Desperate Passage, Page 9

  As is often the case with explosive moments of trauma, even the eyewitnesses could not agree on precisely what happened. The cause of the original dispute was never exactly clear. Perhaps it centered on Snyder's refusal to double-team. Perhaps it was about the order or pace of the climb. The teams may have become tangled. Snyder may have started to beat his animals or use foul language. There was no unanimity on which man struck first, or whether Margret Reed, who had stepped in as peacemaker, was hit as well. Reed's backers always maintained that Snyder took the blame for the whole thing with his dying words, but that too was disputed.

  Favoritisms and resentments bubbled to the surface. Snyder had been a popular fellow, an upbeat and jovial type who liked to take the hind gate off the wagon at night and use it as a dance floor, entertaining the camp with a jig. In contrast to the ostentatious wealth with which Reed began the journey, Snyder was a young man trying to make it on his own, having struck a deal with Franklin Graves to work his way west in return for his board. He was handsome in a rugged, outdoorsy sort of way, and he may even have been romancing Mary Ann Graves, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his employer and the belle of the train.

  By contrast, Reed was disliked. His haughtiness rankled from the start, and he had been the biggest advocate of the Hastings Cut-Off, now plain to all as a disaster. Lewis Keseberg may well have harbored some private grudge against Reed—there were those who said that early in the journey Reed upbraided Keseberg harshly for beating his wife or using foul language in the presence of Reed's wife—and now the German apparently tried to exact his revenge by propping up his wagon tongue, the silent call for a hanging.

  Most of the emigrants opposed anything so drastic. "Perhaps the intimate friends of Snyder favored extreme measures, but this sentiment was not generally approved," remembered James Breen, who was only five at the time but talked about the event later with his older brother.

  Instead, in what must have been a compromise of sorts, the emigrants turned to the most common form of serious punishment meted out on the overland migration: banishment. Executions certainly occurred—almost always by hanging or firing squad—but it was much more common that wrongdoers were simply forced out on their own, perhaps because the emigrants recognized that most trailside killings were not premeditated murders but, as in the case of Reed and Snyder, sudden explosions of temper, what one historian aptly called "unleashed antagonisms, small personal matters greatly magnified." By avoiding a killing, banishment also helped to keep the peace among those who remained in the company, a consideration that may well have influenced Reed's case. It's easy to imagine that Reed and his supporters would have tried to fight off an execution.

  In later years, when the Gold Rush crowded the trail with thousands of wagons, some emigrants began to complain that banishment lacked the needed severity, so easy was it for the expelled man to latch on with some nearby company. But that was hardly the case for Reed. The emigration of 1846 was far smaller, and in any event the Donner Party was lagging far behind all the other companies. Told that he would have to ride alone to California, he faced the real possibility of death.

  At first he refused, and while we have no evidence, it seems reasonable that he must have contemplated another option: abandoning the train with his entire family and pushing ahead on their own. The idea had a certain minimal plausibility. The Graves clan had been alone on the trail until it caught the Donner Party west of Fort Bridger, and the Reeds, with five employees, made a comparably sized group. But there were also sound reasons suggesting that it was impractical for the family to forge onward unaided. Their losses in the salt desert had reduced them to borrowed oxen, and the owners might have demanded their animals back. What was more, the Reeds had precious few supplies left, and without the help of fellow emigrants, they would have been reduced solely to hunting for food.

  Talking over the family's options, Margret Reed emphasized their scarce provisions and told her husband that if he refused the banishment and somehow avoided a hanging by the other emigrants, he might simply watch his children starve. If he rode ahead, he might return with food and save them all. Indeed, some people remembered Reed's departure as motivated less by the killing and more by a desire to push forward quickly. He left, Mary Ann Graves insisted, "because he would rather travail with one man than the company." Whatever the exact mix of reasons, Reed mounted up and struck out alone, his head wounds swathed in bandages.

