As soon as the storm ceased we took the flesh of the bodies, what we could make do us four days and started. We traveled on six days without finding any relief. On the night of the 6th of January, my husband gave out and could not reach camp. I staid with him, without fire; I had a blanket and wrapped him in it, sat down beside him and he died about midnight, as near as I could tell…. On the 18th of January we got relief from the settlement. Seven out of fifteen got in to tell the sufferings of the camp.
Sarah went on to briefly describe her mother’s and her brother’s deaths at Starved Camp, but the letter, at least as it later appeared in the Lawrenceburg Western Republican, then terminated abruptly with a string of asterisks. Whether she had come to the end of her ability to talk in a composed way about what had happened or someone had found the rest of it too personal to print, we do not know.
Mary Ann also wrote a letter, the day before Sarah did. She addressed hers to Levi Fosdick, Sarah’s father-in-law, perhaps because Sarah could not bring herself to tell Jay’s father what had happened, even in a letter. Like Sarah’s, Mary Ann’s letter sketched out the sufferings of the snowshoe party and then revealed that Jay had died, “the idol of his loving wife.” Unlike Sarah’s letter, Mary Ann’s was rife with emotion, and it came to a conclusion that differed greatly from Virginia Reed’s and revealed much about the surviving Graves children’s state of mind as they contemplated how they had arrived in California and what they thought about it.
I have told the bad news, and bad as it is I have told the best. No tongue can exceed in description the reality…. I will now give you some good and friendly advice. Stay at home—you are in a good place, where, if sick, you are not in danger of starving to death. It is a healthy country here, and when that is said, all is said. You can live without work if you are a complete rascal; for a rascal you must be if you are to stand any chance at all. In the number of rogues this country exceeds I believe any other…. I have said enough in favor of the country—as much and perhaps more than I ought.
Mary Ann Graves
Oddly, Mary Ann’s letter, at least as published, did not mention a significant piece of news—that several days before, she had married a young man named Edward Pyle Jr.
Pyle had been among a number of men who had worked to supply logistical support to the relief parties, ferrying supplies up into the foothills and helping to escort survivors back down to Johnson’s Ranch or on to Sutter’s Fort. One of those whom he had escorted was thirteen-year-old Virginia Reed. Pyle, like most young American men in California that spring, knew just how scarce women were in the West. He had promptly proposed to Virginia and just as promptly been rebuffed. When he saw Mary Ann Graves, he had tried again, and this time he’d won.
Mary Ann’s quick marriage must have been a great relief for Sarah. It meant one fewer mouth to feed. Living at Sutter’s Fort that May, Sarah found herself in a land of extraordinary abundance, with no way to share in it. Green fields of new wheat stretched in all directions around the fort under clear, warm skies. Thousands of head of fat cattle grazed on vast tracks of uncultivated land. Hundreds of Indian vaqueros rode herd on the cattle, tended the fields, and hurried about carrying goods to and from Sutter’s Landing on the south side of the American River. Inside the fort’s high adobe walls, Sutter’s Indian guards drilled with military precision in full uniform on the open parade ground. Blacksmiths, weavers, bakers, and various other sorts of craftsmen worked in shops recessed into the fort’s walls. The smell of barbecued beef hung in the air morning, noon, and night. The emigrants living within the fort, and those camped in a ramshackle cluster of white-topped wagons and makeshift cabins outside, worked and ate and drank and sang lustily, grateful to finally be in California. But among them wandered three little girls, politely asking for food. “We are the children of Mr. and Mrs. George Donner,” they said. “And our parents are dead.”
Sarah and her siblings weren’t much better off than the Donner girls. In addition to having little cash and no source of income, they also faced an immediate debt. On April 7, Sutter had asked James Reed to draw up an accounting of what the rescued emigrants owed him for the mules and provisions he had sent over the mountains with Stanton the previous October. The largest amount due on the ledger was the Graves family’s share: the hefty sum of $89.93.
