The Indifferent Stars Above (14 page)

 

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urvivors would later disagree about the exact dates, but on October 29 or 30 the lead group made a steep descent from the ridge into Dog Valley, a broad green vale, then climbed a second summit and descended again, this time into thick pinewoods. There, traveling through flurries of snow alternating with cold rain, they began to follow a clear mountain stream south and southwest. Late in the day on October 30, they camped in a wide grassy meadow just five or six miles short of Truckee Lake, nine or ten miles short of the mountain pass that separated them from California.

When the Breens and the other families in the lead party crawled out of their tents the next morning, a few inches of snow covered the ground. It was discouraging, but it didn't appear to be anything that would seriously impede their travel, so they moved on toward Truckee Lake. The soft, wet snow sloshing under their feet made walking painful for many of them, so tattered and riddled with holes were their shoes, but that afternoon they emerged from the woods near the south end of the lake. There they got their first good look at what lay beyond the flat expanse of gray water.

At the far end of the lake stood a great jumble of granite cliffs, an imposing rock wall squatting squarely in their path west, rising more than eleven hundred feet above the level of the water. They had never seen anything like this in the Rockies nor in the Wasatch nor anywhere in their lives. There was a slight notch in the southern end of the wall, the pass through which they were supposed to travel, but
notch or no, the thing looked utterly impassable for wagons, even under the best of circumstances. To make matters worse, every ledge and crevice and possible foothold on the face of the cliffs was already laden with deep drifts of snow.

They made their way through sparse woods along the north side of the lake and up a rough wagon road toward the granite crags ahead. But snow falls heavily in the lee of a mountain, and it had been falling here intermittently since October 7, a month earlier than usual. Over the past forty-eight hours, it had been snowing almost continuously up at the summit. Now, as they began to climb the approaches to the pass, they quickly found themselves in three or four feet of loose powder. They lost track of the wagon road but kept going anyway, trying to find their own route up the steep incline, meandering among boulders the size of houses. The snow was soon up to the oxen's chests, though, and the beasts could make no headway. The men cursed and snapped whips at the oxen, but it did no good. Finally they gave up and turned around. By evening they were back at the eastern end of the lake, where a cold rain was falling. Only a few inches of snow lay on the ground.

The Breens found a weathered shanty in which an eighteen-year-old emigrant named Moses Schallenberger had passed the winter of 1844–45 alone after having become snowbound at this same spot. All nine of them moved in for the night. The rest of the advance company crawled into the backs of their wagons and tried to sleep.

Sarah and Jay and the rest of the middle group arrived at the eastern end of the lake sometime after the Breens, most likely by the middle of the day, November 1, Mary Ann Graves's twentieth birthday. There they heard from the Breens the sickening news that they had tried but failed to make it over the pass the day before. As more families arrived, confusion and dissension gripped the company. Some felt that the rain and slush through which they'd been traveling meant that a warming trend was beginning—as it might have back home in Illinois—and that all they needed to do was bide their time until rain washed the snow from the mountains above. Others—likely including Franklin Graves, who was experienced with the ways of mountains from his boyhood in Vermont—argued that rain here simply
meant more snow on the surrounding peaks and that they had not a moment to lose in getting over the crest of the mountains. They had Sutter's mules now to break a trail and Luis and Salvador to act as guides through the pass, advantages the Breens had not had the day before.

By the next morning, they had decided to try again. The Donner brothers and their retinue still had not come up to the lake, but the rest of the company set about organizing themselves for a fresh assault on the pass nonetheless. With George Donner, the captain of the party, absent, no one here had any real authority over the others. They argued about what should and should not be brought, about who could and could not ride the horses and mules, about who would lead and who would follow. Some of the men wanted to bring containers of tobacco; some of the women wanted to bring bolts of calico. Franklin Graves had to figure out what to do with the heavy hoard of silver coins he had squirreled away in his wagon. Some families opted to bring their wagons, others to leave them behind. The latter tried to pack their possessions onto the oxen, but the beasts bucked and bellowed and rubbed themselves against trees, trying to rid themselves of the unfamiliar loads. Louis Keseberg, who had injured his foot when he stepped on a sharp stick earlier in the trip, mounted a horse and tied his foot into a sling attached to the saddle. Finally, disjointed and out of sorts, they set out.

