Desperate Passage, Page 8

  The cost of the desert crossing had been incalculable. In all, they had lost thirty-six cattle, either because the animals bolted and ran off or because they simply could go no farther and collapsed. George Donner and Lewis Keseberg each abandoned a wagon, but it was clearly the Reeds whose fortunes had been the most deeply damaged. Left with only one ox and one cow, they were forced to borrow an extra team merely to pull their one remaining wagon, the richest family in the train reduced to accepting frontier charity. Even among the families who made it through with their animals and wagons intact, the livestock had suffered, weaker now as draft animals and scrawnier as a potential supply of meat. Perhaps most significant, the company was increasingly divided and dispirited, families eyeing each other as sources of hindrance rather than help. When the Reed family divided its provisions, which could not fit into the one wagon that remained, the result was a near-universal sense of martyrdom and grievance, the Reeds convinced they had generously victualed their comrades, the other families certain of their beneficence in helping the newly impoverished. Like most wagon trains, the Donner Party had never been a truly unified force, but now it was more fragmented than ever, wilting in both spirit and body. John Breen, who was fourteen at the time of the journey, thought back to the desert passage years later and recalled simply, "Here our real hardships commenced."

  ***

  THEY STARTED FORWARD AGAIN on a morning when a snowstorm dusted the nearby hills, a reminder of the advancing calendar that, as John Breen remembered it, "made the mothers tremble." In fact, desperation was beginning to suffuse more than just the maternal contingent of the Donner Party. Fearful that their provisions might not carry through to California, the company agreed that each family would inventory its foodstuffs, then provide a written status report to Reed, another sign of his de facto status as leader. The result was apparently pessimistic, for Reed suggested that two riders hurry on to Sutter's Fort, fetch fresh supplies, and then backtrack to meet the rest of the party somewhere on the trail. His recent setback on the desert had hardly diminished Reed's enthusiasm for the expansive gesture: He wrote a letter to Sutter personally guaranteeing payment for the supplies, assuming he eventually reached California.

  The resupply effort would be an astonishingly dangerous mission—two men alone would be easy prey for hostile Indians or unscrupulous emigrants in other trains, or even simple mishap—and so it would have to be strictly a matter for volunteers. None of the men with large families—Reed himself, the Donner brothers, Graves—stepped forward, perhaps because they dared not abandon their wives and children, perhaps because they were too old, perhaps both. Either the hired hands were unwilling or their employers balked at losing the help, so it was left to men with smaller, younger families or to those traveling alone. The first to step forward was William McCutchan, a giant of a man with a bushy mane of hair who was going west with his wife, Amanda, and their toddler daughter, Harriet. Left behind by some previous train for unknown reasons, they had joined the Donner Party at Fort Bridger, apparently traveling without a wagon and carrying what supplies they could on a horse and a mule. His offer was conditional: The rest of the party must vow to help his wife and daughter, a reasonable demand that was granted quick acquiescence. The other volunteer was Charles Stanton, the former Chicago merchant hoping to rekindle some inner flame after a bout with depression, who said he would go if someone provided a mount. His family now assured of aid, McCutchan agreed that Stanton could take his mule.

  Physically, the men were opposites—Stanton diminutive, McCutchan said to be six-feet-six—but there were plenty of other reasons to find them a strange selection. McCutchan had not even been a member of the Donner Party for most of the trip, and Stanton was a bachelor with no relatives or loved ones in the train, and thus a man who might balk at returning if he reached safety in California. But absent other volunteers there wasn't much choice, so the unlikely pair of couriers packed food and blankets onto their saddles and set off toward the west.

  ***

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WEEKS Edward Breen swung into a saddle. Through the Wasatch, when the young man's labor had been desperately needed to help clear the way, he had been lying in a wagon, his broken left leg gripped by handmade wooden splints. Now he moved gingerly at first, not wanting to risk some further trouble with the limb. His parents watched nervously, then breathed a sigh of relief as the boy touched his heels to the animal's flank and moved off.

  ***

  SOME PLACES ON THE TRAIL SEEMED CURSED. The air or the water or the soil brought out the snippy side of people, all the collected antagonisms of a long journey simmering like a low-grade fever. Somebody remembered the time that Smith held up the train for no good reason. Or the way Jones always commandeered the best campsite. Or the fact that Johnson was lazy about guard duty. Or the way somebody talked too much or talked too little or just plain annoyed folks. Weeks and weeks and weeks of hard travel built up the pressure until something sparked an eruption, and sometimes it seemed to be nothing more than a spot along the path, even a good spot.

  Up ahead of the Donner Party, Edwin Bryant and his friends in the mule train found one such spot when they camped in a grassy dale where springs bubbled up a water supply and the foliage offered rich feed for the animals. The next morning, two men argued over some minor slight, "a very trivial matter," Bryant wrote. The dispute grew heated until both men leveled rifles. Bryant thought the whole affair was crazy. Here they were in the middle of nowhere and people were threatening to kill the very comrades on whom they depended. He rushed into the middle of it and started giving both men a lecture, telling them that killing each other was as bad as an attack by some outsider. Tempers cooled and the barrels were lowered.

