The Indifferent Stars Above (13 page)

On October 9 the group traveled all through the night. Bogged down in a long stretch of deep sand, they were unable to get free of it until 4:00
A.M.
on October 10, Elizabeth Graves's forty-sixth birthday. It wasn't much of a birthday. Late in the day, Paiutes ran off all the horses Franklin Graves had tried to preserve by refusing to search for Hardcoop. The next day the Paiutes made off with eighteen head of cattle belonging to George Donner, Jacob Donner, and the German Wolfinger. Then, on the morning of October 15, while the company partook of a meager breakfast near the Humboldt Sink, the broad, marshy lake where the Humboldt River sank into the desert and disappeared, still more Paiutes crept up to unguarded cattle. This time they killed twenty-one head—all of the Eddys' team but for one ox, and all of the Wolfingers' but, again, for one. In a stroke, the Eddys and the Wolfingers were left dependent on the goodwill of the
rest of the company, and goodwill was rapidly becoming a very scarce commodity.

William Eddy buried what little he had left in the way of possessions. Then he and Eleanor picked up three pounds of loaf sugar—the only food that remained to them—and set out on foot. William carried three-year-old James, and Eleanor carried their infant, Margaret.

Wolfinger, who was said to be carrying a large amount of money, wanted to bury the body of his wagon with his goods cached inside, but no one was willing to stay behind to help him except for two other emigrants of German extraction, Joseph Reinhardt and Augustus Spitzer. As the three men began to dig, Wolfinger's young wife, Doris—a tall girl who had only recently emigrated from Germany and spoke little English—went on ahead on foot with the other women. In the hills above them, the Paiutes crouched among rocks and laughed as they straggled by.

The company entered another long, dry drive—forty miles across a flat alkali desert. They traveled both day and night again, keeping only loose associations with one another now, each family looking out mostly for itself. At about 4:00
A.M.
on October 16, walking under a thin crescent moon, William and Eleanor Eddy caught up with the Breen family at a group of hot springs where they had encamped briefly in the middle of the Forty Mile Desert. The boiling springs reeked of sulfur and belched plumes of steam into the night air, but the emigrants dipped water out with ladles, let it cool, and then drank it regardless of its taste.

The Breens filled their water casks and pushed on across the dark desert. The Eddys, still carrying their children, stumbled along behind them in the sagebrush. When they paused again, Eddy asked Patrick Breen if he could have half a pint of water for his children, but Breen, with seven children of his own, refused. Desperate, Eddy seized a rifle, said he would have the water even if he had to kill to get it, and filled a bucket from Breen's cask. Breen let it go.

Sarah fared better than many of her companions for now. She and Jay still had their wagon and enough oxen to draw them, as did the rest of her family. They walked all that day across alkali flats, now and then passing columns of white steam rising from more hot springs.
At sunset they kept moving, anxious to be shut of the desert as soon as possible. At about 4:00
A.M
. on October 17, they encountered one last obstacle, a steep sand hill, much like the one where John Snyder had died days earlier. They double-teamed their oxen again and made the long, hard pull in the dawn light.

Later that morning they finally came to the swift, clear, sweet water of the Truckee River running down out of mountains they could not yet see—the Sierra Nevada. They knelt by its side and put their lips to the river and drank deeply and gratefully from it. William and Eleanor Eddy staggered in off the desert, and they and their children also knelt and drank, even more gratefully, from the river. William heard the joyous sound of geese cackling nearby and went off with his gun. When he returned, he had nine fat geese, the first food he and his family had had in two days, except for bits of the sugar they'd carried across the desert.

A bit later Augustus Spitzer and Joseph Reinhardt also rode into camp. But they carried sad news for young Doris Wolfinger. As they had helped her husband to bury his wagon and his other goods back at the Humboldt Sink, they said, Paiutes had attacked, killing Wolfinger and making off with all of his goods. Doris Wolfinger, they were sad to say, was a widow.

