Sitting in the casino, I wondered if the habit of taking chances and thus far surviving them had lulled them into a false sense of security, left them as mesmerized by the temptations of fortune and the hazards of chance as those sitting around me seemed to be as they watched the wheels spin before their faces.
I returned to Reno in late November and drove up into the Sierra Nevada under gray skies. I pulled off the freeway into the town of Truckee, made my way around to the back of the high school, and climbed up on a berm of earth dusted with snow. In front of me lay the westbound lanes of I-80 and a wide spot in the road where, until recently, the old California Agricultural Inspection Station used to stand.
The interstate and the inspection station were built in the 1960s, directly atop the spot where Franklin Graves had built his cabin in 1846. Their construction obliterated any traces of the cabin and precluded any hope of conducting archaeology on the site, but archaeology of a sort was conducted in 1879 when Charles McGlashan, Billy Graves, and a number of townspeople from Truckee took picks and spades to the site and began to dig.
By then, people had been sifting through the remains of the double cabin and carrying off relics, perhaps including human remains, for more than thirty years. All the same, McGlashan and the others managed to find a century-old brass pistol, a flintlock rifle, bullets and lead shot, a cooper’s in-shave that had belonged to Franklin Graves, and a sealed tin box in which Elizabeth Graves had kept oil of hemlock.
Standing there by the interstate, I found it hard to see past the present, to imagine the outlines of a simple cabin where so much modernity was whizzing by at seventy miles per hour. It was hard to see Sarah and Jay there, stooping over in the snow, putting on their snowshoes, about to begin their trek toward death or salvation. Hard to imagine Elizabeth Graves and Margret Reed standing in the snow, perhaps red-faced with rage, fighting over the hides draped on the roof. Imagination can only take you so far out of your own world. But it occurred to me that any one of the sixteen-wheelers racing by on the interstate could have carried all of the Donner Party over the crest of the mountains in about seven minutes.
I returned to the car, drove across an overpass to Donner Memorial State Park, and parked near the tall monument to the Donner Party.* After taking a photo of the monument, I went into the Emigrant Trail Museum, where a number of Donner Party artifacts were on display, including some of Elizabeth Graves’s silver coins. Hung high on a wall in one corner, a picture of Sarah—the same image I had been carrying in my pocket for more than a year now—gazed down at me as I worked my way through the museum. Looking up at her, I wondered, not for the first time, if she had in fact been looking down on me for some time now, wondering what I was up to.
In early January 2008, I returned to the Sierra Nevada. A major winter storm had just blown through, and by the time I got to Truckee, the place looked like Antarctica in July. The streets ran though deep blue canyons of snow. White cornices of snow crowned every building in town, heaped up and sculpted into improbable shapes by the storm’s high winds. Shimmering silver daggers of icicles, three or four feet long, hung from every projecting eave.
I drove around the north side of Donner Lake and began to wind my way up old U.S. 40 toward Donner Pass. The road was freshly plowed but serpentine and narrow. As I climbed higher, abrupt cliffs of snow rose on the right side of the road, encroaching on the pavement and crowding me over into the left lane in places; on the left side, only a thin guardrail separated me from the void that fell abruptly away to the lake below. But the road followed the approximate route that the snowshoe party took, and I wanted to get as close as I could. Finally I parked at an observation point and looked out toward the east.
I was frankly stunned by the beauty of the place—the blue lake below me was just turning to violet in the early-evening light; the snowy peaks surrounding it were tinted gold and pink in alpenglow. Taking in the view, I recalled how Mary Ann Graves had stood near this same spot and, even though she was embarked on a life-and-death endeavor, paused to marvel at the sight of so much grandeur encapsulated in one vista.
The first time I read that she had taken the time to appreciate the view—to let her fancy wander to the image of a troop of Norwegian fur trappers roaming among icebergs—I wondered at the credibility of her report. And I wondered also about its implications. As it turns out, those implications might have been profound, at least for her.
Survival psychologists have since discovered that the people who are most likely to live through extreme, life-and-death challenges are those who open their eyes to the wonders of the world around them, even as their own lives hang in the balance. To appreciate beauty is to experience humility—to recognize that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment. And humility, it turns out, is key to recognizing that in order to survive, you must adapt yourself to the environment, that it won’t adapt to your needs. So it seems that Mary Ann Graves carried an advantage with her as she crossed Donner Pass—her attitude. She kept her eyes open; she did not deceive herself. She saw and touched, tasted, smelled, and heard everything that was happening around her, and everything that might.
