The same day that Reed and McCutchen walked away from the miserable pit in the snow that would eventually come to be called “Starved Camp,” Reason Tucker, Aquilla Glover, and the rest of the First Relief led their band of survivors along the Bear River, through rolling, oak-studded hills. At about three that afternoon, they finally arrived at Johnson’s Ranch.
For the first time since she had left the lake camp on snowshoes more than two and a half months before, Sarah saw Billy, Eleanor, and Lovina. At some point that afternoon or evening, Sarah and Mary Ann must have faced the grim task of telling their younger siblings that their father was dead, along with Jay. But the younger children had better news to report. So far as they knew, their mother and the rest of their brothers and sisters were still alive in the mountains, and Selim Woodworth, James Reed, William McCutchen, and other good men were on their way to rescue them.
In the mountains two of the three hearty young men that Reed and McCutchen had left behind to care for the survivors had meanwhile reconsidered their willingness to stay. Not long after the Second Relief left, Charles Stone had hiked from the lake camp to Alder Creek and talked to Charles Cady. They would be better off out of there as soon as possible, they’d decided.
When a horrified Tamzene Donner heard that Cady was about to abandon her and the rest of the Donner family, she struck a desperate deal with the two of them—for a good sum of gold, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they agreed to take her three youngest daughters over the mountains. Once again she stood outside her tent and wept as she watched men lead her children off through the snow, the last of them this time—six-year-old Frances, four-year-old Georgia, and three-year-old Eliza.
When Cady and Stone arrived at the lake camp, they deposited the three girls in the cold, dank, recesses of the Murphy cabin. The only other souls in the cabin were the feeble skeleton who was Levinah Murphy; her one-year-old grandson, George Foster; her emaciated eight-year-old son, Simon; and a gaunt, hollow-eyed, and increasingly desperate Louis Keseberg. Cady and Stone decided to take shelter elsewhere, likely in the abandoned Breen cabin.
By the time the blizzard that had pinned down Reed, McCutchen, and their party near the summit had finally blown over, Cady and Stone had again revised their plans. With so much fresh snow on the ground, it would be hard enough hiking even without small children to carry, they decided. They assembled their packs and headed out across the ice of Truckee Lake, leaving the Donner girls behind with Levinah Murphy in the cabin built up against a boulder. For the Donner girls, it must have been a harrowing moment—their hopes for escape suddenly dashed as they were left in a fetid cabin with a woman who appeared to be more dead than alive.
Two or three days later, Cady and Stone hiked through Summit Valley, just west of the pass, where they found a deep, wide hole in the snow with a blue curl of wood smoke arising from it. On the edge of the hole lay a dead woman and a dead child. The young men peered down into the hole. At the bottom, a ragged woman, a cluster of children, and one emaciated man lay on their backs, staring up at them with hollow eyes. Charles Stone and Charles Cady turned their backs on the hole and quickly resumed their way westward.
Cady and Stone overtook Reed and the Second Relief farther down the Yuba, and shortly after that they all came across Selim Woodworth and his men encamped in the snow near Yuba Gap. With Woodworth were William Eddy and William Foster. The two survivors of the snowshoe party had set out from Johnson’s Ranch several days before, no longer willing to wait for someone else to rescue what remained of their families. Eddy had already learned that Eleanor and his daughter, Margaret, were dead, but he still hoped to save his three-year-old son, James. Foster learned now from Reed that his son, George, was alive in the Murphy cabin.
Reed told Woodworth that he had left more than a dozen survivors in desperate straits ten or twelve miles to the east. He exhorted Woodworth to press ahead as quickly as possible to rescue them. Woodworth polled his men and asked if they would go forward. But Woodworth’s men studied Reed’s and McCutchen’s stricken and haggard faces, and the corpselike survivors, and promptly announced that they would go no farther. Foster and Eddy pleaded with them and offered to pay any amount, but Woodworth’s men calculated that Eddy and Foster were most likely destitute and unable to fulfill their promises. Reed spoke up, promising to make good on whatever Eddy and Foster offered. But the men were unmoved. Eddy and Foster, desperate, said they would continue alone, without provisions. Reed took them aside and told them it would be suicidal and finally got them to agree to retreat temporarily to Bear Valley until something could be worked out.
