The Indifferent Stars Above (20 page)

On the other side of the log partition dividing the cabin, an almost identical scene played out. Franklin Graves had brought along a sack of dried beans with which he planned to begin farming in California. Elizabeth Graves had hoarded away a meager ration of them. And like Margret Reed she had also kept a small amount of tripe buried in
the snow to simmer with the beans in her large Dutch oven and lay before her children for Christmas dinner.
*

Despite their miserable circumstances, Elizabeth Graves had good reason to cling to hope that Christmas afternoon. She still had a stock of frozen beef buried in the snow. Franklin and the girls had been gone for nine days now on a journey they expected to take no more than six days. For the first few of those days, there had been clear skies and a firm crust of snow to walk upon. She could reasonably assume that by now he was at Johnson's Ranch laying in provisions, or perhaps already starting back over the mountains, bringing those provisions to her and her children.

In the Murphy cabin, there was less reason for hope. Out of beef, with their supply of hides rapidly dwindling, Levinah Murphy and Eleanor Eddy had taken to gathering the cast-off bones of slaughtered oxen. They boiled the bones and served the broth to the nine children huddled in the cabin. Then they boiled the bones again and again, until they became soft enough to chew, and served them whole to the children. On this Christmas Day, Levinah Murphy added a few pieces of oxtail to the broth, to make it perhaps a bit more festive.

They ate bones for Christmas at the Donners' camp at Alder Creek as well, as they had been doing for a while now. Sometimes they boiled them; sometimes they toasted them brown in the coals and then gnawed on them. And as at the lake camp, they boiled hides. Insofar as they had anything to share, Tamzene and George Donner shared with the now-widowed Elizabeth Donner and her children and with Doris Wolfinger. But there was precious little to share. In their insubstantial shelters, they all lived in almost perpetual danger of hypothermia, sometimes lying abed for days at a time in wet clothes, trying to keep smoky fires going through the relentless cycles of freezing rain and snow, constantly brushing snow from their tents lest they be buried. Most of the healthy young men on whom they had depended
were now gone, either dead and buried in the snow or departed for the lake camp. George Donner, with the infection from his cut hand still climbing relentlessly up his arm, could do almost nothing to help his wife and children.

 

O
n Christmas night the storm eased, and it was over by the morning of December 26. On the slope leading down into the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, Sarah and Jay and the others peered out from under their blankets that morning and found themselves surrounded by deep drifts of fresh snow. Without the hatchet they had lost during the storm, they were unable to cut wood or start a fire, so they mostly stayed in their makeshift blanket tent, conserving their body heat and their energy during the morning. But in the afternoon they crawled stiffly and painfully out of their shelter. For some time William Foster was so stiff that he could not get his limbs to unbend at all.

They spent much of the remainder of the day hunting for the hatchet, their snowshoes, and their packs, all of which had disappeared under the snow. As they tried to gather wood without the hatchet, someone broke a dried pine branch from a tree, and a mouse ran out and scurried away. They all chased it, shouting and thrashing through the soft snow in pursuit of it. Thirteen-year-old Lemuel Murphy, who was growing increasingly demented, seized the mouse, thrust it into his mouth, and ate it alive.

The three bodies lying nearby—Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Antonio—were rigid and blue and half covered by snow. The living avoided them. They already knew what they were going to do, but they were not yet ready to do it.

To some extent they had become apathetic. The worst hunger pangs had begun to pass after thirty-six hours without food, and while they were in many ways physically miserable, hunger was not always the most pressing component of their misery. Their brains had stopped screaming out for glucose, partly because their bodies had made some critical adjustments, designed to preserve the integrity of their brains for as long as possible. Their guts had begun to shrink,
reducing the surface area of their digestive systems. Their livers had begun to transform fatty acids into chemical compounds called ketone bodies. These were able to mimic glucose and provide their brains with up to two-thirds of the energy they needed to function. The use of ketone bodies carried a price, though. It was gradually acidifying their blood, leading them toward a dangerous condition called ketoacidosis, common in diabetics. The most obvious manifestation of the condition was that large amounts of acetone were being released in their urine and their respiratory systems. As they huddled under their blankets, their breath began to smell like something they had never known—fingernail polish.

