The Year of Decision 1846, page 54
An assertion of human will followed. Eddy, the strongest-hearted of them, insisted on continuing the effort while life was left to them. The two Indians agreed. So did all the women. “I told them,” Mary Graves said, “I would go too, for to go back and hear the cries of hunger from my little brothers and sisters was more than I could stand. I would go as far as I could, let the consequences be what they might.”
Mary Ann Graves, twenty years old, born in Illinois of parents who had emigrated there from Vermont. An undistinguished item in the year’s migration, one dot of Manifest Destiny, who had set out to find the West with her parents, five sisters, two brothers, and a brother-in-law. A person of no moment making the western traverse. The children of her children in California today are also commoners of the Democracy. Tradition says that she was beautiful and was engaged to marry the John Snyder whom Reed killed in a quarrel on the Humboldt. A further legend says that Stanton also had fallen in love with her. There is nothing remarkable about Mary Ann Graves, except that mankind can be staunch. “I would go as far as I could.”
The will prevailed. But also it precipitated another decision. To go on they must live, to live they must eat, but there was no food. But there was food. Patrick Dolan, whose very presence on this desperate venture was a heroism, since he was a bachelor and owned more than enough of the oxen at the lake to keep him through the winter — Patrick Dolan voiced the thought which they had so far kept from voicing. Let them draw lots to see which one should be killed. Eddy agreed, Fosdick refused. Then Eddy, in revulsion, proposed a manlier solution: that two of them, selected by lot, take revolvers and shoot it out. “This, too, was objected to.” In a moment the obvious became obvious to them. They were all near death. Someone would die soon. They groaned on through falling snow.
They stopped when dusk came and, with their single small axe, got wood for a fire — which they built on little logs on top of the deep, crusted snow. Now the Mexican herder, Antoine, died. Eddy knew that he was dead when he did not withdraw his hand, which had slumped into the fire. Suddenly, toward ten o’clock, the snowstorm changed into a blizzard. A tornado-like wind drove whirlpools of snow at them. All the wood they had been able to cut was used up. Trying to cut more in the midnight blizzard, they lost their hatchet. The fire began to sink through the snow. It made a deep hole but they succeeded in keeping it going for a while, water welling up round their legs. Finally it went out and the yelp of the blizzard was round them.
Most of them were moaning or screaming in the dark, Uncle Billy Graves was dying, and all but Eddy were willing to die. All would have died if it had not been for Eddy. He remembered an expedient of the mountain men in such storms as this — such a storm as Jim Clyman and Bill Sublette had survived in the Wind River Mountains, in our second chapter. They had their blankets. Eddy spread some of them on the snow and had his companions sit on them in a circle. He tented them over with the remaining blankets and closed the circle himself. This was shelter of a kind, and presently the blizzard covered them over and they could live. But not Uncle Billy. He reminded his daughters of their mother and brothers and sisters at the lake, told them they must get through to Sutter’s for their sake, bade them eat his body, and died.
In that mound of snow, Graves’s corpse upholding its part of the tent, they stayed all through Christmas Day, while the blizzard howled on and made the mound bigger. That morning delirium came upon Patrick Dolan and, screaming, he broke his way through tent and snow. Eddy went out into the blizzard and tried to bring him back but could not. He came back after a while, and they held him down till he sank into a coma. As dusk seeped through the blizzard, he died.
The storm kept on through Christmas night, with two corpses in the mound now, and through the morning of the next day. Eddy tried to make some kind of fire inside the blankets but blew up a powder horn and burned himself severely. Mrs. McCutchen and Mrs. Foster also were burned. In the afternoon the snow stopped. They crawled out of their mound, made tinder of the cotton lining of a mantua, struck a spark in it, and got a dead pine tree to burn. So they cut strips from the legs and arms of Patrick Dolan and roasted them. Eddy and the two Indians would not eat. Lemuel Murphy had been delirious for hours. The food could not revive him. That night he died, his head in the lap of Mrs. Foster, his sister. There was a moon. Moonrise would bring back this scene to Sarah Foster through the rest of her life.