When they reached the valley, Woodworth again refused to go into the mountains himself, but he finally agreed to pay out government funds to the tune of three dollars per day to any man who would go, and to pay an additional fifty dollars to any man who would bring out a child not his own. Eddy separately agreed to pay fifty dollars to Hiram Miller, who had just come down with the Second Relief, to return with them. Foster paid the same amount to a second man, William Thompson.
Three more men also agreed to go on the terms offered by Woodward. One was a volunteer from San Francisco, Howard Oakley. Another was Charles Stone, who might have begun to feel guilty about leaving the Donner girls behind, or who might simply have wanted the additional money that hauling one of them down the mountain would fetch. And the third was one of the Graves family’s traveling companions from back on the plains, the tall, bearlike John Schull Stark, Matthew Ritchie’s son-in-law.
The following morning the seven of them set out for the high country. Even as they began the climb out of Bear Valley, though, Eddy’s and Foster’s hopes had already been dashed up in the mountains. Three-year-old James Eddy was dead in the Murphy cabin. And a night or two before, Louis Keseberg had taken one-year-old George Foster into his bed with him. In the morning the boy was dead. As Levinah Murphy and the three Donner girls looked on in abject horror, Keseberg took the boy’s limp body from the bed, carried it to a wall, and hung it on a peg, like a piece of meat.
For nearly a week after Reed, McCutchen, and the rest of the Second Relief departed the makeshift camp at Summit Valley, the people they had left behind there struggled to survive in the pit that their fire had melted in the snow. The hole had grown deeper and wider until it was fifteen feet in diameter and twenty-four feet deep, reaching now all the way down to the bare earth.
As the days dragged on, Patrick Breen largely gave up on living. For the most part, he simply lay listless on the muddy ground, staring up at the circle of sky above him. But Peggy Breen struggled to nurture the nine children there—her own five, Mary Donner, and three of Elizabeth Graves’s orphans. The number of Graves children needing care had diminished by one shortly after Reed and McCutchen had left, when five-year-old Franklin Ward Graves Jr. died. The Breens had dragged the boy’s body up out of the pit and laid it in the snow near his mother’s and Isaac Donner’s bodies.
For the first few days, Peggy Breen brewed small amounts of tea from her diminishing supply of tea leaves and doled it out to the children, to warm them more than nourish them. She rationed out small bits of sugar from the lump she had carried up the mountain, and dispensed some seeds she had also brought along. Every few hours, day and night, she or Patrick or their oldest son, John, crawled up one of the trees that had fallen into the pit and stumbled through the nearby woods searching for downed firewood. Each time they scanned the horizon for signs of rescuers, but each time there was nobody to be seen, no motion save the stirring of pine trees in the wind. Patrick Breen slid further into despair.
The weather was fair and relatively warm, and during the days some of them crawled up to the edge of the pit and sunned themselves, storing up warmth for the nights ahead, averting their eyes from the bodies that lay in the snow staring vacantly at them. But the nights were brutal. Without cloud cover, the warmth of the day was radiated quickly back out into the black void of space. As they lay in the pit, staring at white shee
ts of stars spread across the opening above them, they shivered and shook convulsively, aching with the pain of the cold. In the mornings their thin blankets and clothes were board-stiff, crusted over with a thick white rime.
As the week wore on, the sugar and the seeds and the tea began to run out, and finally there was nothing at all left to alleviate the stabbing hunger cramps of the children in the pit. All of them were profoundly emaciated, and with no body fat to insulate them, their internal temperatures hovered near the hypothermic range. Finally seven-year-old Mary Donner, the toes of her feet blackened by frostbite and the burns she had suffered after falling into the fire, could not stand the hunger pangs any longer. She suggested that they eat the dead.
