Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  ***

  ON ONE POINT, THERE COULD BE NO DISPUTE. When Keseberg and the final group of rescuers arrived at Johnson's Ranch in the closing days of April 1847, the ordeal of the Donner Party was over. Of the eighty-one people who had been trapped by the early autumn snow at the eastern edge of the Sierra, thirty-six had died and forty-five had survived. No one remained at the high camps. For the Donner Party, the journey was finished.

  30

  A Beautiful Country

  The warmth of spring seeped through the rich riverbed land of the Napa Valley as surely as the cold had penetrated the huts at Truckee Lake. Barely two months after her rescue, Virginia Reed's mind was already turning to gentler matters. She wrote her cousin back in Illinois and boasted of her new homeland as a hunting ground for husbands:

  Tel Henriet if she wants to get Married for to come to Callifornia. She can get a spanyard any time.

  It was only mid-May, but beef and bread had fattened the survivors' once-skeletal forms. "We are all verry fleshey," Virginia reported, as though this were an astonishing fact. Her mother weighed 140 pounds, or, as Virginia styled it, "10040 pon." In all, California had proved a worthy haven, a land of warm days and cool nights, of wide valleys and stout horses. "It is a beautiful Country," she wrote. "It aut to be a beautiful Country to pay us for our trubel getting there."

  Not that the tragedy had vanished from Virginia's mind. Her letter gave a long, detailed account of much that had happened—one of the most valuable versions among all the Donner Party records—and then added a declaration that even greater horrors lay unstated:

  O Mary I have not wrote you half of the truble we have had but I hav Wrote you anuf to let you now that you don't now what truble is. But thank the Good god we have all got throw and the onely family that did not eat human flesh. We have left every thing but i dont cair for that. We have got through.

  Still, she wanted no part of hopelessness, harbored no desire to discourage those who might follow: "Dont let this letter dishaten anybody." She offered a single piece of advice, an admonition that might have served as the motto not only for the grand migration west but also for much of life: "Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can."

  ***

  THAT SUMMER, GEN. STEPHEN WATTS KEARNY, who had commanded the American armies in California during the brief war with Mexico, left Sutter's Fort to return east. When he reached Truckee Lake, he stopped to inspect the cabins, snowless now and surrounded by the natural hustle of a short mountain growing season—wildflowers and green grass, does nursing fawns, the flutter of butterflies and the buzz of mosquitoes where once could be heard only the murmured prayers of the starving.

  Human remains lay about, the flesh mummifying in the dry mountain air and the bones scattered in the cabins. Edwin Bryant, the newspaper writer who had traveled the first part of the westward journey with the Donners and who was now going east with Kearny, described the scene as "human skeletons ... in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed."

  Kearny ordered a pit dug in one of the cabins and the bones thrown in, "melancholy duties to the dead," as Bryant phrased it. The cabin was torched, the men standing around hatless and solemn as they watched this impromptu pyre in the wilderness.

  At Alder Creek, Kearny found George Donner's body, and with it the final evidence of Tamzene Donner's steadfast devotion. Before leaving for the lake cabins, she had wrapped her husband's remains in a sheet, the closest approximation of a decent burial she could provide.

  ***

  FOR A FEW OF THE SURVIVORS, the tragedy of the Donner Party proved an unshakable ghost. Nancy Graves, Elizabeth's daughter, married a Methodist minister and had nine children but was haunted by the knowledge that she had participated in the cannibalism of her own mother at Starved Camp. As a girl, she burst into tears at the memory.

  Decades later, she refused to help the writer C. F. McGlashan, who was working on a history of the party. "I have no information to impart," she wrote in her only postcard to him, "and do not wish my name mentioned. I hereby notify you not to use my name in that connection." She signed her name as Mrs. R. W. Williamson, omitting any use of Graves, the maiden name that would identify her as a member of the cursed emigrant contingent.

