In the modern world, rescue is often a relatively easy affair. Discover that some unfortunate band of adventurers is trapped in the wilds— isolated by the natural confines of mountain or island or jungle—and usually a helicopter can whirl down and disgorge medics and guides and helpers of every ilk. There are exceptions, of course. It has been said that the upper reaches of Mt. Everest might as well be the moon, for all the hope of sudden deliverance from afar. But most of the time, if sufferers can be found, assistance can be delivered with astonishing speed. Sailors are saved from turbulent seas; climbers are plucked from cliffs. Even if those in need cannot be reached, they can often be located, so that a crackly voice on the radio or the steady beep of a transponder can serve as the target for a parachuted cache of calories that preserves life until the motor-powered cavalry roars over the hill.
The nineteenth century presented more intractable dilemmas. In the case of the Donner Party, learning the precise location of the stranded party provided no guarantee of its salvation. The helpless travelers faced a mountain range all but impassable on foot or in the saddle, yet would-be rescuers shared precisely the same means of transport. And if getting in is just as hard as getting out, if you cannot reach them for precisely the same reasons they cannot reach you—then how the hell do you save their lives?
AT FIRST, EVEN THE POTENTIAL HELPERS needed help. When the seven surviving members of the Forlorn Hope struggled down out of the mountains in mid-January, the little settlement they found at Johnson's Ranch was too small to mount a rescue mission. So the first task was not to head east to aid the victims, but south and west to summon men, equipment and supplies from Sutter's Fort, forty hazardous miles away.
Winter rains had deluged Northern California. Rivers strained against their banks, floodwaters surged over fields, mud seized hooves and feet and wagon wheels and held them with an unbreakable grip. The countryside, one man remembered, was "one vast quag mire."
The first obstacle was the Bear River, pounding along too high and too fast to ford. Two pine logs were lashed together with strips of rawhide, and the next morning the haphazard raft was shoved out into the roaring current, an Indian messenger named Indian Dick hanging on for dear life. The little vessel remained intact long enough to ferry its passenger to the opposite bank, where he took off his shoes, rolled his pants up above the knee, and set off on his lonely slog through the floodlands. Remarkably, he reached Sutter's Fort that night and raised the alarm about the desperate, trapped emigrants.
Heading into the Sierra in the dead of winter was a life-threatening enterprise, so recruiting participants posed a problem. With a war on, John Sutter had briefly lost control of his own fort, which was now under the command of an army lieutenant named Edward Kern. Kern had no authority to pay a rescue party, but he made a vague promise that the federal government would do something for the men, then fired off a quick letter to his superiors seeking retroactive approval and guidance. Kern's amorphous promise fell short. Only three men came forward, too few to even begin the journey. Then Sutter stepped in and proved that an established local man often has more credibility than the federal government. Along with John Sinclair, whose Mexican title of alcalde made him something akin to a mayor, Sutter said he would guarantee the rescuers three dollars a day, a hefty paycheck. With Sutter and Sinclair backing the finances, four more men volunteered, enough to make the core of an expedition.
Rescuers said later that money was not their incentive, and it's hard to discount their courage. "Finally it was concluded that we would go or die trying," wrote Daniel Rhoads, one of two brothers who agreed to go along. "For not to make any attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us and to California as long as time lasted."
Whatever their motivations, a party of about a dozen men was raised, many of them fresh emigrants who had themselves crossed the plains only months before. They gathered at Johnson's Ranch to make preparations. Sutter and Sinclair built on their earlier generosity by providing provisions and horses, but still it took days to ready the supplies. Cattle were slaughtered and the meat dried. Rawhide strips were cut so they would be ready later for making snowshoes. Saddles posed such a supply problem that two local women loaned sidesaddles for the rescuers' use.
By early February, a little less than three weeks after Eddy stumbled down out of the mountains, the party was ready to leave. Sinclair arrived to take down the names of the rescuers for the official record and to bid them farewell. They were doing a noble thing, he said, and should not sacrifice their own lives in the effort. But neither should they flinch. They were "never to turn their backs upon the Mountains until they had brought away as many of their suffering fellowbeings as possible." A few of the horses had gone astray, and by the time they rounded up the loose animals much of the day was gone, so they delayed their departure until morning. A forbidding sly hinted at a brewing storm, and that evening the clouds loosed a downpour, "one of the heaviest hurricanes ever experienced on the Sacramento." In the higher elevations the rain would be snow, and as the men of the rescue party drifted off to sleep, they must have wondered if the attempt to save other lives would cost them their own.
FROM THE SAFETY OF THE LOWLANDS, Caleb Greenwood raised his eyes to the seductive white peaks and the ominous winter skies, calculating the odds. Greenwood had spent a lifetime in the mountains of the West, as trapper, guide, hunter, explorer. He was in his eighties, but his sinewy strength and vigor suggested a younger man. His worn buckskins looked as though he had not taken them off for years. A Crow Indian wife shared his household. Grown sons, universally referred to in the ugly argot of the day as "half-breeds," joined in his adventures.
Greenwood had stayed alive by respecting the countless agents of death that populated the wilderness: beasts and disease and enemies and, perhaps most of all, ruthless winter. He knew what awaited a handful of men, mostly rubes fresh from the East, with no real guide, trudging off into the teeth of the Sierra in the dead of winter. Greenwood proposed a hard but realistic wager: None of the rescuers would ever be seen alive again. Nobody took the bet.
FROM THE MOMENT THE RESCUERS LEFT Johnson's Ranch, the squelch of mud served as the drumbeat of their march. The trail was so sodden that frequently they had to unburden the pack mules, drag them out of the muck, then reload the beasts and continue on. Within days, the men and equipment were so soaked that they needed an entire day of immobility just to dry out. There was no rain the next day, although they encountered a creek so swollen that the animals had to swim across. The provisions were tied to a log and floated over.
The little band reached the snow on Tuesday, February 9, six days and more than forty miles into their journey. Within hours, the mules were floundering "belly deep," and the next day William Eddy, who had somehow recuperated enough to join the rescue effort, was sent back with some of the exhausted animals. Two men were left with a cache of provisions, and the rest of the meat was divided into fifty-pound packs, a heavy load for men in deep snow.
They struggled on, but as they climbed higher the snow grew deeper every day. On Sunday, the 14th, three of the men simply refused to go farther. That meant only seven were left, and morale plummeted. There must have been some talk of a general retreat, for Reason Tucker, who had been named by Sinclair as one of two captains of the party, decided that a drastic step was needed. "Under existing circumstances I took it upon myself to insure every man who persevered to the end five dollars a day from the time they entered the snow." Tucker was taking on a significant financial risk, but perhaps he was motivated by a sympathetic compassion: He had crossed the plains himself the previous summer, even traveling briefly with the Graves family before they joined the Donner Party. The wage guarantee worked. "We determined to go ahead," Tucker wrote in his diary.
Each man took a turn at the head of the line, breaking trail by sinking knee-deep in the snow at every step. When the leader grew exhausted, he fell to the back, and the second man took over as pacesetter. To guide their return, they set fire to dead pine trees along their path. Every few days they hung a small bundle of meat from a tree, lightening their packs and providing a ready source of resupply on the trip home.
The hiking was fatiguing, brutal work, but when they made camp at night they somehow had to find the strength to fell saplings and make a platform for their campfire. Daniel Rhoads remembered that they usually roasted some meat for supper, "and then throwing our blankets over our shoulders sat, close together, around the fire and dozed through the night the best way we could."
They were extraordinarily exposed, and if a major blizzard hit, they could have been trapped as inescapably as the people they were trying to rescue. But for the most part, the weather held, and up they went, three miles on a bad day, eight miles on a good one. On the 17th, they reached the headwaters of the Yuba River, just beneath the pass, where they guessed the snow was thirty feet deep.
The following day they crossed the pass in the morning and descended the steep eastern slope of the range, the icy flatness of Truckee Lake spread below them. They reached the lake in the late afternoon, their long shadows reaching out as if to announce their presence. They trudged on to the far shore, at the eastern end, where they had been told the cabins lay. Well supplied and with some idea of where they were going, they had completed the journey in about half the time of the Forlorn Hope, yet still it had taken two weeks.
But where was everyone? No emigrants waved or danced or shouted gleefully to herald their arrival. In fact, no one could be seen at all. "No living thing except ourselves was in sight," Daniel Rhoads remembered, "and we thought that all must have perished." Probably they were just a little too late. Probably starvation or disease or despair had taken their ultimate toll. It was a reasonable assumption, but out of some desperate hope one of the rescuers let out a yell, "a loud halloo." Then they waited to see who, if anyone, was alive to answer.
The trapped emigrants had kept a yearning vigil westward, peering off toward the mountains and squinting their eyes against the blinding white glare of sun and snow. In his diary, Patrick Breen anticipated the arrival of help. "Expecting some account from Suiters Soon," he jotted down at one point. And then a few days later: "Expecting some person across the Mountain this week." At Alder Creek, Jean Baptiste Trudeau took a more direct approach. The young Donner family worker once climbed to the top of a tall pine tree near camp—an impressive and exhausting feat given his condition—so that he might catch sight of any arriving rescue party.
So it is ironic that when help finally arrived, no one was waiting. When the seven rescuers walked up to the lake cabins and let out their loud "halloo," the emaciated occupants were all inside their cramped and filthy quarters. As the rescuers stood waiting, hoping for a response and expecting none, Levinah Murphy finally emerged and climbed up the roughly hewn steps in the snow. She reached the surface and stared at these apparitions who had appeared in the midst of so unforgiving a wilderness. In a thin croak—"a hollow voice very much agitated," remembered one of the rescuers—she rasped out a question: "Are you men from California or do you come from heaven?"
Conditions staggered the rescuers. Emigrants whispered shallow breaths from gaunt frames, some unable to stand or walk. Bodies lay about, most buried as well as the waning strength of the survivors had allowed, though some merely covered with quilts. Inside, in the crowded cavelike cabins where the emigrants had passed three and a half months, the revolting glue of boiled hides and bones clung to grimy pots. Bedclothes reeked. Vermin flickered about. The stench overwhelmed.
Rescuers dug into their packs and doled out what little food they had to spare—jerked beef and biscuits "made out of the coarsest flour" but to the emigrants as sweet as any baker's delicacy. Then the rescuers posted a guard over their remaining larder to prevent the famished survivors from raiding supplies needed for the return trip.
The lake cabins were only the first stop, and the next morning three of the rescuers took advantage of warm, clear weather to set off for the Alder Creek camp. A few hours later they arrived, finding the tent-bound Donner families in conditions that were, if it was possible, even worse than those at the lake. The rescuers huddled with George Donner immediately, talking over hard decisions that had to be made almost instantly. A blizzard could roar over the peaks at any moment, dropping fresh sheets of snow that would rise up around both rescuers and victims like the walls of a prison. The return march had to begin that very day, right away in fact, but it was plain that some of the emigrants were too weak to travel. So yet again, as when the Forlorn Hope set out, families faced a horrifying and brutal triage, deciding who would make a harrowing bid for salvation and who would remain behind, very possibly to die.
Softening the blow as best they could, the rescuers claimed that fresh parties were being raised in California, something that Sutter had promised but they did not know with certainty. They feigned ignorance about the gruesome ordeal of the Forlorn Hope, whose true experiences of death and cannibalism would have disheartened the remaining emigrants. William Eddy survived, the rescuers said, for their own expedition had been outfitted in response to his pleas, but as for the rest of the party they claimed to know nothing.
Betsy Donner had no choice but to stay behind. Her husband, Jacob, had died weeks before, and now she was sole parent to seven children, some of whom clearly were too young for the journey. She kept her oldest son, fifteen-year-old Solomon, with her, presumably deciding to risk his life so that he might help care for his youngest siblings. The two next oldest children, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old George, she sent along with the rescuers.
In the other tent, George Donner was plainly too sick to go. The laceration on his hand—the gash he had received while trying to fix the wagon clear back at the start of the entrapment—had grown infected, and the fetid wound had crippled him. Tamzene Donner, his wife, was healthy enough to make a try for safety, but she refused to leave her ailing husband. She sent away her two stepdaughters—fourteen-year-old Elitha and twelve-year-old Leanna, George's children by a prior marriage—but kept her own three toddlers by her side.
The rescuers felled a pine tree, so the remaining emigrants would have firewood, and then measured out the pathetically small rations they could leave behind for each of those staying at the tents—a teacupful of flour, two small biscuits, and a few thin pieces of jerked beef as long as a forefinger. Such scraps might suffice until another rescue party arrived, and in any event common decency required some sort of allowance, even if the recipients were doomed.
Then, within hours of their arrival, they departed, tramping off single file toward the lake, their charges trailing behind. Sparing what she could, Tamzene Donner took some string and tied a threadbare blanket around her stepdaughters' shoulders, hoping it would serve as a shawl in the daytime and a bedroll at night.
The drama was all so quick that it seemed a little unreal. For months the Donners, like every other trapped family, had prayed for the joyous arrival of help from across the mountains. But no trumpets heralded the great moment. Instead it was just three exhausted men bearing scant food, not much news, and precious thin hope. Tamzene's youngest daughter, three-year-old Eliza, didn't even understand what had happened. Only afterward did she comprehend the sad and brutal truth that the long-awaited rescuers had just come and gone.
REASON TUCKER WAS A BIG, RANGY VIRGINIAN with an uncompromising desire to help the stranded emigrants. When William Eddy first stumbled down out of the mountains, Tucker was among the handful of men who saddled up horses and rode out into the night to bring in the trailing members of the Forlorn Hope. And then, in the early stages of the rescue mission, it was Tucker who personally guaranteed the men's wages, a promise that preserved the whole expedition from collapse. Tucker had no relatives in the Donner Party, nor even, so far as we know, any particularly close friends, and yet he never balked at the dangerous business of deliverance.
But as Tucker led the survivors away from the Alder Creek camp and back toward Truckee Lake, the enormity of the experience overwhelmed him, and the vigor that had brought him so far sheered away like an avalanche sheeting down a mountainside. "On the road back I gave out," he confided to his diary, although he displayed characteristic pioneer stoicism and offered no more detailed explanation. In time, he recovered and trudged onward through the dimming light of late afternoon. He reached the lake cabins at sundown, narrowly avoiding the nocturnal cold that might have transformed him from rescuer to victim.
Trailing in Tucker's wake, twelve-year-old Leanna Donner struggled even more. Even at the start, she was so weak that others doubted she would reach the crest of the first hill. As the day wore on, she began to cry, then sat down on the snow, refusing to go farther. Her older sister, Elitha, urged her on, promising that the cabins of the lake camp were just over the next hill. Leanna struggled to her feet, plodded to the crest of the rise, and saw nothing. Again she collapsed and wept. Again Elitha pushed her forward. The cycle repeated until at last they saw the smoke curling upward from the cabin chimneys, a magical lure that drew them on. "When we reached the Graves cabin it was all I could do to step down the snow steps into the cabin," Leanna remembered later. "Such pain and misery as I endured that day is beyond description."
She had gone seven miles; now she had to cross the Sierra.
PATRICK BREEN PUT AWAY HIS DIARIST'S PENCIL, for the sudden presence of strangers in camp meant the first chance for fresh conversation in months. On the two days after Tucker and the others returned from Alder Creek, Breen scratched out the most meager of entries: "pleasant weather" the first day and "Thawey warm day" the second.
People were moving around again, rejuvenated by the knowledge that the snow and the mountains and the winter could be conquered. "The sight of us appeared to put life into their emaciated frames," one rescuer wrote. Yet there wasn't much to do. To rest the rescuers, it had been decided that they would not begin the return journey until Monday, four days after their arrival. In the meantime the survivors at the lake cabins filled the dreary hours with the same heartrending calculus that had already occurred at Alder Creek: families assessing the cold odds of life and death and deciding who would make the Herculean effort to escape and who would stay and wait.