When I drove down out of the Sierra Nevada on I-80 the next day, I stopped at another scenic overlook, at Emigrant Gap. The freeway there runs along the top of the low ridge that screened Sarah and her companions from a view of Bear Valley and the emigrant road that would have brought them safely to Johnson’s Ranch. Getting out of the car to stretch my legs, I could see in a single glance the crux of all that had gone wrong for them. On one side of the road, the ridge falls abruptly and dramatically away to Bear Valley, some seven hundred feet below. On the other side, it falls away more gradually into the wild canyonlands of the American River. This was where they had gone wrong, made their fateful wrong turn. They had been this close to their likely salvation but failed to see it.
In many ways that low ridge seemed to me to be a metaphor for the larger tragedy of the Donner Party, and studying it solidified in my mind a theme that seemed to keep coming back to me wherever I went in their footsteps. From the time they had first encountered Wales Bonney carrying a note from Lansford Hastings back on the approaches to the South Pass, a ridge of deception had slowly arisen between them and the truth of their situation. Led into the wilderness by a lie, led astray at times by their own dreams and ambitions, dazzled by the glare of sun off salt, and confounded by snowstorms, they had found themselves blundering ever more blindly through terra incognita as they moved west. Here at Emigrant Gap, even the landscape itself had conspired to deceive them. And when the land they encountered did not conform to their expectations, they had continued to move forward as if it did, taking the easier route downhill. In the end, as a group they had exhibited precisely the opposite kind of behavior from the humility and open-eyed awareness that survivors always seem to demonstrate.
I left the interstate and drove down into Bear Valley, then down Highway 20 through the foothills to Grass Valley and on into the rolling country where Sarah finally arrived at Johnson’s Ranch. I pulled over on the south side of the Bear River. Johnson’s adobe, the Ritchies’ cabin, and the other ranch buildings that had greeted Sarah had stood fifty yards or so to the north of the spot. It had begun to rain hard, and the river was turgid. The oaks on the other side of the river were stark, black, and leafless.
I stared across the river and recalled the night that Sarah arrived under oaks like these, and the light and warmth she found waiting within the Ritchies’ cabin. Despite her bereavement and after the horror of what she had just been through, I suspect there must have been, for Sarah, a moment of utter and absolute relief such as few of us ever know. When she walked or was carried into that cabin, she was finally able to put down a burden that far exceeded any other that she had carried across the Sierra on her back. For thirty-two days, she and her sister had borne the certain knowledge that if someone did not get through to California with word of what was unfolding in
the mountains, their mother and all their younger brothers and sisters would almost certainly die. She had survived, and because of that her family still had at least a chance of doing the same. If she wept that night for her father and Jay, it seemed to me that Sarah must also have wept, at least a bit, for joy.
Later that spring I went to Corralitos, to search for Sarah’s bones. And then I went home and tried to decide: What—after all my reading and traveling—was I to make of the hard life of Sarah Graves Fosdick Ritchie Spires?
Some have argued that the survivors of the Donner Party were not heroes, that they simply did as anyone would do—fight as hard and as long as they could to survive. On one level I think this is true. Much of the recent research into survivor psychology reveals that what people ordinarily do under extreme conditions is fairly predictable. For the most part, when we are severely stressed, like caged lab rats we bite and claw and squeal until we escape or die. Seen thus, Sarah was simply one of those who struggled and was strong enough to escape.
But I think there is another level to Sarah’s story. When I think about Sarah, I think about the nights when Jay serenaded her with his fiddle under a silver spangle of stars on the prairie, and about the night she knelt beside him as he lay dying in the muddy snow of the California they had dreamed about together. I think about the moment when she walked away from her mother for the last time on snowshoes, and about the Christmas Eve she sat shivering by her father as he begged her to use his body for food. I think about every excruciating step she took through the Sierra snow, trying to bring relief to her mother and her siblings. I think about the birth of her first child, and the day men came to tell her that his father had been hanged as a thief. I think about the loveliness of Corralitos in March, about the apple and pear blossoms coming down in showers outside her doorstep, and about her fighting for her last breaths on an old walnut bed just a few steps away from all that loveliness.
What to make of her story? I’m not sure the language even has words that are adequate to the task. But I think what Sarah’s story tells us is that there were in fact heroes in the Donner Party, and that heroes are sometimes the most ordinary-seeming people. It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars. We can hazard the ravages of chance. We can choose to endure what seems unendurable, and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. We can awaken to the world as it is, and, seeing it with eyes wide open, we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair. When all is said and done, I think the story tells us that hope is the hero’s domain, not the fool’s. Because we dare to hope—even when doing so might undo us—we leave the worlds we create behind us, swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations.
APPENDIX:
THE DONNER PARTY ENCAMPMENTS
November 1846
In early November 1846, the Donner Party scrambled to erect shelters at the south end of Truckee Lake and at Alder Creek five miles to the northeast. As the winter wore on, most of those who belonged to large family groups stayed in their original shelters. As conditions deteriorated, however, many of the single people changed locations, trying to find better opportunities for survival. The following illustrates where each member of the party sheltered during the first frantic weeks. Each person’s location and age, where known, is given as of November 12, 1846. Where precise ages are unknown, approximate ages are given in brackets.
