In the confusion, however, Kearny’s men lost their cattle—their only source of food—and upon reflection it was decided that proceeding any farther, through narrow passes and hills, would constantly subject them to ambush and “lose[ing] our sick and our packs.” Worse, Dr. Griffin concluded that moving the wounded along the rough bouncing road with only the rude travois was not only cruel but endangered their lives. Any hope that Stockton had received their plea for help was dashed next morning when Pico appeared under a flag of truce and informed them he had captured Alexis Godey and the other two messengers and wanted to exchange them for a high-ranking Mexican prisoner the Americans had taken.
The situation had become dire; there was no more food, the wounded needed proper care, and fast, and they were certainly in no condition for another battle with the Mexicans. It was decided as a last-ditch measure to send out another courier party toward San Diego. It was composed of their best scout, Kit Carson; Lieutenant Beale of the navy, in hopes that he might hold special sway with Commodore Stockton; and Beale’s servant, an Indian, who they presumed would keep his ear to the ground for trouble.
Theirs was a daunting mission. Before sunset they could make out distinct lines of Mexican pickets surrounding the hill to prevent just the sort of escape they were planning. There was almost no food and precious little water, but the dragoons gave up what they had to fill the messengers’ pockets with a few parched peas and kernels of corn and small strips of dried mule meat. At dusk these men began crawling across the rocky, cactus-strewn desert, and soon after dark, as they approached the first line of pickets, Carson suggested they remove their shoes and stick them under their belts so as not to make noise against the rocks.
The next hours were among the most harrowing imaginable for the little party, since they were unarmed and the lancers were edgy to begin with. It was freezing cold again and a flutter of breeze often carried whiffs of the enemy sentry’s cigarette smoke. They could also hear them talking and laughing. They slithered on for hours until they thought they were beyond the final line of pickets when suddenly two Mexican horsemen rode up just ahead, dismounted, and lighted cigarrillos. Carson signaled Beale to lie perfectly still, which they did for what must have seemed an eternity. When the pressure became too much and Beale said into Carson’s ear, in the faintest whisper, “We are gone. Let us jump up and fight it out,” Carson replied, “No—I have been in worse places than this,” which must have had a soothing effect on the young navy lieutenant, because he continued to lie still and quiet and presently the sentry mounted his horse and rode away, leaving them in the cold, lonely desert.
When they finally stood up they realized their shoes were gone, having worked their way out of their belts somewhere back along the Mexican picket line. There was nothing for it but to set out barefoot through the cactus and hard, sharp stones—not that shoes would have much mattered, but the desert at night was also alive with rattlesnakes. San Diego was a long thirty-six miles away.
They traveled all day, and the next night the lights of the town finally appeared on the horizon, but Pico’s scouts also prowled the outskirts. Carson decided to split them up, giving Beale, who was suffering terribly with his feet, the most straightforward path, while the Indian was to circle south and Carson went north, the farthest route. To give an idea of the abusive nature of the shoeless forced march, Carson had to be hospitalized afterward for more than a week, and Beale could not stand on his own for three months and, in Carson’s own words, “had become deranged by his excessive exertions and did not fully recover his health for two years.”
All three reached safety to tell Stockton of Kearny’s misadventure. The commodore, already annoyed at the Mexican uprising, was doubly displeased over the news of the army’s predicament, but he immediately assembled a relief force of 160 U.S. Marines and sailors, along with a cannon, “which the men hauled along by means of ropes.”
Back at what they came to call Mule Hill, Kearny’s troops were on their final legs. They had practically no water and were eating the last of their mules. Kearny faced a wrenching decision. On December 9, a Sergeant Cox of the Dragoons, “a gallant fellow,” succumbed to his wounds, leaving a “pretty wife,” whom he had just married before leaving Fort Leavenworth. On the morning of December 10, the Mexicans attacked the Americans’ camp “driving before them a herd of wild horses which they hoped would cause a stampede.” The Mexicans chased the horses toward the camp, but the gambit failed because the Americans were ready, and the dragoons even managed to kill a few of the horses to eat. To Captain Emory, “the sufferings of the wounded were very distressing.” In particular he recalled a moment with one of the mountain men, Antoine Robideaux, who was so badly lanced that Emory did not think he would live out the thirty-eight-degree night. Suddenly the fifty-two-year-old scout sat up and asked Emory if he smelled coffee. Huddled under a blanket, Emory said he did not.