Sarah did have one asset, though, at least in principle, and she set out to capitalize on it. At the lake camp, Elizabeth Graves had sold two head of oxen to Margret Reed, to be paid back two for one in California. As the oldest living heir, Sarah calculated that she had four head of cattle, or the money they represented, coming to her, and she wanted one or the other as soon as possible. She also had come into possession of some items that belonged to the Reeds, probably things salvaged from the double cabin, and showing some of the tenacity her mother had shown at the lake, she intended to hold on to them until she was paid for the cattle. In early May she went to the alcalde, John Sinclair, who began negotiations with James Reed by mail.
Reed, though he had presumably arrived in California penniless himself, had gotten off to a surprisingly promising start. He already owned a large swath of land in the Santa Clara Valley, and he was beginning to wheel and deal in real estate and other commercial activities that would in time make him a prosperous and prominent citizen of San Jose. One of his first transactions, in May, was to form a partnership to buy a herd of horses. His partner was another wheeler and dealer, Lansford W. Hastings.
In the meantime Sarah struggled to feed and clothe herself and her surviving siblings. Billy removed himself from the equation when, somewhat improbably, he decided to go home to Illinois and joined an expedition heading east over the Sierra. On June 3, Sarah attended an auction of items recovered from George Donner’s wagon and tent. She spent $31.18, money she had likely gotten from the sale of goods salvaged from her own family’s side of the double cabin. Virtually all of it went for material with which she could make clothes for her little brother, Jonathan, and her sisters—muslin cloth, woolen fabric, shirting, and some indigo dye. She also bought some black calico with which to make widow’s weeds for herself. Other than that, she bought only a few essentials that young women would need—combs and hairbrushes and a spelling book. Someone needed to teach the younger children how to read and write, and for all that she was a sister, Sarah was also now a mother to her youngest siblings.
15
GOLDEN HILLS, BLACK OAKS
As the wet spring weather of 1847 gave way to the bone-dry heat of a California summer and the hills turned from green to gold, most of the survivors of the Donner Party, and those who had rescued them, spread out over a land that was astonishingly vacant. Most of the Sacramento Valley had never been tilled. The missions along the coast had long since been abandoned—their fertile fields lay fallow, their orchards had gone to weed, their adobe walls had begun to crumble, their darkened chapels stood quietly empty. In the midst of sprawling ranchos of tens of thousands of acres stood only single, lonely adobe homes. In the midst of vast arable plains stood only drowsy pueblos like San Jose and Los Angeles, where mangy dogs sat in the middle of dusty streets, idly scratching their fleas.
Sarah and the rest of her siblings, though, remained in the vicinity of Sutter’s Fort that summer. Neither one-year-old Elizabeth nor seven-year-old Jonathan had really recovered from their ordeal, and they had begun to fail. By the end of the summer, both were dead and buried near the fort.
On August 27, Sarah finally received and signed a receipt for the forty dollars James Reed owed her. But for Sarah Fosdick and Lovina, Eleanor, and Nancy Graves, there was really no choice now but to fall back on the charity of others. Over the following months, the four of them lived under different roofs, with different families, first in the vicinity of the fort and then in San Jose, where Mary Ann and her new husband had settled.
By the following spring, though, Sarah and Eleanor had left Lovina and Nancy with the Isaac Branham family in San Jose and moved to the presidi
o at Sonoma. There they lived for a time with Matthew Ritchie and his family, the first people who had taken her in at Johnson’s Ranch. Then one day Reason Tucker showed up and talked Sarah and Eleanor into moving over the hills to the Napa Valley.
