Even before the last Donner Party survivors arrived at Johnson’s Ranch in April 1846, people were beginning to write and to read about the tragedy. The first accounts to appear in two American newspapers just then springing up in California were, for the most part, both overly sensational and inaccurate. They talked of men casually deciding who would live and who would die, of mothers eating the flesh of their babies, of women callously cutting the tongues out of their husbands for a midday meal. These accounts, and others of the same sort in the years and decades that followed, gave birth to an impression of deliberate and widespread moral depravity that has largely defined the Donner Party in the popular imagination to this day.
As I mention in the preface to this book, the first serious attempt to tell the true story was made by Charles F. McGlashan, who corresponded with a large number of Donner Party survivors and then published his History of the Donner Party, first in serialized form in the Truckee Republican in 1879 and then in book-length form in July of that year. McGlashan’s tone and style are sentimental, as is typical of nineteenth-century histories, and many facts have since come to light that undercut parts of his narrative. Nevertheless, it remains peerless simply because McGlashan was able to correspond directly with so many people who lived the tale.
Several other early book-length works also stand as important if sometimes dubious landmarks: J. Quinn Thornton’s Oregon and California in 1848; Eliza W. Farnham’s California Indoors and Out; Virginia Reed Murphy’s Across the Plains in the Donner Party; and Eliza Donner Houghton’s The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. None of these works is entirely reliable as history, but all are, like McGlashan’s History, based to some extent on firsthand accounts and are therefore irreplaceable. I have also found Edward Bryant’s What I Saw in California to be especially valuable. Though Bryant—a cousin of the poet William Cullen Bryant—was not a member of the Donner Party, he traveled just ahead of Sarah and her companions and interacted with a number of them after their arrival in California. As a result, his book is rich in pertinent facts and descriptive detail about the world and the people that Sarah encountered both on the trail and in California.
There are also, of course, many important modern books about the Donner Party. Among those that I have found to be the most valuable are Dale Morgan’s superb two-volume anthology of primary sources, Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail; Kristin Johnson’s anthology of some of the less available accounts of the Donner Party, Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party; Frank Mullen Jr.’s day-by-day chronicle of the entire saga, entitled, not surprisingly, The Donner Party Chronicles; and Donald Hardesty’s very interesting The Archaeology of the Donner Party.
But all these books, and books in general, represent merely one province in the land of Donner Party literature. Many very valuable firsthand accounts appeared in newspaper articles from around the country shortly after the disaster. A large body of very useful scholarly and semischolarly works has appeared in more than a century’s worth of journals that focus on western American history. And most important of all to serious students of the story, a treasure trove of diaries and personal correspondence has been assembled in various libraries and archives in California. Principal among these, the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley houses the indispensable C. F. McGlashan Papers. The Sutter’s Fort archives in Sacramento house another large collection of valuable papers donated by Martha J. (Patty) Reed Lewis. And the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, houses the useful Eliza Poor Donner Houghton Papers.
Early on I was lucky to come across one additional and particularly valuable resource. Kristin Johnson’s Web site, “New Light on the Donner Party” at www.utahcrossroads.org/DonnerParty is an extraordinarily rich compendium of facts, dates, narratives, chronologies, links to other sources, digests of current research, biographical data, book reviews, statistics, anecdotes, and news for Donner Party buffs. What makes the site particularly valuable is Johnson’s rigorous insistence on accuracy and her emphasis on dispelling myths associated with the tragedy. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Another excellent resource is Daniel Rosen’s Web site at www.donner partydiary.com. Rosen offers a detailed, day-by-day chronicle of the major events in the Donner Party saga as well as links to other useful sites.
The Sources section of this book contains a number of additional resources, many of which are referenced in the following notes.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
for no apparent reason: Nancy Graves’s frequent bouts of crying at her school in San Jose were noted with concern by a school friend and related to Eliza Donner, who relayed the recollection to McGlashan on August 8, 1879: “I never recall my first schooldays in San Jose without thinking of poor little Nancy G——who used to cry during school time, and it often seemed to me that her heart would break…. We cried with her; and begged her to tell us what troubled her so much; and between sobs and sighs she told us of being at Starved Camp….” The full quotation can be found in Stewart, 313.
