eddy and William Foster burst into the cabin with the frenetic energy of adrenaline and emotion. Everyone was talking at once. "They came in like they were most wild," remembered Frances Donner. "We were frightened at first."

  Eddy and Foster asked about their sons: three-year-old James Eddy and two-year-old George Foster, tots left behind when their parents fled with the Forlorn Hope or simply died. Both fathers had rushed back into the mountains determined to save their sons. That had been the justification for leaving children behind, after all—that the parents could summon help and return in time. Now Eddy and Foster wanted to know if they had made it. There must have been a mortified silence, eyes shifting downward, then perhaps a sad and subdued confession. Both little boys were dead, and yet that was not even the worst of it. Their bodies had been cannibalized by the survivors. By one account, Eddy grew so enraged with Keseberg over the cannibalism that he vowed to kill him later, a threat that was never fulfilled.

  But the rescuers found four living children—Simon Murphy and the three little Donner girls—and resolved to save them all. Clark and Trudeau would go along too. Keseberg still refused. That left two women, Tamzene Donner, who had reached the lake cabins, and Levinah Murphy. Murphy had herded her extended clan on the great migration: herself, seven children, two sons-in-law, and three grandchildren. The family had slowly dwindled—some went out with the Forlorn Hope, some with the first relief parties, some died—while she herself had withered and weakened. But she kept Simon alive—he was her youngest—and she was kind to the Donner girls after they were abandoned at the cabins. Keseberg had ordered the girls to stay in bed, insisting that otherwise they were underfoot. Levinah enforced no such rule. When Keseberg left to gather wood, she let the girls get out of bed and play, a benevolence they would not forget.

  She was far too weak for the journey out, a fact she recognized and did not protest, perhaps because she could reflect with pride that she had done all she could for her own children and the children of others. "As we were ready to start," remembered Georgia Donner, "Mrs. Murphy walked to her bed, laid down, turned her face toward the wall. One of the men gave her a handful of dried meat. She seemed to realize that we were leaving her, that her work was finished."

  ***

  HAVING REACHED THE LAKE CABINS, Eddy and Foster had no intention of hiking the extra distance to Alder Creek. The warning of Starved Camp rang with clarity: Parties in the open could be trapped by a sudden blizzard and held for days, pushed to shocking desperation. The only sane thing was to keep moving, to get up the mountains and back down again as quickly as possible. Dawdling begged calamity.

  From the standpoint of the rescuers, no real purpose would be served by going to the Donner family tents. Everyone there—George Donner; Jacob's widow, Betsy; and her two sons, Lewis and Samuel— was dead or dying. None would see spring. Better to turn around, leave now, and make it back down to Johnson's Ranch before another storm struck.

  But Tamzene Donner was adamant. She would not leave her husband so long as he drew breath. There was no hope he would live, but she would not let him die alone. To check on her girls, she had been forced to come over to the lake briefly, but now she would return to Alder Creek. He might already be dead—she told her daughters as much—but she insisted that she go and see. If he was dead, she would return immediately and walk out with the rescue party.

  But while Tamzene was still in sight, the rescuers, standing on the snow before the cabins with the children, yelled to her that they had no intention of waiting. They were going on, and she could come or not. It was her choice. She must have known that this was her last chance, must have realized that her choice wasn't merely about sacrificing herself but about choosing which members of her family would have to share the burden. Either she could let her husband die alone or let her children grow up without a mother.

  She knew what her daughters would face; her own mother had died when she was young. But perhaps she thought back to her first family, to the long years of darkness after their deaths, to the new life she had found through her marriage to George. Perhaps she had simply made a promise she could not break. None of her daughters ever described a hesitancy, a pause, a flicker of irresolution. She just kept walking.

  And then the parting was done, the rescuers hauling the children off toward the pass, toward safety and away from their mother. "There was hardly time for words or action," Georgia Donner remembered, "and none for tears."

  It was the last time the Donner girls ever saw their mother. Years later, they could not remember what she looked like.

  HEADING WEST, THE MARCHERS FOUND A SMALL PACKAGE on the snow, apparently dropped by Stone and Cady, containing silk skirts that Tamzene Donner had given to the men she thought were saving her daughters. The Donner girls were wearing the best clothes they had left— petticoats and linsey-woolsey dresses—but after months of entrapment they must have been sodden with snow and rich with vermin. The men pulled out knives and, as best they could, quickly recut the newly found clothes to fit the girls in makeshift ways, then tied them to the youngsters.

  Before it had been killed and consumed, the Donner family dog had eaten Frances's shoes, and so now she was wearing a pair of her mother's, too big by far. They kept falling off as she tried to pull her feet out of the deep holes in the snow made by the adults' footsteps. Eventually a rescuer named Thompson, who was in charge of her, got tired of pulling the oversized shoes out of the snow and putting them back on her, so he left them and told her to walk in her stocking feet. After a time, he took pity on her and took off his mittens, using them as a pair of moccasins for her feet and going bare-handed himself. Later, he told her that if she walked up a hill he would give her some sugar. "The sugar was something to climb for so I got my prize," she recalled.

