There were smaller families, too—twenty-eight-year-old William Eddy, a cabinetmaker from Illinois, his wife, Eleanor, and their two young children; the Kesebergs with their toddler daughter and a newborn son; and another German couple, the Wolfingers.
There were also bachelors of various ages and ethnicities, among them the diminutive Charles Stanton from Chicago; John Denton, an English gunsmith from Sheffield; an elderly Belgian man named Hardcoop who traveled with the Kesebergs; Joseph Reinhardt, a German traveling with the Wolfingers; another Irishman, a merry, brown-haired, blue-eyed friend of the Breens named Patrick Dolan; the Donners’ teamsters, Samuel Shoemaker, Noah James, and a Mexican drover named Antonio whom they had hired at Fort Laramie; another German who seems to have worked for the Donners, Augustus Spitzer; three teamsters working for the Reeds, twenty-eight-year-old Milt Elliott, James Smith, and Walter Herron; and a Reed family servant, Baylis Williams, an albino who stayed in the wagon during daylight hours and did chores around camp at night. Other than the widow Levinah Murphy, the only single woman not traveling with her parents or stepparents was the Reeds’ nearly deaf cook, Baylis Williams’s half sister Eliza.
Despite their many differences and their frequent bickering, over the next few days the senior men of the Donner Party gradually came into agreement about one thing—the advisability of taking Hastings’s new route. They were thoroughly fed up with life on the trail, and increasingly with one another. With every difficult mile they traveled, the shortest possible route to their destination seemed more attractive. There would still be an opportunity to turn north for Fort Hall when they reached Fort Bridger, but they thought less and less of that option as they moved down the road. The lyrical descriptions of California they had read in Hastings’s book and elsewhere had long since begun to bewitch them, and his reassuring letter about the new route now began to seal the deal.
There was at least one dissenting opinion, but it was a woman’s and therefore not likely to carry much weight. Forty-four-year-old Tamzene Donner, George’s wife, was downcast and apprehensive. She could see nothing but folly in the notion of following a man they did not know over an unproven route. She could not shake her growing suspicion that Hastings might turn out to be, as she was later reported to have put it, merely another “selfish adventurer.”
Sarah and her family crossed the South Pass and reached the Parting of the Ways on the Little Sandy a few days after the Donner Party. There they, too, took the left-hand road, toward Fort Bridger, parting company with the Daniels and McCracken families and continuing on alone in their three wagons. July 28 was Eleanor’s fifteenth birthday, and on August 3 they arrived at Fort Bridger.
There they learned that the Donner Party had come and gone already, arriving on July 28 and leaving on July 31, hoping to catch up with Hastings, who had left days before with some sixty or more California-bound wagons. Before the Donner Party had left, they added several members to their number—another of the exceptionally tall men who characterized the 1846 emigration, a six-foot-six, thirty-year-old Kentuckian named William McCutchen, his wife, Amanda, and their infant daughter, Harriet; a sixteen-year-old French-Canadian boy named Jean Baptiste Trudeau, who claimed to be a mountain man whose father had been killed by Indians; and a young man named Luke Halloran, who was so ill with tuberculosis that his party had abandoned him but whom George and Tamzene Donner had taken into one of their own wagons simply out of compassion.
Fort Bridger as Sarah saw it was not much to behold. It was not in fact a fort at all. It was simply a small trading post run by Jim Bridger, a trapper and mountain man, and his partner, Louis Vasquez. A rough stockade of pointed poles was the only form of fortification that it boasted. When Edwin Bryant had seen it a few days before, he had found little to recommend the place. “The buildings are two or three miserable log cabins, rudely constructed and bearing but a faint resemblance to habitable houses.”