The next day, December 27, they butchered the bodies of Graves, Dolan, Antoine, and Lemuel Murphy and dried at the fire such portions as they did not need now, packing them for the journey still to come. The Indians would eat this meat now, but Eddy still refused, though his strength was ebbing. After three days more here, when the bodies of their companions had restored their vitality a little, he got them into motion again, on December 30. In the literature of the Donner party, these people who made the venture over the divide are called “the Forlorn Hope,” and this bivouac in the blizzard has the name they gave it, “the Camp of Death.”
Of the huts at Alder Creek Eliza Donner Houghton wrote, “Snowy Christmas brought us no glad tidings.” And at the lake the invalid Patrick Breen, who had begun to keep a diary on November 20, made this entry: “[December] 25. Began to snow yesterday, snowed all night, and snows yet rapidly; extremely difficult to find wood; offered our prayers to God this Christmas morning; the prospect is appalling but we trust in him.” Breen, a Catholic, had lately begun to read the Thirty Days’ Prayers. He read them and the Bible aloud by firelight in the murky cabins, and his faith in extremis sank into the childish heart of Virginia Reed. She made — and kept — a vow. If God would save her family she would seek baptism as a Catholic.
Milt Elliott, who was one of Reed’s teamsters, and Noah James, who was one of the Donners’, had started out on December 9 to get news of the Alder Creek camp, and Elliott got back to the lake on December 20. He reported the deaths of Jacob Donner and Samuel Shoemaker and James Smith and Joseph Reinhardt. They had not starved for some food was left, they had just died. (Before he died, Reinhardt confessed to George Donner that he and Spitzer had murdered Wolfinger.) At Alder Creek they were trying to locate the frozen bodies of the oxen by thrusting poles into the snow, but they were not succeeding. They were catching the field mice that crept into the huts and eating them. And they had begun the diet that was to be the staple here and at the lake. Strips of oxhide were singed to remove the hair and then boiled for hours, or days, till a kind of glue was formed. (They had some pepper left to season it.) They boiled the bones also till they were soft and could be swallowed, and a faint taste of meat was imparted to the water. Tommy Reed, three years old, grew up to have no stomach for calf’s-foot jelly or similar foods, and it was among the memories of Eliza Donner, also three, that she had chewed the bark and young twigs of pine to ease the pain in her stomach.
Likewise she remembered that one day her mother Tamsen took her up the snow steps to where the dazzling sun shone on the snow and blinded her, and led her to a hole from which smoke was floating up. Uncle Jacob lived there, Tamsen said (but he didn’t live there any more), and they must go down and see Aunt Betsy and Eliza’s little cousins. Eliza peered down that blackness and was afraid. She called to her cousins to come up instead — and was more frightened when they did. They had grown skinny and white, they were strange, suspicious, feral. “So I was glad when my mother came up and took me back to our own tent, which seemed less dreary because I knew the things that were in it and the faces about me.”
They had buried the dead in the snow, which froze over the bodies and then deepened as more storms came. At the lake no one had died since Baylis Williams gave the Forlorn Hope an omen for their departure. The huts at the lake were a little better off than those at Alder Creek — in that there were more hides to make glue of, some frozen meat still, a couple of handfuls of flour from which Mrs. Murphy could make gruel for her granddaughter, the infant Catherine Pike. Catherine had been weaned when Harriet Pike went over the divide with the Forlorn Hope, weaned on spoonfuls of water a little thickened with this hoarded flour. There were, or had been, four other nursing babies at this camp.
One thinks especially of these and the older children on Christmas Day, the Donners, the Reeds, the Murphys, Breens, Kesebergs, Graveses, Eddys. They could remember firelight on friendlier snow, Sunday School classes with scrubbed faces, hymns in warm rooms, going to bed at night, the inexplicable behavior of grownups on Christmas Day, the myth of a fat man who brought gifts. They could remember the Christmas of the vast America far to the eastward of this mountainside where trees cut down for firewood left twenty-foot stumps in the snow and death came slowly to families trapped by Lansford Hastings’ ambition.
