Maintaining any semblance of hygiene was particularly challenging. Like most people, the emigrants of the 1840s preferred to be as clean as possible. But for families like Sarah’s, back home in Illinois, with no effective way to heat large quantities of water, bathing had been a seldom-indulged-in luxury. Men and women living on the frontier might take as many as one bath a week, but many took as few as a half dozen a year, and some as few as one a year. Here in the sands of eastern Nevada, bathing was a near impossibility. If it happened at all, a bath consisted of a quick, cold splash in a shallow, muddy stream, often a stream reeking of alkali or sulfur. For the most part, it just didn’t happen, and so inevitably Sarah and everyone around her stank virtually all the time. They smelled not just of sweat but also of urine and excrement and menstrual blood and yeast infections and halitosis and tooth decay. Toothbrushes were a rarity, not patented in the United States until 1857 and not mass-produced until the 1880s. As a result, even young women like Sarah often began to lose teeth in their early twenties, one reason for the stern, closed-mouth faces that look back at us from daguerreotypes taken in the 1840s. Menstrual flows were controlled ineffectively at best with rags held insecurely in place by belts around the waist.
Laundering opportunities were hard to come by as well. On the few occasions when they camped in one place for more than one night, Sarah and her sisters did as much laundry as they could. If they had time, they boiled the clothes in large kettles suspended over campfires and then spread them on rocks or hung them on the wagons to dry when the group began to move again. But as water became scarcer, the intervals between laundering opportunities grew longer. When it was necessary, the women sometimes splashed perfumes and essential oils on their bodies to mask the odors emanating from their dirty clothes.
Like their clothing, their bedding also became encrusted with dust, sweat, and the oils their bodies naturally exuded, and this tended to create fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of pests. The travelers battled body lice, head lice, bedbugs, and fleas in their wagons and tents. In the arid desert country of Utah and Nevada, their skin dried out and became scaly, their lips chapped, their eyes ached from the dust and the relentless glare of the sun. All in all, they were physically miserable much of the time.
For two weeks they traveled on, rattling through the hills of eastern Nevada, following Lansford Hastings’s tracks around the south end of the Ruby Mountains on what later turned out to be an unnecessary 125-mile detour. On September 26 they reached the main fork of the Humboldt River. There they rejoined the established emigrant road, finally completing Hastings’s cutoff. It had taken them sixty-eight days to reach this spot after leaving the road at the Parting of the Ways on the Little Sandy. Some of those who had stayed on the older road had made it in as little as thirty-seven days. In the end, Hastings’s shortcut had added roughly a month to Sarah’s journey.
They began to follow the shallow, sluggish Humboldt westward. As the days passed, they noticed increasing numbers of Shoshone Indians, short of stature, dark-skinned, and nearly naked but for breechcloths, watching them from hillsides as they passed. On September 29 two members of the Te-Moak band of Shoshones came into camp to barter and banter with the emigrants. They camped near the emigrants that night, and in the morning both they and two of the Graveses’ oxen were gone. Two nights later more Shoshones spirited away one of Franklin Graves’s best mares.
Since July 3, James Reed had been maintaining a daily diary that one of his fellow emigrants, Hiram Miller, had begun back in Independence in April. From the time Reed had taken over the diary, he’d mostly just noted distances the party had covered each day, road conditions, and occasional incidents of interest along the way. But on October 4 the diary concluded abruptly with one ambiguous word, “Still.” It was the beginning, presumably, of an entry that Reed never finished, because of what happened the next day.
Exactly what happened in the Nevada desert on October 5, 1846, has been the subject of controversy ever since—interpreted and reinterpreted by historians and told and retold by many parties, not least of them members of the Graves and Reed families, for each of whom different truths have emerged from a welter of disputed facts. At its core, though, it was simply a nineteenth-century case of road rage.
