They don’t necessarily go through this process alone, though. Small groups of people living under these kinds of stresses and experiencing this kind of psychic numbness tend to form feral communities, tribes governed not by the usual social conventions but by older, more fundamental laws—the laws of necessity, dominance, self-preservation, and brute strength. Such communities evolved in German concentration camps during World War II, and they evolve in modern-day prisons. One of the hallmarks of feral communities is that they tend to splinter into subgroups based on distinctions of identity, such as gender, race, religion, and culture. This stress-induced rending of the social fabric often allows a stronger group to prey on a weaker one, higher-status individuals to exploit lower-status individuals. That is why black slaves were often the most at risk when shipwrecked with white crews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, why Luis and Salvador had been wise to slip away from the snowshoe party, and why Sarah and the other women, even though they outnumbered the men, needed to watch their backs.
Sarah and the others limped westward through manzanita and digger pines, traveling over lower ridges and rounded hills, still aiming southwest as best they could reckon it. They were having a hard time walking normally now, staggering as if drunk at times and needing to stop to rest every quarter of a mile or so. When they came to logs or trees fallen across their path, they did not have the strength to climb over them. They simply put their arms on the obstructions, embraced them, rolled their bodies over the top, and dropped onto the other side. After about four miles of this, they came across the bloody footprints of Luis and Salvador. Then, two miles farther on, they came upon the two Miwoks themselves near a small stream.
John Sutter would later say that Luis and Salvador—his “good boys,” as he called them—were gathering acorns when the snowshoe party found them, a not-unlikely thing for two starving young Miwok men to be doing under the circumstances. California Indians were the most omnivorous in North America. The Miwoks disdained few food sources, and Luis and Salvador would likely have seen gustatory and nutritional opportunities that Sarah and her companions would never have recognized as food. The Miwoks knew how to leach the tannic acid out of acorns by immersing them in sandy streambeds. They ate various kinds of grubs and larvae, earthworms, crawfish, snails, and freshwater mollusks. They ate a wide variety of native plants and roots. They knew how to grind up buckeye pods and throw them in a pool to poison fish. They knew how to construct simple snares to catch birds, rabbits, and other small mammals. Even spawned-out salmon carcasses or carrion were valuable to them—they ground up the vertebrae of dead fish and deer and made soft, mealy cakes that they could roast on the hot stones around a fire. They would eat the flesh of almost any mammal, except the domestic dog, which they considered the deadliest of poisons.*
Some accounts would later assert that Luis and Salvador were simply lying on the ground, dead, when the snowshoe party discovered them. But in fact they were alive, though greatly weakened. Unlike their white companions, they had not partaken of human flesh, and so except for whatever they might have gleaned from the countryside, they’d likely had little nourishment since December 21. The party moved a short distance past them and paused. Then William Foster took the flintlock gun and went back. He told Luis he was going to kill him and aimed the gun at the young man’s head. Up the trail, Sarah and the others heard a shot. Then a long pause while Foster reloaded. Then another shot.
They stripped the flesh from the young men’s bones and set them aside. Then they built a fire and dried the flesh while they roasted and consumed the more perishable parts of the bodies.
During the night it began to rain. By the next morning, Luis’s and Salvador’s severed heads and bloody bones lay in muddy pools of water. The snowshoe party packed what they could of the young men’s dried flesh on their backs and pressed on. Their energy only modestly replenished by the lean meat they were now eating, they wandered through the rain, painfully and slowly. They saw deer regularly now, but Eddy was too weak to take steady aim at them. The country gradually opened out into more gently rolling ridges and knolls, and oaks began to replace the digger pines. It started to look something like what Sarah and Jay had dreamed California would look like. But in the rain, the mud, the grief, the fear, and the pain simply of walking, this California must have seemed a cruel, gray shadow of the one they had dreamed of. Sarah limped forward, concentrating for the moment on the simple task of putting one foot in front of the other.
