The Indifferent Stars Above (21 page)

 

A
s they began to push forward on January 2, both the men and the women found that they could make better progress without the snowshoes, so they took them off and strapped them on their backs. They hobbled forward, but their feet were now so swollen that every step was excruciating and their progress was slow. The country was gradually changing as they moved southwest and downslope. Granite peaks gave way to rounded mountains. A mix of oaks and long-needled digger pines began to replace the tall conifers of the high Sierra. The snow cover grew lighter, and here and there bare patches of red, gravelly earth began to show through beneath.

When they made camp that evening, they were near the end of their rations again. Some of them toasted the remnants of their leather shoes over the coals of the fire; others disassembled their snowshoes and toasted and ate the rawhide strings.

On January 3, gradually losing elevation, they began to encounter country that was largely snow-free for the first time, but in place of the snow they found a new impediment. The pale, silvery green leaves and red, twisting branches of head-high manzanita brush covered the steep hillsides here. As they fought their way through dense stands of the manzanita, the branches caught on their already half-rotted and tattered clothes and began to rip them apart.

By January 4, Jay Fosdick had started to lag far behind the others. Sarah fell back to stay in step with him. Time and again the others found themselves having to stop and wait for the two of them. William Eddy studied Jay's halting progress and finally went to his side
and told him flat out that he was going to die if he did not exert himself more. They had been lucky enough to have fair skies for over a week now, but nobody could tell how long their luck would hold.

They pushed on, watching all the while for any sign of humanity, whether white or Native American. They had little to fear from the local Indians, the Maidu. Intimidated by what they had seen the Mexicans and John Sutter do to their Miwok neighbors in the lowlands, the Maidu mostly just wanted to live in peace in these hills that, so far, none of the whites had found any reason to covet.

By that evening the snowshoe party had had no food for several days, except for bits of toasted leather, and the mood among them began to grow ugly. William Foster first brought up an idea that had likely festered in the minds of at least some of them for days. Why not kill Luis and Salvador for food? While the Miwok boys were at least technically Christians, they remained in the eyes of some of the whites, if not all of them, savages nonetheless—the same general class of beings many had come to loathe during the Black Hawk War of their youths. Looked at a certain way, they were ignorant, itinerant beggars at best, dangerous cutthroats at worst. Looked at another way, they were simply strangers. When killing to survive, it's easiest to kill and eat whatever or whomever you are least attached to—cattle before horses, dogs before people, strangers before acquaintances, acquaintances before friends, friends before family. Luis and Salvador, more than any of the others, were strangers to them all.

They mulled it over, discussing it in low tones, watching the Miwok boys out of the corners of their eyes. Not everyone agreed with the plan. William Eddy argued against it. What Sarah said or thought, we do not know.

Finally Foster abandoned the idea, at least for the time being. Eddy said that in the morning he would go ahead with the gun and look for game. Now that they were below the snow line, there was a reasonable chance that he might be able to kill a deer. Later that night Luis and Salvador slipped quietly away into the darkness and disappeared. It may be that Eddy warned them, or they might simply have noted the darkening looks in the haggard faces of the whites.

The next morning, January 5, limping through the chaparral, Mary
Ann Graves and William Eddy went out ahead of the others, carrying the flintlock rifle, looking for game. Here and there among the manzanita, they could make out Luis's and Salvador's bloody footsteps. Harriet Pike, Amanda McCutchen, and Sarah and William Foster followed in a second group. Sarah and Jay Fosdick brought up the rear, once again quickly falling behind the others.

A mile or two out of camp, Eddy and Mary Ann Graves came across a place where a deer had recently lain in the brush. The sudden discovery of exactly what they had hoped for stopped them in their tracks, stunning them with an unexpected mixture of desperate hope and profound dread. They glanced at each other, and each discovered that the other had begun to weep. They dropped to their knees and prayed, then rose and staggered on as quietly as they could in the brush, stalking the animal.

They followed the deer's tracks until they spotted it browsing about eighty yards off. Eddy moved closer, angling for a clear shot. He raised the rifle, but his arms were too weak to hold it level and straight. He lowered it and raised it again and heard Mary Ann Graves behind him give out a little sob. He turned and looked at her and saw that she had covered her face with her hands.

