Sitting in her tent on the soft grass of a prairie spring, Tamzene Donner contemplated the vast expanse of wilderness she was about to enter and decided to bid her sister one last goodbye. She reached for a fresh sheet of stationery and carefully noted the date—May 11, 1846—and the location: Independence, Missouri. The next day she would begin a journey as exciting and dangerous as any that could be imagined.
Tamzene and her family were headed for "the bay of Francisco," two thousand miles away in California, a trip she guessed would take four months. The great migration of which they were a part literally engulfed them on the prairie. Tamzene guessed seven thousand wagons might be going west, and while the real number was less than a tenth so large, rigs stood everywhere. Owners tightened the wagon covers, laid out tack for the morning hitch, hammered home a final repair. Mounds of supplies vanished as crates and trunks and burlap bags disappeared into the wagon beds, stowed in precise array. Flying pans and tools and overalls succumbed to a final cleaning. Oxen and mules and horses grazed in the warmth of the sun, their tails flapping against ever-present flies. Children capered at play. The sounds—the edge of a tent flapping in the wind, the neighing of horses, the barking of dogs, greetings and farewells and talk of the trail ahead—mixed with the smell of sod and manure and campfires and freshly laundered calico. "I can give vou no idea of the huny of this place at this time," Tamzene wrote.
Tamzene and her husband, George, were going west with five children, their own three young daughters and George's two older daughters from a previous marriage. George's brother Jacob and his wife, Betsy, had come too, with their seven youngsters. So too had the Reeds, James and Margret and four children, another family from the Donners' hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Together, the three families had left Springfield a month earlier, but the trip thus far had been an easy prelude, an undemanding ramble through farmland and towns. The real voyage to California began here, at Independence, a boomtown at the edge of the frontier.
Tamzene had tried to write her sister once before, but the letter had been laid aside, perhaps because the preparations for the trip had left no time, perhaps because it was simply too hard to say goodbye. The old letter had been soiled—she rued the waste of a nice sheet of pink paper—and so now she was starting again. One of her children played with "an old indiarubber cap"; another pestered her with questions.
The children were the reason for the move, or at least part of the reason. A new life in the West would be "an advantage to our children and to us," Tamzene insisted, yet there was a hint in her letter of the anxiety anyone would have felt. "I am willing to go," she wrote. Willing, not eager.
As if to reassure herself as much as her sister, she outlined their ample gear and provisions: three wagons, each pulled by three yoke of oxen, food, clothing, even a few head of dairy cows for milk and butter along the trail. She added news of another family member, then closed with a promise to write that was really an acknowledgment of just how difficult, perhaps impossible, that might be. "Farewell, mv sister, you shall hear from me as soon as I have an opportunity . . . . Farewell."
AMERICA IN THE 1840s hummed with energy and growth and ambition. The summer of the Donners' journey, the country turned seventy years old—an adolescent age for a nation—and its youthful vigor was unmatched. Since the turn of the centuiy, the population had tripled. The geographic size of the nation had quadrupled. The gross national product had increased sevenfold. The United States was, in the words of historian James McPherson, "the wunderkind nation of the nineteenth century."
Technology seemed to be conquering everything. Since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the country had been laced with man-made waterways. Steamboats, still a relatively new invention, plied the rivers carrying freight and passengers. Even the earliest railroads were belching along. Textile factories had supplanted individual weavers, rolling out affordable fabric by the ton. Inventors fashioned wonder after wonder: Samuel Colt the revolver, John Deere the steel plow, Charles Goodyear a vulcanized rubber that withstood heat and cold. The electric motor had been invented. America had the world's first dental school, and an American doctor had performed the first operation using general anesthetic. In 1844, Samuel Morse had sent the first telegraph message: "What hath God wrought?"
Yet beyond Independence, this cacophonous modern world faded to a hush. To pioneers, Independence was the "jumping-off point," a phrase that rightly suggested the dramatic abandonment of safety, and to the men and women about to undertake the journey, it was a dividing line between civilization and wilderness. To the west, boundless grasslands stretched toward the sunset, an ocean of grass streaked here and there with the trees of a river bottom. There were no great cities. There were no cities at all. The largest community of the west was Santa Fe, with perhaps a few thousand residents, and that was far to the south of the intended path. Where American settlers were headed, there were only a few small settlements—and those were two thousand miles away in California and Oregon. In between, there was nothing save Indians and a handful of trading posts. On many maps the vast expanse was labeled as the "Great American Desert." In the parlance of the day, those who made the trip were invariably "emigrants," people leaving their countiy for an unknown shore.
Some had personal reasons for going: a broken heart or a run of bad luck. Others were escaping hard times. An economic crash in 1837 had briefly halted the boom, touching off a painful depression. And yet the economy had started to grow again by the mid-i840s. Agricultural prices still had not rebounded fully, but the worst of the crisis was over.
The more common reason for starting the journey was simply the continual theme of America: going toward the sunset in search of a better life. Almost from the day the United States bought its way into the western half of the continent, with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans began to dream of using their newly acquired land as a highway to the Pacific. The hard and barren prairies seemed beyond the hope of cultivation, but they could still serve a purpose: access to the rich river valleys of Oregon and California. To go by sea was a grueling prospect—months of churning through the
South Atlantic, then battering around Cape Horn, then sailing up through the whaling waters of the South Pacific and at last to California. Typically the trip took longer by sea, at least five months compared to perhaps four by going overland. And it was often more expensive, especially since the overland migrant's costs might be recouped at the journey's end if he sold his oxen or wagon. It is no surprise that Americans wondered if the overland alternative might not be better.
No one knew with certainty, because for the better part of four decades after the purchase, almost no Americans save a few hardy mountain men and a few inflamed missionaries dared venture into the Far West. The lack of experience did not, however, quiet a vigorous debate about the practicality of overland travel. The exploration party led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark endured countless hardships in reaching the Pacific, dragging a boat up the Missouri River for much of the trip, but after their return it was not long before Americans were being told that repeating such a trip might actually become routine. Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis in 1806, yet as early as 1813 the Missouri Gazette announced that wagons could reach Oregon with surprisingly little trouble. There was nothing along the way "that any person would dare to call a mountain," the paper claimed. Newspapers insisted that the trip to Oregon would soon be as simple as traveling among eastern cities, or even a carriage ride to a summer resort. The American Biblical Repository declared the path to the Pacific so inviting that it must have been "excavated by the finger of God." It was said in some quarters that crossing the Rocky Mountains was so easy that a man driving a wagon would hardly notice the rise.
Skeptics, on the other hand, decried the idea as madness. The trip was compared to a journey to the moon. Livestock would starve along the way. Indians would kill the pioneers. Women and children could not conceivably survive the rigors. Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York Tribune, insisted that trying to take a family west amounted to "palpable homicide."
But the westward urge could only be contained for so long. The middle of the continent, which not so long ago had itself been wilderness, was starting to fill up and settle down, losing the edge that attracted a certain kind of man. Missouri joined the Union in 1821, Arkansas in 1836, Michigan the year after that. The result, by the 1840s, was a decade of expansionist fever. In 1844, James K. Polk won the presidency by promising to annex Texas in the south and Oregon in the north, in the latter case vowing a war if the British didn't abandon their claim as far north as Alaska. The following year, a New York journalist named John O'Sullivan coined a term for America's grand ambitions: It was the country's "manifest destiny" to occupy the continent from sea to sea, no matter that the British still claimed Oregon and that California was part of Mexico.
By that time, western settlers had already started fashioning a continental country. They crafted new lives at the edge of the Pacific, assuming more or less that if Americans forged ahead, America would follow. The first wagon train went west in 1841, the brainchild of a twenty-one-year-old Missouri schoolteacher named John Bidwell. His Missouri land stolen by a claim-jumper and his imagination fired by tales of a California paradise, Bidwell organized the Western Emigration Society and drew pledges of commitment from more than five hundred would-be followers. When fewer than a hundred people showed up at the May rendezvous to start the trip, Bidwell plunged ahead anyway. Merely setting out on the journey was a remarkable display of courage. "We knew that California lay west," Bidwell wrote later, "and that was the extent of our knowledge." By luck, the emigrants encountered a party of Jesuit missionaries guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, an Irishman who had already spent a quarter-century in the West and was a legendary mountain man. Fitzpatrick led them all to the vicinity of Fort Hall, in present-day Idaho, where they split into three groups.
The Jesuits headed north, into modern-day Montana, and the settlers cleaved off into separate companies bound for Oregon and California. To quicken the pace, the Oregon group abandoned its wagons immediately and rode and hiked to missionary Marcus Whitman's outpost at Walla Walla, then survived a harrowing raft trip down the Columbia River to reach the Willamette Valley. The Californians clung to their wagons far longer, finally abandoning them at the foot of the Pequop Mountains in what is today eastern Nevada. Even without the drag of the wagons, they were soon desperate and half-starved. They ate their horses and mules, then the oxen, finally crows and even a wildcat. Without maps or a specific sense of the route, they could easily have disappeared and been lost to histoiy. But they managed to survive, cresting the Sierra Nevada and then working their way down through the canyons and ridges of the western slope, finally reaching the grasslands of the San Joaquin Valley. On November 4, in what are now the outlying suburbs of San Francisco, the remnants of the Bidwell Party stumbled into a ranch owned by John Marsh, an American expatriate and charlatan who fled the United States one step ahead of an arrest warrant but then grew rich in the California sunshine. Regular people—not mountain men, but a schoolteacher and farmers and young adventurers—had reached the Pacific by land.
They had done so by abandoning their wagons, however, and wagons were critical to settlers. When a later party managed to take a few wagons all the way to Oregon, the focus of emigration fever shifted north. Pioneers heading for Oregon soon outnumbered the trickle to California, and for a time it seemed that Oregon would grow to be the colossus of the West.
Then, in 1844, a small group bucked the trend, declaring for California and holding to their destination against all warnings of doom. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party included fifty people at the start and fifty-two at the end, the result of a safe journey for the beginners and the addition of two babies along the way. The captain was Elisha Stephens, a blacksmith and trapper with a full white beard and an eccentric streak. The other namesakes were Martin Murphy, an Irish immigrant eager for the official Catholicism of Mexican California, and John Townsend, a doctor destined to become the first licensed physician in California. Like the California wagon trains of previous years—the ones that had been forced to abandon their wagons and pack over the Sierra—the group led by Stephens followed the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and then turned southwest down the Humboldt River through the deserts of what is now Nevada. They followed the Humboldt until it literally disappeared, for the Humboldt is an unusual river in that it does not feed to the sea but ends in a sink, a boggy lake from which there is no outlet. The water seeps down into the thirsty earth or evaporates into the blistering sky, and the Humboldt dies, a waterway conquered by a surrounding, merciless desert.
From the sink, previous California-bound trains had headed south, marching down the eastern flank of the Sierra, searching constantly on their right for a mountain pass, a doorway through an imposing granite wall. (One group managed to get wagons to the Owens Valley, along the eastern edge of the modern state of California, but that marginal success didn't count for much. To the pioneers, reaching California meant crossing the
Sierra.) The Stephens Party, on the other hand, headed west from the sink rather than south. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune, they had encountered a Paiute Indian who led them to a river running out of the Sierra Nevada. The banks were wooded and grassy, crucial for supplying fuel for the campfires and feed for the oxen. They named it the Truckee, which they mistakenly thought was the name of the Indian who led them to it.
They followed the river, then a creek that branched away due west, and finally, amid November snow flurries, found a lake at the base of the mountains, the granite face above them rising almost as high as the Empire State Building. They abandoned six of their eleven wagons so they could double-team those that remained and then carried the supplies and freight to the summit so the wagons could be taken over empty. Part of the way up, a sheer vertical face about ten feet high stood in their way, seemingly impassable for any wheeled vehicle. They unhitched the wagons and drove the oxen up a narrow defile in the cliff. Then they reyoked the animals and lowered chains to the wagons, which were hauled straight up the ledge, the oxen pulling from above and the people pushing from below. They crossed the summit on November 25, 1844, the first party to take wagons over the top of the Sierra Nevada.
The feat was in some ways a hollow victory. More than half the wagons had been left behind, those that crossed the summit had been taken over without freight, and on the way down the western slope the wagons had to be abandoned altogether, not to be recovered until the following summer. For much of the time the very survival of the emigrants had been in doubt. They were lucky to encounter an Indian willing to guide them, perhaps just as lucky to make it up and over the Sierra without some serious injury or other calamity. Still, wagons had been taken all the way through to California, and if something could be done once, it could be done again.
More than a year passed before news reached the East, but by the spring of 1846 word of the new wagon route to California was spreading. Men returning from the West talked up the discovery, and the newspapers began to publish enthusiastic accounts, including one wildly optimistic assessment that the Stephens-led group had found a "very good road." Enthusiasm for California heightened. In Independence, where the wagon trains readied themselves to head out over the prairies, camps buzzed with excitement about California's climate, said to be good for people and crops alike. One joke had it that when a Californian reached heaven, the archangel Gabriel said the man should return home—"a heap better country than this." For the first time in the brief history of the wagon trains, California surpassed Oregon as the destination of choice. A newspaperman in Independence claimed to have seen just one wagon bound for Oregon. "The word," he wrote, "is California." When Tamzene Donner's family set their wagons and their futures toward "the bay of Francisco," they were joining a rushing tide of optimistic Americans headed west.
AT FORTY-FOUR, Tamzene Donner had already endured one tragedy in life, showing a resiliency that would sustain her in the ordeal yet to come. Born in Massachusetts, she went south as a young woman to work as a schoolteacher. While living in North Carolina, she married and had a baby, a son who looked just like his father. But then, in three horrific months toward the end of 1831, the bedrock of Tamzene's life crumbled beneath her feet. For reasons that are not clear—perhaps an epidemic of some sort—all those closest to her died in quick succession: her son in late September, a premature baby daughter in November, her husband on Christmas Eve. Shattered and alone, she began the long process of reconstructing her life, chronicling the stages of her emotional convalescence in an extraordinaiy series of heartfelt letters to her sister.
"Weep with me if you have tears to spare," she wrote in Januaiy 1832, just a month after her husband's death. Later that year she grew so ill she thought she might die, an idea that did not entirely frighten her. "Sister I could die very easily. One after one of the bonds that bound one to earth are loosened and now there remains but few." The following spring, she remained deeply depressed, with little to look forward to except the occasional letter from her sister. She was plagued with nightmares, dreaming that she was wandering aimlessly while looking for lost relatives, or that she saw her sister "wasting with sickness." By 1836, five years after the deaths, she was struggling to reclaim her optimism. She resolutely insisted that despite everything, she was a lucky woman—"Think not I am unhappy. Far from it. I realize that on me heaven has been lavish of its blessings"—and was obviously proud that her abilities as a schoolteacher had allowed her to survive on her own. Responding to her brother's offer to "take care" of her, she wrote her sister, "I am abundantly able at present to take care of myself and to supply every necessary and unnecessaiy want."
Eventually she fled the South and its personal ghosts, taking a job as a schoolteacher in Illinois. "Think you that my wandering feet will rest this side the grave?" she wrote. Her health was improving, and she had even regained a sense of humor: "You need not fear having a brother in law, for I know not a man old enough for me in the county." Not completely healed, she had at least found an equilibrium. "To say that I have any particular source of anxiety or cause of unhappiness I cannot. To say that I have any particular pleasure I cannot. Life moves on as smoothly and quietly as a summer stream." She loved the prairie. The broad vistas—the wildflowers, the grasslands, the sunsets that spread a swath of crimson across the skyline—gave a sense of possibility. "I stop, I gaze and am awestruck."
In time, she was ready again to consider courtship. In Springfield, Illinois, she met a local farmer, George Donner, a man in some ways her opposite. If she was the lettered Yankee, he was the garrulous southerner. Born in North Carolina in the years just after the Revolutionary War, Donner had traveled through Kentucky, Indiana, even Texas, settling finally in Illinois. He was the kind of man people liked, a big fellow known around Sangamon County as "Uncle George." The nickname fit. He was more avuncular than firm, a friendly presence who was neither a natural-born leader nor merely a face in the crowd. Almost two decades older than Tamzene, he had been widowed twice and had ten children from those first two marriages.
They courted, then married in 1839 and soon began a family of their own that would eventually grow to include three daughters. It was a comfortable life. They owned 240 acres in two parcels, including their home, sixty acres of planted fields, and an orchard of apple, peach, and pear trees. "Our neighbors call us rich," Tamzene admitted. As a wife and mother she gave up teaching but indulged her intellectual bent by starting a "reading society," an antebellum version of a book club.
By 1842, ten years after the death of her first family, Tamzene Donner had started anew. With her baby daughter asleep in a cradle beside her, she paused on a spring day, the window open to the scent of apple blossoms, to write yet again to the sister who had so often received letters of woe. "Things have turned around very much to my satisfaction," she wrote. Her husband was kind, her children a constant delight. A decade after a calamity that would have destroyed many people, Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: "I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world."
THE DONNER FAMILY'S relative affluence was not atypical of those who made the great westward migration. Reaching the Pacific Coast was an expensive proposition. Months of travel that produced no income, then the cost of establishing a new home in a new place—these were not expenses to be borne by the destitute. The very rich were rare in the wagon trains, but often the families heading for Oregon and California were substantial people, with established and successful lives. The Donners' departure from Springfield had been announced in the local paper, and they had hired younger, stronger men to go along on the trip and do the hard work of driving the teams. George Donner had been able to afford a recruiting advertisement touting the fact that his jobs offered the chance at a trip to California for free. "Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? . . . Come, boys!" People even said later that the Donners were carrying ten thousand dollars, some of it sewn into a quilt for safekeeping.
But for all their money, the Donners and their traveling companions, the Reeds, were just unremarkable families from Illinois, ready to join the great migration to the west. The problem was that they were late. James Reed had been told repeatedly to reach Independence by the first of April, or the middle of the month at the latest. The advice was needlessly extreme; nobody "jumped off" that early. Emigrants had to wait for spring grasses to grow so the animals would have forage. But if the Donners and Reeds had reached the town by late April or May 1, they would have had a chance to rest both themselves and their animals, to "recruit" their strength, as they would have put it. For some reason, however, the two families did not leave Springfield until mid-April and reached Independence only on May 10. The bulk of the California-bound emigrants were already out on the trail. The Spring-field families took but a day to rest their oxen and other livestock, then hustled out of town in hopes of catching up. It was less obvious at the time than it would be later, but the sad fact was that the journey had barely begun, and the core of what would become the Donner Party was already lagging behind.
