The Indifferent Stars Above (33 page)

The trail was steeper than I expected. Within five minutes my heart was thudding under my rib cage. The altitude was more than seventy-five hundred feet here. The air was thinner than I was used to, and I was quickly gaining a deep appreciation for how fit Franklin Graves, one year my senior in 1846, must have been when he fought his way over the whole of this range, not just the mile or so that I was attempting. A turkey vulture was circling lazily above the mountain, and I could not shake the notion that perhaps he made it his business to know a fool when he saw one.

Finally, after another thirty minutes of climbing and gasping, I fought through some brush to a spot where the ridgeline fell away to the east. From somewhere very near there, Lansford Hastings had pointed out to James Reed his “better route” through the Wasatch. Looking out at the confusion of green mountains and purple canyons below me, it struck me with full force—in a way that it could not have if I hadn't seen it for myself—that only a madman, or a serious salesman, could look at that landscape and propose taking a party of heavily laden wagons through it.

 

I
n mid-September, I flew to Salt Lake City and set out again on I-80. The Great Salt Lake, pale blue and frothy, its verges white with wind-whipped foam and a crust of salt, stretched away to the north. As the interstate led me out onto the salt desert, I noticed that for mile after mile alongside the road, passersby had arranged dark stones into signs, symbols, and messages on the pure white fields of salt. There were hundreds of these stony graffiti—smiley faces, hearts with initials inside, peace signs, crosses, and an occasional odd inscription like
POLYGAMY HUMPS
.

Most of the offerings, though, were simply initials with dates, manifestations of the ancient urge to record one's passage through an
interesting landscape, to leave one's mark. The Donner Party and the other emigrants of their time felt the same urge. James Reed carved his initials, “JFR,” and the date, “26 May 1846,” on a rock at Alcove Spring in Kansas, where they can still be seen today. And hundreds of Sarah's fellow emigrants in the 1840s etched their names into Independence Rock near Casper, Wyoming, as they passed by it on or near the Fourth of July each year.

Farther up the road, I parked at a rest stop and struck out on foot across the salt. I wanted to see if I could intersect Sarah's trail, to see if it was still visible. Millions of salt crystals glittered and shimmered and crunched beneath my feet as I walked. But it was hot, and after about half a mile the glare of the sunlight off the salt had narrowed my eyes down to sweaty slits. A quarter of a mile farther on, I'd had enough—my eyes were painfully dry, my head was throbbing, and I felt vaguely nauseated. By the time I got back to the rest stop, everything around me seemed to be growing dim and vaguely blackened, like a shadow world. I started up the car, turned on the A/C, put my face to one of the vents, and eagerly sucked up the cool air. My God, I thought, those people were tough.

 

O
ver the next few days, taking my time, I traveled west across the basins and ranges of Nevada—past a spot called Flowery Springs, where the women of the Donner Party all got angry at the same time; down the lazy Humboldt River; past the sandy hills where James Reed killed John Snyder; past the marshes where the Humboldt sinks into the sand and disappears; across the Forty Mile Desert, where plumes of white steam still rise from boiling-hot springs; to Wadsworth, Nevada, where Sarah first encountered the beautifully clear and bracingly cold waters of the Truckee River.

Then I made my way up the Truckee River Canyon on I-80 to Reno. I slid into town on the freeway, exited on Virginia Street, parked behind a casino, and walked through a back door into the cool, clattering, clanging darkness. At row after row of silver slot machines, solemn-looking men and women sat smoking cigarettes, dropping nickels and quarters into the slots, and pulling levers. I sat on a
stool with a roll of nickels and watched them play. They worked at their chance taking with a kind of hypnotic rhythm, inserting coins, leaning forward, pulling the lever, settling back to watch the wheel, then leaning forward to insert more coins and pull the lever again.

