On November 14, though, Eddy got lucky and came across a grizzly bear digging for roots in an exposed meadow about three miles northeast of the lake camp. He leveled his musket, took a long shot, and struck the bear. But a grizzly is a hard beast to bring down, even with high-caliber bullets fired from modern rifles, let alone a single lead ball propelled by black powder. A full-grown male can weigh as much as 600 pounds, a female as much as 350 pounds, and every ounce of them is lethal. The bear, irritated more than wounded, turned and charged. A skilled hunter, Eddy had put an extra ball in his mouth as a precaution. He quickly removed it, reloaded the barrel with powder, rammed the ball home, and stepped behind a tree. As the bear closed on him and began to round the tree, Eddy stuck the barrel of the rifle to the animal’s chest and fired again. This time the bear tumbled into the snow. Eddy grabbed a stout stick, jumped on the bear, and began to beat it about the head to make sure that it was dead. That night, well after dark, Eddy and Franklin Graves dragged the carcass into camp behind a pair of the Graveses’ last few living oxen.*
On the way back into camp with the bear, traveling through darkening pinewoods, Franklin Graves had exchanged some somber words with Eddy. He wasn’t about to give up, but he now believed that he would die here in the mountains, he confided, because God would punish him for his part in exiling James Reed back in the desert and his refusal to return to search for the old man, Hardcoop, a few days later.
The Eddys shared the bear meat with the Fosters, Graveses, and Reeds, and for all of them it was a godsend. But with so many mouths and stomachs to satisfy, the bounty it provided was nearly gone within a few days.
By November 21 it had not snowed for more than a week, and bare patches of ground began to appear at the lake. It seemed likely that there would be significantly less snow at the summit than before, so Franklin Graves pushed for making another assault on the pass. This time twenty-two people would go, virtually all of the adult men and half a dozen women and older children. The greater the number who left, the fewer mouths would have to be fed at the lake and the longer their diminishing stores would last.
Again Stanton, Luis, and Salvador led the way with Sutter’s seven mules to beat down a path. The long sequence of sunny days followed by cold nights had produced a cycle of thawing and freezing that had left a hard crust on the surface of the snow. This time they did not sink into the drifts so readily. They made it over the pass the first day and camped in the snow near the summit that night. The next morning, in the valley just to the west, though, they encountered deeper snow, and by midday the sun began to soften its surface. Men could still walk, more or less, on the crust, but the mules were too heavy—they broke through and sank up to their withers with each new step now. As the mules brayed and floundered in the snow, William Eddy argued for abandoning the animals and continuing, but Stanton refused. He had promised to return the mules to Sutter, and increasingly he seemed obsessed with the commitment.
Without Stanton or the Miwoks to guide them, the rest of the company knew they could not find their way down out of the mountains. Eddy offered to pay for Sutter’s mules himself if need be, but still Stanton would not relent. Furious, Eddy ordered Luis and Salvador to lead the party on without Stanton and the mules, but Stanton intervened. He told the Miwoks—quite possibly correctly—that Sutter would hang them if they returned without the mules. Luis and Salvador refused to go on without the animals.
As the men argued, Sarah and Jay could look far off to the west, toward California. It was a bright, clear day. There was a cold wind at their backs. For as far as they could see under a pale blue sky, there was nothing but deep snow and the dark tops of pine trees. They turned around, facing into the bitter wind, and started hiking back over the pass and downhill into the somber shadows already falling over the lake from the surrounding peaks. So did everyone else. It was late in the afternoon before they arrived back at their cabins by the lake.
Working in a tiny notebook of his own making—just three and three-quarters by six inches—Patrick Breen had begun a diary on November 20 with the words “Came to this place on the 31st of last month…” On November 23, sitting in the cold gloom of his cabin, he noted the return of Sarah and Jay and the other would-be escapees, writing that “the expedition across the mountains returned after an unsuccessful attempt.” And then on November 25, he looked skyward and wrote, “Cloudy looks like the eve of a snow storm.”
Another low-pressure system had slid down out of the Gulf of Alaska. The next day, Thanksgiving Day, it began to snow again. This time it would go on for nearly a week, a week during which all the mules that Stanton had refused to abandon on the summit would wander away, die, and disappear under six or seven feet of fresh snow.
Silently and implacably, serious hunger began to work its way into each of the cabins at the lake that week. Hunger is perhaps the strongest and most unyielding of human urges, according to Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History. Because it is so directly tied to our survival, it handily outcompetes most of our other emotions for our attention. It pesters us first, then nags us, and finally screams at us if we are unwilling or unable to satisfy its demands.
Deprived of food, our brains conspire with our guts to make their mutual needs our foremost and most immediate concern. Our bodies require approximately two hundred grams of glucose per day to function normally, at least half of that fueling just one particularly vital organ, the brain. When our blood-sugar levels begin to drop, our brains grow displeased—we get uncomfortable, we grow tired and irritable, we develop pounding headaches. Our stomachs also rumble in complaint. If they still find themselves empty after this complaining, they begin to produce the hunger hormone ghrelin and send it via the bloodstream to our lower brains, which promptly begin to shriek their own complaints all the more loudly.