Margret Reed fretted. It had been a week of hard travel since they left Independence, but at last they had caught the main body of California-bound emigrants, a sprawling company led by a slightly pompous Kentucky lawyer named William Henry Russell. The extent of Russell's domain—nearly fifty wagons and 150 adults—offered a safety-in-numbers bulk that appealed to the Reeds and the Donners. But camp gossips spread the word that past applicants to the party had sometimes been rejected, and Margret feared that she and her family would also be turned aside.
Once, Margret had been a high-spirited young woman, dashing around on horseback with reckless abandon and proving herself an independent soul. Engaged at eighteen to an older man, she fell for one of her fiance's younger friends, a would-be groomsman named Lloyd Backenstoe. Margret broke off the engagement and transformed Backenstoe from a groomsman to a groom, marrying him and having a daughter, a girl they named Virginia. But in 1834, just four days before their second wedding anniversary, Backenstoe died in a cholera epidemic, leaving Margret alone with a young child just months after her twentieth birthday. Widowhood stole her youthful zest, and when she married James Reed a little more than a year later, she was still bedridden with grief and sickness. During the ceremony, he stood next to the bed holding her hand. The ensuing years did little to improve her health. She suffered from "nervous sick headaches," migraines that debilitated her for days on end, and sometimes from fever and chills as well. The move to California was, in part, an effort to find a gentler climate.
Risking the venture was typical of her husband, a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned. James Reed liked the people he liked, despised those he didn't, and struck some as haughty, perhaps the legacy of the Polish nobility from which he supposedly was descended. He had made a success of himself under difficult circumstances. Born in Northern Ireland, he was brought to Virginia as a child by his widowed mother, a fatherless boy in a new country. As a young man he moved to Illinois and later served with Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hawk War. At home in Springfield after the war, he hustled through a series of businesses: furniture manufacturing, a sawmill, the railroads.
By the time he decided to go west he was a man of means, and he did not mind if others knew of his status. Reed would never sew his money into a quilt, as George Donner did. Reed put his wealth to use, perhaps even flaunted it. Before leaving Illinois, he corresponded with a friend in Independence, picking up tips on what to bring. Reed's friend warned against skimping—"Don't be puny, get a good outfit"—and Reed heeded the advice. He had a special wagon built with an entrance on the side, like a stagecoach, and high-backed seats with handy storage areas beneath the cushions. Extensions built out over the wheels added room. A small stove, vented by a pipe running through the canvas top, provided heat on cold mornings or at night.
There were those who found Reed hard to take, but he was a born leader, and when his wagons and those of the Donner brothers rolled into the camp of the Russell Party, it was Reed who took the initiative. Hoping to make a good impression, he scrubbed the trail grime off his face and then went to see the captain.
Russell's position was less authoritative than it sounded, for wagon trains were remarkably democratic organizations. Out on the open prairie, emigrants were beyond the reach of the law, so to provide some semblance of order they usually formed into companies, electing officers to organize daily progress and settle disputes. Someone had to assign guard duty and get things moving in the morning, after all. But anything created by a show of hands could be undone just as easily. Companies shifted constantly, adding or subtracting members. Smaller groups split off, latecomers joined, individual families decided for whatever reason to change traveling companions. So too could captains be deposed, and thus they were closer to being first-among-equals than commanders of a hierarchy. Still, competition for the honor was fierce, politics carrying into the wilderness even if the law did not. Russell, who had once served in the Kentucky legislature, was undoubtedly proud of his post.
To Reed he proved "kind and obliging." The captain immediately gathered the men of the party in the center of the camp and gave a speech recommending that Reed and the Donners be admitted. Russell said he knew Reed by reputation and would vouch that he was a gentleman. Somebody moved that the new families be allowed into the company, and every hand went up to signify assent. Russell walked over to Reed's wagons to meet his family, a pleasant little visit. "We are all in good spirits," Reed wrote.
REED'S BUOYANCY WAS A LITTLE OVERSTATED, for one member of the group was suffering. Sarah Keyes, Reed's mother-in-law, was ill, too ill for the journey, really. She was seventy and afflicted with "consumption," probably tuberculosis, but she had insisted on going. Margret Reed was her only daughter, and Keyes had no intention of living out her days with her daughter and grandchildren vanished over the horizon. She may also have hoped to meet one of her sons, who had already gone west. So James Reed outfitted a special wagon designed to provide a comfortable ride for his mother-in-law, and Keyes began a trip that often defeated those half her age. The early stages seemed to do her good, her health and spirits improving by the day, but the recovery did not last. By the time the Reeds joined the Russell Party, Keyes had stopped eating. One of her eyes throbbed with pain. Increasing blindness left her unable to see a coffee cup placed near at hand.
The next morning, Keyes confided in her son-in-law. The trip had sapped her remaining strength, she told James, and she did not expect to live long. He thought the same thing, for it was plain that the old woman was fading. Unless there was "a quick change," he wrote in a letter back home, "a few days will end her mortal carear."
SIX DAYS LATER, THE EMIGRANTS STOOD looking down into the churning waters of the Big Blue River, muddy and menacing and wide as a football field. Driftwood bobbed on the swift surface. Trains typically forded here, in what is now northern Kansas, but rains had raised the water level until it was nearly even with the banks, and the normally gentle ford was instead a wagon-wrecking torrent. They were only hours too late. Two companies ahead of them had reached the river the night before, crossed safely, and could now be seen in the distance, rolling west over the broken landscape.
That night a thunderstorm hit. "The whole arch of the heavens for a time was wrapped in a sheet of flame," one man remembered. In the morning the river was higher than the night before, and the emigrants had to accept that they were stuck, probably for days.
Fortunately, they found a delightful place to wait. A few hundred yards short of the river lay a bountiful spring in a cool and shaded gully, the water "of the most excellent kind." There was good wood for campfires and grass for the stock, and even a short, steep hill nearby that offered a splendid view of the countryside. Edwin Bryant, a newspaperman going west who was the wordsmith of the group, dubbed the site "Alcove Spring," presumably because he thought a small cliff in the gully formed a natural alcove. Another man carved the new name in one of the rocks. Characteristically, Reed engraved his name and the date in big, bold letters.
Such an agreeable campsite should have done them good, but as they waited for the river to fall, Sarah Keyes's health flagged. She grew speechless, weakened before their eyes, and then, still in the presence of the daughter she had vowed not to leave, drew a final labored breath. The men of the party had already started work on a raft so the wagons could be floated across, but the rites of the dead took precedence. The men felled a cottonwood tree, hewed it into planks, and hammered together a coffin. About sixty or seventy yards from the trail they dug a grave. John Denton, a young Englishman traveling with the Donners, found a gray stone and carved on its face the dead woman's name and age.
At 2:00 P.M. the emigrants formed into a funeral procession and marched solemnly to the grave. They sang a hymn—"with much pathos and expression," Bryant noted—and then, gathered beneath the oak boughs, listened to a sermon by a Presbyterian minister along on the journey. Like any good preacher, he tailored his message to his audience. "Trouble yourselves not about those that sleep," he urged, taking as his biblical text the Book of Thessalonians. It was important, he said, to seek a "better country," a place without sickness, like the place where Keyes now rested. George McKinstry, a sickly Mississippi merchant heading west for his health, wrote in his diary that it had been a "sensible sermon." That was true, and the reasons were more than theological. In a race against time amid a great wilderness, the pioneers standing bareheaded at the grave of Sarah Keyes would do well to hustle along toward the better country they were seeking, not tarry over the old woman they had just laid to rest.
THE NEXT MORNING THE RIVER was still running high, too high to ford, and the men returned to building a raft for the wagons. They chopped down two more cottonwoods and hollowed them out to make huge canoes, at least twenty-five feet long and close to four feet wide. Then they laid a cross-frame over the tops of the two craft, creating a platform on which the wagons could be taken over. When it was ready to be launched, they named the raft the "Blue River Rover" and shouldered it out into the swift current. When it stayed afloat, cheers erupted.
They crossed nine wagons that day and were up early the next morning to continue the job. In the afternoon a cold wind blew in from the northwest, and as the temperature dropped rain began to fall. Many of the men were standing in the river working the raft from bank to bank with ropes, holding their footing against a current strong enough to knock a man down, and the brutal conditions began to take their toll. Two normally affable men got into a fistfight, even drawing knives, although peacemakers stepped in before anyone was seriously hurt. The last wagon finally crossed about 9:00 P.M., and they made camp in a brake of trees on the western side of the river, but with the cold and the wet and the exhaustion, many men were shivering violently by the time they reached their tents. They were back on the trail the following morning, but between the funeral and the raft-building, more than five days had been lost, time in which a lucky train might make seventy-five miles.
Cold north winds began to blow relentlessly, forcing the men to bundle up in overcoats, the women in shawls. Some of those who had been riding in the wagons started walking, the better to stay warm. Then, almost overnight, a heat wave struck, and people started looking forward to the shade of their tents or a cooling breeze. On the open prairie, Bryant wrote, the heat could be "excessively oppressive."
But they were making good distances across the tabletop flatlands of southern Nebraska, or at least good distances for a journey that occurred at the pace of an ox—fifteen to twenty miles a day. In early June they reached the first milestone of their trip: the Platte River. Too shallow for navigation, the Platte had been useless to trappers and fur traders, who used heavy keelboats to carry their supplies upriver and their spoils down. But for emigrants, the Platte was perfect—a gentle, unmistakable byway that pointed directly at an important pass in the Rocky Mountains. In the era of the wagon trains, the Platte, which pours down out of the Rockies and traverses the length of modern Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri, was the great highway of the West.
The Donners and the Reeds and their companions encountered it about at the site of modern-day Kearney, Nebraska, where they turned west and began working their way upstream along the south bank.
On June 12, Reed shot the first elk taken by the company. Hunters had seen some antelope, but the fleet-footed animals were too fast for most of the horses, and it was hard to get within range. As a result, the meat in the emigrants' diet had been mostly the salted supplies they had purchased in Independence, and the tender, fatty flesh of Reed's elk was welcome.
The next day, Reed lost a little of his glory when two other men rode back from a hunt with fresh buffalo steaks. Reaching the buffalo herds was always a notable occasion for the westward emigrants, many of whom had never seen the great animals before. "If we had found a gold mine," one man wrote during the Gold Rush, "there could not have been a greater commotion." Not surprisingly, Reed's fellow hunters were feted as heroes in camp, and in a letter back home Reed made plain his feelings about their success. The men were hailed as "the best buffalo hunters on the road—perfect 'stars.' " Reed, on the other hand, was thought a greenhorn, a "Sucker." The other men set out again, and the camp was full of talk that they would bring back more of the prized buffalo meat. When Reed organized his own party, almost no one wanted to go along. The snub rankled, and Reed decided to prove both himself and his horse:
And now, as perfectly green as I was I had to compete with old experienced hunters, and remove the stars from their brows; which was my greatest ambition, and in order too, that they might see that a Sucker had the best horse in the company, and the best and most daring horseman in the caravan.
So Reed mounted Glaucus, took three companions, and rode out until he found a buffalo herd so large that it darkened the plains. Disregarding the danger, he outran his friends and then rode straight into the herd. Within minutes, he had shot three buffalo—two bulls and a calf—and was so far ahead of his companions that he rode to a small knoll and sat in the grass to wait. He claimed to have counted 597 buffalo, although it's hard to imagine that he could really have kept track. From his perch, he watched his friends, whose balky horses refused to get close enough to the buffalo to bring one down. Reed had a laugh at their expense, then rode over and joined the hunt, chasing down a bull and shooting him. He shot one more calf, and then they set about the butchering, taking what meat they could carry and leaving the rest for the wolves, unmoved by the waste.
The fresh meat must have boosted spirits, but it was the acclaim that Reed cherished most. When they made it back to camp, he reported proudly, he was hailed as "the acknowledged hero of the day." Other men huddled around Glaucus and pronounced her the finest horse in the train. When he wrote home, Reed made sure to mention the compliment.
The pace could drive a man mad. The column creaked along at two miles an hour. Men could walk faster. They might stop by the trail to write a letter or butcher a fresh kill, and then an hour or two later they would rise and pocket their pencils or their hunting knives and, with a bit of brisk walking, catch the ponderously rolling wagons. Progress, one man said, was "vexatiously slow."
"Covered wagons" became the symbol of the journey, but in fact the rigs used by the emigrants were typically small and simple, not the huge Conestoga freight wagons of the movies. The beds were four or five feet wide and perhaps twice as long, a size that allowed them to maneuver through the canyons and forests and mountain passes the emigrants would eventually face. The running gear was simple: wooden axles and wheels, although strips of iron were wrapped around the wheels to serve as tires. There were no brakes. Going downhill, a wheel or two would be locked with a chain to take off some speed, or a felled tree would be dragged behind, the deadweight serving as a kind of land anchor. Typically, there was no seat for the "driver." Instead, he walked along beside the draft animals, controlling them with nothing but a whip and voice commands.
As a cover, canvas was stretched over bows of wood that had been soaked and bent. In a particularly strong wind, emigrants were known to take down the canopies to reduce the pressure and avoid damage or even being toppled. But almost always the canvas crowns shone out over the trains, a gleam of white against a stark prairie backdrop. That too produced a maritime analogy. As the wagons snaked along ridges and dropped to river crossings, winding with the aimless terrain, the wagon covers looked from a distance like the sails of ships. In time, the mirage produced a fanciful nickname for vehicles that were a thousand miles from the sea: prairie schooners.
The problem with the wagons was the engine. To pull great loads across the better part of two thousand miles, most emigrants used oxen, which were recommended over horses or mules in the tattered guidebooks bouncing in the wagon beds, books that had been thumbed through countless times during the months of preparation back on the farm. Oxen were cheaper, more durable, and said to be less likely to wander from camp. But the ox is not a fleet animal. Two miles an hour for a journey of two thousand miles meant a thousand hours on the trail, 125 days at eight hours a day, more than four months in all. And that ignored the inevitable—the odd day of rest, one of sickness, a busted axle or a shattered wheel. There would be rivers to ford, hills to climb, mud and sand where moving the wagons at two miles an hour was a fantasy even with eveiy ox on the team straining at the front and every man in the company pushing from the rear. There would be obstacles they could not yet imagine. On a journey into the unknown, perfect progress is perfectly impossible.
Edwin Bryant, the newspaperman, was one of those who rued the crawling tempo.
In the moving frontier village that was the wagon train, Bryant stood out—he had studied medicine and later worked as an editor at the Louisville Courier—and like all intellectuals he thought too much. Walking along, a troubling realization began to vex him. Some emigrants lacked the necessaiy impatience, the gut-level recognition of the potential disaster that delay might invite. There was no such thing as getting to California too early, but being too late might mean never getting there at all. Saving time at the early stages was like putting money in a bank. Later, when the inevitable difficulties and delays cropped up, the train could draw down its account and still make it over the final mountains in time. And as with any savings plan, the sooner you began investing, the greater your nest egg at the end. Yet there were those who wanted to pitch camp early and break it late. "I am beginning to feel alarmed at the tardiness of our movements," Bryant wrote, "and fearful that winter will find us in the snowy mountains of California."
TAMZENE DONNER WAS MORE SANGUINE. After more than a month on the trail, things were going well, she thought. The Indians had proven surprisingly amiable. The chiefs of a local tribe had taken breakfast at the Donner tent that very morning. "All are so friendly that I cannot help feeling sympathy and friendship for them," she wrote to a friend back home. No cattle had been stolen—at least not "where proper care has been taken"—and the previous night two men who had exhausted their horses in a hard hunt had slept out in the open, a sign they feared no attack.
The open spaces of the prairie provided "a first rate road," and the countryside was "beautiful beyond description." Even crossing the creeks, though difficult, presented no real danger. The grass, sparse from lack of rain the year before, was plentiful for the cattle, and the cows produced ample supplies of milk and butter. Russell had proved an "amiable" captain, although she had to admit the wagon train was a mixed band. "We have [some] of the best of people in our company, and some, too, that are not so good."
Tamzene herself was making time for reading and botany. She had found tulips, primrose, lupine, "the ear-drop," larkspur, creeping holly-hock, and a "beautiful flower" she could not identify but that resembled the bloom of the beech tree. Most of her time, she admitted, was consumed with cooking, but even that was hardly an onerous chore. She was a little concerned that their flour might run low, but rice and beans and cornmeal were proving good staples, and the hunters were bringing in plenty of meat. As fuel, "Buffalo chips are excellent—they kindle quick and retain heat surprisingly." That night they had dined on buffalo steaks that were as tasty as if they had been cooked over hickory coals.
She estimated they had traveled 450 miles since leaving Independence and had only 200 more miles to go before reaching Fort Laramie. Unlike the cautious Edwin Bryant, she was buoyed by optimism. "Indeed," she wrote, "if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started."
Virginia Reed swung into the saddle of her pony and galloped out onto the prairie. She loved getting away from the dull plod of the wagons, out into the high grasses where the wind whistled through a girl's hair as she rode. She stopped from time to time and gathered wildflowers, the bright sunshine glinting off a dazzling palette of colors in her growing bouquet.
The oldest of the four Reed children, Virginia had been born Virginia Backenstoe, the daughter of her mother's first husband. He died when Virginia was barely a year old, and when her mother remarried a year after that, James Reed adopted her. He treated his stepdaughter as his own, and Virginia grew into a spirited young woman, twelve now and looking forward to her thirteenth birthday in only a few days. In time, she would show a gift for describing the Donner Party's plight in pithy, moving letters.
She could scarcely remember the first time she had been set in a saddle. Outings with her adoptive father had always leavened her mood, the two of them sharing their love of horses and riding, and as she had contemplated the westward trip the previous winter, it was the prospect of daily jaunts on her prized pony, Billy, that made Virginia smile. The valley of the Platte River, up which the wagons were now rolling, was a smooth and welcoming road, perfect for riding, and Virginia took full advantage. Every morning, she stroked Billy's face and talked to him as though he were human. "I wonder what we will see today," she would say, feeling the softness of his mane between her fingers. "Take good care of me, Billy, and don't let me get hurt." He would bow his head as if to promise her safe return, and off they would ride into the freedom of the prairie. To her, it was a portion of the journey that was nothing less than "an ideal pleasure trip."