  Eliza Donner, by contrast, cherished her place in history. She married a promising young attorney named Sherman Houghton—he went on to serve two terms in Congress—and later she took up a vigorous correspondence with McGlashan. In her late sixties she published her memoir, The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. On the cover and title page, she identified herself as Eliza P. Donner Houghton, embracing her maiden name as much as Nancy Graves had spurned hers.

  Most survivors reflected neither Graves's reluctance toward the past nor Donner's enthusiasm for it. Most simply moved on, constructing new lives and displaying the remarkable resilience of the human soul. They married, reared children, tilled farms or built businesses, cherished advances and rued setbacks. They stopped by a saloon on Saturday and a church on Sunday. Some died young. Some saw their dotage.

  James Reed never lost his on-the-make optimism and eventually touted the Gold Rush with the same heedless confidence that had once led him down the Hastings Cut-Off. "The gold is still plenty, plenty, plenty, and will continue plenty through this century and the next, and the next!" he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1849, after the family had settled in San Jose. "You find it in the big hills, you find it in the little rivers, you find it in the little branches, you find it in the little narrow indentations made on the surface of the earth during brief showers." Nor did the capacity for boasting desert him. Real estate was booming, and he was glad to say he had shown the wisdom to invest. "As for myself I have a share and a fair share, too, after all my misfortunes."

  Margret Reed, who had worked so diligently to keep her children alive, never found the robust health that California seemed to promise and died at forty-seven, fifteen years after the tragedy. Virginia eloped at sixteen and eventually had nine children. Her sister, Patty, had eight. Neither of the Reed sons had children. For a time, they both lived with Patty. Virginia Reed fulfilled the personal pledge she had made in the mountains and, against her parents' wishes, became a Roman Catholic.

  The Breens repaired to the Mission at San Juan Bautista, where they were feted as conquerors of the harsh mountains, ensconced in the best house in town and bathed in Mexican hospitality. "Nothing that could add to the comfort of the sufferers was left undone," James Breen wrote later. In time the family prospered. Edward Breen, the boy whose fall from the saddle broke his leg so badly that it was nearly amputated, grew into a strapping man of more than six feet tall. He was an excellent horseman.

  By some weird coincidence, three of the other Breen sons—Patrick Jr., Simon, and James—died within three months of each other in 1899.

  The Donner orphans found homes where they could. Two of the three little daughters of Tamzene Donner were taken in by a German couple who lived near Sutter's Fort. The Reeds took some of the others.

  The Murphy and Graves children were orphans too. Mary Murphy eventually married a prominent local man named Charles Covillaud. When a town sprang up near their home along the Yuba River, it was named Marysville in honor of Covillaud's wife. Simon Murphy, one of the last children rescued, returned to his home state of Tennessee and later served in the Civil War. So far as is known, he never returned to California.

  Two of the Graves girls married men who assisted in the rescue efforts, although neither ever actually reached the high camps. Sarah married William Dill Ritchie, who six years later was caught with stolen mules and lynched. Mary, the belle of the train, froze her feet so badly during the journey of the Forlorn Hope that for three months she could not wear shoes. She married a rescuer named Edward Pyle Jr., who was murdered in 1848. After the trial Mary cooked meals for the murderer. She did not want him to die before the hanging day.

  Billy Graves went east the n
ext summer, where he soon grew weary of incessant questions about his titillating ordeal. He told the story "so many thousand times," he remembered later.

  William Eddy, who lost his wife and two children in the tragedy despite his own heroic efforts, married twice more, the first ending in divorce. He died in 1859, on Christmas Eve.

  Jean Baptiste Trudeau, one of the few single men to survive, never forgot the suffering of the mountains. Years later, when he was a poor man scraping out a hard and dangerous living as a fisherman, he said that even if he were offered half the state of California, he would refuse to spend another winter like the one he endured with the Donner Party.