“the slow accretion of national mythology”: Stephenson, xvi.
much to say about her: Georgia Donner remembered Sarah fondly in a letter to McGlashan of October 2, 1879: “[I] have thought so much of Mrs. Fosdick that I have wondered why so little has been said concerning her…. She seemed to be very intelligent and sociable” [McGlashan Papers, folder 3].
PROLOGUE
emigrants of all ages: For more about the terrible toll that Asiatic cholera took on the emigrants of 1849, see Mattes, 82.
“draw you closer and closer”: Potter, 202.
“you for bread, bread.” Ibid. Bryarly was just one of many emigrants who looked for evidence of the Donner Party as they passed through the Truckee area in the years following the tragedy. In June of 1847, when General Stephen Kearny stopped at the site for the purpose of collecting and interring the human remains there, Edwin Bryant was among those traveling with him. Bryant described a macabre scene, quoted in McGlashan, page 328: “I saw two bodies entire, with the exception that their abdomens had been cut open and the entrails extracted. Their flesh had been either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to the dry atmosphere, and they presented the appearance of mummies. Strewn around the cabins were dislocated and broken skulls (in some cases sawed asunder with care, for the purpose of extracting the brains), human skeletons, in short every variety of mutilation.”
CHAPTER ONE—HOME AND HEART
hung over Steuben Township: The phase of the moon and the time of the sunrise—like all my later mentions of the movements of the sun and the moon—are drawn from data available on the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Web site. Online at www.usno.navy.mil.
river was black and swollen: Details about the weather and the state of the Illinois River are drawn from the Illinois Gazette, April 18, 1846.
in their origins and their ways: The histories of the Graves and Fosdick families are drawn from various online genealogical databases.
with a puncheon floor: The description of Sarah’s family home and many other details of life in Sparland in the 1830s and 1840s are drawn from “Old Settlers of Marshall,” from “Mr. Graves and Family,” and from Perry Armstrong’s oration delivered to the 1879 Old Settlers’ Reunion at Lacon, reported by the Henry Republican, August 28, 1879, as well as from the remarks of other speakers on the same occasion. Additional details are from similar occasions recorded in the Henry Republican on June 13, 1872, and July 17, 1875. Other details about Sparland, Graves family history, the sale of the Graves property, Levi Fosdick’s orchard, the departure for California, and the subsequent journey are derived from Spencer Ellsworth’s Records of the Olden Times: Or Fifty Years on the Prairies.
the bitterly cold winter of 1839–40: The story of Elizabeth Graves’s visit to her neighbor is drawn from “Mr. Graves and Family.” A few additional facts are drawn from the 1840 and 1850 censuses for Marshall County, Illinois.
&n
bsp; the genus Plasmodium—malaria: More about the pathology of malaria can be found in Hoyt Bleakley’s paper “Malaria in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure” and in Michael Finkel’s excellent National Geographic article “Bedlam in the Blood.”
Great Depression of the 1930s: For more about the financial deterioration in the late 1830s, see the chapter entitled “The Financial Panic of 1837” in Bancroft, as well as McLynn, 23.
“what a country this might be!”: Dana, 187.
with plucked beaver fur: My description of Lansford Hastings’s appearance depends heavily on an account by emigrant John R. McBride, quoted in Bagley.
“abundance of its productions”: Hastings, 133.
“they are surrounded”: Hastings, 114.
“with human skulls”: Hastings, 116.
fifteen hundred dollars in cash: The deed of conveyance for this transaction, dated April 2, 1846, showing the amount is recorded in the Marshall County Courthouse Land Records, Book C, 580–81.
and were married: The date of Sarah and Jay’s wedding is recorded at the Marshall County Courthouse, certificate #175, Book A, 23.
“civilizer that I know of”: Hurtado, 71.
lots in the new metropolis: For more about Suttersville and Hastings’s arrangement with Sutter, see Hook.
“by the route just described”: Hastings, 137–38.