Back in December, the Forlorn Hope had consisted almost entirely of adults, several of whom were parents with children back at the cabins. The remaining adults could care for the youngsters, and without provisions the trip was just too risky for the young. So the adults left and the children stayed.
Now it was the other way around. Most of the adults were dead, too sick to travel, or forced to remain in camp to care for children so young they could barely toddle. The new group would be led by relatively healthy adults—the rescuers—with at least some basic provisions, so the parents of the Donner Party took the opportunity to send away their older offspring. Patrick and Peggy Breen sent away two of their seven children. Elizabeth Graves chose the three oldest of her brood to go. Levinah Murphy dispatched two of her three remaining children and one of her two remaining grandchildren. Lewis Keseberg was still hampered by the injured foot that had rendered him a mule passenger during the futile assault on the mountain pass in the fall, but his young wife risked the attempt with her only surviving child, whom she planned to carry. Margret Reed, desperate as always to reach her banished husband, declared that she and all four of her children would flee.
The resulting roster was astonishingly juvenile. As the column marched out of camp, the seven rescuers were pursued by twenty-three skeletal emigrants, most of whom were fourteen or younger, a good many with no parent accompanying them. It was a procession that would today be considered a school parade: two fourteen-year-olds, two thirteen-year-olds, three twelve-year-olds, an eleven-year-old, a ten-year-old, two eight-year-olds, a five-year-old, and, carried in the arms of others, three three-year-olds.
Before long it was plain that two of the Reed children—eight-year-old Patty and three-year-old Thomas—could not go on. Aquilla Glover, along with Tucker a co-captain of the rescue party, recognized the hard truth and told Margret Reed that two of her children would have to go back. He would see them safely to the cabins, he said, then hustle back to catch up. Reed balked. She declared that she too would return to the lake and stay there with Patty and Thomas, letting her two other children go ahead with the party.
Glover took her gently to task, arguing that her return would only add to the number of mouths to feed at the lake. By forging on, she could help Virginia and James, the two older children, and she could effectively conserve the limited provisions that would have to sustain everyone at the cabins. Glover even promised that if they met no other rescue party, he would return and bring out the children, a courageous commitment that could have cost him his life. Reed pondered the unimaginable choice before her, then asked if Glover was a Mason like her husband, a distinction in which he took great pride. Glover said he was, and Reed asked him to back up his vow by tying his commitment to the honor of the fraternal society. Glover gave his word as a Mason, and Reed bent to bid two of her children farewell.
"Well. Ma." said Patty, "if you never see me again, do the best you can."
STRUGGLING BACK TO THE LAKE CABINS, the two Reed children were hardly greeted with glee. They would have to return to the Breen cabin, where they had been living before they left with the rescuers, and the Breens were understandably reluctant to share their sparse provisions with two more hungry mouths. They had already housed the Reed family for weeks, and now it was presumed they would feed and shelter two of the children longer still. Resentment welled up, and initially they refused to let the children enter.
Two rescuers who had brought the youngsters back lobbied for the Breens' forbearance. Fresh relief parties would arrive shortly, they insisted, with more supplies and a renewed determination to pluck the remaining survivors from the mountain prison. Slowly, grudgingly, the Breens relented. Patty and Thomas padded down the snow steps they had climbed only that morning, back into the dark and wretched cabin they had briefly escaped.
MARGRET REED MUST HAVE TURNED IT OVER in her head a thousand times. She had just walked away from two of her children, leaving them to a fate she could not fathom or predict, and now she had nothing to do, save walk and walk and walk.
The third day out from the lake, an Englishman named John Denton crumbled. Denton was a likable figure, a man who had proven himself handy around camp. When Sarah Keyes died back at the Big Blue River, it was Denton who hefted a chisel and carved her name on a tombstone. As the company endured its winter captivity, he bore up better than most of the other young single men, the majority of whom were long since dead. But the journey toward safety sapped his last reserve. He struggled to keep pace, pushing himself with desperation, but in time it became plain that he could not go on.
Not wanting to hinder the others, he asked to be abandoned, so they built a fire on a small platform of green logs, chopped some extra firewood, and left what food they could spare. Reason Tucker laid a crude bed of evergreen boughs next to the fire and provided a blanket to ward off the worst of the cold. Putting up a brave face for a man he was forced to abandon, Tucker vowed to send back help soon, but he knew it was a pointless promise. Denton knew it too. He gave Tucker a brace of pistols he was carrying and told him to keep them in case the worst happened. Tucker's bluffing confidence fooled little James Reed Jr., who asked to be left with Denton and the warmth of the flames. His mother refused, of course, and James and the others gathered up their meager provisions and moved on.
Alone, Denton made himself as comfortable as possible, then took out a pencil and a small journal. He began to write, revising as he went by rubbing out lines with a small India rubber eraser. Surrounded by endless white snow, his mind returned to verdant boyhood summers back in England: gazing at a brook, wandering through fields, sitting beneath "the old witch-elm that shades the village green"—joys now impossibly distant. He finished his composition, and waited.
Weeks later, rescuers found his body sitting against a snowbank, his head down upon his chest.
PHILIPPINE KESEBERG CARRIED HER DAUGHTER, three-year-old Ada, for as long as her arms had strength. She had already lost one child on the journey, Lewis Jr., who had not survived to see his first birthday. Her husband was back at the lake, his injured foot precluding any walking, and it was easy to suppose he would die there. Ada might be the only family Philippine had left. Aching for a respite, she offered a gold watch and twenty-five dollars to anyone who would carry Ada, but no one accepted. Philippine recentered her resolve and marched on, but it was the daughter rather than the mother who could go no farther. Sometime that night, Ada died, the latest victim of hunger and cold.
In the morning, the others discovered that Philippine literally could not let go of her child. She clutched the tiny corpse like a pilgrim with an icon. Her mind reeled back beyond her son's death, beyond even the beginning of the journey, all the way back to her homeland of Germany. Before the Kesebergs crossed the Atlantic, Philippine had given birth to twins, Ada and another little girl they named Mathilde Elise. The tots had barely been a year old when the family came to America, and perhaps the journey proved too much for Mathilde, for she died two months after they arrived. Philippine must have been adamant that she would not lose Ada too, and yet now she had been helpless to prevent it, even as she held the child in her arms.
Reason Tucker stepped forward. They had to keep moving, and it was madness to carry a corpse. The child had to be left to a mountain grave. At last Philippine agreed and stumbled away with the others. Tucker bent to put the little body in the snow, covered it as best he could, and hurried to catch up. "Her sperrit went to heaven," he wrote of Ada, "her body to the wolves."
The grim band marched in single file, just as the rescuers had on the inbound trip, the leaders breaking trail with snowshoes and the others following in their tracks. Each morning they awoke to find their clothing frozen solid. Virginia Reed remembered that even her shoestrings hardened into immovable wires. They started the day's march the minute it was light, for it was easier to walk on the snow when it was still frozen hard rather than softening under the midday sun. Unexpectedly, the sun was in some ways a curse, its glare glinting off the snow until their eyes ached, its warmth melting their frozen clothes until they were soggy and dripping. Virginia, who was thirteen, tried to think of her wet smock as clinging like a fashionable dress.
Hunger deepened by the hour. Hopeful faces sank as they approached the food caches hung in trees by the rescuers on their way up the mountains. Animals had somehow reached many of the bags, gnawing them open and gorging on the contents. Tucker measured out what was left, dividing the rations as evenly as possible and urging his charges to be careful with the precious scraps, lest a lifesaving bite be wasted.
The last allotment was a double ration, two small strips of dried beef, each about the size of an index finger, meant to serve as both dinner that evening and breakfast the following morning. Leanna Donner could not muster the needed self-discipline, and she feasted on both meals at once. At dawn, she had nothing, so she sat in the half-light and watched the others nibble on their breakfasts. Her older sister, fourteen-year-old Elitha, who had kept Leanna going on the first day's fatiguing hike from Alder Creek to Truckee Lake, could not stand to see the girl sit by ravenously while others savored the precious taste of food. Elitha took her own small strip of meat and divided it neatly in two. Leanna, who remembered that the tiny morsels were then "more precious than gold or diamonds," never forgot her sister's help. "How long we went without food after that," she recalled, "I do not know."
The children scrounged desperately. Tucker's buckskin pants were frayed along the bottom, and so the youngsters began to cut off slices of the leather, crisping it in the fire and gnawing it down, in effect recreating the old meals of boiled hide that had sustained them at the lake. By their fifth day on the trail, the whole party was hungry enough to do the same. At noon, Tucker divided up some shoestrings, roasted them, and provided them to the marchers.
There was every possibility now that they all might perish, that they might, like John Denton and Ada Keseberg, survive the ordeal only to die amid the rescue. No one struggled more than little James Reed—at five the youngest of the children who were actually walking, as opposed to being carried by someone. He plunged down into the snow up to his waist, then propped his knee on the edge and struggled from the personal crevasse he had created, thrusting his foot forward to repeat the whole process. Every agonizing step, he told the others, brought him "nigher Pa and somthing to eat." To keep him moving, the adults surely promised him that it was true. Then they must have wondered if it was.
BACK IN THE CAMPS, silent questions of conscience stole through the shelters like a rumor going around town. Even before the rescuers left, the Donners tamped down the inhibitions of taboo and broached an obvious, if forbidden, topic. If they could not find the bodies of their frozen cattle under the layers of snow, they told the rescuers, they would soon begin to eat the dead.
The same horrifying desperation seeped through the lake cabins. The day after the rescue party left, the Breens shot their dog, Towser, and dressed out the meager body. The butchering knives pried little meat from the bones, for the animal was hardly more than skeleton and hide, but even so small and fleeting a bounty drew envy from the other cabins, half-dead neighbors begging for a chance at survival. Elizabeth Graves hobbled over from her cabin to ask for meat. Patrick Breen, whose family had long held the richest larder of the company, could see the longing inspired by his provisions. "They think I have meat to spare but I know to the Contrary," he wrote of the other families. "They have plenty hides. I live principally on the same."
The nights turned especially cold—"froze hard last night," Breen wrote in his diary on four consecutive mornings—and the flagging emigrants could no longer guard the half-buried bodies of the dead against the wolves. The beasts edged ever closer to the cabin doors, and at night their howls rang through the shanties like the keening wails of ghosts.
Friday, February 26, dawned clear and warm after another arctic night, a brisk wind blowing out of the southeast. Patty Reed's jaw bulged with the swollen protrusion of a toothache, but Breen pondered more agonizing matters. Pulling out his pencil, he set to work on the day's diary entry with a fretful mind. Most families now recoiled at the disgusting boiled hides, he noted, although there were enough to go around. "We eat them with a tolerable good apetite," Breen wrote. "Thanks be to Almighty God, Amen." Then Breen turned to the real cause of his vexation. The day before, he confessed to the little diary, Levinah Murphy had come to his cabin and, like the Donner families before her, acknowledged the depth of their plight. Unless the wolves took it first, she intended to cannibalize the corpse of Milt Elliott, the Reed family's faithfiil helper. "Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him," Breen wrote straightforwardly. "It is distressing."
As Reason Tucker's initial relief party bulled its way up to the high camps and then started back down, James Reed was busy mounting a separate attempt at rescue, one that lagged behind Tucker's but ultimately would become intertwined with it. Discharged from his military duties after the Battle of Santa Clara, Reed rode north to the little town of Yerba Buena, which was about to shed its name for the more impressive San Francisco. He was armed with a petition informing the American naval commander that the Donner Party had been delayed "from unavoidable causes" and was now trapped. The signers, prominent local residents from San Jose, asked that the government dispatch rescuers on snowshoes immediately.
Ushered in to see the top-ranking naval officer on the scene, Capt. J. B. Hull, Reed encountered a mixed response. Hull promised to do what he could but rejected the idea that he mount the whole expedition himself, a reaction not unlike Lieutenant Kern's at Fort Sutter after the arrival of the Forlorn Hope. Hull insisted that if he agreed to outfit the entire operation during wartime, bureaucrats back at the War Department would balk at the expense. He was polite but firm. "His sympathy was that of a man and gentleman," Reed recalled.
So Reed turned to charity. Local leaders called a public meeting, and the men of the town gathered in the saloon of the best hotel. People asked Reed to speak, but when he rose to make his appeal the gravity of the moment overwhelmed him, and he was unable to go on. James Dunleavy, a Methodist minister who had also come west earlier that year, stepped in to take Reed's place. Trained by the weekly rigors of the pulpit, Dunleavy appealed to the crowd's basic empathy, describing what he guessed was the sad and deteriorating condition of the emigrants. He also mentioned his own journey, which was probably crucial in giving the San Franciscans, most of whom had arrived by sea, some sense of the rigors faced by overland emigrants.
It was a test of the mettle of the little community, and the response proved their pride. Collection jars filled with eight hundred dollars, and sailors on two American ships in the harbor pitched in three hundred more. Local leaders guessed that more money would come in soon. "This speaks well for Yerba Buena," one of the newspapers reported proudly.
Organizers agreed that the expedition would split in two initially. Reed would head for Napa and Sonoma, forty miles north, to raise more funds and recruit more help, while the bulk of the supplies would be sent up the Sacramento River on a donated schooner commanded by a young naval officer named Selim Woodworth, who volunteered for the job. The two parties would rendezvous at the confluence of the Sacramento and Feather rivers, and from there proceed on foot into the Sierra.
As Woodworth and Reed prepared to leave, a launch arrived from Sutter's Fort with the startling news that some of the trapped emigrants— the surviving members of the Forlorn Hope—had materialized from the wilderness. For the first time, San Franciscans learned that a preliminary relief expedition—the one led by Tucker—was already being mounted. But they also learned the true horror of the ordeal: starvation and death and cannibalism.
Surprisingly, given later coverage of the tragedy, these first public discussions were remarkably muted and sympathetic. The members of the Forlorn Hope apparently made no attempt to hide their cannibalism, and the first newspaper reports treated the issue as simply one component of the ordeal. Two papers broke the story on the same day, February 13. The Californian mentioned cannibalism in only one plain-spoken sentence: "the survivers were kept alive by eating the dead bodies." The California Star said nothing of cannibalism until the middle of a long dispatch, and then the account was hardly sensationalistic. The paper noted calmly that members of the Forlorn Hope considered conducting a lottery to determine who should be killed for food, but also reported that a game of chance proved unnecessary. "But at this time the weaker began to die which rendered it unnecessary to take life, and as they died the company went into camp and made meat of the dead bodies of their companions." Far from portraying the Donner Party as a collection of ghouls, these early stories seemed designed to generate sympathy for the emigrants and support for the rescue efforts. Later, stories far different in tone would appear.
Aware that Tucker's initial relief was already on the way, Wood-worth delayed his departure from San Francisco while fund-raisers worked the town for more cash. The idea now was not merely to rush ahead with food but to set up a base camp partway into the mountains and then to resupply the emigrants thoroughly. In the end, private contributors donated thirteen hundred dollars, and Captain Hull loosened his purse strings enough to add four hundred dollars in government support. Supplies of every type soon filled the hold of Woodworth's vessel: fifteen barrels of flour, four hundred pounds of sugar, seventeen pounds of tobacco, six frying pans, two axes, two hatchets, a shovel, a tea kettle, twenty-four blankets, forty-eight pairs of woolen socks, two pounds of thread, four packets of needles, twelve pairs of women's stockings, twenty-four pairs of pantaloons, thirty red flannel shirts, fifteen pairs of children's shoes, a dozen pairs of adult shoes, four pairs of mittens. Everything was finally stowed on Sunday, February 7, so, without waiting for the passing of the Sabbath, Woodworth weighed anchor, set a spread of sail, and coasted upriver toward the mountains.