By midday they were on the approaches to the pass and the snow was up to the axles on the wagons. They sent Luis and Salvador out in front with some of the mules to break a trail, but over and over again the mules stumbled and pitched headfirst into the snow, kicking and braying loudly each time. The oxen's iron-shod feet clattered and clanged against ice and granite. The iron-rimmed wagon wheels could get little purchase on the snow-covered rocks, and the wagons began to slide backward. Jay and Sarah and the others leaned into the backs of their wagons with their shoulders, trying against all odds to push them forward. They urged their oxen on again with fresh shouts and curses and whips, but the oxen could move the wagons only a few feet with each effort. They struggled forward like this for hours, fighting their way yard by yard up the mountain. By now almost all the
women were carrying children—mothers carrying their sons and daughters, sisters carrying their younger siblings.

It had not snowed for some hours, but black storm clouds had begun to pile up over the peaks immediately ahead. Still short of the summit, they came to a steep granite wall rising out of the snow. Luis and Salvador reported that they had lost track of the wagon road. Charles Stanton and one of the Miwoks went forward, skirting the cliff, to see if they could find signs of the road farther ahead. The two men made it to the pass and paused briefly to survey the flat valley and frozen lakes that lay to the west. Encouraged by the relatively easy terrain before them, they headed back downhill for the others, eager to show them the way. But by the time they returned, the company had ground to a halt.

The women who'd been carrying children in their arms through drifts up to their thighs were too exhausted to continue and had simply sat down in the snow. Some of the men had set fire to a pitch pine, and the flames had climbed up into the branches of the tree, popping and hissing. Everyone began to gather around the blazing tree for warmth. Stanton exhorted them to press on to the summit, but no one would move. Darkness was coming on quickly. People spread buffalo robes on the snow, lay down, and pulled blankets over themselves. Like everyone else, Sarah and Jay, exhausted by what they had just endured, lay down, too. They drifted toward fitful sleep in the eerie, wavering light of the burning pine snag.

A few hours later, the leading edge of a new storm slid in over the jumble of granite peaks just to the west of them. Snow began to spiral silently down out of an utterly black, featureless sky. One by one, feathery flakes landed on cold blankets and buffalo robes, on sweat-slicked hair, on shoulders turned to the sky, on soft cheeks—each flake delicate and slight, but each lending its almost imperceptible weight to the horror of what was about to happen.

O
n the morning of November 3, Sarah awoke to the muffled sound of someone shouting. Louis Keseberg was bellowing. He had just awakened to find himself seemingly alone on the mountain above Truckee Lake, surrounded only by soft drifts and mounds of new-fallen snow. When he had called out in alarm, the mounds had begun to move and to dissolve, gradually revealing the human beings that they concealed. Heads had popped up out of the snow all around him, like prairie dogs on a white prairie.

Sarah and Jay struggled to their feet, brushed snow from their clothing, and looked around in alarm. During the night everything had been transformed. A terrible hush had fallen over the world. Fresh snow weighed down the limbs of firs and ponderosa pines. The granite peaks just to the west of them had become a series of sheer white walls. Everything was utterly still, except for the dizzying swirl of snowflakes still sifting down out of the slate gray sky. They looked about and saw that some of the cattle had wandered away and vanished into the surrounding whiteness.

For the first time, the anxiety that had been eating at the company for weeks gave way to something close to stark terror. They huddled around the smoking remains of the burned pine snag and tried to figure out what to do. If they tried to go forward, they would have to proceed on foot and likely flounder in the deep drifts until they died of exposure and exhaustion. If they returned to the lake, what remained of the cattle would feed them for a while, but they would face the prospect of starvation long before spring came. Neither option was good, but the latter at least offered some time to think of other alternatives. They gathered the mules and as many oxen as they could find and began to fight their way back down the mountain, wading through snow now hip-deep. All day more snow swirled down through the pine forests, covering their tracks from the day before, making it difficult to find their way. They did not arrive back at the lake until about 4:00
P.M.

At that same hour, 130 miles to the west, their old traveling companion from the plains, Edwin Bryant, who had made it through to California several weeks earlier, was in a farmhouse in the Napa Valley. He had just taken shelter from a new and particularly violent storm freshly blowing in from the Gulf of Alaska, and it made an impression on him.

At Truckee Lake that night, as the new storm that Bryant had witnessed worked its way into the Sierra Nevada, the Donner Party retreated into whatever kinds of shelter they could find. Sarah and Jay, lying in the rear of their nearly empty wagon—the wagon that had been so full of provisions back in St. Joe—huddling under buffalo
robes and woolen blankets, watching the snow accumulate ever more rapidly out beyond the tailgate, must have wondered how on earth this could have come to pass, and how on earth it could possibly end well.

It snowed for eight days.

