Fine & pleasant froze hard last night. There [were] ten men arrived this morning from Bear Valley with provisions. We are to start in two or three days & cash our goods here. There is amongst them some old [timers] they say the snow will be here until June.
And fine and pleasant as well, it must have seemed to Patrick Breen that last night, to be sitting in his cabin with the miracle of fresh-baked bread set before him, believing now that the horrors through which he and the others at the lake camp had been living were about to end. But for him, as for many of them, the horrors were in fact just about to begin.
13
HEROES AND SCOUNDRELS
On March 3, James Reed went to Louis Keseberg’s lean-to shanty at the lake camp. The last time the two men had had anything to do with each other was back on the Humboldt River on October 5, when Keseberg had stood in the sand exhorting the others to get a rope and hang Reed from the yoke of his wagon.
Keseberg was now so feeble that he could do no more than to lurch about in the shanty. His face was shrunken, his thin brown beard long and scraggly, his clothes filthy and infested with lice. Reed took Keseberg’s clothes from him. Then he got a bucket of water and warmed it at the fire and took a rag and bathed the man’s reeking body. He combed his hair and dressed him in clean clothes. He gave him a bit of flour and about a half pound of jerked beef, all he could spare from his own pack. He told Keseberg that he would come back in two weeks and carry him over the mountain. Then he went out into the snow to join McCutchen and the other rescuers, who had been busy washing many of the children and clothing them in fresh flannel.
It was midday already, late to be starting out, but Reed wanted to make some progress toward the summit before nightfall. So the men of the Second Relief, after leaving one of their number, Charles Stone, to look after those who would remain at the lake camp, set off through the woods with seventeen survivors trailing behind them—this time three adults and fourteen children.
Many of them were better clothed than they had been in months—in addition to the fresh flannel clothes for the children, Reed had brought twenty-two new moccasins to replace the worn-out shoes of the emigrants. The adults all carried something, or someone. They carried some biscuits and a bit of jerked beef, perhaps a blanket or a quilt. Many of the men carried children whose parents already had their arms full with other children. Peggy Breen carried four pounds of coffee, a few strips of beef, a bit of tea, and a lump of sugar tied in a bundle at her waist so that her arms were free to carry her infant, Isabelle. Patrick Breen limped along carrying three-year-old Peter. No one was more burdened down, though, than Elizabeth Graves. She carried one-year-old Elizabeth and something that she knew that Jay would not want her to leave behind, the violin he had brought across the plains. And something else, even more valuable, and much heavier—the hoard of silver coins that some of the men had helped her retrieve from the floor of her family wagon.
Thus encumbered, slogging through slushy snow, they did not get far that first day. By late afternoon they had gone only partway up the length of the lake, and so they made a camp on a bare patch of ground on the lakeshore, just about two miles from the cabins. The weather had been warm and clear for more than two weeks now, and the members of the party counted their blessings as they contemplated the rate at which the snow was melting. That evening, as twilight faded to night, Patrick Breen took Jay Fosdick’s violin and serenaded the others, the notes rising and falling plaintively as an almost-full moon rose over the cabins to the east. The spirits of many in the party began to lift for the first time in weeks.
The next morning, though, as the party prepared to push on, someone made a joke about Elizabeth Graves’s coins, and whether the men should play a game of euchre to determine who should get them. Elizabeth was not amused. For her the bag of coins must have rapidly been becoming a cruel burden, both psychologically and physically. Essentially useless to her in her present circumstances, it was nevertheless the vessel in which all her hopes and the hopes of her children lay. Particularly with Franklin dead, as she must by now have divined he was, it represented the only form of financial security she had. But with the cliffs of the pass looming ahead and a small child to carry, the heavy coins also represented an encumbrance that might well mean the difference between living and dying. And surrounded by men—many of whom she did not know and some of whom were here primarily to make money—she had no real assurance that it would not be taken from her whether she lived or died.
As the rest of the party set off toward the western end of the lake, Elizabeth Graves hung back until the others were out of sight. She measured out a distance of about thirty feet from a large rock, scratched a shallow hole in a patch of bare earth, and buried the coins. Then, clutching her infant daughter, she hobbled ahead to join the others.
