The Year of Decision 1846, page 57
Eddy and Mary Graves had more strength remaining than the others. He determined to strike out ahead, as well as he was able to. In panic and despair the others begged him not to but he took the gun — they had been carrying it by turns — and made a trial for the preservation of them all. Mary Graves went with him, the two of them staggering a little faster than the others could and gradually getting out of sight. So Eddy killed a deer. His frontiersman’s craft enabled him to identify a place where one had bedded for the night. He and Mary knelt and prayed, and pretty soon they saw it. He could not hold the rifle steady enough to draw a bead but finally contrived the swinging snapshot which frontier gaffers used when their strength was gone. He wounded the deer, crawled toward it, and cut its throat. He and Mary cooked the guts and that night slept soundly, within gunshot of the others.
Farthest of all from him, the Fosdicks heard the shots that Eddy fired to hearten them. Jay Fosdick correctly interpreted them. If he could get to Eddy and the meat, he said, he would live. But he died and Sarah wrapped his body in their remaining blanket and lay down beside him to die. She did not die but woke again in the morning and started out alone, only to meet some of the others who were coming back to find the Fosdick corpses — to get meat. Specifically, “with instructions to get Mrs. Fosdick’s heart.” They got Jay’s heart instead and Sarah saw it roasted on a stick. Eddy called them in and they spent the day drying as much venison and human flesh as they had not eaten.
There were two men left now and William Foster’s sanity had lapsed. The next day when the new food was exhausted he began to plead with Eddy to kill one of the survivors. Mrs. McCutchen was his nominee — he said she was a nuisance and was delaying them. Eddy refused, reminding him that Amanda was a wife and a mother. Then kill the sisters, Sarah Fosdick who was a childless widow, and Mary Graves, who was unmarried. Eddy refused, and suddenly his revulsion could not be stayed. He picked up a club, struck it against a log to make sure it was sound, tossed it to Foster, and told him to defend himself. Then Eddy started toward him, drawing a knife. Four pitiful wraiths of women fell upon Eddy and disarmed him. He mastered his rage but told Foster that he would kill him if he renewed the suggestion or made any move against the women. If any member of this party had to die in order to keep the others alive, William Eddy said, he and Foster would fight it out.
Thornton calls their bivouac that night “the Camp of Strife.” The next day they saw bloody footprints in a patch of snow and knew that Luis and Salvador must have made them. A little later they found the two Indians stretched out on the ground, dying. Foster could not be denied now and Eddy protested with words only, for it was no longer rational to protest. He took three of the women a little way ahead, out of sight, and left the gun. Foster shot the Indians, they butchered the bodies, and that night they ate again. But Eddy ate only grass.
Thereafter they traveled and slept in two groups, Foster with his wife and her sister, Harriet Pike, Eddy with Amanda McCutchen, Mary Graves, and her sister Sarah Fosdick. They often saw deer, some at close range, but Eddy could not raise the rifle for a shot. They rested every quarter of a mile, Eddy had to use two hands to climb over a log, the smallest hummock threw them, and “the women would fall and weep like infants and then rise and totter along again.”
It was on January 12 that they found strange footprints in the mud — it had been raining for two days — and came at dusk to the brush huts of a tiny Indian village. Lowly Diggers lived there but the squaws wept at sight of these living dead and the children wailed with them. All that the Indians had to eat was acorns. They gave the specters some but Eddy could not eat them. Next day, through another rainstorm, the Indians helped them to another village, where there were more acorns and some acorn meal, and through two more long days, half carried from brush village to brush village they went on, the Indians touched by the sight of suffering to the residual pity at the heart of life. Eddy was still living on grass, and acorn bread would not save the others.