Miserable it might have been, but several sinuous strands of the Blacks Fork wound their way past the fort. The streams watered lush meadows of green grass and thereby provided ample pasturage for the Graveses’ livestock, which were haggard and all but broken down after the long, slow haul over the South Pass. The fort offered a last chance to rest those animals or trade them for livelier specimens, which Bridger and Vasquez had in abundance. And the establishment also offered Sarah and her family an opportunity—at exorbitant prices—to lay in a few additional provisions, new shoes or moccasins to replace their worn-out footwear, a pint or two of whiskey to replenish what had been consumed on the Fourth of July, buffalo robes with which to keep warm in the mountains ahead. The next outpost of American civilization was a very long ways down the road—a settlement called Johnson’s Ranch in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. By the time they reached it, they would be home free, in California.
While the Graves family grazed and rested their livestock, someone—whether it was Louis Vasquez or Jim Bridger, we don’t know—offered them some advice. It was the same advice that Bridger had given James Reed just four days before, advice that Reed had recorded in a letter home.
The new road, or Hastings’ cut-off, leaves the Fort Hall road here, and is said to be a saving of 350 or 400 miles going to California, and a better route…. The rest of the Californians went the long route, feeling afraid of Hastings’ Cut-off. Mr. Bridger informs me that the route we design to take is a fine level road, with plenty of water and grass….
Reed seems in some ways to have been a doubtful judge of character. He had, at any rate, been mightily impressed by Bridger and Vasquez, calling them “two very excellent and accommodating gentlemen.” But what Reed didn’t know was that when Bridger and Vasquez had recommended the new route, they had held something essential back from him, something they didn’t bother to tell Franklin Graves now either. Vasquez had in his possession letters that Edwin Bryant had left for Reed. The letters warned Reed and others following him by all means not to take the cutoff, that it was wholly impractical for wagons. But Vasquez never delivered the letters to Reed.
He had his reasons. Bridger and Vasquez had run the trading post since 1843, but by the summer of 1846 they faced an uncertain future. With most of the emigrant traffic now taking the more northerly route from the Parting of the Ways to Fort Hall, there was little reason for their establishment to continue in business—unless Lansford Hastings’s cutoff, which began at their doorstep, should become the established route to California. If that were to happen, Fort Bridger would not only survive but flourish.
Franklin Graves knew nothing of ulterior motives. He knew only what he had read and what Bridger and Vasquez had told him about the new route, and all in all it sounded promising.
While he and his family prepared for the next push forward, the Tuckers and the Ritchies and some of the other families with whom they had traveled on and off for months also arrived at the fort. All of them were planning to veer northwest for Fort Hall, bound most likely, they thought, for Oregon, and not at any rate about to hazard Hastings’s unproven route. So Sarah and her siblings said their final good-byes to young George Washington Tucker, to Harriet and William Dill Ritchie, and to many of the other young people they had met back on the plains. Then Franklin Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder turned their three wagons southwest and hurried off, insofar as one is able to hurry when pulled by oxen, across still more arid, sage-covered hills in pursuit of the Donner Party and Lansford Hastings.
The Donner Party was star-crossed from the very outset. One or two days out of Fort Bridger, two thirteen-year-olds, Virginia Reed and Eddie Breen, took their saddle ponies on a cross-country gallop together. Edward’s pony stepped in a prairie dog burrow and threw the boy to the ground. His left leg snapped on impact. It was a bad break, a compound fracture between the knee and the ankle. The ragged ends of the tibia protruded through bloody skin. Someone sent for help back at the fort, and many seemingly endless hours later a tattered old mountain man with a long white beard streaked wi
th tobacco juice rode into camp astride a mule. He examined the wound.
Breaks like this were serious, life-threatening wounds in 1846. Gangrene and death were the all-too-common outcome. The mountain man unrolled a bundle of instruments and extracted a long knife and a meat saw. When Eddie saw the glint of the tools, he began to wail, and then to scream. Someone held him down.
But his parents could not bear it. They stopped the old man, paid him five dollars for his trouble, and sent him on his way, grumbling that he had not been allowed to demonstrate his skill with the knife and the meat saw. James Reed set the bone as best he could. Then the Breens laid Eddie in the back of one of their three wagons and the caravan moved on, the ends of Eddie’s bones grating and grinding together as the wagon bounced over rocks and ruts.
