Desperate now to get out of the snow, they abandoned the cabin and began to set up canvas tents in three separate camps, one for each of the brothers’ families and one for the teamsters. They built brush shanties covered with pine boughs, quilts, and rubber sheets. They stacked poles against a large pine tree, tepee style, and covered them with more brush. While they worked, the younger Donner children sat on logs, bundled in blankets, the snow piling up all around them. Finally they all crawled into their miserable shelters and tried to figure out what to do next. They thought they might be able to build a real cabin once the snow stopped falling.
Over the next several days, as snow continued to drift down out of a monotonous, lead-colored sky, each of the families and individuals camped at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek sat down to make hard decisions, decisions that it now seemed clear might have life-and-death consequences. They all knew the importance of acting cooperatively; that, after all, was the essence of life in a company. But by nature most of them were independent and self-reliant. And most of them also, by now, were more or less disgusted with one another.
In the last few weeks, abrupt reversals of fortune had taken place, and the resources the company had available were now distributed in new and starkly unequal measures. At the lake, Margret Reed, probably the most affluent woman in the company back on the plains, now found herself and her children among the most impoverished. She still had her cook, Eliza, but little for the woman to cook. She had her servant, Baylis, but he was feeble and largely blind. The two of them mostly just represented more mouths for Margret Reed to feed now. The Eddys and the Murphys were similarly destitute. The Breens, on the other hand, still had most of their cattle and worldly goods.
Sarah and Jay and the rest of the Graves clan had certain advantages over some of their companions at the lake camp. They had lost every one of their horses and many of their loose cattle, but they still had most of their oxen, their household goods, a cache of silver coins, and years of experience living on the Illinois frontier under very harsh circumstances. Above all, they had one another to look out for and to provide mutual aid. Franklin and Elizabeth Graves and their children were not the kind of people to let a little snow scare them; nor would they let a little deprivation demoralize them.
At Alder Creek the Donner brothers also still had most of their possessions, including a large quantity of fine fabrics they had brought west and a considerable hoard of gold and silver coins. But unable to provide their families with any better shelter than tents and a brush shanty, their cash and their goods were of little use to them. Some of the young men who worked for them—those who had not gone ahead to the lake camp—had made a separate camp a short distance from the two Donner family camps. As single men they carried few possessions, though, and so they had virtually nothing to fall back on.
Several of the younger women—Doris Wolfinger at the Alder Creek camp as well as eighteen-year-old Harriet Pike and twenty-three-year-old Amanda McCutchen at the lake camp—found themselves, like Margret Reed, unexpectedly without their husbands to stand by their sides. As a consequence they and their children were largely dependent on other families for food, fuel, and shelter. The unattached young men of the party similarly had nothing and no one to turn to, but at least they did not have children to worry about.
With the relentless snowfall weighing down the canvas covers on the wagons at the lake, the first priority for everyone there was to find or make some kind of more substantial, semipermanent shelter. Patrick and Margaret Breen had already taken possession of the primitive cabin that Moses Schallenberger and his companions had built in 1844, about a quarter of a mile east of the lake. Twelve by fourteen feet, with a dirt floor, it was rudely constructed of poles cut from pine saplings. A single opening served as both door and window. At one end stood a simple chimney that let escape the smoke from an open-hearth fire. Patrick Breen was not a robust man, but all he and his sons needed to do to make the cabin reasonably habitable was to stretch some canvas and hides over the roof and cover it with pine boughs. When this was done, all nine of the Breens, their friend and former neighbor Patrick Dolan, and the Mexican drover Antonio moved into the 168 square feet of living space.
Louis Keseberg, hobbled by his injured foot, could do no better than to build a simple lean-to out of poles and pine branches against the side of the Breens’ cabin, and into this he, Philippine, and their two young children crawled, along with two other German members of the party, Augustus Spitzer and Charles Burger.