 

D
oris Wolfinger was indeed a widow. But it would later emerge that Reinhardt and Spitzer had taken some significant liberties with the facts. It was not the Paiutes that had killed her husband. When the last of the company had moved on from the Humboldt Sink, Reinhardt had killed Wolfinger, whether in the heat of an argument or in cold blood we do not know. But with an opportunity lying before them, he and Spitzer almost certainly had begun to ransack Wolfinger's wagon, searching for the cash and valuables the Wolfingers had been said to have with them.

There were no witnesses to any of this, though, and the Paiutes made convenient scapegoats. So on October 18 the company resumed its journey, traveling up the Truckee River now. At first they moved wearily along level but rocky benchlands on the south side of the river.
Then, as the canyon narrowed, they were forced to repeatedly cross and recross the icy-cold stream, driving the wagons through the water, lurching over rocks the size of washtubs. The cottonwood trees lining the river stood like tall candle flames, brilliant with yellow leaves in the clear autumn light. Rabbit brush on the dry hillsides above the river bore trusses of equally bright yellow flowers, reminding some of the company of Scotch broom. But few of them were in the mood now to appreciate the scenery. Before them they could see dark clouds massing where they knew the mountains lay waiting for them.

As they traveled up the canyon and eyed the clouds ahead, they fretted about whether Stanton and McCutchen would ever return from Sutter's Fort with the supplies they knew they would need to make it through the mountains. And as if in answer to their prayers, the next day Stanton finally rode into camp leading a string of seven mules laden with flour, dried beef, and other provisions from Sutter's Fort. Big Bill McCutchen had fallen ill at the fort and been unable to return, but Stanton—a bachelor with no family connections in the company to draw him back—had nonetheless returned to them for a second time. Trailing behind Stanton were two young men—Miwok Indian vaqueros named Luis and Salvador, whose labor John Sutter had lent to the distressed emigrants.
*

Stanton also brought surprising news. On his way back, he'd had an interesting encounter in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In Bear Valley, thirty miles west of the summit, he had come across two emaciated travelers heading westbound. One of them was James Reed.

 

A
fter he was banished from the Donner Party on October 6, Reed had traveled ahead quickly on horseback and overtaken the wagons of George and Jacob Donner, with whom one of his teamsters, Walter Herron, was traveling. Without mentioning John Snyder's death, nor his own near lynching, Reed told the Donners that he had been sent ahead to seek help in California. He enlisted Herron in
the effort, and the two of them set off westward with only one mount—Reed's gray mare, Glaucus—and almost no provisions.

Taking turns riding on the mare, they made their way painfully across the Forty Mile Desert, up the Truckee, and into the Sierra Nevada, shooting the occasional goose, sage hen, or rabbit when they could find them. As they penetrated deeper into the mountains, though, game became scarce, and they soon had nothing left to eat except for a few wild onions. Herron wanted to shoot Glaucus and eat her, but Reed would have none of that. They pressed on to Truckee Lake and over the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Herron began to grow delirious. Then Reed found a single bean lying in the dusty road. The two of them got down on hands and knees and searched for more, eventually finding a total of five beans. Herron took three of them and James Frazier Reed, until recently among the most affluent members of the Donner Party, sat down and ate the other two, his meal for the day.

The next day, October 22, they stumbled across an abandoned wagon with a tar bucket hanging from it. They scraped some rancid tallow from the bottom of it and ate that, but within minutes Reed became violently ill. Later that day, however, he recovered, and he and Herron made it down a steep descent into the upper reaches of Bear Valley, where they found a small party of emigrants talking with Charles Stanton. Reed was so gaunt and emaciated that Stanton at first did not recognize him.

Over the following days, Reed and Herron staggered on westward toward Sutter's Fort while Stanton continued eastward toward the Donner Party. Reed and Herron came across more emigrants encamped in Bear Valley—among them the Tuckers, the Ritchies, and the Starks. These families, after parting from Sarah and her family for a final time back at Fort Bridger, had struck out for Oregon. But when they'd reached the Humboldt River, they had come across Lansford W. Hastings. Hastings, predictably, had had some advice for them.