On August 5, following the ruts left by Lansford Hastings and the emigrants he was leading, the Donner Party passed through Echo Canyon, under spectacular red-rock ramparts that towered above them on the right-hand side of the road. On August 6 they approached the eastern end of Weber Canyon, a narrow and tortuous passage into the Wasatch Mountains. The ruts disappeared into the canyon, but before they could follow them, the Donner Party came across a note fluttering from some sagebrush. It was from Hastings, who had left it there two days before, and its contents astonished and bewildered them. It said that the road through the canyon ahead was poor, and it instructed them not to enter with their wagons but to wait there and send a messenger forward to meet him. Then he would return to show them a better route.
What Hastings had discovered within the confines of Weber Canyon was a hellish tangle of boulders, overhanging rocks, narrow ledges, and dead-end side canyons. The party he was leading had struggled for days, making an average of only a mile a day, sometimes having to all but carry their wagons over the boulders that lay in the Weber River.
In places they had resorted to using a windlass to drag wagons and teams up steep slopes. At a place called Devil’s Gate, the rope hoisting one of the wagons broke near the windlass. Men rushed to support the wagon, grabbing at the spokes of the wheels and the planked sides, trying to hold it against the pull of gravity. But gravity won. The oxen bellowed and pawed frantically but futilely at the loose talus on the slope. They began to lose ground. The wagon accelerated, sliding down the slope, dragging the wide-eyed and still-bellowing oxen with it. The men had to jump free of the rig to save their lives. Then it hurtled over a precipice at the bottom of the slope, pulling the oxen over the edge two by two. Wagon and oxen cartwheeled through the air, dropped to the boulders at the bottom of the canyon, and landed in a heap of splintered wood, twisted iron, and gore.
Hastings and the remainder of the wagons made it through, eventually, but it was an experience that those who endured it would remember vividly and tell and retell when they were old.
After reading Hastings’s note, James Reed, Charles Stanton, and William Pike volunteered to ride ahead and overtake Hastings. On the afternoon of August 6 or the morning of August 7, the three of them entered the narrow canyon on horseback and quickly came to see why Hastings had advised against it. Even without wagons it was a desperate scramble just to get through. It was late in the day on August 8 before they emerged tattered and torn from the mountains near the south end of the Great Salt Lake, where they finally found Lansford Hastings in the flesh.
They asked him to make good on his promise to return into the Wasatch and show them the better route his note had spoken of. Hastings agreed to ride back with them, but he went only as far as the top of a peak on the western edge of the mountains. There he gestured at a series of steep hills and brushy canyons that lay between the head of Weber Canyon, where the Donner Party was encamped, and a narrow gap just below the summit on which he stood.
Hastings had had his fill of the Wasatch, and he still had to guide the lead wagons across the next great obstacle presented by his cutoff, the searing salt flats of western Utah. He also knew that the better route was only theoretically better, and he likely did not want to be present if and when the Donner Party found out anything to the contrary. So he rode back down one side of the mountain to rejoin his party while Reed plunged down the other side into dense thickets of oak and aspen, working his way along Indian trails, trying to follow what he took to be the new route, using a hatchet to mark blazes on trees as he went. Stanton and Pike stayed at the Salt Lake for a few days to rest their fagged-out horses.
By the time Reed struggled back into camp on August 10, the ranks of the Donner Party had swelled by thirteen. Sarah and Jay Fosdick, the Graves family, and John Snyder had finally caught up with the Donners, and with their dark destiny.
When Franklin Graves’s hired man, the vibrant and youthful John Snyder, met James F. Reed at the mouth of Weber Canyon on August 10, he met the agent of his doom, but he did not yet know that. That evening Reed, despite what he had just seen in the canyons of the Wasatch, set about convincing the rest of the party that Lansford Hastings was right—a difficult but passable route lay through the gap at the crest of the mountains. It would take considerable work, but wagons could be gotten through by going that way. He had already named the new pass Reed’s Gap, and he could show them the way to get to it.