Several days later, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of March 12, William Eddy, William Foster, and the rest of what was now the Third Relief trudged up the length of Summit Valley on snowshoes. At the far end of the valley, they could see a large, dark void in the snow from which was emanating a column of wood smoke. As they approached the column of smoke, they saw that there were bloody bones strewn around the lip of the crater. When they got closer, they saw what appeared to be a woman’s body lying in the snow. It was hard to tell, though. Elizabeth Graves’s body had been stripped of much of its flesh. The heart and the liver had been cut out of her chest and abdomen, and her breasts had been cut off. The rest of the bones were small ones, children’s bones.
Down in the pit, a circle of living children, pale and skeletal, sat around a fire. For several days Patrick Breen had been bringing them bits of meat to roast on the fire. One of the children, eight-year-old Nancy Graves, did not yet know that the flesh she had been eating was her mother’s—a revelation that when it came would so devastate her that it would lead to bouts of sudden, intermittent sobbing in her childhood and a sense of guilt from which she would never entirely recover.
Nancy Graves’s later emotional distress was just one small thread in a much broader fabric of mental anguish that inevitably afflicted many of the Donner Party survivors and rescuers alike for years following the disaster. Even as Sarah and the other rescued emigrants at Johnson’s Ranch waited to learn whether their loved ones would ever emerge from the mountains alive, silent and sinister processes were at work within them, processes that in many cases would transform the way they viewed and experienced the world for the rest of their lives.
Not all disaster survivors suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related syndromes, but large numbers do. Overall, 25 percent of people subjected to a traumatic event develop PTSD, but that number can more than double to 59 percent or higher among survivors of disasters. The precise rate varies according to a variety of factors, many of which were stacked against Sarah and her sisters. For one thing, females are four times more likely than males to develop the disorder when subjected to the same trauma. Children and young people suffer at higher rates than do more mature adults. Indeed, 100 percent of children who witness the homicide of a parent develop PTSD. And Sarah and her siblings had also experienced a witches’ brew of additional traumas, each of which raised their risk: anticipation of suffering or danger to come, close exposure to dead bodies, witnessing the death of a loved one, the long duration of an ongoing trauma, a clear threat to their own lives, the loss of home and hearth, and experiencing physical pain or injury.
None of this, of course, even begins to touch the particular trauma that Sarah, Mary Ann, and Nancy Graves had suffered, along with a number of other Donner Party survivors—that of having eaten and seen eaten the flesh of their companions. Regardless of the necessity of having done so, they had violated a fundamental human taboo, and it was almost inevitable that they would experience significant amounts of guilt and its close cousin, shame. The two are not quite the same thing: Guilt revolves around feeling bad for what you have done; shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person because of what you have done. Guilt can actually be therapeutic, because inherent in the emotion is the idea that you can change your behavior and end the problem. Shame is a far more toxic emotion, because it implies that your character has been polluted by your actions. Deep-seated shame typically leads to a variety of anger-related emotional problems, particularly hostility and aggression.
Psychiatric researchers have only recently begun to understand that traumatic stress produces not just psychological changes but physical changes in the body, particularly in the brain. The hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for regulating memories and putting information into context—shrinks by as much as 8 percent, some of its cells killed by an excess of stress hormones such as cortisol. Under stress the amygdala—an inch-long, almond-shaped structure responsible for regulating emotions—becomes overactive, lighting up with activity like a pinball machine. The levels of neurotransmitters that regulate nerve impulses in the brain become unbalanced: Serotonin levels plunge; norepinephrine levels soar.