Reed went north on his fund-raising and recruiting expedition, successfully rounding up horses and men. But when the party arrived at the confluence of the Sacramento and the Feather, Woodworth was nowhere to be found. The young naval officer had encountered headwinds, so he and his crew had to warp the vessel—attaching ropes for pulling, the lines spitting off water as they were heaved taut, the boat literally dragged upriver against the twin enemies of wind and current. Progress slowed, and when Reed arrived, Woodworth was still well downriver.
Flush with winter rains, the Sacramento ripped along its bank. Without Woodworth's boat, Reed had no way to cross, so he found an elk herd and had his men shoot two of the animals. He intended to stretch the hides over wooden frames to make skin boats, the quickest way to construct some sort of vessel that would float. Crossing a pounding river in the fragile boats would have been treacherous, especially with horses and equipment, and Reed and his men were saved the trouble when a small launch suddenly appeared and offered to help. Reed crossed first with his horse, climbed into the saddle, and hustled off to the last settlement before the mountains, Johnson's Ranch.
Reed started slaughtering cattle while Johnson ordered his Indian workers to grind flour in hand mills. They worked round the clock for two days, the crackle of the drying fire and the creaking of the flour mills keeping time with their labors. Reed's men soon arrived, and on February 23 they headed up into the mountains. Woodworth was somewhere behind, presumably coming on as fast as he could.
Hoping to keep the pack animals from floundering in the snow, Reed left behind spare equipment and supplies, trying to create the lightest possible loads. When they cinched the packs down, each animal carried a mere eighty pounds, less than the lightest of jockeys. Even so, when they reached the snow, hooves plunged downward like rocks tossed into a pond.
They broke camp early the next morning, hoping that the snow would still be frozen from the night and thus would bear up under the animals. But again, as the day before, the horses lurched and sank, every step a trial. After only two hundred yards, the animals heaved and sweated in the dawn chill.
Calling a halt to the barely moving column, Reed must have pondered a perplexing and challenging decision. He knew the first relief party led by Tucker had taken this same route more than two weeks earlier, but he had no way of knowing their fate. Perhaps they had never reached the cabins at the lake. It was entirely possible they had been caught in the open by a blizzard at the higher elevations and frozen to death. From the stories of the Forlorn Hope, Reed knew the desperate straits of the trapped emigrants, including his own wife and children, and if no relief had reached them, death could be imminent for all. But if the animals could not go forward and he pushed on without substantial supplies, how much help would he be? He might arrive at the lake cabins virtually without food. Or his own men might be stranded for days by a storm, with few provisions to tide them over. The last thing anyone needed was yet another party in need of rescue. Standing there in the snow and cold, looking at Reed and waiting for his decision, the men grew silent.
Faced with his staring troops, Reed accepted the bald fact that the animals could no longer negotiate the deepening snow. Resolving to push onward anyway, he decided to shift the loads to the humans and leave the horses behind. So after the initial and pathetic two hundred yards of the morning march, the men slid the packs off the animals and began rearranging provisions. When they shouldered the loads, the uncertain silence that Reed had noted melted away, the presence of a definite task lightening their spirits even as the packs weighed down their backs. "The hilarity Commenced as usual," Reed wrote in his diary.
The long upward miles stretched out into the afternoon, until at last they saw two figures coming toward them, spots against the snow. They hurried forward and discovered two members of the first rescue party, detached and sent ahead for supplies. Questions pierced the cold mountain air: Were there survivors among the emigrants? What were the conditions at the camps? Who was walking out? Reed learned that his wife and two of his children were among those on the trail ahead and quickly sent two men forward with provisions.
The two men Reed sent ahead reached the long file of marchers that afternoon, shortly after the Tucker party had been reduced to a noon meal of roasted shoestrings. With fresh provisions at hand, a fire was quickly kindled and a meal of dried beef devoured by the famished survivors. Two parties were now only a few miles apart and headed directly toward one another—Tucker and his rescued emigrants heading west, Reed and the other men of the second relief party heading east—but night fell before they could close the gap and find one another. As both parties pitched camp, they knew of each other's presence, though certainly not their exact location, and they also knew that a sudden storm could transform the smallest distances into the largest obstacles.
Reed passed what must have been a fitful night, then roused his men early so they could make good time on the still-frozen snow. After only four miles, they began encountering survivors strung out along the trail. Death-mask faces pressed around the rescuers, pleading paupers desperately chanting, "Bread. Bread. Bread, Bread." Bakers had been at work in anticipation of the moment, so the rescuers dug into their provisions and offered sustenance to the bony, grasping hands. In his diary, Reed referred to the survivors as "the poor unfortunate Starved people."
A shout went up for Margret Reed, and then another to promise that her husband was among the rescuers coming up the trail. She fell to her knees in joy and relief. Virginia Reed ran to embrace her father, fell again and again, then at last folded herself into his arms. Little James Reed Jr., who had vowed that every step brought him nearer to his father, must have celebrated his vindication. It was February 27, the first time the Reeds had seen each other since the patriarch's banishment from the Donner Party back in the russet days of autumn. "The meeting was very affecting," one witness wrote with nineteenth-century understatement.
But then Margret breathed horrifying news to her husband: Two of their children were still trapped. James Reed urged the survivors to keep going, then mustered his men and started back up the mountains. Within minutes of a reunion that ended almost five months of separation, Reed was off again, waving farewell to half his family in a frantic attempt to save the rest.
AT THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, THE SURVIVORS were perched at a threshold of desperation. They had all endured the unendurable—months of hunger so sharp it twisted the belly, meal after meal of boiled leather, the slow deaths of comrades and family. Yet now there was hope. Rescuers had made it through once. Perhaps others would too. If only breath and blood could be kept active for a few more days, a lifetime might still stretch out ahead.
Out in the snow lay the food they needed, buried in the shallowest of graves and preserved by the icy cold. At last someone took a knife— perhaps it was one of the Donners, perhaps it was Mrs. Murphy making good on her vow to eat Milt Elliott, perhaps it was someone else. There may have been a conversation: arguments back and forth, tears and angst, the frank necessity pitched against the age-old taboo. Or it may have been a silent consensus, a sudden and collective acceptance of the unavoidable. Someone took a knife and went out into the snow.
IRONICALLY, PEOPLE WHO ARE STARVING can be killed by an overabundance of food. To survive a prolonged period of malnourishment, the body begins to consume itself, burning off fat and then eating through muscle. As the process accelerates, the body begins to plunder the tools it needs to process nutrients, so that eventually a person who is desperately craving food can be killed by a gluttonous feast. In recognition of such perils, modern relief workers are provided with guidelines for the gradual refeeding of famine victims.
The potential dangers of uncontrolled gorging by starvation victims was known even amid the primitive medical knowledge of the nineteenth century, and so when the survivors reached a camp where Reed had stationed one of his men with supplies, the emaciated emigrants were doled out only limited portions. The adults recognized the necessity of this restraint, but to twelve-year-old William Hook, it must have seemed a stubborn and perplexing denial. For months he had eaten almost nothing, had watched his family members wither and die for lack of food. Now an abundant larder was being kept cruelly beyond his reach.
As he lay awake at night, his stomach knotted with a ravenous hunger. His mouth watered at the memory of the meager meal he had been given. At some point, temptation overwhelmed obedience, and he wriggled from his bedroll and snuck quietly to the food cache. For the first time in months, he could eat as much as he wished, and he began inhaling food, gorging himself in a hushed, private feast. Within hours, he was deathly ill. He was given tobacco juice to make him vomit, but when the party was ready to move on, William was too sick to march, so he was left behind with an adult attendant and two other youngsters who could not go on. At one point, apparently sick, William went out on the snow and crouched down, resting on his hands and knees. He was approached by eleven-year-old Billy Murphy, who had been left behind with frostbitten feet. Billy put a hand on William's shoulder, speaking to him and urging him to come back into the camp. William fell over, already dead. Billy and the camp attendant took some biscuits and dried beef from William's pockets and then buried him under a tree where the snow had melted.
Billy's shoes had been cut off, and with no extra pairs on hand, he had no choice but to walk the rest of the way barefoot. They caught the main group of survivors three days later, and four days after that—on March 7—the whole party reached Johnson's Ranch, the end of their journey. After a winter of unending white, the lowland spring seemed a riot of colors and life: the green of the grass, the varied hues of early flowers. Even the soft brown of bare and unfrozen dirt was an enlivening change. "I really thoughtT" remembered Virginia Reed, "I had stepped over into paradise."
George Donner looked away and wept. His three youngest children, the three little girls who remained in the bedraggled tent at Alder Creek with their parents, had been so pitifully hungry, their sunken faces so heartbreaking. Yet George and Tamzene had been unable to satisfy their daughters' pleading. No more rescuers had come to help. No hunter had provided meat.
Out of options, they went out into the snow to dig up the shallow graves of loved ones. At first, the only body that could be found was that of Jacob Donner, George's brother, who had died back in December. His widow gave her permission, and the flesh of his limbs was sliced away.
The girls ate, but George could not bring himself to watch. He had uprooted his prosperous and settled family and dragged them across a desiccated continent in search of a better life, and the great endeavor had come to disaster. The girls ate, and noticed their father's tears.
THE NASAL HONKING OF GEESE sliced through the cold night air, and Patrick Breen lay in bed listening. It was early for the birds to be flying north. They might easily reach their summering grounds before spring loosed the grip of winter. They were at the forefront of their migration, as prompt as the Donner Party had been tardy.
FROM THE SHELTER OF THE FOREST, pitying eyes peered in toward Breen's cabin. During the months of their entrapment, the emigrants had assumed they were alone, seeing no other human presence until the first rescuers arrived from California. In fact, they had been watched ever since they first drove their ox teams up into the mountains.
The Washoe Indians lived in the eastern Sierra Nevada. They spent summers near Truckee Lake and winters at lower elevations, but hunting parlies would have returned to the lake even in the colder months. The Washoe had no written language, but their oral traditions recount a long observation of the strange invaders from the east. At first, the Washoe watched the wagon trains wend up the river canyons and thought the long processions looked like some giant, monstrous snake. Most of the trains disappeared over the crest of the mountains, of course, but the Washoe saw that one group stalled just at the onset of winter and then settled in at makeshift camps. The Indians had heard tales of the Spanish missions in California, where Native Americans were essentially enslaved, and so they were understandably reluctant to contact whites. But as the condition of the Donner Party slowly worsened, the Washoe's fear turned to sympathy, and on the morning after Breen heard the geese flying over, one courageous ambassador approached the cabins.
He wore a heavy backpack and, so far as Breen could see, was alone. He approached from the lake, on snowshoes with strings made of bark. He said something the emigrants could not understand and left five or six small roots as an offering of food. Then he walked off toward the east. "Where he was going I could never imagine," remembered John Breen, Patrick's teenage son.
The roots looked like onions and tasted like sweet potatoes, but the texture was stringy, "all full of little tough fibres," Breen wrote. Still, the emigrants devoured the gift gratefully. The Washoe never approached again. By now, they had seen things that convinced them the strangers were inhuman.
Climbing up into the higher elevations after leaving the members of the first rescue party, James Reed and his men began to plunge down to their waists in powder, the deep snow grabbing them like a demon from the netherworld. The men heaved themselves back to the surface, searched around for some firmer bit of footing, then launched another stride that would take them a yard closer to the summit and, almost surely, deliver them back into the depths.
By midday the sun simmered snowfields into mushy bogs, impossible to walk on. The men lay down to take what rest they could, then rose at midnight, thinking the dependable night chill had again hardened the snow. But still the surface gave beneath their feet, so they waited another two hours and then at last resumed their climb by stars and moonlight and the coming dawn. Reed estimated the snow at thirty feet deep, the same guess Tucker made while marching in with the first relief party.
Soft snow and exhaustion again forced them into an early camp, a delay that cornered Reed into a difficult decision. He and most of the others were spent and needed a full night's rest. But three of the men— Charles Cady, Nicholas Clark, and Charles Stone—somehow found a reserve of energy. They could keep climbing through the night, they insisted, although it was now their second night with almost no sleep. The risks of separation were obvious. A splintered party could more easily fall prey to some accident, and if caught by a blizzard would have fewer bodies for sharing warmth or chopping firewood. Already the saga of the Donner Party and its rescuers was a fractured tale, small groups scattered about like icebergs calved from a glacier: some safe in California, others at the mountain camps, still others in between. To split off a small group yet again might invite disaster.
Yet Reed also knew the desperation of those in the mountain camps, including two of his own children. He knew that for those still alive at the lake cabins and Alder Creek, the odds lengthened with each passing moment, the seconds ticking away until midnight on an executioner's clock. If Cady, Clark, and Stone could march through the night and reach the camps a few hours sooner, they might save lives. Reed told the men they could keep going, and so as he and the others bedded down on the snow, the tiny breakaway group hiked off into the dark.
They approached within two miles of the lake cabins but then spotted a party of about ten Indians. In fact, the Washoe had given aid to the Donner Party, but the three men quickly assumed the Indians were hostile, presuming they had killed those in the cabins. They huddled together and spent the remainder of the night camped without a fire, fearing that flames might attract the attention of the Indians and invite attack.
Morning dawned clear and pleasant, and for the second time a rescue party walked toward the cabins at Truckee Lake thinking that all those inside were already dead.
DESCENDING THE CRUDE SNOW STEPS of the cabins, the rescuers found a gruesome sight. Some of the emigrants were still alive, but around their hovels lay partially butchered corpses, "fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of famine." Limbs and skulls littered the ground, even the hair of those who had been consumed. When they moved on to the Alder Creek site, they found the children of Jacob Donner eating his heart and liver raw, the blood still on their chins.
At least that is the story that Reed and his men recounted in a version that first appeared in the Illinois Journal on December 9,1847, nine months after the rescues, in an article based on Reed's notes, though written by someone else. In a later retelling, Reed made no mention of discovering cannibalism, but on the other hand he never refuted the Journal article.
Parts of the newspaper account seem exaggerated or melodramatic, as though they might have been added by a writer looking to make an extraordinary story even better. Skulls are said to have filled camp kettles, for example, although few people forced to resort to survival cannibalism actually eat the heads of their former comrades. But on the broader point—that cannibalism had occurred at both the lake cabins and the Alder Creek site—there is little reason to doubt Reed and his men. For one thing, it should come as no surprise that the survivors were eating human flesh. Cannibalism had already occurred in the saga of the Donner Party among the members of the Forlorn Hope, the survivors of which had been able to reach Johnson's Ranch only by eating the dead. Furthermore, people at both mountain camps had already acknowledged their plans for cannibalism. The Donners had told members of the first relief party that they would begin eating human bodies soon, and Levinah Murphy had told Patrick Breen of a similar strategy for survival. A week had passed since the departure of the initial rescuers, who had been able to leave few supplies, and yet no one had died.
Most important, some of the survivors later described their cannibalism, including Mary Donner, two weeks shy of her eighth birthday, and Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who was doing much of the work at the Donner camp. Perhaps most convincing of all is the un-adorned candor of Georgia Donner, who had just turned five. It was Georgia who remembered her father crying and turning away, and she also recalled a macabre moment in which her aunt, Betsy Donner, asked, "What do you think I cooked this morning?" and then answered her own question, "Shoemaker's arm." Georgia seems to have resisted any temptation to embellish her tale, for she was frank in admitting what she did not know. "When I spoke of human flesh being used at both tents, I said it was prepared for the little ones in both tents. I did not mean to include the larger children (my half sisters) or the grown people, because I am not positive that they tasted of it."
Such plain and apparently reliable testimony later came into question as doubts were raised about the practice of cannibalism at Alder Creek. Chiefly, these came from Eliza Donner, who turned four in the midst of the events and who later developed an iron determination to disprove allegations of cannibalism by her family. She wrote her own account of the Donner Party's ordeal, and her great triumph came during an interview with Trudeau when he recanted his earlier testimony. But this occurred decades after the entrapment, and he was telling his interviewer exactly what she yearned to hear.
