Antonio, the young Mexican drover, crawled over to the fire and lay down. After a while his hand fell into the fire pit, and he did not remove it. Someone pulled it away, but the second time it fell into the fire pit, nobody bothered to move it. He was dead.
The storm intensified and the temperature dropped sharply as night came on. The wind picked up, and the tops of the pine trees around the party began to tilt over to the northeast. It started to snow hard, extinguishing the fire. By 10:00 P.M. the wind was howling through the trees, blowing the snow horizontally, plastering it against tree trunks and boulders. Franklin Graves stopped shivering. His face was blue, his pupils dilated, his limbs rigid, his breathing shallow. Eddy crawled over to him, looked him in the face, and told him he was dying. Graves said that he did not care. But he called out for his daughters.
Distraught, Sarah and Mary Ann sat by their father weeping. They hugged him and pulled him close and chafed his limbs and tried to warm him. He spoke to them slowly and weakly, his speech slurred by hypothermia. He said that their mother’s life and the lives of their brothers and sisters depended on their making it through the mountains to get help. He pleaded with them to do whatever it took to survive. He told them his body must be used for food, and that they, too, must eat human flesh. Then he turned to the eighteen-year-old widow, Harriet Pike, who also sat by his side, and reminded her of her babies, Naomi and Catherine, back at the lake.
At about 11:00 P.M., Franklin Ward Graves died in the driving snow, with his daughters at his side.
For Sarah, as for Mary Ann, the devastation must have been nearly complete. Her father had been among the most hale and hearty of men and, adult though she now was, her stalwart protector since childhood. With him now dead, lying stiffly out in the open, snow already beginning to cover his blue-white face, she and her sister faced two cruel possibilities—dying miserably, as their father had, or following his dying wishes. It was a hideous choice. And even if they followed his wishes, they knew it might stave off death for only a short time. Sarah had one consolation that Mary Ann did not, though. When she retreated, sobbing, from her father’s body, she had the arms of a loving husband in which to shelter, at least for as long as he lived.
Without more substantial shelter, though, more of them were likely to die before the night was out. The snow was falling even more heavily now, slanting through the air on the bitter-cold wind. It frosted the men’s beards and clung to the women’s long hair, whitening them, aging them. It buried anything that did not keep moving. They began to lose sensation in their toes and fingers and faces. They knew enough of extreme conditions to know that frostbite would soon begin to burn and blacken their extremities if they did not take action.
Then William Eddy remembered a bit of frontier lore he had picked up from some Rocky Mountain trappers. He gathered together the twelve people still alive and instructed eleven of them to lie in a circle on the snow, as closely packed together as they could get, with their feet pointing in toward the center of the circle. The twelfth person was to sit upright in the middle of the circle, at the intersection of all the feet. Eddy then arranged their blankets over their heads so that the person in the middle of the circle held one end of each blanket aloft. The other end of each was draped over the head of its owner and secured there with bits of wood or with snow. The end result was a low, circular tent that would entrap their body heat and shelter them from the biting winds.
It worked well. The snow falling on the outside of the blankets soon added its own insulating value to the shelter. Maintaining it required no more expenditure of energy than to change the person in the center from time to time and occasionally shake excess snow off the blankets. They began at least to feel sensation coming back into their extremities.
Outside, the storm moaned and whistled through the pine trees all night. The sun rose at 7:18 on Christmas morning, but the storm continued to rage, and as the day wore on, it showed no signs of abating. Psyches that had begun to crumble outside the shelter continued to do so within it. Breathing one another’s exhalations, lying in the stench of one another’s filth, cramped by starvation, they listened wearily as Patrick Dolan in particular continued to mutter and to rave. When they tried to sleep, they dreamed of food. When they awoke, they heard Patrick Dolan still shrieking.
Dolan thrashed about under the blankets. He began stripping off his clothes. Then he tried to crawl out into the storm. Eddy struggled to wrestle him back under the blankets, but Dolan wriggled free, crawled out of the shelter, and floundered off into the blowing snow, half naked. Eventually he returned to the shelter but simply lay down in the deep snow outside until the men dragged him back in and held him down.
