Over the following days, Reed and Herron staggered on westward toward Sutter’s Fort while Stanton continued eastward toward the Donner Party. Reed and Herron came across more emigrants encamped in Bear Valley—among them the Tuckers, the Ritchies, and the Starks. These families, after parting from Sarah and her family for a final time back at Fort Bridger, had struck out for Oregon. But when they’d reached the Humboldt River, they had come across Lansford W. Hastings. Hastings, predictably, had had some advice for them.
We met a man by the name of Hastings who advised us not to go the Oregon road, that we were nearer California than Oregon and we stood a chance of being caught in snow,…so we lay by a day to talk about it and think the matter over but finally concluded to take the California road.
Short of provisions and with their oxen giving out, they had barely made it across the crest of the mountains a few days before and were now resting their livestock prior to pressing on to Johnson’s Ranch at the eastern edge of the Sacramento Valley. Looking back at the dark clouds gathering over the crest of the Sierra, they began to wonder whether their friends and companions from the plains would make it through. They hoped they’d had the good sense to turn around and go back down to Truckee Meadows rather than stay in the mountains. A few days later, on October 28, James Reed and Walter Herron, haggard, footsore, and almost too weak to walk, staggered up to the tall wooden gateway to Sutter’s Fort.
That evening, as it began to rain hard at the fort, Reed was reunited with Edwin Bryant, who had traveled with him in the Russell Party until July 2, when Bryant had gone ahead with others on mules. Bryant filled Reed in on the state of the war against Mexico, and Reed signed a document pledging his services to Colonel John Frémont, but only after he had brought his family in from the other side of the mountains.
The next day, though he was still scarcely strong enough to walk, Reed also joined Bryant and a Reverend Dunleavy in signing another document—a petition for the rights to some land—an entire island, twenty to thirty miles long in the Sacramento River. Having arrived in California, Reed was bent on owning a piece of it.
Late on the afternoon of October 20, the lead elements of the Donner Party came around a final bend in the river and saw the expanse of Truckee Meadows—the broad valley where Reno now lies—stretched out before them, green and inviting. Beyond the meadows, they also saw, for the first time, the eastern flank of what they called the California Mountains—the Sierra Nevada—rising up above the meadows, a great granite wall, seemingly perpendicular, gray and imposing, capped with white snow, overhung by black clouds.
Over the next few days, the lead families rested at the meadows, letting their cattle graze and build strength while the families straggling behind caught up. Some of them stayed in place for three or four days. Then they began working their way up the canyon of the Truckee River into the dark mountains ahead of them.
And the mountains greeted them with a dark omen. Not at all certain that the supplies Sutter had sent with Stanton would see them through if they were delayed by weather, the men of the Donner Party decided to send a second advance party to Sutter’s Fort to procure still more provisions. Two brothers-in-law, William Pike and William Foster, would ride ahead to the fort for backup provisions. As Pike and Foster prepared for the trip, though, a gun that Foster was holding discharged accidentally and the bullet entered Pike’s back.
He did not die easily. His eighteen-year-old wife, Harriet, and the rest of the party gathered around him and watched in horror as he writhed on the ground, clutching at the dust and gasping for life for what seemed to those who watched to be an interminable time. Fourteen-year-old Mary Murphy later remembered, “he suffered more than tongue can tell.” There was nothing anyone could do for him, though, with no doctor closer than Sutter’s Fort on the far side of the mountains, and no medicine stronger than whiskey and herbal concoctions likely at hand. If he had been a horse or a dog, they might have shot him to put him out of his agony, but he had a Christian soul and could not be murdered. When he finally ceased breathing, Pike’s stunned young widow was left with two daughters, an infant, and a toddler. For the third time in a month, the Donner Party paused briefly to lay a relatively young man’s body in a rocky roadside grave and then move quickly on. They could not linger here with the mountains looming ahead.