“fifteen or twenty thousand”: Lansford Hastings to John Marsh, March 26, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 39–41.
CHAPTER TWO—MUD AND MERCHANDISE
to be underwater: Though they later made no reference to it, it is possible that in Iowa the Graves family fell in with a party of some thirty wagons that had started from “Iowa and the country east of it” bound for St. Joe and were delayed by the wet weather and bad roads, as recounted in the Missouri Republican, May 27, 1846, and reprinted in Morgan, 536.
“steamers of the largest class”: Illinois Gazette, April 18, 1846.
only about nine months old: The ages of the various members of the Graves family are taken from Kristin Johnson’s Unfortunate Emigrants, pages 295–96, except for the age of the baby, Elizabeth, which is taken from W. C. (Billy) Graves’s “Crossing the Plains in ’46” in the Russian River Flag, April 26, 1877. Ages here and throughout have been adjusted, where necessary, to account for the appropriate calendar dates, since Johnson uses July 31, 1846, as a baseline.
in high spirits: Farnham, reprinted in Kristin Johnson, Unfortunate Emigrants, 140.
“in which were placed our beds”: Virginia Reed, Across the Plains in the Donner Party, reprinted in Kristin Johnson, Unfortunate Emigrants, 266.
early in the twenty-first century: For more about James K. Polk’s expansion of executive powers, see Borneman.
“saw spooks and villains”: DeVoto, 7.
“territory which we desire”: DeVoto, 191.
“War! War!”: Illinois Gazette, May 16, 1846.
better than he did: For more about James Clyman’s life, see DeVoto, 54–58.
backs of wagons or into tents: For more on the typical sleeping arrangements among the emigrants, see Faragher, 69–70.
“alluring them on”: St. Joseph Gazette, May 8, 1846, roughly when Sarah likely arrived in town.
would set her back ten: Information on doctors’ rates is from the city of St. Joseph’s Web site at www.ci.st-joseph.mo.us/history/medicalrates.cfm.
“ten pounds of salt”: Hastings, 143.
most emigrant families: For more on what kinds of flour and other foodstuffs were available to the emigrants, see Williams, 7–9, and Faragher, 20–24.
at the hands of Indians in 1846: Unruh, 185.
none other than Lansford Hastings: Bagley, 14.
named the river aptly: For much more about the Meek Party, see Boyd, Bassett, and Mariah King’s letter on the Oregon History Project’s Web site at www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory.
“more swaring then you ever heard”: Samuel Parker, quoted on the Oregon History Project’s Web site.
“and others say hang him”: John Herren, quoted in Boyd, 24.
scows that served as ferries: See Mattes, 116, for more about the ferries that transported Sarah and emigrants like her across the Missouri.
“if it can possibly be avoided”: Hastings, 147.
“or perhaps forever”: Hastings, 144.
CHAPTER THREE—GRASS
assembling itself in the woods: The party with which the Graves family seems to have set out from St. Joe was called the “Smith party,” though just who “Smith” was remains uncertain. The leading candidate is an Oregon-bound emigrant named Fabritus Smith, though he was only about twenty-six in 1846, a somewhat improbable age for the captain of a train full of strong-willed men and women. Some of the families who joined this party—among them the Graveses, the Ritchies, the Starks, and the Tuckers—are listed in the St. Joseph Gazette, August 27, 1847, reprinted in Morgan, 731–32.
Reason Penelope Tucker and his sons: Many additional tidbits about the Tuckers can be found in Neelands.
a great, windswept sea: For more detail about life on the St. Joseph Road and the terrain, see Mattes, 142–49.
sat smugly by and watched: The story of Billy Graves’s encounter with the resin-weed Indians, including the dialogue, is from his own account in “Crossing the Plains in ’46.”
“exposed to the public gaze”: Ellsworth, 112. Many other details of the Black Hawk War, including the abduction of the Hall sisters, are drawn from the same source.
“Ye sons of thunder!”: Ibid., 121.
on either side: During his imprisonment Black Hawk was taken to Washington, D.C., and shown to President Andrew Jackson. In the following months, he was paraded through the major eastern cities, shown off as a kind of war trophy. But the lust for vengeance gradually faded, and Black Hawk became a kind of celebrity in the East, with people lining up in long queues to see him and hear him talk.
