Far behind them, Amanda McCutchen, Harriet Pike, and the Fosters heard the shot that killed the deer and began to hurry forward. Even farther back, Sarah and Jay also heard it. But they had come to a standstill perhaps a mile behind the second group. When Jay heard the shot, he cried out to Sarah, “There! Eddy has killed a deer. Now if I only can get to him, I shall live.” But he could barely stand by now, let alone walk any distance.
That night Mary Ann Graves and William Eddy feasted on the roasted entrails of the deer. During the night Eddy fired the flintlock at intervals to let the others know where he and Mary Ann were camped, trying to guide them in. But Amanda McCutchen, Harriet Pike, and the Fosters did not make it to the deer that night. They camped on a ridge above them and endured another long night of hunger cramps.
Farther to the east, Sarah wrapped Jay in the one blanket they owned and sat down beside him where he lay on the ground. Now and then she heard the report of Eddy’s rifle off to the west. She might have struggled on alone to Eddy’s camp, and food, guided by the sound of his gun, but she could not bring herself to leave her husband, who seemed to be slipping away.
Jay likely did not hear the later rifle shots, nor Sarah speaking to him at his side. By now he was suffering severe malnutrition and probably severe hypothermia as well. When he spoke to her, his speech was slurred. It was another night of bright moonlight, and his skin must have been pearly white and cool under her touch. His face was cadaverous and shrunken, his frame gaunt and disjointed beneath his clothes. As the evening wore on, his breathing grew shallow and rattling. His mouth and lips grew dry. His heartbeat grew erratic. Time moved ever more slowly for him, and for Sarah sitting beside him. He lapsed into and out of consciousness. Finally, a little before midnight, he died. When Sarah was sure he was gone, she rolled his body in the blanket and then lay down beside him, and held him, and tried to die herself.
But Sarah’s heart continued to beat and she to live. In the morning she took a black silk neckerchief from around Jay’s stiff neck and put it around her own and then staggered forward, alone now, toward California.
Before long she came across William and Sarah Foster and Mary Ann, who were backtracking, looking for her and Jay. When Sarah told them that Jay was dead, the Fosters wasted no time. They asked Sarah point-blank if they might eat him. Sarah must, by now, have been beyond any expectation of sympathy from her companions. She must in fact have been beyond any expectation of any sort of mercy from the indifferent Fates. She looked at the Fosters and said simply, “You cannot hurt him now,” and continued up the trail with Mary Ann. The Fosters went on to where Jay’s body lay and began to butcher it, severing his legs and arms from his trunk, packing onto their backs as many pieces of him as they could carry.
When Sarah reached Eddy and the remains of the deer, she ate roasted venison, the first food other than human flesh that she had tasted since December 21. Harriet Pike and Amanda McCutchen caught up with the others and joined in eating the venison. Then the Fosters also came into camp, bearing their grisly burden.
That evening they all sat around the campfire in a small circle of wavering light. Eddy had already begun drying strips of the venison by the fire, but the meat that the Fosters had brought into camp was fresh, and apparently too tempting to resist. Someone sharpened a stake, impaled Jay Fosdick’s heart on it, and held it out over the coals.
What Sarah thought and felt we can only try to imagine, if such a thing is even possible. She never wrote or spoke about it in so far as we know. She might have hidden her eyes; she might have left the campfire. But there was not very far that she could go in the dark tangle of manzanita around her, and the aroma of roasting meat must have filled the night air far beyond the circle of light. Wherever she took refuge, the vast, silent, suffocating blackness of the California foothills began to close in on Sarah, more alone now than she had ever imagined she could be.
11
MADNESS
As Sarah lay in the cold darkness of the California foothills that January night, living the nightmare in which she found herself, the larger world of course went on without her.
Like all tragedies, hers took place in a historical context, and as is often the case the context sheds light on how Sarah must have viewed her own situation as it unfolded. In many ways she and Jay had been moving backward in time as they moved westward across the continent. They had been slowly leaving behind the modern world as it was then and walking into the essentially Stone Age world in which the California Indians had lived for millennia. Sarah had always lived on the frontier, but even in Illinois her world had been connected to the larger world of American commerce and ideas. Here on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada, though, she found herself in a world devoid of virtually all the creature comforts and technologies of her time.
The mid-1840s was not so divorced from our own time as we sometimes tend to think when we peer at the often haggard faces of emigrants in dusty old daguerreotypes. In significant respects, in fact, the period marked a transition between a much older way of life and a new era of innovation in which we still live. The Industrial Revolution was already well under way in Europe and in the urban centers of the eastern United States, and a new spirit of scientific inquisitiveness was being applied to nearly every aspect of life. Just two years before Sarah had set out for California, Samuel Morse had successfully transmitted a message—“What hath God wrought?”—across a thirty-eight-mile telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. In September of 1846, as Sarah made her way across the sage-lands of Nevada, Scientific American had published its first issue. That same month Neptune was discovered—not by random searching of the sky but by the use of mathematical models to predict its location. The following month, as Sarah first entered the Sierra Nevada, Dr. John Collins Warren made the first public demonstration of an effective anesthetic—ether—to painlessly extract a tumor from a patient’s jaw. The American inventor Richard Hoe developed a rotary printing press that year that could spit out eight thousand printed pages per hour. In England, Daniel Gooch unveiled a powerful new steam locomotive—the Great Britain—that could pull a staggering one hundred tons of deadweight at fifty miles per hour for seventy miles.
