Desperate Passage

by Итан Рарик

  That suggests that the greater male death rate may have been due to biology as well as behavior, a supposition buttressed by modern science. On average, women have a higher percentage of body fat than men. Fat acts as a storehouse for energy, meaning that as women starve, they have greater reserves on which to draw. Men, by contrast, begin to burn valuable muscle much faster. That difference only exacerbates another female advantage: Since women are, on average, smaller than men, they need fewer calories. The men confronted a dual curse. They needed more food than the women, and once their bodies began the internal process of self-consumption, the women were better equipped to endure it. Bravado aside, masculinity proved a deadly disadvantage.

  Age intermingled with gender as a determinant of survival. In fact, statistical analyses have found that age trumped other factors. The young and the old, beset with too little exposure to life's abrasions and too much, always die first and most in tragedies. In the Donner Party, children under five exhibited a high death rate, as did adults in their forties and over. Of those who were trapped in the mountains, only two older adults survived, Patrick Breen, thought to be fifty-one, and Peggy Breen, about forty, both of whom benefited from their family's relatively plentiful hoard of beef. The three other couples who were over forty—George and Tamzene Donner, Jacob and Betsy Donner, and Franklin and Elizabeth Graves—all died.

  In the prime of life, the gender disparity was especially pronounced, so pronounced that it may in fact suggest another cause altogether. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died (Eleanor Eddy), while only one man lived (William Eddy). The other seven men in their twenties, men presumably in the best physical condition of their lives, all died, many of them early in the entrapment. Most of these men were distinguished, however, not only by their age but also by their life circumstances: They were traveling alone, typically as hired ands. The young women, by contrast, were all married, most with children, many with extended families.

  To gauge the value of human connection, modern researchers have studied the health effects of social networks. Their findings buttress the common intuition that people are good for people. Those with interconnected lives—people who are married or have large families or many friends or whose lives in some way bring them into contact with others—enjoy longer, healthier lives. They sniffle through fewer colds, suffer fewer heart attacks, recover faster from the debilitating effects of strokes. Even the incidence of cancer is reduced. One study followed participants for nine years and found that those who were low in "social capital"—the strings that bind us to others—were two to three times more likely to die than those with interwoven nets of human contact. Nor is this solely a modern phenomenon, alien to the Donners' day. An analysis of records from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp during the Civil War, reveals that Union captives were more likely to survive if they were imprisoned with friends, and that the closer the familiarity the greater the benefit.

  The reasons for these benefits are less scientifically demonstrable but seem in many ways obvious. People draw tangible assistance from others—someone comes to check on them when they are old, for example—but they are also succored by the emotional support of love and friendship. Human beings are social creatures.

  The Donner Party demonstrated anew this age-old truth. Those who were traveling with their families, especially the larger extended families, survived at rates far higher than those who were alone. Of fifteen people who were trapped in the mountains without a relative, only two survived: the Donner family employees Noah James and Jean Baptiste Trudeau. Many of the single people were among the first to die. Of the four men who died before Christmas at Alder Creek, three had no kin in camp: Sam Shoemaker, Joseph Rheinhard, and James Smith. Jacob Donner, sickly even before the trip, was the only family man among the four. Had the Donner Party been miraculously plucked from their misfortune on February l, almost no one with a family, save those who had gone with the Forlorn Hope and thus exposed themselves to incalculable additional danger, would have perished. The Donner Party is not merely a story of how hard people will struggle to survive, but of how much they need each other if they are going to succeed.

  Survivors recognized that some of the young, single men lacked the incentive or tenacity to cling to life. A few months after the tragedy, James Reed wrote to a relative back east and told of the early passing of James Smith, one of his family's teamsters. "He gave up, pined away, and died," Reed wrote. "He did not starve."

  ***

  ONLY TWO FAMILIES SURVIVED INTACT, the Breens and the Reeds. This was especially remarkable for the Reeds,

  since James Reed's banishment left the couple's four children solely in the care of their mother, a woman who had once been so frail she had been unable to rise from her sickbed for her own wedding. Her afflicting headaches returned at least once during the winter, perhaps more. Because they had been forced to abandon so much during the crossing of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the Reeds began the entrapment with virtually no food or supplies, a penury that forced Margret to begging. Against all that, she somehow kept her four children alive.

  Even her own husband, who had seen the pallor of his children's faces firsthand, could not quite seem to grasp the straits to which his family had been reduced, or the magnitude of his wife's accomplishment. Once, after the ordeal was done, the Reeds were discussing the fact that at Truckee Lake, the Reed children had found what they thought were flakes of gold. James asked his wife why she had not saved some. She could have been forgiven for punching him in the nose. Instead she looked at him with disbelief and told him that at the time, finding something to eat had seemed more important than all the gold in the world.