About 150 yards to the southwest of the Breens’ cabin, near the stream that drained the lake, William Eddy and William Foster found a large boulder, nearly the size of a cabin itself. One side of the boulder was flat and nearly vertical. The men set about gathering materials to build a cabin up against the boulder. The cabin was rectangular, flat-topped, dirt-floored, about eighteen by twenty-five feet, eight or nine feet tall, built of unpeeled pine logs. The boulder at one end provided a natural hearth and chimney, as smoke could rise through a narrow gap between the cabin’s roof and the face of the boulder. Into this one structure moved all six of the Murphys, all three of the Fosters, all three of the Pikes, and all four of the Eddys—sixteen people sharing 450 square feet.
Franklin Graves, characteristically, decided to build his cabin apart from the others. He selected a site nearly half a mile to the east and slightly north of the Breens’ cabin, where he thought they would be more sheltered from storms but still have wood and water nearby. Working, like the others, in an almost continuous snowfall, their hands red and stiff, Franklin, Jay, Billy, Milt Elliott, Luis, and Salvador cut pine logs eight to twelve inches in diameter. Then they threw chains around the logs and used their surviving oxen to drag them to the site, notched them with axes, and began to assemble a double cabin, eight or nine feet tall. Each of the two interior chambers measured about sixteen by sixteen feet, with a chinked log wall between them. Each had its own fireplace. Like the cabins closer to the lake, this one had a flat roof of poles covered at first by canvas and then pine boughs. When William Eddy had finished working on the Murphys’ cabin, he also helped Franklin complete the double cabin.
The chamber on one side was for the use of the Graves family, along with Amanda McCutchen and her infant child, Harriet. The chamber on the other side was primarily for Margret Reed, her children, Baylis and Eliza Williams, and the five family dogs. The Reeds had nowhere else to go, and Franklin Graves seems to have felt responsible for making sure that they at least had a roof over their heads.* The bachelors Charles Stanton, John Denton, and Milt Elliott would also have to squeeze in with the Reeds, as would the two Miwoks, Luis and Salvador, though all of these people at various times would also bunk in with the Graves family.
When the double cabin was finished, Sarah and her mother and her older siblings began to unpack the wagons, carrying their scant household furniture into their half of the dark, cold interior. They unpacked ceramic tableware, brass knives and forks, wooden spoons, and earthenware mugs; they set cast-iron skillets and their old Dutch oven around the fire pit; they found nooks and crannies to hold cobalt blue bottles of patent medicines, aqua-colored pickle jars, combs, mirrors, bits of jewelry, pouches of tobacco, and tin boxes containing herbal remedies. Franklin brought in his carpentry tools and drove nails into the walls to hang up their wet clothes near the fire pit. He and Jay and Billy hauled in a few old flintlock muskets and newer percussion rifles and stacked them in corners, along with an old brass pistol, boxes or bags of lead shot, black powder, flints, and percussion caps. They toted in a sack of beans that they had planned to use as seed when they reached California. Jay brought in his violin. They left their cache of silver coins outside, still hidden in the cleats in their family wagon. They cut pine boughs and arranged them on the earthen floor to serve as beds, then laid the smaller children down on them, bundled up for warmth. Then they went outside and sized up their oxen.
Hard calculations had to be made. To kill all the animals meant t
hat they would lose the opportunity to draw the wagons over the mountains if the weather turned warm in the days ahead and melted the snow on the pass. Warming weather would also quickly spoil any meat they butchered now; there was almost no salt left with which to preserve it. On the other hand, with little more than pine branches to feed them, the already emaciated oxen would continue to dwindle in bulk if they were kept alive, their bodies offering less in the way of sustenance with every day that passed. Even as it was, their lean, stringy meat could feed the eighty-one people stranded here and at Alder Creek for only a matter of weeks.
And there was another, even tougher, piece of calculus that had to be worked through before anyone slaughtered any livestock. The Breens and the Graveses likely had a half dozen oxen each, but the Murphys had fewer, the Eddys had only one, and Margret Reed, with five children crowded into her half of the double cabin, had none. If something weren’t done to equalize the situation, she and her children were going to die here, and far sooner than the rest of them.