The controversy cropped up again in 2005, when an archaeological team excavated the Donner families' cooking hearth and tested some of the bone fragments found there. When none of the bones proved to be human, many casual followers of the tale concluded that this finding repudiated the possibility of cannibalism. But in fact, it would have been astonishing to find archaeological evidence of cannibalism at Alder Creek. In the acidic soil of the conifer forests of the high Sierra, uncooked bone disintegrates quickly. The only bones found by the archaeologists—the only ones still there to find—were cooked. But the likelihood is small that the families at Alder Creek would have cooked any human bones. In typical cases of survival cannibalism, the desperate sufferers slice flesh from the cadavers and cook only this gruesome "meat." Not until after the supply of flesh is exhausted are the bones boiled, so they too can be eaten.
But at Alder Creek, cannibalism would have occurred for no more than a week. There were four full-grown adult bodies at hand (al-though it's possible that one or two had been lost in the deep snow), and it is unlikely that the handful of survivors would have stripped away all the flesh, requiring the cooking of bone. This is even more true if Georgia Donner's account is correct, since she suggests that the adults may not have participated. It seems unlikely that a few small children and a single teenager would have eaten all the flesh off even a single body in less than a week. So there is a high probability that when the archaeologists scrutinized their diggings for physical proof of cannibalism, they were searching for something that no longer existed. And there is an equally high probability that when James Reed and the other men of the second relief party arrived at the high camps, they saw the plain evidence all around them.
WHEN REED EVENTUALLY REACHED THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, he walked up to the Breen cabin to find his daughter Patty sitting on the roof, her feet dangling on the snow. In the shanty he found his son Tommy, and knew that at least for now all the members of his family were alive.
"Informed the people that all who ware able Should have to Start day after tomorrow," Reed wrote in his journal. "Made soup for the infirm... and rendered evry assistance in our power."
The next morning, Reed and three of his men hiked over to the Alder Creek camps, where agonizing decisions had to be made. Betsy Donner allowed the rescuers to buy the personal property of her late husband, Jacob, whose partially cannibalized body lay nearby. No one recorded her motive, but perhaps she thought that the money would help her children, especially if she too died and left them orphaned. Boots went for $4 a pair, cordovan shoes $3, silk handkerchiefs $1.25 each. Donner's knife, the one item that wasn't some sort of garment, brought $1. A careful record was kept—subtotals for each man, the sums accurate to the penny—and in all the sale raised $118.81, presumably to be paid when the party reached California.
The harder decision for Betsy Donner must have been to divide her family yet again. Two of her children had gone out with the first relief, but five remained with her. The two smallest, Samuel and Lewis, were too weak to go, as was their mother, but she sent the three oldest, Solomon, Mary, and Isaac.
In the other Donner tent, the decision was more vexing. The three little girls were in relatively good health—"Stout harty children," Reed called them—and so was Tamzene, their mother. But George Donner, beset by the infection from his injured hand, was too weak to move. Tamzene would not leave her husband alone, and Reed told her honestly that he expected another rescue party shortly—the group led by Selim Woodworth, the naval officer whose well-supplied expedition had been moving toward the Sierra when Reed entered the wilderness. Promised that more help was on the way, Tamzene decided to stay where she was and keep her three children with her. Having done what he could, Reed bundled up Betsy Donner's children and hiked back to the lake, where his own two youngsters waited.
Since being sent back from the group that escaped with the first relief, Patty Reed had become something of a surrogate mother for her little brother Tommy, and her father seemed to recognize her new status. Before leaving for Alder Creek, he had told her that she could have flour from the rescue provisions to make bread. Patty, who had just turned nine, knew the value of the foodstuffs lugged in by the rescuers, knew that none could be wasted, knew that lives might depend on the wise use of every morsel, and yet now her father was trusting her with the precious stores. She thought herself "quite a little woman." She beamed with pride.
She also set to baking, and when the rescuers returned from Alder Creek, well after dark, the alluring smell of fresh-baked bread wafted from the Breen cabin, a stark contrast to the previous months of deprivation. The men came in—"cold and hungry and tired and heartsick," Patty recalled—and huddled around the fire for warmth. At one point, Patty promised everyone that all the bread was good—the portions she was serving to the strangers as well as those she gave to people she knew—and everyone laughed at her sweet pronouncement. "The laugh," she wrote later, "did almost as much good as the bread."
THE NEXT MORNING, REED AND THE OTHER RESCUERS led seventeen people toward the pass, once again most of them children. Elizabeth Graves took her four remaining youngsters, emptying out once and for all the big double cabin that had been built for her family and the Reeds. The Breens and their five children all left. Patrick Breen, who had so faithfully chronicled the travails of the party in his diary, ended with an astonished acknowledgment of the obdurate foe that had held them all captive. He had talked with old mountain hands among the rescue party, he noted. "They say the snow will be here untill June."
To help care for those unable to travel, Reed detailed three of his men to remain in the high camps—Clark and Cady at Alder Creek, Stone at the lake—assuring them that Woodworth would arrive soon with more help. Whatever meager provisions could be spared were left as well. Just fourteen survivors remained behind, most of them at the edge of death.
Those who walked away with Reed had endured more than four months of captivity, surviving numbing cold, debilitating disease, filth, boredom, and despair. They had divided their families in hopes that some might live while others died. They had watched their friends and family members starve, and at least some of them had been forced to cannibalize the bodies. Now their ordeal was about to get worse.
James Reed looked up into the sky and felt an abiding dread seize his heart. The sly was darkening, portentous clouds rolling up over the peaks. At this elevation, the clouds pressed close, looming down on a man like a monster from a nightmare.
They were three days out from the lake. Progress had been slow, and they had only surmounted the crest of the Sierra a few hours earlier. They were about as high—and about as exposed to the elements— as at any point on their journey.
Reed concealed his alarm in the confessional of his journal. "The Sky look like snow and everything indicates a storm, god for bid. ... Night closing fast, the Clouds still thicking. Terror, terror. I feel a terrible foreboding but dare not Communicate my mind to any. Death to all if our provisions do not Come in a day or two and a storm should fall on us. Very cold, a great lamentation about the Cold."
In the entire ordeal of the Donner Party, no one ever revealed a more acute fear.
Perhaps they had been a little too generous with the food they left at the lake camp and Alder Creek, for their own supplies had run short, and now they were weakened from half rations. Three men had gone ahead in hopes of finding a cache left by the rescue party on the way in, but so far there was no sign of their reappearance.
At least there was work to do, something to pry the mind from the waiting. Wood had to be gathered for a fire. Without a fire they might not survive the night. So those who were able scrounged around for some downed branches, the thicker ones for the fire, the boughs for beds to provide a little insulation from the incessant snow. If they could get some food and start a decent fire, then maybe, just maybe, they could withstand the onslaught coming from the sky.
As they worked, they must have stolen glances to the west, longing for the return of their comrades, and to the sky, eager for some change, a shaft of blue, literally a ray of hope.
But all they could see was the clouds.
SNOW STARTED FALLING EARLY IN THE NIGHT, and with it the wind rose into what Reed remembered as "a perfect hurricane." They were camped amid a stand of tall timber in a shallow valley just beneath the summit. Rectangular, with one of the short ends facing the pass, the little depression funneled the winds so that they raked the campsite ferociously. Blown sideways, snowflakes and ice crystals turned into tiny pellets of buckshot. The wind screamed through the tree branches. The temperature plummeted.
In his diary, Reed noted that he tried to keep watch for the men returning from the cache, but that would quickly have proved impossible, and useless anyway. Given the conditions, the advance scouts were either dead or holed up somewhere. "My dreaded Storm is now on us," Reed wrote. "Crying and lamentations on account of the Cold and the dread of death from the Howling Storm." Children began to weep. Some of the men prayed for their lives.
They all circled the campfire, their backs outward, away from the flames, then piled up snow behind the circle, creating a windbreak that gave them at least marginal shelter. Peggy Breen was still nursing her youngest child, a daughter named Isabella, so she got down on her knees, pulled a blanket and shawl over her shoulders and head, and tried to let the baby take some nourishment.
The fire had been built on a platform of green logs, but still it had melted the snow beneath, forming a pit. At one point, fifteen-year-old John Breen collapsed—"I fainted or became stupid from weakness," as he put it—and would have fallen into the fire hole if a quick-witted companion had not caught him by the leg. His mother rushed over to revive him. His jaws had locked shut, but somehow she forced in a bit of lump sugar, which brought him back to consciousness.
With the temperature so low, the fire was an absolute necessity, but as conditions worsened some of the men gave out physically and could no longer feed the flames. Reed went blind, probably a delayed form of snow-blindness from reflected sunlight earlier in the day. Whatever the cause, he could not see the flames even when he stared straight into the campfire.
By default, the crucial job of tending the fire fell to William McCutchan and Hiram Miller. Like McCutchan, Miller had originally been part of the Donner Party but went ahead on the trail and thus avoided entrapment. In Miller's case, he joined a mule train early on during the journey and far outpaced the lumbering wagons.
McCutchan and Miller fed the fire relentlessly, and there were those in the group who thought that if the two men had failed, everyone might have died. Years later, McCutchan gave the credit to his colleague: "Miller being a man of Herculean strengths and indurance was the life and savior of the party."
Morning brought no relief. The storm raged on, creating a white-out, snow as present in the air as on the ground. Looking into the wind, visibility stretched to less than twenty feet. The sky—"the light of Heaven," Reed called it—was an unknowable mystery.
Maintaining the fire grew ever more strenuous. The snow pit was now fifteen feet deep, although still the bare ground could not be seen. If the fire itself slid down into the hole, it would be too far away to give off much warmth, and so in addition to feeding the flames, men had to tend the platform of green logs laid across the pit. The supply of wood gathered the previous night was exhausted, so they had to go out into the storm and find nearby trees to fell, then drag the wood back. Even with the warmth of exertion, they could only work in ten-minute shifts before the cold forced them back into the fire circle to regain feeling in their hands and feet. Then they would head back out again.
Peggy Breen had a few seeds and a little tea and sugar, but for all practical purposes they were without food. So long as the storm continued, there was no chance of anyone arriving with supplies, and certainly none of hunting, so as their hunger deepened they could do nothing but bide time. In the lore of the Donner Party, the site became known as Starved Camp. "Hunger, hunger is the Cry with the Children and nothing to give them," Reed wrote. "Freesing was the Cry of the mothers with reference to their little starving freesing Children. Night closing fast and with the Hurricane Increases I dread the coming night."
THE DROPS THRUMMED ON THE ROOF above Virginia Reed's head. She was safe now, down in the valley, in California, out of the endless winter, generously sheltered in a real house with a real roof, not a makeshift cabin topped with a hide. But lying awake at night, she listened to the steady patter. She knew that in the mountains above, the raindrops were snowflakes, an infinity of snowflakes piling up into inches and feet and yards. Earlier in the day, she had seen her mother standing in the doorway for hours, looking up at the mountains.
Somewhere up there, Virginia knew, her father and siblings struggled against the snow, struggled to reach, as she had done, bare earth and soft grass and a spring rain.
THE BLIZZARD BELLOWED ON INTO ITS SECOND NIGHT at Starved Camp. The fire failed, snuffed out by wind and snow and cold. McCutchan jumped up and managed to rekindle it, piling up the driest pine logs he could find in their meager supply.
Reed slumped into some sort of half-coma, near death. McCutchan and Miller grabbed him and shook him back to consciousness, slapping and shaking and rubbing him until he stirred. Patty Reed lay in her blankets, unable to move, listening to the men screaming at her father, "Reed! Reed! Wake up man, speak! Reed! We will all die! Wake up! Great God, Reed! Come! Come! You must not die now!" At times, she recalled, they swore at him.
"The Hurricane has never Ceased for ten minuts at atime during one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed," Reed wrote, adding that he hoped never to see such a thing again. "Of all the praying and Crying I ever heard nothing ever equaled it. Several times I expected to see the people perish by the extreme Cold."
At times, the wind was so strong that it seemed one of the nearby trees might topple and crush the little camp. "Snowing and blowing, hailing, sleet and so cold," Patty Reed remembered. "I have not words."
In the circle around the fire, five-year-old Isaac Donner was wedged in between his big sister Mary and Patty Reed. Sometime in the night he whispered a final shallow breath. Amid the noise and fear and confusion, the two girls did not notice his death until the morning.
With daylight came occasional breaks, a few minutes of calm before a resumption of the deluge, and as the day wore on, the storm slackened substantially. In time, the winds calmed and the snow stopped, and the sly made plain that the torrent was over.
At Alder Creek, Nicholas Clark, one of the relief party members left behind to care for the Donners, peered out of the tent and estimated that the storm had dropped six feet of fresh snow. Up near the summit, a thousand feet higher, there undoubtedly was more.
BY THE TIME THE STORM SUBSIDED, Reed's eyesight had returned, and he declared that the party must rise and walk. Another blizzard might strike at any moment. They were without food, and they had no idea if they would be resupplied any time soon. Their own advance party—the three men sent ahead to hunt for the cache—might easily have died in the storm (in fact, they had survived but had been forced to head toward civilization, not back to help the others), and the separate party led by Woodworth, though long expected, had yet to materialize. To stay where they were would be suicide.
But some members of the party simply could not go on. Elizabeth Graves was near death, and it was unclear how her four young children could continue without her. Mary Donner had burned her foot in the campfire and could barely walk. Peggy Breen was holding up well, but Patrick was sickly and spent, just as he often had been at the lake. Two Breen sons struggled. John, the teenager who had handled so many of the chores around the family's cabin, was still recovering from his near-fatal collapse into the fire. James, who was six, was already far gone.
Looking around him at all of this, Patrick Breen announced that his family would stay. It was better to die by a warm fire than collapse into the snow somewhere out on the trail, he said. Perhaps another relief party would come through with provisions. Or perhaps even Reed and his men might make it to safety and send someone back.
Reed began to argue. They must get up and walk, he exhorted. To idle was madness. It would mean certain death. Repeatedly Reed implored them to move. Repeatedly Breen said they would not. Finally, Reed called over the other rescuers and asked them to serve as witnesses to the fact that he was not abandoning his charges, that Breen and the others were staying behind voluntarily.
In fact, both men were merely doing what they had to do. Reed was right that those who were able should push onward. But Breen was right that much of the party was in no condition to do so. Between his family and the Graveses, there were at least five children too young or too weak to walk. Among the adults, it's likely that Elizabeth Graves was unable to go anywhere at all, and so it's difficult to know how one would have convinced her four children to simply abandon their mother to a lonely death.
Nor could Reed and the other rescuers help much. Miller, the strongest of the bunch, planned to carry Tommy Reed, but the other men were apparently unable to take another child. Patty Reed remembered that Mary Donner was willing to go, but with her injured foot was unable to walk. In a letter years later, Patty said that her father asked if any of the other men could help her, but apparently no one stepped forward, and Patty produces no evidence that Reed himself offered to carry Mary, although she consistently portrays her father in the most positive terms possible. If the rescuers were unable to carry the children, then Breen was doubly right to say that for his family and the Graveses, with so many small youngsters, a continued march would have been foolhardy. Perhaps it was only with time that Reed grew sensitive to the idea that he had abandoned people. His diary, which includes an entry for that day, never mentions it, but his later accounts place a greater and greater emphasis on his efforts to exhort Breen to move.
The departing marchers stacked up what wood they could, estimating it at a three-day supply. The party now included just three people rescued from the high camps: Patty and Tommy Reed and fifteen-year-old Solomon Hook, Jacob Donner's stepson. Behind them, lying about on the snow, were thirteen people, most of them children: the seven Breens, Elizabeth Graves and her four offspring, and Mary Donner. They had no shelter, no food, no expectation that they would regain enough vigor to walk to safety unaided. They could do nothing but wait, whether for rescue or death.
