The Indifferent Stars Above (30 page)

E
ighteen fifty-five was a marrying year for the Graves girls. In February, Nancy, now sixteen and an enthusiastic convert to Methodism, married a young Englishman, a Methodist minister named Richard Wesley Williamson, and set out on what would turn out to be a lifelong saga of missionary work. In June, Lovina married John Cyrus, who had traveled the Hastings Cutoff just ahead of the Donner Party. A year or two earlier, smallpox had swept through his household in the upper Napa Valley, killing his father and two brothers and leaving John as the head of the family. And on Christmas Eve that year—a year and a half after Ritchie's lynching—Sarah went to Eleanor's house and stood in the parlor and married for a third time. Her new husband, Samuel Spires, was a farmer, a thirty-seven-year-old widower with two children from a previous marriage. He was by all accounts a good and kindly man, and that, above all, was what Sarah needed.

It's likely that the marriage was more pragmatic than romantic in its origins, as so many nineteenth-century marriages were. At thirty,
Sarah probably saw in Sam Spires a ready form of salvation—a means of recapturing for herself and her children some of the economic security that a gang of vengeful men had deprived them of just eighteen months before. And if Sam Spires, a melon farmer, was not an adventurous younger man, so much the better. By now Sarah had likely had her fill of adventurous young men.

Over the next ten years, Sarah and Sam Spires continued to live and farm in the Napa Valley. Sarah produced four more children—Lloyd in 1857, William in 1861, Eleanor in 1862, and finally Alice Barton in 1865. After Alice was born, they packed up their family and left behind the valley in which Sarah had lived for twenty years now. They lived for a time in Visalia, on the eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley, where Mary Ann and a new husband of her own, James Clarke, had settled. Then they moved on to Corralitos, a small community nestled in a valley southeast of Santa Cruz on the coast.

 

J
ust over a range of hills from the wide blue crescent of Monterey Bay, Corralitos was a world unto itself immediately after the Civil War, as it is today. It was only a village—perhaps twenty houses, a half-dozen stores, a flour mill, a blacksmith shop, a tannery, and a schoolhouse nestled at the base of a redwood-covered hill. But it lay in one of the most charming settings in California, a much smaller rival to the beauty of the Napa Valley. At the head of the Corralitos Valley, where the village sat, a creek poured down out of the redwoods, powering both the flour mill and a pair of sawmills higher in the mountains. Wheat fields spread out on the valley floor. In nooks and glens off the main valley, there were new apple, pear, cherry, and plum orchards—fluffy and white with blossoms in the spring, stately and green in the summer, and heavy with red and golden and purple fruit by the approach of fall. To the south the valley opened out into the large, fertile, and almost perpetually foggy plain surrounding Watsonville, where the Pajaro River wandered down to the bay.

Early in the mornings and late in the afternoons, fog filtered through the redwoods above Corralitos, muffling the valley with a soft gray blanket. But by midday the sun burned through the fog and
warmed the village and the floor of the valley and the homes that sat tucked among the wheat fields and orchards. It was the kind of country that made a man with an inclination to farm want to thrust his bare hands into the rich, warm, black redwood loam and plant something. And that is what Samuel Spires did, planting and tending melons and strawberries and various truck vegetables while Sarah tended at home to her new brood of young children.

Whatever degree of peace and domestic tranquillity Sarah and Samuel knew in Corralitos did not last long, though. On March 28, 1871, at the age of forty-six, lying at home in an old walnut bed with a high headboard and a wide footboard, Sarah died. Her heart gave out. Years later her daughter Alice remembered that her mother looked peaceful but old far beyond her years as she lay in her deathbed. Samuel did not cry when his wife died, but he appeared stunned, much as when, Alice remembered, he had once awakened and found that an early frost had ruined his melon crop just as it came to perfection. When it was over, the house was still. Outside, all across the valley, with every passing breeze, showers of white petals fell silently from apple trees, like snowflakes.

I
n the months and years following their rescue from the mountains, the survivors of the Donner Party went on to live or die as best they could.

Billy Graves returned from Illinois in 1849, guiding a party of Gold Rushers. When the company reached Donner Lake, Graves disappeared for an afternoon. He might simply have gone hunting, he might not have wanted his fellow travelers to see his distress at revisiting the site of his suffering, or—and this is purely my own speculation—he might have gone searching for the cache of coins his mother had buried three years before. He settled in Calistoga, just north of the little community surrounding the Bale Mill where his sisters lived, and took up blacksmithing and prospecting. He married a Pomo Indian woman, then later abandoned her, and in 1873 married Martha Cyphers, from whom he was later divorced. In his old age, he was a notoriously eccentric figure around Calistoga. He died in Santa Rosa in 1907.

Mary Ann and James Clarke lived out their lives on their ranch in Visalia. Mary Ann gave birth to seven children and took in Sarah's
young daughters, Eleanor and Alice, for a time following their mother's death. Mary Ann remained a strong and somewhat formidable figure in later years, given to smoking a clay pipe. But she remained emotionally scarred by her Donner Party experiences for the rest of her life. Mary Ann died in Visalia in 1891 and is buried there.

