By January 25, her twenty-second birthday, Sarah must have begun to fully absorb the fact that she was a widow. She had much to grieve for in the loss of the two principal men in her life—her husband and her father—and all that they had so recently been to her.
And she had new practical worries as well. When she had left her father’s family and married Jay, she’d moved from one financial dependency to another. With both now dead, she faced the cold fact that she had no particular means of support. And at twenty-two she was no longer a child in any sense of the word, and no one would be likely to treat her as such.
The relationship between adults and children and the line demarcating the distinction between the two were shifting in the 1840s, as were many other aspects of life. In the world into which Sarah had been born in 1825, American ideas of who exactly was a child and who an adult, and how children should be treated, were still shaped largely by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century attitudes. In that world, children had for the most part been thought of as miniature adults. As a result, the treatment of children and the expectations placed on them had often been exceedingly harsh and unforgiving by modern standards. These attitudes had resulted in the widespread abuse of even very young children, particularly in Great Britain, where eight-and nine-year-olds were sometimes put in chains and harnessed to carts in coal mines and made to drag the heavy carts for as many as eighteen to twenty hours a day.
Many of these attitudes toward children came to America with the first English colonists. As early as 1619, hundreds of pauper children were abducted in England and shipped to Virginia, to be bound out to service on farms and in manufactories with no pay. And as the Industrial Revolution brought large-scale manufacturing to America’s cities late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries, the demand for cheap labor soon had urban children working long hours in abysmal conditions. In 1790, Samuel Slater, an early American manufacturing magnate, set the trend when he realized that he could run his factory most economically if he dispensed with hiring adults and employed only children, from seven to twelve years old, to staff his first factory in Rhode Island.
As Sarah and her siblings were growing up, town boys whose parents wished them to learn a trade were often sent away from home by the age of fourteen to serve seven-year apprenticeships. Country boys much younger than that worked alongside their fathers from dawn to dusk. Country girls like Sarah and her sisters also worked grueling hours on their farmsteads from the time they could chop kindling or tote a bucket of water into the house. And by thirteen or fourteen, many of them were married and running households of their own.
By the 1840s, though, forces were at work that would eventually begin to ameliorate the situation for children, both in Britain and in the United States. Popular literary works like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “The Cry of the Children” and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist—both widely read in America—began to change attitudes. Romantic notions about the natural innocence of children began to clash with the harsh reality portrayed by Dickens and meld with Victorian sentimentality. In 1842, Massachusetts limited the workday of children under twelve to ten hours. Six years later, in 1848, the state of Pennsylvania passed the first minimum-age law, outlawing the employment of children under twelve in textile mills.
In keeping with a burgeoning American emphasis on individualism and self-improvement, the emphasis in child rearing began to shift from breaking the child’s will to developing the child’s inherent capacity to make his or her own way in the world. To be sure, methods often remained harsh, and the widespread abuse of children in American factories and sweatshops continued largely unabated throughout much of the remainder of the century, fed by a steady stream of immigrant children from Europe. But at least change had been in the wind as Sarah was growing up.
And, of course, most emigrant parents in 1846 loved their children no less than do modern-day parents, and they were no less anxious about them when danger threatened, as their behavior in the Sierra Nevada was demonstrating that winter. They, as much as any of us who are parents today, wanted to turn their children out into the world well equipped to have happy and productive lives. But their frame of reference, their concept of what would best accomplish that aim, remained in the 1840s fundamentally different from ours. Few of us today can imagine our daughters in a wedding bed at thirteen, nor our sons sent away to work full-time at fourteen, but both were still comfortable ideas for most of Franklin and Elizabeth Graves’s peers.
So when Sarah had left home a married woman at twenty-one, all the expectations of adulthood had already long since settled squarely on her shoulders. And when she arrived at Johnson’s Ranch, all those expectations remained in force, despite the horror of what she had just been through. As she contemplated her new status, the one light that she could look to in the darkness of her inner world was the hope that her mother and younger siblings were still alive and that the cache of coins her father had hidden in the family wagon was still in her mother’s safekeeping. Meanwhile, everything in her future depended on the men hurrying around outside making preparations for a rescue. So far, though, nobody had gone anywhere.
As Sarah lay in bed at Johnson’s Ranch, her mother was fighting for her brothers’ and sisters’ survival in ways that illustrate just how fiercely many emigrant mothers were devoted to the welfare of their children. Elizabeth Graves and Margret Reed, struggling to keep their respective broods alive, were waging a low-level war. Margret Reed, living now in the Breens’ cabin, possessed only bits of ox hide with which to feed her children, and these bits of hide were a half mile distant, stretched out on the roof of the double cabin where Elizabeth Graves was still living. Beyond scraps cut from them, she could rely only on whatever ox bones the Breens chose to offer her. From time to time, Peggy Breen slipped Virginia Reed small pieces of poor beef, but only rarely. And in the end Margret Reed knew that Peggy Breen, like any mother, would feed her own children before any others.