I thought once more about Sarah and Jay. We all play on a field of chance every day of our lives. But Sarah and Jay played on a particularly dicey field, a particularly deadly one, though they might not have fully understood that. They and their companions had taken an enormous risk simply by selling their farms and businesses and crossing the Missouri. As they had moved west, the stakes had grown higher each time they cast the dice, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, taking the unproven road south at the Parting of the Ways, following Lansford Hastings into the Wasatch and across the salt flats. And then here, just a hundred miles from their goal, where Reno and its palaces of chance would someday stand, some of them had made one final cast of the dice, pausing to rest and regroup in Truckee Meadows before assaulting the Sierra Nevada, even though they could see the snow already accumulating on the peaks ahead of them.

Sitting in the casino, I wondered if the habit of taking chances and thus far surviving them had lulled them into a false sense of security, left them as mesmerized by the temptations of fortune and the hazards of chance as those sitting around me seemed to be as they watched the wheels spin before their faces.

 

I
returned to Reno in late November and drove up into the Sierra Nevada under gray skies. I pulled off the freeway into the town of Truckee, made my way around to the back of the high school, and climbed up on a berm of earth dusted with snow. In front of me lay the westbound lanes of I-80 and a wide spot in the road where, until recently, the old California Agricultural Inspection Station used to stand.

The interstate and the inspection station were built in the 1960s, directly atop the spot where Franklin Graves had built his cabin in 1846. Their construction obliterated any traces of the cabin and precluded any hope of conducting archaeology on the site, but archaeology
of a sort
was
conducted in 1879 when Charles McGlashan, Billy Graves, and a number of townspeople from Truckee took picks and spades to the site and began to dig.

By then, people had been sifting through the remains of the double cabin and carrying off relics, perhaps including human remains, for more than thirty years. All the same, McGlashan and the others managed to find a century-old brass pistol, a flintlock rifle, bullets and lead shot, a cooper's in-shave that had belonged to Franklin Graves, and a sealed tin box in which Elizabeth Graves had kept oil of hemlock.

Standing there by the interstate, I found it hard to see past the present, to imagine the outlines of a simple cabin where so much modernity was whizzing by at seventy miles per hour. It was hard to see Sarah and Jay there, stooping over in the snow, putting on their snowshoes, about to begin their trek toward death or salvation. Hard to imagine Elizabeth Graves and Margret Reed standing in the snow, perhaps red-faced with rage, fighting over the hides draped on the roof. Imagination can only take you so far out of your own world. But it occurred to me that any one of the sixteen-wheelers racing by on the interstate could have carried all of the Donner Party over the crest of the mountains in about seven minutes.

I returned to the car, drove across an overpass to Donner Memorial State Park, and parked near the tall monument to the Donner Party.
*
After taking a photo of the monument, I went into the Emigrant Trail Museum, where a number of Donner Party artifacts were on display, including some of Elizabeth Graves's silver coins. Hung high on a wall in one corner, a picture of Sarah—the same image I had been carrying in my pocket for more than a year now—gazed down at
me as I worked my way through the museum. Looking up at her, I wondered, not for the first time, if
she
had in fact been looking down on
me
for some time now, wondering what I was up to.

 

I
n early January 2008, I returned to the Sierra Nevada. A major winter storm had just blown through, and by the time I got to Truckee, the place looked like Antarctica in July. The streets ran though deep blue canyons of snow. White cornices of snow crowned every building in town, heaped up and sculpted into improbable shapes by the storm's high winds. Shimmering silver daggers of icicles, three or four feet long, hung from every projecting eave.

I drove around the north side of Donner Lake and began to wind my way up old U.S. 40 toward Donner Pass. The road was freshly plowed but serpentine and narrow. As I climbed higher, abrupt cliffs of snow rose on the right side of the road, encroaching on the pavement and crowding me over into the left lane in places; on the left side, only a thin guardrail separated me from the void that fell abruptly away to the lake below. But the road followed the approximate route that the snowshoe party took, and I wanted to get as close as I could. Finally I parked at an observation point and looked out toward the east.

