As the drifts became deeper and wider climbing up the eastbound slope, Reed’s Indian guides counseled that going farther would be useless because the drifts would only become worse, even dangerous, since another large snowstorm could trap them, too. Reed plowed on anyway in snow shoulder deep, sometimes so deep he had to dig his horse out of it. But it was useless. Finally, reluctantly, he turned back, which was probably a lucky thing for the Indians and also the mules. Something very nasty was brewing up beyond the dark, low-hanging clouds that wreathed the jagged peaks. Consider the earlier party of relief, led by Charles Stanton, with its mule train of provisions and Indian guides. At first the Donners gratefully devoured the food, but as the weeks went by and things went from bad to worse they ate the mules, and then they ate the Indians.
Back at the fort, Sutter informed Reed there was no hope of getting through to the Donner party till spring, February at the earliest. He wanted to know how many cattle and other livestock they had; when Reed gave him the numbers the wilderness-savvy Swiss declared the Donners would survive the winter, provided they killed their beef and preserved the carcasses beneath the snow. But what Sutter didn’t know, and Reed couldn’t tell him because he hadn’t been there, was just how many of the Donners’ livestock had been stolen or killed by the Indians in those frightful days along the Humboldt. In fact, there wasn’t enough beef or mule meat on that mountain to last them much more than a month.
Unaware of this, and unwilling to sit around waiting for spring, James Reed—like nearly every other able-bodied American in the Sacramento valley—joined Frémont’s California Battalion, which had just been called back into service due to the uprising of General Pico and the Californios. In due time he was elected captain, and imagine his surprise at finding out that among his fellow captains was none other than the huckster Lansford Hastings.
Up in the mountains it had begun to penetrate to the people of the Donner party that there might not be any way to get down before the snow thawed, in three or four months. They all began taking inventory of their food, since starvation was a real danger. It soon became apparent that now food was to be the principal currency, and those who had brought along their wealth in gold, jewelry, or other tender began to trade and exchange with the others who owned more food. Inflation quickly set in, and the price of flour, beef, and mutton rose dramatically, generating even more bitterness and rancor among the stranded refugees.
There were a few rude log huts or log cabins in the area, hastily cobbled together by earlier parties or trappers. Members of the Donner company moved into these, while others built lean-tos, or other hovels with cowhide for roofs and doors. They had separated into two main groups: the Breens, the Graves and Murphy families, and about fifty of their cohorts settled down by the large tarn that would later become Donner Lake. The other group, the Donners and about thirty of their people, camped six miles away on Alder Creek. Of the entire number of the party, just about half were children.
On November 13 the weather cleared and fifteen of the fittest decided to try to get down on foot, led by Charles Stanton and with the two Indians, Luis and Salvador, as guides. By nightfall they returned worn-out, “used up,” and frustrated. They had sunk in snowdrifts ten and fifteen feet deep and the trail was completely obliterated. Next day William Eddy tracked and shot a grizzly bear but nearly got eaten up in the process. That night at least some of them dined on bear meat and Eddy had himself the makings of a fine bearskin robe.
At the end of November it was plain that food would not last till spring and once more Stanton assembled twenty of the stoutest, including several women and a few of the older children, and tried to make it off the mountain. After packing Sutter’s seven mules with provisions, the expedition got off to a good start; a week of sun had melted much of the snow and turned the top to crust. They actually got through the pass after breaking through six feet of snow and camped in a valley. But they had had an awful time of it, and in many places all they could see “was the snow with the tops of pine trees sticking out of it.”
That night there arose the gravest kind of controversy. The party had been able to slide over the crusty tops of snowdrifts that day, but the mules could not and sank down, mired, and it was only with unsustainable exertions that they could be brought down the mountain. William Eddy, one of the two men who had stayed up all night tending the fire for old Hardcoop to see, was determined to go for broke, to take food from the mule packs, leaving the mules, and break out down the mountain now, while the getting was good.
But Stanton, the leader, was one of those characters imbued with an antique sense of honor, which fixed itself upon those seven mules that Sutter had lent him. They were not his, he said, and he would not leave them to starve and die, and since it was obvious the mules could not make it through the snows, there was nothing else but to return with them to the camp back up the mountain. So said Stanton. Eddy was aghast and furious, and the discussion nearly became violent. But Stanton held the upper hand: he and the two Indians were the only ones who knew how to navigate the fifty miles through the mountains down to Sutter’s Fort.
Back at the camp, some remained angry and all were frustrated. William Eddy decided to try once more next day, but in the morning it commenced to snow and did not let up for the next ten days. Instead of slaughtering their livestock immediately—as Sutter had assumed they would, and as any competent mountain man would have known to do—the Donners left them to run free, apparently thinking they could be butchered as needed. But during this fierce and unrelenting snowstorm the remaining cattle and few horses and mules wandered off, and while the Donner party huddled in shelters against the storm their livestock starved or froze to death and became buried beneath snow six to ten feet deep, never to be found again. It now became a race against time and starvation.