  When he caught the Donner families farther along on the trail, he offered a sanitized version of his departure: He was simply going ahead for provisions, in effect reprising the effort of Stanton and McCutchan, the volunteers sent out a few weeks before. One of Reed's teamsters, Walter Herron, was traveling with the Donners, but now he joined Reed, providing help and companionship that could easily prove crucial to survival.

  In less than a month, Reed had been transformed from the richest man in the train to one of the poorest, and now he had been rejected altogether, forced to abandon his family and the few material possessions he retained. He was leaving his wife and children with a group of people who had just banished him, some of whom had wanted to kill him. And yet the loss may have been greater for the others than for Reed. For all his airs, he possessed admirable qualities. William Graves, who disliked Reed, acknowledged that he was "as true as steel." Reed often made the day-to-day decisions about where to camp or noon or water the stock, and the others had relied on his intelligence and tenacity. When three men were sent ahead to find Hastings and ask about the route, Reed was the only one who returned quickly. Through the Wasatch—and perhaps beyond—it appears that he was effectively the captain of the party, titles notwithstanding. Others recognized such traits. At Fort Bridger, Louis Vasquez turned to Reed when he wanted to recover three missing horses. The animals had strayed or been stolen, and Vasquez wrote out a short note in effect making Reed his agent. "We do hereby authorise Mr. Jas. Read," Vasquez wrote in a full, rounded hand, "to take where ever he should find three horses stolen or strayed from us." He could have turned to any man in the train, but Vasquez picked Reed. Now, short on both provisions and time and still hundreds of miles from its destination, the Donner Party would have to push ahead without its one true leader.

  11

  Abandoned

  The old man struggled to keep up. The sterile terrain and the long journey had weakened the draft animals until they could no longer bear the extra weight of passengers in the wagons, so everybody was walking, even children and the elderly. Hardcoop, a Belgian whose first name is lost to history, was struggling along as best he could, but the muscles and bones and joints that had carried him through sixty hard years were finally giving way.

  The same thing had happened the day before, after he had been booted from his normal seat in Lewis Keseberg's wagon. He had fallen so far behind that when the others pitched camp at night, they realized the old man was missing and dispatched a rider on a rescue mission. Hardcoop was found five miles back on the trail.

  Now, the following morning, they were again on the march. It had been less than half an hour since they broke camp, and Keseberg had renewed his refusal to carry Hardcoop. Searching for a ride, Hardcoop asked William Eddy for a seat in his wagon. Eddy balked too. They were struggling through a sandy patch, where the loose ground sucked at the wheels, and Eddy thought his oxen could handle no extra weight. If Hardcoop could keep going on his own for a time, Eddy said, perhaps he could ride in the wagon when the trail improved. The old man vowed to forge ahead.

  But when the emigrants stopped that night, they again found Hardcoop was missing, just as he had been the night before. Boys who had been driving cattle recalled him sitting by the side of the trail, physically played out and unable to go on. Another rescue ride so late at night was impossible, so they built a signal fire and hoped he might stumble in to camp. The night guards stoked the flames through the wee hours, but Hardcoop never appeared.

  Eddy set about organizing a rescue effort, but he had no horse
, so he asked Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves, the two men with saddle animals that could be used.

  Breen said it was impossible to save the old man. Graves flashed with anger and said he would not risk losing a good horse to search for a man who was probably already dead. He declared he wanted to hear no more of the idea. Desperate, Eddy and two other men offered to walk back and search. The others said they would not wait. The night had been cold, perhaps too cold for a weakened old man to survive. Even if he was still alive, he could be miles in the rear, a half day's walk just to reach him. And what then? How would they get him back to the main parly? And what about the next day, or the next, or the next? This wasn't a militaiy unit, men bound to one another with unshakable allegiance. Nobody had promised Hardcoop anything. Out this far, you could look to your family members, but not much beyond that. If Hardcoop couldn't keep up, or so the argument must have gone, then sooner or later he was destined to die. They broke camp, hitched up the wagons, took a final look backward, and rolled out to the west. Parents must have told their children to stay extra close that day.