Still, when Margret Reed approached Franklin and Elizabeth Graves and asked to buy some oxen, they must have flinched at the question. To surrender even a single animal would diminish the prospects that they, their nine children, and their son-in-law would survive what lay ahead. And they were not disposed to think well of any of the Reeds. What they viewed as John Snyder’s murder was still fresh in their memories. They could not let the woman and her children starve before their eyes, though, so they sold her a pair of haggard but still-living oxen on credit, to be paid back two for one if and when they reached California. The Breens sold Margret Reed two more. For twenty-five dollars, Franklin Graves sold William Eddy one ox that had already starved to death.
Over the next several days, each family set about killing and butchering most of their remaining oxen. It was a messy business. Killing an animal as large as an ox, even an emaciated one, takes some doing. Those who had percussion rifles of a large enough caliber could try shooting the animals, aiming for the heart or the base of the brain, but it was hard to penetrate the skull or hit a vital organ. The other option was to make the killing more personal, grabbing the beasts by the horns and slitting their throats or sinking an ax head into the tops of their skulls, or simply smashing a sledgehammer into their broad foreheads.
Once the animals were dead, they commenced butchering them. Country men like Franklin Graves and Jay Fosdick knew their way around the inside of a carcass. They tied ropes around the rear legs of the oxen and hoisted them partway up into a pine tree and cut their throats to drain the blood. They slipped sharp knives under the hides to loosen sinews, then peeled the hides off the red, glistening bodies. They dragged the hides to their cabins and incorporated them into their roofing materials. Then they cut the shrunken bellies open, hacked their way into the chest cavities, cut the esophagi and diaphragms loose, and pulled out the entrails, carefully separating anything they could use from the offal they would feed to the dogs. Under the circumstances, they planned to use nearly everything themselves.
Up to their elbows in gore, they slit open stomachs for tripe. They cut out hearts, livers, kidneys, spleens, and pancreases and put them into bloody buckets. They cracked open skulls with axes and scooped out the brains. They pried open the great slobbering mouths and cut out the tongues.
They worked their way carefully and deliberately into the structure of each animal, probing with bloody, cold-numbed fingers for the openings in the joints where they could separate the parts with just a few cuts. Where they had to, they sawed through thick bones, but mostly the animals came apart easily under their expert hands. The women took the tails and got out hatchets and chopped them into short sections for making oxtail soup. Women and boys and girls stacked up the lean hindquarters and forequarters and sections of ribs and vertebrae with shreds of flesh still clinging to them, burying them in snowbanks for refrigeration.
When they were done, the snow around all three cabins was crimson. But fresh snow was still falling steadily, and it soon erased every sign of the butchery. They wiped their knives clean and put them away for now, none of them yet knowing the terrible irony that lay latent in what had just unfolded here.
As the company began to hunker down in the high Sierra, James Reed was slogging through the western foothills, trying to travel east. John Sutter had provided him with thirty horses, a mule, large amounts of flour, a hindquarter of beef, and two more Miwok vaqueros to help manage the horses. William McCutchen, who had recovered from his illness at Sutter’s Fort, had joined him. Both men were determined to make it back to their families.
Two days after setting out, though, they ran into heavy rain and sleet, and by the time they got to Bear Valley, two feet of snow lay on the ground. At the head of the valley, they came across a tent in which two emigrants—Jotham Curtis and his wife—had taken refuge after crossing the mountains. Snowbound, frightened, and half starved, the Curtises were in the process of cooking the last piece of the family dog in a Dutch oven when Reed and McCutchen appeared. The two men provided Mrs. Curtis with some flour, and she set about baking bread. Then all of them sat down to a meal of bread and dog, the latter of which, after some hesitation and considerable sniffing, McCutchen tasted gingerly and finally pronounced “very good dog.”