SELIM WOODWORTH, THE MAN SO MANY PEOPLE were banking on, was heading toward the high country. After sailing upriver from San Francisco, Woodworth had reached Sutter's Fort in mid-February, then gathered supplies and made other preparations. On March 2, he was marching up the mountains when he encountered Tucker's first relief party coming down. He turned around and escorted them to safety, apparently arranging for their transportation to Sutter's Fort. Then he headed back into the wilderness. By now, the great blizzard was brewing, and it's likely that Woodworth spent the two days of the storm at Bear Valley, a well-known camping ground partway up the trail.
The reasons for his slow progress thus far would eventually become a topic of great debate. Defenders say he did the best he could with little help, manpower having been depleted by recruitment for earlier rescue parties and the absence of men who were fighting in the war with Mexico. Detractors claim Woodworth moved too slowly, perhaps from incompetence, perhaps indolence, perhaps even cowardice. Billy Graves, who was capable of getting things wrong, claimed that he saw Woodworth lollygagging around camp drunk.
Whatever the cause, the delay was over now. It had stopped snowing, and Woodworth and a precariously small party—just two or three other men—were on their way at last.
AT STARVED CAMP, THE BREENS suffered through the cold and isolation. The history of the Donner Party owes much to Patrick Breen's diligence as a diarist, for his chronicle of the long months at the lake cabins is a unique and invaluable record. But once Breen and his family left the lake, Patrick abandoned his journalistic role entirely. Peggy Breen, on the other hand, is a silent figure at the lake but one who takes center stage during the rescue.
At Starved Camp, both before Reed's departure and after it, she appears to have been among the more energetic adults, attending to the children, including her own, with far more vigor than her husband. This heroic role eventually caught the eye of a writer named Eliza Farnham, who interviewed Peggy Breen about the sad days at Starved Camp. It is to Peggy Breen's account that we largely owe our knowledge of what happened.
The remnant faded toward death almost as soon as Reed and the others walked away. Elizabeth Graves died first, followed by her son Franklin. Almost as bad, the fire kept melting the snow, and the platform of green logs began to sink, so that with each passing hour the flames were a little farther from the skeletal figures in need of the heat. Without the chance to warm themselves, they would all surely perish.
JAMES REED PITCHED FORWARD INTO THE SNOW like a man felled by a gunshot. His snow-blindness had returned, and he stumbled along insensible to his surroundings, an incapacitated man who somehow kept moving. His feet were bleeding, the result of bad frostbite suffered during the storm.
Walking away from Starved Camp, Patty had done the best she could, but eventually she succumbed to her weariness and could go no farther. She was no toddler. At nine, she was heavy enough to constitute a substantial load for a man in good condition, let alone one who had almost died the night before. But there was no other choice, so her father bent down to a knee and took her on his back. To keep his hands free, he drew a blanket around her, then pulled the ends across his chest and tied them to a sturdy stick.
Soon Reed began to fall, although the indestructible Miller, who was already carrying Tommy Reed, heaved him back to his feet and sent him along the way. Even on her father's back, Patty weakened, until at last Reed realized that his daughter was dying, that she was almost gone already. At camp, Reed had taken a frozen, empty sack that once contained dried meat and held it over the fire. When it softened, he carefully scraped the inside seam, where a few tiny crumbs had clung to the fabric. He produced a teaspoonful, perhaps less, but even this was a treasure to be prized. Like a miser hiding a nugget of gold, he placed the tiny serving in the end of the thumb of one of his mittens, literally the last bite of food they possessed.
Now it was needed, so Reed carefully peeled off the mitten, plucked the frozen speck from its unorthodox storage bin, and placed it in his mouth to thaw. When it seemed edible, he took it from his lips and gently fed it to Patty by hand. She revived, and they went on, without even the smallest morsel in reserve.
PEGGY BREEN CHECKED ON THE SLEEPING CHILDREN one by one, holding a hand before every mouth and nose to wait for the soft exhale of breathy fog. But when she came to her James, who had been doing poorly, she felt nothing. Panic rose in her chest like a rush of rage. She called to her husband that his son was dying, pleading for his help.
"Let him die," Patrick replied. "He will be better off than any of us."
Even decades later, the memory of that instant was etched sharply in Peggy's mind. She said her heart stood still when she heard her husband's words. She sat stunned for a moment, then set to work, rubbing her son's chest and hands, trying to generate some circulation and breath once more. As she had when her eldest son, John, fainted and nearly fell into the fire, she broke off a piece of lump sugar and forced it into James's lips. He swallowed, moved his arms and legs a little, and then at last opened his eyes.
From the beginning of the relief effort, the rescuers marching into the mountains carried along motives as varied as their own lives. Some men strove to save their families. Some worked to fulfill a vow to old traveling companions. Some volunteered to save utter strangers. Some asked about the pay.
As time went on, intentions grew murkier, especially for Charles Cady and Charles Stone, two of the men whom Reed had detailed to stay at the camps and care for the survivors. The day after the main relief party walked away, Stone left his post at the lake cabins and hiked over to Alder Creek, where Cady had been stationed. Nicholas Clark, the third rescuer left at the camps, was out hunting.
Provisions were still plentiful, and there was every reason to believe help was on the way, but Stone and Cady decided they would flee. They struck a deal with Tamzene Donner, whose three little girls were still healthy enough to make it out. Stone and Cady agreed that in return for a fee, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they would take the girls. It was an offer that Tamzene had apparently already proposed to the members of Reed's now-departed relief party, who were too over-burdened with survivors to accept.
When the deal was done, Stone and Cady took the three little girls up the steps and stood them on the snow. Tamzene emerged and put on their cloaks—red and white for Eliza and Georgia, blue and white for Frances—then pulled the matching hoods up around their ears.
"I may never see you again," she told them, "but God will take care of you." Georgia thought her mother seemed to be talking more to herself than to them. and chilled them. In the morning, it had to be scraped off their covers before they could get up.
But once they were out of bed, Stone and Cady made a shocking and shameful announcement. They had no intention of taking the girls over the pass, as they had promised Tamzene. Instead, they were leaving the youngsters in the cabin and going on without any survivors at all. Their decision to flee, suspect from the beginning, was revealed as a disgrace. They were supposedly there on a rescue mission, but now they were leaving without rescuing a soul. They would not stay and care for the sick. They would not carry out a child. They were just leaving.
TWO DAYS LATER, THE DESERTERS HAD CROSSED the pass and were walking through Summit Valley when they passed Starved Camp. Cady and Stone noticed the site, for Cady said later that they passed it at about two in the afternoon, something he would not have been able to pinpoint if they had walked by unknowingly.
But amazingly, neither man offered to help. They did not stop and share their provisions. They did not offer to carry a child or lead a sick adult. They gathered no firewood. So far as we know, they did not even stop to offer words of hope or encouragement. Both were in relatively good condition; they were two of the three self-described "young spry men" who had gone ahead of the second relief party to reach the lake camps early. (To be fair, at some point Cady suffered frostbite on his feet, but that was a comparatively minor matter.) They had been in the mountains a relatively short time, and thus were hardly in the late stages of starvation. They had not even spent a night in the open, since the previous day when they first left Truckee Lake they had been turned back by the blizzard and retreated to the relative safety and warmth of the cabins.
Cady and Stone had once displayed the admirable courage of all the rescuers, perhaps more. Their willingness to forge ahead of the rest of the party on the way into the mountains showed both physical stamina and personal bravery. But at some point, both men lost their moorings. Perhaps the horrors they saw at the camps overwhelmed them. For whatever reason, the same tenacity with which they first rushed into the wilderness on an errand of mercy was now displayed as they rushed out in a desperate bid for self-preservation. Maybe the real surprise is that the other rescuers didn't do the same.
On a cold night, the mountains can be as quiet as a graveyard. Unless the wind kicks up, there is nothing to hear but the voices of your comrades and the crackling of the campfire.
Selim Woodworth and his men, however, turned their ears to something else—other voices, farther off. He sent emissaries to investigate and found the little party that had walked away from Starved Camp: James Reed and two of his children, William McCutchan, Hiram Miller, and the others. By chance, the two parties had almost literally stumbled into one another.
Reed and the others had mostly bedded down for the night, and they were too tired to move, but they asked that some food be brought over from Woodworth's camp, and for the first time in days, they went to sleep with the satisfying feel of a meal in the belly.
THE FIRE AT STARVED CAMP STILL BURNED, but it had fled from those it was intended to warm. Melting the snow, the flames had sunk so far down into a pit that the survivors felt little heat. Peggy Breen stared down into the hole, fifteen, twenty, perhaps even twenty-five feet deep.
At first she must have looked with despair, but then suddenly there was a tiny moment of joy. At the bottom of the hole, she thought she could make out bare ground. If so, if the fire had burned all the way through the winter's slow accumulation of snow, then it would sink no more. If they could descend to meet it, they would once again find some warmth.
She roused John, her teenager, and urged him to climb down. Using a felled treetop as a makeshift ladder, he did so, and then called up that she was right. He was standing next to the fire on warm, unfrozen earth.
She climbed down herself to investigate, then ascended once more and began to shake people from their slumbers. As they woke, she urged them down toward John, and in time everyone who was still alive was down in the pit. Eleven people had to crowd in, but at least they were out of the wind. At least they had the fire again.
WILLIAM EDDY AND WILLIAM FOSTER, BOTH OF WHOM had survived the brutal journey of the Forlorn Hope, bore a special determination to get back into the mountains. Each man hoped to save his own child. Eddy's wife and daughter had died back in early February, something he would have been told by the survivors who walked out with the first rescue party, but his son, James, might still be alive. Foster's wife had come down with him in the Forlorn Hope, but their only child, a son named George, was still back at the lake.
Eddy had briefly joined a previous relief effort, but he had been unable to keep up with the grueling pace. Now, both he and Foster were ready to attack the Sierra, so they borrowed horses at Johnson's Ranch and swung into the saddle. They rode hard until the snow was too deep, switched to hiking, and caught up with Woodworth about the same time Woodworth collided with Reed. By this time Cady and Stone were there too, so that with the exception of Nicholas Clark, the lone rescuer still at the high camps, all the rescuers were together, both those going into the mountains and those going out.
As the groups huddled together to decide what to do, Reed had good news: Eddy and Foster might be in time. When he had left the lake cabins about a week earlier, both their sons had been alive. The boys had been in dreadful condition, but Reed and his men had done what they could, bathing the youngsters and putting them in fresh clothes.
Suddenly Woodworth, who had never gone anywhere near the high camps, was being urged from all sides to mount another relief effort. There might still be people alive at three different locations— Starved Camp, the lake cabins, and Alder Creek.
But Woodworth would not move. He claimed to need a guide, although Reed noted that the tracks of his descending party were plainly visible. He warned Eddy and Foster of the dangers, although both men had walked out of the wilderness in the teeth of the winter with no guide, few provisions, and virtually no equipment. Both Reed and Eddy, and perhaps others too, thought Woodworth was a coward. Reed eventually provided some notes that were used as the basis for a newspaper story portraying Woodworth as a man who "quailed" in fear. Eddy told his story to one of the Donner Party's earliest chroniclers, who described Woodworth as a man who "had become tired from carrying his blanket."
Woodworth finally relented, to a degree. He would not go himself but promised that the government, which was funding his activities, would pay three dollars a day plus a fifty-dollar bonus for any man who carried out a child not his own. Eddy and Foster later claimed they paid two of the men themselves.
With the promise of pay, a little party came together. Remarkably, two of those who agreed to go back had just walked down with Reed: Hiram Miller, who was something of a bull, and Charles Stone, perhaps hoping to redeem himself for bypassing Starved Camp on the downward trip. Three other men said they would go too, so as soon as supplies were rounded up and stuffed into packs, seven men set out on yet another rescue effort, this one quite possibly the last. The money was an inducement, but it took real courage to go. They all knew what another blizzard could mean.
FOR ALL THAT PEGGY BREEN WAS THE MAIN force of energy at Starved Camp, it was one of the children who first broached the obvious. Seven-year-old Mary Donner suggested that they should eat the dead bodies on the snow above them. She told the Breens that she had already eaten human flesh back at Alder Creek, perhaps lessening the strain of breaking the great taboo. Apparently the others agreed, and at some point Patrick Breen, who had regained a little strength, climbed up with a knife.
In an account of the story largely based on an interview with Peggy Breen, the writer Eliza Faraham maintained that only Mary Donner and the remaining Graves children actually ate from the bodies, but it is simply not believable that the Breens refused. Given the length of time of their entrapment and their condition, they must also have participated in the cannibalism, as much a necessity for them as it had been for so many others in their company.
They spent days there, enduring a gruesome tableau as awful as anything in the entire story: eleven people living in a hole, most of them children, unable to see anything but each other and the camp-fire and the sky above, someone occasionally climbing up to slice flesh from the bodies—family members to some of those below—and then returning to their claustrophobic world of ice and desperation.
By the end, when Peggy went up to fetch more wood, she had to crawl from tree to tree, then throw the cut branches along before her as she crawled back to the pit.
SHE HEARD THE RESCUERS BEFORE SHE SAW THEM. Her vision blurred by weakness, she had climbed up from the pit and sensed something coming toward her on the snow. She caught the undecipherable fragments of voices in the distance, and then at last heard someone say, "There is Mrs. Breen alive yet, anyhow."
On the snow lay three corpses, all crudely butchered. Survivors had begun by eating the bodies of the two dead children—Isaac Donner and Franklin Graves. From the body of Elizabeth Graves, they had eaten the breasts, heart, liver, and lungs.
The pit itself must have been appalling. Reed had departed five days earlier. Given their condition, most of the survivors had probably found it impossible to climb out unaided, and thus it's likely that one corner of the pit had been designated as a latrine. Although the depth of their fortress protected them from the wind and perhaps gave them some warmth, they were in other ways exposed to the elements. Snow must have sometimes cascaded down from the trees above. At night the cold would have seeped in. During the day the sun shone down mercilessly.
Still, in one sense it was a remarkable success story. When Reed and his men departed, there were thirteen people left alive at Starved Camp. The fact that eleven of them survived almost a week, essentially without shelter, in the middle of the Sierra, at high elevation, in winter, is astonishing.
There was no guarantee they would survive the trip out of the mountains, however. Most of them could not walk, and the deep snow made it impossible to bring in pack animals. Nor could all seven men of the relief party be expected to help. Eddy and Foster, understandably focused on plucking their own children from the high camps, kept going toward the pass, taking two other men along with them.
That left three rescuers staring down into the pit at Starved Camp. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley each picked up a child and started walking, arguing that given their party's limited manpower, the best they could do was save a handful of the survivors and abandon the rest. The third rescuer, however, balked at such a brutal triage.
John Stark's ancestors bequeathed him a streak of toughness. His father hewed a life from the wildlands of Kentucky; his mother was a cousin of Daniel Boone. Like many of those involved in the rescue efforts, he too had been an emigrant in 1846, going west with his wife and children and her extended family. His father-in-law and brother-in-law helped in the early stages of the relief effort, although neither ever made it to Truckee Lake. Stark was a big man—he weighed 220 pounds, a giant for the day—and stubborn in the best sense of the word.
As his colleagues walked away, he faced the seemingly impossible task of rescuing nine people single-handedly: all seven members of the Breen family and the two older Graves children, Nancy and Jonathan. Perhaps he pondered the strength of his pioneer ancestors. Perhaps he just refused to give up on a job. Perhaps he thought of his own overland migration and realized that with a little bad luck it might be he and his wife and his children looking up from the pit.
He decided he would not simply pick up a child and leave the others to die, as his comrades had. He would bring them all in. He would carry the little ones, encourage the older ones, bolster the adults, drag the whole party down out of the snow.