Once again they made only two miles that day and camped at the western end of the lake, under the forbidding granite cliffs that led up to the summit. Their evening meal was spare that night. Reed had grown alarmed at how little they had left in the way of provisions, so everyone was limited to a bit of gruel made from their remaining flour. On the morning of March 5, Reed calculated that he had only enough left for two scanty meals for each person, enough for breakfast and dinner that day, then nothing more until they reached their first cache. Late that afternoon they struggled across the summit and arrived at the remains of the camp that the First Relief had made on their way toward the lake. Tucker and Glover had left behind a platform of green logs on which to build a fire. The camp was located in an exposed spot at the eastern end of a long meadow just west of the pass.
During the day the skies had begun to grow overcast, then leaden. Now they were nearly black with storm clouds, and the temperature began to plummet. An iron cold began to lash the tops of the trees fringing the meadow. Reed and McCutchen set the men to cutting pine boughs for beds and building a windbreak, piling snow and more pine branches around the fire platform. They felled several trees in such a way that they toppled over and intersected near the platform, to provide a ready supply of firewood. With nightfall rapidly approaching, there was not time to do much more. Reed found time, though, to scribble notes for a journal entry.
Night closing fast, the Clouds still thicking terror terror to many, my hartte dare not communicate my mind to any, death to all if provisions do not Come, in a day or two and a storm should fall on us. Very cold, a great lamentation about the cold.
By sunset the wind began to howl through the peaks around them. Later that night, snow began to slice down out of the sky, plastering everyone white as they huddled around the fire.
More than a century and a half after the fact, historians and climatologists still debate whether the Donner Party fell victim to unusually cold weather in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that they did.
Back on October 30, John Sutter had noted snow in the western foothills and said that “it was low down and heavy for the first fall of the season.” Aboard the U.S. naval sloop Portsmouth, anchored in San Francisco Bay for much of that winter, observers more than once noted snow on the hills surrounding the bay and, on one occasion, in San Francisco itself, both rare though not unheard of in the twentieth century. George Tucker, who spent the winter in the foothills of the Sierra, said that it had rained “nearly all winter and the country was all covered with water.” Daniel Rhoads said, “This last winter is the coldest has ever been known in Calafornia.” The next spring, eastbound travelers reported snow depths in the Sierra Nevada that today would be considered highly unusual so late in the season. Crossing the pass on May 1, 1847, just two months after Reed and the Second Relief became snowbound there, James Clyman reported drifts as deep as twenty or thirty feet near the summit. More than a month later, on June 7, John Craig encountered drifts still as deep as twenty feet.
There is anecdotal evidence, in fact, that the winter of 1846 was unusually cold across the Northern Hemisphere. At Fort Va
ncouver in the Oregon Country, the Columbia River was frozen over that winter. At their winter quarters in Nebraska, thousands of Mormons suffered terribly, and more than six hundred of them died, in bitterly cold blizzards that swept across the plains. Farther afield, on December 13, three days before Sarah and the snowshoe party departed the lake camp, Charlotte Brontë looked out the window of her father’s parsonage in Yorkshire and wrote a friend,
The cold here is dreadful. I do not remember such a series of North-Pole days—England might really have taken a slide up into the Arctic zone—the sky looks like ice—the earth is frozen—the wind is as keen as a two-edged knife.
The same bitter cold settled over Ireland that month, contributing greatly to the staggering misery and soaring mortality of desperate victims of the Potato Famine, a cataclysm that would in the following several few years claim perhaps a million lives.
In the Canadian Arctic, Sir John Franklin sat helplessly that winter on one of his two ships—the Erebus and the Terror—locked in ice at the south end of Peel Sound, off King William Island. Franklin, traveling south, had expected the passage to be ice-free when he entered it in September, as earlier explorers had reported, but he was quickly outflanked and entrapped by ice. What Franklin didn’t know—but ice-core studies conducted in the twentieth century would show—was that he had sailed into Peel Sound just at the beginning of what would turn out to be a five-year-long period of exceptionally cold weather in the Arctic.