With hundreds of miles behind them, the wagon trains had by now settled into a daily rhythm. At dawn or before, a trumpeter sounded reveille to rouse the camp. The women made coffee and fried bacon for breakfast, the wafting scent tempting laggards from their bedrolls. If the oxen had been set loose to graze the night before, they were driven into the corral formed by the wagons, and men began to hitch the teams. George Donner, perhaps still playing his hometown role of "Uncle George," liked to encourage a little hustle by mounting a small gray pony and riding about camp, bellowing out, "Chain up, boys! Chain up!" If things went well, wagons rolled out of camp by 7:00 or 7:30. At 12:00, they stopped for lunch, perhaps pickled pork and baked beans, cold ham, bread and butter, pickles, cheese, and dried fruit, with coffee and tea, and milk for the children. "Nooning," as the emigrants invariably called it, might be a short break or might stretch out for an hour, giving both the people and the animals a chance to rest. Depending on where they found water and grass for the animals, they stopped for the night sometime between 4:00 and 6:00, forming the wagons into a corral once again. If they were passing through a region where they feared Indian attack, the horses and oxen were driven inside the ring of wagons; if not, they were turned loose to graze, although guards were still posted to protect against wolves or other predators. Occasionally, the mosquitoes were so thick that emigrants feared for the health of the livestock, so the animals would be penned or picketed and fires lit nearby in hopes that the smoke would drive away the insects. To save space for the livestock inside the ring of wagons, tents and campfires were placed outside. Men worked on repair jobs or cared for the animals, while women and children fetched water for cooking and gathered wood or buffalo dung—euphemistically known as "chips"—for fires. In the evening, if exhaustion could be held at bay, a fiddler might scratch out a tune. If spirits were high there might even be singing or a little dancing. At the end of the night, families took to their tents and guards took up their weapons, although frequently the sentries fell asleep.
In all, there were nearly five hundred wagons in this moving community, perhaps half headed to California, half to Oregon. Unfortunately for the Donners and the Reeds, they were near the rear of the long column. In letters home, others traveling with them claimed to be trailing by design, convinced that their slow pace helped preserve their livestock. The lead wagons, they believed, were working the animals too hard. Draft stock were priceless. Driving the poor animals until they collapsed was the ultimate example of short-term thinking, a way to make a few extra miles now and suffer more later. The race, in the end, would go to the tortoise, not the hare.
THE WAIL OF A NEWBORN sang out from one of the wagons, a happy broadcast carried along by the stiff prairie wind. Philippine Keseberg, a young German immigrant going west with her husband and three-year-old daughter, lay back, exhaled, and cradled her new baby boy. They named him for his father. Farther back on the trail, the family wagon had tipped over, throwing Philippine from the bed and plunging her into a pool of water, but the accident seemed to have had no major ill effects, and Lewis Keseberg Jr. emerged into the world as the newest member of the migration.
Although he would be the only trailside baby born to the members of the Donner Party, little Lewis was hardly unique. It was not uncommon for women to give birth during the journey, nor, interestingly, less than nine months after its completion. Pregnancy rarely slowed the trains, at least for long. Maybe the Kesebergs spent a little extra time in camp the next day, or perhaps the other women lent a hand with the family's washing, but Philippine Keseberg and her son, like everybody else, kept moving west.
LIKE ALL TRAVELERS, WESTERING EMIGRANTS wanted a record of their great adventure, so many of them found time around the campfire or along the trailside to keep a journal. In all, there are hundreds of such recollections, an archival treasure trove that accounts for much of what we know about the pioneer experience. Of the original Donner Party group that set out from Springfield—the Donners and the Reeds—the only surviving diary of the early portions of the trip was kept by Hiram Miller, a Mend of Reed's who had signed on to work as a teamster for the Donners. Remarkably, Miller's record did not emerge into the public eye for a centuiy. For decades, it lay unnoticed in the basement of a family home, and only in 1946 did a Reed descendant donate it to a museum in Sacramento.
Miller was apparently a no-nonsense fellow, for most of his entries offer nothing more than the daily distance traveled and the location of the nightly campsite. There is nothing about his ideas or emotions, nothing about his comrades in the train, not even a note about the weather. His chronicle reveals more about nineteenth-century spelling and punctuation than about the scenery. The day after the wagons crossed from the south branch of the Platte to the north branch, a striking piece of territory and a milestone of the trip, Miller's entire entiy reads, "and from their wee traveled up the plat a Bout 18 mills and Camped near the plat." The next day, he allowed himself a rare burst of comparative lyricism:
And from their wee traveled up the plat a Bowt 12 miles and Camped near the plat By a fine Spring. No timber. Off to the left of the Spring on the Bluffs is a Beautiful pine ridge, the first that i have Seen on the Rout.
Still, for all its just-the-facts simplicity, Miller's diaiy allows us to trace the movements of the Donners and the Reeds with some precision, especially when it is pieced together with the letters and journals of other emigrants traveling nearby.
With each mile up the Platte, the party slowly departed the vast grasslands of the Great Plains and entered the kind of arid, high-desert country that dominates the American West. Along the river valleys, bluffs soared higher into the broad open skies, "rugged and sterile, exhibiting barren sands and perpendicular ledges of rock." Wagon wheels sank eight or ten inches into the dry, sandy soil, the oxen straining to keep the axles turning. Shallow and muddy, the water of the Platte tasted terrible, but there was nothing else to drink, so the emigrants forced it down.
The terrain threw up memorable landmarks everywhere, and the wagons began to pass them daily. On June 22 Courthouse Rock loomed up, though many people thought it looked nothing like a courthouse. On the 23rd it was Chimney Rock, a spire that could be seen for thirty-five or forty miles. They guessed its height at anywhere from 200 to 800 feet; it was probably 450 or 500 feet, although weather has now eroded it significantly. The next day the wagons rolled beneath Scott's Bluff, a sandstone face rising straight up out of the flatland. The landscape brought fanciful thoughts to mind for an emigrant named Charles Stanton, who wrote to a relative back east to describe the "knobs, or hills. or bluffs, or whatever else they may be called.... The wagons will often wind along under these bluffs, and, in their broken appearance, you can trace houses, castles, towns, and every thing which the imagination can conceive." One formation, he wrote playfully, looked like a citadel placed there to guard "the genii and spirits which dwell in the caverns and deep recesses of the ragged peaks."
THE DONNER CHILDREN STARED WIDE-EYED at the family's breakfast guests, two Sioux warriors in full regalia: beads, feathers, seashells acquired by trade all the way from California, pieces of colored tree bark, even the hair of scalps they had taken in battle. It was all "tastefully arranged," according to George Donner, who, true to his gregarious nature, had invited the visitors to join the family meal. "The Indians all speak very friendly to us," Donner wrote in a letter to a friend back home.
They had stopped at Fort Bernard, a grand name for what was in fact nothing more than a small log building built by a trapper at the very eastern edge of what is today the state of Wyoming. Just eight miles farther along the trail stood Fort Laramie, an adobe-walled quadrangle enclosing the space of half a football field, perhaps a little more, and containing watchtowers and a two-story administrative building. Like almost all the "forts" of the West in 1846, these were not military facilities, merely private trading posts, although eventually the federal government would buy Fort Laramie for four thousand dollars and station troops there until 1890. For now, though, the name "fort" seemed a little grandiloquent. Amused, Biyant put "Fort Bernard" in quotation marks in his book.
The neighborhood bustled. Between the two forts, there were fur trappers, traders, passing emigrants, and hundreds of Sioux preparing to make war against the Crow. It was by far the largest community of people the emigrants had seen since jumping off.
"Our journey has not been as solitary as we feared," Donner wrote to his friend. Like his wife in her earlier letter written along the Platte, Donner was optimistic. "I can say nothing except bear testimony to the correctness of those who have gone before us," he wrote. A month and a half after leaving Independence, they had avoided serious accident. "Our company are in good health. . . . Our supplies are in good order." With a touch of pride, he noted that their preparations had served them well. Even the wagons were in good shape. The covers shed the rain quite nicely.
At 9:00 A.M. on Saturday, July 4, the Donners and the Reeds and some other families gathered near their campsite along Beaver Creek, a stream lined with box elder and willows. Brightly colored wildflowers poked through the grasses, and high red bluffs lined the little valley. There was no hurry to wash the breakfast dishes and hitch the teams, for they intended to stay in camp all day to celebrate the Fourth of July.
Patriotic feelings ran high, for the country was at war. A few days after the wagon train left Independence, latecomers rode into camp bearing the latest St. Louis newspapers, which told of hostilities between American and Mexican troops on the Rio Grande. The news was no surprise. The year before, President Polk had acted on his campaign promise by annexing Texas, ostensibly an independent country but one that had been unrecognized by Mexico and coveted by the United States. Mexico and the United States still disputed the southern border of Texas, and it had been easy to see that the situation could lead to war, but that didn't lessen the importance of the issue for California-bound emigrants. California remained a part of Mexico, and now the United
States and Mexico were at war. Emigrants had no idea how they might be treated when they arrived, even whether they might be arrested as hostile foreign nationals. They must have huddled around the campfires and pored over every word in the papers, but anyone willing to take the risk of a new life in California was not easily dissuaded. "How this important event is to affect us upon our arrival in California, it is impossible to foresee," Edwin Bryant, the journalist who began the journey with the emigrants, wrote at the time. "No one, however, is in the least disposed to turn back in consequence of it."
When Independence Day rolled around, there were those in camp who saw the melancholy side—celebrating the founding of a country they were abandoning—but nobody wanted to be a killjoy, and so the celebration started early. The men fired off a salute, and then a procession formed and marched solemnly around the corral of wagons, returning to the shade of the trees. Somebody read the Declaration of Independence. Colonel Russell gave a speech, although nobody bothered to write down what he said. They sang patriotic songs and made patriotic toasts, firing off more salutes when they felt like it. Just before noon, James Reed pulled out a bottle of liquor saved for the occasion. Friends back in Springfield had told him that at twelve sharp on the Fourth of July, they would face due west and raise a toast, while he did the same facing east. Enjoying his luxuries as always, Reed saluted his distant friends, then treated the whole company to a drink. The children gulped down lemonade. Perhaps because they were leaving their country behind, the little band of emigrants at Beaver Creek took the holiday to heart and made it their own. The celebration had "more spirit and zest," one participant wrote, than the grand and gaudy festivals back home.
The next day they remained in camp, their second straight day of making no distance. It was Sunday, and they told themselves they were keeping the Sabbath, but if so religion came upon them suddenly. Never before had they failed to travel on a Sunday. More likely they were nursing hangovers from the previous day's festivities and managed to convince themselves that another day of rest would do them good. No need to sprint during a marathon, after all. It was the height of summer, and it would be months and months before the long, warm days faded into cold winter nights. Plenty of other companies were camped nearby, making about the same pace. Everybody was part of a massive moving community, and nobody seemed panicked. If anyone asked George Donner, he might have noted, as he did in a letter back home, that the journey seemed far from solitary. There was safety in such numbers. True, they were toward the back of the line, but they could always make an extra push somewhere down the trail.
ON MONDAY MORNING THEY BROKE CAMP sharply and "mouved off in fine Style," as Reed jotted down in the diary he was now keeping. They made sixteen miles, maybe twenty, the wagons rolling along beneath the towering snow-capped spire of 10,272-foot Laramie Peak, the tallest mountain that many of the emigrants had ever seen and the plainest proof yet that they were slowly climbing into the Rockies. The Platte showed a change too: the shallow, muddy river of the plains was now a clear, tumbling mountain stream.
The buffalo hunting remained superb. On the 9th, Alphonso Boone, a grandson of Daniel Boone and an emigrant bound for Oregon, rode into camp to say he and some other hunters had killed eight of the animals and would be happy to share the meat. During a hunt the next day, Reed wounded a buffalo and then managed to drive it right up to the wagons, as though it were a daily cow being herded to the barn.
At about the site of present-day Casper, Wyoming, they finally left the Platte, the river that had been their principal guide for a month, and aimed for the Sweetwater, which would take them on the last portion of their journey into the Rockies. Even as they gained elevation, the summer heat held its force. For six straight days the high temperature averaged 102—brutal conditions for twenty-mile marches.
The trail struck the Sweetwater near one of the most famous landmarks of the entire journey: Independence Rock. It is an unmistakable site, a huge hunk of sloping granite shaped roughly as though someone had taken a cereal bowl and turned it upside down. The rock rises up from a particularly flat stretch of valley floor, the Sweetwater River winding by on one side. The day after Reed herded his buffalo to the wagons, the Donner Party drove to within a few miles of the great sight, which they estimated, with fair accuracy, to be six hundred yards long and 140 feet high. The next day was Sunday, and for the second week in a row they paused for services, taking the chance to rest and write letters. Virginia Reed wrote to her cousin, among other things describing the death of her grandmother, Sarah Keyes, weeks earlier. "We miss her verry much. Every time we come into the Wagon we look at the bed for her." Still, like so many of the adults in their letters, she insisted on a resolute optimism. "We are all doing well," she wrote, "and in hye sperits."
The next day, Monday, they headed over to the rock for a closer look, but ironically were disappointed. Considering the fame of the place, they expected it to be so high that the top could barely be seen. But compared to the mountain peaks that lined both sides of the river valley, the rock itself appeared "tame and uninteresting." Still, if they climbed to the top—and surely some of them must have—they were treated to a striking panorama. Behind them, along the way they had just come, spread the open and treeless plain of the valley, stretching down to the horizon, spotted here and there with similar, smaller hummocks of rock. Before them, along the way they must go, the Sweet-water snaked ahead, beckoning them toward an astonishing sight—a 370-foot-high gorge known as Devil's Gate where the river sliced through some nearby mountains.
They stopped to noon at the Gate, and most of the company walked over from the trail, which ran a little to the south of the chasm, to take a look. Three days later, they got their first glimpse of the Wind River Mountains. Perhaps the sight spurred them on, for they made especially good progress, passing three other companies in a single day. The next morning, however, started with an argument. The younger men wanted to stay in camp for a day to hunt buffalo and rest the cattle; others said that a delay would only give away the advantage they had just gained, allowing the other companies to sweep past them and use whatever pastures lay ahead for their own stock. The latter faction won, and they rolled out of camp.
Their goal now was the culminating achievement of the first half of the journey: South Pass, a broad and relatively easy crossing of the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide. In the middle of North America's most dominant chain of mountains, South Pass was a natural blessing for expansionism. At 7,550 feet, it's low—many passes in Colorado top 10,000 feet—and the upward slope toward the pass is, at least by the standards of mountain passes, a forgivingly gentle grade. It's also at roughly the right line of latitude. Wagons rolling along the Platte River were aiming, more or less, directly toward South Pass. Lewis and Clark, by contrast, had crossed the Continental Divide far to the north, along what is now the border between Montana and Idaho, using a pass that one western historian described as "more barrier than portal."
South Pass had been known to Native Americans for centuries, but white explorers first crossed it in 1812, when it was traversed by a small party returning from the Oregon outpost established by fur trade magnate John Jacob Astor. The ease and utility of South Pass went largely unnoticed, however, for the next twelve years, until Crow Indians recommended it as the route for a group of fur trappers led by a young mountain man named Jedediah Smith. Trappers soon made the pass the preferred path to the Far West, and when in 1836 the missionary Marcus Whitman took the first wagon over, his wife, Narcissa, became the first white woman to cross the Continental Divide. By 1846, the year of the Donner Party, South Pass was the universally accepted avenue through the Rocky Mountains.
To this day, the landscape approaching the pass remains unchanged. Windswept and treeless, the trail crosses an arid desert more than a mile in the sky, an escarpment named Pacific Butte standing just to the left of the trail and offering an easy navigational aid. Ironically, for all the importance that the emigrants gave to the moment, the exact point at which the Continental Divide was crossed was often unclear. The trail rose steadily toward a ridgeline that seemed far too modest for the spine of North America, then fell away mildly on the other side. A little farther on, a set of springs fed a small, meandering creek whose waters ran west, and often it was only here that emigrants fully realized they had crossed from one watershed to another. Accordingly, it was named Pacific Spring and was a common point for celebrations.
On Friday, July 17—the day that began with an argument about moving on or hunting—the Reeds and the Donners and their companions mistook a subordinate rise for the summit and thought for a time that they had crossed the Divide. The balloon burst that night, when they camped on a river running east. If they had already conquered the Divide, the rivers would be running west, eventually to empty into the Pacific. Instead, they had once again found the meandering Sweet-water.
They reached the real Divide the next day, Saturday, July 18, stopping for lunch right at the ridgeline. The days had been hot, and the cold wind at the crest felt good. Coming down the other side they decided to bypass Pacific Spring, fearing that the cattle would get mired in the boggy ground. But they needed water, and so Reed rode ahead on Glaucus to scout. At dusk he charged back at a full gallop with disappointing news. There was no water ahead, and the wagons needed to turn back toward a small gully they had already passed. It had little water and no grass, but nothing better could be found. Another scout, probably one of the Donner brothers, had become lost, so once they pitched camp, they fired off their guns and lit signal fires on the surrounding hills, and the missing man finally rode in about midnight. The next day, the poor campsite proved more costly than they had realized. The water had been bad, and some of the livestock died. The Donners lost two oxen, and Reed lost "old Bailey." probably a steer.
To say that crossing the Continental Divide was a milestone of the westward journey is an understatement. As they rolled across South Pass, emigrants had traveled more than a thousand miles, and were, roughly speaking, halfway to their goal. The Donners had been on the trail a little more than two months and were near the rear of the line, but by no means were they shockingly behind. From the adults to the children, they remained confident. If the second half of the trip took as long as the first, they would reach into his bones, it was crossing the Continental Divide. The next day, he stopped to write his brother and realized that the water at his feet would pour into the Green and then to the Colorado and then to the Gulf of California:
Thus the great day-dream of my youth and of my riper years is accomplished. I have seen the Rocky mountains—have crossed the Rubicon, and am now on the waters that flow to the Pacific! It seems as if I had left the old world behind, and that a new one is dawning upon me.