  Keseberg has often been described as the villain of Hardcoop's abandonment, and there is little doubt he was a hard man, if not an overtly mean one. Yet Keseberg should not shoulder the blame alone. Eddy was the main source for the story, especially the details about his efforts at a morning rescue, yet even he admitted that the previous day he refused to let Hardkoop ride in his wagon when the old man asked for help, and Eddy apparently made no effort to learn what happened to him the rest of the day.

  Nor did anyone else. On the day Hardcoop was left behind, most members of the party must have had some inkling of the old man's struggle, must have noticed that he was faltering or was sitting by the trail or was nowhere to be found at the noon break. Only the day before, after all, he had been unable to keep up; it would have required no great act of collective mercy or prescience to mind his progress with a protective eye. Anyone could have helped, but no one did.

  Hardcoop would have labored on until he was past exhaustion. He had a son and daughter in Antwerp, and after the trip west he intended to return to Belgium and spend his declining years with them. If only he could somehow make it to camp, perhaps he would see them again, bounce grandchildren on his knee and spend a peaceful old age amid the pleasures of home. He had risked everything for one last adventure—a glimpse of this far-off place called California—and now the dream was darkening into nightmare. He could be halfway to Belgium now, not out here stumbling through the wilderness and fighting for his life.

  If he made it through the night, he must have gazed at the morning horizon hoping for some approaching figure of rescue. Perhaps someone was coming back. Perhaps they had not forgotten him. Perhaps they would take pity on a weak old man. But at some point he faced the facts. He could go no farther forward, and they were not coming back. He may have just walked to the end and collapsed onto the trail when he was fully spent. Or perhaps he found some piece of shade where he could sit down and await the inevitable.

  ***

  AHEAD ON THE TRAIL, THE BANISHED James Reed and his teamster Walter Herron had only one horse between them, so they took turns riding and walking, half the day in the saddle and half on foot. Freed from the wagon train's crawling pace, they made good time—close to forty miles one day and often twenty-five or more, by Reed's reckoning. His unfinished diary remained with his family, but now he continued the effort as best he could, using a scrap of spare paper to scrawl out a crude map, mileage notations, and a few taciturn comments. "Hard pass. You must double teams," he wrote at the start, presumably referring to the hill where he had killed Snyder.

  Despite "all the economy I could use," as Reed wrote later, their provisions ran out in a few days, forcing them to hunt for food. Still, he and Herron survived the Nevada desert, even stopping long enough at a hot springs to use the scalding water to make a cup of tea. Near the lake where the rest of the party would eventually be trapped, Reed noted that they endured eight miles of "the worst road in creaton," and then began climbing into the Sierra Nevada. Game grew scarcer, and in any event they had little time for hunting if they wished to reach the California settlements and return with supplies before winter. The result was that starvation became a very real possibility. They managed to gather a few wild onions, but eventually they grew so famished that Herron wanted to kill the horse for meat, although Reed held him off, insisting that destroying their best means of transportation should be a last resort. At one point, while Herron was riding and Reed walking, Reed found a single bean, apparently dropped by previous emigrants, and they began scanning the ground. "Never was a road examined more closely for several miles," Reed wrote later. In all, they found five beans; Herron, who had briefly become delirious from hunger, ate three of them, Reed two.

  Stumbling on some abandoned wagons, they ransacked the contents but found no food. Desperate, Reed checked a bucket slung under the bed of one of the wagons and used to store axle grease. He scraped away the tar normally used as grease and at the bottom found "a streak of rancid tallow"—animal fat that was sometimes also used as a lubricant. As an animal product, it was theoretically edible, and so Reed used the bucket's tar paddle to scrape up a ball of tallow about the size of a walnut. As repulsive as it sounds—old, congealed animal fat that had been sitting beneath a coating of tar—they each ate a piece, and then Herron had another. They walked on, but Reed went only fifty yards before his stomach rebelled and he became "deadly sick and blind." He had to stop and rest against a rock, leaning his head on the muzzle of his gun. He looked so ashen that Herron asked if he was dying.