It is hard to imagine a more bucolic place than the Napa Valley in the spring of 1848. In the great, broad swale lying between the Mayacamas Mountains and the Vaca Hills, the soil was so fertile, the climate so beneficent, the living so good that in time this would become some of the most valuable real estate on earth. In the mornings the air was clear and dry and smelled of bay laurel. The sun crept across improbably blue skies, warming green hillsides ablaze with orange poppies. On the parklike savanna of the valley floor, herds of elk grazed under the sprawling arms of valley oaks. Cool streams burbled down the sides of the mountains, emerged from dense, dark stands of ancient redwoods and red-barked madrone trees, then flowed out across the valley and emptied into the Napa River. The river meandered lazily down the center of the valley, meeting new streams, growing fatter and lazier as it went, all the way to the cold, green, saltwater chop of San Pablo Bay. In the afternoons the sunlight slanted in low over the Mayacamas and lit up the peak of stately Mount St. Helena rising above the valley to the northeast, painting it purple and gold.
Up to that time, fewer than a dozen American and Mexican families had shared in the valley’s bounty. So when the first few of the new wave of emigrants began to straggle into the valley in 1847 and 1848, they discovered a place that exceeded even the wildest dreams they had harbored on cold, sleety nights back in Illinois or Missouri. Everywhere they looked, they saw opportunities.
Some of the most attractive opportunities they came across lay on a rancho at the far northern end of the valley, where a number of mountain streams provided easy and ample sources of fresh water. The land belonged to an eccentric Englishman named Dr. Edward Turner Bale. Bale had arrived accidentally in California in 1837 when the ship on which he served as surgeon, the Harriet, was wrecked off of Monterey. Mariano Vallejo, glad to have such medical expertise wash up on California’s shore, had promptly named him surgeon-in-chief of the Mexican forces in California. Bale had wooed and married Vallejo’s beautiful niece, María Guadalupe Soberanes, and Vallejo had given the couple the seventeen-thousand-acre rancho to get them off to a good start. Bale, oddly, christened the property with what turned out to be a strangely apt name for some of its subsequent residents, “Rancho Carne Humana”—Human Flesh Ranch.
By the time he saw Americans coming into the valley in the mid-1840s, Bale was rich in property but poor in cash, and he was eager to sell pieces of his property to the new arrivals. Knowing and trusting one another as perhaps no one else after all they had been through, the new settlers were attracted to the idea of banding together as neighbors, so many of them were eager to buy land from Bale. A number were people Sarah had come to know on the overland trip and the subsequent attempts to rescue the Donner Party. The Tuckers, the Kelloggs, and the Starks all purchased adjoining parcels from Bale.
Within a short time, a tight community was born, centered on their mutual interests, their shared history, and a single building. As the settlers began to sow the fields he had sold them, Edward Bale realized that they would need a place to mill the wheat that most of them preferred to grow. So he began construction of a large gristmill at the foot of one of the mountain streams tumbling down the west side of the upper valley. The mill—said to be the largest of its kind in the United States at the time—featured a twenty-foot overshot waterwheel fed by a long redwood flume, and wooden cogs.* When set in motion, it made a thunderous clattering that could be heard for miles. But it was a vast improvement over Bale’s previous mill, which had been powered by Indians made to walk in endless circles, rotating the millstones by hand. The new mill was housed in a towering three-story building made of redwood planks cut at Bale’s nearby sawmill. The building served primarily as a granary, but in short order it also became a commercial center, a dance hall, and the community gathering place for the burgeoning American settlement.
The new community was largely self-sufficient, except for one thing. With a sizable population of young children and more on the way, it needed a school, or at least a schoolteacher. Reason Tucker knew that the young widow living in Sonoma, Sarah Fosdick, was lettered, bright, and in desperate need of employment, so Tucker rode to the Ritchies’ place in Sonoma and fetched her.
Sarah moved in first with the Tuckers and then with the Kelloggs, who were running the mill for Bale. Someone constructed a brush shanty under a tall fir tree out in front of the mill to serve as an open-air schoolroom. Sarah placed some benches in the shanty, gathered a few schoolbooks, and set about her new job, finally able to earn a bit of money to help support herself and her sisters.
In May of that year, though, just as things were finally beginning to settle down for the Graves girls, Mary Ann’s young husband, Edward Pyle, went missing in San Jose. Distraught and fearing the worst, Mary Ann searched through the brush along Almaden Creek near their home, but she could find no sign of her husband. Days, and then weeks, and then months dragged by, and still he did not show up. Mary Ann didn’t know if he had fallen ill, or died, or simply left her. She found out only after his bones were discovered.