  Some incentives were less generous. Frances was walking, but Eliza and Georgia were being carried. The men tired, put them on the snow, and told them they too must make their own way. The girls refused to budge, so the men reached down and gave them each a spanking. "There was a crying bee," Frances remembered.

  But somehow the girls kept going, some of the smallest children to make the long journey without either parent present. Georgia said later that when she thought of the rescuers' efforts, the agonies faded. "I do not feel like I ought to complain."

  ***

  JOHN BREEN AWOKE TO A WONDERLAND. His rescue and delivery from Starved Camp was complete, as was that of his family members, but they had arrived at Johnson's Ranch late at night, well after dark. In the morning, he found a world he had not seen for months:

  The weather was fine. The ground was covered with fine green grass and there was a very fat beef hanging from the limb of an oak tree. The birds were singing from the tops of the trees above our camp and the journey was over. I stood looking on the scene and could scarcely believe that I was alive.

  ONE LAST RELIEF EFFORT REMAINED. A small company set out in late March from Johnson's Ranch, mostly consisting of veterans of earlier rescue parties who found the will to try again. They reached the snow, but then quickly abandoned the effort. There were stories that the snow, touched by the first kiss of spring, was now so soft that progress was impossible. Another recollection held that a fresh storm blew in and blocked their way.

  Or perhaps they just gave up. The only people who could conceivably be rescued were Keseberg and Tamzene Donner, and both of them had been healthy enough to travel when the previous party left the lake. Rescuers could be forgiven for a reluctance to risk th
eir own lives to save people who had failed to save themselves. Whatever the reason, the last little party turned around and headed back down the mountains. If anyone was still alive at the high camps, they would have no rescue soon.

  29

  The Last Man

  By mid-April, a month had passed since the last relief party had left the lake camp. Little hope prevailed that anyone remained alive. Survival on almost nothing but human flesh seemed an impossibility, nutritionally and psychologically, particularly since the handful of emigrants left behind would have had few comrades to bolster their morale.

  The principal idea now was to bring in property rather than persons. John Sinclair, the local alcalde for the area around Sutter's Fort, cut a deal with a small group of would-be salvage agents led by a flamboyant mountain man named William Fallon, a giant known as "Le Gros" but also reputed to be so agile that he could pluck a sixpence from the ground while riding a galloping horse. The men would be allowed to keep half the property they collected from the camps of the two Donner families, including gold and silver. Sinclair, acting as an ad hoc child welfare agency, would take the other half and use it for the benefit of the orphaned Donner children. The contract specifying the terms of the deal made no mention of survivors until after the financial details were spelled out at length, and even then the treatment was perfunctory, addressing the issue of survivors' property rather than their lives. So when, about two weeks later, Fallon reemerged with a last surviving member of the Donner Party in tow, the small communities around Johnson's Ranch and Sutter's Fort buzzed with curiosity: How had anyone stayed alive so long? What had happened up there?

  ***

  SIX WEEKS LATER, the California Star landed on the newsstands of San Francisco with an answer, courtesy of Fallon's diary. Fallon and his men had arrived to find the lake cabins deserted—at least by the living. The bodies of the dead lay everywhere, "terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and sculls scattered in every direction." A woman's body, thought to be that of Eleanor Eddy, lay near the entrance, "the limbs severed off and a frightful gash in the scull." Most of the flesh had been eaten from the bones, and "a painful stillness pervaded the place."

  At the Alder Creek camps, the mood proved equally eerie. Jacob Donner's tent had been ransacked. Household goods—books, calicoes, shoes, furniture—lay everywhere. The bloody evidence of cannibalism presented a gruesome scene:

  At the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with human flesh cut up, it was from the body of Geo. Donner, the head had been split open, and the brains extracted therefrom, and to the appearance, he had not been long dead, not over three or four days at the most.

  The carcass of an ox lay nearby, apparently preserved—and perhaps hidden—for much of the winter in the snow, yet almost wholly uneaten.

  They spent a day packing—camping and working amid the dreadful scene—and then half the group started back for the lake cabins, the other half staying to cache whatever property they could not carry. When they returned to the lake, they were surprised to find Lewis Keseberg alive, lying next to "a large pan full of fresh liver and lights."

  Keseberg said he was the lone survivor. Tamzene Donner, relatively healthy when the previous rescuers departed, had lost her way trying to hike from Alder Creek to the lake cabins, spent a night on the snow, and died soon after reaching Keseberg's wretched hovel. He seemed almost enthusiastic about his own resourcefulness—Tamzene Donner's flesh was "the best he had ever tasted"—but evasive about the property of the other emigrants. "He appeared embarrassed, and equivocated a great deal," then insisted that he had no property from any of the other families. But when the rescuers searched him, they found silks and jewelry worth two hundred dollars, and a brace of pistols that had once belonged to George Donner. Hidden in his waistcoat, they found $225 in gold.