When you fire a flintlock rifle, a small but disconcerting delay follows between the time you pull the trigger and the time the shot goes off. The cock holding the flint must fall and strike the steel of the striker plate. Then the resulting spark must fall into the pan and ignite the powder. The flash in the pan must then penetrate the touch-hole and ignite the powder in the chamber, producing a second, larger explosion. This second explosion must then finally propel the ball out of the barrel. All told, it might take nearly a second to get the shot off, a small eternity when you are trying to hold your aim steady and true on a distant target. And a good many times, if the powder is damp or a breeze blows the spark away, nothing happens at all when you pull the trigger.

Eddy raised the rifle yet again, aiming the muzzle well above the deer this time, then letting it slowly descend until the deer fell into his sights. He pulled the trigger, and the gun discharged. The deer leaped a yard or two and stood still, dropping its tail between its legs. Mary
Ann cried out, “Oh, merciful God, you have missed it!” The deer bounded forward. Eddy dropped the gun, and he and Mary Ann took off in pursuit, limping as they ran through the brush. Two hundred yards later, the deer tumbled to the ground, dying. When they reached it, Eddy drew out a knife and slit its throat. He and Mary Ann knelt in the chaparral and drank the blood as it spurted out of the animal's veins.

 

F
ar behind them, Amanda McCutchen, Harriet Pike, and the Fosters heard the shot that killed the deer and began to hurry forward. Even farther back, Sarah and Jay also heard it. But they had come to a standstill perhaps a mile behind the second group. When Jay heard the shot, he cried out to Sarah, “There! Eddy has killed a deer. Now if I only can get to him, I shall live.” But he could barely stand by now, let alone walk any distance.

That night Mary Ann Graves and William Eddy feasted on the roasted entrails of the deer. During the night Eddy fired the flintlock at intervals to let the others know where he and Mary Ann were camped, trying to guide them in. But Amanda McCutchen, Harriet Pike, and the Fosters did not make it to the deer that night. They camped on a ridge above them and endured another long night of hunger cramps.

Farther to the east, Sarah wrapped Jay in the one blanket they owned and sat down beside him where he lay on the ground. Now and then she heard the report of Eddy's rifle off to the west. She might have struggled on alone to Eddy's camp, and food, guided by the sound of his gun, but she could not bring herself to leave her husband, who seemed to be slipping away.

Jay likely did not hear the later rifle shots, nor Sarah speaking to him at his side. By now he was suffering severe malnutrition and probably severe hypothermia as well. When he spoke to her, his speech was slurred. It was another night of bright moonlight, and his skin must have been pearly white and cool under her touch. His face was cadaverous and shrunken, his frame gaunt and disjointed beneath his clothes. As the evening wore on, his breathing grew shallow and rattling. His mouth and lips grew dry. His heartbeat grew erratic.
Time moved ever more slowly for him, and for Sarah sitting beside him. He lapsed into and out of consciousness. Finally, a little before midnight, he died. When Sarah was sure he was gone, she rolled his body in the blanket and then lay down beside him, and held him, and tried to die herself.

 

B
ut Sarah's heart continued to beat and she to live. In the morning she took a black silk neckerchief from around Jay's stiff neck and put it around her own and then staggered forward, alone now, toward California.

Before long she came across William and Sarah Foster and Mary Ann, who were backtracking, looking for her and Jay. When Sarah told them that Jay was dead, the Fosters wasted no time. They asked Sarah point-blank if they might eat him. Sarah must, by now, have been beyond any expectation of sympathy from her companions. She must in fact have been beyond any expectation of any sort of mercy from the indifferent Fates. She looked at the Fosters and said simply, “You cannot hurt him now,” and continued up the trail with Mary Ann. The Fosters went on to where Jay's body lay and began to butcher it, severing his legs and arms from his trunk, packing onto their backs as many pieces of him as they could carry.

When Sarah reached Eddy and the remains of the deer, she ate roasted venison, the first food other than human flesh that she had tasted since December 21. Harriet Pike and Amanda McCutchen caught up with the others and joined in eating the venison. Then the Fosters also came into camp, bearing their grisly burden.