At this point we are going to eat, or try darned hard to eat. If for some reason we can’t eat, or can’t eat very much, a number of other physiological and psychological processes then begin to kick in.
In a study at the University of Minnesota in 1945, a group of volunteers, all young, healthy men, underwent a yearlong experiment during which they were subjected to severe caloric restrictions. As their bodies began to react to the reduced amount of food, the young men first began to notice periods of dizziness. Then they became sensitive to cold, asking for extra blankets even on warm summer days. Their metabolisms began to slow down, their blood pressures began to drop, and their hearts began to shrink. Their lung capacity began to diminish. They generally began to lose strength and endurance. As time went on, they became possessive and defensive about whatever food they had, guarding it jealously from others. They became increasingly omnivorous, stopped disliking certain foods, and began to crave greater amounts of salt and other seasonings.
All this and more began to unfold for Sarah and Jay and their companions at the lake camp. No one was actually starving yet, for there were still small portions of lean beef to eat, meager and unpalatable as it was. The leanness of the meat, though, began to exacerbate the situation. The human body requires a certain amount of fat in order to digest and extract nutrients from meat, so even as they ate what they called their “poor beef,” the Donner Party began to find that they were deriving little nutritional benefit from it.
As hunger hardened its grip on them, Billy Graves and some of his sisters hiked out onto the frozen surface of Truckee Lake, dug their way down through the snow, and sawed a foot-and-a-half square out of the hard lake ice below them. They pushed the plug of cut ice out of the way so they could lie on their bellies and peer into the dark depths. And sure enough, from time to time fat and silvery lake trout flashed by in the long column of light descending from the hole. They lowered hooks and lines and lay on the ice for hours, peering down, watching the flashes of silver, catching nothing.
Living conditions deteriorated steadily at the lake camp as the snow began to bury the cabins. The emigrants cut steps into the snow so that they cou
ld climb from their doorways up to the surface, but the interiors of their cabins grew dark and increasingly fetid. There was virtually no light except for the flickering of the fires. Smoke from the fires continuously stung the eyes of everyone who stayed inside. And even inside, even with the insulating effect of the snow piled up around the cabin, the cold gripped them without sur-cease. Their hands and feet ached around the clock, ached with the kind of dull, relentless pain that gets down into your bones and lives there and will not ease up.
In the Graveses’ half of the double cabin, Sarah and Mary Ann and their mother crouched around their own fire, over which was suspended a Dutch oven in which they cooked small bits of the stringy beef they retrieved from the snowbanks outside. The rich but perishable organ meats and the best cuts of beef were almost certainly long gone by now, consumed within the first few days after the slaughter of the oxen. What was left was largely muscle and gristle. There was almost nothing now with which to supplement the meat, and no salt with which to season it. The more they ate of it, the more it began to taste like pasteboard to them. Sarah and her mother and Mary Ann tended, around the clock, to the younger children in the cabin, who were bored, miserably cold, and increasingly cranky. Five-year-old Franklin Jr. and the baby Elizabeth in particular wailed and whimpered.
Jay and Franklin and Billy spent much of their time out in the relentless snowfall with Stanton and Luis and Salvador, foraging for firewood. The dry pine limbs that had littered the ground when they arrived at the lake had by now disappeared under the snow, so they tried to knock dead limbs out of trees. Finally they took to felling living pines, cutting them off just above the snow line with crosscut saws, bucking them into short lengths, and splitting them with axes. But the work was exhausting, and they came back from these wood-cutting expeditions cold, wet, and spent. The green wood they brought in burned poorly, filling the cabin with even more smoke.
Everyone’s clothes were perpetually damp. There was no way to bathe at all now. Lice, bedbugs, and fleas continued to infest their bedding. The cabin reeked of wet wool, sweat, unwashed bodies, urine, and excrement. To relieve themselves, day or night, Sarah and her family had either to use chamber pots or to emerge from the cabin into the bitter cold outside, climb up steep steps cut into the snow, walk a reasonable distance from the cabin, and squat in the cold, stinging snow.
On the other side of the log partition that separated the two halves of the cabin, just eight or nine inches away, Margret Reed, her albino servant Baylis Williams, and his sister Eliza labored under similarly miserable conditions to provide for the Reed children. Margret Reed was carefully rationing her very limited supply of meat, and Baylis, who was likely getting the least share, was beginning to grow noticeably weak. To pass the time, Patty Reed played with the small wooden doll she had hidden away back on the western edge of the salt desert.
At the Murphy cabin, where there were seventeen mouths to feed, only scraps of beef were left from the two oxen they had started with at the beginning of the month. William Eddy went out to hunt every day but seldom returned now with anything more than an occasional squirrel. In the Breen cabin, Patrick was suffering bouts of agonizing pains from kidney stones. On November 29 he and his sons managed to kill the last of their oxen, but his wife, Peggy, had to do most of the butchering the next day. On December 1, as the snowstorm continued unabated, Patrick Breen wrote in his diary, “Difficult to get wood no going from the house completely housed up…. The horses & Stanton’s mules gone & cattle suppose lost in the snow no hopes of finding them alive.”