Late in the day, they crawled back under the blankets, still unfed except for Lemuel. The pittance of nourishment provided by the mouse seemed to stimulate the boy's madness and renew his hunger pains, though. As night fell, he howled and raved and grabbed at people's arms, biting them, crying out, “Give me my bone!” His sister, twenty-year-old Sarah Foster, held him tight and tried to comfort him, but, like Patrick Dolan the night before, he clawed his way free and scrabbled about, bent on escaping from the tent. Finally they all forced him to the center of the circle with their feet, trying to keep him from slipping out under the perimeter.

The skies were clear that night, and a waxing gibbous moon crossed above the rim of the canyon. Everything in the canyon—still and white and crystalline—shimmered. Under the blankets, Lemuel Murphy finally quieted down. His sister, sobbing, held his head in her lap until, at about 2:00
A.M.
, he ceased breathing. Then they rolled his body out into the moonlit snow and closed the circle tighter, down to ten now.

The next day they set about the task of butchering meat.

T
he first order of business on the morning of December 27 was to make a fire. Under the blankets, William Eddy poured some black powder from his powder horn onto a bit of tinder and at the same time struck a spark from his flintlock rifle. Pouring black powder onto tinder, especially if the tinder is damp, is an old woodsman's trick for increasing the likelihood that the spark will catch. Unfortunately for Eddy, it caught with a vengeance, exploding the powder horn in his hands with a terrific flash of smoke and flame. He scrambled out from under the blankets with a blackened face and badly burned hands. Amanda McCutchen and Sarah Foster followed him out, also burned but not so badly. Eventually they got a fire kindled in dried branches they had collected and used it to set fire to another dry dead pine. Then they began doing what they had by now agreed that they would do.

They divided into groups so that no one would have to eat, or see eaten, any of their kin. Sarah and Mary Ann and Jay stayed apart
from Franklin's body, Sarah Foster from Lemuel's body. Luis and Salvador would have no part of any of it. They built a separate fire at a distance and turned their backs on the whites.

If they did as others in similar circumstances have almost universally done, Jay Fosdick, William Eddy, and William Foster started by removing and concealing in the snow the heads, hands, and feet of the dead, to render the bodies a bit less human. Then, as they would with a deer or an ox, they cut open the body cavities and extracted the most nutritious organs: the liver, the heart, and the kidneys. These would not keep well; they needed to be eaten first.

Now that they had crossed the line, their hunger put itself foremost in their thoughts. So at some point shortly after they had taken these organs from the bodies, they stopped and sat down to their first unthinkable meal. They put the meat on sharpened stakes and held it out over glowing coals, roasting it until they judged it done, or done enough. The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat, and, unbidden, it stimulates the appetite mightily, activating the salivary glands, awakening the gut, grabbing the attention of the brain. So when it had cooled enough that it did not burn their lips, they sat down in the snow, weeping, their eyes averted from one another's faces, and took their first few tentative bites. Then they ate.

And when they ate, their digestive systems gurgled and surged back to life and demanded more, and so they ate more. Their headaches and bone-crushing weariness began to lift. Energy poured into their limbs. So they got up and prepared more of the flesh and ate more, still avoiding one another's eyes as best they could. For the first time in days, they now believed they would live at least a few more days, but they also knew that for the rest of their lives they would bear a terrible awareness of what they had done here on this day. For three of them—Sarah, Mary Ann, and Sarah Foster—the psychic burden was all the more crushing for knowing that at one of the adjoining campfires someone was at that moment eating their father or brother.

 

M
ost people faced with starvation, most of the time, choose to die rather than resort to cannibalism. The prohibition against eating human flesh is as ancient and fundamental a taboo as can be found. That is not to say that cannibalism is rare in the history of the world, though. It has been practiced, sometimes on a very large scale, in nearly every corner of the world and nearly every age. Neanderthals are believed to have chowed down on one another from time to time, and early
Homo sapiens
likely did as well. There are biblical accounts of cannibalism, tenth-century accounts of Christian Crusaders eating captured Arabs, and widespread accounts of cannibalism among indigenous peoples of South America, Polynesia, and North America. Much of this anthropophagy, to use the technical and more euphemistic term, has had nothing to do with survival, but rather with ritual and religion. Or sometimes simply with vengeance.

