The Indifferent Stars Above
The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
Daniel James Brown
For Sharon
Thank you
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above.
—W. B. YEATS,
“A Dream of Death”
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One:
A Sprightly Boy and a Romping Girl
Chapter One Home and Heart
Chapter Two Mud and Merchandise
Chapter Three Grass
Part Two:
The Barren Earth
Chapter Four Dust
Chapter Five Deception
Chapter Six Salt, Sage, and Blood
Part Three:
The Meager by the Meager Were Devoured
Chapter Seven Cold Calculations
Chapter Eight Desperation
Chapter Nine Christmas Feasts
Chapter Ten The Heart on the Mountain
Chapter Eleven Madness
Chapter Twelve Hope and Despair
Photographic Insert
Chapter Thirteen Heroes and Scoundrels
Part Four:
In the Reproof of Chance
Chapter Fourteen Shattered Souls
Chapter Fifteen Golden Hills, Black Oaks
Chapter Sixteen Peace
Chapter Seventeen In the Years Beyond
Epilogue
Appendix: The Donner Party Encampments
Acknowledgments
Chapter Notes
Sources
About the Author
Other Books by Daniel James Brown
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Even well after the tragedy was over, Sarah Graves’s little sister Nancy often burst into tears for no apparent reason. She mystified many of her schoolmates in the new American settlement at the Pueblo de San José. One minute she would be fine, running, laughing, and playing on the dusty school ground like any other ten-or eleven-year-old, but then suddenly the next minute she would be sobbing. All of them knew that she had been part of what was then called the “lamentable Donner Party” while coming overland to California in 1846. Recent emigrants themselves, most of them knew, generally, what that meant and sympathized with her for it. But for a long while, none of them knew Nancy’s particular, individual secret. That part was just too terrible to tell.
Nancy Graves’s secret was just one part of many things that were too terrible to tell by the time the last survivors of the Donner Party staggered out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the spring of 1847. And for decades thereafter, many of those things were not told, except in tabloid newspaper accounts that were often compounded farmore of fiction than of truth. It wasn’t until a newspaper editor named Charles F. McGlashan began to delve into the story in the 1870s that many of the real details of what had happened that winter in the Sierra Nevada started to emerge. McGlashan set about interviewing survivors, and in 1879 he published his History of the Donner Party, the first serious attempt at documenting the disaster. Since then the true stories and the fictional ones have bred and interbred in the American imagination.
In introducing his recent book, Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought, Michael Stephenson points out that our ideas about the generation that fought the American Revolution have become “embalmed” by “the slow accretion of national mythology.” How true. I still cannot think of George Washington without visualizing him as a marble bust. But if the generation of 1776 has been fossilized by mythology, the same is equally true of their grandchildren. The emigrant generation of the 1840s has been endlessly depicted in film and television productions, almost always in highly stereotyped ways—a string of clichés about strong-jawed men circling the wagons to hold off Indian attacks and hard-edged women endlessly churning butter and peering out from under sunbonnets with eyes as cold and hard as river-worn stones.
The emigrants of the 1840s deserve better. They were, on the whole, a remarkable people living in remarkable times. Just how remarkable they were has largely been camouflaged for us, not only by the stereotyping and the mythologizing but by the homespun ordinariness of their clothes, the commonplace nature of their language, the simple virtues they held dear, and the casual courage with which they confronted long odds and bitterly harsh realities. The men among them did, in fact, sometimes circle their wagons to defend against potential Indian attacks, though the attacks were anticipated far more often than they ever occurred. But the men also lay awake at night agonizing about what they had gotten their families into, schemed to take advantage of one another, sobbed under the stars when their children died, lusted after women half their ages. And the women did, of course, churn a great deal of butter, but they also studied botany, counseled troubled teenagers, yearned for love, struggled with domineering husbands, and made wild rollicking love deep in the recesses of their covered wagons. Like all people in all times, the emigrant men and women, as well as the Native American men and women, of the 1840s were complex bundles of fear and hope, greed and generosity, nobility and savagery.
And in the end, each of them was, of course, an individual, as unique and vital and finely nuanced as you or me. So before I began to write this book, I made a vow to myself that wherever possible I would cut through the clichés and resist the easy assumptions about the men and women who went west in 1846. And I decided that I would focus on one woman in particular, Sarah Graves, and tell the unvarnished truth about what happened to her in the high Sierra in the terrible winter of that year.
