Things were even harder for the souls huddled miserably in wet tents and under brush shelters at the Donners’ Alder Creek camp. The robust young men who had wrangled cattle, cut brush, driven oxen, and rolled boulders out of the paths of wagons for the Donners and Reeds for months had begun to die, unable to subsist on a diet of roasted mice and strips of toasted buffalo robe. James Smith, Sam Shoemaker, and Joseph Reinhardt were all dead. As he lay dying, Reinhardt had confessed to Doris Wolfinger that he had murdered her husband back at the Humboldt Sink.
Jacob Donner was also dead. He had been the first of them to die. Never very robust, he had descended into a state of nearly complete inaction almost as soon as they became entrapped. For weeks he had dwelled in despair, doing little to help himself or his family, until finally one day he sat down at a table in the tent, bowed his head upon his hands, and sat motionless until he died.
9
CHRISTMAS FEASTS
By the morning of the snowshoe party’s sixth day out, December 21, it had been snowing hard through much of the night. As daylight arrived, snow continued to fall, shrinking their world down to a circle twenty or thirty yards in diameter. Beyond that distance everything faded into a blur of white snow, gray rock, and dark green conifers. Without Stanton to guide them, they turned to Luis and Salvador, but the young Miwok men were no more able than the rest of them to see beyond the white curtain enveloping them all. Finally, with no other real choice, they strapped their snowshoes back on and set out again.
They managed to hold a generally westward course through the morning. There was a strong, relatively warm wind out of the southwest. From time to time, the snowfall lightened a bit. During one of these intervals, Mary Ann Graves, looking down into a deep gorge to the north, believed she saw smoke hanging in the air. She began to holler at the top of her voice, but there was no answering cry. She prevailed upon the men to fire the flintlock rifle, but it drew no response. She implored the men to turn to the north and descend into the gorge to investigate the smoke, but Luis, who spoke a bit of English, said it was not the right direction, so they trudged on toward what they believed was the west.
Before they had gone much farther, though, they again ground to a halt. They stood in the falling snow talking, arguing. Their stock of dried beef was nearly gone; they did not know where they were, nor even with any certainty which direction they were going. The parents among them desperately wanted to hold their children again. Some of them argued for turning around, but it had taken them six days to get this far, with provisions. With no food to sustain them, attempting to return seemed suicidal, though going forward seemed no less so. Mary Ann Graves said she would rather die than return and watch her brothers and sisters starve at the lake. Luis and Salvador outright refused to go back. The two Miwoks turned and resumed walking. Mary Ann followed them. Then Sarah Foster fell in behind. Then everyone else did as well.
Sometime that afternoon they made a catastrophic mistake. As they left the western end of Sixmile Valley, they approached a low ridge to their northwest. If they had climbed it, they would have found themselves precisely where they needed to be, on the established emigrant road at Emigrant Gap at the point where it dropped some seven hundred feet into Bear Valley. From there they would have had a relatively easy, gradual descent to Johnson’s Ranch. But the ridge screened their view of Bear Valley, and instead of ascending it they turned left, to the south, skirting the ridge and beginning to follow terrain that led inexorably and invitingly downhill.
Immediately ahead of them now was the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, other than the Yosemite Valley perhaps the most dramatic feature of the Sierra Nevada’s western flank. A steep-sided fissure carved out eons ago by glaciers and by the river that tumbles among granite boulders at its bottom, the canyon is, for much of its length, more than three thousand feet deep, in places four thousand feet. To this day, stretches of it are inaccessible except by river rafts and helicopters. The deep side canyons that run into it are similarly steep-sided and impressive. It is a place of breathtaking beauty both in summer and in winter, but for anyone on foot, particularly in winter, it can be a world of pain and desperation at best, a death trap at worst.