I was frankly stunned by the beauty of the place—the blue lake below me was just turning to violet in the early-evening light; the snowy peaks surrounding it were tinted gold and pink in alpenglow. Taking in the view, I recalled how Mary Ann Graves had stood near this same spot and, even though she was embarked on a life-and-death endeavor, paused to marvel at the sight of so much grandeur encapsulated in one vista.

The first time I read that she had taken the time to appreciate the view—to let her fancy wander to the image of a troop of Norwegian fur trappers roaming among icebergs—I wondered at the credibility of her report. And I wondered also about its implications. As it turns out, those implications might have been profound, at least for her.

Survival psychologists have since discovered that the people who are most likely to live through extreme, life-and-death challenges are those who open their eyes to the wonders of the world around them,
even as their own lives hang in the balance. To appreciate beauty is to experience humility—to recognize that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment. And humility, it turns out, is key to recognizing that in order to survive, you must adapt yourself to the environment, that
it
won't adapt to
your
needs. So it seems that Mary Ann Graves carried an advantage with her as she crossed Donner Pass—her attitude. She kept her eyes open; she did not deceive herself. She saw and touched, tasted, smelled, and heard everything that was happening around her, and everything that might.

 

W
hen I drove down out of the Sierra Nevada on I-80 the next day, I stopped at another scenic overlook, at Emigrant Gap. The freeway there runs along the top of the low ridge that screened Sarah and her companions from a view of Bear Valley and the emigrant road that would have brought them safely to Johnson's Ranch. Getting out of the car to stretch my legs, I could see in a single glance the crux of all that had gone wrong for them. On one side of the road, the ridge falls abruptly and dramatically away to Bear Valley, some seven hundred feet below. On the other side, it falls away more gradually into the wild canyonlands of the American River. This was where they had gone wrong, made their fateful wrong turn. They had been this close to their likely salvation but failed to see it.

In many ways that low ridge seemed to me to be a metaphor for the larger tragedy of the Donner Party, and studying it solidified in my mind a theme that seemed to keep coming back to me wherever I went in their footsteps. From the time they had first encountered Wales Bonney carrying a note from Lansford Hastings back on the approaches to the South Pass, a ridge of deception had slowly arisen between them and the truth of their situation. Led into the wilderness by a lie, led astray at times by their own dreams and ambitions, dazzled by the glare of sun off salt, and confounded by snowstorms, they had found themselves blundering ever more blindly through terra incognita as they moved west. Here at Emigrant Gap, even the landscape itself had conspired to deceive them. And when the land they encountered did not conform to their expectations, they had contin
ued to move forward as if it did, taking the easier route downhill. In the end, as a group they had exhibited precisely the opposite kind of behavior from the humility and open-eyed awareness that survivors always seem to demonstrate.

I left the interstate and drove down into Bear Valley, then down Highway 20 through the foothills to Grass Valley and on into the rolling country where Sarah finally arrived at Johnson's Ranch. I pulled over on the south side of the Bear River. Johnson's adobe, the Ritchies' cabin, and the other ranch buildings that had greeted Sarah had stood fifty yards or so to the north of the spot. It had begun to rain hard, and the river was turgid. The oaks on the other side of the river were stark, black, and leafless.

I stared across the river and recalled the night that Sarah arrived under oaks like these, and the light and warmth she found waiting within the Ritchies' cabin. Despite her bereavement and after the horror of what she had just been through, I suspect there must have been, for Sarah, a moment of utter and absolute relief such as few of us ever know. When she walked or was carried into that cabin, she was finally able to put down a burden that far exceeded any other that she had carried across the Sierra on her back. For thirty-two days, she and her sister had borne the certain knowledge that if someone did not get through to California with word of what was unfolding in the mountains, their mother and all their younger brothers and sisters would almost certainly die. She had survived, and because of that her family still had at least a chance of doing the same. If she wept that night for her father and Jay, it seemed to me that Sarah must also have wept, at least a bit, for joy.