And when they ate, their digestive systems gurgled and surged back to life and demanded more, and so they ate more. Their headaches and bone-crushing weariness began to lift. Energy poured into their limbs. So they got up and prepared more of the flesh and ate more, still avoiding one another’s eyes as best they could. For the first time in days, they now believed they would live at least a few more days, but they also knew that for the rest of their lives they would bear a terrible awareness of what they had done here on this day. For three of them—Sarah, Mary Ann, and Sarah Foster—the psychic burden was all the more crushing for knowing that at one of the adjoining campfires someone was at that moment eating their father or brother.
Most people faced with starvation, most of the time, choose to die rather than resort to cannibalism. The prohibition against eating human flesh is as ancient and fundamental a taboo as can be found. That is not to say that cannibalism is rare in the history of the world, though. It has been practiced, sometimes on a very large scale, in nearly every corner of the world and nearly every age. Neanderthals are believed to have chowed down on one another from time to time, and early Homo sapiens likely did as well. There are biblical accounts of cannibalism, tenth-century accounts of Christian Crusaders eating captured Arabs, and widespread accounts of cannibalism among indigenous peoples of South America, Polynesia, and North America. Much of this anthropophagy, to use the technical and more euphemistic term, has had nothing to do with survival, but rather with ritual and religion. Or sometimes simply with vengeance.
But there have also been large-scale examples of survival cannibalism, many of them in disturbingly recent times. During the great famine in the Ukraine in the early 1920s—a horrific catastrophe that caused some 5 to 8 million deaths—so many dead bodies, particularly the bodies of children, disappeared from the streets that authorities had to put up signs proclaiming EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM. During the 900-day siege of Leningrad in 1941–44, people resorted to eating first dogs and cats and then finally rats. When the rats were gone and human bodies began piling up in the streets, many of them were soon stripped of their flesh. As things got even worse, the Leningrad police had to track down organized gangs who had gone into business kidnapping, murdering, and butchering their victims for meat. Once again it was children who disappeared fastest. In the apartment of one violinist, authorities found the bones of several dozen children. The violinist’s own five-year-old son was among his apparent victims.
Even the Russian and Ukrainian catastrophes paled in comparison, though, with the appalling horror that descended on the Chinese people between 1958 and 1962. A combination of drought, floods, and the economic policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused some 30 to 40 million of them to starve to death. By as early as 1959, the famine was so widespread in some rural parts of China that peasants began to eat the corpses of their fellow villagers, particularly the corpses of children. When they ran out of corpses, some families took to starving their infant daughters and then exchanging the bodies with those of their neighbors’ daughters so that nobody would have to eat his or her own children. They made soup out of them.
Still, the fact is that cannibalism is a remedy that remains well beyond the last resort for most of us. For every poor soul who has eaten of a companion, there are countless who preferred to die so that a loved one might live.
So the question arises: Why did the men of the snowshoe party draw out their knives on the morning of December 27, 1846, and commence carving? And why did Sarah and the other women eat what the men carved from the bodies? They had been entirely without food for just six days at most. People have lived far longer than that without food, even in very cold environments. Despite the tremendous rate at which they were burning calories, they likely had considerable time to go before they actually starved, perhaps weeks.
It may have been, for one thing, that they were at least partly mistaken as to what was killing them. Their growing malnutrition was rapidly breaking down both their psychological defenses against madness and their physiological defenses against the cold, all of which must have contributed to an overwhelming sense of impending doom. To some extent they believed that Stanton, Antonio, Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Lemuel Murphy had died of hunger, when in fact they almost certainly had died primarily of hypothermia. As a consequence the survivors might well have thought that they themselves were starving to death—it certainly must have felt as if they were. Then, too, they had already broken through the psychological barrier that ordinarily prevents us from seeing food when we look at one another. When Patrick Dolan had drawn the fatal lot, they had all been given license for the first time to turn their hungry eyes on a fellow human being and see a potential meal.
And in the seemingly endless hours that the snowshoe party had spent under the blankets, we know that some of them had begun to have what clinicians call anthropophagic dreams—visions of eating other people—a phenomenon not uncommon among those facing starvation.*
Mostly, though, what allowed the men of the snowshoe party to pull out the knives and what allowed both the men and the women to eat was likely something beyond an instinct for self-preservation and something well short of madness. All of them—except possibly Luis and Salvador, about them we just don’t know—had someone back at the lake camp whom they loved, someone who was depending on them to get through and send help. Their own survival meant more to them than simply continuing to live. It meant hope for those they had left behind. And Sarah and Mary Ann must have felt this obligation particularly keenly. Only a few days before, their father had laid a sacred charge on them to save the lives of their mother and siblings, instructing them explicitly to do whatever was necessary. And nobody had to tell Harriet Pike and Sarah Foster and Amanda McCutchen that the lives of their infant children back at the lake camp depended on their making it to Johnson’s Ranch.
None of that made it any easier, though.