So he launched an extraordinary one-man relay. Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process. Again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough. When they asked about his stamina, he said that once they were out of the snow he would eat something and take a rest. Somehow, he even coaxed or cajoled or bullied Patrick Breen down from the camp, although initially everyone thought that the family patriarch could not walk. In the end, all the survivors from Starved Camp made it down to safety.
The Breens treasured Stark's heroism, then and for the rest of their lives. When the party finally got down out of the snow, Peggy Breen was astonished to hear Woodworth take credit for the rescue. "I thank nobody but God and Stark and the Virgin Mary," she replied. Years later, Billy Graves, who heard the story, noted that she put Stark second, behind only God and ahead of the Madonna. "I think he deserved it," Graves wrote.
Nicholas Clark, the sturdy rescuer detailed by James Reed to stay with the Donner families, made sure he was out of earshot of the tents. He was outside with Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who had also been taking care of the Donners. Clark confided that he planned to leave, perhaps at the arrival of the next rescue party, perhaps even sooner. Nobody could blame him. George Donner was already half dead, and surely incapable of ever leaving the mountains. The three little Donner girls had been sent off with Stone and Cady, and Clark, who was at Alder Creek, had no way of knowing that the tots had been abandoned at the Truckee Lake cabins. The girls' mother, Tamzene, was healthy enough to go whenever she wanted. The only other people at Alder Creek were Betsy Donner and two of her children, Samuel and Lewis, but they too were all but dead. For Clark to stay any longer would be to risk his own life just so he could chop firewood for people who were going to die anyway. He admitted he was afraid he might starve to death, a reasonable fear given the struggles faced by the other rescuers in getting back down to civilization.
Trudeau had an even stronger case. He had been healthy enough to leave with either of the first two relief parties but had been prevailed upon to stay and help care for the Donners. Like Clark, there wasn't much more he could do by staying, so he vowed that he too would leave at the first opportunity. "I have been here four months," he told Clark, "and it is my turn if anybody's."
The two men set out for the lake cabins, and when they arrived were astonished to find the three little Donner girls. For days, Clark had been assuming that Cady and Stone had fulfilled their pledge to Tamzene Donner and taken her daughters over the mountains. Instead, here they were, stuck in a cabin with Keseberg and the Murphys. Clark stayed the night, then went back the next morning to Alder Creek to tell Tamzene that her daughters remained in danger.
Tamzene bent over the bed of the husband she had nursed for months. He drifted toward death every day now, weaker and weaker. She detested the idea of leaving, for it was obvious that he might die while she was away, but there was simply no choice but to go and make some arrangement for the girls. She bundled herself up in the warmest of the tattered clothes she had left, took one last look back toward George's sickbed, and headed for the lake.
THE LITTLE RESCUE PARTY LED BY William Eddy and William Foster burst into the cabin with the frenetic energy of adrenaline and emotion. Everyone was talking at once. "They came in like they were most wild," remembered Frances Donner. "We were frightened at first."
Eddy and Foster asked about their sons: three-year-old James Eddy and two-year-old George Foster, tots left behind when their parents fled with the Forlorn Hope or simply died. Both fathers had rushed back into the mountains determined to save their sons. That had been the justification for leaving children behind, after all—that the parents could summon help and return in time. Now Eddy and Foster wanted to know if they had made it. There must have been a mortified silence, eyes shifting downward, then perhaps a sad and subdued confession. Both little boys were dead, and yet that was not even the worst of it. Their bodies had been cannibalized by the survivors. By one account, Eddy grew so enraged with Keseberg over the cannibalism that he vowed to kill him later, a threat that was never fulfilled.
But the rescuers found four living children—Simon Murphy and the three little Donner girls—and resolved to save them all. Clark and Trudeau would go along too. Keseberg still refused. That left two women, Tamzene Donner, who had reached the lake cabins, and Levinah Murphy. Murphy had herded her extended clan on the great migration: herself, seven children, two sons-in-law, and three grandchildren. The family had slowly dwindled—some went out with the Forlorn Hope, some with the first relief parties, some died—while she herself had withered and weakened. But she kept Simon alive—he was her youngest—and she was kind to the Donner girls after they were abandoned at the cabins. Keseberg had ordered the girls to stay in bed, insisting that otherwise they were underfoot. Levinah enforced no such rule. When Keseberg left to gather wood, she let the girls get out of bed and play, a benevolence they would not forget.
She was far too weak for the journey out, a fact she recognized and did not protest, perhaps because she could reflect with pride that she had done all she could for her own children and the children of others. "As we were ready to start," remembered Georgia Donner, "Mrs. Murphy walked to her bed, laid down, turned her face toward the wall. One of the men gave her a handful of dried meat. She seemed to realize that we were leaving her, that her work was finished."
HAVING REACHED THE LAKE CABINS, Eddy and Foster had no intention of hiking the extra distance to Alder Creek. The warning of Starved Camp rang with clarity: Parties in the open could be trapped by a sudden blizzard and held for days, pushed to shocking desperation. The only sane thing was to keep moving, to get up the mountains and back down again as quickly as possible. Dawdling begged calamity.
From the standpoint of the rescuers, no real purpose would be served by going to the Donner family tents. Everyone there—George Donner; Jacob's widow, Betsy; and her two sons, Lewis and Samuel— was dead or dying. None would see spring. Better to turn around, leave now, and make it back down to Johnson's Ranch before another storm struck.
But Tamzene Donner was adamant. She would not leave her husband so long as he drew breath. There was no hope he would live, but she would not let him die alone. To check on her girls, she had been forced to come over to the lake briefly, but now she would return to Alder Creek. He might already be dead—she told her daughters as much—but she insisted that she go and see. If he was dead, she would return immediately and walk out with the rescue party.
But while Tamzene was still in sight, the rescuers, standing on the snow before the cabins with the children, yelled to her that they had no intention of waiting. They were going on, and she could come or not. It was her choice. She must have known that this was her last chance, must have realized that her choice wasn't merely about sacrificing herself but about choosing which members of her family would have to share the burden. Either she could let her husband die alone or let her children grow up without a mother.
She knew what her daughters would face; her own mother had died when she was young. But perhaps she thought back to her first family, to the long years of darkness after their deaths, to the new life she had found through her marriage to George. Perhaps she had simply made a promise she could not break. None of her daughters ever described a hesitancy, a pause, a flicker of irresolution. She just kept walking.
And then the parting was done, the rescuers hauling the children off toward the pass, toward safety and away from their mother. "There was hardly time for words or action," Georgia Donner remembered, "and none for tears."
It was the last time the Donner girls ever saw their mother. Years later, they could not remember what she looked like.
HEADING WEST, THE MARCHERS FOUND A SMALL PACKAGE on the snow, apparently dropped by Stone and Cady, containing silk skirts that Tamzene Donner had given to the men she thought were saving her daughters. The Donner girls were wearing the best clothes they had left— petticoats and linsey-woolsey dresses—but after months of entrapment they must have been sodden with snow and rich with vermin. The men pulled out knives and, as best they could, quickly recut the newly found clothes to fit the girls in makeshift ways, then tied them to the youngsters.
Before it had been killed and consumed, the Donner family dog had eaten Frances's shoes, and so now she was wearing a pair of her mother's, too big by far. They kept falling off as she tried to pull her feet out of the deep holes in the snow made by the adults' footsteps. Eventually a rescuer named Thompson, who was in charge of her, got tired of pulling the oversized shoes out of the snow and putting them back on her, so he left them and told her to walk in her stocking feet. After a time, he took pity on her and took off his mittens, using them as a pair of moccasins for her feet and going bare-handed himself. Later, he told her that if she walked up a hill he would give her some sugar. "The sugar was something to climb for so I got my prize," she recalled.
Some incentives were less generous. Frances was walking, but Eliza and Georgia were being carried. The men tired, put them on the snow, and told them they too must make their own way. The girls refused to budge, so the men reached down and gave them each a spanking. "There was a crying bee," Frances remembered.
But somehow the girls kept going, some of the smallest children to make the long journey without either parent present. Georgia said later that when she thought of the rescuers' efforts, the agonies faded. "I do not feel like I ought to complain."
JOHN BREEN AWOKE TO A WONDERLAND. His rescue and delivery from Starved Camp was complete, as was that of his family members, but they had arrived at Johnson's Ranch late at night, well after dark. In the morning, he found a world he had not seen for months:
The weather was fine. The ground was covered with fine green grass and there was a very fat beef hanging from the limb of an oak tree. The birds were singing from the tops of the trees above our camp and the journey was over. I stood looking on the scene and could scarcely believe that I was alive.
ONE LAST RELIEF EFFORT REMAINED. A small company set out in late March from Johnson's Ranch, mostly consisting of veterans of earlier rescue parties who found the will to try again. They reached the snow, but then quickly abandoned the effort. There were stories that the snow, touched by the first kiss of spring, was now so soft that progress was impossible. Another recollection held that a fresh storm blew in and blocked their way.
Or perhaps they just gave up. The only people who could conceivably be rescued were Keseberg and Tamzene Donner, and both of them had been healthy enough to travel when the previous party left the lake. Rescuers could be forgiven for a reluctance to risk their own lives to save people who had failed to save themselves. Whatever the reason, the last little party turned around and headed back down the mountains. If anyone was still alive at the high camps, they would have no rescue soon.
By mid-April, a month had passed since the last relief party had left the lake camp. Little hope prevailed that anyone remained alive. Survival on almost nothing but human flesh seemed an impossibility, nutritionally and psychologically, particularly since the handful of emigrants left behind would have had few comrades to bolster their morale.
The principal idea now was to bring in property rather than persons. John Sinclair, the local alcalde for the area around Sutter's Fort, cut a deal with a small group of would-be salvage agents led by a flamboyant mountain man named William Fallon, a giant known as "Le Gros" but also reputed to be so agile that he could pluck a sixpence from the ground while riding a galloping horse. The men would be allowed to keep half the property they collected from the camps of the two Donner families, including gold and silver. Sinclair, acting as an ad hoc child welfare agency, would take the other half and use it for the benefit of the orphaned Donner children. The contract specifying the terms of the deal made no mention of survivors until after the financial details were spelled out at length, and even then the treatment was perfunctory, addressing the issue of survivors' property rather than their lives. So when, about two weeks later, Fallon reemerged with a last surviving member of the Donner Party in tow, the small communities around Johnson's Ranch and Sutter's Fort buzzed with curiosity: How had anyone stayed alive so long? What had happened up there?
SIX WEEKS LATER, the California Star landed on the newsstands of San Francisco with an answer, courtesy of Fallon's diary. Fallon and his men had arrived to find the lake cabins deserted—at least by the living. The bodies of the dead lay everywhere, "terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and sculls scattered in every direction." A woman's body, thought to be that of Eleanor Eddy, lay near the entrance, "the limbs severed off and a frightful gash in the scull." Most of the flesh had been eaten from the bones, and "a painful stillness pervaded the place."
At the Alder Creek camps, the mood proved equally eerie. Jacob Donner's tent had been ransacked. Household goods—books, calicoes, shoes, furniture—lay everywhere. The bloody evidence of cannibalism presented a gruesome scene:
At the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with human flesh cut up, it was from the body of Geo. Donner, the head had been split open, and the brains extracted therefrom, and to the appearance, he had not been long dead, not over three or four days at the most.
The carcass of an ox lay nearby, apparently preserved—and perhaps hidden—for much of the winter in the snow, yet almost wholly uneaten.
They spent a day packing—camping and working amid the dreadful scene—and then half the group started back for the lake cabins, the other half staying to cache whatever property they could not carry. When they returned to the lake, they were surprised to find Lewis Keseberg alive, lying next to "a large pan full of fresh liver and lights."
Keseberg said he was the lone survivor. Tamzene Donner, relatively healthy when the previous rescuers departed, had lost her way trying to hike from Alder Creek to the lake cabins, spent a night on the snow, and died soon after reaching Keseberg's wretched hovel. He seemed almost enthusiastic about his own resourcefulness—Tamzene Donner's flesh was "the best he had ever tasted"—but evasive about the property of the other emigrants. "He appeared embarrassed, and equivocated a great deal," then insisted that he had no property from any of the other families. But when the rescuers searched him, they found silks and jewelry worth two hundred dollars, and a brace of pistols that had once belonged to George Donner. Hidden in his waistcoat, they found $225 in gold.
They began threatening him, insisting that the other rescuers would hang him unless he came clean. A rescuer named John Rhoads decided to play the good cop and took Keseberg off to one side. If he owned up to everything, Rhoads said, he would be well treated and given help in getting down to the settlements. Through it all, Keseberg maintained his innocence.
The interrogation continued the next day, this time reinforced by the other rescuers. Fallon asked about a large amount of gold that George Donner had reportedly been carrying, and then grabbed a rope and threatened to hang Keseberg if he kept feigning ignorance. He fashioned a noose and threw it around Keseberg's neck, then pushed him to the ground and yanked the rope tight. At last, Keseberg relented and led them back to a spot near Alder Creek where he had buried the Donners' money.
The rescuers took him down to the settlements, but before the whole party left the mountains, they asked Keseberg why he had not eaten the ox meat. He replied that it was too dry. Humans made better eating. The brains made an excellent soup.
THAT WAS THE TALE TOLD IN FALLON'S DIARY, although Keseberg offered a different story. Left alone when Levinah Murphy died, he resisted the idea of cannibalism for four days after his provisions gave out, finally resorting to the grisly option so that he might live to support his family:
There was no other resort—it was that or death. My wife and child had gone on with the first relief party. I knew not whether they were living or dead. They were penniless and friendless in a strange land. For their sakes I must live, if not for my own. ... I can not describe the unutterable repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less eating, a corpse. It makes my blood curdle to think of it! It has been told that I boasted of my shame—said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and disgusting.
Too weak to move the bodies of the dead, Keseberg lay in his cabin surrounded by corpses, and at times became so unnerved that he put his pistol in his mouth and fingered the trigger.
Late one night, Tamzene Donner arrived, cold and fatigued, her clothes frozen into ice. She said that George had died, and now she was intending to walk over the mountains alone, for she had to reach her children. She refused Keseberg's offer of human flesh, so he put her into bed and covered her as warmly as possible. By morning she was dead, and Keseberg was again alone.
He had promised Tamzene that he would retrieve the family's money and use it for her children, so when he felt strong enough he hiked over to Alder Creek. He buried the silver in a spot marked by a low-hanging tree branch and packed the gold back toward the lake cabins. Halfway there, the snow gave way beneath his feet, and he plunged down into a stream running beneath the snow. As he fell, he threw out his arms and managed to fall no deeper than his armpits, and then eventually managed to hoist himself from the hole. By the time he reached his cabin, he was half-frozen.
The next morning, he awoke to human voices. He rushed outside and saw the rescuers coming toward him, the relief that had seemed an impossible dream. But to his astonishment, they did not greet him with joy but with a simple and gruff demand: "Where is Donner's money?"
Worried about keeping his promise to Tamzene that the money would go to her children, Keseberg would not answer, begging instead for a bit of food. The men refused and threatened to kill him if he failed to hand over the money. With no other choice, he gave them the gold and told them where to find the buried silver. Heading down the mountains to safety, they offered no help to the pathetic, weakened fellow. Instead they concentrated on shuttling down two packs, each filled with booty, and left Keseberg to struggle into camp on his own.
WHOSE VERSION TO BELIEVE? In the common lore of the Donner Party, then and for 150 years to follow, Fallon's picture of Keseberg as a bloodthirsty ghoul held sway, perhaps because it intermingled with and reinforced an image already in the public mind. Even before Fallon's journal appeared, a newspaper account claimed that one of the survivors—unnamed but obviously Keseberg—took a child to bed with him and ate the youngster before morning, then ate another before noon the next day. Such yarns obviously involved scurrilous exaggeration if not outright falsehood, but Fallon's diary echoed the theme. Almost as soon as Keseberg came down from the mountains, the stories blossomed into the most damning rumor possible: He had murdered Tamzene Donner so that he might eat her body.