Time began to collapse for them now. They wandered forward for another day or two. Then one of them found a human footprint, and then another and yet another in the mud. They gathered around the tracks and began to follow them. The prints led to what seemed to be an Indian trail through the brush. They hobbled along the trail as quickly as they could manage and then suddenly came around a chaparral-covered hillside and saw an Indian village laid out before them.
It might have been the Maidu village of Takema near modern-day Colfax. It may be that they had wandered as far south as the village of Hangwite near Auburn. Or it might have been another, unnamed Maidu village. Whatever its name, it consisted of a cluster of larger, round, earth-covered lodges called k’um, intermingled with smaller, conical brush shelters called hübo. Columns of smoke rose from chimney holes in the center of the larger lodges as well as from outdoor campfires all through the village.
The Maidu were astonished by the sudden appearance of seven pale and spectral figures on the edge of the village. They stood staring at them, mouths agape. The Maidu men wore simple, loose mantles of deer or rabbit skins around their shoulders, woven hairnets, and little else except simple moccasins. The women wore only aprons made of shredded bark.
As Sarah and her companions began to lurch toward the villagers with their arms outstretched, imploring aid, some of the Maidu at first ran away into the brush. But when they saw the condition that the white people were in, they approached them cautiously. Then they began to gather nosily around the whites, pointing and gesticulating at their hollow faces and gaunt frames. Some of the children cried and hid their eyes in horror.
Then they must have led Sarah and the others into the smoky interiors of the earthen shelters and laid them down on willow platforms covered with pine needles, tule mats, and soft animal skins. The Maidu, if they served the whites as they served themselves, used pairs of sticks to drop hot rocks from the fire into coiled willow baskets of acorn mush. When the mush was warm, they showed the whites how to eat it, scooping it out of the baskets with their index and middle fingers and then licking it off. Then they made patties of the mush, placed them between leaves, cooked them on the hot rocks surrounding the fire, and handed the hot acorn cakes to the strangers.
William Eddy could not manage to eat the stuff and settled for brewing tea from fresh grass instead. But Sarah and the rest of her companions ate the acorn mush and cakes, unpalatable though they probably found them. Then they lay on their backs and looked around and found themselves in circumstances that must have been stranger than they could ever have imagined, in huts full of odd smells, surrounded by dark faces peering back at them, speaking at them in an incomprehensible language, with the sound of rain splattering in the mud outside. But they were warm and dry for the first time in a very long time, and one by one they fell asleep.
So far as we know, none of them told the Maidu—close kindred to the Miwoks—about the meat still stored in their packs.
Over the next several days, it continued to snow in the mountains. Patrick Breen wrote in his diary, “Snowing fast wind N.W. snow higher than the shanty must be 13 feet deep don’t know how to get wood this morning it is dreadful to look at.” In the foothills it continued to rain, but the snowshoers, conscious that they still bore the burden of telling the outside world what was happening in the mountains, used signs to let the Maidu know that they wanted to continue to the nearest American settlement as soon as possible. They set off again with Maidu guides, following Indian trails thr
ough the brush. The going was slow, though. Even with their stomachs full, they were still malnourished and weak. But it was their swollen and bleeding feet that posed the largest problem now. They hobbled a hundred yards at a time, continually having to sit and rest in the relentless downpour.
They made four miles and arrived at another Maidu village, where they rested again, trying to regain strength and heal their feet. Then they resumed traveling, moving ever more slowly, following guides from one Maidu settlement to another. They were among broad-branched oaks now, almost on the edge of the Sacramento Valley; they could see it clearly from hilltops, stretched out before them, vast and flat and immensely fertile. The weather had cleared, but colder air had come in behind the rain. The mornings were frosty, the nights bone-chilling, and they were dressed only in tatters, some of them virtually nude.