When they finished eating and finally began to look at one another again, and to talk, they started to make plans. The weather had cleared and grown colder, and that meant that there was a crust on the snow. They had no way to know how long the favorable weather would hold, but they knew that they should resume their trek as soon as possible. First, though, they had to render the remaining flesh portable and nonperishable. They cut off long, thin strips and stretched them on racks or stakes placed before the fire. It was a long, slow, gruesome process. They had to take care to keep the flesh close enough to the fire to dry it but not so close as to actually cook it. So for three days, under mostly clear skies, they worked at the task, and rested, and continued to eat.
By the morning of December 29, they were ready to travel again. They loaded their packs with their blankets and what remained of their former companions, strapped on their snowshoes, and struck off again. The four bodies had yielded less meat than they might have expected. Like the flesh of the oxen they had all been subsisting on since November, the flesh of the four malnourished corpses was lean and stringy. It contained almost no fat. A man as large as Franklin Graves might have yielded as much as sixty-six pounds of fresh, usable meat when healthy, but his body had probably yielded roughly half that by the time he died. An emaciated boy like Lemuel Murphy might have yielded as little as twenty pounds. Once the flesh had been dried, of course, it weighed a fraction of these amounts. And they had been living on it for three days already. By the time they left what would come to be called the “Camp of Death,” they calculated that they had only about four more days’ worth of the grisly rations.
The weather remained good for traveling, clear and cold, and with their bodies now resupplied with fuel, they made about five miles that day, and six the next. Seeking to hold to a roughly southwesterly course and navigating by the sun, which was at this time of year well to the south of due west, they inevitably worked their way deeper into the drainage of the American River’s North Fork. By December 31, though, they found themselves boxed in by high cliffs ahead and the in
creasingly deep main canyon to their left. They decided to cross the gorge itself and proceed southwest along the ridge visible on the other side.
The descent was steep. It was so steep, in fact, that soon they could not keep their balance when walking. They found, though, that by squatting on their snowshoes they could simply ride them downhill like sleds. This saved enormous amounts of energy, but it also caused them, time and again, to go out of control, tumbling head over heels into heavy drifts of snow at the end of each run, driving snow deep inside their increasingly tattered clothing, next to their bare skin.
By the end of the day, they had made it down to the river, and on the morning of New Year’s Day, they set out to ascend the steep—in places almost vertical—opposite side of the canyon. It took them an entire day of laborious, leg-throbbing climbing. With each step they had to drive the toes of their snowshoes into the wall of snow before them, then lift themselves up the slope as if they were on a ladder, much as a modern mountain climber does, but without the benefit of crampons. Where the climb was steepest and there was little snow clinging to the rocks, they scrabbled desperately for footholds in the clumsy snowshoes, grabbing at roots and branches to keep from plummeting back down into the canyon.
By the time they reached the top that afternoon, their feet were swollen and cracked and bleeding. Their leather shoes were so rotten now that they were falling to pieces. They wrapped their feet in rags and bits of blanket, but the blood oozed out through the fabric and into the snow, leaving crimson tracks wherever they went. The frostbitten toes of one of the Miwoks had begun to fall off at the first joint.
Exhausted by the ordeal, and famished, they ate again, digging deeper into their packs for the dried flesh. From the high ridge on which they now found themselves, they saw glimpses of what they took to be the broad Sacramento Valley, still far off to the west. But they also saw ridge after snowy ridge stretched out between it and them.
The climb had taken much out of all of them, but the men in particular were fatigued and dispirited. Since leaving the Camp of Death, the women had more and more often found themselves having to take the initiative, setting the course, sometimes leading the men by the hands, gathering the wood, making the fires at night, bringing them food.
A Donner Party survivor later told J. Quinn Thornton, author of one account of the snowshoe expedition, that the men had been ready to give up well before the women.
The deep stupor into which their calamities had plunged the most of them often changed to despair. Each seemed to see inevitable destruction, and expressed in moans, sighs, and tears the gloomy thoughts over which their minds were brooding.
Of the women, though, the same survivor said,
Most of them manifested a constancy and courage; a coolness, presence of mind, and patience…. The difficulties, dangers, and misfortunes which seemed frequently to prostrate the men, called forth the energies of the gentler sex and gave them a sublime elevation of character, which allowed them to abide the most withering blasts of adversity with unshaken firmness.
The women, of course, were themselves in mortal danger hour by hour, but if the men were not going to break down, it seemed that it was the women who would have to make sure of it. By the time they arrived at the top of the high ridge late on the afternoon of January 1, Sarah must have been watching Jay closely, studying him for clues.
As they began to push forward on January 2, both the men and the women found that they could make better progress without the snowshoes, so they took them off and strapped them on their backs. They hobbled forward, but their feet were now so swollen that every step was excruciating and their progress was slow. The country was gradually changing as they moved southwest and downslope. Granite peaks gave way to rounded mountains. A mix of oaks and long-needled digger pines began to replace the tall conifers of the high Sierra. The snow cover grew lighter, and here and there bare patches of red, gravelly earth began to show through beneath.
