The Year of Decision 1846, page 47
There were eighty-six of them now, and twenty-three wagons. They toiled on, hurrying as fast as the condition of the oxen permitted, and in five days reached the last oasis east of the Salt Desert, Skull Valley. Here they found fragments of paper tacked to a board. Tamsen Donner gathered them up and pieced them together, and they proved to be a note from Hastings. The author of their ills was confessing another enthusiasm. He had originally said that the Salt Desert was no more than forty miles wide and could be crossed in one day. Now he was telling them that the crossing would take two days and nights.3
It took them six days and they traveled all or most of every night.
Here is where the membrane broke, where the group was atomized to individuals. The blinding glare, the burning blue sky with the insolent peace of bellying clouds, the horizon of mountains blue and purple and amethyst, the reds of sunset and the greens of dawn — the cruel beauty of the death-giver could be observed in irony. Twisting whirlwinds or high walls of salt blew past them. Mirages offered them lakes and streams or showed them fields of grass blowing in the wind. William Eddy saw a file of men moving across the distance; they were himself repeated twenty times. Others saw similar processions and once some of them cried out, for this must be Hastings, the deliverer, coming back to help his victims. But none of this mattered for fear and the pit were upon them. They might die … here … now. The social system disintegrated. Some drove their oxen to the uttermost exertion, some tried to conserve their strength, some merely went on. Following the tracks of Hastings’ wagons, they strung out across the white hell, under sun or full moon, formless, disorganized, at random, the stock failing, men and women with death in their hearts, all of them forced to observe the stoic, uncomprehending agony of the children.
The heavily loaded outfits of Reed and the Donners fell to the rear, where shrewdness would have put them anyway in a crisis of sauve qui peut. But too much had been required of the oxen in the Wasatch, and by the third night there was no water left in the casks. Men and stock must have water or die in the salt. Reed rode ahead, passing most of the others. Some had abandoned their wagons, driving the teams toward the water that was somewhere ahead. Others, frail, black-faced, stolid, were trying to keep to the wheel tracks. At the end of the fourth day (if he had slept at all, it was during part of the first night) he got to Pilot Peak and its springs. William Eddy and the Graveses had got there before him, first of all. Eddy, taking water to an exhausted ox, went back a few miles with Reed, who again in the moon’s unreality passed down the frayed line of specters. He met his own teamsters, who had unhitched the oxen and were trying to get them and his horses to water in time. Then the Donners, driving their stock and some wagons. Then an abandoned Donner wagon and at last, toward dawn, his wife and children and some employes. One of the employes took Reed’s horse back. The others waited for the drivers and the oxen.
They sat there in the salt, under the sun, blistered by wind, all the next day. No oxen and no drivers came.… The herd, maddened by thirst, had stampeded into the wasteland and would never be recovered.… So at the end of the day, Reed carrying the three-year-old Tommy, the others packing some food from the wagons and the remaining gills of water, they started out to walk it. When the children could go no farther, they made a kind of camp. An insane ox charged them and they got up again and went on. They reached Jacob Donner’s wagon, Reed heard that he had lost his teams, and, leaving his family, hurried on. Nearly everyone was getting to Pilot Peak now, some with their wagons, some with only their teams, some staggering in alone. The last day stretched out its agony, Jacob Donner came in with Reed’s family, and, with no one dead, they had crossed the Salt Desert in six days. September 8.
Thirty-six oxen all told, just half of them Reed’s, had died or stampeded into emptiness. As soon as they had drunk and let the surviving oxen drink, they started back to round up any stock they could find and bring the wagons in. When at last they had finished, the extent of disaster was clear. Those of high degree had been cast down, Reed altogether. They had futilely cached most of his possessions and abandoned two of his wagons, one of them the great van which his stepdaughter Virginia was to call the Pioneer Palace Car. He still had one ox and a cow; he hired two oxen from others and yoked the two teams thus formed to his remaining wagon. The surplus food supplies he had carried were distributed among his companions, who would presently refuse to share them with his family. Jacob Donner also abandoned a wagon, and so did the opulent Keseberg.