He couldn't have known it then, but in time he would have the chance to display his newfound vigor in ways he could not imagine. Even beyond the standards of the other members of the Donner Party, Stanton would prove his courage and risk his life.
From the jumping-off point at Independence to the crossing of the Continental Divide, the path for all westward travelers was identical. Everyone needed to reach the easy transit through the Rockies, so everyone traveled up the Platte and the Sweetwater, like ships aiming for a strait before reaching the open ocean. But west of the mountains, no similar geographical narrows constricted the traffic. Depending on their intended destination and their personal preferences, emigrants were now free to follow different routes. It was the first time they made a real decision about their course, and for the Donner Party, no choice would ultimately prove more important nor rest on a shakier foundation.
JAMES REED MUST HAVE BEEN PONDERING the options for weeks. Marching along hour after hour, California-bound emigrants would have found it impossible not to weigh the impending alternatives, for in a certain sense the wagons were going in the wrong direction.
Central Missouri and Northern California—the beginning of the journey and the end—are roughly on the same line of latitude. A straight-line trip would have produced a far different path: across Kansas, then through Colorado south of what is today Denver, then across Utah and Nevada before arriving at Sutter's Fort, the site of modern Sacramento. The wagons would never have rolled through an inch of Nebraska or Wyoming. But nineteenth-century emigrants lived in desperate need of the holy trinity of wagon travel—water, wood, and grass—and thus they were slaves to the meanderings of rivers and the haphazard location of mountain passes. For those headed to California, the trip traced a huge arc, northwest for the first thousand miles out of Independence, then at some point southwest toward the destination. This was partly because the trail had first been broken to Oregon, but it had far more to do with the path of the Platte River and the location of South Pass. Crossing the Rockies, emigrant wagon trains were almost two hundred miles north of both Independence and Sutter's Fort. Yet the traditional trail would take them farther north still, up to Fort Hall, in what is today Idaho, before starting a long southward swing toward California. Not surprisingly, emigrants were tempted by the idea of a more direct route, one that was both enticingly straight and dangerously unknown.
Travelers knew that an alternate course existed because it had been described, albeit briefly, in a book that some of the wagons carried, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, written by a young lawyer from Ohio named Lansford Warren Hastings. Hastings had first gone west four years earlier, in 1842, when he signed on with a wagon train organized and captained by Elijah White, who had been appointed Indian sub-agent for Oregon. Hastings quickly displayed both ambition and a talent for self-promotion. He was only in his mid-twenties and inexperienced in the ways of the West, but when White's term as captain expired, Hastings was elected as his replacement. The new captain was "an aspiring sort of man," one fellow emigrant remembered, "and he worked it so that he got the command."
Once in Oregon, Hastings grew dissatisfied and decamped south to California, where the unbounded possibilities suited his striving soul. Hoping to attract American settlers to this new homeland, he set to work on his book, which combined travelogue observations from his own western adventures—salmon abounded in the Oregon rivers, California priests thrilled to cockfights—with practical advice for would-be pioneers. The final two chapters were a how-to list for emigrants, a do-it-yourself guide to crossing the continent. Never shy, Hastings made plain his preference for California over Oregon, and even dangled the gleaming lure of a shortcut. In a brief passage, Hastings noted that once the wagons crossed South Pass, California-bound emigrants could leave the Oregon Trail and head southwest to the Great Salt Lake rather than continue northwest into Idaho. From the lake, they could turn due west, cross the desert beyond the lake, and then take aim for California. Hastings offered little detail about the new route, and for good reason: He had never set foot on an inch of it.
Still, cocksure of his own skills as a literary evangelist, Hastings began dreaming of the multitudes his book might seduce. By the winter of 1845-46—the same winter during which the Donners and the Reeds were laying plans and readying equipment and stockpiling supplies for the long trip west—Hastings was literally plotting a California boom, laying out a town near Sutter's Fort. A bold army of pilgrims would bring culture to a benighted land, he thought. "A new era in the affairs of California, is about to arise," he wrote to the American consul in Monterey in March 1846. "These now wild and desolate plains must soon abound with all the busy and intresting scenes of highly civilized life." He had even begun to chat up the outsized idea that perhaps California should break away from Mexico and declare its independence, as Texas had done less than a decade before, and there were those who got the impression that Hastings envisioned himself as the future president of this would-be California Republic.
The problem for Hastings was that the American emigration—the linchpin on which all his grand plans relied—might bypass California altogether, choosing Oregon instead. And so in the early months of 1846, he decided to ride out onto the trail and lobby for California as the emigrants' goal. If settlers could not be trusted to find California, then California—in the person of Lansford Warren Hastings—would go and find settlers.
HASTINGS LEFT SUTTER'S FORT on April 11, a month before the Donners and the Reeds jumped off from Independence. He gathered a small party and started over the Sierra, intending to travel his proposed cut-off backwards, from west to east, and then to await the emigration on the main trail. As the wagons rolled up, he would recruit them for California.
Joining Hastings was James Clyman, who lent extraordinary experience to the group. Born in Virginia little more than a decade after the Revolutionary War, Clyman grew up on land owned by George Washington, from whom Clyman's father leased a parcel. As a young man he went west as a fur trapper, distinguishing himself with displays of ingenuity and determination. He completed, for example, the first known circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake. In 1827 he returned east to take up business in Wisconsin and Illinois, but nearly two decades later, in 1844, he decided once again to go west. He was almost fifty, perhaps looking for a better climate or perhaps just seeking a little of the old adventurous spirit of his youth, a nineteenth-century version of a midlife crisis. He went first to Oregon, then the next year to California, and by the spring of 1846 was ready to return home. Wisely choosing not to make the trip alone, he joined up with Hastings.
From the beginning, the old explorer doubted the feasibility of Hastings's proposed cut-off—"my beleef is that it [is] verry little nearer and not so good a road as that by fort Hall," Clyman recorded in his journal—and the farther they went the more his apprehension deepened.
By the time he stood amid the desiccated bleakness of the Great Salt Lake Desert, Clyman was awestruck by the lifeless vista. "In fact this is the [most] desolate countiy perhaps on the whole globe," he wrote in his journal, "there not being one spear of vegitation and of course no kind of animal can subsist." At the lake itself, he looked about and recorded simply that he was surrounded by "wide spread Sterility."
When Hastings and Clyman and the others of their little party at last completed the cut-off and rejoined the traditional trail, Hastings stopped to wait for the approaching emigrants, but Clyman kept on going, encountering one wagon train after another coming from the other direction. By extraordinary chance, he found an old friend—James Reed. Fourteen years earlier, Clyman and Reed had served together in the Black Hawk War, when the Sauk and Fox Indians tried to reclaim their tribal lands from white settlers and were massacred by U.S. troops. Clyman and Reed mustered in as members of Capt. Jacob M. Early's Company of Mounted Volunteers on the same day, along with another unknown private, Abraham Lincoln. "We didn't think much then about his ever being
President of the United States," Clyman wrote decades later, after Lincoln's assassination.
At Fort Laramie, the two old friends talked late into the night, Reed questioning Clyman about what lay ahead on the trail, Clyman trying to warn Reed about the desolation he had just seen in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Remembering the conversation years later, Clyman said he told Reed to "take the regular wagon track, and never leave it—it is barely possible to get through if you follow it, and it may be impossible if you don't."
"There is a nigher route," Reed replied, insistently, "and it is of no use to take so much of a roundabout course." Clyman acknowledged that the Hastings Cut-Off might be straighter, but again warned his old friend that it might also be impassable.
Clyman was a rare combination, half southern gentleman, half mountain man. "Deliberate in all his movements," as one contemporary remembered, he was kind and well read, and his voice still held the syrupy tincture of an antebellum upbringing. But he was also an old denizen of the West, a man with hair that reached his shoulders and a forest of whiskers and a sun-burnished face glazed to the hue of "smoked buckskin." He was the kind of man, in other words, who should have received his due from greenhorn settlers. Some of those at Fort Laramie did listen, changing their plans and following the traditional route, or even striking out for Oregon rather than California. By rights, Reed should have been among those who heeded Clyman's advice. The two men had fought a war together, after all, a shared experience that often creates an unbreakable bond.
But if Clyman's warning resonated at all—a nettling abrasion undermining Reed's former certainty—such doubts were probably washed away two weeks later by another eastbound rider, this one a stranger rather than an old friend. Wales Bonney was traveling by himself all the way from Oregon to Independence—a daring if not foolish venture—and carried with him an impressive token of expertise: a letter from Hastings himself. The two men had met along the eastbound trail, and Hastings had given Bonney the letter to show to emigrants. The missive declared that Hastings would wait for the wagons up ahead and guide them along the new route mentioned in his book.
That must have been exactly what Reed wanted to hear. He had not transformed himself from a fatherless boy into a wealthy and successful man by playing it safe. Nor had he started the journey west intending to avoid risks. Danger was inherent in what they were doing, no matter what route they took. Hastings was even putting himself in jeopardy to prove his new shortcut, guiding the wagons personally over the last and most treacherous portion of the journey. And if Reed considered the relative position of his wagons—near the tail end of the season's migration—he surely must have been encouraged to tiy anything that might save time. So he ignored the sound warnings of his old wartime friend Clyman and began talking to his fellow emigrants about the gamble of a lifetime: an untried shortcut through an unknown wilderness.
ON JULY 19, THE DAY AFTER CROSSING the Continental Divide, the wagons reached a nondescript fork in the road that would soon be given a rather romantic nickname: the Parting of the Ways. To the right lay the branch northwest to Fort Hall, to the left the southwest route toward the Hastings Cut-Off. The next morning, most teamsters steered their oxen to the right, choosing the safety of an established trail. But a few families—the Reeds, the Donner brothers, a few others who had been traveling along in the same general pack of wagons—decided to bank on Hastings's promises. In all, about seventy people waved goodbye to their former companions and took the gentle bend toward the left. Most were upbeat, their spirits buoyed by the prospect of a shortcut that might save precious time. The exception was Tamzene Donner, who was wary. They had never met Hastings, she noted, and yet now they were trusting his word on an issue that might literally decide their fate.
As a practical matter, the split at the Parting of the Ways was the true emergence of the Donner Party. Throughout the first half of the journey, as hundreds of wagons all rolled along the same route, traveling arrangements mutated ceaselessly, families or groups of families combining or withdrawing as the inevitable alliances and frictions developed and changed. Sometimes these changes were not even formally recognized. The Donners and Reeds, for example, had initially joined the Russell Party, which in turn became the Boggs Party when Russell resigned his post and was replaced by former Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, but it appears likely that along the Sweetwater River, they and some companions broke away from Boggs's leadership and traveled independently, although without any known organization or structure.
But now the small group of wagons turning toward the Hastings shortcut would be on its own, traveling down a spur trail without close company, and so they decided to organize formally. With only a few small changes, the emigrants who veered to the left at the Little Sandy River would be the group that faced the coming ordeal in the mountains. The Donners and the Reeds still formed the core, but other large families would prove just as important in the long run.
The Breens were a big Irish family, and devoutly Catholic. Patrick Breen, who was in his fifties, had been born in Ireland and emigrated to Canada in 1828. He married an Irish girl, Margaret Bulger, who was called Peggy, and eventually they settled on a farm near Keokuk, Iowa. The restlessness that pushed Patrick Breen from Ireland to Canada to the United States did not fade, and by the 1840s he was talking about joining the great migration west. Religion may have been one factor. Catholics were rare in Keokuk, but they dominated Mexican California. By 1846 he was ready to take the great leap, so he sold the farm and set out for the Pacific. By that time the Breens had seven children, six boys and a baby girl named Isabella. Not as wealthy as the Donners or the Reeds, they had no hired hands, but neither were they poor.
A woman headed one big clan. Levinah Murphy was only thirty-six but was already a widow with seven children and three grandchildren. Born to a prosperous family in South Carolina, she married her distant cousin four days after her sixteenth birthday and quickly began a family. When her husband died in 1839, Murphy was left to care for seven children. Apparently a convert to Mormonism, she moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, the home of Joseph Smith's new church, and then to Tennessee. No one knows exactly why she decided to go west, although she may have hoped to reunite with her fellow Mormons, who were already planning to flee the Midwest but whose final destination was uncertain. Her oldest children, nineteen- and eighteen-year-old daughters, were married and had children of their own but decided to go along. Murphy's brood was thus huge: her seven children ranging in age from eight to nineteen, two sons-in-law, and three toddling grandchildren.
An Illinois couple, William Eddy and his wife, Eleanor, had two young children, a three-year-old son and a baby daughter. A carriage-maker by trade, William Eddy was talkative, ebullient, eager to help. Early in the trip, a wagon belonging to a group of single men broke an axletree, a common problem on the trail. A number of wagons rolled past, but Eddy and some other men stopped to help. Eddy set to work with the needed tools—a saw, augers, chisels, hammers, etc.—and fashioned a replacement for the broken axletree. By sundown, the owners thought, the wagon was as good as new, maybe better. But Eddy could also exaggerate his role in a story. There were those who thought him a liar, the kind of man who made himself the hero of every tale he told. He was capable, a fellow emigrant remembered, of "eulogizing himself."
A group of native German speakers stuck together, although they were not all actually Germans. The most important was Lewis Keseberg, a tall, blue-eyed, thirty-two-year-old Prussian Emigre who spoke English, French, and German and would eventually learn Spanish. Before leaving Europe for the United States he had married Philippine, who was almost a decade younger than he and pretty and, some said, flirtatious. They endured a troubled union. A nasty temper plagued Keseberg, and he sometimes directed his vitriol at his wife, a habit that offended some of his fellow travelers on the journey west. More than one member of the Donner Party remembered Keseberg beating Philippine, a "humble and unassuming" woman who was "cowed down." "He treated her like a brute," recalled Virginia Reed. "She was afraid of him and yet made all sorts of excuses for him." James Breen remembered Keseberg, a tall and powerful man, as "quick tempered and irritable."
The Wolfingers were another German couple, young and childless although apparently wealthy. Doris Wolfinger spoke little English but impressed eveiyone with a regal bearing, not to mention elegant clothes and expensive jewelry. There were several young, single men among the "Germans," and one old man known only as Hardcoop, a cutler from Cincinnati who wanted to see the west before returning to his two children in Belgium.
Patrick Dolan was one of the few bachelors who was not working his way west as a teamster. A neighbor of the Breens back in Iowa, Dolan had vouched for Patrick Breen when the Irishman took the oath as a naturalized American citizen. Perhaps thirty-five or forty, Dolan was not as rich as some of the well-established family men, but he had made a success of himself. He sold his farm in Iowa and went west with a wagon and some cows. Optimistic and jovial by nature, he was popular with the children.
The first task for this emerging new group was to pick a leader. Surely the men had been eyeing each other for some time, drawing one another aside or wandering by someone else's campfire to discuss the likely candidates, glances thrown back over their shoulders to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Perhaps some men campaigned for the job while others refused it. As the wagons prepared to pull away on their new course, the men finally gathered around to settle the matter.
Reed, the only man keeping a regular diary at that point, failed even to mention the decision. We do not know with certainty that he wanted the job, but he was an obvious potential choice. Assuming he expressed an interest, it's easy to see why he was passed over. He was aristocratic and headstrong and rubbed people the wrong way. He was not the kind of man to win a popularity contest. But he was also not the kind of man to bring up someone else's victory in his own journal.
Charles Stanton, who had been so excited to cross the Continental Divide, had the courage and commitment of a leader, but he was a young man traveling alone, far less established than the older family men. The same was true of William Eddy, whose family was small and young. Patrick Breen headed a big clan, but he was an Irishman and a Catholic, and nobody volunteers to be led by an outsider.
And then there was the easiest choice of all: George Donner, the older of the two Donner brothers, a friendly fellow with enthusiasm and goodwill. He led one of the three families from Springfield that lay at the core of the group. Perhaps he wasn't the most commanding of men, but then all the captain needed to do was get the group moving in the morning and pick the campsite at night. In a pinch, somebody else could even take those duties. Maybe Donner was a little malleable, but better that than a self-important blowhard like Reed.
They counted the votes, and the new company assumed the name by which it would enter history.
BILLY, THE PONY THAT HAD CARRIED Virginia Reed so joyfully across the plains, could go no farther. Worn down by the long days of endless walking, he simply stopped. James Reed could have shot him to save the beast a lingering death, but perhaps Virginia could not stand the idea, and so instead they simply abandoned the exhausted little animal by the trail.
Virginia agonized at the harsh ethos of the western trail: keep moving or die. "When I was forced to part with him, I cried until I was ill, and sat in the back of the wagon watching him become smaller and smaller as we drove on, until I could see him no more."
Edwin Bryant decided to gamble. The newspaperman was now well ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, for his lingering doubts about the pace of the wagon trains had finally crystallized into action. At Fort Bernard, Bryant and his traveling companions traded their wagon for pack mules and rode ahead as fast as they could.
More than a week before the Donner Party, he reached Fort Bridger, a small trading post along the Black's Fork of the Green River in what is today the southwestern corner of Wyoming. Fort Bridger was the last chance to decide which route to pursue toward California, since in effect it offered a second chance at the decision the emigrants had faced at the Parting of the Ways. As at the Parting, the trail split at Fort Bridger: To the right lay a well-established route via Fort Hall; to the left was the untried Hastings Cut-Off.
When Bryant arrived, Lansford Hastings was there, touting his new course. But so too was the legendary Joseph Walker, a mountain man with decades of experience in the west. Walker "spoke discouragingly" of the Hastings route, Bryant wrote.
Nonetheless, Bryant and his friends resolved to risk the new path. The whole trip west was a risky venture, and the timid were still on the farm, a thousand miles back and probably regretting the missed opportunity.
But Bryant also worried about the families farther back on the trail, the ones with which he had begun the journey. With their ponderous ox-drawn wagons, they should try no new and untested routes. At their slower pace, they would spend longer in the desert. With their livestock, they required more water and feed. And then there were the children. Family men should stick to the proven and rutted road. "Our situation was different than theirs," Bryant recalled. Single men on mules "could afford to hazard experiments, and make explorations. They could not."