“I supposed a dream had carried him back to the cafes of New Orleans and St. Louis,” the captain said, but when Emory stuck his nose outside his blanket, “it was with some surprise I discovered my cook heating up a cup of coffee over a small fire of wild sage.” Emory lifted the cup to Robideaux’s trembling lips and “his warmth returned, and with it hopes of life. In gratitude,” Emory said, “he gave me what was then a great rarity, a half of a cake made of brown flour, almost black with dirt, which had, for greater securing, been hidden in the clothes of his Mexican servant, a man who scorned ablutions. I ate more than half without inspection,” Emory went on, “when, on breaking a piece, the bodies of the most loathsome insects were exposed to view.”
Scenes like this were being played out all over the American camp, and when the men’s minds weren’t on food they were on how to deal with the fix they were in. Considering the demise of the last message party, nobody gave Carson’s group much of a chance. They had been fought to a frazzle but surrender was a prospect too horrid to contemplate. Emory ate the rest of his cake anyway.
Then, in the darkest hours just before dawn, one of Emory’s sentries came in breathless with an extraordinary report. Out in the desert, he said, he had clearly heard someone speaking in English. As this was being absorbed, there “came the tramp of a column, followed by the hail of a sentinel.” They were saved.
* A low, feathery shrub also known as flannel bush, named for John C. Frémont. It is ubiquitous throughout the Southwest.
† De Voto says these originally Spanish cattle belonged to the stock “that gave rise to the famous longhorns of Texas, which were to be the basis of the Cattle Kingdom that reigned before oil.”
‡ He was of course describing the famous saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) native to Arizona and the Sonoran Desert, which can grow to fifty feet tall and live up to 150 years. They are today prized as lawn or garden specimens in the Southwest, and wild ones are protected from destruction or molestation by stringent state laws.
§ The symbols remain undeciphered.
‖ This may be a forerunner of the luxurious Pima extra long staple cotton that produces a cloth of silky softness.
a In fact, when Kearny’s army arrived the Pima had on display eleven fresh Apache scalps and thirteen Apache prisoners, whom they intended to sell to the Mexicans as payback for some recent Apache outrage.
b One of these men was later identified as José María Leguna, a colonel in the Mexican army.
c It is today the site of Yuma, Arizona.
d The gun was cast in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1804, just in time to help repel Napoleon’s siege. It was then taken across Siberia and shipped to a Russian outpost in Alaska, and from there by sea to a Russian fort near Sonoma. In 1841 Captain John Sutter bought the property, and with it the cannon, which he put on a boat up the Sacramento to his own fort. In 1845 Sutter helped the Mexicans put down a rebellion, during which he carried the gun to Los Angeles and, for reasons unexplained, left it there in someone’s garden, “overgrown with roses and covered with dust thrown up by horses in the str
eet.” When Captain Gillespie got the call from Stockton to meet General Kearny in the desert, he sent a couple of his men for the gun, almost as an afterthought. No one then knew how useful it would become.
e It has been said that Lieutenant Davidson strongly advised Kearny to place the howitzers at the head of the column, but that request was denied due to the slowness of the caissons.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Death Trap
From the moment they peeled off on the Hastings Cutoff, bad luck overtook the Donner-Reed wagon train. First was a shocking murder, likely prompted by the frustration and fear that had begun to nag the emigrant party, the dark and nervous sensation that they had made a mistake in following Lansford Hastings’s advice. They were now utterly on their own among the misshapen mountains and deserts of what is now northern Utah. There was often no marked trail to follow and the leaders and scouts found themselves flummoxed in box canyons or up against massive granite walls, losing entire days or more, as leaves browned and shriveled and the deathly breath of winter closed in around them. They wasted three precious weeks fumbling around in the Wasatch Range, where amity receded into acrimony as they fell farther and farther behind, knowing they must get across the High Sierras before the big snows came or … or what? Perish, probably. It was certainly on their minds.
