In the first two weeks of December, Franklin Graves was still determined to make a break for it, despite the string of earlier failures. He knew that the most recent report that anyone in California had heard regarding their situation was whatever James Reed and Walter Herron, who had left the company far back in the Nevada desert in early October, might have told them. That meant that for all John Sutter or anyone else in California knew, the company might at this moment be wintering in reasonable comfort in Truckee Meadows, with access to plenty of game and plenty of grass to keep the oxen alive. There was, therefore, no particular reason to believe that anyone would come looking for them before spring. If even a few of them could get through, somebody might be able to keep what seemed about to happen here from actually happening.
So within the close confines of their cabin, the Graves family set up a manufactory for snowshoes, something that Franklin had used as a boy in Vermont and that he hoped would be the means of their salvation. With help from Charles Stanton and others, they dug through the snow searching for abandoned oxbows—the U-shaped pieces of bentwood that fit under the necks of the oxen and connected them to their yokes. Franklin carefully split these lengthwise along the grain of the wood to produce from each one a matched pair of thinner but still-substantial bows. Sarah and her siblings cut long, narrow strips of rawhide from the skins of the slaughtered oxen and wove them together tightly in a crisscross pattern over the frames provided by the bows. When they added wider rawhide straps to hold their feet in place, they had durable, if heavy and cumbersome, snowshoes, each about two feet long and a foot wide. By early December they had fifteen pairs of them stacked in the cabin.
On December 9 one of the Donners’ teamsters, Augustus Spitzer, left the Keseberg shanty, where he had been staying. Like many of the single men, he had few resources to fall back on, and it is unlikely that the Kesebergs had much that they were willing to share. Apparently nearing starvation, Spitzer staggered around the corner of the Breens’ shanty to their entrance, descended the snow steps, and collapsed full length through the doorway. Patrick and Margaret Breen dragged him the rest of the way into the dark cabin, another mouth to feed.
On that same day, Charles Stanton sent a note to the Donners at Alder Creek.
9th Dec 1846 [Mrs. Donner,] You will please send me 1# your best tobacco. The storm prevented us from getting over the mountains we are now getting snow shoes ready to go on foot I should like to get your pocket compass as the snow is so very deep & in the event of a storm it would be invaluable Milt & Mr. Graves are coming right back and either can bring it back to you The mules are all strayed off—If any should come round your camp—let some of our Company know it the first opportunity Yours Very Respectfully C.T. Stanton
Stanton remained an essential element of any plan for escape. He was the only one in the company who had crossed the summit and returned, and everyone counted on him and the Miwoks to find the way. But if he was going up that mountain yet again, he aimed to make sure that he had not only a compass with which to navigate, with or without the Miwoks, but also sufficient tobacco for his pipe. If he made it through to California for a second time, he intended to stay put this time. But Franklin Graves, he knew, would be coming back for the rest of his family as quickly as possible.
Over the next few days, Franklin Graves made his way laboriously from shanty to shanty, once again recruiting the youngest and strongest of the company for the attempt. At the overcrowded cabin built against a boulder, he asked Levinah Murphy, “Are there any in your cabin, Mrs. Murphy, that want to go? It is our only choice.” It was an agonizing decision for the thirty-six-year-old widow and her family, but they finally settled on Levinah’s married daughters, Sarah Foster and the newly widowed Harriet Pike. The two young mothers—both of whose breast milk had by now dried up—would leave their babies behind in Levinah’s care. Sarah’s husband, William Foster, would go, too. So would thirteen-year-old Lemuel Murphy and ten-year-old William Murphy. William was of such a slight build that they thought perhaps he could walk in the footsteps of the others, without snowshoes. William Eddy would go as well, but Eleanor would stay behind to care for their two small children.
At the relatively well-stocked Breen cabin, only the lighthearted bachelor Patrick Dolan elected to go. He was the one single man who owned enough beef to almost certainly survive the winter on his own, but he insisted that Margret Reed and her children should have some of it, the rest to go to the Breens. In the Kesebergs’ lean-to, Charles Burger, the Donners’ teamster, thought he would go, too, though he would attempt to do it without snowshoes.