Nevertheless there was one Christmas feast at Donner Lake. In her end of the double cabin whose other half was occupied by the remaining Graveses, Mrs. James Frazier Reed had taken thought long before of her children’s memories. When she bought four oxen from the Breens and Graveses, she had cleaned the tripe of one and hung it low outside the cabin, where snow would conceal and preserve it. She had also contrived to store away through nearly eight weeks a quantity of white beans amounting to a cupful, half as much rice, half as much dried apples, and a two-inch square of bacon. On Christmas Day she took them from the hiding place and made a stew of them. While the storm that was killing Dolan and Graves on the far side of the ridge buried the cabin still deeper, the children danced round that bubbling pot. Thirteen-year-old Virginia; Patty Reed, eight years old; Jimmy, five, and Tommy, three. There was once more a perfume of the kitchen in the hut, and diced cubes of tripe or bacon jigged on the bubbles while the children shouted. Thinking of her husband, possibly dead, possibly alive somewhere beyond the hurricane of snow, Margaret Reed could nevertheless speak the warning of all mothers on Christmas Day, “Children, eat slowly, there is plenty for all.”
Another Christmas must not be forgotten, Bill Bowen’s, who had come down to California or Oregon. The loss and alteration it may have cost his family has been made clear, but he had done what he set out to do. He had reached the new country — and had brought with him the core of American belief and habit, differentiated in two and a quarter centuries from the belief and habit of Europe that had accompanied the first of his predecessors when they began the westering which he had now brought to its farthest bound. Let the part of that core of feeling which made his Christmas American stand for the rest of American feeling. Stripped to little more than his skin, a stranger in the land of his desiring which proved more strange than he had imagined when he started, he would now make his new home in the West. It would be his old home modified not only by the new conditions but by the experiences of his crossing. He had come a long way, and at the eastern end of it was the old home. Great distances were a part of his mind now, the distances he had traveled, the distances he tinily lived among. He had given the nation its continent and perforce something continental formed the margins of his mind. It was a centrifugal, a nation-breaking force that had sent him out, but in the end it was a centripetal, a nation-making force he was changed into. He was a counterweight, the nation traveled was his nation and lines meant less to him; he was more a nationalist, less a sectionalist already and from now on. The ribbon of the trail bound the nation more tightly together — and the time was not far off when the United States would need that strength. So he had found the West and given it to the United States; now he faced the labor of subduing it and building in it a farther portion of the United States. To that labor would be addressed the rest of Bill Bowen’s life and the lives of his children and their children. Christmas along the Sacramento and the Willamette, the Bay of San Francisco, the lower Columbia, was Christmas in a strange land firelit by memories of Christmas back home in the States but also heightened by the realization he had achieved. Beside these waters that fell into the Pacific there was a hope about the future that has become a deed within our past.
* * *
“These Mexicans,” wrote Private Jacob Robinson of Captain Reid’s Company D, the day after Christmas, “are a singular people: but yesterday in arms against us — today every man says omega or friend.”
Robinson made his contribution to linguistics in the now fallen city of El Paso del Norte.3 Doniphan marched into it after the affair at El Brazito, commissioners coming out to pray that the conqueror would not lay it waste. They supposed that farm boys who could lick armies between meals must be carnivores. As a matter of fact, they now had one carnivore with them, James Kirker having ridden in to enlist, the day after Brazito. Kirker was an Irishman on permanent retainer from the government of Chihuahua to act as a destroyer of Apache. He had collected an elite guard of retired mountain men and the Ishmaels of the plains, the dispossessed Delaware. With this posse of specialists he ranged Chihuahua gathering Apache scalps and was paid fifty dollars per scalp, half price for women and children. (He appears by name in one of the best Wild West novels, Mayne Reid’s Scalp Hunters, and is really the model of that romance’s prettified gothic hero with the beautiful daughter and the heart of bitter fire.) Doniphan added him to the platoon of mountain men which was now captained by Thomas Forsythe. Disdaining to eat Chihuahuans, he did excellent service as a scout.
The army was not at all carnivorous. The boys had learned Spanish, or thought they had, and practised it on a citizenry who were eager to say “omega.” They had arrived at a considerable city. El Paso was the last outpost of the Great Spain that had found New Mexico beyond its strength. More than ten thousand people, a more vigorous stock than the New Mexicans, lived in the beautiful town in its green valley, and an ancient culture flourished there. The churches were impressive though idolatrous. The ranchos supplied abundant food — Doniphan was now paying in government drafts which had better be accepted, or else. For centuries the haciendas of the valley had been producing notable wines. There was plenty to eat, plenty to drink, and a comfortable surplus of señoritas, some of whom the boys even married.