  Lewis Keseberg suffered more than anyone else, although in many ways this had more to do with public perceptions than actual events. On his arrival at Sutter's Fort, whispering rumors painted him a ghoul. The gossip compounded until, motivated by an especially wagging and malevolent tongue, Keseberg sued one of his own rescuers for defamation. The jury found in Keseberg's favor but concluded that his slanderers had broken tarnished goods: Damages totaled one dollar. In time he became a public caricature, the demented ogre who had relished his cannibalism. Business setbacks pushed him into poverty. Even the lottery of biology struck against him: Two of his daughters were born with disabilities that rendered them, in the language of the day, "idiots." Keseberg came to see himself as Job, singled out by God for afflictions designed to test his soul. He died a poor man, his burial unrecorded.

  For brief periods in the years after the Donner Party, though, Keseberg enjoyed business successes. During one of them, he ran a Sacramento hotel, the Lady Adams. It might be strange enough that the putative fiend chose to enter a business where he would host weary travelers, but public fascination with the Donner Party was such that even that irony was insufficient. It may or may not be true, but the accepted lore of the tale came to be that the most notorious cannibal of the Donner Party eventually opened a restaurant.

  ***

  THE FATES OF THE RESCUERS PROVED AS MIXED as those of the survivors. Selim Woodworth overcame the inauspicious start to his career as a naval officer. He commanded a supply ship during the remainder of the Mexican-American War, winning the respect of his men, and during the Civil War rose to the rank of commodore.

  Hiram Miller remained a friend of the Reed family for decades, settling near them in California. Smallpox eventually swept through, infecting Miller, and after a time of quarantine in the local "pest house" he moved to the Reed home, where he was an invalid for the last five years of his life. They buried him in a cemetery nearby. Patty Reed, the little girl who had baked him bread when he arrived as a member of the second relief party, and to whom Miller had been kind, tended his grave for years.

  William Fallon, the mountain man who led the last relief party, eventually went east but was traveling back to California in 1848 when he grew frustrated with the slow pace of the train and, with one other man, rode ahead. They were attacked and killed by Indians. Weeks later the main party found their bodies.

  John Stark never got the public acclaim he deserved for his heroic rescue of the Breens from Starved Camp. In his report about the relief effort, Woodworth omitted Stark's name entirely, taking credit for those Stark saved. But his fine qualities drew recognition in other ways. He was the sheriff of Napa County for six years and even served in the state legislature. In 1875, when he was fifty-eight, the body that had sustained him through his remarkable performance in the mountains finally gave out. While pitching hay from a wagon, he had a heart attack and died.

  Reason Tucker, the leader of the first relief party to reach the high camps, later spent two years in the gold fields, one with luck, one without. He built a fine home of split redwood near Calistoga, the back commanding an ostentatious view of the verdant Napa Valley, but later lost his estate in a dispute growing out of the settlement of Mexican land claims. A marriage collapsed amid uncertain circumstances, and in time he moved to Goleta, near Santa Barbara, where he lived out his days amid the gentle swells of coastal hills and ocean breakers. When he died, in 1888, he was buried beneath a white marble marker that reached back more than forty years to a moment of valor: "An honest candid worthy man—one of the heroic rescuers of Donner Party." Tucker would have liked the epitaph. He never forgot the scenes that greeted his arrival at the Truckee Lake cabins, an appearance that put the survivors in mind of angels. Years later, he could still see the rude huts and hear the emigrants' shouts of joy.

  ***

  LANSFORD HASTINGS DREAMED HIS DREAMS to the end. The man who had envisioned a magical shortcut to California served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1849 and then moved to markedly bigger stages. During the Civil War he hatched a fruitless scheme to conquer Arizona for the Confederacy. When he died a few years later, he was trying to plant a colony of former southerners in Brazil, as though his former efforts to lure midwesterners to California had been insufficiently grand.

  Other parties stumbled along the Hastings Cut-Off, the chimera that had so worsened the Donner Party's woes. But the route never became a main channel of the great migration, and a single bald fact testifies to the rigors of the inhospitable terrain: So far as is known, no one ever traveled it twice.