At the Graves-Reed double cabin, the decisions were simpler. Of Margret Reed’s four children, only Virginia was old enough to even be considered, but she had fallen ill in recent days, and it had become clear that she could not go. Salvador, Luis, and Charles Stanton had to go—they were the guides. Antonio, the Mexican drover, would go.
On the other side of the log partition, the Graves family made its own decisions. Elizabeth would stay behind to care for her children, with help from twelve-year-old Lovina and fourteen-year-old Eleanor. Billy would also stay behind, to chop wood, tote water, shovel snow, and take care of the other heavy chores for his mother and younger siblings. Sarah and Jay and Mary Ann were young, strong, and vigorous. All would go. Mary Ann convinced Amanda McCutchen that she should go, even though it meant leaving her baby, Harriet, behind for Elizabeth Graves to care for. And, of course, the man to whom all eyes had now turned, Franklin Graves, would also go.
If anyone started out with a particular disadvantage, though, it was Franklin, for all his practical knowledge. At fifty-seven, he was more than twenty years older than the next-oldest men in the party, Patrick Dolan and Charles Stanton. In the long run, when stamina became the difference between life and death, the age gap might well prove telling. But Franklin Graves’s children were on the verge of starving, and he did not intend to let them down.
They all knew that this would be the final attempt, that everyone’s lives now hung in the balance, and that the odds were heavily weighted against them. No one would be turning around this time. There was no reason to come back without provisions, and plenty of reasons not to. Returning empty-handed would only mean starving and watching one’s family starve. They also knew that anyone who could not keep up would have to be left behind to die a cold and lonely death.
They bided their time, watching the weather, waiting for the right moment to make their break for the pass. By December 12 it had been snowing again for four days straight. The next day it continued, more heavily than before. Patrick Breen watched the snow mount around his shanty and observed in his diary that it “snows faster than any previous day…. Stanton & Graves with Several others making preparations to cross the Mountains On Snow shoes, snow 8 feet deep on the level….”
On December 14 the day finally broke clear and fine and rather warm, but the snowshoe party stayed at the lake. Hunger was their constant companion now, gnawing at them from the time they awoke every day until they fell asleep at night, and it urged them to do something, anything, as soon as possible. But with so much fresh powder sitting loose on the surface, they feared that they would quickly get bogged down, even on snowshoes. So they waited. On the fifteenth, conditions were the same: clear and dry and relatively mild. The powder was still fluffy. That night, though, there was a change. The air was iron cold, and that was what they had been waiting for.*
On the morning of December 16, the day once again dawned clear, but now, finally, there was a firm crust on the surface of the snow. In the Graves cabin, Sarah and Mary Ann donned heavy flannel pantaloons, garments that they had likely contrived themselves by altering their heavier dresses. They put on linen shirts, woolen coats, and cloaks. They pulled on woolen socks and battered boots. Franklin and Jay dressed in woolen trousers, woolen shirts, and woolen hats. Jay wrapped a black scarf around his neck. Those without scarves wrapped rags around their necks, anything to keep the cold at b
ay. Then they put makeshift packs on their backs. The packs contained blankets, a little coffee and sugar, some tobacco, and about eight pounds of dried beef for each of them.† This, they thought, if they rationed it carefully, would see them through for the six days that they calculated it would take them to make it through to Johnson’s Ranch in the western foothills. They believed that Johnson’s was thirty or forty miles to their southwest. In fact it was sixty-six as the crow flies, at least seventy-five by the route they would attempt.
Finally they clambered out of their cabin and stood outside in the snow, bending over in the bright sunlight, strapping their new snowshoes to their boots. Now all that remained was to say farewells that they well knew might be their last. Amanda McCutchen had to give her baby a final kiss. Sarah and Mary Ann had to embrace their mother and their younger siblings one more time. Franklin Graves had to look Elizabeth in the eyes and tell her he would return. And then the moment inevitably came when those who were going had to turn their backs on those who were staying and begin to make their way off through the snowy woods.