The next day, as Reed and McCutchen began to climb out of Bear Valley on horseback, the snow was thirty inches deep. As they went higher, the snow grew deeper. The Miwoks were a people of the valleys and foothills, and as afraid of Sutter as they might be, they would have none of this. That night they disappeared into the pines. In the morning Reed and McCutchen abandoned all but the nine best horses and continued. As they approached headwaters of the Yuba River, though, the horses struggled to make headway. They began to rear on their hind legs and then fall forward into drifts so deep that they were buried up to their noses.
The two men left the last of the horses mired helplessly in the snow and continued on foot. Almost immediately, though, they found themselves wallowing through snow so deep and loose that with each step they sank up to their chests. Exhausted, they finally conceded that they could go no farther. They took a last look eastward through the falling snow at the gray granite peaks that separated them from their loved ones—perhaps as close as ten or twelve miles to them at this point—and turned around.
At the lake camp, there was talk of trying again to cross the mountains. Despite all he had done in preparing a winter camp for his family, Franklin Graves had no intention of simply staying at Truckee Lake and watching them slowly starve. He, more than perhaps anyone else in the company, was determined to break out of the mountains and get help. With the Donner brothers laid up at Alder Creek, he was the oldest man in camp and, as he must have been beginning to realize, the most senior.
In many ways he was a natural to lead an escape attempt. He likely knew more about winter survival than all the other men in the camp combined. Living out of doors, or close to it, had always been his natural inclination. He was physically large and strong. He could read the weather, construct a sound shelter, and hunt with the best of them. He didn’t get rattled easily. He persevered when faced with adversity. Perhaps most important, he didn’t give a damn about what others thought of him.
Modern disaster psychologists have found that bold, decisive leadership greatly improves any group’s ability to survive the early stages of an impending catastrophe. As floodwaters rise or a wildfire approaches, there generally is little time to waste building consensus, forging compromises, or worrying about other people’s feelings. Tough decisions have to be made; bold actions have to be taken before a dangerous situation can evolve into a desperate one. From all we know about him, Franklin Graves seems to have fit the profile of just such a leader.
So when the snow finally stopped falling on November 12, Graves wasted no time in trying again to escape. The first attempt at crossing the pass had bogged down when the women carrying children could go no farther, so this time the only women who would go wo
uld be two who had no children, and whom he could trust to keep going, Sarah and Mary Ann Graves. Most of the healthy men in camp would constitute the rest of the company—Franklin himself; Jay Fosdick; William Eddy; William Foster; a few of the Donners’ teamsters; two of Reed’s teamsters; and Charles Stanton, Luis, and Salvador to act as guides. They improvised packs, loaded a few meager supplies on Sutter’s mules, dressed in heavy layers of wool and flannel, and set off with the mules, wallowing through the snow toward the granite wall at the west end of the lake.
Even before the sun set over the pass that had been their first objective that evening, though, they staggered wearily back into camp. At the far end of the lake, they had encountered ten feet of snow, much of it fluffy powder into which they promptly sank up to their thighs. With every new step, each of them had had to pull a boot free from the snow, lift a knee up to his or her chest, swing a leg forward, shift his or her weight to the suspended leg, plunge forward a half a yard, and then repeat the whole process over and over. Even at sea level, the effort would have exhausted anyone. Here, at almost six thousand feet, it left them gasping for breath with every few steps, their hearts pounding wildly in their chests. Before they had even gotten truly under way, the snow had defeated the strongest of them.
The next day William Eddy—with the meat from his two oxen already dwindling away—borrowed William Foster’s muzzle-loading rifle and resumed the long, cold hunting expeditions he had been making for some days now. There was little in the way of game, though. The local deer had all retreated to lower elevations, and the bears mostly had gone into hibernation. Thus far Eddy had been forced to settle for an owl one day, a coyote another day, and an occasional squirrel, all of which Eleanor Eddy had turned into miserable meals for their family.