But at last a mangy chief gave Eddy a handful of pine nuts, and they made all the difference. It was January 17, a bright blue day, and after one mile of going the others had at last reached the uttermost limit. Their feet were only pulp wrapped in shreds of blanket that were sodden with mud, and the remaining filament of strength that held them up broke. They lay down to die. But his handful of pine nuts had brought Eddy back from his “dream of combats, of famine and death, of cries of despair, of fathomless snows and impassable mountains.” He refused to die. One Indian was still helping him and they met another one whose help could be bought by a promise of tobacco. Supported on their shoulders, Eddy left bloody footprints across six miles of rough ground and came, an hour before sunset, to a little shack on the edge of Johnson’s ranch, the first outpost of settlement, at the eastern wall of the Sacramento Valley. The shack belonged to M. D. Ritchie, an emigrant of ’46, one of a number who had settled near Johnson’s for the winter. Young Harriet Ritchie came to the door and Eddy asked her for bread.
Harriet Ritchie burst into tears. But she got him to bed, got bread for him, and ran out among the other shacks, summoning help. Before long, four Americans were hurrying back to find the six survivors whom Eddy had described, and were able to find them by following his bloody footprints. The Forlorn Hope had reached the succor of their own kind, seven of the fifteen who started out, thirty-three days after the beginning of the effort for which they had laid in six days’ rations of two mouthfuls a day.
* * *
Now the settlements could learn the truth about the Donner party, of whom they had known only, on Reed’s and McCutchen’s reports, that they were caught in the snows with enough cattle to see them through the winter, and that they could probably not be reached till February. February was two weeks away.
At Johnson’s there was a small cluster of emigrants who had crossed this year, some of them in the very train the Donners had started with from Indian Creek. Notably, from that great train that elected Owl Russell captain when the dew was still on them all, there were Acquilla Glover and Riley Septimus Mootrey. The latter is Moultry in most of the literature but he was Mootrey to Jessy Thornton and it was as Mootrey that we saw the Reverend Mr. Cornwall marry him to Mary Lard, one June Sunday beside the Platte. Among such men as these, men who had shared the trail with the Donners and safely passed the hazards that had overcome them, there was no question of doing whatever could be done to save them. There was only the question of how best to go about it.
At Johnson’s they at once prepared to send help. But there were too few of them and only Glover, Mootrey, and a runaway sailor named Sels volunteered. They sent word to John Sinclair, a Scotchman who was an associate of Sutter’s and the alcalde of these parts, and to Sutter’s Fort, where Edward Kern, Frémont’s artist and cartographer, now commanded for the United States Navy. Sinclair and Kern called a meeting of such men, this year’s emigrants mostly, as had not gone out with the California Battalion or with the even more irregular detachments that were now riding the countryside in its troubled state between peace and war. As a result of this meeting the rescue party known as the First Relief was organized. But also Sutter sent his “launch” down the river with a letter from Sinclair which told the story of the Forlorn Hope and summarized Eddy’s description of what they had left behind. This got to Yerba Buena — San Francisco, now — just as the effort of Reed and McCutchen to raise rescue parties was beginning to be successful.
Reed and McCutchen, when they rode out from Sutter’s in late November to raise help in the settlements, had found them nearly empty of men. McCutchen had ended up at the late republic, Sonoma, and Reed at San Jose. The countryside was full of rumors and armed bands, native and American. Till some kind of tranquillity could be restored no one could be spared for the relief of starving emigrants far away in the snow. Reed had to join a company of horsemen at San Jose and ride out on guard duty as the quickest way to help his wife and children. (Remember that he knew of them only that the snow had cut them off and that there was no one but Milt Elliott to defend them against the hate roused by his own fatal quarrel with John Snyder.) So through December he was an active home guard, a “lieutenant,” and as such on January 2 took part in what was called the battle of Santa Clara, which was practically bloodless but ended the guerrilla war in these parts. It took another month to rearrange the hashed society tolerably, and finally on February 1, Reed was able to go to Yerba Buena bearing demands from San Jose that action be taken to rescue the Donner party.
Yerba Buena was commanded by the navy, whose officers would not commit the government to the project officially but would help out in their private capacity. They called a mass meeting on February 3 and Reed found there a number whom he had traveled with on the plains and others he had soldiered with more recently. Called on to speak, he burst into tears and could not. But the Reverend Mr. Dunleavy, first of all to lead a group of seceders away from Owl Russell’s wagon train, spoke for him. The parson was able to guess exactly where the Donners must have been stopped and he needed no gift of fiction to describe their plight. He roused the horror and pity of his audience: Yerba Buena would do what it could. Thirteen hundred dollars was raised to equip and pay a relief expedition. A recent arrival in California, Passed Midshipman Selim Woodworth, was put in charge. That was a mistake.