Surely the Fallon diary is, at best, half true. Donner Party scholars have long observed that the language—"evinced confusion" and "evident reluctance" and the like—is too refined for Fallon's rough-hewn life. And there is a lyrical quality at points that seems foreign to a mountain man's pen: "A painful stillness pervaded the place." Nor was it long before little pieces of the story began to crumble: A newspaper retracted the claim that it was Eleanor Eddy's body near the cabin door, and a summertime traveler found George Donner's body months later, apparently not mutilated. Furthermore, it seems incredible that Keseberg would have praised human flesh as moister and more succulent than beef.
And yet the diary must be right in describing Keseberg and the camp in hideous terms. By the time the final rescuers arrived, Keseberg had been alone for days, perhaps weeks, surviving on nothing more than human flesh. He had no choice but to crudely butcher the bodies, and probably had little energy to dispose of the remains. Indeed, a more sober and less biased source suggests precisely such a scene, without attributing to Keseberg the morbid enthusiasm reported by Fallon. More than thirty years after the tragedy, Reason Tucker, who led the first relief party and participated in the last, wrote of bones scattered about and skulls opened to get at the brains. It was a place, he said, of "Death & Destruction."
ON ONE POINT, THERE COULD BE NO DISPUTE. When Keseberg and the final group of rescuers arrived at Johnson's Ranch in the closing days of April 1847, the ordeal of the Donner Party was over. Of the eighty-one people who had been trapped by the early autumn snow at the eastern edge of the Sierra, thirty-six had died and forty-five had survived. No one remained at the high camps. For the Donner Party, the journey was finished.
The warmth of spring seeped through the rich riverbed land of the Napa Valley as surely as the cold had penetrated the huts at Truckee Lake. Barely two months after her rescue, Virginia Reed's mind was already turning to gentler matters. She wrote her cousin back in Illinois and boasted of her new homeland as a hunting ground for husbands:
Tel Henriet if she wants to get Married for to come to Callifornia. She can get a spanyard any time.
It was only mid-May, but beef and bread had fattened the survivors' once-skeletal forms. "We are all verry fleshey," Virginia reported, as though this were an astonishing fact. Her mother weighed 140 pounds, or, as Virginia styled it, "10040 pon." In all, California had proved a worthy haven, a land of warm days and cool nights, of wide valleys and stout horses. "It is a beautiful Country," she wrote. "It aut to be a beautiful Country to pay us for our trubel getting there."
Not that the tragedy had vanished from Virginia's mind. Her letter gave a long, detailed account of much that had happened—one of the most valuable versions among all the Donner Party records—and then added a declaration that even greater horrors lay unstated:
O Mary I have not wrote you half of the truble we have had but I hav Wrote you anuf to let you now that you don't now what truble is. But thank the Good god we have all got throw and the onely family that did not eat human flesh. We have left every thing but i dont cair for that. We have got through.
Still, she wanted no part of hopelessness, harbored no desire to discourage those who might follow: "Dont let this letter dishaten anybody." She offered a single piece of advice, an admonition that might have served as the motto not only for the grand migration west but also for much of life: "Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can."
THAT SUMMER, GEN. STEPHEN WATTS KEARNY, who had commanded the American armies in California during the brief war with Mexico, left Sutter's Fort to return east. When he reached Truckee Lake, he stopped to inspect the cabins, snowless now and surrounded by the natural hustle of a short mountain growing season—wildflowers and green grass, does nursing fawns, the flutter of butterflies and the buzz of mosquitoes where once could be heard only the murmured prayers of the starving.
Human remains lay about, the flesh mummifying in the dry mountain air and the bones scattered in the cabins. Edwin Bryant, the newspaper writer who had traveled the first part of the westward journey with the Donners and who was now going east with Kearny, described the scene as "human skeletons ... in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed."
Kearny ordered a pit dug in one of the cabins and the bones thrown in, "melancholy duties to the dead," as Bryant phrased it. The cabin was torched, the men standing around hatless and solemn as they watched this impromptu pyre in the wilderness.
At Alder Creek, Kearny found George Donner's body, and with it the final evidence of Tamzene Donner's steadfast devotion. Before leaving for the lake cabins, she had wrapped her husband's remains in a sheet, the closest approximation of a decent burial she could provide.
FOR A FEW OF THE SURVIVORS, the tragedy of the Donner Party proved an unshakable ghost. Nancy Graves, Elizabeth's daughter, married a Methodist minister and had nine children but was haunted by the knowledge that she had participated in the cannibalism of her own mother at Starved Camp. As a girl, she burst into tears at the memory.
Decades later, she refused to help the writer C. F. McGlashan, who was working on a history of the party. "I have no information to impart," she wrote in her only postcard to him, "and do not wish my name mentioned. I hereby notify you not to use my name in that connection." She signed her name as Mrs. R. W. Williamson, omitting any use of Graves, the maiden name that would identify her as a member of the cursed emigrant contingent.
Eliza Donner, by contrast, cherished her place in history. She married a promising young attorney named Sherman Houghton—he went on to serve two terms in Congress—and later she took up a vigorous correspondence with McGlashan. In her late sixties she published her memoir, The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. On the cover and title page, she identified herself as Eliza P. Donner Houghton, embracing her maiden name as much as Nancy Graves had spurned hers.
Most survivors reflected neither Graves's reluctance toward the past nor Donner's enthusiasm for it. Most simply moved on, constructing new lives and displaying the remarkable resilience of the human soul. They married, reared children, tilled farms or built businesses, cherished advances and rued setbacks. They stopped by a saloon on Saturday and a church on Sunday. Some died young. Some saw their dotage.
James Reed never lost his on-the-make optimism and eventually touted the Gold Rush with the same heedless confidence that had once led him down the Hastings Cut-Off. "The gold is still plenty, plenty, plenty, and will continue plenty through this century and the next, and the next!" he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1849, after the family had settled in San Jose. "You find it in the big hills, you find it in the little rivers, you find it in the little branches, you find it in the little narrow indentations made on the surface of the earth during brief showers." Nor did the capacity for boasting desert him. Real estate was booming, and he was glad to say he had shown the wisdom to invest. "As for myself I have a share and a fair share, too, after all my misfortunes."
Margret Reed, who had worked so diligently to keep her children alive, never found the robust health that California seemed to promise and died at forty-seven, fifteen years after the tragedy. Virginia eloped at sixteen and eventually had nine children. Her sister, Patty, had eight. Neither of the Reed sons had children. For a time, they both lived with Patty. Virginia Reed fulfilled the personal pledge she had made in the mountains and, against her parents' wishes, became a Roman Catholic.
The Breens repaired to the Mission at San Juan Bautista, where they were feted as conquerors of the harsh mountains, ensconced in the best house in town and bathed in Mexican hospitality. "Nothing that could add to the comfort of the sufferers was left undone," James Breen wrote later. In time the family prospered. Edward Breen, the boy whose fall from the saddle broke his leg so badly that it was nearly amputated, grew into a strapping man of more than six feet tall. He was an excellent horseman.
By some weird coincidence, three of the other Breen sons—Patrick Jr., Simon, and James—died within three months of each other in 1899.
The Donner orphans found homes where they could. Two of the three little daughters of Tamzene Donner were taken in by a German couple who lived near Sutter's Fort. The Reeds took some of the others.
The Murphy and Graves children were orphans too. Mary Murphy eventually married a prominent local man named Charles Covillaud. When a town sprang up near their home along the Yuba River, it was named Marysville in honor of Covillaud's wife. Simon Murphy, one of the last children rescued, returned to his home state of Tennessee and later served in the Civil War. So far as is known, he never returned to California.
Two of the Graves girls married men who assisted in the rescue efforts, although neither ever actually reached the high camps. Sarah married William Dill Ritchie, who six years later was caught with stolen mules and lynched. Mary, the belle of the train, froze her feet so badly during the journey of the Forlorn Hope that for three months she could not wear shoes. She married a rescuer named Edward Pyle Jr., who was murdered in 1848. After the trial Mary cooked meals for the murderer. She did not want him to die before the hanging day.
Billy Graves went east the next summer, where he soon grew weary of incessant questions about his titillating ordeal. He told the story "so many thousand times," he remembered later.
William Eddy, who lost his wife and two children in the tragedy despite his own heroic efforts, married twice more, the first ending in divorce. He died in 1859, on Christmas Eve.
Jean Baptiste Trudeau, one of the few single men to survive, never forgot the suffering of the mountains. Years later, when he was a poor man scraping out a hard and dangerous living as a fisherman, he said that even if he were offered half the state of California, he would refuse to spend another winter like the one he endured with the Donner Party.
Lewis Keseberg suffered more than anyone else, although in many ways this had more to do with public perceptions than actual events. On his arrival at Sutter's Fort, whispering rumors painted him a ghoul. The gossip compounded until, motivated by an especially wagging and malevolent tongue, Keseberg sued one of his own rescuers for defamation. The jury found in Keseberg's favor but concluded that his slanderers had broken tarnished goods: Damages totaled one dollar. In time he became a public caricature, the demented ogre who had relished his cannibalism. Business setbacks pushed him into poverty. Even the lottery of biology struck against him: Two of his daughters were born with disabilities that rendered them, in the language of the day, "idiots." Keseberg came to see himself as Job, singled out by God for afflictions designed to test his soul. He died a poor man, his burial unrecorded.
For brief periods in the years after the Donner Party, though, Keseberg enjoyed business successes. During one of them, he ran a Sacramento hotel, the Lady Adams. It might be strange enough that the putative fiend chose to enter a business where he would host weary travelers, but public fascination with the Donner Party was such that even that irony was insufficient. It may or may not be true, but the accepted lore of the tale came to be that the most notorious cannibal of the Donner Party eventually opened a restaurant.
THE FATES OF THE RESCUERS PROVED AS MIXED as those of the survivors. Selim Woodworth overcame the inauspicious start to his career as a naval officer. He commanded a supply ship during the remainder of the Mexican-American War, winning the respect of his men, and during the Civil War rose to the rank of commodore.
Hiram Miller remained a friend of the Reed family for decades, settling near them in California. Smallpox eventually swept through, infecting Miller, and after a time of quarantine in the local "pest house" he moved to the Reed home, where he was an invalid for the last five years of his life. They buried him in a cemetery nearby. Patty Reed, the little girl who had baked him bread when he arrived as a member of the second relief party, and to whom Miller had been kind, tended his grave for years.
William Fallon, the mountain man who led the last relief party, eventually went east but was traveling back to California in 1848 when he grew frustrated with the slow pace of the train and, with one other man, rode ahead. They were attacked and killed by Indians. Weeks later the main party found their bodies.
John Stark never got the public acclaim he deserved for his heroic rescue of the Breens from Starved Camp. In his report about the relief effort, Woodworth omitted Stark's name entirely, taking credit for those Stark saved. But his fine qualities drew recognition in other ways. He was the sheriff of Napa County for six years and even served in the state legislature. In 1875, when he was fifty-eight, the body that had sustained him through his remarkable performance in the mountains finally gave out. While pitching hay from a wagon, he had a heart attack and died.
Reason Tucker, the leader of the first relief party to reach the high camps, later spent two years in the gold fields, one with luck, one without. He built a fine home of split redwood near Calistoga, the back commanding an ostentatious view of the verdant Napa Valley, but later lost his estate in a dispute growing out of the settlement of Mexican land claims. A marriage collapsed amid uncertain circumstances, and in time he moved to Goleta, near Santa Barbara, where he lived out his days amid the gentle swells of coastal hills and ocean breakers. When he died, in 1888, he was buried beneath a white marble marker that reached back more than forty years to a moment of valor: "An honest candid worthy man—one of the heroic rescuers of Donner Party." Tucker would have liked the epitaph. He never forgot the scenes that greeted his arrival at the Truckee Lake cabins, an appearance that put the survivors in mind of angels. Years later, he could still see the rude huts and hear the emigrants' shouts of joy.
LANSFORD HASTINGS DREAMED HIS DREAMS to the end. The man who had envisioned a magical shortcut to California served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1849 and then moved to markedly bigger stages. During the Civil War he hatched a fruitless scheme to conquer Arizona for the Confederacy. When he died a few years later, he was trying to plant a colony of former southerners in Brazil, as though his former efforts to lure midwesterners to California had been insufficiently grand.
Other parties stumbled along the Hastings Cut-Off, the chimera that had so worsened the Donner Party's woes. But the route never became a main channel of the great migration, and a single bald fact testifies to the rigors of the inhospitable terrain: So far as is known, no one ever traveled it twice.
AS SHE TRIED TO WALK OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, before she died and her body was cannibalized, Elizabeth Graves had carried a heavier load than most. The Graves family wagon featured secret grooves in the middle of the bed—hiding places for the profit from the sale of the family farm back in Illinois. Before leaving the lake, rescuers helped Elizabeth pry up the coverings and recover the gold and silver, said to be eight hundred dollars in all. She lugged it along as best she could but eventually concluded she would have to stash it, perhaps because the rescuers were bantering about who would take the cash when she died, talk that was later dismissed as joking but must have seemed sinister to Elizabeth. So she hung back from the march one morning and buried the money, marking the location in her mind as best she could. So far as we know, she failed to tip off her children to the secret spot before her death a few days later, and so it seemed that the youngsters had lost their inheritance.
Then, on a spring day in 1891, almost half a century later, a miner named Edward Reynolds was digging for quartz on a hillside near Truckee when the glint of coin sparkled in his shovel. None of the pieces was dated after 1845, and the Graves children, now grown and graying adults, identified bite marks on a coin that had once been used as a family teething ring. Billy Graves, eighteen when his mother died, claimed the money.
In one of the last acts of her life, Elizabeth Graves had succeeded. She had saved the family inheritance for her children.
BY THE TIME THE COINS WERE FOUND, Truckee Lake had become Donner Lake. Today, the surrounding countryside is rife with other imprints of the great drama. The notch in the mountains above the lake is Donner Pass; a nearby summit is Donner Peak.
Men tamed those tormenting heights with remarkable speed. Less than a quarter century after the tragedy—well within the lifetimes of most survivors—workers laid the tracks of the transcontinental railroad across the pass. In time, a two-lane road followed for automobiles, then at last a superhighway that bears the brunt of winter and remains open through all but the fiercest storms. Donner Lake is surrounded by vacation homes. The little valley near the summit where the Breens passed their hellish ordeal in the snowpit is now a ski area, chairlifts shuttling skiers upward with ease, all to be followed by a hot chocolate and a cozy drive home.
Even a century ago, survivors marveled at the transformation. In 1892 Virginia Reed read a description of Donner Lake as a "pleasure resort" and sensed in the phrase strange evidence of all that had changed:
It seems ages since I was there yet I can feel the cold and hunger and hear the moan of the pines. Those proud old trees used to tell me when a storm was coming and seemed to be about the only thing there alive, as the snow could not speak. And now the place is a pleasure resort. The moan of the pines should cease.
Yet still the Sierra winter can rise and growl. Lay yourself open to the elements, and you may suffer as the emigrants of old. In 2004 a sudden blizzard in late October—about the same time of the year that the Donner Party was trapped—left thirteen hikers temporarily stranded. Two climbers in Yosemite National Park died.
FROM THE BEGINNING, ONE PLAIN TRUTH of the Donner Party saga stood out against the sexist assumptions of the age: Women toughed it out far better than the men. The first book to tell the tale, J. Quinn Thornton's Oregon and California in 1848, included a crude chart outlining the different survival rates for men and women. Thornton noted that twenty-eight men died compared to only eight women. Even accounting for the greater number of men in the party, Thornton found that men tended to die while women tended to live. Nineteenth-century sensibilities admitted no explanation for this outcome, and Thornton hazarded no guesses.
