Led to the Slaughter

by Duncan McGeary

  I couldn’t make sense of it at first. I saw the old man, seemingly sitting cross-legged, his back against a huge boulder at the side of the stream. Then I noticed the frenzied motion of something––some creature––tearing at his throat. Hardkoop’s body flopped back and forth like a rag doll. I heard snarling, and in the darkness, a pair of red eyes turned our way. There was a splattering sound, as if thick liquid was being splashed about.

  Jean Baptiste ran back up the hill, but I stood frozen, staring into those malevolent eyes. There was intelligence there, and a careful, measuring look, as if it was assessing me; but the creature was satisfied with its prey, apparently, because it turned away disdainfully. It went back to tearing at Hardkoop’s body, ignoring me.

  This was a different wolf than the one I had seen in the mountain glade. There is more than one, I thought. And if there is more than one, there is probably a pack.

  I slowly, stealthily lifted the gun and sighted down it, but the creature wasn’t there anymore. In that brief moment, it had disappeared, as if it had caught the slight motion as I raised the rifle. My hair start to lift up, as if charged by friction, and my knees got weak. I started backing away. I had the sense that it was still nearby, watching me.

  The trip back to camp was like a whirling fever dream. I started at every sound, and turned and checked behind me, in front of me––then to the side, then behind me again. The wolf followed me the entire way, I am sure of it, though I never saw it.

  I was so exhausted by the time I reached the campfires that I didn’t even bother to look for Jean, nor did I want to after he’d abandoned me in the middle of danger. That had been a surprise. I didn’t know what I’d say to him. I tried to excuse his behavior, telling myself that both Bayliss and Jean Baptiste would fight Indians, or bears, or anything that could be explained, but that all this strangeness had unnerved them.

  Also a surprise was the fact that I wasn’t affected the same way. I was frightened, of course, but I figured these creatures could be killed, just like any other animal.

  Everyone was asleep when I got back to camp, even the two men who were supposed to be guarding the livestock. I was too tired to do anything about that.

  I collapsed into my blankets, completely depleted, the rifle at my side. I wish Father was here, I thought.

  Though only moments before, I wouldn’t have believed it possible, I fell into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 19

  Virginia Reed, Truckee River, October 10, 1846

  To be truthful, I was disappointed in both my suitors. Both Jean Baptiste and Bayliss had been with me when something unnatural and frightening happened, but neither of them wanted to talk about it. It was as if they wanted to deny it had happened. Jean was embarrassed, I could tell, and Bayliss was angry.

  I wanted to shake them, to tell them that their pride and petty rivalry was unimportant now. It was clear to me that dangerous and implacable creatures were stalking us.

  Without Father, I felt immensely vulnerable. I tried to corral my family, to keep them within my sight, but I barely saw my brothers anymore––they were always off with the young men, running around underfoot, to the men’s mock annoyance. Mother and Patty were a closed circle: they had established a routine that the rest of us weren’t part of.

  Nevertheless, I felt it was my duty to protect my mother and my siblings, so I refused to go on any further walks with my suitors, who were most unhappy about it. But Father had asked me to take care of the family, and I intended to do so.

  We finally reached the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The mountains rose before us, covered with huge pines. The peaks were capped with snow, but below the alpine heights, there were gray, jagged cliffs and hillsides of loose scree. It seemed impossible that our wagon train could traverse those rocky crags.

  Once again, the Donner group had moved on ahead of us, a few days’ journey farther into the mountains to Truckee Lake, the source of the Truckee River. They left word that the Donner family had accepted Father into their midst and that he was traveling with them. This lifted my heart, which was in sore need of some good news.

  The Truckee Valley was lush and bountiful, but we’d reached it too late for many of us to save what little we still owned. The push over the final stretch of desert had been cruel. Our family’s last wagon had broken an axle, and we’d carried what we could the rest of the way. We had but a few head of livestock left in our possession.

  The Eddys were in even worse straits, having lost their wagons days earlier. They were without provisions. None of the other families would help them, including us, for we had barely enough for ourselves. They’d been forced to march along carrying their children, who cried much of the time. The Graves family had been obliged to abandon their wagon, having lost their horses to Indians.

  Bayliss and Jean Baptiste, who had attached himself to our family, were carrying as much as they could. Even eight-year-old Patty was burdened with a pack. My little brothers had finally come back to our campfire, realizing their own kin were in bad shape, and also carried their share. They never wandered far from us from then on, and I wondered if they had seen something that scared them.

  Mother had started setting aside extra food for Tommy and Jimmy, and I didn’t object. I noticed that Patty was getting distressingly thin. When I was honest with myself, I realized I had become rather skinny myself. Just as well Jean and Bayliss are no longer courting me, I thought. I must look frightful.

  The fodder was sparse in the days before we reached the Truckee Valley. By necessity, we’d let the livestock forage far from the safety of the camp. The Indians (and the others, I couldn’t help but think) were merciless, killing dozens of cattle and stealing many of those that were left. Some of the men took to sleeping near the stockades, but even so, animals were gone in the morning, though the guards swore they never relaxed their vigilance. By then, over a hundred head of livestock were missing from our little group of wagons.