While the storm raged outside, Charles Stanton, who grew up in New York State, and a man of the Graves family from Vermont, were feverishly fashioning snowshoes from oxbows and rawhide to facilitate another escape attempt. On December 11, the very day of Kearny’s deliverance following the Battle of San Pasqual, half a dozen members of the Donner party entered the last phases of starvation sickness. They were all young men. The symptoms were malaise and hallucinations, followed by coma and death. They were buried beneath the snow.
Before he died, thirty-year-old Joseph Reinhardt had a confession to make. He told George Donner and others that he and Augustus Spitzer murdered Jacob Wolfinger back along the Humboldt River. They killed him for his gold and blamed it on Indians, he said.
Many were down to their final morsels and began to eat rats, mice, and insects like the Digger Indians. Others boiled raw cowhide, producing a kind of glue they believed had nutrition. At the Donners’ camp at Alder Creek, twelve-year-old Lemuel Murphy climbed a tree to search for any sign of a rescue party. All he could see was snow.
On December 15, the party of seventeen snowshoers—fathers, mothers, boys, and girls, including three without snowshoes—began the long trek down the mountain. They were led by Stanton and the two Miwoks and came to be known as the Forlorn Hope. Misinformation in Hastings’s book led them to believe a ranch was thirty miles to the west; in fact, it was twice that distance. On the first day two grown men of the three without snowshoes gave up and returned to the camp, but the twelve-year-old Murphy boy struggled on.
By Christmas Day, when Colonel Doniphan and his First Missouri Volunteers were scattering Mexicans during the Battle of the Brazito, the Forlorn Hope had run into serious trouble. They had made it across the pass but a huge new storm had obliterated the trail. They had run out of food three days earlier. Three members expired from starvation—Charles Stanton was one of them. The thirty-five-year-old bachelor had contracted snow blindness, a serious affliction. When the group collected themselves to continue that morning, Stanton remained by the campfire smoking his pipe. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves asked if he was coming. He nodded cheerfully and replied, “Yes, I am coming soon.”
But he would not. He was exhausted and blind. Stanton’s death would be keenly felt. He was a true hero, having crossed the mountain, then returned with food. The Indians, Luis and Salvador, spoke some English, but it was Stanton who best knew the path down and could communicate it.
With no food the surviving members were going fast now. Some were already in the delirium or raving madly and flailing. Thirty-year-old Patrick Dolan lost consciousness. Others wailed and cried. No one could really sleep, the hunger hurt too much. Dolan died; so did Antonio the Mexican, who slumped into the fire, and fifty-seven-year-old Franklin Graves. Young Lemuel Murphy appeared to be next. He was out of his mind and fading fast.
The day after Christmas, with the three bodies lying in snow around the campfire, the surviving members were faced with a choice for which they felt there was no alternative. They began cutting the flesh from the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan and roasting it on sticks in the flames, “averting their faces from each other, and weeping.”
Only William Eddy, who had discovered a pound of bear meat his wife had hidden in his pack, and the two Miwok Indians abstained from the practice. When faced with hard situations such as this, the will to survive is perhaps the most potent, compelling force in human nature. But it would get worse than this. Much worse. They tried to feed a piece of cooked flesh to Lemuel Murphy, but he was too far gone to eat it, and he died shortly afterward.
Next morning, they turned to the grisly task of butchering the four bodies and roasting and drying the flesh for their journey. By now the Indians had decided to join the others in eating the dead.
While all of this transpired, General Kearny and the tattered remnants of his Army of the West staggered into the fortified city of San Diego without further incident. General Pico could not persuade himself to tangle with Commodore Stockton’s tough-looking relief force of nearly two hundred sailors and U.S. Marines and took his lancers north toward Los Angeles. After so long in the wilderness, Kearny’s woebegone troops were flabbergasted by the never-ending bawdiness and debauchery in the town—drunkenness, cockfights, fandangos—but this did not last for long.
On the evening of December 22, 1846, Kearny sent a letter to Stockton, having just spoken with him that morning, which apparently sparked a friction between the two men that ultimately exploded into the most sensational court-martial trial of the century.
Kearny’s letter seemed harmless enough. It began “Dear Commodore” and advised that it would be a good thing if Stockton could “take from here sufficient force to oppose the Californians,” who were believed to be waiting for Frémont and the California Battalion. After offering to accompany such an expedition and serve in any capacity, Kearny then added a sentence stating, “I do not think that Lt. Col. Fremont should be left unsupported to fight a battle upon which the fate of California may for a long time depend.” Here is where Stockton seemed to take umbrage, for the next day Kearny received a message from the commodore, asserting that Stockton had proposed just such a mission that very morning in personal conversation between the two men. Stockton suggested, somewhat cattily, that “if the object of your note is to advise me to do any thing which would enable a large force of the enemy to get into my rear & cut off my communications with San Diego … you will excuse me for saying I cannot follow such advise.”
Now it was Kearny’s turn to be perplexed, for he responded in a note the same day that he’d never understood in the morning’s conversation that it was Stockton’s intention to move on the enemy, and further that he certainly never made any suggestion about “enabl[ing] a large force of the enemy to get into [Stockton’s] rear” and cut him off.
Stockton immediately replied with a note of his own acting as if the matter never happened, and stating that “nothing would be more gratifying to me personally than your presence” on the march.