That evening they all sat around the campfire in a small circle of wavering light. Eddy had already begun drying strips of the venison by the fire, but the meat that the Fosters had brought into camp was fresh, and apparently too tempting to resist. Someone sharpened a stake, impaled Jay Fosdick's heart on it, and held it out over the coals.

What Sarah thought and felt we can only try to imagine, if such a thing is even possible. She never wrote or spoke about it in so far as we know. She might have hidden her eyes; she might have left the campfire. But there was not very far that she could go in the dark
tangle of manzanita around her, and the aroma of roasting meat must have filled the night air far beyond the circle of light. Wherever she took refuge, the vast, silent, suffocating blackness of the California foothills began to close in on Sarah, more alone now than she had ever imagined she could be.

A
s Sarah lay in the cold darkness of the California foothills that January night, living the nightmare in which she found herself, the larger world of course went on without her.

Like all tragedies, hers took place in a historical context, and as is often the case the context sheds light on how Sarah must have viewed her own situation as it unfolded. In many ways she and Jay had been moving backward in time as they moved westward across the continent. They had been slowly leaving behind the modern world as it was then and walking into the essentially Stone Age world in which the California Indians had lived for millennia. Sarah had always lived on the frontier, but even in Illinois her world had been connected to the larger world of American commerce and ideas. Here on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada, though, she found herself in a world devoid of virtually all the creature comforts and technologies of her time.

The mid-1840s was not so divorced from our own time as we sometimes tend to think when we peer at the often haggard faces of emigrants in dusty old daguerreotypes. In significant respects, in fact, the
period marked a transition between a much older way of life and a new era of innovation in which we still live. The Industrial Revolution was already well under way in Europe and in the urban centers of the eastern United States, and a new spirit of scientific inquisitiveness was being applied to nearly every aspect of life. Just two years before Sarah had set out for California, Samuel Morse had successfully transmitted a message—“What hath God wrought?”—across a thirty-eight-mile telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. In September of 1846, as Sarah made her way across the sage-lands of Nevada,
Scientific American
had published its first issue. That same month Neptune was discovered—not by random searching of the sky but by the use of mathematical models to predict its location. The following month, as Sarah first entered the Sierra Nevada, Dr. John Collins Warren made the first public demonstration of an effective anesthetic—ether—to painlessly extract a tumor from a patient's jaw. The American inventor Richard Hoe developed a rotary printing press that year that could spit out eight thousand printed pages per hour. In England, Daniel Gooch unveiled a powerful new steam locomotive—the Great Britain—that could pull a staggering one hundred tons of deadweight at fifty miles per hour for seventy miles.

And it wasn't just the technological foundations of our world that were being laid in the 1840s; cultural issues and concepts were arising that would dominate the twentieth century and live into the twenty-first. Charles Darwin had published
Voyage of H.M.S.
Beagle. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were at work on
The Communist Manifesto
even as Sarah suffered in the mountains. On the East Coast, women's benevolent societies were planting the seeds of modern feminism. Richard Wagner was inventing new concepts in the language of music, composing operas like
Rienzi
and
Tannhäuser.
Edgar Allan Poe was writing the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the first modern mystery, “The Gold Bug.”

If Sarah had been picked up out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, flown twenty-five hundred miles east, and put down in New York City, she would have found a scene of enormous vitality and considerable modernity. She would have moved among throngs of people bustling through a network of busy streets—streets that you or I could
follow using any twenty-first-century map of lower Manhattan. On the southeast side of town, she would have found herself among new, monumental stone buildings, many of which still stand today. At 26 Wall Street, she could have visited the new Customs House, now the Federal Hall National Monument. At 55 Wall Street, she would have found businessmen hurrying in and out of the stately new Greek Revival Merchants' Exchange Building. Up the street and around the corner, she could have stopped to offer prayers for Jay's soul at Trinity Church, the soaring Gothic Revival spires and steeple of which made it the tallest building in the city. If she had climbed into the steeple, she could have looked out over sprawling shipyards and watched dozens of steam ferries plying the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, watched passenger liners belching clouds of black smoke as they departed for Europe. She could have taken a commuter train from City Hall north to Twenty-seventh Street for six and a half cents or continued to Harlem for twelve and a half cents. She could have taken the Long Island Rail Road north from Brooklyn all the way to Boston via a train/ferry combination. She could have watched students poring over their books at Columbia College on Park Place or at New York University, or sat on adjoining Washington Square watching gaslights flickering all around her as dusk gave way to darkness.