In Elizabeth Graves’s half of the double cabin also, there was now nothing to eat but hides. On January 21 the Reeds’ cook, Eliza Williams, waded through the snow from the Graveses’ cabin, where she had been living, to the Breens’ cabin. There she implored her mistress for a bit of beef. She could not digest the scraps of hide that Mrs. Graves provided her, she said. But with nothing but the same for herself and her children, Margret Reed could offer Eliza no help. Patrick Breen made a simple notation on the result of the encounter in his diary that same day: “Mrs. Reid sent her back to live or die on them.”
On January 30 the struggle between Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves reached a new pitch. Graves—a woman her former neighbors in Illinois remembered years later to be extraordinarily generous—seized the hides and various other goods that Margret Reed had left at her half of the double cabin. She dragged them into her side of the cabin and announced that she would not return them until Margret Reed paid her back for the cattle that Franklin had sold to her when they’d first become snowbound in November. Nobody recorded the words that followed between Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves, but one can imagine. John and Edward Breen, Patrick’s teenage sons, went to the Graveses’ cabin later that same day to try to recover Margret’s goods by force or by diplomacy, but when they returned, they had only two paltry pieces of hide to show for the effort.
At the Murphy cabin that night, a third mother, Levinah Murphy, with no resources to fight over, watched in despair as her seventeen-year-old son, John Landrum, ceased his delirious ranting, took a few last rattling breaths, and died. In the three full months since they had all become entrapped, he was the fourteenth member of the Donner Party to die, all of the dead, so far, male.
On February 4, under gloomy skies, fourteen men finally set out from Johnson’s Ranch in an attempt to reach the emigrants at Truckee Lake. Reason P. Tucker and another of that year’s newly arrived emigrants, Aquilla Glover, led the expedition—which in time would come to be called “the First Relief.” Sixteen-ye
ar-old George Washington Tucker accompanied his father. Colonel Matthew D. Ritchie also went along, as did two newly arrived emigrant brothers, Daniel and John Rhoads, a young man named Riley Septimus Moutrey, several sailors, a German with the nickname of “Greasy Jim,” a half-witted boy named Billy Coon, Jotham Curtis, whom James Reed had rescued from Bear Valley back in November, and a still-emaciated William Eddy.
They made their way up the emigrant road alongside the Bear River, traveling through a wet landscape of manzanita, sprawling oak trees, and spindly digger pines. The road was bad, and the horses and mules repeatedly got bogged down in mud, requiring the men to unload the animals each time and pull them out with ropes, then reload them. It rained intermittently at first. Then, two or three days out, the skies opened up and torrential rain slanted down in sheets. On February 9 they reached the snow line, and after four miles of leading the horses and mules through snow up to the animals’ bellies, they made an encampment at Mule Springs at an elevation of 3,849 feet.
The next day Eddy, still too weak to once again assault the high country, turned back with the pack animals. He did not yet know it, but both his one-year-old daughter, Margaret, and his beloved wife, Eleanor, were already dead, their bodies lying in the snow outside the cabins at the lake camp. The rate of dying at the lake was accelerating rapidly now. Since February 1, in addition to Margaret and Eleanor Eddy, Amanda McCutchen’s one-year-old daughter, Harriet, and Augustus Spitzer and Milt Elliott had all died.
Reason Tucker and Aquilla Glover cached a portion of the provisions at Mule Springs for their return trip and left the boys, George Tucker and Billy Coon, to watch them. As the remaining men started to climb higher, each of them carried roughly fifty pounds of supplies on his back, along with a blanket, a hatchet, and a tin cup.
On the morning of February 14, they faced the daunting prospect of making the steep climb out of Bear Valley to Emigrant Gap and then beginning to work their way among the high granite peaks to the east. Three of the men refused to go farther. Tucker pleaded with them and offered five dollars per day out of his own pocket for those who would continue, but in the end only seven men started up the ridge.
They traveled in single file, each man taking a turn going out ahead of the others to beat a path through the snow, then falling back to the end of the line. Once they reached the top of the ridge, they followed a sinuous course, winding among trees and around the sides of peaks. Aware that they, like the snowshoe party, could easily become lost in this terrain, they set fire to dead pine trees that they came to along the way, both to serve as markers for their return trip and to show the route to additional rescuers who they hoped would soon be following them.
They went on like this for the next several days, until, on February 17, they camped just short of the summit overlooking Truckee Lake, where they again built a log platform on which to kindle a fire. They guessed the snow to be as deep as thirty feet here.
On February 18 the First Relief carefully descended the granite cliffs and crossed the frozen lake. Just before sunset they approached the woods where they had been told they would find the lake camp. The snow was, by their reckoning, about eighteen feet deep here, and they could see no sign of life. Daniel Rhoads described what happened next.
We raised a loud halloo and then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her several others made their appearance in like manner of coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine and I never can forget the horrible ghastly sight they presented. The first woman spoke in a hollow voice very much agitated and said, “are you men from California or do you come from heaven?”