After taking their noon break at the base of a steep, sandy incline called Pauta Pass, Franklin Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder began the arduous process of double-teaming their oxen to each of their three wagons in turn and driving them one at a time up the hill. Jay added his own team to Franklin’s wagon and pulled it to the top, then returned with both teams and began to ascend with his and Sarah’s wagon. John Snyder felt he could drive the third wagon up with one team and began to follow Jay up the hill. But his team of oxen became entangled with a team driven by Milt Elliott, who was struggling to make headway up the hill with Reed’s family wagon. Reed, who had been out hunting with William Eddy, arrived at the scene on horseback to find Snyder quarreling with Elliott, cursing and whipping the oxen and trying to untangle the teams.
Reed dismounted. He and Snyder exchanged hot words over a wagon tongue that separated them. Snyder said Elliott had gotten in his way. Reed took Snyder to task for mistreating the oxen. Snyder raised his bullwhip and threatened to whip Reed. Reed started across the wagon tongue and drew a knife. Snyder struck him on his head with the butt of his bullwhip and then struck again. Margret Reed rushed between the two men, and one of the blows struck her on the head. Reed lunged and stabbed Snyder in the chest, puncturing his left lung. Snyder staggered a few feet before Billy Graves caught him in his arms and lowered him to the ground. And there in the Nevada desert, John Snyder, who had danced jigs on the tailgates of wagons back on the Platte and who had apparently caught the eye of Mary Ann Graves, died spewing blood into the hot sand.
Snyder had been popular, James Reed considerably less so. Reed’s family and his teamsters gathered nervously around him at the bottom of the hill. Virginia Reed began dressing the wounds on her father-in-law’s scalp. Sarah’s family and most of the remainder of the company withdrew and encamped near the top of the hill. There they began a debate that would last through centuries about what exactly had happened. They took affidavits for a possible future trial in California, but feelings against Reed ran high, and some in the camp did not want to wait for California. Louis Keseberg propped a wagon tongue in the air and demanded that Reed be hanged from it forthwith. But some of the men gathered around Reed at the bottom of the hill—led by his teamsters—brandished rifles, and made it clear that they would fight rather than stand by and watch Reed be executed.
In the end the company decided to banish Reed with neither provisions nor weapons—the near equivalent of a death sentence in the desert, but one that would spare his wife and children the sight of their husband and father writhing at the end of a rope.
In the morning Reed offered to pry some boards from his wagon to construct a coffin for Snyder, whom he said he had always regarded as a friend. The offer was rejected, but Reed attended the funeral nonetheless. Snyder’s body was lowered into the sand. Then Reed said farewell to his horrified and sobbing wife and children and set out on his prized gray mare, Glaucus, heading west alone.
That night Reed’s daughter Virginia and Milt Elliott stole out of camp in the darkness, overtook Reed, and gave him his rifle, his pistols, some ammunition, and some crackers—all they could spare from the meager store of provisions they had left.
The company moved on, following the Humboldt southwest as it grew ever shallower, gradually devolving into a series of green, stagnant pools. They had expected to be in California by now, and their provisions were nearly depleted. Many families began to ration what food remained in their wagons.
Over the next few days, their fortunes continued to spiral ever more rapidly downward. Hearts that had long since begun to harden now became petrified. On October 7, Louis Keseberg put the elderly Belgian, Hardcoop, out of his wagon and told him he would have to walk, tho
ugh the old man’s legs had given out days before. Hardcoop quickly fell behind, but that night a party of men went back and brought him into camp. By the next morning, it had become clear that Margret Reed’s heavy family wagon, even emptied of most of its contents, was impeding the company’s progress, and she was finally made to abandon it in the desert. Despite what had happened at Pauta Pass a few days before—or perhaps because of it—Franklin Graves turned one of his three wagons over to Mrs. Reed and her children.