 

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oughly five miles to the northeast, the Donner brothers, their families, and their teamsters had also become hopelessly bogged down. Descending a steep ridge a few days before, probably on the descent into Dog Valley, one of their wagons had overturned, briefly trapping four-year-old Georgia and three-year-old Eliza in the wreckage. More seriously, the accident had broken an axle on one of the wagons. It had taken a day of work to fashion a new axle from a pine log, a day they could ill afford to lose. To make matters worse, George Donner had cut his right hand when his chisel slipped while shaping the axle. It wasn't much of a wound, but it was already starting to get infected and this made it difficult for him to use the hand.

The next day they had pushed on toward the lake in light snow. Before they'd gone far, though, they encountered messengers from the lake camp doubling back to warn them that the pass above the lake could not be crossed. The news must have stunned them. With no real alternative, they began to look for a place to make some kind of winter quarters. When they came to a wide meadow spread along a stream now called Alder Creek, they stopped and went to work. The Donner brothers and their teamsters began to fell trees, then to buck the logs into lengths suitable for a cabin. Working with aching, freezing hands, they notched the first set of logs and used their oxen to drag them into position. They began to stack them up, building walls. By now the snow was falling hard and fast, but George Donner could work only slowly with his left hand. Jacob Donner, frail and in failing health, could do little to help. Fourteen-year-old Elitha Donner helped her father notch the logs while the other men felled more trees and hauled the logs to the site. By the time they had the first four courses of logs laid, though, the snow was falling at such a rate that it simply overwhelmed them.

Desperate now to get out of the snow, they abandoned the cabin
and began to set up canvas tents in three separate camps, one for each of the brothers' families and one for the teamsters. They built brush shanties covered with pine boughs, quilts, and rubber sheets. They stacked poles against a large pine tree, tepee style, and covered them with more brush. While they worked, the younger Donner children sat on logs, bundled in blankets, the snow piling up all around them. Finally they all crawled into their miserable shelters and tried to figure out what to do next. They thought they might be able to build a real cabin once the snow stopped falling.

 

O
ver the next several days, as snow continued to drift down out of a monotonous, lead-colored sky, each of the families and individuals camped at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek sat down to make hard decisions, decisions that it now seemed clear might have life-and-death consequences. They all knew the importance of acting cooperatively; that, after all, was the essence of life in a company. But by nature most of them were independent and self-reliant. And most of them also, by now, were more or less disgusted with one another.

In the last few weeks, abrupt reversals of fortune had taken place, and the resources the company had available were now distributed in new and starkly unequal measures. At the lake, Margret Reed, probably the most affluent woman in the company back on the plains, now found herself and her children among the most impoverished. She still had her cook, Eliza, but little for the woman to cook. She had her servant, Baylis, but he was feeble and largely blind. The two of them mostly just represented more mouths for Margret Reed to feed now. The Eddys and the Murphys were similarly destitute. The Breens, on the other hand, still had most of their cattle and worldly goods.

Sarah and Jay and the rest of the Graves clan had certain advantages over some of their companions at the lake camp. They had lost every one of their horses and many of their loose cattle, but they still had most of their oxen, their household goods, a cache of silver coins, and years of experience living on the Illinois frontier under very harsh circumstances. Above all, they had one another to look out for and to provide mutual aid. Franklin and Elizabeth Graves and their
children were not the kind of people to let a little snow scare them; nor would they let a little deprivation demoralize them.

At Alder Creek the Donner brothers also still had most of their possessions, including a large quantity of fine fabrics they had brought west and a considerable hoard of gold and silver coins. But unable to provide their families with any better shelter than tents and a brush shanty, their cash and their goods were of little use to them. Some of the young men who worked for them—those who had not gone ahead to the lake camp—had made a separate camp a short distance from the two Donner family camps. As single men they carried few possessions, though, and so they had virtually nothing to fall back on.

Several of the younger women—Doris Wolfinger at the Alder Creek camp as well as eighteen-year-old Harriet Pike and twenty-three-year-old Amanda McCutchen at the lake camp—found themselves, like Margret Reed, unexpectedly without their husbands to stand by their sides. As a consequence they and their children were largely dependent on other families for food, fuel, and shelter. The unattached young men of the party similarly had nothing and no one to turn to, but at least they did not have children to worry about.