But there have also been large-scale examples of survival cannibalism, many of them in disturbingly recent times. During the great famine in the Ukraine in the early 1920s—a horrific catastrophe that caused some 5 to 8 million deaths—so many dead bodies, particularly the bodies of children, disappeared from the streets that authorities had to put up signs proclaiming
EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.
During the 900-day siege of Leningrad in 1941–44, people resorted to eating first dogs and cats and then finally rats. When the rats were gone and human bodies began piling up in the streets, many of them were soon stripped of their flesh. As things got even worse, the Leningrad police had to track down organized gangs who had gone into business kidnapping, murdering, and butchering their victims for meat. Once again it was children who disappeared fastest. In the apartment of one violinist, authorities found the bones of several dozen children. The violinist's own five-year-old son was among his apparent victims.

Even the Russian and Ukrainian catastrophes paled in comparison, though, with the appalling horror that descended on the Chinese people between 1958 and 1962. A combination of drought, floods, and the economic policies of Mao's Great Leap Forward caused some 30 to 40 million of them to starve to death. By as early as 1959, the
famine was so widespread in some rural parts of China that peasants began to eat the corpses of their fellow villagers, particularly the corpses of children. When they ran out of corpses, some families took to starving their infant daughters and then exchanging the bodies with those of their neighbors' daughters so that nobody would have to eat his or her own children. They made soup out of them.

Still, the fact is that cannibalism is a remedy that remains well beyond the last resort for most of us. For every poor soul who has eaten of a companion, there are countless who preferred to die so that a loved one might live.

So the question arises: Why did the men of the snowshoe party draw out their knives on the morning of December 27, 1846, and commence carving? And why did Sarah and the other women eat what the men carved from the bodies? They had been entirely without food for just six days at most. People have lived far longer than that without food, even in very cold environments. Despite the tremendous rate at which they were burning calories, they likely had considerable time to go before they actually starved, perhaps weeks.

It may have been, for one thing, that they were at least partly mistaken as to what was killing them. Their growing malnutrition was rapidly breaking down both their psychological defenses against madness and their physiological defenses against the cold, all of which must have contributed to an overwhelming sense of impending doom. To some extent they believed that Stanton, Antonio, Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Lemuel Murphy had died of hunger, when in fact they almost certainly had died primarily of hypothermia. As a consequence the survivors might well have thought that they themselves were starving to death—it certainly must have felt as if they were. Then, too, they had already broken through the psychological barrier that ordinarily prevents us from seeing food when we look at one another. When Patrick Dolan had drawn the fatal lot, they had all been given license for the first time to turn their hungry eyes on a fellow human being and see a potential meal.

And in the seemingly endless hours that the snowshoe party had spent under the blankets, we know that some of them had begun to have
what clinicians call anthropophagic dreams—visions of eating other people—a phenomenon not uncommon among those facing starvation.
*

Mostly, though, what allowed the men of the snowshoe party to pull out the knives and what allowed both the men and the women to eat was likely something beyond an instinct for self-preservation and something well short of madness. All of them—except possibly Luis and Salvador, about them we just don't know—had someone back at the lake camp whom they loved, someone who was depending on them to get through and send help. Their own survival meant more to them than simply continuing to live. It meant hope for those they had left behind. And Sarah and Mary Ann must have felt this obligation particularly keenly. Only a few days before, their father had laid a sacred charge on them to save the lives of their mother and siblings, instructing them explicitly to do whatever was necessary. And nobody had to tell Harriet Pike and Sarah Foster and Amanda McCutchen that the lives of their infant children back at the lake camp depended on their making it to Johnson's Ranch.

None of that made it any easier, though.