Woodworth was the son of Samuel Woodworth, a journalist who is still remembered as the author of “The Old Oaken Bucket” and “The Hunters of Kentucky.” He had been sent to Oregon in April, ’46, with dispatches notifying settlers there that joint occupation had been terminated. Francis Parkman had met him at St. Louis and again at Westport and had not been impressed. Woodworth, a man gifted in the appreciation of his own qualities, had voiced a Stockton-like plan to raise some volunteers and capture Santa Fe — presumably on his way to the Columbia by the northern trail — which Parkman understood as brainless. Later Parkman’s notebook records, “I rode to Westport with that singular character, Lieut. Woodworth. He is a great busybody and ambitious of taking a command among the emigrants.… Woodworth parades a revolver in his belt, which he insists is necessary.” Doubtless he paraded it all the way to Oregon and doubtless the comparative sobriety of life along the Willamette was what had brought him down to California. He made a splash there, talking himself into a considerable reputation. So now he was going to contribute some additional disasters to the Donner party and their rescuers.
While Woodworth talked and Reed worked furiously preparing his expedition, Sutter’s launch arrived with Sinclair’s harrowing description of Eddy and the Forlorn Hope. Horror stimulated the preparations and now here was Caleb Greenwood coming in from Sonoma, where McCutchen also had got action at last. Greenwood was gathering a rescue party in Napa Valley, spurred on by an offer of $500 reward from Mariano Vallejo, lately the prisoner of the Bear Flaggers.
We have met Greenwood a number of times in this narrative, and at last there had come into the preparations for relief a man who knew and knew how. In November of 1844, by the exercise of a mountain man’s intelligence and skill, he had saved from the fate of the Donners, and in precisely the same place, the last emigrant party of that year. He had, that is, got the famous Stevens-Murphy party over the divide just as the snows came. (That was the party to which Moses Schallenberger belonged, who built the cabin in which the Breens were now living.) Last April, following Clyman, he had crossed the Sierra through the snows, and last September, guiding the Aram party to California, he had actually got from Diggers a vague anonymous rumor of the Donners’ troubles in the Salt Desert and had ridden eastward from the junction of the trails for a full day to find them. Greenwood was eighty-three years old but was made of parfleche, and he had lived in the mountains forever, his career going as far back as the Astorians. Last December Edwin Bryant had met him at his hunting camp in Napa Valley, where he was recruiting his strength on bear meat after the puny fare of “bread, milk and sich-like mushy stuff” which he had had to endure with the “emigrators.” Bryant had relished his profanity and that of his fellow mountain man, John Turner, “who could do all the swearing for our army in Mexico and then have a surplus.” Old Greenwood tried to make a census of his children for Bryant but there were too many of them, mostly the issue of his Crow wife, and one was named Governor Boggs and another, who would join the relief, was Britton.
Blasting his profane encouragement, Caleb Greenwood got to work too. His would be a party of professionals, mountain men, among them his son Brit and John Turner. Accordingly, leaving Woodworth to organize and finance bases and supporting expeditions, Reed rode off with Greenwood to prepare an advance party. From this came what the literature knows as the Second Relief. But meanwhile the First Relief had left Johnson’s and headed toward the snow.
Let it be understood: any man who went to the assistance of the Donners knew that he was risking the fate he was trying to save them from. Down in the great valley the California spring was riotous, the opulent loveliness that stirred Jim Clyman’s heart when we first met him. But in the Sierra the snow was thirty feet deep and the worst storms of the winter, worse even than the Christmas blizzard, were still to come.