Survival psychologists call reactions like Patrick Dolan’s attempt to run away from the others the “hide-and-die syndrome” or “terminal burrowing.” Like the paradoxical undressing that Dolan also exhibited, it is indicative of the final—terminal—stage of hypothermia, and between 25 and 50 percent of hypothermia victims experience it before they die.
By late afternoon Dolan’s breathing grew shallow, his body grew rigid, and he died. The men dragged his body out into the snow and laid it alongside those of Franklin Graves and Antonio.
At the lake camp, Christmas Day brought little cheer, little to celebrate.
Just how much each of the families huddled there felt the bitter irony of spending Christmas in such miserable circumstances depended to some extent on where they and their forebears were from. Christmas as we know it was, in some senses, just being invented in America in the 1840s. Families that hailed originally from New England, as did Sarah’s family, might still have felt some sense of the strong disapproval with which their Yankee parents and grandparents and their Puritan ancestors had regarded any special treatment of the day. But by the end of the 1830s, the old severe views were beginning to slowly give way, even in New England. For the first time, meetinghouses were beginning to be decorated and ministers were beginning to preach sermons on Christmas themes. The thawing would take a long time, though. As late as 1869, schoolchildren in Boston could still be expelled for skipping school on Christmas Day.
But German and Irish immigrants were bringing different attitudes to the United States in the 1840s, slowly altering the American concept of Christmas and gradually popularizing not just the Christmas tree—which until then had been found only in German settlements in Pennsylvania—but also the traditions of gift giving, feasting, decorating homes, and celebrating Christmas services with something of the elaborateness and joyousness of the Catholic liturgy. In 1842 the first commercial Christmas cards were printed. When Charles Dickens, immensely popular in America, published A Christmas Carol in 1843, it infused the American imagination with the revival of English traditions then under way in Victorian England, traditions like celebrating the day with roasted fowl, plum puddings, and the singing of carols.
By the mid-1840s, well-to-do families, particularly in New York and in the South, had begun to observe Christmas on a fairly elaborate scale. Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s home overlooking the Potomac in Virginia, was decorated with holly, ivy, and mistletoe. Gifts were given to family members and the household staff. A Yule log was set ablaze in one of the fireplaces, and the family attended special Christmas services at a nearby Episcopal church. On that particular Christmas Day in 1846, as the Donner Party huddled in the Sierra Nevada, Lee himself was fighting the Mexicans and living in a tent in Mexico. But a letter he wrote home to his family that day gives a sense of what Christmas at the Lee household was like.
I hope good Santa Claus will fill Rob’s stockings tonight, that Mildred’s, Agnes’s, and [Annie’s] may break down with good things. I do not know what he may have for you and Mary, but if he only leaves for you one half of what I wish, you will want for nothing.
Later that day, even in a tent in Mexico, Lee sat down to a feast of roast turkey and chickens and eggnog at a table decorated with oranges and pine boughs.
For most Am
ericans of a mind to celebrate the holiday that year, though—in towns and villages like those that the Reeds and Graveses had come from—the Christmas observations had a more homespun flavor. Women baked cakes and other treats and slipped them into their children’s caps and stockings that night. Men gathered and drank whiskey and hard cider and brandy. Sometimes they fired off guns or set off firecrackers and exploded water-filled hogs’ bladders as they did on the Glorious Fourth. Children attended socials or performed plays. Family members exchanged gifts—often homemade treasures like quilts that they had labored on throughout the year. Many of them sat down to a turkey dinner, lending an American twist to the English tradition of roast goose. And almost always they attended church, for in the end Christmas was above all a religious occasion for most of them, an occasion on which to contemplate the light that their faith brought to the darkest time of the year.