It could not have been easy, but they were hastened on their journey by a sobering fact lying in the snow nearby. Earlier that morning, or the night before, Billy Graves had washed and shaved the cold, stiff body of Baylis Williams. Then he and John Denton had dragged Baylis out of Margret Reed’s half of the cabin, cut through the hard crust of snow, and buried him six feet deep in the softer snow underneath. The dying that they had been anticipating and dreading for weeks now had begun.
They made their way to the Breens’ shanty where they met up with the other snowshoers. More tearful partings took place. Harriet Pike had been as reluctant as Amanda McCutchen to leave her infant daughters behind, but unable to nurse her one-year-old, Catherine, she believed that the best thing she could do was to go for help. Yet she was in anguish now that the moment had come. So were Sarah and William Foster, leaving behind two-year-old Jeremiah George. Perhaps no parting was more difficult, though, than that between Eleanor and William Eddy. The two had been struggling together simply to keep their children alive, almost continuously since Paiutes had killed all their oxen in the desert two months before. Now, as William finally turned his back on Eleanor and his children and began to walk away, he was racked by silent, tearless sobbing.
The snowshoe party—what the historian Charles McGlashan would later call “the Forlorn Hope”—struck off through pinewoods toward the eastern end of Truckee Lake, wallowing in the snow as much as walking on it. Most of them had never used snowshoes, and they had a hard time getting the hang of it. Even with the frozen crust, their feet sank a foot or more into the snow with each step. With each subsequent step, they had to pull the bulky snowshoes free from the holes into which they had sunk on the previous step. They grunted and gasped at the labor of it. They fell forward and backward and sideways into the powder, trying to move forward with some degree of control and efficiency. Gradually they learned to manage the cumbersome snowshoes more effectively, but the effort required to use them was rapidly exhausting them even as they set out, and burning what would turn out to be precious calories at a furious rate.
Two of their number—Charles Burger and ten-year-old William Murphy—had no snowshoes, and they were having an even harder time of it. Young Murphy quickly found himself up to his thighs. Burger, known by all as “Dutch Charley,” was short and stocky. His stout legs punctured the surface of the snow like pile drivers, and he had to try to bull his way forward by brute force, up nearly to his hips in snow.
They moved out onto Truckee Lake. The sky overhead was bright blue, and there was a light, cool breeze at their backs. By midmorning the sun warmed them, but its light reflected harshly off the white expanse of snow and ice covering the lake. As the sun moved farther to the west, out over the jumble of granite peaks at the far end of the lake, the glare began to strike them full in the face, dazzling their eyes and threatening to blind them, though they did not yet know that.
If you ski or snowboard or climb mountains, you likely have at least a passing awareness of snow blindness, though these days any reasonably good pair of sunglasses will protect you from its effects. Called radiation keratitis by medical professionals, snow blindness is caused by exposure of the eye to ultraviolet B rays (UVB). Unlike ultraviolet C, the most dangerous form of ultraviolet radiation, UVB rays are able to penetrate the ozone layer in the earth’s atmosphere, though their strength is much diminished by its filtering effects. Under normal circumstances, at sea level, the eye can absorb UVB rays without damage. But with every thousand feet in elevation gain, the strength of ultraviolet rays increases by 5 percent. So at the elevation of Donner Lake, for instance, UVB rays are approximately 30 percent stronger than at sea level. The exposure of the eyes to UVB rays is greatly increased by the reflectivity of snow, and a snowy environment at high altitude is where one is most likely to suffer from snow blindness.
Under these circumstances, particularly after prolonged exposure, UVB rays irritate the superficial epithelium of the cornea. This produces an inflammatory response that results in symptoms ranging from mild irritation to acute pain, nausea, headache, temporary loss of vision, and even permanent blindness if the exposure continues long enough.