Edward Pyle had apparently had the misfortune to get into a dispute over a horse with one Antonio Valencia. Valencia had lassoed Pyle and then dragged him behind his horse for a mile. When Valencia finally dismounted and found the young man still alive, he cut his throat. Then an accomplice, Anastasio Chabolla, shot the body full of arrows to make it appear that Indians had committed the murder, and the two rode off. Nearly a year later, after Pyle’s remains were found, Valencia was arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. Mary Ann Pyle prepared food for the condemned man and delivered it to him in his jail cell every day, to make sure he lived long enough to hang. On May 10, 1849, he did.
Lovina began to come more frequently to visit Sarah and Eleanor in the Napa Valley, where they lived at different times with the Kelloggs and the Tuckers. The younger two girls waited tables in boardinghouses and took whatever other kinds of work they could find. Meanwhile, they set about the more serious business of finding husbands, the only real path to economic stability open to young single women in the 1840s.
At first the pickings were decidedly slim. Men vastly outnumbered women in California, but in May of 1848 almost all the young, eligible men of the Napa Valley had headed for the hills, looking for more gold of the sort that Peter Wimmer and John Marshall had plucked out of a millrace on the American River in January. By late that summer, though, many of them were beginning to return, and some of them had a good deal of jingle in their pockets.*
After a full year of mourning for Jay, Sarah was looking as well, and by the fall of 1848 she believed she’d found a man who would suit her. She had actually met him long before Jay died, back in another world, when they had all first set out across Missouri. And then much later he’d been among the first people she saw when she staggered half naked out of the mountains at Johnson’s Ranch. William Dill Ritchie was Matthew Ritchie’s only living son, and likely therefore to inherit much of his father’s considerable wealth. Like Edward Pyle, he had helped supply logistical support for the First Relief. He was three years younger than Sarah, not much more than a boy, but all in all he seemed like a good choice.* In October of 1848, Sarah married him.
By the following year, Sarah’s financial problems and worries were mostly resolved. In September of 1849, Eleanor married William McDonnell, who had been a teamster for the Kelloggs on the overland trip, traveling just ahead of the Graves family on the Hastings Cutoff. The Branham family in San Jose had taken in Nancy more or less permanently. Matthew Ritchie moved his family from Sonoma to the Napa Valley and bought a large parcel of land adjoining the Kellogg, Stark, and Tucker properties. A substantial chunk of the land was for William and Sarah to homestead as their own.
And so they settled
down. Sarah continued to teach school out in front of the Bale Mill, and on November 22, 1849, she gave birth to their first son, George Leet. Two years later, in 1851, she and William had another son who died shortly after birth. Then, in 1853, Sarah bore a third son, Alonzo Perry. Living with her children in a small house out in the middle of perhaps the most beautiful valley in the world, Sarah must have felt that she had finally realized at least some measure of the dream she and Jay had nourished lying under the stars back on the plains.
Even in this seeming paradise, there were problems, though. Sarah soon found that her young husband was prone to wander—to take his gun and disappear for days at a time. His frequent sojourns, her sisters reported, often left her feeling unsettled, lonely, and vulnerable in her dark house. Sometimes Eleanor or Lovina came to stay with her for company.
One such night, when William was away, Lovina went outside and found that one of Sarah’s young pigs had gone missing. A few moments later, a bear charged out of the darkness, chasing the pig toward the house. She and Sarah screamed and waved their arms and succeeded in distracting the bear for a moment, but then it resumed chasing the pig. The two animals began to run in circles around the house. Sarah and Lovina stood in the doorway, and each time the pig passed by, they ran out and tried to direct it into the house before the bear could catch up. But with each circuit of the loop, the circle widened and the bear began to gain ground. At last it caught the pig and carried it away into the brush, screaming as only a dying pig can scream.