For the Donner Party, it was exceedingly hard to find the light that Christmas, though. At the lake camp, Patrick Breen was too enfeebled by hunger and too incapacitated by kidney stones even to gather firewood. Devoutly Catholic, he and his family strove to maintain their faith. In their cold, dark shanty, Patrick sat down to his journal and wrote about his family’s observance of the day, that they “offerd our prayers to God this Cherismass morning the prospect is appalling but hope in God Amen.”
One of the most appalling prospects that faced Patrick Breen that morning was what seemed to be the imminent death of Augustus Spitzer, who still lay prostrate, barely clinging to life in a corner of the cabin.
In the Graves-Reed double cabin that morning, Margret Reed served her children the same gluey concoction of boiled ox hides that they had largely been subsisting on for weeks now. But later in the day, she had a holiday surprise. She had hidden away a few dried apples, some beans, a bit of bacon, and some tripe from the slaughtered oxen. These she slowly and carefully prepared and then laid before her wide-eyed children for their Christmas dinner. “Children,” she cautioned, “eat slowly,…for this one day you can have all you wish.”
On the other side of the log partition dividing the cabin, an almost identical scene played out. Franklin Graves had brought along a sack of dried beans with which he planned to begin farming in California. Elizabeth Graves had hoarded away a meager ration of them. And like Margret Reed she had also kept a small amount of tripe buried in the snow to simmer with the beans in her large Dutch oven and lay before her children for Christmas dinner.*
Despite their miserable circumstances, Elizabeth Graves had good reason to cling to hope that Christmas afternoon. She still had a stock of frozen beef buried in the snow. Franklin and the girls had been gone for nine days now on a journey they expected to take no more than six days. For the first few of those days, there had been clear skies and a firm crust of snow to walk upon. She could reasonably assume that by now he was at Johnson’s Ranch laying in provisions, or perhaps already starting back over the mountains, bringing those provisions to her and her children.
In the Murphy cabin, there was less reason for hope. Out of beef, with their supply of hides rapidly dwindling, Levinah Murphy and Eleanor Eddy had taken to gathering the cast-off bones of slaughtered oxen. They boiled the bones and served the broth to the nine children huddled in the cabin. Then they boiled the bones again and again, until they became soft enough to chew, and served them whole to the children. On this Christmas Day, Levinah Murphy added a few pieces of oxtail to the broth, to make it perhaps a bit more festive.
They ate bones for Christmas at the Donners’ camp at Alder Creek as well, as they had been doing for a while now. Sometimes they boiled them; sometimes they toasted them brown in the coals and then gnawed on them. And as at the lake camp, they boiled hides. Insofar as they had anything to share, Tamzene and George Donner shared with the now-widowed Elizabeth Donner and her children and with Doris Wolfinger. But there was precious little to share. In their insubstantial shelters, they all lived in almost perpetual danger of hypothermia, sometimes lying abed for days at a time in wet clothes, trying to keep smoky fires going through the relentless cycles of freezing rain and snow, constantly brushing snow from their tents lest they be buried. Most of the healthy young men on whom they had depended were now gone, either dead and buried in the snow or departed for the lake camp. George Donner, with the infection from his cut hand still climbing relentlessly up his arm, could do almost nothing to help his wife and children.
On Christmas night the storm eased, and it was over by the morning of December 26. On the slope leading down into the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, Sarah and Jay and the others peered out from under their blankets that morning and found themselves surrounded by deep drifts of fresh snow. Without the hatchet they had lost during the storm, they were unable to cut wood or start a fire, so they mostly stayed in their makeshift blanket tent, conserving their body heat and their energy during the morning. But in the afternoon they crawled stiffly and painfully out of their shelter. For some time William Foster was so stiff that he could not get his limbs to unbend at all.
They spent much of the remainder of the day hunting for the hatchet, their snowshoes, and their packs, all of which had disappeared under the snow. As they tried to gather wood without the hatchet, someone broke a dried pine branch from a tree, and a mouse ran out and scurried away. They all chased it, shouting and thrashing through the soft snow in pursuit of it. Thirteen-year-old Lemuel Murphy, who was growing increasingly demented, seized the mouse, thrust it into his mouth, and ate it alive.