All this results in a kaleidoscope of psychiatric symptoms that plague victims of PTSD: panic attacks, flashbacks, dissociation (in which the patient feels detached from his or her own body), phobias, irrational avoidance of anything imagined to be related to the trauma, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, emotional numbness, intrusive thoughts, and in extreme cases even psychosis and suicide. Among children there is sometimes a tendency to see “ghosts,” apparitions that are apparently hallucinations brought on by the disorder. And to round out the misery, the vast majority of PTSD victims simultaneously suffer from at least one other psychological disorder, a full 80 percent experiencing depression and/or substance abuse.
The toll that traumatic stress takes is not confined to the brain and the psyche, though. Along with a host of other problems, chronic, recurring stress of the type associated with PTSD suppresses the immune system, rendering the entire body vulnerable to a variety of infectious agents. Researchers have for some time also noted high incidences of mortality from coronary heart disease among disaster survivors. It now appears that this is due, at least in part, to elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels brought on by hormonal changes at work in the bodies of disaster survivors.
To what extent Sarah and her siblings suffered from any stress-induced symptoms we can never know with certainty. There was no formal knowledge of these syndromes in their time. No one had recourse to the wide variety of treatments available today, ranging from recently designed psychotropic medications to hypnosis, to eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, to elaborate cognitive-behavioral therapies and carefully controlled reexposure techniques. For the most part, people were expected to keep their emotional problems to themselves. If Sarah suffered, she, like most of her fellow survivors, did so largely in silence and mostly unaware of why they were experiencing the problems they were. But Mary Ann Graves gave some insight into what she and likely her sisters were all experiencing many years later, when she said sadly, “I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again,” encapsulating even in those few words two of the principal symptoms of PTSD—recurring recollections of the trauma and emotional numbness.
At the crest of the Sierra Nevada, the men of the Third Relief were stunned by what they had found at the pit in the snow and uncertain what to do next. It seemed unlikely that any of these people, except perhaps Peggy Breen and her eldest son, John, could walk out of the mountains unaided, but Peggy Breen announced that she would not leave without her husband and all of her children. Eddy and Foster wanted to push ahead immediately to the lake camp to look for their young sons. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley, there only as hired hands, wanted to return to Bear Valley as quickly as possible with the three surviving Graves children and Mary Donner. That, though, would mean leaving all of the Breens behind to wait for yet another relief effort, or for those who were going on to the lake camp to return.
The men stood in the snow discussing it. Finally a vote was taken. All except for twenty-year-old John Stark were for leaving the Breens. When his name w
as called, Stark stepped forward and said, “No, gentlemen. I will not abandon these people. I am here on a mission of mercy, and I will not half do the work. You can all go if you want to, but I shall stay by these people while they and I live.”
Early the next morning, the party divided. Before dawn, Eddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson resumed traveling east toward the pass and the lake camp. Charles Stone picked up the emaciated baby, Elizabeth Graves. Howard Oakley picked up the shrunken frame of Mary Donner, whose feet were too badly burned to allow her to walk. John Stark took charge of all the rest, placing Jonathan Graves on his back among his blankets and other gear and then leading Nancy Graves and the Breens step by step down the length of Summit Valley, traveling westward. As the smaller children grew exhausted from floundering through the snow, they took turns climbing onto John Stark’s broad back, sharing the ride with Jonathan.
Eddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson arrived at the lake camp before noon. Eddy and Foster hurried to the Murphy cabin, where they had last seen their sons alive on December 16. The two men rushed into the dark cabin and found a group of spectral figures crouched in the corners and lying on beds of pine boughs. In the dim light, they could make out the three youngest Donner girls—Frances, Georgia, and Eliza. Levinah Murphy was there, too, gaunt, wild-eyed, and disheveled. Her son Simon was there. And a startled and feral-looking Louis Keseberg was there as well. But the two boys for whom Eddy and Foster had come searching were nowhere to be seen. Eddy confronted Keseberg and demanded to know what had become of them. Keseberg told him flat out—the boys had died and been eaten. Enraged, Eddy threatened to kill Keseberg then and there, but the man was so emaciated and frail-looking that he resolved instead to wait until they got to California to commit the deed.*