Shortly after they got started that morning, Hardcoop hobbled up to William Eddy and said Keseberg had put him out again. Hardcoop pleaded for a ride, but everyone was walking now to spare the increasingly exhausted oxen, and Eddy told the old man he would have to walk, too. The old man limped on through the sand, but once again he quickly fell behind and was soon out of sight. That night it was bitter cold. Margret Reed, Milt Elliott, and William Eddy implored Keseberg to go back and try to find Hardcoop, but he refused. They tried Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves. Both of them had horses with which to make the attempt, but neither wanted to risk overtaxing his stock. Both refused. Some boys driving cattle into camp late that afternoon said that they had seen Hardcoop, his feet black, split, and swollen, sitting exhausted under some sagebrush some miles back. They were the last to see the old man alive.
On October 9 the group traveled all through the night. Bogged down in a long stretch of deep sand, they were unable to get free of it until 4:00 A.M. on October 10, Elizabeth Graves’s forty-sixth birthday. It wasn’t much of a birthday. Late in the day, Paiutes ran off all the horses Franklin Graves had tried to preserve by refusing to search for Hardcoop. The next day the Paiutes made off with eighteen head of cattle belonging to George Donner, Jacob Donner, and the German Wolfinger. Then, on the morning of October 15, while the company partook of a meager breakfast near the Humboldt Sink, the broad, marshy lake where the Humboldt River sank into the desert and disappeared, still more Paiutes crept up to unguarded cattle. This time they killed twenty-one head—all of the Eddys’ team but for one ox, and all of the Wolfingers’ but, again, for one. In a stroke, the Eddys and the Wolfingers were left dependent on the goodwill of the rest of the company, and goodwill was rapidly becoming a very scarce commodity.
William Eddy buried what little he had left in the way of possessions. Then he and Eleanor picked up three pounds of loaf sugar—the only food that remained to them—and set out on foot. William carried three-year-old James, and Eleanor carried their infant, Margaret.
Wolfinger, who was said to be carrying a large amount of money, wanted to bury the body of his wagon with his goods cached inside, but no one was willing to stay behind to help him except for two other emigrants of German extraction, Joseph Reinhardt and Augustus Spitzer. As the three men began to dig, Wolfinger’s young wife, Doris—a tall girl who had only recently emigrated from Germany and spoke little English—went on ahead on foot with the other women. In the hills above them, the Paiutes crouched among rocks and laughed as they straggled by.
The company entered another long, dry drive—forty miles across a flat alkali desert. They traveled both day and night again, keeping only loose associations with one another now, each family looking out mostly for itself. At about 4:00 A.M. on October 16, walking under a thin crescent moon, William and Eleanor Eddy caught up with the Breen family at a group of hot springs where they had encamped briefly in the middle of the Forty Mile Desert. The boiling springs reeked of sulfur and belched plumes of steam into the night air, but the emigrants dipped water out with ladles, let it cool, and then drank it regardless of its taste.
The Breens filled their water casks and pushed on across the dark desert. The Eddys, still carrying their children, stumbled along behind them in the sagebrush. When they paused again, Eddy asked Patrick Breen if he could have half a pint of water for his children, but Breen, with seven children of his own, refused. Desperate, Eddy seized a rifle, said he would have the water even if he had to kill to get it, and filled a bucket from Breen’s cask. Breen let it go.
Sarah fared better than many of her companions for now. She and Jay still had their wagon and enough oxen to draw them, as did the rest of her family. They walked all that day across alkali flats, now and then passing columns of white steam rising from more hot springs. At sunset they kept moving, anxious to be shut of the desert as soon as possible. At about 4:00 A.M. on October 17, they encountered one last obstacle, a steep sand hill, much like the one where John Snyder had died days earlier. They double-teamed their oxen again and made the long, hard pull in the dawn light.
Later that morning they finally came to the swift, clear, sweet water of the Truckee River running down out of mountains they could not yet see—the Sierra Nevada. They knelt by its side and put their lips to the river and drank deeply and gratefully from it. William and Eleanor Eddy staggered in off the desert, and they and their children also knelt and drank, even more gratefully, from the river. William heard the joyous sound of geese cackling nearby and went off with his gun. When he returned, he had nine fat geese, the first food he and his family had had in two days, except for bits of the sugar they’d carried across the desert.