Eleanor Graves and her husband, William McDonnell, acquired a sprawling ranch in Knights Valley, north of Calistoga, where they prospered, and Eleanor bore them ten children, though four died young. At the time they settled on their ranch, it was said to be the northernmost American homestead on the Pacific coast until one reached Oregon. Like Mary Ann, the McDonnells took in Sarah's daughters for a time. Eleanor died at the ranch in 1894.

Lovina and John Cyrus produced six children and lived well in the upper Napa Valley, where they became well-known and beloved figures. Lovina died in 1906 and was buried in Calistoga.

Nancy and her husband moved from town to town in California, spreading the Methodist faith and rearing nine children. Late in life they finally came to roost in Sebastopol, California, where Nancy died in 1907. To the end of her days, she remained averse to talking about the Donner Party ordeal and outright refused to provide information about it to Charles McGlashan.

On May 14, 1891, a prospector named Edward Reynolds was scratching around on a hillside above the western end of Donner Lake when he found a few old silver dollars lying near the rotten stump of a pine tree, about thirty feet from a large boulder. Digging deeper, he found more silver coins. The next day he returned to the site with a compatriot, Amos Lane, and with the editor of the
Truckee Republican,
Charles McGlashan, who had by then become an authority on the Donner Party. The men did some more excavating and soon had a hatful of silver and gold coins, the earliest of which was dated 1845. When he was later shown the coins, Billy Graves identified them as those that his mother had buried in 1847, noting tooth marks that one of the Graves children had left on one when teething as a baby. Half of the coins were given to Reynolds and Lane; the others were distributed among members of the Graves family, whose descendants treasure them to this day.

Peggy and Patrick Breen's family survived the disaster intact. In September of 1847, they left Sutter's Fort and moved to San Juan Bautista, where they lived rent-free in the adobe of General José Castro, who had commanded the Mexican army in Northern California during the Mexican War. In 1849 the Breens' oldest son, John, then seventeen, went to the goldfields and returned with twelve thousand dollars. The Breens used the money to buy the Castro adobe and to acquire large amounts of land in what is now San Benito County. From that point forward, they prospered and became prominent members of their new community, not far from where Sarah died in 1871. Patrick Breen died in 1868, and Peggy Breen followed him in 1874. In 1878, James Breen, just five at the time of the disaster, walked into the offices of the
Truckee Republican
and asked Charles McGlashan if he could subscribe to the paper. When McGlashan learned that the young man was a survivor of the Donner Party, he became so intrigued that he launched an intensive effort to research the story. His effort culminated six months later in the first full-fledged book on the subject,
History of the Donner Party.

James Reed's family also emerged intact, and they also prospered. As a result of real-estate transactions and mining successes, Reed acquired both wealth and social prominence in San Jose, presiding over large tracts of land, including the one on which San Jose State University now stands. Reed continued to have what some considered an outsize opinion of himself. In July 1847, he wrote home, “Our misfortunes were the result of bad management. Had I remained with the company, I would have had the whole of them over the mountains before the snow would have caught them; and those who have got through have admitted this to be true.” Margret Reed remained frail after the disaster and died in 1861; James died in 1874. Virginia Reed converted to Catholicism after witnessing the strength that the Breens' faith had given them in their cabin at the lake. She married and bore nine children and died in 1921. Patty Reed became one of the public faces of the Donner Party in her later life, partly because of the endearing story of the small wooden doll that she had carried across the plains and kept hidden at the lake camp, but mostly because of her ceaseless efforts to keep alive the memory of those who had suffered. She bore eight children and was
widowed at a relatively young age. She supported her children by keeping a boardinghouse in Santa Cruz and died there in 1923.

After they left Sutter's Fort, George and Tamzene Donner's orphaned daughters were taken in by other families, including the Reeds, who took in Frances. All the girls married, lived full lives, and bore children. Georgia died in 1911, Frances in 1921, Eliza in 1922, Elitha in 1923, and Leanna in 1930.

Three children from Jacob and Elizabeth Donner's family survived as orphans. Ten-year-old George Donner was first taken to San Francisco, where he lived rent-free in a hotel and where Lansford Hastings provided him with some of his clothes. He later became a farmer, but he died in 1874, just thirty-seven years old. Several of Mary Donner's injured toes were removed at Johnson's Ranch immediately after her rescue. She, like her cousin Frances, was taken in and raised by the Reed family in San Jose. She married in 1859 but died within a year, apparently from complications arising from childbirth. Solomon Hook worked variously as a carpenter, an innkeeper, and a farmer and died of cancer of the jaw in 1878.

William Eddy, having lost his wife, Eleanor, and his two children in the disaster, moved to the San Jose area. In 1848 he remarried, and he and his wife had three children, including one whose name stood as a testament to Eddy's political views—James Knox Polk Eddy. He subsequently divorced and remarried again and died in Petaluma, California, on Christmas Eve 1859.