With the relentless snowfall weighing down the canvas covers on the wagons at the lake, the first priority for everyone there was to find or make some kind of more substantial, semipermanent shelter. Patrick and Margaret Breen had already taken possession of the primitive cabin that Moses Schallenberger and his companions had built in 1844, about a quarter of a mile east of the lake. Twelve by fourteen feet, with a dirt floor, it was rudely constructed of poles cut from pine saplings. A single opening served as both door and window. At one end stood a simple chimney that let escape the smoke from an open-hearth fire. Patrick Breen was not a robust man, but all he and his sons needed to do to make the cabin reasonably habitable was to stretch some canvas and hides over the roof and cover it with pine boughs. When this was done, all nine of the Breens, their friend and former neighbor Patrick Dolan, and the Mexican drover Antonio moved into the 168 square feet of living space.

Louis Keseberg, hobbled by his injured foot, could do no better than to build a simple lean-to out of poles and pine branches against
the side of the Breens' cabin, and into this he, Philippine, and their two young children crawled, along with two other German members of the party, Augustus Spitzer and Charles Burger.

About 150 yards to the southwest of the Breens' cabin, near the stream that drained the lake, William Eddy and William Foster found a large boulder, nearly the size of a cabin itself. One side of the boulder was flat and nearly vertical. The men set about gathering materials to build a cabin up against the boulder. The cabin was rectangular, flat-topped, dirt-floored, about eighteen by twenty-five feet, eight or nine feet tall, built of unpeeled pine logs. The boulder at one end provided a natural hearth and chimney, as smoke could rise through a narrow gap between the cabin's roof and the face of the boulder. Into this one structure moved all six of the Murphys, all three of the Fosters, all three of the Pikes, and all four of the Eddys—sixteen people sharing 450 square feet.

Franklin Graves, characteristically, decided to build his cabin apart from the others. He selected a site nearly half a mile to the east and slightly north of the Breens' cabin, where he thought they would be more sheltered from storms but still have wood and water nearby. Working, like the others, in an almost continuous snowfall, their hands red and stiff, Franklin, Jay, Billy, Milt Elliott, Luis, and Salvador cut pine logs eight to twelve inches in diameter. Then they threw chains around the logs and used their surviving oxen to drag them to the site, notched them with axes, and began to assemble a double cabin, eight or nine feet tall. Each of the two interior chambers measured about sixteen by sixteen feet, with a chinked log wall between them. Each had its own fireplace. Like the cabins closer to the lake, this one had a flat roof of poles covered at first by canvas and then pine boughs. When William Eddy had finished working on the Murphys' cabin, he also helped Franklin complete the double cabin.

The chamber on one side was for the use of the Graves family, along with Amanda McCutchen and her infant child, Harriet. The chamber on the other side was primarily for Margret Reed, her children, Baylis and Eliza Williams, and the five family dogs. The Reeds had nowhere else to go, and Franklin Graves seems to have felt responsible for making sure that they at least had a roof over their
heads.
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The bachelors Charles Stanton, John Denton, and Milt Elliott would also have to squeeze in with the Reeds, as would the two Miwoks, Luis and Salvador, though all of these people at various times would also bunk in with the Graves family.

When the double cabin was finished, Sarah and her mother and her older siblings began to unpack the wagons, carrying their scant household furniture into their half of the dark, cold interior. They unpacked ceramic tableware, brass knives and forks, wooden spoons, and earthenware mugs; they set cast-iron skillets and their old Dutch oven around the fire pit; they found nooks and crannies to hold cobalt blue bottles of patent medicines, aqua-colored pickle jars, combs, mirrors, bits of jewelry, pouches of tobacco, and tin boxes containing herbal remedies. Franklin brought in his carpentry tools and drove nails into the walls to hang up their wet clothes near the fire pit. He and Jay and Billy hauled in a few old flintlock muskets and newer percussion rifles and stacked them in corners, along with an old brass pistol, boxes or bags of lead shot, black powder, flints, and percussion caps. They toted in a sack of beans that they had planned to use as seed when they reached California. Jay brought in his violin. They left their cache of silver coins outside, still hidden in the cleats in their family wagon. They cut pine boughs and arranged them on the earthen floor to serve as beds, then laid the smaller children down on them, bundled up for warmth. Then they went outside and sized up their oxen.

Hard calculations had to be made. To kill all the animals meant that they would lose the opportunity to draw the wagons over the mountains if the weather turned warm in the days ahead and melted the snow on the pass. Warming weather would also quickly spoil any meat they butchered now; there was almost no salt left with which to preserve it. On the other hand, with little more than pine branches to feed them, the already emaciated oxen would continue to dwindle
in bulk if they were kept alive, their bodies offering less in the way of sustenance with every day that passed. Even as it was, their lean, stringy meat could feed the eighty-one people stranded here and at Alder Creek for only a matter of weeks.