And it wasn’t just the technological foundations of our world that were being laid in the 1840s; cultural issues and concepts were arising that would dominate the twentieth century and live into the twenty-first. Charles Darwin had published Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were at work on The Communist Manifesto even as Sarah suffered in the mountains. On the East Coast, women’s benevolent societies were planting the seeds of modern feminism. Richard Wagner was inventing new concepts in the language of music, composing operas like Rienzi and Tannhäuser. Edgar Allan Poe was writing the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the first modern mystery, “The Gold Bug.”
If Sarah had been picked up out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, flown twenty-five hundred miles east, and put down in New York City, she would have found a scene of enormous vitality and considerable modernity. She would have moved among throngs of people bustling through a network of busy streets—streets that you or I could follow using any twenty-first-century map of lower Manhattan. On the southeast side of town, she would have found herself among new, monumental stone buildings, many of which still stand today. At 26 Wall Street, she could have visited the new Customs House, now the Federal Hall National Monument. At 55 Wall Street, she would have found businessmen hurrying in and out of the stately new Greek Revival Merchants’ Exchange Building. Up the street and around the corner, she could have stopped to offer prayers for Jay’s soul at Trinity Church, the soaring Gothic Revival spires and steeple of which made it the tallest building in the city. If she had climbed into the steeple, she could have looked out over sprawling shipyards and watched dozens of steam ferries plying the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, watched passenger liners belching clouds of black smoke as they departed for E
urope. She could have taken a commuter train from City Hall north to Twenty-seventh Street for six and a half cents or continued to Harlem for twelve and a half cents. She could have taken the Long Island Rail Road north from Brooklyn all the way to Boston via a train/ferry combination. She could have watched students poring over their books at Columbia College on Park Place or at New York University, or sat on adjoining Washington Square watching gaslights flickering all around her as dusk gave way to darkness.
Much more likely, though, Sarah would have headed straight for one of New York’s 123 full-service restaurants, perhaps an economical choice like Sweeney’s on Anne Street, where she could buy a plate of assorted meats for six cents, a plate of vegetables for three cents. If she had one of the silver dollars from her father’s hoard and wanted a fine beefsteak, she might have stopped in at Delmonico’s on Beaver Street. Even if she had no money at all, she could have retreated to the Alms-House, a sprawling thirty-acre complex on the East River, complete with sixty sleeping apartments, two large dining rooms, a school, a chapel, and a hospital, open to any “well-behaved person” who might apply for aid and a hot meal.
But there were no almshouses in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There were no telegraph wires to send an SOS to Johnson’s Ranch; no steam train to carry Sarah to Sutter’s Fort; no restaurants of any kind, let alone Delmonico’s; no flickering gaslights, only the flickering of the campfire over which Jay Fosdick’s entrails had just been roasted. The most advanced technology at the disposal of Sarah and her companions was the old flintlock rifle that Eddy carried. They were no better equipped, technologically, than Sarah’s forefathers had been when they first stepped onto the continent two hundred years before. If any of them were going to survive the rest of the journey, it would have to be on the basis of strength, endurance, cunning, and courage.
On January 7, Sarah picked up what remained of her hope and her life and staggered on, following the others forlornly through the manzanita. They were down to seven now, all five of the women but only two men—William Eddy and William Foster. Before they had gone far, they discovered that the river, deep in the canyon below them, had made an abrupt ninety-degree turn to the south. To continue on a generally westerly course, as they knew they had to in order to have any chance of finding Johnson’s Ranch, they would have to recross the canyon. Over the next many hours, they slid, stumbled, and fell into the gorge, descending from an elevation of roughly twenty-seven hundred feet to the river at about twelve hundred feet.
To a large extent, they were barefoot now, their shoes having dis-integrated and the shreds of blanket in which they had since wrapped their feet rapidly falling apart as well. By the time they reached the bottom of the canyon, their feet—already cracked and swollen—had been lacerated by the sharp rocks of the canyon wall. Their clothes had been burned through in places from crowding too close to their nightly fires. Their garments were so tattered that neither the women nor the men could even begin to maintain their modesty any longer—thighs and breasts and buttocks peeked out from under the miserable rags that hung limply from their shoulders.
They camped that night in country that was laden with gold. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gold lay in the California foothills, much of it right where they now slept—hidden in the blue gravel beneath them, in pockets behind boulders deep in the fast-flowing river, in the sharp quartz rocks that had been cutting their feet and their hands all day, in the ancient drifts of sand and gravel hundreds of feet thick, forming many of the ridges around them.* In a little more than a year, John Marshall and Peter Wimmer—the latter of whom had traveled just ahead of Sarah back on the plains—would pluck a gold nugget out of a millrace at Coloma twenty miles south of here and transform California forever. Eighteen months from now, men would begin swarming up and down this river canyon and over these hills, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Sarah and her companions would not then have been able to travel a hundred yards up or down this river without coming to a campfire, a tent, a warm meal of bacon and beans and biscuits. But that was in the future, and they were not. For now this was as lonely and trackless a place as they could imagine, without comfort and without mercy.