Amanda and William McCutchen, mourning their baby, Harriet, moved first to Sonoma and then to Gilroy in the Santa Clara Valley, where William was elected sheriff in 1853. In 1857, Amanda died in childbirth. William remarried and lived until 1895, when he died of a stroke.

In June 1847 the young widow Harriet Pike married Michael Nye at Sutter's Fort. The couple raised stock in the Marysville area for a few years and then moved to The Dalles in northern Oregon, where Harriet died in 1870. Her daughter Naomi, brought out of the mountains by the First Relief at the age of two, married a banker and became his wealthy widow, until the stock-market crash of 1929 wiped out her fortune. She died in 1934.

Mary Murphy, fifteen and an orphan when she was brought to Johnson's Ranch by the First Relief, married the ranch's proprietor, William Johnson, that same June. Johnson soon proved to be an abusive husband and, in Mary's own words, “a drunken sot.” Mary divorced him. On Christmas Day in 1848, at Sutter's Fort, she married again, this time a man named Charles Covillaud, fifteen years her senior. The couple prospered through the Gold Rush and produced five children. The town that grew up where they settled at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather rivers was named Marysville in her honor. But Mary's husband died in February of 1867, and Mary followed him in September of that same year, dying at the age of thirty-seven. Mary's brother William became a lawyer and a prominent citizen of Marysville and died there in 1904. Her youngest brother, Simon, served in the Union cavalry in the Civil War and died in Tennessee in 1873.

Of the thirteen single men who entered the Sierra Nevada with the Donner Party, just two—Noah James and Jean Baptiste Trudeau—left the mountains alive. Both had been only about sixteen at the time of the tragedy, and their youth likely contributed to their survival. In 1847, Trudeau reported to a naval officer, Lieutenant H. A. Wise, that before he had left the Alder Creek camp, he had “ate Jake Donner and the baby [Sammy Donner], ‘eat baby raw, stewed some of Jake, and roasted his head, not good meat, taste like sheep with the rot, but sir, very hungry, eat anything.'” Trudeau spent much of his life as a fisherman on Tomales Bay in Marin County. Later in life he styled himself as the Donner Party's guide. He died in 1910. Noah James disappeared into California in the spring of 1847 and was not heard of again until 1851, when a horse thief with the alias of “Mountain Jim,” but reputedly Noah James in fact, was hanged.

Louis and Philippine Keseberg were reunited when Louis limped down out of the mountains with the Fourth Relief. Keseberg worked for a time for John Sutter. He then suffered a series of business setbacks, first buying a hotel that burned down, then operating a brewery that was flooded out in Sacramento. After working at a distillery in Calistoga, Keseberg finally returned with Philippine to Sacramento. Philippine—after bearing Keseberg eight consecutive daughters—died in 1877. Keseberg—publicly and privately reviled as a voluntary
cannibal and likely a murderer as well from the time he arrived in California—watched his wife and all but one of his daughters predecease him before he died penniless and friendless in a charity hospital in 1895.

The Reeds' family cook, Eliza Williams, hiked out of the mountains with the First Relief. She married a German emigrant named Thomas Follmer at Mission San Jose in September 1847. After a brief period in Sonoma, she lived most of her life near the Reed family in San Jose. Doris Wolfinger also hiked out with the First Relief and married George Zinz, an Alsatian emigrant, that same year. The couple settled first in Sacramento and then moved to Sutter County, where she died in 1861.

Isabel Breen, the last survivor of the Donner Party—only about one year old in 1846—died on March 25, 1935, in Hollister, California, at the age of eighty-nine.

Lansford W. Hastings lived an odd and peripatetic life following the disaster. After briefly serving in the Mexican War, he set himself up as a lawyer in San Francisco, abandoned his practice to rush to the hills in search of gold, and then moved to Sacramento to go into business with John Sutter. When he had a trunk shipped from San Francisco to Sacramento, it went missing, along with fifteen hundred dollars in gold coins it contained. He nevertheless opened a retail store with Sutter, but the business promptly collapsed, causing Sutter to remark, “The store made money, but I lost. Hastings was a bad man.” Bad man or not, Hastings was appointed judge of the northern district of California and represented Sacramento at the state's constitutional convention in 1849. He went on to suffer an additional series of business failures, became the postmaster of Fort Yuma, Arizona, and then hatched a wild scheme to use the Colorado River as a means to channel goods from San Francisco to Brigham Young's burgeoning Mormon community on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. The scheme was designed, not incidentally, to create a financial empire for himself in the Southwest. He was entirely undeterred by the fact that no one had any idea whether the Colorado River was navigable through the Grand Canyon, as in fact it was most emphatically not. Hastings then served as a major in the Confederate army during the Civil War, in
which capacity he promulgated a scheme for conquering the Southwest for the Confederacy. Finally, after the war, embittered by defeat but undiminished in his capacity for pursuing bad ideas, he set out to create a Confederate colony in Brazil and sat down to write
The Emigrants' Guide to Brazil.
He died on a ship returning to Brazil sometime thereafter.