The Indifferent Stars Above (26 page)

 

S
arah's heart must have lightened at least a bit as she watched Reed, McCutchen, and their men leave Johnson's and ride up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She knew now that there were two parties of strong, hearty, and well-provisioned men bent on saving what was left of her family, and she knew that a third, led by a U.S. naval officer, would soon be on its way. The First Relief, in fact, had been gone long enough that she could begin to expect—or at least to hope—to see them riding down the river with her mother and siblings any day now.

But she could not know just how dire the situation at the lake camp was now growing. On the same day that advance men from Reed's Second Relief met the returning First Relief and handed out food, some of the women who had been left behind in the mountains were making desperate and hitherto-inconceivable decisions. Patrick Breen recorded their plight in his diary the next day.

The following day, February 27, Reason Tucker and the First Relief met James Reed, William McCutchen, and the main body of the Second Relief somewhere in the vicinity of Yuba Gap. Told the afternoon before that his wife and two of his children were alive, Reed had stayed up through the night, baking sweet cakes for them.

When he saw black dots on the bright snow ahead slowly growing larger, Reed rushed forward to meet Margret, Virginia, and James Jr. Recognizing him, they stumbled forward themselves, trying to close the distance between them. Margret Reed fell to her knees in the snow, overwhelmed with the emotion of seeing her husband for the first time since he had ridden away into the Nevada desert and an uncertain fate five months before. Reed stooped to embrace her. But when he looked into her eyes, and then into the eyes of the other survivors, he was horrified, much as Eliza Gregson had been when she first looked into the eyes of the snowshoe party. “I cannot describe the death-like look they all had ‘Bread Bread Bread' was the begging of every child and grown person,” Reed later wrote. “I gave to all what I dared.”

Reed already knew from Glover and Rhoads that two of his children—Patty and Thomas—were still at the lake camp and that his journey wasn't going to end there. So he stayed with Margret only minutes before Tucker and Glover lead Reed's family and the other survivors down toward Bear Valley. Then he and McCutchen and their men began to hike eastward toward the lake camp, meeting
stragglers from Tucker's group and handing out sweet cakes to them as they went.

Forty-eight hours later, Reed and the Second Relief crossed Truckee Lake and approached the Breen cabin. The snow had melted a bit since the First Relief had left, and the eaves of the cabin were now protruding above the snow. Reed saw his daughter, Patty, sitting atop the cabin, her feet resting on the snow. When she saw that it was her father who was approaching, Patty Reed ran toward him but fell face-first into the snow. Reed bent and scooped his daughter out of the snow and embraced her quickly. Then he plunged into the dank depths of the cabin, where he found his son, Thomas, alive but asleep on a bed of pine boughs. As Reed later reported to a writer named J. H. Merryman, he was that afternoon “in raptures.”

The men of the Second Relief went next to the Murphy cabin. The scene there was ghastly. Skeletal, hollow-eyed women and children crawled out of the dark portal of the cabin and gathered around them. Scattered about the cabin, where Tucker and Glover had seen bodies covered by quilts a week and a half before, human bones now lay, with shreds of pink flesh still clinging to them. Levinah Murphy took Reed down into the reek of the cabin where the surviving children in her care had been lying in bed for fourteen days, too weak to stir. Clumps of human hair were strewn about, matted in bloodstained clots.

Reed told the survivors that in just two days those who were able would have to walk out. One of the men set about making soup to build the strength of those who would make the attempt. Then McCutchen and Reed continued on to the Graveses' cabin.

They found Elizabeth Graves and all her remaining children alive but, like all the others who had been here since October, emaciated and nearly disabled by famine. Again they doled out small amounts of food and explained that in two days' time they would be leaving with all who were willing and able to accompany them. Then Reed went outside and joined William McCutchen to help him dig the body of his infant daughter, Harriet, out of the snow and rebury it in some exposed soil near the cabin.

The next morning, March 2, Reed, McCutchen, and several of the others pushed on to the Donners' camp at Alder Creek. A few of the
men, though, stayed behind with Elizabeth Graves. She had told them of a problem that she needed help with. Somewhere beneath all the snow surrounding her cabin lay her family wagon and the cache of silver coins on which her family's whole future now depended. Under her direction the men began to dig for the wagon and the silver. But she could not have been happy that so many now knew about something she had thus far successfully kept concealed.