Things were even worse for those at the Donner brothers’ camps on Alder Creek. Their tents and brush shanties did almost nothing to keep out the cold and snow. Their clothes were wet day and night. Most of their cattle had been lost in the first storm and buried under the snow. By now George Donner’s cut hand had become badly infected, throbbing with pain and swelling up to twice its normal size. The infection was beginning to creep up his arm. When he went foraging for firewood, he had to carry it back bit by bit cradled in the crook of his right arm. Jacob Donner, frail to begin with, had also begun to weaken noticeably and now spent most of the time prostrate in his tent. Tamzene and Elizabeth Donner rationed out meager bits of beef to their children.
By far the worst off, though, were the single men living at Alder Creek—particularly James Smith, Samuel Shoemaker, and Joseph Reinhardt. Living under a brush cover in the snow with no oxen, no resources of their own, and asked to do much of the heavy work for the ailing Donner brothers, they had begun to sink from the outset. By early December they’d been reduced to catching mice with their hands, roasting the tiny bodies over a fire, and consuming them whole. When that fare proved inadequate, they had begun to cut strips from their buffalo robes and eat them.
At the lake camp, the failed attempts at crossing the mountains began to exact a noticeable physical toll on those who had made the effort. The laws of supply and demand were starting to catch up with them, particularly the strongest and most energetic among them.
It is possible, under certain circumstances, to live for a very long time with very little food, or even with no food. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, and American Indians—just to name the most obvious examples—have all at various times in history embraced extended fasting as a means of attaining heightened levels of spirituality. Saints of various sorts have fasted for months. In the nineteenth century, so-called hunger artists often fasted for twenty, thirty, or in one case forty-four days without apparent permanent harm to themselves. In 1981 the IRA’s twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Sands survived 66 days on a hunger strike before he died. Another twenty-seven-year-old man in Scotland survived an astonishing 382 days on nothing more than water, potassium, and sodium supplements. His trick: He started his fast weighing 456 pounds. Paradoxically, though, you can starve to death in as little as two to three weeks. It all depends on the math.
How many calories a particular individual needs to consume depends on numerous variables, the most important being his or her age, height, weight, and degree of activity or inactivity. Nutritionists typically use a formula known as the Harris-Benedict equation to figure out how many calories a subject needs to consume simply to maintain his or her current weight. The equation produces a number called the basal metabolic rate, or BMR. When converted from metric to English units of measure, it looks like this for women:
BMR = 655 + (4.35 × weight in pounds) + (4.7 × height in inches)-(4.7 × age in years)
The equation is interesting because by making a couple of educated guesses about Sarah’s weight and height, we can use it to figure out roughly what her basic caloric needs were when she became snowbound in November 1846. Both Sarah’s mother and father were notably tall and thin. If we assume conservatively that she was something like five feet eight inches tall and weighed perhaps 125 pounds, the formula tells us that Sarah would have required about 1,612 calories per day. But that assumes she was lying in bed, night and day, expending no more energy than required to eat, breathe, think, maintain a core body temperature, and carry on the other business of keeping her body functioning.
To figure out anyone’s true caloric requirements, the Harris-Benedict equation requires one further step—assessing that person’s level of activity and then multiplying the BMR by a factor corresponding to that level. If we peg Sarah as a “very active” woman, as she certainly was during those frantic weeks in November and December of 1846, we must multiply her BMR by 1.9. This yields an estimate that Sarah required about 3,063 calories per day—roughly five and a half Big Macs—simply to maintain her weight. By way of comparison, in 2007 the average American woman consumed an average of 2,679 calories per day.*
If we run the similar but slightly different Harris-Benedict equation for males and make similar estimates about Franklin Graves’s height, weight, and age, we discover that Sarah’s father needed to be taking in something like 3,646 calories a day, considerably above what the average American male no
w eats. These figures, though, probably understate by a good deal the number of calories that Sarah and her father were burning, for two reasons: First, they assume a person of average fitness and with an average amount of muscle mass. By the time Sarah and her father had walked much of the way across the continent, they likely were far more fit than is now average and had acquired very high percentages of muscle mass. The greater the amount of muscle, the higher the caloric demands of the body. Second, the calculations don’t take into account the often bitterly cold environment in which Sarah, her father, and everyone in the Donner Party were operating. In those kinds of conditions, even lying in bed, the body requires far more calories than normal.
The net result was that for some time now they had been burning calories a good deal more rapidly than they were taking them on board with their daily rations of lean beef. All their bodies could do in response was to quietly and efficiently begin to cannibalize themselves in order to provide energy to the brain and other vital organs. Sarah and Jay and their companions discovered that they were beginning to feel weak. They began to grow gaunt. Their eyes began to sink deeper into their faces. Their fingers grew bony. Ribs and other bones began to protrude in ways they had not previously. And as all these transformations took place, they began to peer into one another’s increasingly angular faces with a growing sense of alarm and incredulity.
8
DESPERATION