By the morning of January 17, Sarah could barely walk at all. Despite their diet of acorn gruel, she and her companions suffered from a host of symptoms related to their months of malnutrition. As Sarah’s body had tried to extract protein and vitamins from nonvital tissues, she had grown skeletally gaunt. She had almost certainly begun to experience bleeding gums from scurvy, yellowed skin from jaundice, intestinal bleeding, double vision, and slurred speech. As the nerve fibers in her extremities had begun to waste away, she likely had severe pain followed by loss of control in her arms and legs. Her skin was by now probably dry, scaly, and badly sunburned, her eyelids swollen with edema, her voice hoarse, her lips cracked, her tongue blistered. From time to time, she likely vomited green bile.
Finally, after stumbling on for two or three miles that morning, she simply gave out. She sat down by the trail and went no farther. Mary Ann, Harriet Pike, Sarah Foster, and William Foster did the same.
They had walked across the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the middle of winter, covering more than seventy miles of granite and ice and snow. They had been malnourished before they’d even begun. They had battled hypothermia every day of the trek. Much of the way, they had struggled through deep drifts of snow in heavy, clumsy, homemade snowshoes. Most of the rest of the way, they had been without intact shoes. They had walked as far as they could and come at last to rest on the very verge of what they had sought for so long. But now they could go no farther.
William Johnson’s Ranch, the place toward which Sarah had been inevitably, though perhaps unknowingly, moving since she left home back in April of the preceding year, was not much of an establishment, less imposing even than the miserable stockade at Fort Bridger, the last American outpost any of them had seen, an eternity ago. The only structures were Johnson’s house—a small two-room building, one half made of logs and the other half of adobe bricks—a few pens cobbled together from poles for the livestock, and a few rustic cabins that recently arrived emigrants had erected as temporary homes.
The land on which these structures stood was reasonably fertile, and Johnson and his partner, Sebastian Keyser, farmed it, or at least oversaw the farming of it, most of the actual labor being supplied by several dozen naked Miwoks and Maidu. Johnson was fond of drink and generally disinclined to exert himself, but his property had the advantage of sitting squarely on the emigrant road leading down out of the Sierra Nevada and the even greater advantage of being the first American establishment that hungry and ill-provisioned emigrants encountered when descending that road.
In late October, just ahead of the snowstorms that closed the mountain pass to the Donner Party, several of the families that Sarah had first met across the Missouri River from St. Joe had arrived at Johnson’s. Reason P. Tucker and his sons had arrived in October, after moving down from Bear Valley along with Matthew Ritchie’s family and the Stark family. More of Sarah’s traveling companions from back on the plains had also stopped at Johnson’s but then moved quickly on to Sutter’s Fort. A few had moved deeper even into California, but with winter closing in and the Sacramento Valley increasingly inundated by floodwaters, the Tuckers and the Ritchies had taken up winter quarters at Johnson’s Ranch.
And it was at Johnson’s Ranch that late on the afternoon of January 17, fifteen-year-old Harriet Ritchie saw two figures coming slowly down the flood-swollen Bear River, approaching her family’s cabin. She studied the men approaching her. One was an Indian, and he was holding up the other, a white man—a gaunt figure with rags hanging from his shoulders. The white man’s feet were bloody; his eyes were sunken into his pale, bearded face. He was bent over as if by great age. He stank of sweat and blood. When he got to the door, he peered up into Harriet’s face and whispered, “Bread.” She burst into tears.
Matthew Ritchie and his wife, Caroline, ushered William Eddy into the cabin and laid him out on a bed. Eddy croaked out that he was of the Donner Party and that there were six more like himself, dying or dead, some miles back up the trail. Caroline Ritchie brought him food, and as she spooned it into his mouth, she, too, began to sob.