Franklin died the following June, his ships still trapped in the ice. His crew remained aboard the ships, dying one by one for another harrowing year until, in April of 1848, 105 survivors finally abandoned the ships. On King William Island, they converted one of the ships’ boats to a fourteen-hundred-pound sled, piled supplies and personal possessions into it, and tried to escape overland. In the course of the next six miserable years every one of them died, wandering in the frozen wasteland, victims of lead poisoning from the canned food they were consuming, exposure, scurvy, and apparent cannibalism.
The scientific evidence for an exceptionally severe winter in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 is mixed. Tree-ring studies conducted in the 1980s by the University of Arizona suggest that it was a low-precipitation year—tree rings from samples taken at Donner Summit and downslope in the western Sierra Nevada do not show the kinds of growth that would be expected in a year of heavy runoff from a deep, wet snowpack. And yet stumps left behind by the Donner Party, presumably cut off a foot or two higher than the level of the snow, are known to have stood as tall as twenty-two feet, far above normal for the Donner Lake area.
As Mark McLaughlin points out in his book The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm, the explanation appears to be that light precipitation in the Sierra Nevada does not necessarily mean either warm weather or scant snow. In fact, it may well mean the opposite. Cold air creates light, deep snow—powder. An inch of precipitation may produce twelve inches of snow if the air is relatively warm. But the same inch of precipitation will produce as much as twenty inches of snow if the air is cold enough.
So it seems that while the Sierra Nevada did not have more storms than usual that winter, the ten major storms it did have were very cold and left very deep accumulations of snow. The first of them came early, at the end of October, and the last of them came late, in March, just as James Reed and the Second Relief arrived at the long meadow east of Donner Summit and set up camp.
And they could not, in many ways, have picked a worse place to camp. Surrounded on three sides by high granite crags—now called Mount Disney, Mount Judah, and Donner Peak—and located at the very crest of the Sierra Nevada, the landscape in which they were encamped is perfectly configured to trap massive amounts of snowfall. Open to the west, and thus to the full brunt of cold, Arctic storms blown in off the Pacific, the bowl-like landscape captures, in fact, an average of forty-one feet of snowfall per winter. That is why in 1938, less than a hundred years after the Second Relief camped here, Walt Disney chose it as the site for what is now the thirty-seven-hundred-acre Sugar Bowl Ski Resort. The snow here, at sixty-eight hundred feet, is dry, powdery, and copious even in a year of normal precipitation—more copious, in fact, than at any other ski resort in California. And that is why the Central Sierra Snow Lab, a high-tech, instrument-laden facility that studies the extreme meteorological conditions of the high Sierra, is located just down the road. For experiencing blizzards in the Sierra Nevada, this is the place to be.
All through the night of March 5, the storm that had caught the Second Relief near the summit continued to intensify. The party formed a circle around the fire, their feet pointing inward, lying close to one another. Elizabeth Graves held her baby, Elizabeth. Nancy, Jonathan, and Franklin Jr. lay close by. Peggy Breen clutched her own infant daughter, Margaret, to her breast, letting her suck, though Peggy’s milk had ceased to flow some days before. Periodically she peeked under her cloak at the skeletal baby to see if she was still alive, surprised each time to find that she was. Next to her, Patrick Breen and four more of their children crushed up against one another.
William McCutchen and James Reed and some of the other men got up now and then to forage for firewood, but each time they did so, they had to go farther out into the icy, black void beyond the firelight.
As the night wore on, the radiant heat emanating from the fire, ablaze on the large platform of green logs, began to melt a wide hole in the snow under the logs. The platform and the fire slowly started to sink into the hole. Some of the men gave up on gathering firewood and instead began to pray. Reed, McCutchen, and a few others continued gathering wood and shoring up the berm, frantically trying to keep the wind and blowing snow from extinguishing the fire. McCutchen, returning from one of his wood-foraging trips, sat with his back to the fire trying to warm up, so numb that he was not aware his clothes had ignited until all four of the shirts he was wearing were burned from his back.