Short of provisions and with their oxen giving out, they had barely made it across the crest of the mountains a few days before and were now resting their livestock prior to pressing on to Johnson's Ranch at the eastern edge of the Sacramento Valley. Looking back at the dark clouds gathering over the crest of the Sierra, they began to wonder whether their friends and companions from the plains would make it through. They hoped they'd had the good sense to turn around and go back down to Truckee Meadows rather than stay in the mountains. A few days later, on October 28, James Reed and Walter Herron, haggard, footsore, and almost too weak to walk, staggered up to the tall wooden gateway to Sutter's Fort.

That evening, as it began to rain hard at the fort, Reed was reunited with Edwin Bryant, who had traveled with him in the Russell Party until July 2, when Bryant had gone ahead with others on mules. Bryant filled Reed in on the state of the war against Mexico, and Reed signed a document pledging his services to Colonel John Frémont, but only after he had brought his family in from the other side of the mountains.

The next day, though he was still scarcely strong enough to walk, Reed also joined Bryant and a Reverend Dunleavy in signing another document—a petition for the rights to some land—an entire island, twenty to thirty miles long in the Sacramento River. Having arrived in California, Reed was bent on owning a piece of it.

 

L
ate on the afternoon of October 20, the lead elements of the Donner Party came around a final bend in the river and saw the expanse of Truckee Meadows—the broad valley where Reno now lies—stretched out before them, green and inviting. Beyond the meadows, they also saw, for the first time, the eastern flank of what they called the California Mountains—the Sierra Nevada—rising up above the meadows, a great granite wall, seemingly perpendicular, gray and imposing, capped with white snow, overhung by black clouds.

Over the next few days, the lead families rested at the meadows, letting their cattle graze and build strength while the families straggling behind caught up. Some of them stayed in place for three or four days. Then they began working their way up the canyon of the Truckee River into the dark mountains ahead of them.

And the mountains greeted them with a dark omen. Not at all certain that the supplies Sutter had sent with Stanton would see them through if they were delayed by weather, the men of the Donner Party decided to send a second advance party to Sutter's Fort to procure still more provisions. Two brothers-in-law, William Pike and William Foster, would ride ahead to the fort for backup provisions. As Pike and Foster prepared for the trip, though, a gun that Foster was holding discharged accidentally and the bullet entered Pike's back.

He did not die easily. His eighteen-year-old wife, Harriet, and the rest of the party gathered around him and watched in horror as he writhed on the ground, clutching at the dust and gasping for life for what seemed to those who watched to be an interminable time. Fourteen-year-old Mary Murphy later remembered, “he suffered more than tongue can tell.” There was nothing anyone could do for him, though, with no doctor closer than Sutter's Fort on the far side of the mountains, and no medicine stronger than whiskey and herbal concoctions likely at hand. If he had been a horse or a dog, they might have shot him to put him out of his agony, but he had a Christian soul and could not be murdered. When he finally ceased breathing, Pike's stunned young widow was left with two daughters, an infant, and a toddler. For the third time in a month, the Donner Party paused briefly to lay a relatively young man's body in a rocky roadside grave and then move quickly on. They could not linger here with the mountains looming ahead.

As they pushed up the Truckee River Canyon, they separated into at least three groupings. The Breen family, along with the Kesebergs, the Eddys, and Patrick Dolan were out front. Sarah and Jay Fosdick, the Graveses, Margret Reed and her children, the Murphys, Charles Stanton, Luis, and Salvador formed a middle group. Margret Reed and some of her smaller children rode on the mules that Stanton had
brought from Sutter's. The Donner brothers and their teamsters lagged behind the others in a third group.

The canyon grew narrow and steep-sided. They had to cross and re-cross the frigid river almost continuously now, trying to find passageways for the wagons among the boulders in the water. When they had crossed the river more than twenty times, near present-day Verdi, Nevada, they finally left the river and worked their way northwest up a dry, narrow side canyon and over a high ridge forested with large Jeffrey pines and ponderosa pines.