The Year of Decision 1846, page 58
The indomitable Margaret Reed (it seems superfluous that she had always suffered from migraine) had, just after New Year’s, made an attempt fully as resolute as her husband’s. She left one of the youngest children in each of the three huts. (“We told them we would bring them back bread,” Virginia Reed says, “and then they were willing to stay.”) Then, taking Virginia and Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams (whose mind had dimmed to childhood), she made a desperate ascent of the ridge, between storms. They were gone five days, missed the trail, and got back just in time. (Virginia: “I could get along very well while I thought we were going ahead, but as soon as we had to turn back I could hardly walk.”)
Breen was reading his Bible and keeping his diary, one of the most soul-shocking documents in our literature. It details the weather and the deaths, not much language spent on suffering or despair. The great winds, the great snows, how the hides and bones were holding out, sometimes a prayer remembered from the Mass or the litany, and who died — that is what Patrick Breen put down. How the Graveses confiscated the hides that Margaret Reed had bought with promises, how Milt Elliott made good his demand that Margaret be given a hide — the Keseberg baby died last night — “Eddy’s child died last night,” February 5, with Eddy climbing toward Bear Valley in the rain to save little Margaret’s life. Then Mrs. Eddy is growing weaker — Spitzer dies — Mrs. Eddy dies — Keseberg never gets up from bed (Breen had his suspicions of Keseberg and listed the valuables he hoarded, which might not have been his at first) — “Milt Elliott died last night at Murphy’s shanty,” the last friend of the Reed family gone — John Denton, the English gunsmith, growing weaker — Mrs. Graves takes back the hide that Milt had got for Mrs. Reed (title to it really vested in John Augustus Sutter) — “wind SE all in good health Thanks be to Almighty God Amen” — and the First Relief arrives.
The seven gave them a little food — it was not safe to give them more — posted a guard over the packs, and got their first full night’s sleep in a week. The next morning, three of them went on down to Alder Creek. None had died there since the report Milt Elliott brought back, but George Donner appeared to be dying. Tamsen was still strong. Her small body had the toughness of her Yankee forbears. She would not leave and neither would Elizabeth, Jacob’s widow. So the rescuers took four of the older children, Tamsen’s daughters Elitha and Leanna and Elizabeth’s sons George and William Hook. They also took Noah James and the widow Wolfinger. They left the Donner women and the younger children with one man to take care of them, the worthless Jean Baptiste Trubode. They were counting on the Reed-Greenwood relief being just behind them, and surely Passed Midshipman Woodworth, that staunch commander, would be sending other relief parties with ample food. They went back to the lake, where their companions were trying to decide which of the babbling, cursing survivors could or should attempt the trip.
That left eleven at Alder Creek. Elitha and Leanna had a piece of blanket over their clothes — good, substantial clothes, for the Donners had been richly outfitted. They were in great pain and they kept sitting down in the snow to cry. Those left at Alder Creek had only one hide remaining. As the party started out Tamsen said staunchly that if food did not come by the time it was used up, they would begin eating what they had refrained from eating.
At the lake the seven made their decision. All the Reeds were to go and their surviving hired girl, Eliza Williams, by now an innocent. Only Edward, thirteen, and Simon, nine, of the Breen family — who had plenty of hides. William, Eleanor, and Lovina Graves; their father had died on the Forlorn Hope (the rescuers carefully lied, saying that everyone who tried the crossing had survived), Mary and Sarah had got through, their mother and younger brothers and sisters would wait for the next rescue party. William Murphy, eleven, who had started with the Forlorn Hope but had to come back, and his sister Mary — leaving their mother, feeble and going blind, and ten-year-old Simon, and the Pike baby and little George Foster, Mrs. Murphy’s grandchildren. She would also try to take care of James Eddy, William’s surviving child. Mrs. Keseberg was to go, with the surviving Ada, but Keseberg was too sick to make the attempt — and, if later suspicions were correct, he had his eye on the property of the dead. The dying John Denton would start, too, and John Rhoads would carry Naomi Pike, daughter of Harriet Pike of the Forlorn Hope and granddaughter of the widow Murphy.