As they pushed up the Truckee River Canyon, they separated into at least three groupings. The Breen family, along with the Kesebergs, the Eddys, and Patrick Dolan were out front. Sarah and Jay Fosdick, the Graveses, Margret Reed and her children, the Murphys, Charles Stanton, Luis, and Salvador formed a middle group. Margret Reed and some of her smaller children rode on the mules that Stanton had brought from Sutter’s. The Donner brothers and their teamsters lagged behind the others in a third group.
The canyon grew narrow and steep-sided. They had to cross and re-cross the frigid river almost continuously now, trying to find passageways for the wagons among the boulders in the water. When they had crossed the river more than twenty times, near present-day Verdi, Nevada, they finally left the river and worked their way northwest up a dry, narrow side canyon and over a high ridge forested with large Jeffrey pines and ponderosa pines.
Survivors would later disagree about the exact dates, but on October 29 or 30 the lead group made a steep descent from the ridge into Dog Valley, a broad green vale, then climbed a second summit and descended again, this time into thick pinewoods. There, traveling through flurries of snow alternating with cold rain, they began to follow a clear mountain stream south and southwest. Late in the day on October 30, they camped in a wide grassy meadow just five or six miles short of Truckee Lake, nine or ten miles short of the mountain pass that separated them from California.
When the Breens and the other families in the lead party crawled out of their tents the next morning, a few inches of snow covered the ground. It was discouraging, but it didn’t appear to be anything that would seriously impede their travel, so they moved on toward Truckee Lake. The soft, wet snow sloshing under their feet made walking painful for many of them, so tattered and riddled with holes were their shoes, but that afternoon they emerged from the woods near the south end of the lake. There they got their first good look at what lay beyond the flat expanse of gray water.
At the far end of the lake stood a great jumble of granite cliffs, an imposing rock wall squatting squarely in their path west, rising more than eleven hundred feet above the level of the water. They had never seen anything like this in the Rockies nor in the Wasatch nor anywhere in their lives. There was a slight notch in the southern end of the wall, the pass through which they were supposed to travel, but notch or no, the thing looked utterly impassable for wagons, even under the best of circumstances. To make matters worse, every ledge and crevice and possible foothold on the face of the cliffs was already laden with deep drifts of snow.
They made their way through sparse woods along the north side of the lake and up a rough wagon road toward the granite crags ahead. But snow falls heavily in the lee of a mountain, and it had been falling here intermittently since October 7, a month earlier than usual. Over the past forty-eight hours, it had been snowing almost continuously up at the summit. Now, as they began to climb the approaches to the pass, they quickly found themselves in three or four feet of loose powder. They lost track of the wagon road but kept going anyway, trying to find their own route up the steep incline, meandering among boulders the size of houses. The snow was soon up to the oxen’s chests, though, and the beasts could make no headway. The men cursed and snapped whips at the oxen, but it did no good. Finally they gave up and turned around. By evening they were back at the eastern end of the lake, where a cold rain was falling. Only a few inches of snow lay on the ground.
The Breens found a weathered shanty in which an eighteen-year-old emigrant named Moses Schallenberger had passed the winter of 1844–45 alone after having become snowbound at this same spot. All nine of them moved in for the night. The rest of the advance com
pany crawled into the backs of their wagons and tried to sleep.
Sarah and Jay and the rest of the middle group arrived at the eastern end of the lake sometime after the Breens, most likely by the middle of the day, November 1, Mary Ann Graves’s twentieth birthday. There they heard from the Breens the sickening news that they had tried but failed to make it over the pass the day before. As more families arrived, confusion and dissension gripped the company. Some felt that the rain and slush through which they’d been traveling meant that a warming trend was beginning—as it might have back home in Illinois—and that all they needed to do was bide their time until rain washed the snow from the mountains above. Others—likely including Franklin Graves, who was experienced with the ways of mountains from his boyhood in Vermont—argued that rain here simply meant more snow on the surrounding peaks and that they had not a moment to lose in getting over the crest of the mountains. They had Sutter’s mules now to break a trail and Luis and Salvador to act as guides through the pass, advantages the Breens had not had the day before.