When they arrived at Alder Creek, Reed and McCutchen found two men they had sent ahead—Nicholas Clark and Charles Cady—tending to what was left of the Donner families. Elizabeth Donner, lying prostrate in her tent, was too enfeebled to do much of anything for her five children. In the other tent, George Donner lay near death. Tamzene was emaciated, but still healthy enough to get around. The three children remaining there—Frances, Georgia, and Eliza Donner—were all reasonably hale and hearty. Many years later Georgia would explain one possible reason that the children in the camp appeared more robust than the adults. For at least several days now, the children had been receiving more nourishment than that supplied by their usual rations of burned ox bones and boiled hides. Georgia sadly and cautiously recounted what the adults had decided to do.

Reed and McCutchen quickly assessed the situation in the two tents and then told the two mothers there that once again they had to make some quick and difficult decisions, just as they had less than two weeks before. Anyone who could walk should come with them immediately, the men said. Those who could not should wait for Selim Woodworth and his men, who Reed and McCutchen believed would arrive soon. Elizabeth Donner was clearly among those who were too weak to walk out, so once again she had to decide whether
and how to divide her children. This time she chose to send seven-year-old Mary, five-year-old Isaac, and her son by a previous marriage, fourteen-year-old Solomon Hook. She would not part with her two youngest, Samuel and Lewis.

The men urged Tamzene Donner to come with them and to bring all of her children. But Tamzene was adamant. Once again she would not leave her husband here to die alone. She and her three daughters would stay and wait for Woodworth. The men packed Mary and Isaac Donner onto their backs and set off for the lake camp.

They left behind seven days' worth of provisions and two men—Clark and Cady—to help Jean Baptiste Trudeau cook for the surviving Donners and perhaps nurse them back to health so that they would be able to travel when Woodworth arrived.

By eight o'clock that night, Reed and McCutchen and the others had made it, exhausted from carrying the two Donner children, back to the Graveses' cabin. McCutchen and Reed pressed on to the Breen cabin. There they finally sat down to a meal of fresh bread that Patty Reed had baked during their absence, using flour her father had left her that morning.

The night before, Patrick Breen had made the last entry he would make in the diary he'd begun back in November.

And fine and pleasant as well, it must have seemed to Patrick Breen that last night, to be sitting in his cabin with the miracle of fresh-baked bread set before him, believing now that the horrors through which he and the others at the lake camp had been living were about to end. But for him, as for many of them, the horrors were in fact just about to begin.

O
n March 3, James Reed went to Louis Keseberg's lean-to shanty at the lake camp. The last time the two men had had anything to do with each other was back on the Humboldt River on October 5, when Keseberg had stood in the sand exhorting the others to get a rope and hang Reed from the yoke of his wagon.

Keseberg was now so feeble that he could do no more than to lurch about in the shanty. His face was shrunken, his thin brown beard long and scraggly, his clothes filthy and infested with lice. Reed took Keseberg's clothes from him. Then he got a bucket of water and warmed it at the fire and took a rag and bathed the man's reeking body. He combed his hair and dressed him in clean clothes. He gave him a bit of flour and about a half pound of jerked beef, all he could spare from his own pack. He told Keseberg that he would come back in two weeks and carry him over the mountain. Then he went out into the snow to join McCutchen and the other rescuers, who had been busy washing many of the children and clothing them in fresh flannel.

It was midday already, late to be starting out, but Reed wanted to
make some progress toward the summit before nightfall. So the men of the Second Relief, after leaving one of their number, Charles Stone, to look after those who would remain at the lake camp, set off through the woods with seventeen survivors trailing behind them—this time three adults and fourteen children.

Many of them were better clothed than they had been in months—in addition to the fresh flannel clothes for the children, Reed had brought twenty-two new moccasins to replace the worn-out shoes of the emigrants. The adults all carried something, or someone. They carried some biscuits and a bit of jerked beef, perhaps a blanket or a quilt. Many of the men carried children whose parents already had their arms full with other children. Peggy Breen carried four pounds of coffee, a few strips of beef, a bit of tea, and a lump of sugar tied in a bundle at her waist so that her arms were free to carry her infant, Isabelle. Patrick Breen limped along carrying three-year-old Peter. No one was more burdened down, though, than Elizabeth Graves. She carried one-year-old Elizabeth and something that she knew that Jay would not want her to leave behind, the violin he had brought across the plains. And something else, even more valuable, and much heavier—the hoard of silver coins that some of the men had helped her retrieve from the floor of her family wagon.

Thus encumbered, slogging through slushy snow, they did not get far that first day. By late afternoon they had gone only partway up the length of the lake, and so they made a camp on a bare patch of ground on the lakeshore, just about two miles from the cabins. The weather had been warm and clear for more than two weeks now, and the members of the party counted their blessings as they contemplated the rate at which the snow was melting. That evening, as twilight faded to night, Patrick Breen took Jay Fosdick's violin and serenaded the others, the notes rising and falling plaintively as an almost-full moon rose over the cabins to the east. The spirits of many in the party began to lift for the first time in weeks.