With this assurance from Reed, the party turned southwest. At first the new route seemed a good one, rising gradually through a broad canyon bordered by more of the familiar sagebrush-covered hills through which they had traveled for many weeks now. But soon the canyon began to grow narrower and the climb steeper. When they arrived at the head of the canyon, they could, for the first time, get a good look at the jumble of mountains that lay ahead of them. Following Reed’s blazes, they descended from the first ridge and turned up another canyon, crossing and recrossing the same stream, but the route soon became choked with brush.
This was not the kind of brush that one could cut through with a few lopping swings of an ax nor root out with chains dragged between teams of oxen. This was a miniature forest—ten or twelve feet tall. Along with the usual willows, cottonwoods, and aspens that grew in dense stands close to the trickles of water in the streambeds, there were large numbers of scrubby hardwood trees—mostly Gambel oak and big-tooth maple. The aridity of the summer climate, the wind that buffeted it in spring and fall, and the snowfall that weighed it down in the winter had all worked together to compress, compact, and toughen the vegetation. The oaks in particular—stout and multitrunked—proved formidable roadblocks. Teams of men with axes had to attack each one individually, and the dense, heavy wood did not yield easily to their blades.
By August 15 the wagons could go no farther. The company made an encampment. Then Franklin Graves and Jay Fosdick and Billy Graves and all the able-bodied men and boys went forward and began the herculean task of cutting a road up the last and steepest canyon toward the narrow pass above them. Progress was slow, and Reed soon grew irritated, feeling that the men were not working as hard as they ought. It took three long days of backbreaking labor before the oxen could finally drag the wagons up into the gap.
Even then their troubles were not over. The western side of the mountain was just as steep and just as densely covered in brush. They quickly found that it was nearly as hard to get heavily laden wagons down a brush-cloaked mountain as it was to get them up. It took another three days of bushwhacking and a series of harrowing descents of precipitous mountainsides before the company finally worked their way down. And then they arrived unexpectedly at one last morale-crushing obstacle—a boulder-and brush-clogged narrowing at the outlet of the final canyon leading out into the Salt Lake Valley.
Turning around was unthinkable, but they had no heart for cutting more brush and rolling more boulders out of their way. Finally they decided to assault a steep hogback ridge that lay to their southwest. One by one they yoked each wagon to long strings of oxen—as many as twenty-four at a time—and then drove them laboriously up the slope. Each time the oxen reached the top, someone had to lead them back down and do the whole thing over
again. Mothers carrying infants, toddlers churning short legs, old men gasping for breath—they all struggled individually up the grass-slick hill, crawling as much as walking as the grade got steeper.
Finally, on the afternoon of August 21, Sarah, her family, and the rest of the Donner Party stood atop what is now called Donner Hill, gazing out at the Salt Lake Valley with a profound sense of relief. The landscape that lay before them looked to be lush with grass and water and certainly much flatter than the country they had just traversed. But even as they contemplated the pleasant prospect of level roads ahead, many of them also began to wrestle with a deepening sense of anxiety. Counting the time they had waited for Reed to return from his rendezvous with Hastings, it had taken them sixteen days to make just thirty-five miles through the Wasatch Mountains. They had been told it might take a week. Still ahead of them was what Hastings had told them would be a taxing but manageable forty-mile dry drive across the salt desert, followed by hundreds of miles of sage and sand hills and alkali desert before they reached the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, still the greatest obstacle between them and California. By any means of reckoning, they were now terribly behind schedule. What exactly it would cost them was a mystery that none of them could yet divine, but it was a question that was beginning to work on them all, a worm that was burrowing its way ever deeper into their hearts and minds.
For many of them, there was now no doubt that Lansford Hastings could not be trusted. But for some of them another niggling doubt was beginning to grow. Why had James Reed—with his haughty manner, his self-assurance, his fancy family wagon, his hired hands, and his personal servants—listened to Hastings and led them into the trap from which they had just emerged? For the Graves family, for Sarah and Jay Fosdick, and for John Snyder, whose first and only knowledge of Reed was what they had witnessed in the past eleven days, the doubts were more than niggling. But they kept their thoughts about Reed to themselves, for now.