But they were traveling blind; they had no idea what lay ahead. They forged on for only another mile or two, following the path of least resistance, down along one of several ridges paralleling one of the American River’s tributaries, the North Fork of the North Fork. They didn’t travel much farther that day, though. It was the shortest day of the year. Before the sun set at 4:39 P.M., they set another dead pine afire and made another miserable camp in the snow.*
Sarah and Jay wrapped themselves in blankets and stared into the flames. They chewed on the last few shreds of dried beef from their packs. Occasionally, as the fire climbed higher into the tree, flaming limbs broke off and plunged to the snow, landing among them, sputtering and hissing. They were so exhausted and dispirited that they made no effort to move out of range of the falling firebrands. William Eddy dug into his pack to find something and came across a small parcel wrapped in paper. Written on the parcel was a simple message: “Your own dear Eleanor.” Inside was about a half pound of bear meat. As Eddy ate, the rest of them began to ponder what kinds of choices they were about to face.
It snowed all night again, and on the morning of December 22 a few intermittent flurries were still falling. The snowshoers again shoved their bruised and aching feet into cold, wet, and increasingly tattered boots, strapped on their snowshoes, and set forth. But a warm southwest wind had come up, and it made for softer, wetter snow, which clung to the snowshoes in heavy clumps that rendered it nearly impossible to make headway. Within a short time of setting out, they struggled miserably back to their campsite and resolved to spend the day there. They gathered firewood and tried to build a new fire, but the snow was honeycombed now with rivulets of water. Every fire they managed to start simply sank into the mush and was promptly extinguished.
None of them, except for Eddy, had had anything to eat that morning. As the day wore on, their blood-sugar levels began to drop, making them anxious and irritable. Hunger pains gnawed at their guts even more ferociously than ever. Their heads pounded. Their bodies were beginning to burn protein instead of glycogen for fuel, accelerating the process of wasting that had been slowly resculpting their bodies for weeks. Their heart rates increased, their blood pressures fell. They were increasingly clumsy, inclined to fall down and disinclined to exert themselves. Their cognitive abilities were also beginning to decline—their alertness, concentration, and ability to focus on a task were all failing them.
So they sat motionless in the snow, their bodies slowly losing heat. The afternoon rapidly dissolved into another cold, wet night. In the dark they shivered and shook under their blankets, each of their bodies starting to fight a renewed and more desperate battle against hypothermia.
Just how insidious hypothermia is, and how long the odds against Sarah and the snowshoe party were now growing, is underscored by a tragedy that unfolded almost exactly 160 years later. On November 25, 2006, thirty-five-year-old James Kim and his wife, Kati, and their two daughters found themselves snowbound in their Saab station wagon after making a wrong turn onto a logging road in Oregon’s Coast Range.
For more than a week, the Kims remained in the cramped, cold confines of their car. They ate berries and rationed a small supply of baby food and crackers. When the food was exhausted, Kati Kim breast-fed both her infant, Sabine, and her four-year-old, Penelope. James Kim ran the car’s engine at intervals in order to provide heat, until the gas ran out. Then he removed the car’s tires and burned them one by one. They huddled around them for warmth in the stench of burning rubber and waited for someone to find them. And in fact rescuers were beginning to close in on them, using signals from the Kims’ cell phone to get a fix on their general location. But the Kims did not know that.
After more than a week in the car, James Kim, like Franklin Graves long bef
ore him, decided he had to get help for his family. He studied an Oregon state road map and concluded, incorrectly, that the town of Galice was just five miles away. Early on the morning of December 2, he built a final fire for his family and then set off on foot with his map in hand, telling Kati that he would be back by 1:00 P.M. He was dressed in extra layers of clothes, but he wore only tennis shoes on his feet.
Two days later a helicopter search team spotted Kati waving an umbrella just as she was herself setting off from the car with her children in search of help. James had not returned. Kati and the kids were promptly rescued, and after a night in the hospital they were fine, other than for some minor frostbite on Kati’s toes. James Kim, meanwhile, had been waging a desperate battle against the elements.