Bryant could not wait around at Fort Bridger to voice his reservations in person. Even on the relatively fast mules, he still wanted to keep moving. Fortunately, an alternative was at hand. Louis Vasquez, who owned and operated the fort along with Jim Bridger, offered to see that letters were held for the oncoming wagons. Undoubtedly thankful for the kindness, Bryant scrawled out his doubts in messages to some of the key men, one addressed to James Reed. Then he rode off, trusting that the honorable men who ran Fort Bridger would see the missives safely delivered.
THE DONNER PARTY REACHED THE FORT nine days later, on July 27, a Monday, and pitched camp in a pleasing meadow half a mile downriver, hoping the rich valley grasses would rejuvenate their exhausted oxen. To let the animals rest, the emigrants planned to stay a few days.
As soon as the stock was turned loose and the bedrolls unpacked, the men went looking for Hastings. According to his own letter, he was supposed to be at the fort, waiting to guide them on his new and untested cut-off. It was crucial that they find him. Since Hastings's proposed route had hardly been traveled before, it bore none of the guide-posts that dotted heavily traveled trails—wagon tracks, well-worn fords, old campsites. Without Hastings, the Donner Party would be forced to feel their way along blindly, following a trail that did not really exist through terrain they did not know.
Yet Hastings was nowhere at the fort. He had gone ahead with other wagons. He had promised to wait for those who heeded his call, and now he had vanished. For Reed and the Donner brothers and the others of their company, it must have come as a brutal shock. They had banked their fate on an unreliable man.
Another option remained: the branch of trail leading northwest, toward Fort Hall. Take it, and soon enough they would be back in the ruts of the main route, perhaps even reunited with those to whom they had bid farewell at the Parting of the Ways. Clyman's knowledgeable warning about the Hastings Cut-Off argued for that option, and now so did Hastings's failure to wait for them.
One more stone might have tipped the scale, but the warning letters from Bryant lay as hidden as a miser's heart. Bridger and Vasquez had opened their fort just three years before, in 1843, as a trading post and way station for westward emigrants. The location seemed first-rate. Fort Laramie was well back to the east, on the other side of the Continental Divide; Fort Hall was still 150 miles away, at least a week's hard travel. Fort Bridger would do a booming business selling supplies and livestock to weary travelers. What's more, it was on the main road. The primary emigrant trail—the route that led to Fort Hall and then to Oregon and California—passed right by the new establishment.
But in a striking case of bad luck, Fort Bridger was bypassed the very next year. In 1844 a party of emigrants blazed what came to be known as the Greenwood Cut-Off, a shortcut that saved several days' travel but went nowhere near Fort Bridger. When emigrants steered to the right at the Parting of the Ways, it was actually the Greenwood Cut-Off they were taking. By 1846 the shortcut had become the main road, and almost nobody was going by way of Fort Bridger. Bridger and Vasquez found themselves stranded on a back road, like an old-fashioned motel too far from a new interstate.
Hastings's proposed route offered a solution. His cut-off required that emigrants use the old and now largely abandoned trail down to Fort Bridger before striking off through the Wasatch and along the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Unavoidably, families that took the Hastings Cut-Off would roll right past Bridger and Vasquez. So perfectly did the needs of Hastings and Bridger mesh that rumors of pay-offs circulated, although some of the gossip suggested that Hastings was paying Bridger and some that it was the other way around.
For Bridger and Vasquez, therefore, Bryant's discouraging letters were a potential disaster. If word got around that the cut-off was too dangerous for emigrants with wagons, families would continue to take the Greenwood route, never approaching Fort Bridger. Business would collapse.
The solution was as obvious as it was devious. When the Donner Party arrived, Bridger said not a word about the warning from Bryant, the emigrants' old traveling companion. Instead, he claimed the Hastings Cut-Off was a "fine level road." rich with grass for the livestock and well watered most of the way. The shortcut might save hundreds of miles over the old route via Fort Hall, he insisted. A benign explanation washed away Hastings's absence: The route he had initially explored contained a stretch without water, and now he had gone ahead to scout for an even easier trail.
Even without reading Bryant's letter, Reed and the other members of the Donner Party should have been suspicious of Bridger's enthusiasm. Anyone could see that the trading post was in danger of being marooned, an anachronism past which the modern trail detoured. Clyman had already offered cautionary words at Fort Laramie, and it's possible that at Fort Bridger the emigrants heard doubts yet again. Walker, the legendary mountain man who had warned Bryant about Hastings's route, may still have been there when the Donner Party arrived, telling people of his doubts. But if Reed heard of Walker's views, either directly or through local gossip, he seems to have disregarded them. Far from wondering about Bridger's possible motives in promoting the cut-off, Reed fell for the man. Bridger and Vasquez, he wrote, were "very excellent and accommodating gentlemen" who could be trusted to do business with emigrants "honorably and fairly."
So far as we know, no one else raised any strong objections, and so the wagons turned away from the tested trail to California. In less than two weeks, the Donner Party had faced essentially the same dilemma twice: Stay with the traditional route or take a chance on Hastings's promises. Both times they made the same decision. Sooner than they could imagine, they would have reason to wonder about the wisdom of their choice.
The young rider bounced off his mount and thudded sickeningly into the hard earth of Wyoming. The fall knocked Edward Breen out cold, and when he regained consciousness his left leg throbbed with pain. Adults arrived and examined the boy and found a bad break between the knee and ankle. There was no doctor in the company, but they were only a little ways beyond Fort Bridger. Perhaps someone there boasted medical training. A rider galloped off, and in time he returned with the nearest thing to a doctor the fort had to offer, "a rough looking man with long whiskers" who had probably acquired what medical knowledge he had through long experience on the frontier. He unrolled a small bundle he was carrying and produced a short saw and a long-bladed knife, obviously the tools of amputation.
Edward shrieked at the sight and began begging his parents to prohibit the operation. It was no easy decision. If the leg didn't set properly—and what were the odds of that in a jouncing wagon?—gangrene could fester. The boy could die. But Edward was adamant, and in time his parents agreed. They gave the would-be surgeon five dollars for his trouble and sent him on his way. Edward exhaled and tried to lie easy.
CHARLES STANTON BASKED IN THE SUMMER SUN, letting it warm both his body and his spirit. Snow-capped mountains glittered in the distance, yet another sign that the emigrants had long since left behind the flat-lands of their midwestern homes. Taking up a letter he had written to his brother two weeks earlier, Stanton added a short, optimistic postscript. "We take a new rout to California, never travelled before this season; consequently our route is over a new and interesting region." Perhaps too new and interesting. It was August 3, three days since the Donner Party had pulled away from Fort Bridger, and yet Lansford Hastings remained a ghost.
Then, on the sixth day out from the fort, they found some shadow of the phantom. Someone spotted a note protruding from the top of a sagebrush and called out to tell the others, and when they reached it they found it was from Hastings. In a way, it was a remarkable find—the paper could have blown away or been taken by an animal or simply overlooked—but in fact it was a common method of trailside communication. Paper being valuable, emigrants occasionally used whatever lay at hand for their impromptu billboards—pieces of wood or even buffalo skulls.
The wagons had reached Weber Canyon at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, the steep and rugged range that lay between Fort Bridger and the Great Salt Lake. Up ahead, the forward group led by Hastings—the Harlan-Young Party—had already spent a grueling week struggling down the forbidding canyon, which grew narrower as it went. Wagons crossed and recrossed the river, sometimes driving straight down the rocky bed, with no guarantee they might not topple. One man watched some of his comrades trying to build a road through the canyon and proclaimed in his journal that it was "an exhibition of most consumate folly."
Hastings had never intended to travel down the canyon; a guide working for him had taken the wagons down that route while Hastings was briefly away. Now, in the note he left for the Donner Party, Hastings urged the trailing emigrants to stop where they were and send a messenger ahead so that he could return and take them along another route through the Wasatch. Finding the note, the men of the Donner Party huddled together and decided that three riders would search out Hastings while the rest of the party waited and rested. Ever at the center of events—and at least partly responsible for convincing the others to chance the shortcut—James Reed was chosen to go, along with Charles Stanton and William Pike, a son-in-law in the big Murphy clan. They mounted up, waved goodbye to their families and comrades, and rode off into the mountains to pursue the vanishing "guide" on whom they had staked so much.
THE THREE MEN RODE HARD, but by the time they caught Hastings they had crossed the Wasatch and descended to the beginning of the pancake-flat country that nuzzles up against the Great Salt Lake. None of the three had ever met Hastings, but somewhere in camp they were introduced. Reed must have noted acidly that his party relied on Hastings's promise to guide them from Fort Bridger, only to arrive and find that he had already left. Now they were here to collect on the promissory note. Hastings should return and show the way.
Hastings agreed, and he and Reed headed back toward the Wasatch, Reed on a fresh, borrowed mount. Stanton and Pike, their horses gasping for water and rest, stayed behind, promising to follow along when they could.
Reed and Hastings had not even reentered the Wasatch before Hastings yet again broke his word, announcing that he would not return to the stranded wagons and instead would simply point out the preferred route to Reed. There was no time to go all the way back, Hastings insisted. He needed to stay with the Harlan-Young Party and guide them across the salt desert west of the lake. Reed and Hastings camped together that night, and the next morning climbed a nearby peak from which Hastings vaguely indicated a course the Donner Party wagons might take through the mountains. "He gave me the direction," Reed wrote later.
Then, his duty grossly unfinished, Hastings turned away from Reed and rode off to the west. For the rest of their journey, the members of the Donner Party would never again speak with the man who had promised to lead them.
Consigned to his own ingenuity, Reed rode down off the mountaintop and found an Indian trail, which he began following back toward the wagons, blazing trees to mark the path more clearly. He rode back into the ring of the Donner Party corral on Monday evening, August 10, four days after he, Stanton, and Pike had gone ahead to find Hastings. Eveiyone must have crowded around eagerly to hear his report, in which he told of Hastings's refusal to come back and act as guide. The canyon route of the Harlan-Young Party was too risky, he insisted. Many of the wagons would be destroyed. On the other hand, the path he had just blazed through the Wasatch was "fair, but would take considerable labor in clearing and digging."
There is no record that Reed and the others discussed another option, one they should at least have considered: backtracking to Fort Bridger, returning to the traditional trail, and forsaking Hastings's chimerical cut-off altogether. Traveling from Fort Bridger to their current position had required six and a half days, but since they now knew the country the return trip would have been quicker. And they now had abundant evidence of Hastings's rash judgment, if not mendacity. Clyman had told them the shortcut was probably impassable. Hastings had promised to wait for them at Fort Bridger, then gone ahead without them. Then he had promised to return and guide them through the Wasatch, only to abandon them with little more than a wave of his hand toward a route he had never taken. Surely they did not want to be seen as fainthearts who lost courage in a crisis, staggering back into Fort Bridger ignominiously. But on the other hand, their circumstances had changed—they no longer had any promise of a guide to show them the way—and when fresh evidence emerges settled decisions must often be revisited. Judicious reappraisals were common on western trails. The same year as the Donner Party, one group of emigrants took the so-called Applegate Cut-Off toward Oregon, a new and reputedly easier route. But just fifteen miles past the fork, they found a handwritten note warning that it was two or three days to grass and water, a dangerous and difficult haul. Consultations were held, and the group resolved to change its destination and make for California.
For the Donner Party, backtracking would have cost precious time, but their only other options were equally grim: try to follow the Harlan-Young Party's disastrous route through Weber Canyon, or take their chances with Reed's newfound path, which had never been traversed by wagons of any kind, which in fact barely existed at all. Still, Reed "reported in favour" of the new route, as he put it in his diary, and no one was in a position to argue. Of those who were present, only he had seen the narrow end of Weber
Canyon, and only he had crossed the Wasatch. If he thought the mountain route was the better way—and it may have been—it was simple logic to bow to his judgment. Reed seemed to acknowledge that he bore some special responsibility for the decision. In his journal, he noted that his account of the mountains "induced the Compay to proceed."
So, as they had before, the men of the Donner Party ignored the increasing evidence that Hastings was a charlatan and vowed to forge ahead along his untried bearing.
UNTIL NOW THE JOURNEY HAD BEEN ACROSS the open plains or up the relatively gentle slope of the Rockies, and always in the wake of those who had gone before. But in the Wasatch, the Donner Party began to bushwhack, clearing a road through a thicket of mountain forest as impenetrable as a jungle. Virginia Reed thought it was incomprehensible to those who were not there:
Only those who have passed through this country on horseback can appreciate the situation. There was absolutely no road, not even a trail. The cannon wound around among the hills. Heavy underbrush had to be cut away and used for making a roadbed.
In one canyon the trail crossed the same creek thirteen times, the teamsters weaving from bank to bank in search of clearance. Frustrated, James Reed thought they were making even less distance than they were.
Then suddenly progress stopped entirely. They were approaching a pass across what is now known as Big Mountain, and the pace of road building grew so glacial that moving the camp seemed pointless. Instead the men simply walked out every morning, hacked away what little territory they could, and then returned to the exact same campsite at night. Reed's journal entries became terse concessions of stasis: "in Camp all hands Cutting and opning a road through the Gap" and "Still Clearing and making Road in Reeds Gap." Then at last he allowed himself a quiet and exhausted declaration of triumph: "Still in Camp and all hands working on the road which we finished."
They rolled across the pass using the road they had just hewn from the forest, and then down an incredibly steep and treacherous descent on the other side. A search party located Stanton and Pike, unseen since Reed had been forced to leave them behind with the Harlan-Young Party near the Great Salt Lake. The two men had spent days trying to rejoin the Donner Party, struggling through the mountains and, at least according to one account, nearly starving to death. But no sooner had the group regained its two lost members and crossed over Big Mountain than it faced another seemingly immutable natural enemy—a canyon so clogged with heavy timber that the wagons again remained in camp while the men went to work. They chopped and sawed for two days before moving the wagons up, but then found the veiy end of the canyon so barricaded with foliage that it seemed impervious to road-building. The only option was to take the wagons over a frighteningly steep hill at the side of the canyon, a climb so precipitous that there was a real danger of rolling backwards down the grade. Virginia Reed remembered that almost every ox in the train was required to pull each wagon up the slope, which would mean that thirty or forty animals were needed to drag a single vehicle. But in time they reached the summit and were rewarded with a view of the valley of the Great Salt Lake. "It gave us great courage," remembered fourteen-year-old John Breen. Reed's journal entry, by contrast, does not even mention the struggle over the final hill and seems strangely nonchalant: "this day we passed through the Mountains and encampd in the Utah Valley."
More than at any other point on its long and emotionally powerful journey, the Donner Party's passage through the Wasatch created a tangible historical legacy. Just a year later, in the summer of 1847, Mormon emigrants used the route while seeking a haven for their faith. At times, the Mormons had to scour the earth for the faint traces of the Donner Party's presence, wagon ruts still vaguely visible. In other places, the residue of the 1846 journey was more obvious—a cleft through the thick forests that was plain evidence of the tenacity with which the new road had been hewed. Only at the end did the Mormons depart from the Donner trail. The final, infuriating gorge that defeated the Donner Party—forcing them to haul up over the nearby hill—was cleared by the Mormons in less than a day and became Emigration Canyon, the main entryway to the Latter-Day Saints' lonely, pious kingdom of Deseret.
The Donner Party's Wasatch crossing had required more than two weeks, a debilitating loss of precious time. It was now August 22. Soon the debilitating heat of summer would give way to the crisp nights of fall. The delays that had beset the earlier portions of their journey—the high water of the Kansas River, the death of Sarah Keyes, the mysterious Sabbath lull that followed their Fourth of July celebration—were nothing compared to the slog through the mountains. Maybe it had been the best of a bad set of options. Maybe it would have taken longer to follow the Harlan-Young Party down Weber Canyon or to backtrack to Fort Bridger and the traditional trail. But the hard facts of the calendar could not be denied. At Fort Bridger, Reed had optimistically predicted that they might reach California in seven weeks. Crossing the Wasatch had required a third of that time, all for a paltry thirty-five miles. Virginia Reed remembered that by the time the Donner Party cleared the mountains and reached the exotic shores of the Great Salt Lake, they were "worn with travel and greatly discouraged." They had six hundred more miles to go.
If the Donner Party received any brief encouragement as it struggled against the Wasatch Mountains, it must have come from the startling realization that other emigrants were even farther behind. At some point during the Wasatch ordeal, newcomers unexpectedly rolled up from the east.
The three wagons belonged to Franklin Graves, a big, amiable man whose life had been a fitting prelude to the deprivations of the California Trail. In Illinois, where Graves and his wife had carved out a hardscrabble life in a one-room cabin along the banks of the Illinois River, Graves had gone shoeless in summer and hatless in winter. The family kept chickens and bees, and every morning Graves crossed the river in a handmade canoe to trade game, furs and buckets of honey with settlers in town. In the afternoon, the equally resourceful Elizabeth Graves showed up in the same boat with butter, eggs and soap. When the river froze, she kept up her errands by walking across the ice. They were cheerful, happy people, and it isn't entirely clear why they decided to make the journey west, especially since Franklin was in his late fifties. They may have been trying to escape the fevers of the Midwest—a common complaint of the day—or perhaps the country was just growing too tame for a man like Graves. The farm sold for $1,500, at least some of it paid in coin that Graves hid in the box of one of the wagons for the trip west. Presumably, the money also helped pay for the traveling costs of their nine children, one son-in-law, and a teamster named John Snyder.
Later even than the Donners, the Graveses jumped off from St. Joseph, Missouri, in late May with the last group of the season. Most members of the party kept to the traditional trail, but the Graveses showed characteristic pluck and turned for Hastings's unknown cut-off even though they numbered only thirteen people. When they caught the Donner Party, they must have felt a sense of relief at their newfound fellowship, even as the Donners and the others must have endured mixed emotions—gratitude for the extra hands, unease that they were now unquestionably the hindmost runners in the race to California.
Whatever the emotions—and strangely James Reed made no mention of the company's expansion in his diaiy—the arrival of the Graves family was the last time anyone would join the group of wagons destined for tragedy. The Donner Party was now complete.