  31

  A Day of Renown

  Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the California Star peered through a green eyeshade and a wafting helix of cigar smoke and approved a story for that week's paper. Typesetters bent over their trays, and ink-stained fingers soon began laying down the metal letters that would spell out the horrors of the Donner Party. "A more shocking scene cannot be imagined," the piece began, "than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains."

  ... Bodies of men, women, and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father—the mother that of her children—children that of father and mother.

  Worse still, survivors had lost their most basic humanity. Once they would have "shuddered and sickened" at the thought of cannibalism, but now they "coldly" calculated which of their comrades would make future meals. Family members no longer cared for one another. Some preferred human flesh to the provisions of the rescue parties.

  Earlier newspaper stories had described desperation and even cannibalism, but none had sketched so vivid a picture of depravity. Most of the details were false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Of the forty-five survivors, for example, only about half tasted human flesh. Perhaps another half dozen people resorted to cannibalism before dying. A precise count is impossible, nor would one matter. The abiding mark of the Donner Party was an act of desperation, nothing more. Faced with imminent starvation and death, the pioneers did what was necessary to survive. Eating the flesh of people who had already died wasn't barbaric or animalistic. It was the only logical and reasonable course of action open to those left alive.

  But such caveats made no difference. Two weeks after the Star story the yarn was repeated in a paper in Monterey, this time embellished even more richly: Mothers had refused food to their famished children, then eaten the youngsters once they starved.

  The mold was set. The story of the Donner Party went from paper to paper and mouth to mouth, spreading across the country in
a titillating admixture of exaggeration, half-truth, and lie. The tall tales worsened in the retelling, as tall tales always do. Occasionally, even the survivors themselves spread bizarre and incredible anecdotes. Frances Donner once insisted that Eleanor Eddy "died deranged:"

  In the forenoon before she died she got the benches and arranged them in the floor in imitation of people and danced the cotilliion and other dances untill she was exosted and then died.

  Such sagas found purchase in the public mind for several reasons, perhaps including, ironically, the fact that the Donner Party represented no great turn of history. For a story that has fascinated the national psyche for decades, it was an evanescent affair. Like the survivors, history trudged ahead. Migration to California plummeted the next two years, but almost surely that had more to do with the uncertainties of the Mexican-American War than with the distant travails of a few families. When gold glittered, the allure washed memories clean. A renewed flood of humanity started marching across the continent to California, willing to risk anything for a chance at life's mother lode.

  Indeed, the Donner Party was far more anomalous than typical. During the twenty years at the heart of the great overland migration— from 1840 to i860—a quarter of a million people crossed the continent, few with a result similar to that of the Donner Party. The best estimates are that perhaps 4 to 6 percent of emigrants died on the route, and of course some of those would have died back at home. Gauging the number who gave up and turned around is almost impossible, but it is clear that the great majority of those who loaded a wagon and steered westward reached their destination in safety. In the end, of course, the migration peopled California and Oregon with astonishing speed, and thus helped spread the reach of the nation toward the "manifest destiny" in which so many emigrants fervently believed. Thus the tale of the Donner Party is mismatched with its broader context, for it is a cautionary warning about an enterprise that was largely, from the standpoint of the participants, a splendid success.

  Early newspaper accounts often seemed at pains to make the point that most travelers had no trouble. The California Star noted that some companies reached the golden shore in less than four months. Even with time to spare for resting the cattle, no more than four and a half months was needed. All "candid persons" knew as much. Mere "ordinary industry and care" ensured a crossing of the Sierra before the first snow.

  The real trouble with the Donner Party, according to this line of argument, was not the inherent risks of the journey west but the company's own sloth and foolishness. Even before the first rescuers reached the cabins, the Star blamed the party's delay on "a contrary and contentious disposition." Everyone would have completed the trek safely, the paper claimed, if only "the men had exerted themselves as they should have done."

  It would be specious to claim insight into the motives of long-dead editors, but it's worth noting that this focus on the alleged shortcomings of the Donner Party suited the interests of the emerging American establishment in California, which was eager for more emigrants. If the Donner Party could be at least partly blamed for its own travails, other prospective newcomers might not be discouraged. The last thing anyone in California wanted to suggest publicly was that a harrowing catastrophe was simply an intrinsic—if highly unlikely—risk of westward migration.

  In the early years, therefore, the public imagination took on a twofold perception of the Donner Party—first that they were ghouls, second that they bore a substantial responsibility for their own misfortune. Together, these two ideas intertwined into an ugly and depressing perception of the emigrants. Some survivors rarely spoke of the events, almost as if they were hiding a shameful family secret.