Harriet ran from cabin to cabin informing the other families. Nineteen-year-old William Dill Ritchie helped his father to rustle up some supplies. Men and women came running, converging on the Ritchie cabin carrying bread, coffee, tea, sugar, blankets, whatever they could think of. Five men—Reason Tucker, John Howell, John Rhoads, Pierre Sicard, and the Maidu guide who had brought Eddy in—hastily gathered together all the goods they could carry, strapped them on their backs, and set out on foot among leafless oak trees, following the turgid river back into the hills.
It was nearly midnight by the time they reached Sarah and the others, lying in the mud where they had collapsed that morning. They were all alive, although nearly naked and so malnourished and hypothermic that they were hardly able to sit up, let alone walk. But they ate ravenously the food that was offered to them; then they wept and cried out and begged for more. When it was given to them, they ate until they grew ill and vomited, the food overwhelming their shrunken digestive systems. Then they ate more.
All that night at Johnson’s Ranch, women continued to bake bread and stew beef. On the morning of January 18, a second contingent of men—Matthew Ritchie, William Johnson, Joseph Verrot, and Sebastian Keyser—set out on horseback with the fresh supplies, trailing a string of extra horses behind them. Without an Indian to guide him, Ritchie followed Eddy’s bloody footsteps for more than six miles through the brush. It took them all day to reach the survivors.
Late that night, moving through dark oak woods, Sarah and Mary Ann finally approached the Ritchies’ makeshift cabin by the Bear River. What they remembered for the rest of their lives was not the cabin itself but rather the warm, yellow lamplight that shone out through loose chinking—light coming to them through the black night as if miraculously, beckoning them to come back in out of the cold, to the hearth of humanity.
The next day an Indian runner was sent splashing through the flooded lowlands west of Johnson’s Ranch to the home of John Sinclair, the new, American-designated alcalde, or chief magistrate, of Northern California. When the runner returned, he carried on his back something that Sarah and her sister needed nearly as badly as food and rest—a large pack of clean, fresh women’s clothes.
But it would take far more than clean clothes to heal Sarah’s soul. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the few white women at Johnson’s Ranch, and later at Sutter’s Fort, devoted themselves to nursing the survivors of the snowshoe party. One of those who tended to them was a young Englishwoman who had immigrated to California the year before, Eliza Gregson. When she first looked into the survivors’ eyes, Gregson was startled by what she saw looking back at her, and she later marveled at it.
I shall never forget the looks of those people, for the most part of them was crazy & their eyes danced & sparkled in their heads like stars.
12
HOPE AND DESPAIR
The news that Sarah and her companions had carried out of the mountains—news of whole families snowbound and starving—startled and horrified the handful of American settlers living at Johnson’s Ranch. For many of
those who had themselves so recently made it through the mountains, a sense of shared purpose, a sense of common humanity, and a sense of Christian duty all demanded that they do something to help their countrymen. But to launch any kind of successful rescue effort, they knew they would need far more resources than could be mustered at Johnson’s squalid establishment. They would need food, blankets, horses, mules, and, above all, men willing to hazard their lives in the high Sierra in midwinter. Those were commodities that they could hope to find only at Sutter’s Fort, some forty miles away. William Eddy scrawled out a letter detailing the dismal situation in the mountains and imploring Sutter’s aid, and Johnson sent it off to the fort by way of a foot courier.
The Tuckers and the Ritchies began to slaughter beef cattle and to dry the meat. They cut hides into strips with which to make snowshoes. William Johnson put some of his Indian laborers to work grinding wheat into flour in stone matates. The whites used coffee mills to grind still more wheat. George Tucker and William Ritchie and other young men rode through the surrounding countryside searching for enough horses and mules to pack the supplies into the mountains. And they waited for more men and supplies from Sutter’s.
Meanwhile, Sarah and the other survivors lay abed in various cabins alongside the Bear River at Johnson’s Ranch, stunned and desolate, trying to recover. Mary Ann—whose feet were so swollen and injured that she would not be able to wear shoes for three months—spent some of her time writing letters to her mother, hoping that the rescuers would carry them into the mountains for her.