  They began threatening him, insisting that the other rescuers would hang him unless he came clean. A rescuer named John Rhoads decided to play the good cop and took Keseberg off to one side. If he owned up to everything, Rhoads said, he would be well treated and given help in getting down to the settlements. Through it all, Keseberg maintained his innocence.

  The interrogation continued the next day, this time reinforced by the other rescuers. Fallon asked about a large amount of gold that George Donner had reportedly been carrying, and then grabbed a rope and threatened to hang Keseberg if he kept feigning ignorance. He fashioned a noose and threw it around Keseberg's neck, then pushed him to the ground and yanked the rope tight. At last, Keseberg relented and led them back to a spot near Alder Creek where he had buried the Donners' money.

  The rescuers took him down to the settlements, but before the whole party left the mountains, they asked Keseberg why he had not eaten the ox meat. He replied that it was too dry. Humans made better eating. The brains made an excellent soup.

  ***

  THAT WAS THE TALE TOLD IN FALLON'S DIARY, although Keseberg offered a different story. Left alone when Levinah Murphy died, he resisted the idea of cannibalism for four days after his provisions gave out, finally resorting to the grisly option so that he might live to support his family:

  There was no other resort—it was that or death. My wife and child had gone on with the first relief party. I knew not whether they were living or dead. They were penniless and friendless in a strange land. For their sakes I must live, if not for my own. ... I can not describe the unutterable repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less eating, a corpse. It makes my blood curdle to think of it! It has been told that I boasted of my shame—said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and disgusting.

  Too weak to move the bodies of the dead, Keseberg lay in his cabin surrounded by corpses, and at times became so unnerved that he put his pistol in his mouth and fingered the trigger.

  Late one night, Tamzene Donner arrived, cold and fatigued, her clothes frozen into ice. She said that George had died, and now she was intending to walk over the mountains alone, for she had to reach her children. She refused Keseberg's offer of human flesh, so he put her into bed and covered her as warmly as possible. By morning she was dead, and Keseberg was again alone.

  He had promised Tamzene that he would retrieve the family's money and use it for her children, so when he felt strong enough he hiked over to Alder Creek. He buried the silver in a spot marked by a low-hanging tree branch and packed the gold back toward the lake cabins. Halfway there, the snow gave way beneath his feet, and he plunged down into a stream running beneath the snow. As he fell, he threw out his arms and managed to fall no deeper than his armpits, and then eventually managed to hoist himself from the hole. By the time he reached his cabin, he was half-frozen.

  The next morning, he awoke to human voices. He rushed outside and saw the rescuers coming toward him, the relief that had seemed an impossible dream. But to his astonishment, they did not greet him with joy but with a simple and gruff demand: "Where is Donner's money?"

  Worried about keeping his promise to Tamzene that the money would go to her children, Keseberg would not answer, begging instead for a bit of food. The men refused and threatened to kill him if he failed to hand over the money. With no other choice, he gave them the gold and told them where to find the buried silver. Heading down the mountains to safety, they offered no help to the pathetic, weakened fellow. Instead they concentrated on shuttling down two packs, each filled with booty, and left Keseberg to struggle into camp on his own.

  ***

  WHOSE VERSION TO BELIEVE? In the common lore of the Donner Party, then and for 150 years to follow, Fallon's picture of Keseberg as a bloodthirsty ghoul held sway, perhaps because it intermingled with and reinforced an image already in the public mind. Even before Fallon's journal appeared, a newspaper account claim
ed that one of the survivors—unnamed but obviously Keseberg—took a child to bed with him and ate the youngster before morning, then ate another before noon the next day. Such yarns obviously involved scurrilous exaggeration if not outright falsehood, but Fallon's diary echoed the theme. Almost as soon as Keseberg came down from the mountains, the stories blossomed into the most damning rumor possible: He had murdered Tamzene Donner so that he might eat her body.

  Surely the Fallon diary is, at best, half true. Donner Party scholars have long observed that the language—"evinced confusion" and "evident reluctance" and the like—is too refined for Fallon's rough-hewn life. And there is a lyrical quality at points that seems foreign to a mountain man's pen: "A painful stillness pervaded the place." Nor was it long before little pieces of the story began to crumble: A newspaper retracted the claim that it was Eleanor Eddy's body near the cabin door, and a summertime traveler found George Donner's body months later, apparently not mutilated. Furthermore, it seems incredible that Keseberg would have praised human flesh as moister and more succulent than beef.

  And yet the diary must be right in describing Keseberg and the camp in hideous terms. By the time the final rescuers arrived, Keseberg had been alone for days, perhaps weeks, surviving on nothing more than human flesh. He had no choice but to crudely butcher the bodies, and probably had little energy to dispose of the remains. Indeed, a more sober and less biased source suggests precisely such a scene, without attributing to Keseberg the morbid enthusiasm reported by Fallon. More than thirty years after the tragedy, Reason Tucker, who led the first relief party and participated in the last, wrote of bones scattered about and skulls opened to get at the brains. It was a place, he said, of "Death & Destruction."