Seventeen from the lake, leaving seventeen there, and six from Alder Creek — twenty-three all told started with the seven rescuers on February 22. The calm weather still held. They had not gone far when it became obvious that three-year-old Tommy Reed and his eight-year-old sister Patty could not make the journey and were endangering the lives of the whole party. Glover, the real leader, told Mrs. Reed that they must be taken back to the huts. She had no recourse but she swore him on his honor as a Mason to come back for them if their father could not. “That was the hardest thing yet,” Virginia’s account runs, “to leave the children in those cabins — not knowing but they would starve to death. Martha [Patty] said, ‘well Mother, if you never see me again, do the best you can.’ The men said they could hardly stand it: it made them cry.” That must have been Mootrey and Glover, who took the two children back to the huts, and Patty told them that she was willing to care for her brother but knew she would not see her mother again. The Breens refused to take them in. Mootrey and Glover had to make detailed promises of reward and at last had to supplement them with threats. Even so they doubted if the children could survive the unwatched charity of the Breens.
We need not detail the progress of children and adults through the snow. The first day Denton failed on the trail and had to be carried into camp. The next day he failed altogether. They built a fire for him and left far more than his share of food, wrapped him in a blanket, and left him to his courage. When they reached the first cache, it had been rifled by martens — and now there was exceedingly little food for anyone. There was nothing to do but to send the two strongest ahead, Mootrey and Coffeemeyer (the latter’s snowshoes had been eaten, overnight, by one of his charges). Glover and Dan Rhoads had to go with them; they were exhausted, of no further use. They would either meet another relief party or raise one of the remaining caches and bring back food. That left Sels, Tucker, and John Rhoads to bully and exhort the twenty survivors, give them a shoulder for a few rods, cajole and carry the children by turns. They built fires on log platforms by night. At evening on the fifth day Mootrey and Coffeemeyer came in with packs replenished from the cache at Bear Valley. But they brought also the terrifying news that they had not met any of the other parties who by now should be here.
The packs were replenished — two packs. A little beef, a little bread, and clearly no further help to be counted on. In the morning they started out again. They must be seen in a line stretching westward below the peaks, among the evergreens, in the snow and silence of the heights. So James Frazier Reed saw them, who was hurrying his Second Relief forward, having met Glover and Dan Rhoads the night before. “Left camp on a fine, hard snow,” Reed’s curt record says, written by firelight in fifteen feet of snow, “and proceeded about four miles, when we met the poor, unfortunate starved people. As I met them scattered along the trail, I distributed some bread that I had baked last night. I gave in small quantities to each. Here I met my wife and two of my little children. Two of my children are still in the mountains. I cannot describe the death-like look all these people had. ‘Bread!’ ‘Bread!’ ‘Bread!’ ‘Bread!’ was the begging cry of every child and grown person. I gave all I had to give them and set out for the scene of desolation at the lake. I am now camped within twenty-five miles of the place, which I hope to reach by traveling tonight and tomorrow.”
Margaret Reed fainted when the cry came down the straggling line that her husband was here, but Virginia ran and fell and ran again over crusted snow till she was in his arms. They had last seen each other on the Humboldt, with Snyder buried and Milt Elliott cocking his rifle lest Keseberg should prop up his wagon tongue again for a desert hanging. But Patty and Tommy were at the lake, with the unwilling Breens.… Reed told the saved that behind him the swiftly organizing Californians were building a series of way stations for them, bountifully supplied with food. The vigilant, resolute Passed Midshipman Woodworth would take care of them. They were, his diary says, “overjoyed.” He led his party on and the saved took up the trail again.