  ***

  AS SHE TRIED TO WALK OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, before she died and her body was cannibalized, Elizabeth Graves had carried a heavier load than most. The Graves family wagon featured secret grooves in the middle of the bed—hiding places for the profit from the sale of the family farm back in Illinois. Before leaving the lake, rescuers helped Elizabeth pry up the coverings and recover the gold and silver, said to be eight hundred dollars in all. She lugged it along as best she could but eventually concluded she would have to stash it, perhaps because the rescuers were bantering about who would take the cash when she died, talk that was later dismissed as joking but must have seemed sinister to Elizabeth. So she hung back from the march one morning and buried the money, marking the location in her mind as best she could. So far as we know, she failed to tip off her children to the secret spot before her death a few days later, and so it seemed that the youngsters had lost their inheritance.

  Then, on a spring day in 1891, almost half a century later, a miner named Edward Reynolds was digging for quartz on a hillside near Truckee when the glint of coin sparkled in his shovel. None of the pieces was dated after 1845, and the Graves children, now grown and graying adults, identified bite marks on a coin that had once been used as a family teething ring. Billy Graves, eighteen when his mother died, claimed the money.

  In one of the last acts of her life, Elizabeth Graves had succeeded. She had saved the family inheritance for her children.

  ***

  BY THE TIME THE COINS WERE FOUND, Truckee Lake had become Donner Lake. Today, the surrounding countryside is rife with other imprints of the great drama. The notch in the mountains above the lake is Donner Pass; a nearby summit is Donner Peak.

  Men tamed those tormenting heights with remarkable speed. Less than a quarter century after the tragedy—well within the lifetimes of most survivors—workers laid the tracks of the transcontinental railroad across the pass. In time, a two-lane road followed for automobiles, then at last a superhighway that bears the brunt of winter and remains open through all but the fiercest storms. Donner Lake is surrounded by vacation homes. The little valley near the summit where the Breens passed their hellish ordeal in the snowpit is now a ski area, chairlifts shuttling skiers upward with ease, all to be followed by a hot chocolate and a cozy drive home.

  Even a century ago, survivors marveled at the transformation. In 1892 Virginia Reed read a description of Donner Lake as a "pleasure resort" and sensed in the phrase strange evidence of all that had changed:

  It seems ages since I was there yet I can feel the cold and hunger and hear the moan of the pines. Those proud old trees used to tell me when a storm was coming and seemed to be about the only thing there alive, as the snow could not speak. And now the place is a
pleasure resort. The moan of the pines should cease.

  Yet still the Sierra winter can rise and growl. Lay yourself open to the elements, and you may suffer as the emigrants of old. In 2004 a sudden blizzard in late October—about the same time of the year that the Donner Party was trapped—left thirteen hikers temporarily stranded. Two climbers in Yosemite National Park died.

  ***

  FROM THE BEGINNING, ONE PLAIN TRUTH of the Donner Party saga stood out against the sexist assumptions of the age: Women toughed it out far better than the men. The first book to tell the tale, J. Quinn Thornton's Oregon and California in 1848, included a crude chart outlining the different survival rates for men and women. Thornton noted that twenty-eight men died compared to only eight women. Even accounting for the greater number of men in the party, Thornton found that men tended to die while women tended to live. Nineteenth-century sensibilities admitted no explanation for this outcome, and Thornton hazarded no guesses.

  One plausible theory was that, in effect, manliness killed the men. Much of the hard physical labor, both on the overland journey and during the entrapment, fell to the males. Men broke trail, drove the wagons, hitched and unhitched the teams. So far as we know, hunting was an exclusively male chore. Perhaps, therefore, the men were already weaker than the women when the party arrived at the Sierra, and then weakened still more as the taxation of masculine camp duties conflicted with a steadily diminishing diet.

  But in the nineteenth century, female work was hardly for the frail. Women hauled water for cooking and washing. They produced the meals using cumbersome iron skillets and bully Dutch ovens. Female arms and shoulders stirred the butter churn and rasped the family clothes across the washboard. At least on the open prairie, gathering firewood was more a woman's job than a man's. And walking was everyone's lot, especially as the draft animals deteriorated. The women, in other words, may have been just as exhausted as the men after months of travel.