Snow blindness can be particularly insidious for those who are unaware of its dangers. Symptoms often lag the actual exposure to UVB by as much as six to twelve hours, so one may go blithely about his or her business unaware of the damage that is being done until it is too late.
There is one tender mercy that snow blindness offers to most of its victims. The cornea is remarkably good at healing itself. Given a chance, it will repair the damage spontaneously within about forty-eight hours. That, however, benefits only those who are able to get in out of the snow and sunlight or take other precautions. Those who continue to expose themselves day after day to the same levels of UVB cannot heal. Their eyes inevitably suffer something like what a sunbather’s skin would suffer if he or she persisted in lying out in the sun every day with red, blistered skin upturned to the sun’s unrelenting rays.
As the day wore on and the snow covering Truckee Lake grew softer, Charley Burger and William Murphy gave up and turned around partway across the lake. Without snowshoes they simply could not keep up with the others, and with the cliffs ahead growing closer, they must have known they would never make it over the pass. That left fifteen in the snowshoe party—nine men, five women, and a boy. Beyond the lake there was another mile or so of gradually rising, forested, and boulder-strewn terrain before they would reach the abrupt granite cliffs that they would ultimately have to climb to reach the pass. The days were short now in mid-December, and they needed time to make camp before the sun set. So when they finally trudged off the ice at the western end of the lake, they climbed a small hill and removed their snowshoes and packs. They hunted for firewood, gathered pine boughs for makeshift beds, struck a fire using sparks from the flintlock rifle that Eddy was carrying, built a fire on a platform of logs, spread out their blankets, and sat down to ration out their first portions of dried beef.
As Sarah sat with Jay on their pile of pine branches, chewing the cardboardlike beef, she could look down the length of the lake at the semicircle of snowy trees fringing the far end, painted peach and rose by the light of the sunset streaming over the pass above them. In among the trees, blue curlicues of smoke rose from the cabins. The easternmost of those, she knew, was from the fire her mother was tending. At this very moment, her brothers and sisters were gathered around that fire eating their own dwindling share of the beef, wondering about her as much as she was wondering about them. It was a hard, cold thing to be so near and yet so irretrievably far.
She and Jay slept that night, or tried to sleep, beneath thin blankets under clear, crystalline skies. The frigid black vault of the heavens above them was moonless but ablaze with shimmering stars. The southeast wind that had blown all day continued through the night, making the long, low, mournful sound that only win
d in pines can make.
The next day, December 17, began with what they believed would be the toughest challenge they would face—climbing the east face of the pass. The weather was bright, clear, and cold again, all they could have hoped for in that regard. They made a little coffee, chewed a bit of dried beef, strapped on the snowshoes, and began climbing through thickly forested country toward the granite cliffs that lay beyond.
At first the going was relatively easy—over the first mile they gained only about 250 feet in elevation. But that modest rise brought them out of the forest and into a very different kind of landscape, one in which there were few trees but large expanses of granite rising abruptly out of the snow. Like much of the crest of the Sierra Nevada, this landscape had been scoured by a series of glaciers over the past million years. Moving ponderously downslope, sculpting out the depression in which Donner Lake now lies, and then retreating again, these glaciers had left behind a jumble of highly polished flat surfaces, house-size boulders, deep crevices, and abrupt cliffs. After the last of the glaciers finally melted away, another ten thousand years or so of additional exposure to brutal weather had shattered much of the granite into loose talus—piles of broken rock that had accumulated in deep drifts on some of the gentler slopes. To all this was now added perhaps ten or twelve feet of snow and liberal applications of ice wherever water had run over the granite and then refrozen.
They were only three-quarters of a mile from the narrow notch in the summit that constituted the pass itself, but they still had nearly a thousand feet to climb before they reached it. They worked their way up among the rocks, following Salvador and Luis. With the snowshoes strapped to their feet, they could not walk easily on rock and ice, so they tried to stay on open expanses of snow, but at intervals they were forced to cross stretches of slippery rock. As the grade steepened and the air grew thinner, they had to stop more and more frequently, gasping for breath before pushing on.