A bit later Augustus Spitzer and Joseph Reinhardt also rode into camp. But they carried sad news for young Doris Wolfinger. As they had helped her husband to bury his wagon and his other goods back at the Humboldt Sink, they said, Paiutes had attacked, killing Wolfinger and making off with all of his goods. Doris Wolfinger, they were sad to say, was a widow.
Doris Wolfinger was indeed a widow. But it would later emerge that Reinhardt and Spitzer had taken some significant liberties with the facts. It was not the Paiutes that had killed her husband. When the last of the company had moved on from the Humboldt Sink, Reinhardt had killed Wolfinger, whether in the heat of an argument or in cold blood we do not know. But with an opportunity lying before them, he and Spitzer almost certainly had begun to ransack Wolfinger’s wagon, searching for the cash and valuables the Wolfingers had been said to have with them.
There were no witnesses to any of this, though, and the Paiutes made convenient scapegoats. So on October 18 the company resumed its journey, traveling up the Truckee River now. At first they moved wearily along level but rocky benchlands on the south side of the river. Then, as the canyon narrowed, they were forced to repeatedly cross and recross the icy-cold stream, driving the wagons through the water, lurching over rocks the size of washtubs. The cottonwood trees lining the river stood like tall candle flames, brilliant with yellow leaves in the clear autumn light. Rabbit brush on the dry hillsides above the river bore trusses of equally bright yellow flowers, reminding some of the company of Scotch broom. But few of them were in the mood now to appreciate the scenery. Before them they could see dark clouds massing where they knew the mountains lay waiting for them.
As they traveled up the canyon and eyed the clouds ahead, they fretted about whether Stanton and McCutchen would ever return from Sutter’s Fort with the supplies they knew they would need to make it through the mountains. And as if in answer to their prayers, the next day Stanton finally rode into camp leading a string of seven mules laden with flour, dried beef, and other provisions from Sutter’s Fort. Big Bill McCutchen had fallen ill at the fort and been unable to return, but Stanton—a bachelor with no family connections in the company to draw him back—had nonetheless returned to them for a second time. Trailing behind Stanton were two young men—Miwok Indian vaqueros named Luis and Salvador, whose labor John Sutter had lent to the distressed emigrants.*
Stanton also brought surprising news. On his way back, he’d had an interesting encounter in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In Bear Valley, thirty miles west of the summit, he had come across two emaciated travelers heading westbound. One of them was James Reed.
After he was banished from the Donner Party on October 6, Reed had traveled ahead quickly on horseback and overtaken the wagons of George and Jacob Donner, with whom one of his teamsters, Walter Herron, was traveling. Wit
hout mentioning John Snyder’s death, nor his own near lynching, Reed told the Donners that he had been sent ahead to seek help in California. He enlisted Herron in the effort, and the two of them set off westward with only one mount—Reed’s gray mare, Glaucus—and almost no provisions.
Taking turns riding on the mare, they made their way painfully across the Forty Mile Desert, up the Truckee, and into the Sierra Nevada, shooting the occasional goose, sage hen, or rabbit when they could find them. As they penetrated deeper into the mountains, though, game became scarce, and they soon had nothing left to eat except for a few wild onions. Herron wanted to shoot Glaucus and eat her, but Reed would have none of that. They pressed on to Truckee Lake and over the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Herron began to grow delirious. Then Reed found a single bean lying in the dusty road. The two of them got down on hands and knees and searched for more, eventually finding a total of five beans. Herron took three of them and James Frazier Reed, until recently among the most affluent members of the Donner Party, sat down and ate the other two, his meal for the day.
The next day, October 22, they stumbled across an abandoned wagon with a tar bucket hanging from it. They scraped some rancid tallow from the bottom of it and ate that, but within minutes Reed became violently ill. Later that day, however, he recovered, and he and Herron made it down a steep descent into the upper reaches of Bear Valley, where they found a small party of emigrants talking with Charles Stanton. Reed was so gaunt and emaciated that Stanton at first did not recognize him.