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About the Author
DANIEL JAMES BROWN is the author of the widely acclaimed Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. He lives in the country east of Redmond, Washington, with his wife and two daughters.
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* One of the deadliest of the plagues that afflicted the California Indians was—ironically enough for the white emigrants who sought to flee “the ague” in the Midwest—a virulent strain of malaria brought from Hawaii by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1833.
* Hastings’s imagination and his rhetoric had vastly outstripped the reality of the 1846 emigration. However, it should be noted that his expectations were no doubt influenced by his dealings with Sam Brannan, who was that spring actively working to bring more than ten thousand Mormons west to California. On March 26, Hastings wrote to John Marsh, an American settler with a large rancho on the western side of the Sacramento Valley, “You can rely on…six or seven thousand human souls…[but] the emigration will be much more likely to amount to fifteen or twenty thousand.” There were, in fact, just a few more than two thousand California-bound emigrants on the trail that spring and summer.
* None of the flour available to Sarah was what you and I know of as white flour. The process for chemically bleaching flour was not commercially available until after 1900.
* In fact, though, only four emigrants would die at the hands of Indians in 1846, while twenty Indians would die at the hands of emigrants.
* Roughly a hundred years after it afflicted the Meek Party, typhus would kill thousands in Nazi concentration camps.
* The following winter, one of the 1846 emigrants, Edwin Bryant, calculated and noted with some astonishment that his companions in John Frémont’s “California Battalion” could happily eat an average of ten pounds of beef per day. And then ask for more.
* Probably a species of Grindelia.
* Members of the family Simuliidae, these tiny, humpbacked, bloodsucking flies attack both livestock and humans. Their bites sometimes cause severe pain and swelling in sensitive humans, and badly bitten livestock sometimes die as a result of acute toxemia or anaphylactic shock. Occasionally they die of asphyxiation, literally suffocated by the masses of insects clogging their throats and nostrils.
* Many a nineteenth-century woman, knowing that death was approaching, sewed her own shroud, and many a man constructed his own coffin.
* Vaquero, Spanish for “cowboy,” is the origin of the English word “buckaroo.”
* Not all the Reeds would later appreciate Franklin Graves’s efforts, though. One surviving Reed eventually wrote tartly that Graves had built so far from the rest of the cabins “because he wished to, for he, & all of his family, had minds & wills of their own.”
* In 1984 a team of archaeologists from the University of Nevada at Reno conducted a thorough dig at the site of the Murphy camp and found a wide variety of small artifacts, among them the bones of both oxen and a grizzly bear.
* Up sharply from 2,158 calories in 1970.
* They may also have been waiting for Milt Elliott to return from Alder Creek with the compass Stanton had requested from the Donners in his letter of December 9.
† A pound of beef jerky—essentially the type of beef they carried—yields an average of about 1,208 calories, according to modern packaging labels.
* Interestingly, whole-body hyperthermia is now sometimes deliberately induced in clinical settings to weaken and damage cancer cells.
* They didn’t know it, but the river in the canyon to their south ran, many miles downstream, directly past Sutter’s Fort. Had they had a modern inflatable raft and the skill to navigate Class-5 rapids, they could have been at the fort within a day or two.
* It is possible that Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves collaborated on Christmas Day to share the treasures the
y had hoarded. The fact that both managed to produce tripe for dinner suggests that they might have overcome the tensions that were building between them to make the day special for their children.
* At least one of the young men enrolled in the Minnesota hunger experiment—Franklin Watkins—suffered vivid dreams of eating insane people, just before he himself descended into hunger-induced psychosis.