The next morning, though, as the party prepared to push on, someone made a joke about Elizabeth Graves's coins, and whether the men should play a game of euchre to determine who should get them. Elizabeth was not amused. For her the bag of coins must have rapidly
been becoming a cruel burden, both psychologically and physically. Essentially useless to her in her present circumstances, it was nevertheless the vessel in which all her hopes and the hopes of her children lay. Particularly with Franklin dead, as she must by now have divined he was, it represented the only form of financial security she had. But with the cliffs of the pass looming ahead and a small child to carry, the heavy coins also represented an encumbrance that might well mean the difference between living and dying. And surrounded by men—many of whom she did not know and some of whom were here primarily to make money—she had no real assurance that it would not be taken from her whether she lived or died.

As the rest of the party set off toward the western end of the lake, Elizabeth Graves hung back until the others were out of sight. She measured out a distance of about thirty feet from a large rock, scratched a shallow hole in a patch of bare earth, and buried the coins. Then, clutching her infant daughter, she hobbled ahead to join the others.

Once again they made only two miles that day and camped at the western end of the lake, under the forbidding granite cliffs that led up to the summit. Their evening meal was spare that night. Reed had grown alarmed at how little they had left in the way of provisions, so everyone was limited to a bit of gruel made from their remaining flour. On the morning of March 5, Reed calculated that he had only enough left for two scanty meals for each person, enough for breakfast and dinner that day, then nothing more until they reached their first cache. Late that afternoon they struggled across the summit and arrived at the remains of the camp that the First Relief had made on their way toward the lake. Tucker and Glover had left behind a platform of green logs on which to build a fire. The camp was located in an exposed spot at the eastern end of a long meadow just west of the pass.

During the day the skies had begun to grow overcast, then leaden. Now they were nearly black with storm clouds, and the temperature began to plummet. An iron cold began to lash the tops of the trees fringing the meadow. Reed and McCutchen set the men to cutting pine boughs for beds and building a windbreak, piling snow and more pine branches around the fire platform. They felled several trees in such a way that they toppled over and intersected near the platform,
to provide a ready supply of firewood. With nightfall rapidly approaching, there was not time to do much more. Reed found time, though, to scribble notes for a journal entry.

By sunset the wind began to howl through the peaks around them. Later that night, snow began to slice down out of the sky, plastering everyone white as they huddled around the fire.

 

M
ore than a century and a half after the fact, historians and climatologists still debate whether the Donner Party fell victim to unusually cold weather in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that they did.

Back on October 30, John Sutter had noted snow in the western foothills and said that “it was low down and heavy for the first fall of the season.” Aboard the U.S. naval sloop
Portsmouth,
anchored in San Francisco Bay for much of that winter, observers more than once noted snow on the hills surrounding the bay and, on one occasion, in San Francisco itself, both rare though not unheard of in the twentieth century. George Tucker, who spent the winter in the foothills of the Sierra, said that it had rained “nearly all winter and the country was all covered with water.” Daniel Rhoads said, “This last winter is the coldest has ever been known in Calafornia.” The next spring, eastbound travelers reported snow depths in the Sierra Nevada that today would be considered highly unusual so late in the season. Crossing the pass on May 1, 1847, just two months after Reed and the Second Relief became snowbound there, James Clyman reported drifts as deep as twenty or thirty feet near the summit. More than a month later, on June 7, John Craig encountered drifts still as deep as twenty feet.

There is anecdotal evidence, in fact, that the winter of 1846 was unusually cold across the Northern Hemisphere. At Fort Vancouver
in the Oregon Country, the Columbia River was frozen over that winter. At their winter quarters in Nebraska, thousands of Mormons suffered terribly, and more than six hundred of them died, in bitterly cold blizzards that swept across the plains. Farther afield, on December 13, three days before Sarah and the snowshoe party departed the lake camp, Charlotte Brontë looked out the window of her father's parsonage in Yorkshire and wrote a friend,

The same bitter cold settled over Ireland that month, contributing greatly to the staggering misery and soaring mortality of desperate victims of the Potato Famine, a cataclysm that would in the following several few years claim perhaps a million lives.