Much more likely, though, Sarah would have headed straight for one of New York's 123 full-service restaurants, perhaps an economical choice like Sweeney's on Anne Street, where she could buy a plate of assorted meats for six cents, a plate of vegetables for three cents. If she had one of the silver dollars from her father's hoard and wanted a fine beefsteak, she might have stopped in at Delmonico's on Beaver Street. Even if she had no money at all, she could have retreated to the Alms-House, a sprawling thirty-acre complex on the East River, complete with sixty sleeping apartments, two large dining rooms, a school, a chapel, and a hospital, open to any “well-behaved person” who might apply for aid and a hot meal.

But there were no almshouses in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There were no telegraph wires to send an SOS to Johnson's Ranch; no steam train to carry Sarah to Sutter's Fort; no restaurants of any kind, let alone Delmonico's; no flickering gaslights, only the flickering of
the campfire over which Jay Fosdick's entrails had just been roasted. The most advanced technology at the disposal of Sarah and her companions was the old flintlock rifle that Eddy carried. They were no better equipped, technologically, than Sarah's forefathers had been when they first stepped onto the continent two hundred years before. If any of them were going to survive the rest of the journey, it would have to be on the basis of strength, endurance, cunning, and courage.

 

O
n January 7, Sarah picked up what remained of her hope and her life and staggered on, following the others forlornly through the manzanita. They were down to seven now, all five of the women but only two men—William Eddy and William Foster. Before they had gone far, they discovered that the river, deep in the canyon below them, had made an abrupt ninety-degree turn to the south. To continue on a generally westerly course, as they knew they had to in order to have any chance of finding Johnson's Ranch, they would have to recross the canyon. Over the next many hours, they slid, stumbled, and fell into the gorge, descending from an elevation of roughly twenty-seven hundred feet to the river at about twelve hundred feet.

To a large extent, they were barefoot now, their shoes having dis-integrated and the shreds of blanket in which they had since wrapped their feet rapidly falling apart as well. By the time they reached the bottom of the canyon, their feet—already cracked and swollen—had been lacerated by the sharp rocks of the canyon wall. Their clothes had been burned through in places from crowding too close to their nightly fires. Their garments were so tattered that neither the women nor the men could even begin to maintain their modesty any longer—thighs and breasts and buttocks peeked out from under the miserable rags that hung limply from their shoulders.

They camped that night in country that was laden with gold. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of gold lay in the California foothills, much of it right where they now slept—hidden in the blue gravel beneath them, in pockets behind boulders deep in the fast-flowing river, in the sharp quartz rocks that had been cutting their feet and their hands all day, in the ancient drifts of sand and gravel
hundreds of feet thick, forming many of the ridges around them.
*
In a little more than a year, John Marshall and Peter Wimmer—the latter of whom had traveled just ahead of Sarah back on the plains—would pluck a gold nugget out of a millrace at Coloma twenty miles south of here and transform California forever. Eighteen months from now, men would begin swarming up and down this river canyon and over these hills, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Sarah and her companions would not then have been able to travel a hundred yards up or down this river without coming to a campfire, a tent, a warm meal of bacon and beans and biscuits. But that was in the future, and they were not. For now this was as lonely and trackless a place as they could imagine, without comfort and without mercy.