  The Donner Party reached the same exact place five weeks later and weathered a broader if less acute quarrel—a war of the sexes. "All the women in Camp were mad with anger," Reed wrote in his diary. He gave no more details, other than suggesting that the site should be known as Mad Woman Camp.

  Maybe it was just boredom that tweaked the nerves. After crossing the salt desert of Utah, the wagons entered what is today eastern Nevada and endured a repetitious geology where the earth has furrowed itself into a succession of small mountain ranges, like the lines of a wrinkled forehead. Heinrich Lienhard, traveling the same route but well ahead of the Donner Party, could not avoid echoing the region's monotony in his journal entries. "We came into a valley which was veiy much like the one we had left," he wrote. Then the next day: "We went through another gap and came into a dry valley." And the following day, after yet another mountain crossing: "The valley lying before us was again broad, and resembled in eveiy respect the one we had just crossed."

  And then they squared up against the Ruby Mountains, the last obstacle on Hastings's ill-advised cut-off. On the other side of the mountains lay the Humboldt River, where they would rejoin the traditional trail. On his eastbound journey earlier in the year, Hastings had crossed the Rubies via a small, steep defile that later came to be known as Secret Pass, a route that required little detour. But Secret Pass was too rugged for wagons; another way had to be found. The point at which the trail collided with the mountains lay toward the northern tip of the range, and so the easiest and quickest choice would have been to turn north and circle around that end. But no one had ever taken that route, so nobody knew how close the wagons were to an easy passage. Guiding the Harlan-Young Party, days in front of the Donner Party, Hastings instead turned to the south—yet another mistake, this one born mostly of ignorance. He began paralleling the mountains, looking constantly to his right to find a workable pass.

  When the Donner Party wagons came along, they were following the plainly visible tracks of the earlier group, and so they too headed south. They trudged along beneath the precipitous rise of the mountains for three days, interrupted by one baffling and inexcusable Friday on which they remained in camp, going nowhere and achieving nothing. Finally, they came to a shallow pass—Reed described it as "a
flatt in the mounton"—and followed it up and over the crest. Streams led them down the other side, and on September 26, a little west of what is today Elko, Nevada, they at last reached the Humboldt, where they found the main California trail that ran down from Idaho. The Hastings Cut-Off was finished at last.

  It had been more than two months since they separated from the other California-bound trains along the Little Sandy. At Fort Bridger, the last place where they could change their minds and stick with the main trail, Reed had optimistically written that he hoped to reach Sutter's Fort in seven weeks by taking the cut-off. When they arrived at the Humboldt, more time than that had already passed, and they were still far from their goal. Edwin Bryant, their onetime traveling companion who had joined the Fourth of July celebration before trading in his wagon for mules, was now more than a month ahead.

  Ironically, it was the presumed advantage of Hastings's route that was in fact its central flaw. Like a modern engineer building a freeway, Hastings laid his course with a straight-edge, heedless of the constraints of mountain or desert. In this, he was in some respects the first modern westerner, struggling to impose human preference on an unforgiving geography, but he was foolishly ahead of his time. Mountain men or militaiy units might conquer whatever barrier lay before them, but family wagons and livestock needed to treat the most difficult topography with grudging respect, circumventing obstructions rather than assaulting them. Travel by compass bearing alone was an arrogant fantasy. The traditional trail curved and buckled and detoured for a reason: Western terrain demanded a circumspect and sinuous approach. Crossing the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert—tasks more onerous than anything emigrants faced on the traditional trail—not only slowed progress horrendously but also weakened people and animals alike, both physically and mentally. Lienhard, the fellow emigrant who was ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, pondered the realities of the Hastings Cut-Off and declared in his diary that it would more appropriately be called "Hastings Longtripp."

  In rough terms, the delay could be measured. Using information from Indians or other emigrants or even trailside notes, parties that used the Hastings Cut-Off could gauge themselves against those who had gone the traditional way. One group estimated they had lost seventy miles, at least four days of hard travel, probably more. Another party pegged their delay at nearly two weeks. For the Donner Party, the last of the groups along the cut-off, it was even worse. The gamble probably cost them a full month in lost time, as though they had simply stopped traveling and lollygagged about camp for thirty precious days.

  Yet there was no time for recriminations or pouting, nothing to do but to keep moving. They could neither go back nor remain in place. Like their wagons, they had no brakes, no way of stopping the high-stakes journey on which they had wagered their lives and fortunes. The only alternative was to push forward, exhausted marathoners hoping for a second wind. They could not know that, as at every stage of their long ordeal, their situation would soon grow more precarious still. And this time, the fault would lie not with a hostile geography or an unreliable promise, but with the bitter divisions of their own comrades.

  10

  One Bad Hill

  Most of the wagons had already climbed the long, sandy hummock. John Snyder, the teamster for the Graves family, was toward the back of the line when he began urging his charges up the slope. It was rough terrain—emigrants recalled it as a "very bad ridge" or "one bad hill"—and most men stopped to double-hitch, combining five or six pairs of oxen to haul just one wagon, like a truck driver dropping into a lower gear.