In the Canadian Arctic, Sir John Franklin sat helplessly that winter on one of his two ships—the
Erebus
and the
Terror
—locked in ice at the south end of Peel Sound, off King William Island. Franklin, traveling south, had expected the passage to be ice-free when he entered it in September, as earlier explorers had reported, but he was quickly outflanked and entrapped by ice. What Franklin didn't know—but ice-core studies conducted in the twentieth century would show—was that he had sailed into Peel Sound just at the beginning of what would turn out to be a five-year-long period of exceptionally cold weather in the Arctic.

Franklin died the following June, his ships still trapped in the ice. His crew remained aboard the ships, dying one by one for another harrowing year until, in April of 1848, 105 survivors finally abandoned the ships. On King William Island, they converted one of the ships' boats to a fourteen-hundred-pound sled, piled supplies and personal possessions into it, and tried to escape overland. In the course of the next six miserable years every one of them died, wandering in the frozen wasteland, victims of lead poisoning from the canned food they were consuming, exposure, scurvy, and apparent cannibalism.

The scientific evidence for an exceptionally severe winter in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 is mixed. Tree-ring studies conducted in the 1980s by the University of Arizona suggest that it was a low-precipitation year—tree rings from samples taken at Donner Summit and downslope in the western Sierra Nevada do not show the kinds of growth that would be expected in a year of heavy runoff from a deep, wet snowpack. And yet stumps left behind by the Donner Party, presumably cut off a foot or two higher than the level of the snow, are known to have stood as tall as twenty-two feet, far above normal for the Donner Lake area.

As Mark McLaughlin points out in his book
The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm,
the explanation appears to be that light precipitation in the Sierra Nevada does not necessarily mean either warm weather or scant snow. In fact, it may well mean the opposite. Cold air creates light, deep snow—powder. An inch of precipitation may produce twelve inches of snow if the air is relatively warm. But the same inch of precipitation will produce as much as twenty inches of snow if the air is cold enough.

So it seems that while the Sierra Nevada did not have more storms than usual that winter, the ten major storms it did have were very cold and left very deep accumulations of snow. The first of them came early, at the end of October, and the last of them came late, in March, just as James Reed and the Second Relief arrived at the long meadow east of Donner Summit and set up camp.

And they could not, in many ways, have picked a worse place to camp. Surrounded on three sides by high granite crags—now called Mount Disney, Mount Judah, and Donner Peak—and located at the very crest of the Sierra Nevada, the landscape in which they were encamped is perfectly configured to trap massive amounts of snowfall. Open to the west, and thus to the full brunt of cold, Arctic storms blown in off the Pacific, the bowl-like landscape captures, in fact, an average of forty-one feet of snowfall per winter. That is why in 1938, less than a hundred years after the Second Relief camped here, Walt Disney chose it as the site for what is now the thirty-seven-hundred-acre Sugar Bowl Ski Resort. The snow here, at sixty-eight hundred feet, is dry, powdery, and copious even in a year of normal
precipitation—more copious, in fact, than at any other ski resort in California. And that is why the Central Sierra Snow Lab, a high-tech, instrument-laden facility that studies the extreme meteorological conditions of the high Sierra, is located just down the road. For experiencing blizzards in the Sierra Nevada, this is the place to be.

 

A
ll through the night of March 5, the storm that had caught the Second Relief near the summit continued to intensify. The party formed a circle around the fire, their feet pointing inward, lying close to one another. Elizabeth Graves held her baby, Elizabeth. Nancy, Jonathan, and Franklin Jr. lay close by. Peggy Breen clutched her own infant daughter, Margaret, to her breast, letting her suck, though Peggy's milk had ceased to flow some days before. Periodically she peeked under her cloak at the skeletal baby to see if she was still alive, surprised each time to find that she was. Next to her, Patrick Breen and four more of their children crushed up against one another.

William McCutchen and James Reed and some of the other men got up now and then to forage for firewood, but each time they did so, they had to go farther out into the icy, black void beyond the firelight.

As the night wore on, the radiant heat emanating from the fire, ablaze on the large platform of green logs, began to melt a wide hole in the snow under the logs. The platform and the fire slowly started to sink into the hole. Some of the men gave up on gathering firewood and instead began to pray. Reed, McCutchen, and a few others continued gathering wood and shoring up the berm, frantically trying to keep the wind and blowing snow from extinguishing the fire. McCutchen, returning from one of his wood-foraging trips, sat with his back to the fire trying to warm up, so numb that he was not aware his clothes had ignited until all four of the shirts he was wearing were burned from his back.

Reed, by now, had grown desperately concerned about the lives of his own two children as well as all the others in his charge. He later remembered that he watched helplessly as “the pitiless snow beat fiercely against their thinly clad and weak forms; their blood grew chill in their veins, and death, with glaring eyes, stared them in the face.”