The next day they faced the much harder task of climbing back out of the canyon on the northwestern side of the river. It was again an all-day effort, and this time it took nearly everything they had to make the fifteen-hundred-foot, nearly vertical climb. They grappled for footholds and handholds as brush lashed at their faces and further shredded their clothes. Their feet smeared the rocks with blood as they climbed. They concentrated on the rocks and brush in front of their faces, trying not to look back over their shoulders as they climbed higher and the void behind them grew increasingly alarming. They heaved and grunted, gasped and sometimes sobbed. Toward the end of the day, they crawled over the rim of the canyon and lay prostrate on relatively level ground. They were likely not much more than about twenty miles almost due east of Johnson's Ranch now, but they did not know that. They did not in fact know within a hundred miles where on earth they were.

 

T
hat same day, at Truckee Lake, Margret and Virginia Reed staggered back into camp, along with Milt Elliott. The three of them had been five days undertaking an audacious but ultimately doomed attempt to break out of the mountains.

Before they had left, Margret Reed had taken the last hide from the roof of her half of the double cabin and moved her children to the Breen and Keseberg shanties. There they had made a meal of Cash, the last of the Reeds' family dogs, an experience Virginia later wrote her cousin Mary about.

Then they had set out for the pass. The Reeds' servant, Eliza Williams, had started out with them but became exhausted and returned the second day, but the others had stopped to fashion improvised snowshoes and made it over the pass. By the fourth day, though, they had become lost, wandering among the peaks. When Virginia's feet had begun to suffer from apparent frostbite, they had finally aborted the effort and returned, though Margret Reed well knew she had almost nothing more to offer her children in the way of food back at the lake.

In the cold darkness of the Murphy cabin huddled up against the large granite boulder, meanwhile, the widow Levinah Murphy had grown seriously ill and was often unable to arise from her bed. And she was beginning slowly to go blind—perhaps from snow blindness, perhaps from general debility brought on by foraging for food and wood. Her seventeen-year-old son, John Landrum, who as the oldest male in the family had for weeks been doing most of the heavy work, also lay in bed, starting to rant and rave. Her younger children were doing better, but all of the infants in the cabin—Catherine Pike, George Foster, and Margaret Eddy—were weakening rapidly. Catherine was especially feeble. Plagued not only by hunger but also by the lice and bedbugs that infested her bedding, she made low, barely audible sobbing sounds almost continuously now. As her face shrank in on itself, her eyes seemed to grow larger and darker.

Half a mile to the east, in her part of the double cabin, Elizabeth Graves tended to another rapidly declining infant. Harriet McCutchen was also afflicted by lice, and her screaming was so incessant that it haunted Patty Reed on the other side of the log partition day and night. Elizabeth's own children were still relatively robust, but her stock of beef was running low.

 

I
n the hills above the North Fork of the American River, insanity stalked the snowshoe party. They began to glare at one another out of hollow eyes, like wild animals. William Foster in particular seemed to be coming unhinged. Over the past few days, he had grown listless and despondent. He had ceased helping to make fires at night and looked more and more to his wife and the others to take care of him.

Precisely what happened next is unclear, as later accounts varied. By some accounts, after gazing upon Amanda McCutchen for some time, Foster approached William Eddy privately and proposed killing her for food, arguing that she was slowing them all down anyway. Eddy protested violently against such a thing, pointing out that Amanda was a mother. Foster, in this version of events, then reportedly proposed another plan that would avoid that objection and also provide a greater yield of meat as well—killing both Sarah and Mary Ann, neither of whom was a mother. Eddy then apparently pulled a knife and threatened to kill Foster if he pursued the subject. It's impossible to know whether the confrontation happened so dramatically or whether the story simply grew more vivid with the later telling. A different version of events suggested, in fact, that Eddy himself tried to lure Mary Ann Graves away from the others in order to kill her. But it is clear that Foster at least, and perhaps Eddy as well, had reached some kind of snapping point.

It's not surprising that minds had begun to unravel in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As Nathaniel Philbrick points out in
In the Heart of the Sea,
people living in conditions of extreme stress often undergo a process of psychic deadening. They stop experiencing ordinary human feelings such as compassion and understanding. Their desire to survive usurps these emotions and replaces them with a kind
of cunning, cruel, self-centeredness. They begin to ignore the rules the rest of us play by. Religious and moral tenets that they may have adhered to all their lives begin to fall away, freeing them to do whatever seems in their best interest at any given moment.