When they made camp that evening, they were near the end of their rations again. Some of them toasted the remnants of their leather shoes over the coals of the fire; others disassembled their snowshoes and toasted and ate the rawhide strings.
On January 3, gradually losing elevation, they began to encounter country that was largely snow-free for the first time, but in place of the snow they found a new impediment. The pale, silvery green leaves and red, twisting branches of head-high manzanita brush covered the steep hillsides here. As they fought their way through dense stands of the manzanita, the branches caught on their already half-rotted and tattered clothes and began to rip them apart.
By January 4, Jay Fosdick had started to lag far behind the others. Sarah fell back to stay in step with him. Time and again the others found themselves having to stop and wait for the two of them. William Eddy studied Jay’s halting progress and finally went to his side and told him flat out that he was going to die if he did not exert himself more. They had been lucky enough to have fair skies for over a week now, but nobody could tell how long their luck would hold.
They pushed on, watching all the while for any sign of humanity, whether white or Native American. They had little to fear from the local Indians, the Maidu. Intimidated by what they had seen the Mexicans and John Sutter do to their Miwok neighbors in the lowlands, the Maidu mostly just wanted to live in peace in these hills that, so far, none of the whites had found any reason to covet.
By that evening the snowshoe party had had no food for several days, except for bits of toasted leather, and the mood among them began to grow ugly. William Foster first brought up an idea that had likely festered in the minds of at least some of them for days. Why not kill Luis and Salvador for food? While the Miwok boys were at least technically Christians, they remained in the eyes of some of the whites, if not all of them, savages nonetheless—the same general class of beings many had come to loathe during the Black Hawk War of their youths. Looked at a certain way, they were ignorant, itinerant beggars at best, dangerous cutthroats at worst. Looked at another way, they were simply strangers. When killing to survive, it’s easiest to kill and eat whatever or whomever you are least attached to—cattle before horses, dogs before people, strangers before acquaintances, acquaintances before friends, friends before family. Luis and Salvador, more than any of the others, were strangers to them all.
They mulled it over, discussing it in low tones, watching the Miwok boys out of the corners of their eyes. Not everyone agreed with the plan. William Eddy argued against it. What Sarah said or thought, we do not know.
Finally Foster abandoned the idea, at least for the time being. Eddy said that in the morning he would go ahead with the gun and look for game. Now that they were below the snow line, there was a reasonable chance that he might be able to kill a deer. Later that night Luis and Salvador slipped quietly away into the darkness and disappeared. It may be that Eddy warned them, or they might simply have noted the darkening looks in the haggard faces of the whites.
The next morning, January 5, limping through the chaparral, Mary Ann Graves and William Eddy went out ahead of the others, carrying the flintlock rifle, looking for game. Here and there among the manzanita, they could make out Luis’s and Salvador’s bloody footsteps. Harriet Pike, Amanda McCutchen, and Sarah and William Foster followed in a second group. Sarah and Jay Fosdick brought up the rear, once again quickly falling behind the others.
A mile or two out of camp, Eddy and Mary Ann Graves came across a place where a deer had recently lain in the brush. The sudden discovery of exactly what they had hoped for stopped them in their tracks, stunning them with an unexpected mixture of desperate hope and profound dread. They glanced at each other, and each discovered that the other had begun to weep. They dropped to their knees and prayed, then rose and staggered on as quietly as they could in the brush, stalking the animal.
They followed the deer’s tracks until they spotted it browsing about eighty yards off. Eddy moved closer, angling for a clear shot. He raised the rifl
e, but his arms were too weak to hold it level and straight. He lowered it and raised it again and heard Mary Ann Graves behind him give out a little sob. He turned and looked at her and saw that she had covered her face with her hands.
When you fire a flintlock rifle, a small but disconcerting delay follows between the time you pull the trigger and the time the shot goes off. The cock holding the flint must fall and strike the steel of the striker plate. Then the resulting spark must fall into the pan and ignite the powder. The flash in the pan must then penetrate the touch-hole and ignite the powder in the chamber, producing a second, larger explosion. This second explosion must then finally propel the ball out of the barrel. All told, it might take nearly a second to get the shot off, a small eternity when you are trying to hold your aim steady and true on a distant target. And a good many times, if the powder is damp or a breeze blows the spark away, nothing happens at all when you pull the trigger.
Eddy raised the rifle yet again, aiming the muzzle well above the deer this time, then letting it slowly descend until the deer fell into his sights. He pulled the trigger, and the gun discharged. The deer leaped a yard or two and stood still, dropping its tail between its legs. Mary Ann cried out, “Oh, merciful God, you have missed it!” The deer bounded forward. Eddy dropped the gun, and he and Mary Ann took off in pursuit, limping as they ran through the brush. Two hundred yards later, the deer tumbled to the ground, dying. When they reached it, Eddy drew out a knife and slit its throat. He and Mary Ann knelt in the chaparral and drank the blood as it spurted out of the animal’s veins.