“look at the bed for her”: Virginia Reed’s letter to her cousin Mary C. Keyes on July 12, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 278. Here and elsewhere I have maintained Virginia’s spelling, as I think it lends a certain charm and authenticity to her voice.
the popular “Virginia Reel”: Smith, Mary Ann Harlan. Mary and her father, George, traveled across the plains ahead of the Donner Party that summer.
particular notice of each other: It should be noted that Mary Ann later hotly disputed that she and Snyder had been involved in any kind of romance. Writing to Charles McGlashan on July 18, 1879, she took him to task for alluding to the supposed romance in his History of the Donner Party: “Drop that trash out and insert more useful history…. It was all real life of a sterner style” [McGlashan Papers, folder 14]. However, her brother Billy seemed to acknowledge the romance in one of his own letters to McGlashan on March 30, 1879: “As to your ‘Romance’ I suppose it is as true of the majority of them. But I don’t altogether approve [of publishing it]” [McGlashan Papers, folder 16].
“wildest and most beautiful scenery”: Stanton’s letter to Sidney Stanton, June 12, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 554–57.
“to embrace the women”: Ibid.
“their horses after a hard chase”: Tamzene Donner, June 16, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 561.
“the trouble is all in getting started”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOUR—DUST
had begun to intrigue him: For much more about the life and times of Mariano Vallejo, a thoroughly interesting character, see Rosenus. Many of the details about Casa Grande are drawn from his book, as are the figures on Vallejo’s wealth and income.
“so many exalted personages”: Rosenus, 110.
linseed oil and ferric oxide: William Todd listed the materials used to fashion the first bear flag in the Los Angeles Express, January 11, 1878.
disemboweled and left to die: Bryant recounts the brutal deaths of Cowie and Fowler in chapter 23 of What I Saw in California.
chasing them off: The killing of Edward Trimble is described in th
e Jefferson Inquirer, July 21, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 596–99.
each night and morning: Mattes, 64.
four sets of twins: Lockley, 264.
the sexual appetite in particular: Horowitz, 63. For more on sex and contraception in the 1840s, see Horowitz, Brodie, and McCutcheon.
on the road to California: We know that Elizabeth Graves brought oil of hemlock with her, because in April of 1879, W. C. (Billy) Graves was present when the site of his family’s cabin at Donner Lake was excavated. Among the other items found that day was a sealed tin that still contained traces of the oil. Graves identified it as his mother’s.
“the misrepresentations of L. W. Hastings”: Oregon Spectator, June 25, 1846. Reprinted in Morgan, 567.
“Hastings published his book of lies”: Oregon Spectator, June 25, 1846. Reprinted in Morgan, 569.
“it may be impossible if you don’t”: James Clyman’s words of advice to Reed were recorded by Ivan Petroff in 1878 and appear in Morgan, 58–59.
“so much of a roundabout course”: Ibid.
five hundred feet above the surrounding desert: Sadly, the spire of Chimney Rock has eroded considerably since 1846 and now stands approximately 350 feet tall.
with their rivals the Crow: Charles T. Stanton to Sidney Stanton, July 5, 1846. Reprinted in Morgan, 582–87.
killed the day before for the purpose: Ibid.
the valley of the North Platte: B. F. E. Kellogg to Preston G. Gesford, July 5, 1846. Reprinted in Morgan, 580–82.
from the slough behind the fort: Rosenus, 155.
CHAPTER FIVE—DECEPTION
the John McCracken family: W. C. (Billy) Graves mentions that only the William Daniels family and the John McCracken family accompanied the Graves family west of Fort Laramie in “Crossing the Plains in ’46.”
“you had better come”: B. F. E. Kellogg to Preston G. Gesford, July 5, 1846. Reprinted in Morgan, 580–82.
was becoming particularly unpopular: For a further description of Louis Keseberg, see W. C. (Billy) Graves’s letter of April 14, 1879, to Charles McGlashan [McGlashan Papers, folder 16].