When the First Relief rode out from Johnson’s on February 4 it numbered fourteen, among them William Eddy of the intrepid heart, who had had less than three weeks of rest. He could not go all the way but he got to the high ridge well up in the mountains where, at Mule Springs, they made a base camp. He and another were sent back from here with the horses, since the rest of the going would have to be on foot. Two others were left to guard the camp (one of them was a half-wit), and ten men set out from Mule Springs, each one carrying as heavy a pack as he could manage, seventy-five pounds perhaps. The snow was already higher than their knees. Four days later, at the foot of the vertical wall that drops down from Emigrant Gap, three of them had had enough — Jotham Curtis (whom McCutchen had had to bully so, last November), Ritchie (to whose shack Eddy had been dragged by the Indians), and a German who was known only as Greasy Jim. No one may blame them for turning back: they had ahead of them the Sierra and the storms. But there were seven who would not turn back.
Reaching this insistence of naked valor, George Stewart, the historian of the Donner party, for the second time quotes the words in which George McKinstry (lately of the Harlan-Young party, now sheriff of the lands surrounding Sutter’s) reported the First Relief: “I will again give you a list of their names, as I think they ought to be recorded in letters of gold.” The seven were: two exsailors, Sels and Ned Coffeemeyer, and five emigrants of ’46, Acquilla Glover, Reasin Tucker (called “Dan”), Riley Septimus Mootrey, and the Rhoads brothers, John and Daniel. The last two were among the very few Mormons who, maintaining a seemly reticence about their faith, had crossed to California last summer with Gentile trains. Tucker’s son George, a boy of sixteen, had been left at the base camp at Mule Springs.
It had taken them eleven days to get to the base of that high cliff — through violent rainstorms, over swollen mountain streams which they sometimes had to bridge, and at last through snow. They had been drenched and chilled, they had had repeatedly to stop and dry out the food they were carrying, sometimes they had slept in snow water, sometimes they had not slept at all. Now they started into the snow which, at the divide, had been deepened by another storm. With great daring they left the emigrant trail which they had been following (and which the Forlorn Hope had missed) and broke a new one to the Yuba Bottoms, where they made caches of food for the return trip. Single file. One man breaks the snow as well as he can, the others following behind him till he is used up. Then he falls to the rear and it is the next man’s turn. Bright weather, snow dazzle, steel air. A short snowstorm. They stop and make snowshoes. The storm ends.… If it hadn’t, they would have died.
They camped at the western end of the pass on February 17, just fourteen days out from Johnson’s. The next day they went over it on their snowshoes, with Glover and Dan Rhoads barely able to cross as their lungs heaved in thin air and their hearts pounded. They were all day coming down the barrier that the Donners had not been able to get across and following the silent, white lakeside to the huts. They could see no smoke, they could not even see the huts, since they were buried deep, till they came right up to them at sunset. They shouted, wondering if anyone were still alive, and something like a woman came up out of a hole in the snow. (It was Mrs. Breen, who had started to take Mrs. Reed outside to whisper her belief that Virginia Reed was dying.) The others crawled up the ramp of frozen snow to mew at the seven men from beyond the mountains, in the crimson sunset and the violet shadows of the woods. They looked like mummies, their wailing was cracked and tiny, their cries broke into lunatic talk. Around them at the top of the ramp, in the sunset, lay the bodies of those who had died since the last storm, dragged so far and left uncovered.
Life in those buried huts since December 16, two months before, when the Forlorn Hope departed, is hardly to be understood. Over them were the storms and the sunny, bitter days and the sunny, gentle days. Around them was fantasm, whose figures were both real and unreal. Their minds peeled down to anger and dread out of which bubbled the primitive delirium for which physicians to the diseased soul probe. Besides those tempests were the exterior dreads of what sanity remained to them, as the cattle hides they lived on ran out. No clue told them which of the figures they saw and the voices they heard were hallucinatory and which those of their companions. The mind grew monocular, its vision flat. Up from childhood came the figures of the Old Testament, and from a far more distant past the figure of Lansford Hastings by whose act they had become animals that died in apathy and animals that lived on sodden with their personal filth. Abraham and Hastings and one’s own children with dim eyes lying silent till they died — all mingled together in the reeking huts.