Sarah hasn’t made it easy. She left little record of her own experiences, and while others who suffered through the ordeal with her that winter have left us with their own, sometimes quite detailed accounts, few of them have had much to say about her. But what accounts there are suggest that she was a friendly, sociable, and thoughtful person, well liked by many of her companions but perhaps not apt to call attention to herself. And so while I have everywhere tried to remain entirely factual in writing about her, I have at times extrapolated from what those who accompanied her reported or from the published findings of experts in particular fields to describe what she must have experienced. Knowing, for instance, that she spent a specific night sleeping on the snow, clad only in wet flannel as the mercury plummeted into the low twenties, allows us also to know with reasonable certainty what she must have experienced in terms of physical discomfort, potential hypothermia, and psychological distress. So I have gone where eyewitness accounts and expert testimony have led me in describing such experiences. Similarly, in places I have drawn on my own experiences walking in her footsteps to re-create direct physical sensations that she must inevitably have felt. So, for example, in describing her passage through tall prairie grass, I have included sensory details from my own trek through the deep grass of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Nebraska.
With that in mind, I offer this book not as a comprehensive history-of the Donner Party but as a lens through which I hope you will be able to gaze with compassion and understanding on one young woman and all that the world once was to her.
DANIEL JAMES BROWN
Redmond, Washington
September 1, 2008
PROLOGUE
In many ways this book began one hot
October afternoon in the fall of 2006 when I drove up the Napa Valley searching for bones. I have an affinity for bones. I like their hard-and-fast durability, the crispness of their lines, the heft and weight of them. Most of all I like their honesty. Bones have their secrets, but they tell no lies.
I made my way slowly up the valley in a rental car, trapped in the usual weekend procession of tourists promenading from one winery to the next on Highway 29. Heat waves rippled off of the black asphalt ahead of me. A vague autumnal haze hung over the valley, and so did the heady aroma of fermenting wine. The harvest was in full swing. Crews of pickers were making their way among the vines, stooped over, lugging white plastic boxes full of dark grapes. Watching them, I was glad for the car’s air conditioner.
The wine tourists and I crept through the hot but picturesque old brick downtown of St. Helena, past the stately stone buildings of the Beringer winery, then past the Old Bale Mill. I craned my neck to see the mill, but its enormous wooden waterwheel was hidden behind a screen of redwoods. I remember the mill fondly as a shady, cool place my father used to bring me for picnics on warm days like this when I accompanied him on sales trips up the valley in the 1960s. Finally, just south of Calistoga, I pulled out of the parade and parked my car in front of a stately old farmhouse. The house is the headquarters for the Bothe-Napa Valley State Park now, but once it belonged to my great-uncle, George Washington Tucker.
I got out of the car. The house was closed for the afternoon, so I circled behind it and made my way up a little dirt path through a field of dried-out thistles and parched, waist-high grass toward what was left of a white picket fence. Sections of the fence had fallen to the ground, and the thistles had grown up tall and ragged between the pickets. Other sections still stood, leaning at odd, disjointed angles, flakes of white paint peeling from gray, weathered wood. From time to time, gusts of hot, dry wind blew down from the chaparral-cloaked Mayacamas Mountains just to the west, and the thistles rattled and scraped against the wooden pickets. Cicadas whirred in the big valley oaks fringing the field. The peppery scent of bay laurel spiced the wine-rich air.
The tumbled-down fence surrounded the remains of a derelict cemetery. Most of the tombstones were made of white marble, and many of them were cracked. Some had toppled to the ground and lay facedown among the weeds; others were missing essential parts, bearing only fragmentary inscriptions half obscured by patches of gray-green lichen. I began to wonder if I would find the one I was looking for. But then I did. Chiseled into the marble was the inscription GEORGE W. TUCKER DEC. 15, 1831–AUG. 16 1907.
He was my father’s uncle, and I was there because he is my one tenuous connection with a young woman named Sarah Graves Fosdick. I had come to commune with his bones before I began to search for hers. He was not a major figure in Sarah’s life, but once, a long time ago and far from there, he had been in her company. He was only fifteen then, she twenty-one, and they had both been setting forth on a journey of staggering proportions into, quite literally, uncharted territory. Whether they were even acquainted in the first few weeks of that trip, I do not know. They had both begun their journeys in Illinois—he in Illinois City and she in Sparland, near Peoria. A month later, on the west bank of the Missouri River, their families had met up and become friendly. It’s unlikely that she would have paid him, a mere boy, any particular heed. But I do know that they must eventually have come to know each other, thrown together by circumstances so horrifying that neither of them could have imagined anything of the kind when they first met. He had traveled where she traveled, saw and felt much of what she saw and felt. His bones had walked the same tedious trails, stretched out at night on the same patches of prairie sod, climbed laboriously through the same icebound mountain passes.
I am far from the first to commune with bones in hopes of understanding Sarah’s story. One warm August afternoon in the summer of 1849, Wakeman Bryarly, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor from Baltimore, found himself near what was then still called Truckee Lake in the high Sierra. Like so many other ambitious young men that summer—the summer when a whole world of young men seemed to pour across North America and into California—he was on his way to the goldfields. His party had encamped just east of the lake, and, with an afternoon to kill, he decided to take the opportunity to indulge in a cold bath. On his way to the lake, he hoped also to find something else that hundreds of other travelers that summer had sought out—a local tourist attraction of sorts.