The army ought to have had a good time but did so too spasmodically. As a matter of fact, this is their low point and they show symptoms of ebbing morale. They had reacted from the exhilaration of Brazito, they had too little cash for pleasures, they were bored and grew quarrelsome, and there was an undercurrent of anxiety. It was now known that Wool’s expedition to the city of Chihuahua had been abandoned and his force ordered to the support of Taylor. Rumor promptly gathered a crushing Mexican force at the city Wool was to have occupied, and at intervals the First Missouri were sent running out in their shirt tails to form battle line and repel an imaginary attack. The air vibrated with secret conspiracy. Another persistent rumor, which had more behind it, whispered that trouble was preparing at Santa Fe, which could cut the army off from its base. The precarious situation of a handful of conquerors a thousand miles from home, deep in a hostile country, was quite clear. So the army bragged, swaggered, dissipated, and sometimes bullied the inoffensive Mexicans. The wines were potable, there were plenty of stills, Missouri drank much and behaved accordingly. Native gambling games were everywhere; the boys got so interested in them that, tired of falling over monte banks in the public street, Doniphan ordered them cleaned out. There were cockfights, fandangos, fiestas. Brawling among themselves, the boys were willing to include any bystanders. They retaliated on native profiteers and, on January 12, the diary of John T. Hughes, our A.B., notes that three of Captain Hudson’s company are “to be court-martialed for ravishing a Mexican woman.”
Doniphan had more serious problems than those of an unruly organization in an enemy town. He had to recruit his outfit and, now more than ever, keep it at fighting pitch. Though a trickle of supplies came from Santa Fe, getting there down the trail from Independence to which the Comanche were now beginning to devote their attention, the quartermaster service was in collapse. The army had been living off the country ever since San Miguel — back in August — and had to provide even its own munitions. That at least proved easy: Doniphan’s patrols picked up ten tons of gunpowder at El Paso, five hundred stands of small arms, a magazine full of cannon balls (not much good), four cannon (tiny), and a museum of culverins, swivels, and other medieval armament. (He took what he needed and sank the rest in the Rio Grande.) Except for a little scurvy and hundreds of hangovers his regiment was healthy, but horses fit for cavalry service were hard to find and the requisitioned boots and shoes were bad. A wagonload of medical supplies came down from Santa Fe but it was far from enough.
Moreover, at the end of a thousand-mile line of communication, two thousand miles from the War Department, he did not know what to do. The White House had arranged for Wool to take Chihuahua. Relying on the high command, Kearny had ordered Doniphan to join Wool. Doniphan now knew that the trivialities of terrain and command which the White House strategy had disregarded had broken up the pretty plan. (Happily he did not know that Missouri, hearing that Wool had turned back, supposed that its Mounted Volunteers were lost forever and was now mourning them.) Rumor had Taylor badly licked and perhaps a prisoner; it also had southern Chihuahua and its neighbors rising en masse to destroy its invaders. What was he to do? Councils of war produced conflicting advice — the army, if consulted, would have turned back, Private Robinson said — and finally Doniphan put an end to debate. The hell with it: he would go on and do Wool’s job.
He sent for his artillery but at Santa Fe Price, who had extinguished one revolt just as it got started, was wary. He would release only Major Meriwether Lewis Clark and the battery of Captain Weightman, and wanted some time before releasing them. Doniphan cracked down on the traders, who had been an annoyance all along and were a burden from now on. Some of them had set up shop in El Paso and were doing an excellent business. Some bolted ahead to Chihuahua to run their chances and, though Doniphan sent a posse after them, most of these got away. Others held back intending to wait till the invasion was settled one way or the other, or to detour it at their convenience. They were, however, a possible source of man power, and Doniphan got tough. He called in his patrols, who had been looking for Chihuahua troops or chasing Apache for the inhabitants. He filled up his trains, commandeered what he wanted, drilled the farm boys in the school of the soldier, and got ready to march again.