By the next morning, they had decided to try again. The Donner brothers and their retinue still had not come up to the lake, but the rest of the company set about organizing themselves for a fresh assault on the pass nonetheless. With George Donner, the captain of the party, absent, no one here had any real authority over the others. They argued about what should and should not be brought, about who could and could not ride the horses and mules, about who would lead and who would follow. Some of the men wanted to bring containers of tobacco; some of the women wanted to bring bolts of calico. Franklin Graves had to figure out what to do with the heavy hoard of silver coins he had squirreled away in his wagon. Some families opted to bring their wagons, others to leave them behind. The latter tried to pack their possessions onto the oxen, but the beasts bucked and bellowed and rubbed themselves against trees, trying to rid themselves of the unfamiliar loads. Louis Keseberg, who had injured his foot when he stepped on a sharp stick earlier in the trip, mounted a horse and tied his foot into a sling attached to the saddle. Finally, disjointed and out of sorts, they set out.
By midday they were on the approaches to the pass and the snow was up to the axles on the wagons. They sent Luis and Salvador out in front with some of the mules to break a trail, but over and over again the mules stumbled and pitched headfirst into the snow, kicking and braying loudly each time. The oxen’s iron-shod feet clattered and clanged against ice and granite. The iron-rimmed wagon wheels could get little purchase on the snow-covered rocks, and the wagons began to slide backward. Jay and Sarah and the others leaned into the backs of their wagons with their shoulders, trying against all odds to push them forward. They urged their oxen on again with fresh shouts and curses and whips, but the oxen could move the wagons only a few feet with each effort. They struggled forward like this for hours, fighting their way yard by yard up the mountain. By now almost all the women were carrying children—mothers carrying their sons and daughters, sisters carrying their younger siblings.
It had not snowed for some hours, but black storm clouds had begun to pile up over the peaks immediately ahead. Still short of the summit, they came to a steep granite wall rising out of the snow. Luis and Salvador reported that they had lost track of the wagon road. Charles Stanton and one of the Miwoks went forward, skirting the cliff, to see if they could find signs of the road farther ahead. The two men made it to the pass and paused briefly to survey the flat valley and frozen lakes that lay to the west. Encouraged by the relatively easy terrain before them, they headed back downhill for the others, eager to show them the way. But by the time they returned, the company had ground to a halt.
The women who’d been carrying children in their arms through drifts up to their thighs were too exhausted to continue and had simply sat down in the snow. Some of the men had set fire to a pitch pine, and the flames had climbed up into the branches of the tree, popping and hissing. Everyone began to gather around the blazing tree for warmth. Stanton exhorted them to press on to the summit, but no one would move. Darkness was coming on quickly. People spread buffalo robes on the snow, lay down, and pulled blankets over themselves. Like everyone else, Sarah and Jay, exhausted by what they had just endured, lay down, too. They drifted toward fitful sleep in the eerie, wavering light of the burning pine snag.
A few hours later, the leading edge of a new storm slid in over the jumble of granite peaks just to the west of them. Snow began to spiral silently down out of an utterly black, featureless sky. One by one, feathery flakes landed on cold blankets and buffalo robes, on sweat-slicked hair, on shoulders turned to the sky, on soft cheeks—each flake delicate and slight, but each lending its almost imperceptible weight to the horror of what was about to happen.
Part Three
THE MEAGER BY THE MEAGER WERE DEVOURED
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meager by the meager were devoured.
—Lord Byron,
“DARKNESS”
7
COLD CALCULATIONS
On the morning of November 3, Sarah awoke to the muffled sound of someone shouting. Louis Keseberg was bellowing. He had just awakened to find himself seemingly alone on the mountain above Truckee Lake, surrounded only by soft drifts and mounds of new-fallen snow. When he had called out in alarm, the mounds had begun to move and to dissolve, gradually revealing the human beings that they concealed. Heads had popped up out of the snow all around him, like prairie dogs on a white prairie.