THE EMIGRANTS DIDN'T KNOW it, but as they left the Wasatch the wagons were rolling onto the bed of ancient Lake Bonneville, a sprawling inland sea that was once 325 miles long, 135 miles wide, and more than 1,000 feet deep, roughly the equivalent of Lake Michigan. Lying in the Great Basin, a vast depression hemmed in by the Rockies on one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other, Bonneville was what geologists call a "terminal lake," meaning that it had no outlet to the sea. Fed by rivers tumbling down out of the mountains, it eventually grew into an aqueous behemoth that created its own release valve by pushing across Red Rock Pass in what is today southern Idaho. In one riotous spasm, Lake Bonneville emptied much of itself into the Snake River drainage, the torrent pouring through the pass at a rate well above that at which the Amazon River discharges into the ocean. Then, almost as quickly as it began, the flood abated. The lake level dropped below the height of the pass, and Bonneville returned to its traditional boundaries.
In time, the lake bequeathed two legacies, both essentially lifeless. As the last Ice Age ended and temperatures rose, evaporation rates increased until the atmosphere began sucking away more water from the lake than the rivers could pour in. Unable to sustain itself, the lake began to die of thirst, the waters receding until evaporation and input came into rough annual equilibrium, creating the body of water we know today as the Great Salt Lake, the runt child of Lake Bonneville. Like its parent, the Great Salt Lake has no outlet, and thus the minerals carried in by feeder rivers cannot be swept away by drainage streams. The result, of course, is increasing salinity; today the lake is brinier than the ocean, and home to virtually no marine life.
To the west, Bonneville's receding waters deposited billions of tons of salt, spread across the playa as though troweled on by a giant mason. Seepage from the lake itself soaks the underlying surface, creating vast bogs of soft alkaline loam. The liquid rarely breaks through, and even if it did it would not be drinkable, so the salt flats present a strange paradox: a moist and muddy desert devoid of potable water. Almost nothing grows there, and almost no animals can be seen. The only break in the relentless, blinding whiteness of the salt is a few tiny mountain chains, the tops of which were once islands poking up through the frothy waters of Lake Bonneville. Yet the Great Salt Lake Desert lay directly in the wagons' path as they came down from the Wasatch. The Hastings Cut-Off, in other words, led straight through one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
European or American parties had rarely penetrated the heart of the desert. A train of emigrants had crossed the northern section in 1841, nearly dying in the process. The southern portion—the route now proposed by Hastings—had been traversed only twice, and both times without wagons. The explorer John C. Fremont had led a paramilitary party through in 1845, and Hastings himself had crossed from west to east earlier in 1846, the trip that convinced Jim Clyman that Hastings's plan was madness. With superior local knowledge, Indians may have crossed the desert from time to time, though we have no written record of such ventures. Or they may have known enough to give the region a wide berth; emigrant records make no mention of Indian trails, as they often do in other portions of the West.
Marching along toward this great plain, the Donner Party found the trail of the Harlan-Young Party, the group up ahead that Hastings was leading, and fell in behind. If Hastings refused to return and guide their wagons as he had promised, at least they could follow his tracks.
LUKE HALLORAN HOPED THE WEST would cure him, not kill him. A young, entrepreneurial Irishman who owned a small store in St. Louis, Halloran was a success—he owned six lots in town—but decided to give up his comforts to search for better health. He hoped that the western climate might cure his tuberculosis, what emigrants called "consumption." Little is known about the early part of his journey, but at the Parting of the Ways he was abandoned by the family with which he was traveling. Alone and in poor health, he sought refuge with George and Tamzene Donner, who displayed a characteristic kindness and took him in. Too weak to walk, Halloran rode in a wagon, though even such luxury could not stop the ravages of his disease. He traveled with the Donners for more than a month, but died just after they came down out of the Wasatch and was buried in the salty soil of Utah. Having rescued him from abandonment once, perhaps the Donners did not want to leave Halloran alone in the wilderness again. They dug his grave next to that of an earlier emigrant who had also succumbed to the rigors of the great journey west.
TAMZENE DONNER, THE WOMAN WHO had doubted the wisdom of the Hastings Cut-Off from the beginning, gathered the fragments of paper scattered before her on the Utah desert. The note, apparently written by Hastings, had been torn apart by birds or animals or simply the elements. Donner assembled them like a jigsaw puzzle and produced a reconstructed missive that was both cryptic and fearsome: "2 days—2 nights—hard driving—cross—desert—reach water."
At Fort Bridger, the emigrants had heard warnings about the salt desert, rumors that it required a "dry drive" of forty miles without grass or water. Arid stretches of trail posed a particular hardship for the pioneers, since their overburdened wagons could carry little added weight, and water is an extraordinarily heavy commodity. A fifty-five-gallon barrel, for example, weighs close to five hundred pounds when filled. Even a fifteen-gallon barrel—a container only about two feet high—weighs well over a hundred pounds, the equivalent of asking the oxen to drag another full-grown woman across the desert. Hastings's note, found at a spring, presumably signaled the last oasis before the wastelands. The wagons stayed in camp the next day, "wooding watering and laying in a Supply of grass for our oxen and horses," as Reed put it in his diary. They expected to spend one night out on the desert, he noted, but doubted they would find "grass wood or water of sufficentt quallity or quantity to be procured."
The desolation they were about to enter has challenged even modern expeditions armed with the benefits of technology. In 1929, when a small group set out to track the route in a Model A, the vehicle became mired in "soapy slime" and could be freed only when the men dismantled the bed of an abandoned pioneer wagon and forced the boards under the car's wheels for added traction. Fearing a similar fate, a later expedition resorted to a converted Caterpillar tractor. As recently as 1986, archaeologists working in early September, exactly the season of the Donner Party's crossing, found it impossible to cross the "semisolid mud flats" in modern, four-wheel-drive trucks and were forced to use all-terrain vehicles instead.
For nineteenth-century emigrants like the Donner Party, the bogs clung tenaciously to hooves and wagon wheels. Mules sank to their knees, sometimes to their bellies, floundering forward and kicking up vast clouds of suffocating dust as thick as fog. Riders often had to dismount, lessening the burden on the horses but slowing the pace. Heat waves baked the days; frigid winds chilled the nights. With wood scarce, some parties swore off a cooked breakfast, starting the day's march on cold tack or even an empty stomach. Water was more valuable still, so only tiny rations were allowed. Often, thirst gave way to hallucination, and families imagined themselves marching toward cooling lakes or lush, verdant meadows or even magnificent cities dotted with grand homes and shaded, regal avenues. If there was any other living thing for miles, the emigrants could not see it. "The hiatus in the animal and vegetable kingdoms was perfect," wrote Edwin Bryant, the journalist who had once traveled with the Donners. The desert, he said, was "unearthly."
By midday on Wednesday, September 2, the members of the Donner Party had been marching through this lifeless vacuum for more than two days with little sleep or rest. It had been three days since they passed the last spring with drinkable water, and the oxen began to give out. The line of march elongated—families pulling ahead if they could and lagging behind if they could not—but even the forward-most group could not make it with all their wagons. So teamsters unhitched their animals and drove them onward, hoping merely to keep the beasts alive and return later for the abandoned cargo. Teamsters kept their eyes on Pilot Peak, an aptly named and plainly visible mountain at the desert's western edge with a well-known freshwater spring at its base.
The Reeds struggled near the rear of the line. James Reed decided to ride ahead to fetch water and then return, telling his hired teamsters before he left that if necessary they should unyoke the oxen and drive them forward, along with the cattle he was taking west as livestock. Reed reached the encampment beneath Pilot Peak about dark, just a few hours after the other families had made it. He stayed for an hour, drinking from the spring and resting, and then started back toward his family. Sometime before midnight, he encountered his own teamsters, driving his oxen and cattle toward the spring, and told them to water the animals and then follow him back out onto the desert.
He found his family in the morning, and together they kept a day-long vigil, peering vainly to the west in hopes of seeing the returning teamsters and animals. By nightfall, with their water running low, it was clear that another day on the desert might prove fatal, so they decided to abandon the wagons and set out on foot for the spring, carrying some bread and what little water they had left. James Reed carried the youngest child, three-year-old Thomas; the other three children walked. The youngsters eventually grew exhausted and lay down to sleep, covered as much as possible by shawls. A wind kicked up—James Reed remembered it as "a cold hurricane"—so he and Margret sat upwind of their children, their backs forming a makeshift break, and encouraged the family's five dogs—Tyler, Barney, Trailor, Tracker, and Cash—to crowd around for more warmth. "It was the couldes night you ever saw," thirteen-year-old Virginia wrote later in a letter. "The wind blew and if it haden bin for the dogs we would have Frosen."
If they needed an incentive to get moving again, it came by accident before dawn, when one of the dogs suddenly jumped up and began barking. The others did the same, and as the Reeds roused themselves, one of the family steers suddenly bolted out of the night and ran straight for them. Luckily it changed course, although, as Reed noted diyly, "There was no more complaining of being tired or sleepy the balance of the night."
Resuming their march, they reached the wagons of Jacob Donner, whose oxen had also grown so weak that they had been unhitched and driven ahead to water. From the Donner family, Reed learned why his teamsters had never returned with the livestock: As they approached the spring at Pilot Peak, the unyoked animals sensed water and bolted into the desert, and now were missing. (The animal that ran at the Reed camp in the night had obviously wandered around and eventually stumbled across the family, almost literally.) Once again, Reed temporarily abandoned his family, leaving them with the
Donners, and walked ahead to the spring, where the other families were camped and waiting. That night, Reed and Jacob Donner returned to the desert and brought out the Donner wagons, which now carried the Reed family as well. Five and a half days after they walked away from the last freshwater spring on the eastern edge of the desert, all the members of the Donner Party had made it across.
They spent nearly a week camped at Pilot Peak, alternately resting, searching for missing cattle, and going back into the desert to bring up wagons that had been left behind. Perceptions varied as to the cause of the delay, doubtlessly deepening existing tensions within the group. Reed remembered later that most everyone had lost some stock, universalizing the cause of the delay; others thought they were hunting specifically for Reed's animals, as though he alone were the cause of the extra effort. Two days after the Reeds and the Donners reached the spring, some of the men set out for the Reeds' abandoned wagons, the farthest out on the salt flats. Judging by Reed's own journal and modern archaeological evidence, the wagons were probably about twenty-five miles from Pilot Peak, a hard day's travel. In one case, Reed and the others may have freed a wagon by digging a small pit, perhaps a yard wide and a foot deep, at the same time discarding a broken wheel and replacing it with a spare. Since most of their cattle had been lost, the Reeds were forced to permanently abandon two of their three wagons, leaving behind most of their household goods.
The cost of the desert crossing had been incalculable. In all, they had lost thirty-six cattle, either because the animals bolted and ran off or because they simply could go no farther and collapsed. George Donner and Lewis Keseberg each abandoned a wagon, but it was clearly the Reeds whose fortunes had been the most deeply damaged. Left with only one ox and one cow, they were forced to borrow an extra team merely to pull their one remaining wagon, the richest family in the train reduced to accepting frontier charity. Even among the families who made it through with their animals and wagons intact, the livestock had suffered, weaker now as draft animals and scrawnier as a potential supply of meat. Perhaps most significant, the company was increasingly divided and dispirited, families eyeing each other as sources of hindrance rather than help. When the Reed family divided its provisions, which could not fit into the one wagon that remained, the result was a near-universal sense of martyrdom and grievance, the Reeds convinced they had generously victualed their comrades, the other families certain of their beneficence in helping the newly impoverished. Like most wagon trains, the Donner Party had never been a truly unified force, but now it was more fragmented than ever, wilting in both spirit and body. John Breen, who was fourteen at the time of the journey, thought back to the desert passage years later and recalled simply, "Here our real hardships commenced."
THEY STARTED FORWARD AGAIN on a morning when a snowstorm dusted the nearby hills, a reminder of the advancing calendar that, as John Breen remembered it, "made the mothers tremble." In fact, desperation was beginning to suffuse more than just the maternal contingent of the Donner Party. Fearful that their provisions might not carry through to California, the company agreed that each family would inventory its foodstuffs, then provide a written status report to Reed, another sign of his de facto status as leader. The result was apparently pessimistic, for Reed suggested that two riders hurry on to Sutter's Fort, fetch fresh supplies, and then backtrack to meet the rest of the party somewhere on the trail. His recent setback on the desert had hardly diminished Reed's enthusiasm for the expansive gesture: He wrote a letter to Sutter personally guaranteeing payment for the supplies, assuming he eventually reached California.
The resupply effort would be an astonishingly dangerous mission—two men alone would be easy prey for hostile Indians or unscrupulous emigrants in other trains, or even simple mishap—and so it would have to be strictly a matter for volunteers. None of the men with large families—Reed himself, the Donner brothers, Graves—stepped forward, perhaps because they dared not abandon their wives and children, perhaps because they were too old, perhaps both. Either the hired hands were unwilling or their employers balked at losing the help, so it was left to men with smaller, younger families or to those traveling alone. The first to step forward was William McCutchan, a giant of a man with a bushy mane of hair who was going west with his wife, Amanda, and their toddler daughter, Harriet. Left behind by some previous train for unknown reasons, they had joined the Donner Party at Fort Bridger, apparently traveling without a wagon and carrying what supplies they could on a horse and a mule. His offer was conditional: The rest of the party must vow to help his wife and daughter, a reasonable demand that was granted quick acquiescence. The other volunteer was Charles Stanton, the former Chicago merchant hoping to rekindle some inner flame after a bout with depression, who said he would go if someone provided a mount. His family now assured of aid, McCutchan agreed that Stanton could take his mule.
Physically, the men were opposites—Stanton diminutive, McCutchan said to be six-feet-six—but there were plenty of other reasons to find them a strange selection. McCutchan had not even been a member of the Donner Party for most of the trip, and Stanton was a bachelor with no relatives or loved ones in the train, and thus a man who might balk at returning if he reached safety in California. But absent other volunteers there wasn't much choice, so the unlikely pair of couriers packed food and blankets onto their saddles and set off toward the west.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WEEKS Edward Breen swung into a saddle. Through the Wasatch, when the young man's labor had been desperately needed to help clear the way, he had been lying in a wagon, his broken left leg gripped by handmade wooden splints. Now he moved gingerly at first, not wanting to risk some further trouble with the limb. His parents watched nervously, then breathed a sigh of relief as the boy touched his heels to the animal's flank and moved off.
SOME PLACES ON THE TRAIL SEEMED CURSED. The air or the water or the soil brought out the snippy side of people, all the collected antagonisms of a long journey simmering like a low-grade fever. Somebody remembered the time that Smith held up the train for no good reason. Or the way Jones always commandeered the best campsite. Or the fact that Johnson was lazy about guard duty. Or the way somebody talked too much or talked too little or just plain annoyed folks. Weeks and weeks and weeks of hard travel built up the pressure until something sparked an eruption, and sometimes it seemed to be nothing more than a spot along the path, even a good spot.
Up ahead of the Donner Party, Edwin Bryant and his friends in the mule train found one such spot when they camped in a grassy dale where springs bubbled up a water supply and the foliage offered rich feed for the animals. The next morning, two men argued over some minor slight, "a very trivial matter," Bryant wrote. The dispute grew heated until both men leveled rifles. Bryant thought the whole affair was crazy. Here they were in the middle of nowhere and people were threatening to kill the very comrades on whom they depended. He rushed into the middle of it and started giving both men a lecture, telling them that killing each other was as bad as an attack by some outsider. Tempers cooled and the barrels were lowered.
The Donner Party reached the same exact place five weeks later and weathered a broader if less acute quarrel—a war of the sexes. "All the women in Camp were mad with anger," Reed wrote in his diary. He gave no more details, other than suggesting that the site should be known as Mad Woman Camp.
Maybe it was just boredom that tweaked the nerves. After crossing the salt desert of Utah, the wagons entered what is today eastern Nevada and endured a repetitious geology where the earth has furrowed itself into a succession of small mountain ranges, like the lines of a wrinkled forehead. Heinrich Lienhard, traveling the same route but well ahead of the Donner Party, could not avoid echoing the region's monotony in his journal entries. "We came into a valley which was veiy much like the one we had left," he wrote. Then the next day: "We went through another gap and came into a dry valley." And the following day, after yet another mountain crossing: "The valley lying before us was again broad, and resembled in eveiy respect the one we had just crossed."
And then they squared up against the Ruby Mountains, the last obstacle on Hastings's ill-advised cut-off. On the other side of the mountains lay the Humboldt River, where they would rejoin the traditional trail. On his eastbound journey earlier in the year, Hastings had crossed the Rubies via a small, steep defile that later came to be known as Secret Pass, a route that required little detour. But Secret Pass was too rugged for wagons; another way had to be found. The point at which the trail collided with the mountains lay toward the northern tip of the range, and so the easiest and quickest choice would have been to turn north and circle around that end. But no one had ever taken that route, so nobody knew how close the wagons were to an easy passage. Guiding the Harlan-Young Party, days in front of the Donner Party, Hastings instead turned to the south—yet another mistake, this one born mostly of ignorance. He began paralleling the mountains, looking constantly to his right to find a workable pass.
When the Donner Party wagons came along, they were following the plainly visible tracks of the earlier group, and so they too headed south. They trudged along beneath the precipitous rise of the mountains for three days, interrupted by one baffling and inexcusable Friday on which they remained in camp, going nowhere and achieving nothing. Finally, they came to a shallow pass—Reed described it as "a flatt in the mounton"—and followed it up and over the crest. Streams led them down the other side, and on September 26, a little west of what is today Elko, Nevada, they at last reached the Humboldt, where they found the main California trail that ran down from Idaho. The Hastings Cut-Off was finished at last.
It had been more than two months since they separated from the other California-bound trains along the Little Sandy. At Fort Bridger, the last place where they could change their minds and stick with the main trail, Reed had optimistically written that he hoped to reach Sutter's Fort in seven weeks by taking the cut-off. When they arrived at the Humboldt, more time than that had already passed, and they were still far from their goal. Edwin Bryant, their onetime traveling companion who had joined the Fourth of July celebration before trading in his wagon for mules, was now more than a month ahead.