  In time, they spotted wagons belonging to a group of emigrants who had stopped to rest their cattle at a place called Bear Valley. Amazingly, they also found Charles Stanton, one of the two men who had left the Donner Party six weeks earlier to ride to California and fetch supplies. Stanton had safely reached Sutter's Fort and now was returning to the company with mules loaded with flour and dried meat. William McCutchan, the other volunteer and a man whose wife and baby daughter were among the emigrants, had also reached Sutter's Fort but had been too sick to return, so it was Stanton, the diminutive bachelor with no relatives at risk, who started back eastward over the Sierra.

  Reed and Stanton exchanged news and then, as soon as possible rode off in opposite directions: Reed westward, toward Sutter's Fort and more supplies, Stanton eastward, toward the struggling party he had vowed to rescue.

  ***

  BACK ON THE HUMBOLDT RIVER, the main contingent of the Donner Party was enduring a fresh adversity: conflict with Indians. Hollywood depictions notwithstanding, violence between wagon trains and tribes was actually quite rare. Over the long span of history, of course, the European conquest of the Americas was devastating to native peoples, seizing their homelands and effecting a genocide on the population. In North America, British, French, and Spanish settlement reduced the pre-Columbian population by at least half, perhaps far more than that. Estimates vary hugely, but it's clear that the European triumph cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. But in the shorter term, the overland migration to the West actually produced far less bloodshed than has commonly been portrayed in the popular culture, either in vintage movies that depicted all Indians as bloodthirsty savages preying on innocent families or in more recent fare that reversed the roles. John D. Unruh Jr., the best historian of the overland migration, tried to count the deaths of emigrants at the hands of Indians, and vice versa, using reasonably reliable contemporary sources. His admittedly imprecise tally for the two decades between 1840 and i860 found only 362 emigrants killed by Indians and—even more surprising—only 426 Indians directly killed by emigrants. Even among the few hundred deaths Unruh could identify, most occurred in 1849 or later, when the Gold Rush increased traffic on the trail drastically, unavoidably exacerbating discord with Indians. In some early years, Unruh found no deaths directly attributable to emigrant-Indian skirmishes. In 1846, the year of the Donne
r Party, he recorded only four emigrant deaths and twenty Indian fatalities.

  Typically, emigrants started the journey with great fear of the Indians but soon found their concerns unwarranted. At Fort Kearny in Nebraska—two hundred miles or more into the journey—a correspondent reported in 1850 that most of that year's trains had yet to even see an Indian. When the two groups did encounter one another, relations were usually friendly. Indians gave directions to those who were lost, helped extract wagons that were stuck, provided water or firewood to families short on provisions, and in at least one case rescued a drowning man. Mutually beneficial business deals were common, with Indians hired to serve as guides, guards, interpreters, and packers. So peaceful was the trip that some emigrants concluded almost all dangers were mythological and discarded their weapons. Lansford Hastings, who had written the guidebook read by many emigrants of 1846, noted that earlier parties had disarmed in what is today Idaho. In 1850 one party was no farther than western Nebraska when they lightened their load by throwing out their guns.

  Almost all emigrants viewed the Indians with what we would regard as gross racism and sometimes acted on an attendant belief that they could behave toward natives in any way they liked. There are stories not only of kidnapping but of wanton murder. But there were also many cases of emigrant-Indian interaction that were charmingly human and universal. Heinrich Lienhard, ahead of the Donner Party on the trail in 1846, once struck up a sign-language friendship with a Shoshone by asking him to dig some edible roots. Lienhard ate one of the roots—it reminded him of a parsnip—and enjoyed it. But that night he suffered horribly from stomach cramps and diarrhea, so when the Indian brought him more roots in the morning Lienhard was aghast. "Since I could explain why only by signs, I bent over forward, held my stomach with both hands, and groaned as if I had severe stomach pains. Then I imitated a certain sound with my lips that could come only from another part of the anatomy, and at the same time I made a quick gesture to my behind. The Indians understood completely, and they all burst out in a storm of laughter. My friend laughed loudest of all, and threw his roots at my back. We naturally joined in the laughter and parted as good friends in spite of all."