There were few spare teams left now, and all the stock was dangerously worn down. No more dangerously so, however, than their owners. The Salt Desert had accelerated the collapse which the Wasatch had begun.
They started toward the Humboldt. They had no way of knowing how to get there except by following Hastings’ tracks — and the booster had taken the Harlan-Young party on a wide detour instead of using the trail which Clyman had found for him three months before.4 Instead of taking a straight line, then, they tacked westward by long north and south courses which added at least a week to their traveling time. The oxen weakened and some of them died, and the wagons kept falling apart. The travelers repeatedly lightened their loads, sometimes making caches in the dream that they would be able later on to come back and open them, sometimes just leaving the stuff there in the desert. The process of doubling up had begun as the oxen failed: your remaining team and my wagon, whichever looks stronger, and as much food as we think we can carry.
Now they realized that it wasn’t enough food. To the terror that they might not get across the Sierra before the snow came (now stimulated by a typical September snowstorm) there was added the terror that they might starve before they could freeze. So they did what the desert-bound in these parts always did: they resolved to appeal to Sutter. After a debate in which the nakedest suspicions must have found utterance, two who had previously served them volunteered and were accepted, the bachelor Stanton and the tall, powerful McCutchen, who would leave a wife and child behind him. On September 18 they rode ahead, hoping to bring supplies back from the Sacramento Valley in time. There was the plain danger that they might not get through to Sutter’s. But in the minds of those they left behind, what assurance could there be that, if they should get through to food, comfort, and safety, they would commit the folly of coming back?
The going was dreadful all the way to the Humboldt. Even on the trail the Nevada stretches were always felt to be the worst of all. Except for occasional dry drives there was always water, and the double-teaming, the struggle with narrow gaps of rock or sudden and insane vertical hills or knife wedges of rock or stinking quicksand, was by now so routine that no one noticed. But it was here that the reserves of physical strength and moral stamina were exhausted. Here the cumulative strain of emigration precipitated trouble for man and beast and outfit alike, if it was going to. And here, if you were going to, you encountered the Diggers, their half-gram brains vibrating with the remembered murders of hundreds of kinsmen and with desire for oxen and other plunder.
The term “Digger” is an epithet, not a classification. It was properly applied to Indians who, being unskillful hunters or residing in country where game was scarce, lived on roots. But it came to mean certain degenerate bands of various tribes who can be exactly described as the technological unemployed. Unable to stand competition with hardier Indians, they had been pushed into the deserts and, living there on the subsistence level, had lost their culture. Many of them were physically decadent. The weapons of all were crude. Mostly they lived in caves or brush huts. Some had lost the use of fire. Some “Diggers” were Bannack or Shoshoni in origin; those in Great Salt Lake Valley were Paiute and Gosiute; fragments of other neighboring tribes also degenerated, and the Indians who harassed the Donners probably belonged to the Kuyuidika band of the Paviotso. But the whites who used the term meant no particular tribe; they meant only that they hated skulking, theft, and malicious mischief. From Ewing Young and Joseph Walker on, they had massacred Diggers idly, for fun, or in punishment for theft. The Diggers remembered … If they had not, they might have succored the Donners in the snow.
* * *
Hastings’ route followed down the valley of the south fork of the Humboldt and the Donner party reached its junction with the main trail on September 30. They had come back (just west of Elko) to the road from Fort Hall which they should have taken from the Little Sandy or Fort Bridger. Exactly a month before, on August 30, Edwin Bryant had come down to Johnson’s ranch on the far side of the Sierra.
The party split in two, one group forming round the Donners, whose outfits had survived in the best condition and could travel faster. The division was made on the theory that they could thus make more efficient use of the sparse grass. But it was really an act of anxiety, further evidence that the bonds of the community had been broken.