Reed, by now, had grown desperately concerned about the lives of his own two children as well as all the others in his charge. He later remembered that he watched helplessly as “the pitiless snow beat fiercely against their thinly clad and weak forms; their blood grew chill in their veins, and death, with glaring eyes, stared them in the face.”
By morning the fire had melted a pit nearly ten feet across and perhaps ten feet below the surface of the snow. Counting heads, Reed and McCutchen discovered that five-year-old Isaac Donner was dead and already frozen stiff in his blanket.
The storm continued all through the day. Reed and McCutchen went to and fro, every ten or fifteen minutes, climbing out of the pit in search of wood, braving the wind that cut through their clothes like cold steel. They were almost entirely out of food now and their stomachs were cramped with pain. Peggy Breen began to weep, then to pray, and then to rage at the men—shaming them for being paid three dollars a day to save them and yet letting them all freeze to death like little Isaac Donner. Her lamentations grew even louder when her son John, sitting on a log sloping down into the hole, slipped and tumbled headfirst toward the center of the pit. McCutchen caught the boy and saved him from horrible burns, but a bit later seven-year-old Mary Donner slipped and badly burned one of her feet in the fire. Peggy Breen grew quieter and began to recite Catholic devotions.
They all dreaded the coming of another night, but it came nonetheless. Reed had begun to have trouble with his vision, and by nightfall he was so entirely snow-blind he could not even see the fire blazing before him. Now it was mostly up to McCutchen to keep the fire going. As the hours wore on, the snowfall began to taper off, but temperatures plummeted and the cold grew lethal. Reed later called the night “one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed and I hope I never shall witness such…. Of all the praying and Crying I never heard nothing ever equaled it.”
In the flickering light in the pit, Peggy Breen heard Nancy Graves call out to her mother repeatedly to come and cover her, but Elizabeth Graves responded weakly that she could not, that she was too tired. Then Eliza
beth Graves’s breathing grew irregular. She began to make sounds that alarmed Peggy Breen, unnatural sounds, she thought. One of the men got up and examined Elizabeth, shook the snow from her blanket and re-covered her. Elizabeth rolled over awkwardly to one side, her arm akimbo, and then did not move anymore. Peggy Breen waited a bit and then crawled over to her and found her already cold to the touch. Nancy Graves took her feeble baby sister into her arms and sat next to her mother’s body. At eight, she was now the oldest member of her family still alive in the mountains.
By about noon the next day, March 7, the snow had stopped falling. Reed and McCutchen gathered their men together and talked about what they should do. Then Reed announced their decision: He and McCutchen and the other men would continue until they came to one of their caches or to Woodworth’s party and then send someone back with food. He was taking his own children with him, he said, and he would also take fourteen-year-old Solomon Hook, who seemed to be up to the trek.
The Graves children and Mary Donner were clearly too feeble to go—most of them were too weak to even crawl out of the hole in the snow. But the Breens were not as malnourished as most of the others, and they seemed to be more robust. Reed and McCutchen tried to talk Patrick Breen into making the attempt, along with his family, but Breen would have none of it. He and his family would stay here and wait for relief, he insisted. Reed called his men to his side and made them witness Breen’s decision. If Breen’s family died, their blood was on Breen’s own head and not Reed’s, he said. The men cut three days’ worth of firewood and then called for Solomon Hook to join them. Hiram Miller took Tommy Reed on his back, Reed took Patty by the hand, and they walked off to the west.
The trees that the men had felled when they’d first arrived had tipped into the hole and now projected upward out of it at awkward angles. In order to stay warm, fourteen-year-old John Breen climbed down one of the trees deeper into the pit. Then he cut steps for the others to help them descend. At the bottom of the pit, Nancy, Franklin, Jonathan, and the baby Elizabeth Graves huddled by the fire, along with the Breens and seven-year-old Mary Donner. At least they now had protection from the wind, but none of them had eaten anything in more than two days. Up on the rim of the pit, rigid and cold, lay the bodies of Elizabeth Graves and Isaac Donner.