 

W
hen they finished eating and finally began to look at one another again, and to talk, they started to make plans. The weather had cleared and grown colder, and that meant that there was a crust on the snow. They had no way to know how long the favorable weather would hold, but they knew that they should resume their trek as soon as possible. First, though, they had to render the remaining flesh portable and nonperishable. They cut off long, thin strips and stretched them on racks or stakes placed before the fire. It was a long, slow, gruesome process. They had to take care to keep the flesh close enough to the fire to dry it but not so close as to actually cook it. So for three days, under mostly clear skies, they worked at the task, and rested, and continued to eat.

By the morning of December 29, they were ready to travel again. They loaded their packs with their blankets and what remained of their former companions, strapped on their snowshoes, and struck off again. The four bodies had yielded less meat than they might have expected. Like the flesh of the oxen they had all been subsisting on since November, the flesh of the four malnourished corpses was lean and stringy. It contained almost no fat. A man as large as Franklin Graves might have yielded as much as sixty-six pounds of fresh, usable meat when healthy, but his body had probably yielded roughly half that by the time he died. An emaciated boy like Lemuel Murphy might have yielded as little as twenty pounds. Once the flesh had been dried, of course, it weighed a fraction of these amounts. And they had been living on it for three days already. By the time they left what would come to be called the “Camp of Death,” they calculated that they had only about four more days' worth of the grisly rations.

The weather remained good for traveling, clear and cold, and with their bodies now resupplied with fuel, they made about five miles that day, and six the next. Seeking to hold to a roughly southwesterly course and navigating by the sun, which was at this time of year well to the south of due west, they inevitably worked their way deeper into the drainage of the American River's North Fork. By December 31, though, they found themselves boxed in by high cliffs ahead and the increasingly deep main canyon to their left. They decided to cross the gorge itself and proceed southwest along the ridge visible on the other side.

The descent was steep. It was so steep, in fact, that soon they could not keep their balance when walking. They found, though, that by squatting on their snowshoes they could simply ride them downhill like sleds. This saved enormous amounts of energy, but it also caused them, time and again, to go out of control, tumbling head over heels into heavy drifts of snow at the end of each run, driving snow deep inside their increasingly tattered clothing, next to their bare skin.

By the end of the day, they had made it down to the river, and on the morning of New Year's Day, they set out to ascend the steep—in places almost vertical—opposite side of the canyon. It took them an entire day of laborious, leg-throbbing climbing. With each step they had to drive the toes of their snowshoes into the wall of snow before
them, then lift themselves up the slope as if they were on a ladder, much as a modern mountain climber does, but without the benefit of crampons. Where the climb was steepest and there was little snow clinging to the rocks, they scrabbled desperately for footholds in the clumsy snowshoes, grabbing at roots and branches to keep from plummeting back down into the canyon.

By the time they reached the top that afternoon, their feet were swollen and cracked and bleeding. Their leather shoes were so rotten now that they were falling to pieces. They wrapped their feet in rags and bits of blanket, but the blood oozed out through the fabric and into the snow, leaving crimson tracks wherever they went. The frostbitten toes of one of the Miwoks had begun to fall off at the first joint.

Exhausted by the ordeal, and famished, they ate again, digging deeper into their packs for the dried flesh. From the high ridge on which they now found themselves, they saw glimpses of what they took to be the broad Sacramento Valley, still far off to the west. But they also saw ridge after snowy ridge stretched out between it and them.

The climb had taken much out of all of them, but the men in particular were fatigued and dispirited. Since leaving the Camp of Death, the women had more and more often found themselves having to take the initiative, setting the course, sometimes leading the men by the hands, gathering the wood, making the fires at night, bringing them food.

A Donner Party survivor later told J. Quinn Thornton, author of one account of the snowshoe expedition, that the men had been ready to give up well before the women.

Of the women, though, the same survivor said,

The women, of course, were themselves in mortal danger hour by hour, but if the men were not going to break down, it seemed that it was the women who would have to make sure of it. By the time they arrived at the top of the high ridge late on the afternoon of January 1, Sarah must have been watching Jay closely, studying him for clues.