THE LAKE CAMP
In the Murphy Cabin
Levinah Murphy 36
John Landrum 16
Meriam (Mary) 14
Lemuel 13
William 10
Simon 8
Sarah 20 and William Foster 31
Jeremiah (George) 2
Harriet Pike 18
Naomi 2
Catherine [1]
William [28] and Eleanor Eddy [25]
James [3]
Margaret [1]
In the Breen Cabin
Patrick [51] and Margaret Breen [40]
John 14
Edward 14
Patrick Jr. 9
Simon [8]
James 5
Peter 3
Margaret [1]
Patrick Dolan [35]
Antonio [last name unknown, 23]
In the Keseberg Lean-To
Louis 32 and Philippine Keseberg 23
Ada 3
Louis Jr. [5 months]
Augustus Spitzer [30]
Charles Burger [30]
In the Graves-Reed Double Cabin
Jay [23] and Sarah Fosdick 21
Franklin [57] and Elizabeth Graves 46
Mary Ann 20
Billy 17
Eleanor 14
Lovina 12
Nancy 8
Jonathan [7]
Franklin Jr. [5]
Elizabeth [1]
Amanda McCutchen [23]
Harriet [1]
Margret Reed 32
Virginia 13
Martha (Patty) 8
James Jr. 5
Thomas 3
Baylis Williams [25]
Eliza Williams [31]
Charles Stanton 35
Luis [Unknown]
Salvador [Unknown]
John Denton [28]
Milt Elliott [28]
In Unknown Shelters
James Smith [25]
Jean Baptiste Trudeau [16]
Noah James [16]
THE ALDER CREEK CAMP
George [62] and Tamzene Donner [45]
Elitha 14
Leanna 11
Frances 6
Georgia 4
Eliza 3
Jacob [56] and Elizabeth Donner [38]
George Jr. 10
Mary 7
Isaac [5]
Samuel [4]
Lewis [3]
Solomon Hook 14
William Hook [12]
Doris Wolfinger [20]
Joseph Reinhardt [30]
Samuel Shoemaker [25]
DIED BEFORE REACHING THE SIERRA NEVADA
Sarah Keyes, May 29, 1846 [70]
Luke Halloran, September 25, 1846 [25]
John Snyder, October 5, 1846 [25]
Mr. Hardcoop, about October 8, 1846 [60]
William Pike, about October 22, 1846 [32]
ARRIVED IN CALIFORNIA BEFORE THE ENTRAPMENT
James Reed 45
Walter Herron [27]
William McCutchen [30]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the most heartening things about writing a book is how many people always seem to step forward to lend a helping hand. I take it as a positive sign about the state of the world. It suggests that books matter to people, that the bringing forth of books strikes people as a communal responsibility, much as a group of people trapped in an elevator with a pregnant woman about to go into labor might feel they have a common stake in making sure the baby arrives safely.
With that in mind, I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people who have lent a hand in bringing this book wailing into the world. First, I’d like to thank Sarah’s great-granddaughter, Kathy Larson, and her husband, Gary, for all the family information and the photographs that they have unstintingly shared with me. Both have been invaluable resources.
I’d also like to pay particular thanks to Kristin Johnson for undertaking the very considerable task of reviewing the manuscript, for her many corrections and constructive comments about it, and for making a number of valuable documents available to me.
A number of other researchers and archivists have also been very helpful. In particular, I am indebted to Juanita D. Larimore and Marilyn Sherwood Kramer for making available Graves family photographs and genealogical information; Judy Malmin for help with the history of Corralitos; Dorothy Folkerts of the Marshall County Historical Society; Judy Russo at Sutter’s Fort State Park Archives; the staff of the Bancroft Library in Berkeley; and the staff of the Jean and Charles
Schulz Information Center at Sonoma State University.
Jennifer Pooley, my editor at William Morrow, embraced this project enthusiastically from the get-go, and I thank her for that. But I thank her even more for her very perceptive reading of the first draft and for setting me on a more profitable course with the second. And once again I extend my hearty thanks to my agent, Agnes Birnbaum, for tending to the many nitty-gritty details involved in the business side of writing a book.
Above all, I want to thank my wife, Sharon, and my daughters, Emily and Robin, for putting up with my absences while I traveled the country following Sarah; for reading and making many insightful comments on the manuscript; and for always being there, all my pretty chickens.
CHAPTER NOTES
One of the places that I have journeyed while following Sarah is across the landscape of Donner Party literature. I learned early on that it is an uncertain and sometimes treacherous terrain. I have climbed in and out of canyons of conflicting accounts, groped my way through a fog of mythology, and stumbled across arid plains devoid of even a sprig of useful information. But I have found it to be a fascinating and expansive land, well worth traversing.