Photographic Insert
Sarah Graves, undated photograph. Courtesy of Kathy Larson
Mary Ann Graves, circa 1879. Courtesy of California State Parks, Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park Archives
Eleanor Graves, undated photograph. Courtesy of Marilyn Sherwood Kramer, great-granddaughter of Lovina Graves
Nancy Graves, circa 1853. Courtesy of Marilyn Sherwood Kramer, great-granddaughter of Lovina Graves
Lovina Graves, circa 1850. Courtesy of Marilyn Sherwood Kramer, great-granddaughter of Lovina Graves
William Eddy, undated photograph. Courtesy of California State Parks, Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park Archives
Charles Stanton, 1844. Courtesy of California State Parks, Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park Archives
Louis Keseberg, circa 1879. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
James and Margret Reed, undated photograph. Courtesy of California State Parks, Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park Archives
Chimney Rock, in Nebraska, stands 325 feet from the base to the tip of the spire .
Scotts Bluff, Nebraska; an emigrant wagon much like the one the Fosdicks drove.
Wagon ruts west of Fort Laramie in Wyoming, etched in the stone by Sarah Graves Fosdick and thousands who followed her.
Looking east over the Wasatch Mountains. On Lansford Hastings’s and James Reed’s recommendation, the Donner Party fought their way through this section of the Wasatch to reach the Great Salt Lake Valley.
Donner Lake as seen from the crest of the Sierra Nevada; the lake camp was in the woods at the far end of the lake.
The Murphys and Fosters built their cabin at the lake camp against this boulder.
Donner Pass at the left, as seen from the cliffs west of Donner Lake.
Arrival of a relief party at the lake camp. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley
Tall stumps cut at the level of the snow by the Donner Party or a relief party, likely at Starved Camp. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley
Discovery of Elizabeth Graves’s coins on the shores of Donner Lake in 1891. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley
The death of Franklin Graves as depicted in Graham’s Illustrated magazine, February 1857.
The woman was Levinah Murphy, whose son John had died on January 30. In the past few days, she had watched first the baby Margaret Eddy, then Margaret’s mother, Eleanor, and then Milt Elliott all die in her miserable cabin built up against the gray, cold boulder.
Reason Tucker and his men went quickly among the survivors, doling out small portions of food in the failing light of dusk. Tucker and his men were horrified by what they beheld. These people were walking cadavers. He and his men, he said, “cried to see them cry and rejoiced to see them rejoice.” The picked-over bones of oxen and putrefied bits of ox hide lay about on the snow. Worse, human bodies also lay scattered about, half covered by snow or by quilts. To get the bodies out of the cabins, the women and children who now mostly inhabited them had had to dig inclined planes and drag them up and out. They had not then had enough strength remaining to bury them any deeper than under a light cover of snow.
Tucker pushed on to the Graveses’ cabin a half mile to the northeast and arrived there in the dark at about 8:00 P.M. He found the double cabin, like the others, buried under more than a dozen feet of snow. But it was a clear night, and a crescent moon hung in the western sky. He could make out a column of smoke rising from a hole in the snow. When he called out, an emaciated Elizabeth Graves and her children crept up out of another hole. She scanned the faces of the men assembled in front of her in the moonlight and asked where Franklin was, whether he and Jay and Sarah had gotten through. Tucker did not have the heart to tell her the truth. He said that they had all arrived safely but that their feet were too frozen to allow them to return.* Elizabeth Graves didn’t buy a word of it, though. If Franklin had not come back, it must be because something dreadful had happened. For now, though, she could only imagine just how dreadful.
The next day Tucker and some of his men continued on to the Alder Creek camp, where they found an even more dismal scene. Hunkered down in their tattered tents with only a single ox hide left between them, Tamzene and Elizabeth Donner had for days now been watching their twelve ch
ildren, ages three to fourteen, slowly approach starvation. With Jacob Donner dead, George Donner bedridden with his infected arm, and most of the teamsters dead, the two mothers and Doris Wolfinger had had only three teenage boys—Jean Baptiste Trudeau, Noah James, and Solomon Hook—to help them with the heavy and relentless work of cutting wood and shoveling snow off the tents.
Tucker and Rhoads explained to the women that they had been able to pack in only enough supplies to last a few days, but that they hoped other rescuers would be arriving soon. In the meantime they needed to take anyone healthy enough to endure the hike out of here. And they needed to do it now, before anyone got any weaker.
Both mothers faced agonizing choices. Elizabeth Donner had four children who were simply too young to have a chance wading through the deep drifts of snow, and there were not enough adults to carry them all. Tamzene had three of her own in the same situation. What’s more, Tamzene would not hear of leaving George Donner here to die without her. They picked out a few older children who they thought might be able to make it out—Elitha, Leanna, George Jr., and William—and handed them over to Tucker and his men. The rest of the children would have to stay with their mothers. The sixteen-year-old teamster Noah James would go, and so would Doris Wolfinger. But Solomon Hook would stay, and Jean Baptiste Trudeau was told he must, much against his will, stay to help cut wood for the women. The rescuers felled a large pine tree to give him a head start. They doled out small bits of beef and flour. Then, just hours after they had arrived, they led the children away from their desolate mothers and disappeared into the snowy woods.