It quickly became apparent that the Hastings Cutoff was no place for ladened wagons. Parties coming afterward recorded that the desert trail along the Donners’ path was strewn with “highly waxed heirlooms,” a chair here, a table there, incongruous in the sandy sage; a trunk of ladies’ clothes or Grandma’s chifforobe, promiscuously tossed aside with or without tears but never without grim determination.
On October 6, 1846, wagon master James Reed killed his young friend John Snyder; witnesses’ accounts differed but the killing was a fact. It was said Reed’s big “Palace Car” was trying to pass Snyder’s wagon on a hill somewhere along the Humboldt River in Nevada when their ox teams tangled up. Threatening words were exchanged. In a fit of original road rage, Snyder hit Reed with the heavy leaded butt end of his bullwhip and Reed stabbed him to death with his butcher knife. Or Reed stabbed first, or Snyder also hit Reed’s wife, Margaret, who tried to intervene. Whatever the truth, Snyder lived but a few minutes before his heart pumped out the last of its remaining blood on the desert floor, and Reed, a principal organizer of the company, became a pariah. The Graves family, who had employed Snyder as a driver, called for Reed’s execution. Lewis Keseberg, a German ghoul about whom we will hear more later, offered to hang Reed from the tongue of his wagon. Reed’s friends interceded, armed to the teeth.
A trial or drumhead court was held and banishment from the company, without gun, was Reed’s punishment—there in the wilds, a fate just about corresponding to death. The bullwhips cracked, the dogs barked, and the caravan moved on with the sorrowful Reed standing alone in the wagon tracks. Later that night his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, Virginia, sneaked away from the party and brought Reed a rifle and some food—at least a fighting chance. Seeing the distress of her mother “seemed to make a woman of me,” she recalled later.
Swinging wide around the train, Reed overtook George Donner and his party of a dozen wagons who were a day ahead of the others. He said he was riding on for supplies and never mentioned the killing. He would never mention it, even in his diaries and writing, for the rest of his days.
Here was enough drama for a lifetime but their furies were just beginning. The wagons became mired in deep beds of loose sand. Digger Indians stole the emigrants’ horses and cattle—once eighteen head at a fell swoop, a dangerous rate. At dusk their camps were often showered with arrows from surrounding clumps of sage. It was soon determined that the Reed family’s wagon was too heavy to negotiate the weak trail and must be abandoned. Other families took in the Reeds, and the Palace Car was left to the desert and the Indians.
In the excitement over the murder it was overlooked that old man Hardcoop was missing. He was a sixty-something-year-old Belgian who had been riding with Keseberg, the German. Two boys working cattle next day had seen him sitting beside the tracks nursing his feet, which had become enormously swollen and the skin had split. Hardcoop told them that Keseberg had put him out of his wagon and told him to walk. Keseberg was not well liked in the company. Once chastised by Reed for risking everyone’s life by rifling an Indian grave to get a buffalo robe, the tall, thirtyish Westphalian sported a long beard that gave him somewhat of a theatrical countenance. A group went to Keseberg and urged him to return and look for Hardcoop but he flatly refused. Two men, William Eddy and Milford (Milt) Elliott, stayed up all night tending a fire, hoping it would guide Hardcoop into camp. They would have gone looking for him themselves but the Diggers had stolen all their horses.
In the morning a party, including Mrs. Reed, approached Franklin (Uncle Billy) Graves and Patrick Breen, who owned the only horses left, and asked them to help. They also refused on grounds that it was dangerous and that by now Hardcoop was probably dead anyway. The idea of waiting for him was out of the question. By then the threat of snow in the mountains and starvation were “already hanging upon them like a death-sentence.”