  We shouldn’t have stayed in that little valley for so long, but we were so glad to be out of the heat. To have fresh water! We had been told that it would not snow until late November, so most of us thought the rest and recuperation were worth the risk. I remember how the river was lined with women trying to wash the trail dust from our threadbare clothes with cold water and hard soap.

  We didn’t know that in the mountains, the snows had already begun to fall. The mountains were shrouded with mist for a few days, and it wasn’t until the clouds dispersed that we saw that the peaks were completely white. The Donner family had already tried to push over the mountains but was forced back. We found out, when they straggled back to Truckee Lake, that Father and Walter Herron had gone on ahead, sharing a single horse, in one last attempt to get help before we were snowed in completely. The news lifted my spirits. Father would come back with supplies and all would yet be well.

  Stanton and McCutchen had not returned. We were almost out of provisions. We were worn out by the unexpected rigors of the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake. We were too tired and hungry to move forward, but time was running out, and everyone knew it. We were told that the last mountain pass was even harder going than the Hastings Cutoff had been, and I think this dispirited all of us. That was why we lingered longer than we should have on the banks of the Truckee River.

  Then something happened that convinced everyone to push on.

  #

  I had taken to sleeping outside our family tent, near the campfire, with the rifle by my side. Late one night, a noise woke me. The fire had burned low, its embers providing little heat or light. I threw off my blankets and took up the rifle. I wasn’t sure what I’d heard, only that it had sent my blood surging. I was learning to trust my instincts.

  I heard the soft swooshing sound again, then a rasping breath. In the dim light of the fire, I saw eyes staring at me from the darkness, unblinking red spheres that took in the sight of my gun and appeared almost amused. I could see a low-slung body behind the eyes, that o
f some animal, though the eyes had a strangely human aspect to them. I raised the rifle to fire, but the eyes blinked out and the dark shape ran away into the trees.

  I sat back down, my heart pounding. I would not sleep another wink till sunrise, I vowed; yet when the shouting started, I had dozed off. I woke with a start at the sound of raised voices, followed by a gunshot. There was some sort of altercation going on in the young men’s camp, and I ran toward it.

  When I arrived, I saw Bill Foster standing alone in the middle of a circle of men, as if no one wanted to go near him. He was shaking, his hands trembling as he tried to reload his rifle. At his feet lay William Pike, shot through the head. He was naked, though it was freezing cold.

  “He attacked me, I tell you!” Foster cried. “He was like a beast. He… he wasn’t… himself!”

  There was a wound on Foster’s shoulder, blood seeping through his shirt.

  “He bit me!” Foster said. He gave up trying to reload his rifle. His muscles went slack and his eyes lost focus: I believe he was seeking refuge within himself.

  Finally, Patrick Dolan stepped forward and took the rifle from Foster’s trembling hands. “Bill, you killed him.”

  Foster shivered all over and looked around wildly, like someone waking up from a bad dream. “He came out of nowhere and bit me in the neck!” he said hoarsely. “It was like he was some kind of animal. I threw him off me, and he ran into the darkness, but then I could see him coming toward me again, and I… I shot him. I had no choice. He was a… ” He stopped and swallowed hard. He’d been about to say something more, but had thought better of it.

  “We’ll decide in the morning what to do,” Dolan said. “We need to think about this in the light of day.”

  They covered the poor naked corpse with a blanket.

  The men moved off reluctantly, leaving Foster by himself by the fire. No one wanted to be near him, though he’d always been a popular man. He looked at me with blank eyes, as if not really seeing me.

  I stepped into the firelight and sat down across from him. “What did you really see?” I asked quietly.

  He had a hard time focusing on me. His head and arms were twitching, as if he wanted to run away but was trying hard to hold himself in place. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I might,” I said. “I’ve seen some strange things lately.”

  “I thought I was being attacked by a wolf,” he blurted. “Oh, God, that sounds crazy.”

  “But he turned into back into Mister Pike when he died?” I asked.

  Foster nodded spasmodically.

  “I saw the same thing when John Snyder attacked my father,” I said. “I believe what you say, Mister Foster.”

  He seemed pathetically grateful for my support, but what I told him next made him frown. “Tell the others you were cleaning your gun and it went off accidentally,” I advised. “They’ll believe that more readily than that Pike attacked you, especially that he attacked you in the form of a wolf.”

  He sat thinking for a while, then nodded. “It could’ve happened that way. I clean my gun almost every night. Everyone sees me doing it. I’ll tell them I was so shocked by Pike’s death that my mind conjured up a vision of being attacked, but in truth, he startled me and the gun went off accidentally.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It was an accident. Don’t worry: you’ll be fine.”

  Perhaps it would have been better if I had tried to warn the others then, using the testimony of Jean Baptiste and Foster to back me up. But I sensed they weren’t ready for the truth; that they would deny it and cease to listen to anything I had to say, that they might even blame me for the bad luck that had befallen the Donner Party.

  I went back to my own campfire, traversing the darkness with my rifle at the ready, but I couldn’t shake the image of the wound on Foster’s neck.