He had headed south and west at first, traveling about three miles before he entered the drainage of Big Windy Creek. He then apparently decided that the creek would lead him to Galice, or at least to some form of civilization. He followed the creek back eastward, in the general direction of the car, through rugged, steep terrain broken by narrow ravines and abrupt cliffs. He tore off pieces of the road map and dropped them along the way, presumably to mark his trail for searchers, or for himself if he decided to reverse his course.
As Sarah and her companions had been 160 years earlier in the Sierra Nevada, Kim was weak from days of near starvation. And, as in the Sierra, nighttime temperatures in the Coast Range were well below freezing, and not much above it during the days. He had no shelter. His feet were wet from snowmelt and from wading back and forth across the creek. Then James Kim began to remove his clothes.
Forensic pathologists call it “paradoxical undressing.” In addition to the disorientation, mental confusion, and cognitive challenges that come along with the final stages of hypothermia, many victims experience, toward the end, a sudden, overwhelming sensation of warmth. In earlier stages of hypothermia, the blood vessels of the extremities and the skin constrict in order to shunt blood and warmth to the core of the body. In the final stages, though, the process is often reversed, as vessels in the extremities—deprived of vital glucose and energy—give up the ghost and relax. Blood begins to flow rapidly away from the body’s core, back out to the face and extremities, and the victim suddenly, and paradoxically, feels flushed and warm even as he or she freezes to death.
Toward the end James Kim started to shed layers of clothes, dropping them along the way. Then he lay or fell down on his back in the icy waters of Big Windy Creek and died. He never knew that he had circled back close to the car, never knew that Kati, Sabine, and Penelope would survive. But he had done what countless mothers and fathers have done through time—reached deep inside himself, marshaled all his energy, exercised his wits, and finally hazarded everything for the sakes of those whom he loved.
All fourteen of the surviving snowshoers made it through the night of December 22. On the morning of December 23, their eighth day out, they set off again, moving in single file downhill. It was a bit warmer now, and snow flurries began to give way to cold showers of rain. The terrain grew steeper, falling away off to their south as they traveled on. This country was nothing like what Stanton had told them to expect. They had been looking for a sharp drop-off to the northwest, with a flat-floored, oval valley at the base. Salvador and Luis were clearly as bewildered as the rest of them were.
At some point that afternoon, they stopped to rest. They sat in the snow, leaning against trees, studying one another’s faces for signs of hope but finding only despair. They began to ask one another, “What will we do? What can we do?” The questions, and the answer that many of them had likely already begun to contemplate, hung darkly in the air for a long while. Finally Patrick Dolan, the merry Irishman who had sacrificed all his beef for the women and children back at the lake camp, gave terrible weight and form to it. The men must cast lots, he said, to see which among them should die to provide flesh for the others.
It was an appalling solution, and in some ways a surprisingly premature one. Though they had been on scant rations for a week, they had been entirely out of food for only hours. Most, if not all, of them were to a greater or lesser extent Christians. Dolan himself, an Irishman, was likely Catholic. And even without religious considerations, the moral imperatives against taking another life, let alone the almost universal taboo against consuming the victim’s flesh, were powerful inducements to continue suffering rather than to take such a step. And yet they sat in the snow and discussed it, and the proposition began to make headway.
William Foster would have none of it, but Dolan and the other men persisted and finally carried the day. They tore up strips of paper, and the men somberly took turns drawing them. Sarah and Mary Ann had to sit and watch with dread as Franklin and Jay took their turns. Sarah Foster did the same as her husband took his chance. But it was Patrick Dolan himself who drew the fatal strip.
Dolan didn’t have long to react. The men gathered around him and studied him, then looked one another in the eyes and realized that none of them was willing to put the flintlock rifle to the young man’s head and pull the trigger. Dire though their straits were, murder was still murder, and, for now at least, a gnawing stomach could not supersede their moral codes, nor simple human compassion. William Eddy pointed out that one or another of them was bound to die pretty soon anyway and that they could then decide whether or not to consume the body.