Ironically, it was the presumed advantage of Hastings's route that was in fact its central flaw. Like a modern engineer building a freeway, Hastings laid his course with a straight-edge, heedless of the constraints of mountain or desert. In this, he was in some respects the first modern westerner, struggling to impose human preference on an unforgiving geography, but he was foolishly ahead of his time. Mountain men or militaiy units might conquer whatever barrier lay before them, but family wagons and livestock needed to treat the most difficult topography with grudging respect, circumventing obstructions rather than assaulting them. Travel by compass bearing alone was an arrogant fantasy. The traditional trail curved and buckled and detoured for a reason: Western terrain demanded a circumspect and sinuous approach. Crossing the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert—tasks more onerous than anything emigrants faced on the traditional trail—not only slowed progress horrendously but also weakened people and animals alike, both physically and mentally. Lienhard, the fellow emigrant who was ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, pondered the realities of the Hastings Cut-Off and declared in his diary that it would more appropriately be called "Hastings Longtripp."
In rough terms, the delay could be measured. Using information from Indians or other emigrants or even trailside notes, parties that used the Hastings Cut-Off could gauge themselves against those who had gone the traditional way. One group estimated they had lost seventy miles, at least four days of hard travel, probably more. Another party pegged their delay at nearly two weeks. For the Donner Party, the last of the groups along the cut-off, it was even worse. The gamble probably cost them a full month in lost time, as though they had simply stopped traveling and lollygagged about camp for thirty precious days.
Yet there was no time for recriminations or pouting, nothing to do but to keep moving. They could neither go back nor remain in place. Like their wagons, they had no brakes, no way of stopping the high-stakes journey on which they had wagered their lives and fortunes. The only alternative was to push forward, exhausted marathoners hoping for a second wind. They could not know that, as at every stage of their long ordeal, their situation would soon grow more precarious still. And this time, the fault would lie not with a hostile geography or an unreliable promise, but with the bitter divisions of their own comrades.
Most of the wagons had already climbed the long, sandy hummock. John Snyder, the teamster for the Graves family, was toward the back of the line when he began urging his charges up the slope. It was rough terrain—emigrants recalled it as a "very bad ridge" or "one bad hill"—and most men stopped to double-hitch, combining five or six pairs of oxen to haul just one wagon, like a truck driver dropping into a lower gear.
Snyder spurned such caution. Perhaps it was pride in his animals, or in his own skill as a teamster. Maybe he was just tired and exhausted and sick of the wearying delays. Maybe it was simple exuberance, for Snyder was a young man. Whatever the reason, he insisted his charges could conquer the hill unaided, and he started up the climb.
Suddenly there was trouble with the teams: confusion, a tangle of reins, animals shouldering their great bulks into one another, wagons crunching together. Angry words flew. Snyder and one of the Reed family teamsters shouted insults. James Reed himself stepped into the fray, and he and Snyder flared. After all those months of walking across a continent, the fatigue and the delays and the aggravations finally combined into one irresistible moment of wrath. Adrenaline shot through the veins. Fury rose in the chest. Fists clutched weapons and raised them in the air. Rage conquered all.
IT WAS BARELY A WEEK since the Donner Party had completed the disastrous Hastings Cut-Off and regained the main trail along the Humboldt River, the waterway that would guide them across what is now the state of Nevada. Rejoining the traditional road had been a milestone: For the only time in his long diary, Reed noted the party's location even before mentioning the date.
But the Humboldt itself proved a disappointment. Drought plagued the West in 1846, and the river had withered until it was "more a succession or chain of stagnant pools than a stream of running water." At places the soil was so dry that it resembled ash. Ricked up by the draft animals into vast white clouds, the dust caked the emigrants' hair and skin until they were "as cadaverous as so many corpses." The Humboldt was better than Hastings's nonexistent shortcut, but it was hardly easy. The hard work and long days and constant exertion still sapped the body and frayed the nerves. And then on Monday, October 5, the wagons reached the hill where Snyder refused to double-hitch.
As Snyder and Reed argued, Reed barked that they should get the teams to the top of the hill and then settle the matter man-to-man. Snyder insisted on a more immediate brand of satisfaction. He raised the butt end of his ox whip and struck Reed in the head. At almost the same moment, Reed pulled a hunting knife and lunged at Snyder, stabbing him deeply in the chest. As soon as the fight began, it was over, Snyder collapsed to the ground with a mortal wound, Reed gashed across the head, both men soaked in blood. Snyder's friends carried him up the hill and laid him on the ground, but there was nothing anyone could do for him, and within minutes he was dead.
The company cleaved in two, both figuratively and literally. The Graveses and their friends pitched camp near the top of the hill, Snyder's body lying nearby and surely fueling anger at Reed. The Reeds stopped near the bottom of the hill, perhaps with the Eddys, who seem to have taken Reed's side almost immediately. Opinion was as divided as the tents, split between those who thought Reed had merely defended himself and those who denounced him as a murderer. Later, Reed's friends and family members recalled a man deeply saddened and working to make amends: casting the knife away in disgust, rushing to Snyder's side to hear his dying words, offering boards from his own lone remaining wagon for a coffin, standing at the gravesite till every clod of dirt had been patted down over the body.
Nobody knew quite what to do. They had quit the United States when they crossed the Continental Divide—the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase—and so technically they were no longer subject to American law. Nevertheless, the developing credo of the western migration was one of remarkable commitment to legal procedure. When crime struck, emigrants typically formed courts to try the defendant, often with a rather elaborate legal structure that included a judge, jury, and lawyers for both the prosecution and defense. In at least one case, a "sheriff " was appointed to watch over the jury, which returned its verdict in writing. Nor were these show courts. Emigrants took great pains to ensure some element of fairness, often recruiting people from other companies to act as judge or jury so as to gain greater impartiality. In some cases, even though the wagons were racing against time, parties halted their progress to find suitable jurors in other companies or spent precious hours tracking down suspects or investigating a crime scene.
Yet for a variety of reasons, it was hardly clear that the Donner Party would observe the niceties. For one thing, there were no other companies nearby to provide a ready pool of disinterested jurors. For another, there was no agreed-upon set of rules. The Russell Party—the company in which the Donners and the Reeds first traveled—had established a set of bylaws, but these were mostly concerned with procedural matters like organizing the day's march and assigning guard duty, not punishing capital crimes. In any event, the rules had been adopted before the Donners and the Reeds joined the company, and when they and the other families split off from the main emigration to follow the Hastings Cut-Off, there was, as far as we know, no discussion of the legal procedures that might apply to the newly formed party. In later years, most emigrant parties abandoned the practice of formal bylaws for precisely this reason. Companies divided and reformed with such frequency that the original signers were often long gone by the time the rules were actually needed.
Worse still for the Donner Party, their nominal leader was not at hand. As happened periodically throughout the journey, the train had, for whatever reason, split in two a few days before the fight, and the Donner families were traveling separately, two days ahead on the trail. Revealing the tenuous nature of hierarchy in emigrant trains, nobody thought to ride ahead and fetch the elected leader of their band, and so the half dozen or so family groups now camped at opposite ends of the fatal hill were left to their own devices to settle a matter of life and death.
As is often the case with explosive moments of trauma, even the eyewitnesses could not agree on precisely what happened. The cause of the original dispute was never exactly clear. Perhaps it centered on Snyder's refusal to double-team. Perhaps it was about the order or pace of the climb. The teams may have become tangled. Snyder may have started to beat his animals or use foul language. There was no unanimity on which man struck first, or whether Margret Reed, who had stepped in as peacemaker, was hit as well. Reed's backers always maintained that Snyder took the blame for the whole thing with his dying words, but that too was disputed.
Favoritisms and resentments bubbled to the surface. Snyder had been a popular fellow, an upbeat and jovial type who liked to take the hind gate off the wagon at night and use it as a dance floor, entertaining the camp with a jig. In contrast to the ostentatious wealth with which Reed began the journey, Snyder was a young man trying to make it on his own, having struck a deal with Franklin Graves to work his way west in return for his board. He was handsome in a rugged, outdoorsy sort of way, and he may even have been romancing Mary Ann Graves, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his employer and the belle of the train.
By contrast, Reed was disliked. His haughtiness rankled from the start, and he had been the biggest advocate of the Hastings Cut-Off, now plain to all as a disaster. Lewis Keseberg may well have harbored some private grudge against Reed—there were those who said that early in the journey Reed upbraided Keseberg harshly for beating his wife or using foul language in the presence of Reed's wife—and now the German apparently tried to exact his revenge by propping up his wagon tongue, the silent call for a hanging.
Most of the emigrants opposed anything so drastic. "Perhaps the intimate friends of Snyder favored extreme measures, but this sentiment was not generally approved," remembered James Breen, who was only five at the time but talked about the event later with his older brother.
Instead, in what must have been a compromise of sorts, the emigrants turned to the most common form of serious punishment meted out on the overland migration: banishment. Executions certainly occurred—almost always by hanging or firing squad—but it was much more common that wrongdoers were simply forced out on their own, perhaps because the emigrants recognized that most trailside killings were not premeditated murders but, as in the case of Reed and Snyder, sudden explosions of temper, what one historian aptly called "unleashed antagonisms, small personal matters greatly magnified." By avoiding a killing, banishment also helped to keep the peace among those who remained in the company, a consideration that may well have influenced Reed's case. It's easy to imagine that Reed and his supporters would have tried to fight off an execution.
In later years, when the Gold Rush crowded the trail with thousands of wagons, some emigrants began to complain that banishment lacked the needed severity, so easy was it for the expelled man to latch on with some nearby company. But that was hardly the case for Reed. The emigration of 1846 was far smaller, and in any event the Donner Party was lagging far behind all the other companies. Told that he would have to ride alone to California, he faced the real possibility of death.
At first he refused, and while we have no evidence, it seems reasonable that he must have contemplated another option: abandoning the train with his entire family and pushing ahead on their own. The idea had a certain minimal plausibility. The Graves clan had been alone on the trail until it caught the Donner Party west of Fort Bridger, and the Reeds, with five employees, made a comparably sized group. But there were also sound reasons suggesting that it was impractical for the family to forge onward unaided. Their losses in the salt desert had reduced them to borrowed oxen, and the owners might have demanded their animals back. What was more, the Reeds had precious few supplies left, and without the help of fellow emigrants, they would have been reduced solely to hunting for food.
Talking over the family's options, Margret Reed emphasized their scarce provisions and told her husband that if he refused the banishment and somehow avoided a hanging by the other emigrants, he might simply watch his children starve. If he rode ahead, he might return with food and save them all. Indeed, some people remembered Reed's departure as motivated less by the killing and more by a desire to push forward quickly. He left, Mary Ann Graves insisted, "because he would rather travail with one man than the company." Whatever the exact mix of reasons, Reed mounted up and struck out alone, his head wounds swathed in bandages.
When he caught the Donner families farther along on the trail, he offered a sanitized version of his departure: He was simply going ahead for provisions, in effect reprising the effort of Stanton and McCutchan, the volunteers sent out a few weeks before. One of Reed's teamsters, Walter Herron, was traveling with the Donners, but now he joined Reed, providing help and companionship that could easily prove crucial to survival.
In less than a month, Reed had been transformed from the richest man in the train to one of the poorest, and now he had been rejected altogether, forced to abandon his family and the few material possessions he retained. He was leaving his wife and children with a group of people who had just banished him, some of whom had wanted to kill him. And yet the loss may have been greater for the others than for Reed. For all his airs, he possessed admirable qualities. William Graves, who disliked Reed, acknowledged that he was "as true as steel." Reed often made the day-to-day decisions about where to camp or noon or water the stock, and the others had relied on his intelligence and tenacity. When three men were sent ahead to find Hastings and ask about the route, Reed was the only one who returned quickly. Through the Wasatch—and perhaps beyond—it appears that he was effectively the captain of the party, titles notwithstanding. Others recognized such traits. At Fort Bridger, Louis Vasquez turned to Reed when he wanted to recover three missing horses. The animals had strayed or been stolen, and Vasquez wrote out a short note in effect making Reed his agent. "We do hereby authorise Mr. Jas. Read," Vasquez wrote in a full, rounded hand, "to take where ever he should find three horses stolen or strayed from us." He could have turned to any man in the train, but Vasquez picked Reed. Now, short on both provisions and time and still hundreds of miles from its destination, the Donner Party would have to push ahead without its one true leader.
The old man struggled to keep up. The sterile terrain and the long journey had weakened the draft animals until they could no longer bear the extra weight of passengers in the wagons, so everybody was walking, even children and the elderly. Hardcoop, a Belgian whose first name is lost to history, was struggling along as best he could, but the muscles and bones and joints that had carried him through sixty hard years were finally giving way.
The same thing had happened the day before, after he had been booted from his normal seat in Lewis Keseberg's wagon. He had fallen so far behind that when the others pitched camp at night, they realized the old man was missing and dispatched a rider on a rescue mission. Hardcoop was found five miles back on the trail.
Now, the following morning, they were again on the march. It had been less than half an hour since they broke camp, and Keseberg had renewed his refusal to carry Hardcoop. Searching for a ride, Hardcoop asked William Eddy for a seat in his wagon. Eddy balked too. They were struggling through a sandy patch, where the loose ground sucked at the wheels, and Eddy thought his oxen could handle no extra weight. If Hardcoop could keep going on his own for a time, Eddy said, perhaps he could ride in the wagon when the trail improved. The old man vowed to forge ahead.
But when the emigrants stopped that night, they again found Hardcoop was missing, just as he had been the night before. Boys who had been driving cattle recalled him sitting by the side of the trail, physically played out and unable to go on. Another rescue ride so late at night was impossible, so they built a signal fire and hoped he might stumble in to camp. The night guards stoked the flames through the wee hours, but Hardcoop never appeared.
Eddy set about organizing a rescue effort, but he had no horse, so he asked Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves, the two men with saddle animals that could be used.
Breen said it was impossible to save the old man. Graves flashed with anger and said he would not risk losing a good horse to search for a man who was probably already dead. He declared he wanted to hear no more of the idea. Desperate, Eddy and two other men offered to walk back and search. The others said they would not wait. The night had been cold, perhaps too cold for a weakened old man to survive. Even if he was still alive, he could be miles in the rear, a half day's walk just to reach him. And what then? How would they get him back to the main parly? And what about the next day, or the next, or the next? This wasn't a militaiy unit, men bound to one another with unshakable allegiance. Nobody had promised Hardcoop anything. Out this far, you could look to your family members, but not much beyond that. If Hardcoop couldn't keep up, or so the argument must have gone, then sooner or later he was destined to die. They broke camp, hitched up the wagons, took a final look backward, and rolled out to the west. Parents must have told their children to stay extra close that day.
Keseberg has often been described as the villain of Hardcoop's abandonment, and there is little doubt he was a hard man, if not an overtly mean one. Yet Keseberg should not shoulder the blame alone. Eddy was the main source for the story, especially the details about his efforts at a morning rescue, yet even he admitted that the previous day he refused to let Hardkoop ride in his wagon when the old man asked for help, and Eddy apparently made no effort to learn what happened to him the rest of the day.
Nor did anyone else. On the day Hardcoop was left behind, most members of the party must have had some inkling of the old man's struggle, must have noticed that he was faltering or was sitting by the trail or was nowhere to be found at the noon break. Only the day before, after all, he had been unable to keep up; it would have required no great act of collective mercy or prescience to mind his progress with a protective eye. Anyone could have helped, but no one did.
Hardcoop would have labored on until he was past exhaustion. He had a son and daughter in Antwerp, and after the trip west he intended to return to Belgium and spend his declining years with them. If only he could somehow make it to camp, perhaps he would see them again, bounce grandchildren on his knee and spend a peaceful old age amid the pleasures of home. He had risked everything for one last adventure—a glimpse of this far-off place called California—and now the dream was darkening into nightmare. He could be halfway to Belgium now, not out here stumbling through the wilderness and fighting for his life.
If he made it through the night, he must have gazed at the morning horizon hoping for some approaching figure of rescue. Perhaps someone was coming back. Perhaps they had not forgotten him. Perhaps they would take pity on a weak old man. But at some point he faced the facts. He could go no farther forward, and they were not coming back. He may have just walked to the end and collapsed onto the trail when he was fully spent. Or perhaps he found some piece of shade where he could sit down and await the inevitable.
AHEAD ON THE TRAIL, THE BANISHED James Reed and his teamster Walter Herron had only one horse between them, so they took turns riding and walking, half the day in the saddle and half on foot. Freed from the wagon train's crawling pace, they made good time—close to forty miles one day and often twenty-five or more, by Reed's reckoning. His unfinished diary remained with his family, but now he continued the effort as best he could, using a scrap of spare paper to scrawl out a crude map, mileage notations, and a few taciturn comments. "Hard pass. You must double teams," he wrote at the start, presumably referring to the hill where he had killed Snyder.
Despite "all the economy I could use," as Reed wrote later, their provisions ran out in a few days, forcing them to hunt for food. Still, he and Herron survived the Nevada desert, even stopping long enough at a hot springs to use the scalding water to make a cup of tea. Near the lake where the rest of the party would eventually be trapped, Reed noted that they endured eight miles of "the worst road in creaton," and then began climbing into the Sierra Nevada. Game grew scarcer, and in any event they had little time for hunting if they wished to reach the California settlements and return with supplies before winter. The result was that starvation became a very real possibility. They managed to gather a few wild onions, but eventually they grew so famished that Herron wanted to kill the horse for meat, although Reed held him off, insisting that destroying their best means of transportation should be a last resort. At one point, while Herron was riding and Reed walking, Reed found a single bean, apparently dropped by previous emigrants, and they began scanning the ground. "Never was a road examined more closely for several miles," Reed wrote later. In all, they found five beans; Herron, who had briefly become delirious from hunger, ate three of them, Reed two.
Stumbling on some abandoned wagons, they ransacked the contents but found no food. Desperate, Reed checked a bucket slung under the bed of one of the wagons and used to store axle grease. He scraped away the tar normally used as grease and at the bottom found "a streak of rancid tallow"—animal fat that was sometimes also used as a lubricant. As an animal product, it was theoretically edible, and so Reed used the bucket's tar paddle to scrape up a ball of tallow about the size of a walnut. As repulsive as it sounds—old, congealed animal fat that had been sitting beneath a coating of tar—they each ate a piece, and then Herron had another. They walked on, but Reed went only fifty yards before his stomach rebelled and he became "deadly sick and blind." He had to stop and rest against a rock, leaning his head on the muzzle of his gun. He looked so ashen that Herron asked if he was dying.