  I remembered the wound on William Pike’s arm after he returned from the scouting trip with Charles Stanton. I remembered the suspicious looks that Stanton kept casting his companion’s way, and how after the trip they were never seen together, though before then, they had been friends.

  It might be a good idea to keep an eye on Mister Foster, I thought. He’s been bitten by… one of them. Even then, I was unwilling to use the word, to admit what was happening. It still didn’t seem possible. There had to be some other explanation.

  I continued to sleep by the fire after that, if sleep it could be called.

  #

  William Pike died by accident: so it was recorded. No one wanted to admit there was another explanation. The sense of unease increased among the wagon train. One by one, the families remaining along the Truckee River loaded up their few belongings and began climbing the pass.

  When we arrived at the encampment at Truckee Lake, we discovered that some small groups had already tried to make it over the mountain. Most of them didn’t get far. The snow started falling the day they left and didn’t stop. A few groups got close to the summit but ran into snowdrifts up to ten feet tall. They turned back, but it wasn’t just the snow that stopped them. I heard the word “wolves” being muttered in conversation. No one wanted to believe that we were being hunted, and yet, by then, almost everyone had seen the sleek bodies of the wolves running beside us, winding through the trees with a natural grace that made us humans feel all the more awkward and helpless.

  I learned that Father and Walter Herron were the last to leave before the heavy snows. No one would look me in the eye when they informed me of this, and it was clear to me that they believed the two men lost. But I was certain he had made it. I would have felt something if anything had happened to Father. I was sure of it.

  Truckee Lake, November 2, 1846

  My prayers were answered. Stanton returned just after we made it to the encampment at Truckee Lake. He brought word of Father.

  “He arrived a few days before I left California,” he said to my mother and me after the hubbub caused by his arrival began to die down. “He was healthy, but he had had a rough time of it. Both Herron and your father were emaciated and exhausted. I decided it was best not to wait for him to recover enough to join me, but he made me promise that I would give you a message.”

  He paused, unendurably. Tell us! I wanted to shout at him.

  “He said not to give up hope; that he would be back for you as soon as possible. That nothing would keep him away.”

  Those simple words, that promise, sustained me for the next few horrible months. Without them, I might well have succumbed, as so many did.

  More importantly to the rest of the party, Stanton brought mules laden with provisions. He was accompanied by two Miwok Indians named Luis and Salvador. They were the first Indians I had seen dressed in white man’s clothing. This only served to make them seem even more savage in my eyes. Their bronzed skin, angled faces, almost Oriental eyes and black hair made them seem exotic, no matter that they were clad in shirts and trousers. Surely, we all thought, the Indians will show us how to survive in this wilderness; surely they will show us the way out of here.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Stanton was also accompanied by more snow. It started again shortly after he arrived, and it never stopped.

  CHAPTER 20

  Diary of Charles Stanton, Sutter’s Fort, October 28, 1846

  The buildings of Sutter’s Fort are enclosed by mud-brick walls painted white, with guard towers at each corner and a main gate in the middle of one wall. Most everyone lives outside the fort and retreats inside only in times of emergency. I expected thick forests in California, but instead, there is low vegetation and grass pastures, as if God has prepared the land to be plowed. The terrain is gently rolling, with red rock outcroppings, small ponds, and a wide, flat road leading up to the fort.

  It seems a paradise; but I am leaving paradise to return to hell.

  Just as I was preparing to return to the Donner Party, James Reed and Walter Herron staggered into view. Much of the settlement lined the road to stare as they went by. The people of Sutter�
�s Fort were surprised enough when McCutchen and I arrived so late in the season: they obviously did not expect to see anyone else make it through.

  I barely recognized the two men, and I could see in their eyes that they barely recognized me. There before me was a vision of what McCutchen and I must have looked like not so long ago, when we arrived here. They are scarecrow men, with thin arms and legs, gaunt faces, and sunken, dark eyes. These are men who have seen horrors, who have endured great hardship; yet they still have hope that everything will turn out all right.

  James Reed wanted to join my party, but I convinced him to hold back, to give himself a chance to rest and recover. In his condition, he’d be more of a burden than help.

  “Stay,” I told him. “Organize a genuine rescue party.” I waved at my two silent Indian companions. “I was only able to talk Luis and Salvador into going with me. My finances aren’t what I thought they were––I’ve had some setbacks back East. I’ve barely been able to buy what you see here. Mister Sutter has been kind enough to loan us a pack mule and provisions, but there is only so much I can take.”

  “Let me pay you,” Reed urged. “Buy another pack animal and laden it with supplies. Things have gotten desperate, Stanton.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed to let him outfit another mule: any more than that, the three of us won’t be able to handle. What I really need is more men, but based on what I can pay, only the two Indians have agreed to accompany me.

  I am much lower on funds than I expected. It turns out that the markets back East have fallen into a depression. Unfortunately, news of this downturn came by ship a few days before I arrived in the Sacramento Valley; otherwise I’m certain Sutter would’ve extended more credit. The provisions and transport I can afford are inadequate, but I don’t want to wait any longer. As it is, I fear we’ll be too late. Apparently, the last stretches of desert decimated the wagons and livestock.