Two days later they reached Mule Springs, where by now Woodworth had come up and made a camp. Military man’s camp, with brandy to drink and strikers to rub the commander’s feet with snow, lest they be frostbitten. The victims of winter thought tenderly of his risks and discomforts, and the next morning mounted the horses that had been brought here for them and rode down toward green earth and warm weather. Virginia Reed was not yet fourteen years old but this was a frontier community they were coming down to, after all, and one of the emigrants who was shepherding them had an eye to the needs of the commonwealth. He looked at this skinny child and proposed marriage. By that token Virginia, giggling an unpractised refusal, knew that the ordeal was over and they had come in. (Three months later she wrote her cousin Mary, back in Springfield, “Tell the girls that this is the greatest place for marrying they ever saw and that they must come to California if they want to marry.” Before the year was out she was married.) On March 4 they reached Sutter’s and the nursing of Mrs. Sinclair.
* * *
When Reed, at the head of the Second Relief, met the First Relief coming down, his party had dwindled to ten. They had left old Caleb Greenwood at Mule Springs in charge of cattle and a base camp. McCutchen was with Reed, the great, powerful man who had crossed with Stanton to Sutter’s long ago and fallen ill. He had seen his wife Amanda, of the Forlorn Hope, and when he met the First Relief he learned that their year-old daughter had died at the lake. But McCutchen would do his part, he would go on. Also with them was another emigrant responding to the need of his kind, Hiram Miller, who had been one of George Donner’s drivers as far as Independence Rock and thence had ridden ahead with Edwin Bryant. The other seven were Greenwood’s men, all but one of them trappers, young, sturdy, and experienced, several of them mountain-man French and among them Brit Greenwood and John Turner of the mighty oaths.
The incompetent Woodworth had missed all the meetings he had arranged with them, but men like Reed, McCutchen, Miller, Turner, and the Greenwoods did not need help or rely on it. So far they had come on their own, triumphantly, and they hurried on toward the lake. On the way they passed the frozen corpse of John Denton, sitting wrapped in his blanket at the foot of his tree. He had not needed the food in his pockets but before the end a strange need had come upon him. Dying as a man of honor in the snow, he had taken out his memorandum book and pencil and had written a poem. Reed and his companions did not find it when they passed but William Eddy did, a few days later, and here it is, from the hour of death in the snow.
O! after many roving years,
How sweet it is to come
Back to the dwelling place of youth —
Our first and dearest home: —
To turn away our wearied eyes
From proud ambition’s towers,
And wander in those summer fields,
The scene of boyhood’s hours.
But I am changed since last I gazed
Upon that tranquil scene,
And sat beneath the old witch-elm
That shades the village green;
And watched my boat upon the brook —
It was a regal galley,
And sighed for not a joy on earth
Beyond the happy valley.
I wish I could once more recall
That bright and blissful joy,
And summon to my weary heart
The feelings of a boy.
But now on scenes of past delight
I look, and feel no pleasure,
As misers on the bed of death
Gaze coldly on their treasure.1
Reed had pushed three of the youngest ahead, Clark, Cady, and Stone. The day after the meeting with the First Relief these three got to within two miles of the cabins, where they saw some Indians. (Diggers, probably from Winnemucca’s mangy little tribe, who had been afraid to investigate the huts closely and had been further scared by reports from their most resolute scouts that the white men were eating one another.) They had no arms, wondered if the Indians had killed the survivors, and camped without a fire.
Early in the morning of March 1, Clark, Cady, and Stone went on down to the first hut. They distributed a little food and Clark and Cady pushed on to Alder Creek. The others came up at noon and Reed found that Patty and Tommy were alive. The little boy did not know him but Patty’s disbelief was cured; presently she had the duty of distributing one biscuit apiece to the living. At the Murphy cabin they found Stone washing the children’s clothes. They took off their own clothes — need one remark that there were lice? — and began to bathe little James Eddy and George Foster. They needed the bath: for two weeks they had not been moved from the bed. Finishing this sanitation, Reed and McCutchen began to bathe the disabled Keseberg, who once had propped up his wagon tongue to invoke the justice of the trail on Reed.