These were murky times. By all rights, as a general, Kearny was the ranking officer in California. In addition, he had direct orders from President Polk to take control of the province. Stockton, on the other hand, was officially a captain in the navy but held the temporary rank of “commodore,” a title designated for captains who commanded more than one ship—in Stockton’s case, the U.S. Pacific Squadron—but below the rank of admiral. But Stockton was also of a separate service than Kearny, and had far more men directly under him than Kearny’s poor decimated command. So Kearny accepted, at least temporarily, his secondary role, but the commodore nevertheless seemed to harbor ill feelings toward his army counterpart.
After counting noses, Stockton was able to assemble a 550-man force consisting of 345 marines and sailors acting as infantry, 47 of Kearny’s healthy dragoons, 48 of Captain Gillespie’s California volunteers, 40 sailors manning the artillery, and various officers and noncommissioned officers, as well as detachments such as Captain Emory’s topographical group. It was Stockton’s expressed intention to march this small army on Los Angeles, 125 miles distant, retake the city, and, if possible, capture the rebel leader José Flores and, he said, hang him for violating his parole of the previous August.
On December 29, the same day that the Donners’ Forlorn Hope began the descent into cannibalism, Stockton’s army, with Kearny in charge of the infantry and accompanied by a dozen or so wagons, departed San Diego and camped at Soledad, watched closely but not molested by Pico’s mounted lancers. Captain Emory reported that the navy tars, because of “close discipline aboard ship, made a very good infantry soldier.” However, their lack of marching experience made them footsore, and the column scarcely managed ten miles a day; all the while the ferocious Californio lancers hovered around them at a distance. On January 7, 1847, they came to a ranch owned by “a rich widow lady” who said the Mexicans would attack next day as they crossed the San Gabriel River, about a day’s march south of Los Angeles.
Sure enough, the following afternoon when they reached the river, Captain Emory said, “It became quite apparent the enemy intended to dispute our passage.”
The San Gabriel was about a hundred yards across and knee deep. The Americans’ approach was level, but on the opposite side, where the Mexicans had gathered, the land rose in a bluff, or hill, about fifty feet high. Kearny had arranged the marching force in a version of the British “hollow square,” with infantry on the outside, artillery at each of the four ends, and the livestock and supply wagons protected inside. It was Emory’s opinion that the Mexicans, who were mounted, intended to break into the square with a cavalry charge and “deprive us of our cattle.”
Just as the Americans were about to cross the river, 250 Mexican cavalry appeared on the bluff opposite, and about 200 more appeared to their left. The Americans began to take fire from enemy sharpshooters, and just then the Mexicans rolled out four pieces of artillery and commenced firing.
Kearny ordered a hundred-man company under Captain Turner to deploy as skirmishers and ford the river. When the company reached midstream the Mexicans opened fire with grapeshot and cannonballs, sending geysers of water into the air. Remarkably, no one was hit. Then Stockton ordered his own artillery across, where “it was unlimbered and placed in counter-battery on the enemy’s side of the river.” The commodore personally assisted in this maneuver, which involved manhandling the guns through the water.
Emory wrote, “Our people, very brisk in firing, made the fire of the enemy wild and uncertain. Under this cover the wagons and cattle were forced with great labor across the river, the bottom of which was quicksand.”*
On the north side of the river where the Mexicans held ground there was a little bluff or overhang at the bottom of the hill where the Americans took cover and returned fire. Emory credits this terrain feature with the low number of casualties. A large detachment of Mexican cavalry somehow got to the Americans’ rear and charged down, threatening to envelop Stockton’s force, but his sailors, as Emory had predicted, proved very effective marksmen indeed, and the charge was repulsed. In an hour and twenty minutes of rattling gunfire, the entire U.S. column hauled itself a
cross the river. Meantime, the American artillery fire had taken its toll on the Californios, whose guns were soon silenced.
Flores then ordered a charge on Stockton’s left flank, which was repulsed, and threatened his right flank, where Kearny ordered the men into a square. But Stockton countermanded the order and directed the men to rush the Mexican positions atop the hill. This they did, chanting, “New Orleans! New Orleans! New Orleans!” in commemoration of Andrew Jackson’s famous victory over the British army at the Battle of New Orleans, which took place January 8, 1815, exactly thirty-two years to the day. Thus inspired, the Americans charged upward with bayonets fixed and blood in their eyes, ready for the hand-to-hand combat they considered inevitable at the top of the hill, “but great was our surprise,” Emory concluded, “to find it abandoned.”
It was so. Flores had tried everything he knew but, unable to break or even penetrate the American formation, he drew off his forces to fight another day, which happened to be the next one.
The following afternoon, only two or three miles from Los Angeles, Stockton’s men were marching across the wide, empty mesa between the San Gabriel and San Fernando rivers when Flores reappeared and began shooting at them with his artillery from a long distance. The Americans ignored this as a nuisance and marched on, even though some men were wounded and animals hit. At some point Flores “addressed his men, and called upon them to make one more charge; expressed his confidence in their ability to break out line; said that ‘yesterday he had been deceived into supposing that he was fighting soldiers.’ ”