The next day they faced the much harder task of climbing back out of the canyon on the northwestern side of the river. It was again an all-day effort, and this time it took nearly everything they had to make the fifteen-hundred-foot, nearly vertical climb. They grappled for footholds and handholds as brush lashed at their faces and further shredded their clothes. Their feet smeared the rocks with blood as they climbed. They concentrated on the rocks and brush in front of their faces, trying not to look back over their shoulders as they climbed higher and the void behind them grew increasingly alarming. They heaved and grunted, gasped and sometimes sobbed. Toward the end of the day, they crawled over the rim of the canyon and lay prostrate on relatively level ground. They were likely not much more than about twenty miles almost due east of Johnson’s Ranch now, but they did not know that. They did not in fact know within a hundred miles where on earth they were.
That same day, at Truckee Lake, Margret and Virginia Reed staggered back into camp, along with Milt Elliott. The three of them had been five days undertaking an audacious but ultimately doomed attempt to break out of the mountains.
Before they had left, Margret Reed had taken the last hide from the roof of her half of the double cabin and moved her children to the Breen and Keseberg shanties. There they had made a meal of Cash, the last of the Reeds’ family dogs, an experience Virginia later wrote her cousin Mary about.
We had to kill little Cash the dog & eat him we ate his head and feet & hide & everything about him o my Dear Cousin you don’t now what truble is…. There was 15 in the cabon we was in and half of us had to lay a bed all the time thare was 10 starved to death while we [were] there we was hadley able to walk we lived on little Cash a week and after Mr. Breen would [cook] his meat and boil the bones Two and three times….
Then they had set out for the pass. The Reeds’ servant, Eliza Williams, had started out with them but became exhausted and returned the second day, but the others had stopped to fashion improvised snowshoes and made it over the pass. By the fourth day, though, they had become lost, wandering among the peaks. When Virginia’s feet had begun to suffer from apparent frostbite, they had finally aborted the effort and returned, though Margret Reed well knew she had almost nothing more to offer her children in the way of food back at the lake.
In the cold darkness of the Murphy cabin huddled up against the large granite boulder, meanwhile, the widow Levinah Murphy had grown seriously ill and was often unable to arise from her bed. And she was beginning slowly to go blind—perhaps from snow blindness, perhaps from general debility brought on by foraging for food and wood. Her seventeen-year-old son, John Landrum, who as the oldest male in the family had for weeks been doing most of the heavy work, also lay in bed, starting to rant and rave. Her younger children were doing better, but all of the infants in the cabin—Catherine Pike, George Foster, and Margaret Eddy—were weakening rapidly. Catherine was especially feeble. Plagued not only by hunger but also by the lice and bedbugs that infested her bedding, she made low, barely audible sobbing sounds almost continuously now. As her face shrank in on itself, her eyes seemed to grow larger and darker.
Half a mile to the east, in her part of the double cabin, Elizabeth Graves tended to another rapidly declining infant. Harriet McCutchen was also afflicted by lice, and her screaming was so incessant that it haunted Patty Reed on the other side of the log partition day and night. Elizabeth’s own children were still relatively robust, but her stock of beef was running low.
In the hills above the North Fork of the American River, insanity stalked the snowshoe party. They began to glare at one another out of hollow eyes, like wild animals. William Foster in particular seemed to be coming unhinged. Over the past few days, he had grown listless and despondent. He had ceased helping to make fires at night and looked
more and more to his wife and the others to take care of him.
Precisely what happened next is unclear, as later accounts varied. By some accounts, after gazing upon Amanda McCutchen for some time, Foster approached William Eddy privately and proposed killing her for food, arguing that she was slowing them all down anyway. Eddy protested violently against such a thing, pointing out that Amanda was a mother. Foster, in this version of events, then reportedly proposed another plan that would avoid that objection and also provide a greater yield of meat as well—killing both Sarah and Mary Ann, neither of whom was a mother. Eddy then apparently pulled a knife and threatened to kill Foster if he pursued the subject. It’s impossible to know whether the confrontation happened so dramatically or whether the story simply grew more vivid with the later telling. A different version of events suggested, in fact, that Eddy himself tried to lure Mary Ann Graves away from the others in order to kill her. But it is clear that Foster at least, and perhaps Eddy as well, had reached some kind of snapping point.
It’s not surprising that minds had begun to unravel in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As Nathaniel Philbrick points out in In the Heart of the Sea, people living in conditions of extreme stress often undergo a process of psychic deadening. They stop experiencing ordinary human feelings such as compassion and understanding. Their desire to survive usurps these emotions and replaces them with a kind of cunning, cruel, self-centeredness. They begin to ignore the rules the rest of us play by. Religious and moral tenets that they may have adhered to all their lives begin to fall away, freeing them to do whatever seems in their best interest at any given moment.