  But in time, a new tableau emerged. In 1879 the editor of the newspaper at Truckee, near the site of the tragedy, published a history of the Donner Party, downplaying the occurrence of cannibalism and justifying almost everything the emigrants did. The book proved popular and began to change the public perception. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Native Sons of the Golden West were ready to erect a monument to the Donner Party, a grand statue of a pioneer family striding boldly into the future. It was set atop a massive pedestal said in popular legend to reflect the height of the winter snows of 1846. No longer were the men and women of the Donner Party the sad and incompetent counterpoise to the success of the westward migration; now they were the avatars of its glories, symbols of the Pioneer archetype. The Native Sons wanted "to acknowledge the Donner Party to be typical of the entire race of pioneers, strong, resourceful, self-reliant, fearless, unconquerable spirits—who even in their death added luster to California's name." Where once "there was reproach heaped upon it," now the party's name enjoyed "a day of renown." Eventually the head of the society's monument committee went well beyond that, declaring that the Donner Party reflected not only the best of the pioneer spirit but the best of human endeavor generally. The great edifice, he declared, would "charge the minds of all who behold it with a reverence for those characters who 'gird their armor on,' who square their shoulders to the world and who take the brunt of life."

  If a single day typified the rehabilitation of the Donner Party name, it was the dedication of the monument, on a hot June day in 1918, more than seventy years after the tempest. Eight survivors were still alive, three of them at the dedication: Patty Reed and Frances and Eliza Donner. Eliza had become something of a celebrity, having written a book about the Donner Party in which she attempted to disprove her family's cannibalism, and so she was seated at the head of the honored guests, just to the right of the speaker's podium. There had already been a reception the previous day, an event at which Eliza, attempting to say a few words, had choked up with uncontrollable emotion. At the dedication ceremony, she looked out over the crowd, but the faces dissolved into ghosts. She could see her mother walking away from the cabins at Donner Lake, back toward her dying husband, "her small figure moving in and out among the pine trees." Her gaze shifted, and she could see herself and her two little sisters climbing up the massive escarpment hanging above the lake.

  The sharp rap of the master of ceremonies' gavel snatched away her reverie. She flashed back to the present, a time when an automobile or a train or even an airplane could carry one across Donner Pass in less time than it might take to walk to the far end of the lake. Two girls dressed in white drew away cords, and a veil fell from the monument.

  ***

  WAS THE DONNER PARTY, AS THE MONUMENT builders believed, composed of heroes? In the traditional sense of the word hero, some members qualify. Stanton's willingness to return to a company in which he had no family members, especially when McCutchan's illness offered him a ready excuse, offered a sterling example of commitment. Eddy's leadership of the Forlorn Hope notified the California settlements of the party's dire condition and summoned help without which the entire company might have died. Rescuers displayed much valor, especially Stark, whose bullheaded insistence pulled the Breens from certain death.

  But more than gleaming heroism or sullied villainy, the Donner Party is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity. The Breens hoarded their larger supply of meat when they deemed it necessary and shared it when they thought they could. Amanda McCutchan abandoned her daughter to the care of near-strangers when she left with the Forlorn Hope, but ultimately it was the Forlorn Hope that summoned help. Jean Baptiste Trudeau stayed to help the Donners as long as he could and left when he thought he might die. Tamzene Donner orphaned her daughters to comfort a husband sure to perish. Margret Reed left behind two of her children to care for the other two. Tojudge such decisions from the comfort of modern life is a fool's errand. The members of the Donner Party did the best they could, which is a form of Everyman's valor.

  And therein lies the true lesson and attraction of the tale: They were Everyman. Often, adventure stories feature larger-than
-life figures, grand Victorian explorers or indomitable generals or pith-helmeted naturalists resolutely seeking some wondrous discovery. They are tales of men seeking the South Pole or the North, or hunting the fortune of a lifetime at sea, or climbing to the top of the world. Such quests have much to teach us, but so too does the drama of the mundane gone madly wrong. The Donner Party is a narrative of merchants and farmers, of middle-aged parents with children and young couples with dreams, of infants and toddlers and teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. It is a story of American families doing what they have always done—moving west in search of a better life. It is a story of extraordinary deeds born of ordinary devotion.

  That is why the most resonant moments of the Donner Party saga are often the quietest, the times when we can see glimpses of normalcy in lives torn asunder. There is no plainer exhibition of that fact than the day Patty Reed finally escaped the interminable snows. She had ridden down out of the mountains on her exhausted father's back and been taken ahead to the camp of one of the relief parties. She was fed a meal such as she had not eaten in months—rich California beef and soft fresh bread, even the almost-forgotten taste of sugar—and then led to a seat by the fire.

  No one knew it, but months before, when the family had been forced to abandon one of its wagons on the harsh deserts of Utah, Patty had saved a precious artifact. Her parents told her that nothing could be preserved, but when adult heads were turned, she snuck from the wagon bed a doll that her grandmother had made for her—a tiny wooden figurine three or four inches tall, perfect for the grasp of a small hand, with a white dress and a red shawl and a bun of black hair painted on its head. Patty hid the treasured little item in the folds of her dress, secreting away the talisman through long months of fear and heartbreak, a private friend through an ordeal that called forth from Patty the courage and stamina of an adult more than the playfulness and gaiety of a child.