One plausible theory was that, in effect, manliness killed the men. Much of the hard physical labor, both on the overland journey and during the entrapment, fell to the males. Men broke trail, drove the wagons, hitched and unhitched the teams. So far as we know, hunting was an exclusively male chore. Perhaps, therefore, the men were already weaker than the women when the party arrived at the Sierra, and then weakened still more as the taxation of masculine camp duties conflicted with a steadily diminishing diet.
But in the nineteenth century, female work was hardly for the frail. Women hauled water for cooking and washing. They produced the meals using cumbersome iron skillets and bully Dutch ovens. Female arms and shoulders stirred the butter churn and rasped the family clothes across the washboard. At least on the open prairie, gathering firewood was more a woman's job than a man's. And walking was everyone's lot, especially as the draft animals deteriorated. The women, in other words, may have been just as exhausted as the men after months of travel.
That suggests that the greater male death rate may have been due to biology as well as behavior, a supposition buttressed by modern science. On average, women have a higher percentage of body fat than men. Fat acts as a storehouse for energy, meaning that as women starve, they have greater reserves on which to draw. Men, by contrast, begin to burn valuable muscle much faster. That difference only exacerbates another female advantage: Since women are, on average, smaller than men, they need fewer calories. The men confronted a dual curse. They needed more food than the women, and once their bodies began the internal process of self-consumption, the women were better equipped to endure it. Bravado aside, masculinity proved a deadly disadvantage.
Age intermingled with gender as a determinant of survival. In fact, statistical analyses have found that age trumped other factors. The young and the old, beset with too little exposure to life's abrasions and too much, always die first and most in tragedies. In the Donner Party, children under five exhibited a high death rate, as did adults in their forties and over. Of those who were trapped in the mountains, only two older adults survived, Patrick Breen, thought to be fifty-one, and Peggy Breen, about forty, both of whom benefited from their family's relatively plentiful hoard of beef. The three other couples who were over forty—George and Tamzene Donner, Jacob and Betsy Donner, and Franklin and Elizabeth Graves—all died.
In the prime of life, the gender disparity was especially pronounced, so pronounced that it may in fact suggest another cause altogether. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died (Eleanor Eddy), while only one man lived (William Eddy). The other seven men in their twenties, men presumably in the best physical condition of their lives, all died, many of them early in the entrapment. Most of these men were distinguished, however, not only by their age but also by their life circumstances: They were traveling alone, typically as hired ands. The young women, by contrast, were all married, most with children, many with extended families.
To gauge the value of human connection, modern researchers have studied the health effects of social networks. Their findings buttress the common intuition that people are good for people. Those with interconnected lives—people who are married or have large families or many friends or whose lives in some way bring them into contact with others—enjoy longer, healthier lives. They sniffle through fewer colds, suffer fewer heart attacks, recover faster from the debilitating effects of strokes. Even the incidence of cancer is reduced. One study followed participants for nine years and found that those who were low in "social capital"—the strings that bind us to others—were two to three times more likely to die than those with interwoven nets of human contact. Nor is this solely a modern phenomenon, alien to the Donners' day. An analysis of records from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp during the Civil War, reveals that Union captives were more likely to survive if they were imprisoned with friends, and that the closer the familiarity the greater the benefit.
The reasons for these benefits are less scientifically demonstrable but seem in many ways obvious. People draw tangible assistance from others—someone comes to check on them when they are old, for example—but they are also succored by the emotional support of love and friendship. Human beings are social creatures.
The Donner Party demonstrated anew this age-old truth. Those who were traveling with their families, especially the larger extended families, survived at rates far higher than those who were alone. Of fifteen people who were trapped in the mountains without a relative, only two survived: the Donner family employees Noah James and Jean Baptiste Trudeau. Many of the single people were among the first to die. Of the four men who died before Christmas at Alder Creek, three had no kin in camp: Sam Shoemaker, Joseph Rheinhard, and James Smith. Jacob Donner, sickly even before the trip, was the only family man among the four. Had the Donner Party been miraculously plucked from their misfortune on February l, almost no one with a family, save those who had gone with the Forlorn Hope and thus exposed themselves to incalculable additional danger, would have perished. The Donner Party is not merely a story of how hard people will struggle to survive, but of how much they need each other if they are going to succeed.
Survivors recognized that some of the young, single men lacked the incentive or tenacity to cling to life. A few months after the tragedy, James Reed wrote to a relative back east and told of the early passing of James Smith, one of his family's teamsters. "He gave up, pined away, and died," Reed wrote. "He did not starve."
ONLY TWO FAMILIES SURVIVED INTACT, the Breens and the Reeds. This was especially remarkable for the Reeds,
since James Reed's banishment left the couple's four children solely in the care of their mother, a woman who had once been so frail she had been unable to rise from her sickbed for her own wedding. Her afflicting headaches returned at least once during the winter, perhaps more. Because they had been forced to abandon so much during the crossing of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the Reeds began the entrapment with virtually no food or supplies, a penury that forced Margret to begging. Against all that, she somehow kept her four children alive.
Even her own husband, who had seen the pallor of his children's faces firsthand, could not quite seem to grasp the straits to which his family had been reduced, or the magnitude of his wife's accomplishment. Once, after the ordeal was done, the Reeds were discussing the fact that at Truckee Lake, the Reed children had found what they thought were flakes of gold. James asked his wife why she had not saved some. She could have been forgiven for punching him in the nose. Instead she looked at him with disbelief and told him that at the time, finding something to eat had seemed more important than all the gold in the world.
Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the California Star peered through a green eyeshade and a wafting helix of cigar smoke and approved a story for that week's paper. Typesetters bent over their trays, and ink-stained fingers soon began laying down the metal letters that would spell out the horrors of the Donner Party. "A more shocking scene cannot be imagined," the piece began, "than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains."
... Bodies of men, women, and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father—the mother that of her children—children that of father and mother.
Worse still, survivors had lost their most basic humanity. Once they would have "shuddered and sickened" at the thought of cannibalism, but now they "coldly" calculated which of their comrades would make future meals. Family members no longer cared for one another. Some preferred human flesh to the provisions of the rescue parties.
Earlier newspaper stories had described desperation and even cannibalism, but none had sketched so vivid a picture of depravity. Most of the details were false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Of the forty-five survivors, for example, only about half tasted human flesh. Perhaps another half dozen people resorted to cannibalism before dying. A precise count is impossible, nor would one matter. The abiding mark of the Donner Party was an act of desperation, nothing more. Faced with imminent starvation and death, the pioneers did what was necessary to survive. Eating the flesh of people who had already died wasn't barbaric or animalistic. It was the only logical and reasonable course of action open to those left alive.
But such caveats made no difference. Two weeks after the Star story the yarn was repeated in a paper in Monterey, this time embellished even more richly: Mothers had refused food to their famished children, then eaten the youngsters once they starved.
The mold was set. The story of the Donner Party went from paper to paper and mouth to mouth, spreading across the country in a titillating admixture of exaggeration, half-truth, and lie. The tall tales worsened in the retelling, as tall tales always do. Occasionally, even the survivors themselves spread bizarre and incredible anecdotes. Frances Donner once insisted that Eleanor Eddy "died deranged:"
In the forenoon before she died she got the benches and arranged them in the floor in imitation of people and danced the cotilliion and other dances untill she was exosted and then died.
Such sagas found purchase in the public mind for several reasons, perhaps including, ironically, the fact that the Donner Party represented no great turn of history. For a story that has fascinated the national psyche for decades, it was an evanescent affair. Like the survivors, history trudged ahead. Migration to California plummeted the next two years, but almost surely that had more to do with the uncertainties of the Mexican-American War than with the distant travails of a few families. When gold glittered, the allure washed memories clean. A renewed flood of humanity started marching across the continent to California, willing to risk anything for a chance at life's mother lode.
Indeed, the Donner Party was far more anomalous than typical. During the twenty years at the heart of the great overland migration— from 1840 to i860—a quarter of a million people crossed the continent, few with a result similar to that of the Donner Party. The best estimates are that perhaps 4 to 6 percent of emigrants died on the route, and of course some of those would have died back at home. Gauging the number who gave up and turned around is almost impossible, but it is clear that the great majority of those who loaded a wagon and steered westward reached their destination in safety. In the end, of course, the migration peopled California and Oregon with astonishing speed, and thus helped spread the reach of the nation toward the "manifest destiny" in which so many emigrants fervently believed. Thus the tale of the Donner Party is mismatched with its broader context, for it is a cautionary warning about an enterprise that was largely, from the standpoint of the participants, a splendid success.
Early newspaper accounts often seemed at pains to make the point that most travelers had no trouble. The California Star noted that some companies reached the golden shore in less than four months. Even with time to spare for resting the cattle, no more than four and a half months was needed. All "candid persons" knew as much. Mere "ordinary industry and care" ensured a crossing of the Sierra before the first snow.
The real trouble with the Donner Party, according to this line of argument, was not the inherent risks of the journey west but the company's own sloth and foolishness. Even before the first rescuers reached the cabins, the Star blamed the party's delay on "a contrary and contentious disposition." Everyone would have completed the trek safely, the paper claimed, if only "the men had exerted themselves as they should have done."
It would be specious to claim insight into the motives of long-dead editors, but it's worth noting that this focus on the alleged shortcomings of the Donner Party suited the interests of the emerging American establishment in California, which was eager for more emigrants. If the Donner Party could be at least partly blamed for its own travails, other prospective newcomers might not be discouraged. The last thing anyone in California wanted to suggest publicly was that a harrowing catastrophe was simply an intrinsic—if highly unlikely—risk of westward migration.
In the early years, therefore, the public imagination took on a twofold perception of the Donner Party—first that they were ghouls, second that they bore a substantial responsibility for their own misfortune. Together, these two ideas intertwined into an ugly and depressing perception of the emigrants. Some survivors rarely spoke of the events, almost as if they were hiding a shameful family secret.
But in time, a new tableau emerged. In 1879 the editor of the newspaper at Truckee, near the site of the tragedy, published a history of the Donner Party, downplaying the occurrence of cannibalism and justifying almost everything the emigrants did. The book proved popular and began to change the public perception. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Native Sons of the Golden West were ready to erect a monument to the Donner Party, a grand statue of a pioneer family striding boldly into the future. It was set atop a massive pedestal said in popular legend to reflect the height of the winter snows of 1846. No longer were the men and women of the Donner Party the sad and incompetent counterpoise to the success of the westward migration; now they were the avatars of its glories, symbols of the Pioneer archetype. The Native Sons wanted "to acknowledge the Donner Party to be typical of the entire race of pioneers, strong, resourceful, self-reliant, fearless, unconquerable spirits—who even in their death added luster to California's name." Where once "there was reproach heaped upon it," now the party's name enjoyed "a day of renown." Eventually the head of the society's monument committee went well beyond that, declaring that the Donner Party reflected not only the best of the pioneer spirit but the best of human endeavor generally. The great edifice, he declared, would "charge the minds of all who behold it with a reverence for those characters who 'gird their armor on,' who square their shoulders to the world and who take the brunt of life."
If a single day typified the rehabilitation of the Donner Party name, it was the dedication of the monument, on a hot June day in 1918, more than seventy years after the tempest. Eight survivors were still alive, three of them at the dedication: Patty Reed and Frances and Eliza Donner. Eliza had become something of a celebrity, having written a book about the Donner Party in which she attempted to disprove her family's cannibalism, and so she was seated at the head of the honored guests, just to the right of the speaker's podium. There had already been a reception the previous day, an event at which Eliza, attempting to say a few words, had choked up with uncontrollable emotion. At the dedication ceremony, she looked out over the crowd, but the faces dissolved into ghosts. She could see her mother walking away from the cabins at Donner Lake, back toward her dying husband, "her small figure moving in and out among the pine trees." Her gaze shifted, and she could see herself and her two little sisters climbing up the massive escarpment hanging above the lake.
The sharp rap of the master of ceremonies' gavel snatched away her reverie. She flashed back to the present, a time when an automobile or a train or even an airplane could carry one across Donner Pass in less time than it might take to walk to the far end of the lake. Two girls dressed in white drew away cords, and a veil fell from the monument.
WAS THE DONNER PARTY, AS THE MONUMENT builders believed, composed of heroes? In the traditional sense of the word hero, some members qualify. Stanton's willingness to return to a company in which he had no family members, especially when McCutchan's illness offered him a ready excuse, offered a sterling example of commitment. Eddy's leadership of the Forlorn Hope notified the California settlements of the party's dire condition and summoned help without which the entire company might have died. Rescuers displayed much valor, especially Stark, whose bullheaded insistence pulled the Breens from certain death.
But more than gleaming heroism or sullied villainy, the Donner Party is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity. The Breens hoarded their larger supply of meat when they deemed it necessary and shared it when they thought they could. Amanda McCutchan abandoned her daughter to the care of near-strangers when she left with the Forlorn Hope, but ultimately it was the Forlorn Hope that summoned help. Jean Baptiste Trudeau stayed to help the Donners as long as he could and left when he thought he might die. Tamzene Donner orphaned her daughters to comfort a husband sure to perish. Margret Reed left behind two of her children to care for the other two. Tojudge such decisions from the comfort of modern life is a fool's errand. The members of the Donner Party did the best they could, which is a form of Everyman's valor.
And therein lies the true lesson and attraction of the tale: They were Everyman. Often, adventure stories feature larger-than-life figures, grand Victorian explorers or indomitable generals or pith-helmeted naturalists resolutely seeking some wondrous discovery. They are tales of men seeking the South Pole or the North, or hunting the fortune of a lifetime at sea, or climbing to the top of the world. Such quests have much to teach us, but so too does the drama of the mundane gone madly wrong. The Donner Party is a narrative of merchants and farmers, of middle-aged parents with children and young couples with dreams, of infants and toddlers and teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. It is a story of American families doing what they have always done—moving west in search of a better life. It is a story of extraordinary deeds born of ordinary devotion.
That is why the most resonant moments of the Donner Party saga are often the quietest, the times when we can see glimpses of normalcy in lives torn asunder. There is no plainer exhibition of that fact than the day Patty Reed finally escaped the interminable snows. She had ridden down out of the mountains on her exhausted father's back and been taken ahead to the camp of one of the relief parties. She was fed a meal such as she had not eaten in months—rich California beef and soft fresh bread, even the almost-forgotten taste of sugar—and then led to a seat by the fire.
No one knew it, but months before, when the family had been forced to abandon one of its wagons on the harsh deserts of Utah, Patty had saved a precious artifact. Her parents told her that nothing could be preserved, but when adult heads were turned, she snuck from the wagon bed a doll that her grandmother had made for her—a tiny wooden figurine three or four inches tall, perfect for the grasp of a small hand, with a white dress and a red shawl and a bun of black hair painted on its head. Patty hid the treasured little item in the folds of her dress, secreting away the talisman through long months of fear and heartbreak, a private friend through an ordeal that called forth from Patty the courage and stamina of an adult more than the playfulness and gaiety of a child.
But now, at the relief camp, the nightmare was over. She pulled the doll from its hiding place and sank back into the lighthearted amusements of youth. She let the firelight shine off the wooden face. She smoothed the dress with her fingers. She laughed and chattered and listened to her companion's imagined replies. "Oh, what a pleasant little hour," she remembered decades later. Writing about the ordeal, it was that memory she seemed to treasure most, not her triumph over tragedy, but her return to the commonplace.
"Little Dolly looks old now," she wrote, "but she is appreciated by Patty as much today in April 1879 as she was in April 1846. You thought Dolly handsome, did you not Mr. McGlashan, when you seen her in San Jose a few weeks ago? My fine daughters and two sons look upon Dolly with feeling and respect for that little piece of wood, for their Mama had it to play with when she was a little girl, and carried it through all her troubles too."