In time, they spotted wagons belonging to a group of emigrants who had stopped to rest their cattle at a place called Bear Valley. Amazingly, they also found Charles Stanton, one of the two men who had left the Donner Party six weeks earlier to ride to California and fetch supplies. Stanton had safely reached Sutter's Fort and now was returning to the company with mules loaded with flour and dried meat. William McCutchan, the other volunteer and a man whose wife and baby daughter were among the emigrants, had also reached Sutter's Fort but had been too sick to return, so it was Stanton, the diminutive bachelor with no relatives at risk, who started back eastward over the Sierra.
Reed and Stanton exchanged news and then, as soon as possible rode off in opposite directions: Reed westward, toward Sutter's Fort and more supplies, Stanton eastward, toward the struggling party he had vowed to rescue.
BACK ON THE HUMBOLDT RIVER, the main contingent of the Donner Party was enduring a fresh adversity: conflict with Indians. Hollywood depictions notwithstanding, violence between wagon trains and tribes was actually quite rare. Over the long span of history, of course, the European conquest of the Americas was devastating to native peoples, seizing their homelands and effecting a genocide on the population. In North America, British, French, and Spanish settlement reduced the pre-Columbian population by at least half, perhaps far more than that. Estimates vary hugely, but it's clear that the European triumph cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. But in the shorter term, the overland migration to the West actually produced far less bloodshed than has commonly been portrayed in the popular culture, either in vintage movies that depicted all Indians as bloodthirsty savages preying on innocent families or in more recent fare that reversed the roles. John D. Unruh Jr., the best historian of the overland migration, tried to count the deaths of emigrants at the hands of Indians, and vice versa, using reasonably reliable contemporary sources. His admittedly imprecise tally for the two decades between 1840 and i860 found only 362 emigrants killed by Indians and—even more surprising—only 426 Indians directly killed by emigrants. Even among the few hundred deaths Unruh could identify, most occurred in 1849 or later, when the Gold Rush increased traffic on the trail drastically, unavoidably exacerbating discord with Indians. In some early years, Unruh found no deaths directly attributable to emigrant-Indian skirmishes. In 1846, the year of the Donner Party, he recorded only four emigrant deaths and twenty Indian fatalities.
Typically, emigrants started the journey with great fear of the Indians but soon found their concerns unwarranted. At Fort Kearny in Nebraska—two hundred miles or more into the journey—a correspondent reported in 1850 that most of that year's trains had yet to even see an Indian. When the two groups did encounter one another, relations were usually friendly. Indians gave directions to those who were lost, helped extract wagons that were stuck, provided water or firewood to families short on provisions, and in at least one case rescued a drowning man. Mutually beneficial business deals were common, with Indians hired to serve as guides, guards, interpreters, and packers. So peaceful was the trip that some emigrants concluded almost all dangers were mythological and discarded their weapons. Lansford Hastings, who had written the guidebook read by many emigrants of 1846, noted that earlier parties had disarmed in what is today Idaho. In 1850 one party was no farther than western Nebraska when they lightened their load by throwing out their guns.
Almost all emigrants viewed the Indians with what we would regard as gross racism and sometimes acted on an attendant belief that they could behave toward natives in any way they liked. There are stories not only of kidnapping but of wanton murder. But there were also many cases of emigrant-Indian interaction that were charmingly human and universal. Heinrich Lienhard, ahead of the Donner Party on the trail in 1846, once struck up a sign-language friendship with a Shoshone by asking him to dig some edible roots. Lienhard ate one of the roots—it reminded him of a parsnip—and enjoyed it. But that night he suffered horribly from stomach cramps and diarrhea, so when the Indian brought him more roots in the morning Lienhard was aghast. "Since I could explain why only by signs, I bent over forward, held my stomach with both hands, and groaned as if I had severe stomach pains. Then I imitated a certain sound with my lips that could come only from another part of the anatomy, and at the same time I made a quick gesture to my behind. The Indians understood completely, and they all burst out in a storm of laughter. My friend laughed loudest of all, and threw his roots at my back. We naturally joined in the laughter and parted as good friends in spite of all."
When trouble did arise, emigrants sometimes found that Indians were wrongly blamed. In 1844 a minister named Edward Parrish noted in his journal a developing crisis that was by turns a story of suspicion and exculpation, all in a single morning: "Preparing to make an early start, But the cattle are not all lined up. Indians accused of driving them off. Indians not guilty—cattle found." White criminals sometimes disguised themselves as Indians, although in at least one case the ruse failed. In 1859 a woman was raped by five apparent Indians, although she was able to identify her attackers as white men because, in the words of a government report on the incident, "They had not taken the precaution to paint the whole body."
We have fewer written records revealing the Native American perspective about the migration, although we know that some chiefs initially urged cooperation and amicable relations. The West was a polyglot place, after all.
Aside from hundreds of distinct Indian tribes, there had long been French, British, and American trappers and traders, occasionally even Spanish explorers roaming up from the south. It would not have been immediately obvious that the new groups of white people in covered wagons represented a stark departure from the past. When the emigrants did begin to appear, one record of Indian perception suggests a progression of emotions not unlike that of the emigrants: initial fear followed by a growing acceptance and realization of common humanity. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, the daughter of a chief, remembered that when she was a girl, her people first heard stories of slaughter and even cannibalism by emigrant trains. Caught too near a band of approaching whites, the little girl's mother became so fearful that she briefly buried her two children alive as a way to hide them, propping sage bushes over their exposed faces to provide more cover.
If a single rough grain of contention abraded the relationship between emigrants and Indians—at least from the perspective of the emigrants—it was the theft of horses and other stock. For California-bound trains, theft was worst of all along the Humboldt, a hardscrabble region inhabited by Indians whom the emigrants denounced as "diggers." The name came from the native practice of using a stick to dig for edible roots and grub, but it was also meant to suggest that the local Indians were primitive, filthy people. Mark Twain denounced them as "the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen," and the perception continued into the twentieth century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard DeVoto, who in another context chastised Americans for insufficient comprehension of Indian life and folkways, described the "diggers" as people without a culture, even insisting that many were "physically decadent." In fact, the Indians of the Great Basin—mostly Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute—had shrewdly adapted to their difficult surroundings. The digging that earned the white men's epithet was a reasonable way to reach foodstuffs, but it was hardly their only method of acquiring nourishment. They snared game, irrigated small plots of land, and collected large quantities of pine nuts, some of which were buried in order to preserve them for the winter months. DeVoto was wrong about a lack of culture: They were renowned for their artistic basketry, painted hides to depict important events, and specified rites to mark mileposts of life such as the birth of a couple's first child. Though hardly the richest native people of North America, neither were the Indians of the Humboldt River the filthy savages reported by the emigrants.
At every step of the journey, the Donner Party fit the pattern of emigrant-Indian interaction: initial fear, then friendly relations, then trouble along the Humboldt. The fear began before the trip did. On the long winter nights in the months before they left, Virginia Reed's grandmother entertained the girl with yarns about a relative supposedly kidnapped and held captive by Indians for five years, tales that so frightened Virginia she would back up against the nearest wall, lest a marauder attack her with a tomahawk from behind. When the Donner Party wagons encountered Indians operating a ferry service across the Kansas River, Virginia wondered if the strange entrepreneurs would sink the vessel halfway across so as to drown their white passengers. No such confrontation occurred, of course, and by the time they reached Fort Laramie, the members of the Donner Party were comfortable enough with Indians to invite them for meals. But conflict began almost as soon as they hit the Humboldt. A yoke of Graves's oxen was stolen by two Indians who wandered into camp and stayed the night, at one point helping to put out a grass fire. Two days later, Graves lost a horse, again apparently to thieves. Farther down the river, all of Graves's remaining horses trotted away under the reins of new and unknown owners. Then the serious depredations began. In a single night nineteen head of cattle went missing. A few days later the overnight guards, apparently thinking the danger had passed with the darkness, came into camp for breakfast. When they gulped down their last swig of coffee and rose to prepare for the morning march, they discovered that twenty-one more animals had disappeared in the time it took a man to eat a rasher or two of bacon. The losses imperiled transportation—cattle pulled the wagons—but the real cost was far greater, and one the emigrants could not yet fully appreciate. A good portion of the Donner Party's potential food supply had vanished.
Down the dwindling waters of the Humboldt, they set their course by taking aim toward Lone Mountain, a desert butte that reminded some emigrants of pictures they had seen of ancient Mayan pyramids. A broad, open meadow provided good fodder for the stock—the coarse grass "as thick as hair on a Dogs back"—and then they were at the Sink, the strange and somber spot where the river died. In wet years it formed a broad, shallow lake; in a drought it simply vanished into the desert. Most years it was something in between, a boggy marsh that one slightly poetic Gold Rusher described as "a veritable sea of slime, a slough of despond, an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison," all of which created "the appearance of utter desolation." Given the conditions of 1846, the Donner Party almost surely found little or no water in what was sometimes called, too optimistically, Humboldt Lake. James Clyman, the mountain man who had tried to warn Reed about the Hastings Cut-Off, had passed by the area earlier in the year and spied "the most thirsty appearance of any place I ever witnessed The whole of several large vallies is covered in a verry fin clay or mud which has vimited from the bowels of the earth."
At the end of the sink stood a strange earthen berm, perhaps twenty feet high, extending across the riverbed. Probably created by the wave action of an ancient lake, this natural dike guarded a small slough where emigrants were known to fill every available vessel, sometimes even using their boots for water storage. They were eager to collect all the water they could because they were about to enter a stretch of the journey almost as brutal as the desert just beyond the Great Salt Lake. With the Humboldt now gone, they needed to cross to the Truckee River, which would lead them toward the pass over the Sierra Nevada and into California. But between the Humboldt and the Truckee lay a desolate forty-mile desert.
Like most trains, the Donner Party tried to cross at night, hoping the cooler temperatures would ease the agony of the long, waterless push. At 4:00 AM., halfway across, they found a hot springs, where steam spewed up from the ground "like the mouth of hell," as a later emigrant wrote. Brackish and foul-tasting, the water was still good enough to drink once it was cooled, and in the meantime offered the chance to make coffee or tea. Eddy got some coffee from the Donners and made some for his wife and children, who seemed to get a boost of energy. They rested for a time, then started again a few hours later and drove all through the day, then into the wee hours for the second straight night. For the last ten miles, deep sand covered the road, and the animals slipped and slid as they heaved the wagons through. When the Gold Rush hit a few years later and the trail turned into a crowded highway, the rotting corpses of collapsed animals lined the route. One man reported in 1849 that he and his companions had to stop "every few yards" to rest their teams, despite the overpowering stench of decay. "All our traveling experience," he wrote, "furnishes no parallel to this." The Donner Party was no exception: Three yoke of cattle died of fatigue.
But at the end of the desert, a verdant reward awaited. After hundreds of miles of the arid, rocky sterility of the intermountain West, the Truckee River was a thing of beauty, a cool and inviting oasis lined with trees. No member of the Donner Party left a direct record of the moment they saw the river, but if their experience was like that of other trains, the arrival at the Truckee was an occasion for glee. For weeks they had seen virtually no trees; now they rushed toward a river lined with a shady bower of cottonwoods and willows. They paused a moment or two to scan the trees for hidden Indians, then turned loose the animals and ran toward the clear, clean water. They waded out into the knee-deep stream and, side by side with the stock, drank long and delicious draughts. Elisha Brooks, who made the trip in 1852, remembered her first sighting of the Truckee as though it were a mirage or a miracle. "We beheld the green banks and crystal clear waters of the Truckee River by the morning sun; and it was to us the River of Life."
Still, the Donner Party that arrived at those resuscitating riverbanks was a slowly disintegrating unit, both materially and spiritually. The Eddys were nearly destitute now, their wagon and possessions abandoned back on the Humboldt when Indians stole their last yoke of oxen. With no other choice, they had resolved to finish the journey on foot, Eleanor carrying their baby daughter and William shouldering their three-year-old son, three pounds of sugar, some bullets, and a powder horn. (His rifle no longer fired, but apparently he assumed he could borrow one later.) Margret Reed, her children, and her employees were hardly better off. They had been forced to abandon their wagon shortly after James Reed's departure, and although for a time they borrowed a lighter vehicle from the Graveses, soon they too, like the Eddys, abandoned most of their property. "We had to cash all of our close except a change or 2," Virginia Reed wrote. The Breens agreed to haul the family's last few garments, and three-year-old Thomas Reed and five-year-old James Reed were put aboard their two remaining horses. The fact that a three-year-old boy was not joined by another rider offered plain testimony to the pathetic condition of the animals. The other Reeds walked, although across the desert the Donners let them ride in a wagon. Worst of all was the fate of a German named Wolfinger, reputedly a rich man. When he stayed behind to dig a cache for his wagon before the desert crossing from the Humboldt to the Truckee, he mysteriously disappeared, and the various recollections of survivors could never quite clarify the circumstances.
So with the party still struggling, it's not surprising that talk soon turned toward another effort to secure more provisions from California. Stanton and McCutchan, the two volunteers, had been gone for more than a month, and no one knew if they had even survived to reach Sutter's Fort, let alone return. As for Reed and Herron, occasional trailside notes had offered evidence of their initial survival, but no one knew their ultimate fate. It was conceivable that none of the four men had reached safe haven across the mountains.
The two men who emerged as the would-be saviors this time were the sons-in-law of Levinah Murphy, the Mormon widow leading a three-generation clan. William Foster was married to Murphy's oldest daughter, William Pike to the second oldest. They had joined the family somewhat by chance. In the winter of 1842, when the Murphy family was leaving Nauvoo, Illinois, for Tennessee, ice floes captured their ship and held it fast in the Mississippi River. Foster and Pike were both crew members, and as the vessel lay motionless, romances flowered with the two oldest Murphy daughters, sixteen-year-old Sarah and fourteen-year-old Harriet. Both couples were wed four days after Christmas, and by the time they went west four years later, the Fosters had one young child, the Pikes two.
For an engineer on a riverboat, William Pike was a man of glorious pedigree. His grandfather had been an officer in the Revolutionary War; his uncle was the explorer Zebulon Pike, the discoverer of Pike's Peak. At the time of the Donner Party expedition, William was in his early thirties, an impressive and intelligent figure with a mechanical bent, a man almost as old and experienced as his mother-in-law. It says something about his standing in the company that near the start of the Hastings Cut-Off, when three men were needed to ride ahead and find the company's absent guide, Pike was one of those chosen. Now, he was ready to begin a risky new venture with a man he surely must have trusted, his former shipmate and current brother-in-law. But as the two men readied supplies and equipment, a small pistol that was being loaded somehow fired, striking Pike in the back. One of his wife's sisters remembered that he lived for half an hour, suffering "more than tongue can tell."
Accidents with firearms on the trail were more common than might be expected, especially given our modern conception that everyone in the nineteenth century was a backwoodsman or a hunter. In fact, many emigrants were new to life in the wild, as nothing so vividly attests as their experiences with weapons. More than once, someone pulled a gun from a wagon muzzle-first—and paid for the mistake with his life. Gold Rusher Andrew Orvis shot himself in the hip and noted that "there has been several kiled and wounded on the road in the same way by just being earless with their fire arms." Occasionally, the circumstances were simply bizarre. In one case a gun went off accidentally because the hammer caught on a woman's skirt.
But Pike's death offered a broader lesson too. In less than a month, the Donner Party had lost four of its members: Snyder stabbed, Har-coop abandoned, Wolfinger the victim of an unknown fate, Pike shot accidentally. Even before the mountain entrapment that would mark their tale for generations, the Donner Party was proving the hazards of the way west. Life was risky everywhere—cholera was cholera, no matter where it struck—but the weight of the historical evidence suggests that death was more common for emigrants who braved the trip than for their more timid brethren back home. A budding new industry recognized the risks. Only three years before the Donner Party headed west, the first commercial life insurance company in the United States was founded, sparking a quick proliferation of competitors. But almost all the policies forbade travel beyond the Mississippi River, so likely was it that the companies would have to pay beneficiaries. Not until the Gold Rush sent thousands of policyholders scurrying toward the Pacific did the insurers allow western travel, and even then there was typically a surcharge on premiums, an added tariff for adventure in America's great natural wonderland.
ALONG THE TRUCKEE, THE WAGONS snaked through the river canyon, fording the current again and again, the water pushing up against the wheel rims. At times the canyon pinched to a sheer-walled gorge that barely offered room for a trail.
Then on one of the endless days marching westward they finally saw a cheering site ahead of them. Stanton bumped along at the head of a little mule train, returning with supplies, just as he had promised. After bidding farewell to Reed on the west slope of the Sierra, the intrepid Stanton had crossed the mountains with two Indians sent along by John Sutter, and now, somewhere on the eastern side, he reappeared before his old companions. Provisions were extraordinarily low, but Stanton brought flour and fresh meat, and the Dutch ovens soon produced biscuits. Patty Reed loaded her apron and distributed the welcome victuals to the children—one biscuit apiece. "I don't know when we had had bread before," remembered Frances Donner. "It was a great treat to us then." For the Reeds, Stanton brought another godsend as well: news that James Reed had made it safely over the mountains. Stanton recounted his meeting with Reed, "not fur from Suters Fort," as Virginia Reed described it, and said that although Reed had eaten only three times in a week, he was at least healthy enough to ride onward.
To the bedraggled, half-starved members of the Donner Party, it must have seemed that the worst of their problems had passed. They had already endured more than many emigrants ever did. Leaving the main road, they had been forced to hack a new path through the Wasatch and then to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert, a more desiccated and debilitating environment than most trains ever encountered. Comrades had been deserted callously and killed violently, and a man had been banished to the wilderness. At various points, water and provisions had run so low as to threaten the very survival of the party. Yet now they had a replenished larder and, perhaps more important, a guide who could lead them over the lone obstacle still to be conquered. Stanton had crossed the Sierra twice, once westward to fetch supplies, once eastward to bring them back. What was more, he was a man they could trust, not merely one of their own but a selfless volunteer who had proven his fealty merely by reappearing. Surely he could lead them all over the mountains to safety. Surely the ordeal was done.