They pushed on and made eight miles that day, camping somewhere on the northern flanks of the canyon of the American River’s North Fork. They were utterly exhausted. They had not eaten in forty-eight hours now, but they were burning calories as if they were competing in an Olympic biathlon competition. And all the while they were sliding deeper into a topographical funnel.
From the time they had departed St. Joe until they arrived at Truckee Lake, Sarah and her companions had had one principal aid to navigation—the tracks and ruts left by hundreds of wagons that had preceded them west that summer. But once the snows of late October covered the tracks leading over the Sierra Nevada, they had in a sense been blinded. In an age when maps of the West consisted of little more than pencil sketches drawn from the recollections of trappers and explorers, and the navigational advice dispensed in guides like Lansford Hastings’s was often equally sketchy, they’d had nothing more than Stanton’s, Luis’s, and Salvador’s memories to guide them forward. Before they left the lake camp, Stanton had requested the loan of a compass from the Donners, but Milt Elliott had apparently not returned from Alder Creek in time to hand it to Stanton before they set off on their snowshoes.
It is difficult for us, with our twenty-first-century view of the earth—replete with satellite imagery, the Internet, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, GPS systems, and high-resolution topographical maps—to comprehend just how potentially terrifying it was for the snowshoe party to come to any fork in what they imagined to be their route to salvation. They knew all too well that a wrong turn, any wrong turn, could mean the difference between living and dying. And the landscape was beginning to tell them that they had in fact already made just such a wrong turn, but they didn’t know where or when. All they knew was that they were now profoundly lost, and it was beginning to eat at their minds.
By the morning of Christmas Eve, a hard, steady, cold rain had set in over the western flanks of the Sierra Nevada. During the night it had soaked Sarah and her companions, chilling them, bringing on spasms of shivers, and setting their bones to aching. They managed to build a smoky fire, but they had unknowingly camped above a snow-covered stream. The fire melted through the snow and suddenly dropped into the stream. They crawled to the hole it left behind and peered down into the dark void. They could hear the icy water running below.
As the day wore on, it grew colder. Relatively warm, wet, sub-tropical air that had been flowing into the Sierra from the southwest had begun to collide with an Arctic low-pressure system and the colder air that it had brought down from the Gulf of Alaska. The rain turned to sleet. Everyone i
n the company was ashen-faced now, but the faces of some of the men especially began to take on an almost blue pallor. Franklin Graves shook violently and incessantly in his wet clothes. Young Lemuel Murphy began to rant and rave incoherently. So did Patrick Dolan.
Both Dolan and Lemuel Murphy were likely suffering from a toxic combination of woods shock, hypothermia, and hunger-induced psychological stress. But another factor might also have been at work within Dolan’s increasingly stressed psyche. Just twenty-four hours before, he had drawn the lot that told him he was to be murdered, a piece of information that could only have induced enormous psychological trauma. In a similar incident in 1765, sailors aboard a storm-damaged ship called the Peggy in the Atlantic, facing starvation after eighteen days without food, killed a black slave and ate him. Several days later they were ready to kill again, but no more slaves were available. So they drew lots. A foremast man named David Flatt drew the fatal lot. Flatt asked that the execution be postponed until the next day, but during the night he grew first deaf and then delirious. The next morning the crew was rescued, but by then it was too late for David Flatt. He had become permanently deranged.
The snowshoers made no effort to leave the camp. It was clear by now that at least some of them would never see California. The question was whether any of them would see it, whether someone would die quickly enough to save the rest.
It continued to grow colder. Lying on the snow under wet blankets, shuddering convulsively with the cold, men and women alike began to cry out in anguish, to no one in particular or to God, begging for deliverance, for food, for warmth. Harriet Pike found a small patch of her cloak that was still dry inside, between the shoulders, and pulled out bits of raw cotton batting. With shaking hands, using sparks from Eddy’s flintlock rifle and the cotton as tinder, the men finally managed to get a fire going. But when they went to chop more wood for the fire, the head of the hatchet flew off the handle and was immediately lost deep in the snow.