Some Diggers who came into camp seemed amiable and they were fed and allowed to spend the night. They were gone in the morning and so were two oxen. Some of their kin got a horse presently, and others began shooting arrows, not yet fatally, into the hides of oxen. And on October 5 the constraints of human association snapped apart. Note that in approximately the same place Bryant had stepped between two companions who were bent on killing each other.
It was double-teaming up one more of a thousand slopes that did the business. The Reeds had by now merged their small remaining outfit with Eddy’s. Reed’s teamster, Milt Elliott, who was driving the single wagon, had hitched Pike’s team to it for the ascent. Elliott got into a quarrel with John Snyder, of the Graves party, over precedence up the hill. Snyder flamed into a rage and became violently abusive. Reed intercepted his threats. Snyder began to beat Reed over the head with his bull-whip, gashing him badly. Reed drew a knife and stabbed Snyder, just as another blow from the whip knocked him down. Snyder died almost at once. And at once this band of pilgrims traveling the frontier of death were atomized to armed men threatening one another. The Graveses demanded Reed’s life. Keseberg, whom Reed had once insisted on temporarily banishing from the train for rifling an Indian grave and thus risking all their lives, propped up his wagon tongue — they were sufficiently veteran to know that this was how you hanged a man on the trail. Reed, supported by Eddy and Elliott, would not be hanged without some shooting first. When due fear of loaded guns had made itself felt above the blood lust, the party convened as a court, Reed’s wounds bandaged and his wife’s face showing the bruise where Snyder’s whip had struck her. Sentence: on promise of the others to take care of his family, Reed must hereafter travel alone. And unarmed.
Such a verdict could not have been reached if the more stable Donners had been with this half of the party. Not only the cruelty but the grotesque folly of the sentence shows what inroads fear and exhaustion had made on their intelligence. They were depriving themselves of their strongest personality.
Prevailed on by his family, and by the thought that he might bring help to them all, Reed rode ahead the next day. Someone — either Virginia Reed or William Eddy — defied the common will by taking his rifle to him and so giving him a chance to survive. He overtook the forward section and had breakfast with George Donner. One of his teamsters who was traveling with them, Walter Herron, joined him and they went on. They carried a letter from George Donner to Sutter, asking him to send help and containing Donner’s promise to pay all the expenses that might be involved. So there were now two pairs of messengers ahead of the divided train.
As the rack twists, certain of these people are seen to be more resistant than the others. In that inscrutable area of the personality which we call moral, Reed and his wife, George and Tamsen Donner, Mary Graves, Stanton, McCutchen, and William Eddy had a greater richness than their companions. It goes into the total sum for what it is worth. It proved to be worth much.
They were six days along the Humboldt stretch of the trail when the quarrel occurred. It took them the entire month of October to travel that stretch, go up the Truckee, and reach Truckee Lake just east of the final Sierra crossing. They had ceased to be a group long since. Some of them now ceased to acknowledge membership in the human race. Obeying the law of avalanches, the daily disasters grew worse.
Hardkoop, who was more than sixty years old, had been traveling with Keseberg and had suffered badly from the desert. One morning he could walk no more. Keseberg, with the limpid logic of the German mind, would not take him in a wagon, condemning the unfit for the preservation of the strong. Eddy was at the end of the caravan that day — it was of course no longer a caravan but only an irregular line. He saw Hardkoop, promised to take him in after crossing a difficult stretch, found the stretch longer than he had thought, and forgot Hardkoop. That night he did not come in, and that night and the next day Eddy, Elliott, and Pike would obey the obligations of humanity and go back for him. But they had no horse to ride. Those who had horses would not lend them for such an errand. Let him die. He died.
Route Taken by the Donner Party
They caught up with the section that had been leading — at a place where a member of the Harlan-Young party had been killed, and his grave rifled, by Diggers. At once the Diggers ran off Graves’s horses. The next night they got eighteen oxen and a cow. The following night they playfully shot arrows into some oxen without killing them. The third night they shot twenty-one oxen, and those which were not killed were useless.… If there had been one mountain man along, the Diggers would not have struck more than once.