Just outside the hut was the dismembered, recognizable body of Milt Elliott, Reed’s driver and the protector of his family. It was nine days since the First Relief had left the lake, and in that interval the survivors had reached the extremity. Breen’s diary, six days earlier, stated: “Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him.” She had. The conscientious Thornton adds, “Half consumed limbs were seen concealed in trunks. Bones were scattered about. Human hair of different colors was seen in tufts about the fireplace.”
And at Alder Creek the same. Clark and Cady got there at a moment when Trubode, sent by Tamsen to borrow a meal from Elizabeth, was returning with a leg of Elizabeth’s husband, Jacob, and the message that the best of neighbors would be able to spare no more. At sight of the rescuers, he tossed the now unneeded leg back on the butchered corpse. Jacob’s surviving children “were sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half roasted liver and heart of the[ir] father, unconscious of the approach of the men, of whom they took not the slightest notice even after they came up.”
Elizabeth had not eaten the food her children fed on, and she was nearly dead. George Donner, Reed’s old friend, with whom he had shared the dream of California in the long planning of an earlier winter — George Donner had a few words of friendship for him but seemed to be dying. Tamsen, keeping her resolution, had kept her strength also. Reed could see the bearded face of his other old friend, Jacob, in the snow, the head cut off from the body and the brain opened.
Tamsen would not leave her husband. George, pointing out that he was dying, bade her go. But the honor of marriage sustained her. She would stay beside him while he died.
Reed decided that the younger children also must stay here. Surely Woodworth would arrive in two or three days at most, and he was able to leave food enough to last a week. So Tamsen’s three youngest daughters, Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, and Elizabeth’s two youngest sons, Lewis and Samuel, would stay at Alder Creek, waiting for the largest and best supplied of all the relief parties, as Woodworth’s would surely be. Reed left Cady and Clark to care for them and took Elizabeth’s three remaining children with him. At the lake he chose Patrick and Margaret Breen, Mrs. Graves, and eleven children. That left the two helpless adults, Keseberg and Mrs. Murphy, and three children, Simon Murphy, James Eddy, and George Foster. Stone was left to care for them, and Woodworth with many men and much food must come down from the pass any day now, perhaps tomorrow.
Woodworth was not coming; he never came. He was taking his comfort in camp and nourishing what, compared with the courage of the others, can only be called an ignominious cowardice. So the return of the Second Relief, which should have been the most successful, constitutes the final catastrophe of the Donner party.
Like the First Relief, Reed’s men had been scrupulous not to allude to the deaths of the Forlorn Hope, and Mrs. Graves was taking to her dead son-in-law, Jay Fosdick, the violin she had watched over for him at the huts. Patrick Breen played on it for hours, the first two nights out, serene in the belief that they were safe at last. That music is a bizarre touch for already the Second Relief were in ghastly danger. They had counted on traveling faster than it was possible to travel with so many children, most of whom the seven rescuers had to carry in turn. And they were counting on meeting Woodworth, who was not coming.
Even before they got over the divide Reed sent three of his best men ahead — Turner, Gendreau, and Dofar — to bring back food, whether by lifting the nearest cache or by urging Woodworth on if they should meet him. The four remaining rescuers got their seventeen charges over the divide and down to the head of the Yuba, camping where the First Relief had camped. The three who had been sent ahead should join them here if they found the first cache intact. But it had been rifled by animals and they had had to go on.
On March 6 just such a storm as the Forlorn Hope had had to live through struck the Second Relief. From Reed’s diary: “The men up nearly all night making fires. Some of the men begin praying. Several of them became blind. I could not see the light of the fire blazing before me nor tell when it was burning.… The snow blows so thick and fast that we cannot see twenty feet looking against the wind. I dread the coming night. Three of my men only able to get wood. ‘Hungry,’ ‘Hungry,’ is the cry with the children and nothing to give them. ‘Freezing!’ is the cry of the mothers who have nothing for their little, starving, freezing children. Night closing fast and with it the hurricane increases.”