Sarah and Jay struggled to their feet, brushed snow from their clothing, and looked around in alarm. During the night everything had been transformed. A terrible hush had fallen over the world. Fresh snow weighed down the limbs of firs and ponderosa pines. The granite peaks just to the west of them had become a series of sheer white walls. Everything was utterly still, except for the dizzying swirl of snowflakes still sifting down out of the slate gray sky. They looked about and saw that some of the cattle had wandered away and vanished into the surrounding whiteness.
For the first time, the anxiety that had been eating at the company for weeks gave way to something close to stark terror. They huddled around the smoking remains of the burned pine snag and tried to figure out what to do. If they tried to go forward, they would have to proceed on foot and likely flounder in the deep drifts until they died of exposure and exhaustion. If they returned to the lake, what remained of the cattle would feed them for a while, but they would face the prospect of starvation long before spring came. Neither option was good, but the latter at least offered some time to think of other alternatives. They gathered the mules and as many oxen as they could find and began to fight their way back down the mountain, wading through snow now hip-deep. All day more snow swirled down through the pine forests, covering their tracks from the day before, making it difficult to find their way. They did not arrive back at the lake until about 4:00 P.M.
At that same hour, 130 miles to the west, their old traveling companion from the plains, Edwin Bryant, who had made it through to California several weeks earlier, was in a farmhouse in the Napa Valley. He had just taken shelter from a new and particularly violent storm freshly blowing in from the Gulf of Alaska, and it made an impression on him.
The storm soon commenced and raged and roared with a fierceness and strength rarely witnessed. The hogs and pigs came squealing about the door for admission; and the cattle and horses in the valley, terrified by the violence of elemental battle, ran backwards and forwards bellowing and snorting. In comfortable quarters, we roasted and enjoyed our bear meat and venison, and left the wind, rain, lightning, and thunder to play their pranks as best suited them, which they did all night.
At Truckee Lake that night, as the new storm that Bryant had witnessed worked its way into the Sierra Nevada, the Donner Party retreated into wh
atever kinds of shelter they could find. Sarah and Jay, lying in the rear of their nearly empty wagon—the wagon that had been so full of provisions back in St. Joe—huddling under buffalo robes and woolen blankets, watching the snow accumulate ever more rapidly out beyond the tailgate, must have wondered how on earth this could have come to pass, and how on earth it could possibly end well.
It snowed for eight days.
Roughly five miles to the northeast, the Donner brothers, their families, and their teamsters had also become hopelessly bogged down. Descending a steep ridge a few days before, probably on the descent into Dog Valley, one of their wagons had overturned, briefly trapping four-year-old Georgia and three-year-old Eliza in the wreckage. More seriously, the accident had broken an axle on one of the wagons. It had taken a day of work to fashion a new axle from a pine log, a day they could ill afford to lose. To make matters worse, George Donner had cut his right hand when his chisel slipped while shaping the axle. It wasn’t much of a wound, but it was already starting to get infected and this made it difficult for him to use the hand.
The next day they had pushed on toward the lake in light snow. Before they’d gone far, though, they encountered messengers from the lake camp doubling back to warn them that the pass above the lake could not be crossed. The news must have stunned them. With no real alternative, they began to look for a place to make some kind of winter quarters. When they came to a wide meadow spread along a stream now called Alder Creek, they stopped and went to work. The Donner brothers and their teamsters began to fell trees, then to buck the logs into lengths suitable for a cabin. Working with aching, freezing hands, they notched the first set of logs and used their oxen to drag them into position. They began to stack them up, building walls. By now the snow was falling hard and fast, but George Donner could work only slowly with his left hand. Jacob Donner, frail and in failing health, could do little to help. Fourteen-year-old Elitha Donner helped her father notch the logs while the other men felled more trees and hauled the logs to the site. By the time they had the first four courses of logs laid, though, the snow was falling at such a rate that it simply overwhelmed them.