He set off on foot, and just 150 yards down the road he found the first evidence of what he was looking for. In a dusty meadow full of whirring grasshoppers, dry grass, and foot-tall plants with broad gray leaves called “mule ears” stood a weathered but neatly fashioned log cabin. The cabin was surrounded by some unusually tall stumps, the remains of pine trees that had been cut off ten feet or more above the ground. He examined the cabin and found that it had two entrances and two living chambers separated by a log partition. In the dirt floor of each chamber, there was a shallow depression, the remnants, perhaps, of fire pits, or burial pits of some sort. Poking about in the dry grass among the stumps outside the cabins, he found some charred logs. And then, nearby, he found what he’d been told he would.
Half hidden in the grass were piles of bones. At first most of them seemed to be the bones of cattle, but then, just to the left of these, he found a nearly complete human skeleton sprawled out on the ground with grass growing up between the ribs. He stooped and examined the remains. Then he noticed that in the grass nearby there were bits and pieces of broken wooden boxes and some faded articles of clothing. He picked up a child’s stocking and felt something rattling around inside it. He carefully turned the stocking inside out and dumped its contents into his hand—the small and perfect foot bones of a child.
Bryarly stood up and contemplated the scene before him. As a doctor, he had seen plenty of human bones before. And just recently he had seen a great many. The overland trail on which he’d been traveling all summer had been strewn with shallow graves, as many as ten per mile in some places. Most of them were the product of the devastating Asiatic cholera epidemic that had spread its way from New Orleans up the Missouri River and then westward along the trail that summer, killing hundreds of emigrants of all ages. The graves were often shallow, dug in sandy soil by grim-faced men anxious to move on and escape whatever mysterious agent was causing all these deaths. Many of the graves had been ripped open by wolves and coyotes, and in spots the road had been strewn with bones and tattered bits and pieces of mummified corpses.
Satisfied that he had seen what he’d come to see, Bryarly shook off the grimness of his discovery and continued along a pretty little creek through sparse pinewoods to Truckee Lake. There had been frost on the grass that morning, but the afternoon had grown warm and dry, as they often do on the east side of the Sierra in late summer. He was dusty and travel-weary, so he undressed and took a bath. The sheer beauty of the place stunned him. He exulted in the clarity of the lake’s frigid, crystalline water and in the drama of the stark granite cliffs and basalt crags towering above the far end of the lake.
Exhilarated, he started back toward his party’s encampment. And then, unexpectedly, as he passed through some dark pinewoods, he came across more evidence of what had happened there just three years before—the remains of another cabin, this one burned to the ground. Among blackened logs he found more human bones—many more. He crouched to examine them, and this time the bones shocked Bryarly, not so much for their number but for their condition. Femurs and tibias had been hacked open as if with an ax; skulls had been cut open as if with a meat saw. Whatever sense of spiritual renovation he had felt at the lake quickly faded. Looking at what lay before him, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation that the whole place was, as he wrote in his diary that night, pervaded by a “sad, melancholy stillness…which seems to draw you closer and closer….” He grew still and began to reflect on what these bones might have to tell him:
To look upon these sad monument
s harrows up every sympathy of the heart & soul, & you almost hold your breath to listen for some mournful sound from these blackened, dismal, funeral piles, telling you of their many sufferings & calling on you for bread, bread.
Wakeman Bryarly had it right. To hear the only voices that can tell this story, you must almost hold your breath to listen. What they have to say is hard to hear, and harder still to come to terms with.
And so, standing in a long-neglected cemetery in the Napa Valley, I, too, held my breath and strained to listen. I pulled a manila envelope from my pocket and took out a photograph of Sarah that had been given to me by one of her relatives. I studied it, as I had done many times before. It has haunted me since I first saw it, and ultimately it is the reason I set out to write this book. At the moment when it was taken, Sarah gazed back at the camera calmly, with bright, intelligent-looking eyes. She was pretty, but only in a quiet, understated way. In the picture her hair is parted in the middle and pulled back above the ears, and she is wearing what looks to be a simple black bodice with a lace collar and a large white bow at the neck. She appears serious, almost somber, but, paradoxically, she is wearing what seems to me to be just the slightest, Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile.
It was those bright eyes and that slim suggestion of an almost-smile that first arrested my attention and that have held it ever since. In an era when people almost universally believed that a grim, even severe, countenance was the most appropriate face to present to the camera, Sarah had let a tiny glimmer of happiness, or at least apparent contentment, show through. Standing there among the rattling thistles next to my great-uncle’s grave, I wondered how I was to reconcile that hint of happiness with what I already knew about her life and death.