The wagons rolled on, leaving Hardcoop to his fate. The Humboldt River disappeared, and along its sink a vast belt of stinking alkali dust arose to cover everyone and everything in a foul white powder. The mood of the emigrants matched their environs. Families had become withdrawn and distrustful. On October 13, twenty-one head of cattle were killed by Diggers’ arrows and more wagons were abandoned. They were already low on food. Another German—one Jacob Wolfinger—stayed behind to hide his wagon in brush, apparently hoping to retrieve it later, but he failed to return. Two fellow Germans, Spitzer and Reinhardt, claimed the elderly man was slain by Indians, but everyone suspected he was murdered by the pair for a stash of gold coins he was known to possess. The lead wagon came across a note tacked to a tree. It was a warning from the exiled Reed that hostile Indians lay ahead.
On October 23, the day the first snow fell, what had now become the Donner party began its ascent of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a seventy-mile-wide wall of granite that rears out of the desert for four hundred miles along what is now the California-Nevada line. It is one of the most striking terrain features in the world and a place of great beauty, but in winter it can also be a death trap. The mountain peaks rise from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, but there was an Indian pass that Frémont took, and that Hastings also mapped, a gap at 7,085 feet with relatively easy access provided you came before late autumn. If not, you faced an average yearly snowfall of 400 inches, or more than 30 feet—much higher in drifts—and below-zero temperatures, where in big storms winds can easily reach a hundred miles per hour. In short, it is no place for fools or foul-ups.
The bad luck seemed to cling to them like a pall. That same day they reached the mountains, a man named William Pike was accidentally shot in the back by his brother-in-law, whom he had just asked to hold his pistol while he put another log on the fire. Pike lived for two hours, then died and was buried in a shallow grave beside the trail, leaving a wife and two babies. Two days later things took a better turn. On the trail they met one of their number who had gone ahead weeks earlier and crossed the mountains to Sutter’s Fort for provisions.
His name was Charles Stanton, and he came with two of John Sutter’s “civilized” Miwok Indians, Luis and Salvador, and seven mule-loads of food—enough to get them across the Sierras if they hurried. It was already late in the year, and as they climbed higher the ponderosa pines were snow-dusted and dark storm clouds hovered over the peaks to the northeast. Cresting a final rise on the final day of October, they could see snow already clogging the pass above. That was not supposed to be. They’d been told the pass was generally open till mid-November. And perhaps it was—generally.
Three days later in a driving rain they reached a mountain lake. What they did not know, but would soon find out, was that rain at that altitude meant snow up at
the pass. Scouts sent ahead reported chest-deep snow approaching the pass. Panic set in; suddenly it became obvious that the wagons could never get through, that they were trapped, and that they would have to crash through on mules and oxen alone or perish in the cold and snows. They plowed on but it was no good. The snow went from knee deep to waist, and from waist to chest. Animals plunged into ravines masked with drifts, not to be seen again. They floundered through it most of the day until they were exhausted, then returned to the lake where they camped for the night among the huge ponderosas, ghostly with their blankets of snow, like stark white sentries guarding the mountain pass. Tomorrow, they said, they would cross; tomorrow they would find a way. It was only one, maybe two miles, then the trail began slowly descending into the lovely valley of the Sacramento that Frémont had written about so eloquently, a cornucopia of fruits and honey, of brilliant sunshine and gentle rains. They built fires from pine limbs and settled in for the night. Around bedtime it began to snow.
It snowed for eight days straight, leaving the emigrant party trapped at both ends of the trail. They could not move forward through the pass and they could not move back down the mountain from whence they had come.
The exiled James Reed, riding a week ahead of the company, had made it through the pass in the nick of time and arrived at Sutter’s to acquire provisions to take back—despite his banishment—for his family and others. Sutter, now a captain in Frémont’s California Battalion, had generously provided Reed with food, mules, and two Indian guides—wholly on credit—as he had with Charles Stanton. As Reed ascended the mountains in the first week of November, the big north Pacific storm crashed into the coast and spread across the Sacramento valley with driving rain and howling winds. In the Sierras it had clogged the mountain passes with fifteen feet of snow that had stranded the Donners flat.