The last massacre of cattle occurred at the Sink of the Humboldt. Other horses and oxen had been dying. Wagons were abandoned. The dreary process of combining outfits and caching possessions in the hope of sometime reclaiming them went on. Wolfinger stayed behind one day to cache some of his wealth. Probably he wore a money belt. His countrymen, Reinhardt and Spitzer, stayed to help him, and Keseberg was also making a cache that day. When Keseberg, alone, caught up with the rest, he was suspected of having killed Wolfinger, but that was one offense Keseberg refrained from committing. It was Reinhardt and Spitzer who murdered Wolfinger, got his money belt if he had one, and reported that Indians had killed him and burned his outfit.
Many of the oxen killed by Diggers had belonged to the Donner brothers, and serious inroads had now been made on that opulent outfit. Tamsen had dreamed of founding a polite academy for girls in the never-never land of California. Now a great crate of books designed for its library was buried in the desert. They would come back and get it sometime.… Neither Eddy nor the Donners could help Mrs. Reed and her children. All of Eddy’s stock was finished and he could get none from anyone. He had smashed the lock of his rifle. No one would take his three-year-old son or the year-old Peggy into a wagon. He made a pack of some powder and bullets and three pounds of sugar. His wife carried the baby, he carried the three-year-old. On the last day in the desert the children nearly died of thirst. When they came into camp, old Patrick Breen, whose casks were full, refused them water. Eddy announced that he would kill Breen if he interfered and got some water for the kids. The next day, with a borrowed gun, Eddy killed nine geese. He distributed them among the families. The Diggers killed some more oxen.
At the end of that desert was the Truckee River. They rested for a day. Reinhardt and Spitzer came in and told their Wild West romance. The widow Wolfinger attached herself to the Donners, who crawled ahead of the rest again, and Eddy could get no food for his children. They headed up Truckee Canyon. And then, on the third day, October 19, Stanton came riding in from the west with seven pack mules and two Indians driving them. Sutter, whose mules and Indians they were, had not failed them. Nor had Stanton and McCutchen failed them. McCutchen had given out on the crossing and was laid up at Sutter’s. But Stanton, a bachelor, moved solely by the obligation which most of them daily refused to acknowledge, had, after reaching safety, put his life in jeopardy again and brought back over the divide the food which, for a time, saved the lives of all.
He could report that Reed and Herron had got through, though barely. For game had failed in the mountains and they had nearly starved. At one point they had found five navy beans spilled from some wagon and later a tar bucket discarded from another, at the bottom of which was some tallow that they could eat, though it puked Reed. They got down into Bear Valley, however, and, catching up with the rear guard of the emigration, got food and met Stanton.
So, besides Stanton, Reed and Herron had reached the golden shore. From now on the man they had banished to die alone was the focus of their hope.
And why should Stanton, whose strength was restored and who had five strong mules and two Indians in his charge, stay on and share their journey? There was only one reason but it sufficed. He stayed on, and he died for it.
Also he took Mrs. Reed and her children under his protection. They came up to the Truckee Meadows. Here they were all together again — something over a dozen decayed wagons, and the oxen and the cows that were yoked with them all but dead. They were a tangle of fear, hatred, family love, friendship, fortitude, panic, and desperate hope. Ahead of them was the worst ascent of all, to the divide above Truckee Lake. If their teams had been sound they could have made it in at most three days. But their teams were hardly alive. They had to rest their stock at the Truckee Meadows — but there had been a number of snowstorms already and the sky above the pass was leaden with the threat of winter. The two dreads made a cruel dilemma. They solved it — though no longer in the orderly, debating-club process of the long vanished days when Owl Russell’s big train had put Indian Creek behind them — by lingering to recruit the teams. They were thus following Stanton’s advice. Stanton had been told at Sutter’s, where the best judgment was to be had, that they could expect nearly a full month more before the snows would begin to block the pass.