  Snyder spurned such caution. Perhaps it was pride in his animals, or in his own skill as a teamster. Maybe he was just tired and exhausted and sick of the wearying delays. Maybe it was simple exuberance, for Snyder was a young man. Whatever the reason, he insisted his charges could conquer the hill unaided, and he started up the climb.

  Suddenly there was trouble with the teams: confusion, a tangle of reins, animals shouldering their great bulks into one another, wagons crunching together. Angry words flew. Snyder and one of the Reed family teamsters shouted insults. James Reed himself stepped into the fray, and he and Snyder flared. After all those months of walking across a continent, the fatigue and the delays and the aggravations finally combined into one irresistible moment of wrath. Adrenaline shot through the veins. Fury rose in the chest. Fists clutched weapons and raised them in the air. Rage conquered all.

  ***

  IT WAS BARELY A WEEK since the Donner Party had completed the disastrous Hastings Cut-Off and regained the main trail along the Humboldt River, the waterway that would guide them across what is now the state of Nevada. Rejoining the traditional road had been a milestone: For the only time in his long diary, Reed noted the party's location even before mentioning the date.

  But the Humboldt itself proved a disappointment. Drought plagued the West in 1846, and the river had withered until it was "more a succession or chain of stagnant pools than a stream of running water." At places the soil was so dry that it resembled ash. Ricked up by the draft animals into vast white clouds, the dust caked the emigrants' hair and skin until they were "as cadaverous as so many corpses." The Humboldt was better than Hastings's nonexistent shortcut, but it was hardly easy. The hard work and long days and constant exertion still sapped the body and frayed the nerves. And then on Monday, October 5, the wagons reached the hill where Snyder refused to double-hitch.

  As Snyder and Reed argued, Reed barked that they should get the teams to the top of the hill and then settle the matter man-to-man. Snyder insisted on a more immediate brand of satisfaction. He raised the butt end of his ox whip and struck Reed in the head. At almost the same moment, Reed pulled a hunting knife and lunged at Snyder, stabbing him deeply in the chest. As soon as the fight began, it was over, Snyder collapsed to the ground with a mortal wound, Reed gashed across the head, both men soaked in blood. Snyder's friends carried him up the hill and laid him on the ground, but there was nothing anyone could do for him, and within minutes he was dead.

  The company cleaved in two, both figuratively and literally. The Graveses and their friends pitched camp near the top of the hill, Snyder's body lying nearby and surely fueling anger at Reed. The Reeds stopped near the bottom of the hill, perhaps with the Eddys, who seem to have taken Reed's side almost immediately. Opinion was as divided as the tents, split between those who thought Reed had merely defended himself and those who denounced him as a murderer. Later, Reed's friends and family members recalled a man deeply saddened and working to make amends: casting the knife away in disgust, rushing to Snyder's side to hear his dying words, offering boards from his own lone remaining wagon for a coffin, standing at the gravesite till every clod of dirt had been patted down over the body.

  Nobody knew quite what to do. They had quit the United States when they crossed the Continental Divide—the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase—and so technically they were no longer subject to American law. Nevertheless, the developing credo of the western migration was one of remarkable commitment to legal procedure. When crime struck, emigrants typically formed courts to try the defendant, often with a rather elaborate legal structure that included a judge, jury, and lawyers for both the prosecution and defense. In at least one case, a "sheriff " was appointed to watch over the jury, which returned its verdict in writing. Nor were these show courts. Emigrants took great pains to ensure some element of fairness, often recruiting people from other companies to act as judge or jury so as to gain greater impartiality. In some cases, even though the wagons were racing against time, parties halted their progress to find suitable jurors in other companies or spent precious hours tracking down suspects or investigating a crime scene.

  Yet for a variety of reasons, it was hardly clear that the Donner Party would observe the niceties. For one thing, there were no other companies nearby to provide a ready pool of disinterested jurors. For another, there was no agreed-upon set of rules. The Russell Party—the company in which the
Donners and the Reeds first traveled—had established a set of bylaws, but these were mostly concerned with procedural matters like organizing the day's march and assigning guard duty, not punishing capital crimes. In any event, the rules had been adopted before the Donners and the Reeds joined the company, and when they and the other families split off from the main emigration to follow the Hastings Cut-Off, there was, as far as we know, no discussion of the legal procedures that might apply to the newly formed party. In later years, most emigrant parties abandoned the practice of formal bylaws for precisely this reason. Companies divided and reformed with such frequency that the original signers were often long gone by the time the rules were actually needed.

  Worse still for the Donner Party, their nominal leader was not at hand. As happened periodically throughout the journey, the train had, for whatever reason, split in two a few days before the fight, and the Donner families were traveling separately, two days ahead on the trail. Revealing the tenuous nature of hierarchy in emigrant trains, nobody thought to ride ahead and fetch the elected leader of their band, and so the half dozen or so family groups now camped at opposite ends of the fatal hill were left to their own devices to settle a matter of life and death.