The three bodies lying nearby—Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Antonio—were rigid and blue and half covered by snow. The living avoided them. They already knew what they were going to do, but they were not yet ready to do it.
To some extent they had become apathetic. The worst hunger pangs had begun to pass after thirty-six hours without food, and while they were in many ways physically miserable, hunger was not always the most pressing component of their misery. Their brains had stopped screaming out for glucose, partly because their bodies had made some critical adjustments, designed to preserve the integrity of their brains for as long as possible. Their guts had begun to shrink, reducing the surface area of their digestive systems. Their livers had begun to transform fatty acids into chemical compounds called ketone bodies. These were able to mimic glucose and provide their brains with up to two-thirds of the energy they needed to function. The use of ketone bodies carried a price, though. It was gradually acidifying their blood, leading them toward a dangerous condition called ketoacidosis, common in diabetics. The most obvious manifestation of the condition was that large amounts of acetone were being released in their urine and their respiratory systems. As they huddled under their blankets, their breath began to smell like something they had never known—fingernail polish.
Late in the day, they crawled back under the blankets, still unfed except for Lemuel. The pittance of nourishment provided by the mouse seemed to stimulate the boy’s madness and renew his hunger pains, though. As night fell, he howled and raved and grabbed at people’s arms, biting them, crying out, “Give me my bone!” His sister, twenty-year-old Sarah Foster, held him tight and tried to comfort him, but, like Patrick Dolan the night before, he clawed his way free and scrabbled about, bent on escaping from the tent. Finally they all forced him to the center of the circle with their feet, trying to keep him from slipping out under the perimeter.
The skies were clear that night, and a waxing gibbous moon crossed above the rim of the canyon. Everything in the canyon—still and white and crystalline—shimmered. Under the blankets, Lemuel Murphy finally quieted down. His sister, sobbing, held his head in her lap until, at about 2:00 A.M., he ceased breathing. Then they rolled his body out into the moonlit snow and closed the circle tighter, down to ten now.
The next day they set about the task of butchering meat.
10
THE HEART ON THE MOUNTAIN
The first order of business on the morning of December
27 was to make a fire. Under the blankets, William Eddy poured some black powder from his powder horn onto a bit of tinder and at the same time struck a spark from his flintlock rifle. Pouring black powder onto tinder, especially if the tinder is damp, is an old woodsman’s trick for increasing the likelihood that the spark will catch. Unfortunately for Eddy, it caught with a vengeance, exploding the powder horn in his hands with a terrific flash of smoke and flame. He scrambled out from under the blankets with a blackened face and badly burned hands. Amanda McCutchen and Sarah Foster followed him out, also burned but not so badly. Eventually they got a fire kindled in dried branches they had collected and used it to set fire to another dry dead pine. Then they began doing what they had by now agreed that they would do.
They divided into groups so that no one would have to eat, or see eaten, any of their kin. Sarah and Mary Ann and Jay stayed apart from Franklin’s body, Sarah Foster from Lemuel’s body. Luis and Salvador would have no part of any of it. They built a separate fire at a distance and turned their backs on the whites.
If they did as others in similar circumstances have almost universally done, Jay Fosdick, William Eddy, and William Foster started by removing and concealing in the snow the heads, hands, and feet of the dead, to render the bodies a bit less human. Then, as they would with a deer or an ox, they cut open the body cavities and extracted the most nutritious organs: the liver, the heart, and the kidneys. These would not keep well; they needed to be eaten first.
Now that they had crossed the line, their hunger put itself foremost in their thoughts. So at some point shortly after they had taken these organs from the bodies, they stopped and sat down to their first unthinkable meal. They put the meat on sharpened stakes and held it out over glowing coals, roasting it until they judged it done, or done enough. The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat, and, unbidden, it stimulates the appetite mightily, activating the salivary glands, awakening the gut, grabbing the attention of the brain. So when it had cooled enough that it did not burn their lips, they sat down in the snow, weeping, their eyes averted from one another’s faces, and took their first few tentative bites. Then they ate.