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  Desperate Passage

  Итан Рарик

  The non-fiction book narrates about a horrendous journey of Donner Party. In 1846 a large party of emigrants crossed western plains from Missouri to California. On their way they were blocked in the mountain pass and had to survive a long winter without food. The starvation led to cannibalism. Only a half of the party reached California's lush country.

  ETHAN RARICK

  DESPERATE PASSAGE

  The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

  For Ellie

  "We were full of hope and did not dream of sorrow."

  —Virginia Reed Murphy, a survivor of the Donner Party, describing the journey's beginning

  "All of us have dark stirrings of doubt and fear whenever the Donner Party is mentioned. In such extremis what would we do? Snow-trapped and starving in the Sierras with no hope of relief, would we fall to devouring each other? Our fathers? Our children? Our lovers? How close to the animal are we? How far from the desperate beast? In the purely physical realm of survival, what justifies what?"

  —James Dickey

  Prologue

  Margret Reed spread out a buffalo robe for her children and then covered them with a shawl. It was snowing—"great feathery flakes," as one of the youngsters remembered—so every few moments Reed would rouse herself and shake the accumulation from their makeshift bedding, lest she and the children be buried alive in a muffling layer of white.

  Huddled near a campfire, the forward section of the Donner Party had stopped for one last night of rest before the final assault on the mountains. Almost six months earlier, they had left Independence, Missouri, striking out for new lives in California. In the long ordeal of their journey, they had survived accidents, misjudgment, inexperience, disease. They had battled each other and helped each other. They had buried some comrades and abandoned another. They had hacked their way over trackless mountains and willed their way across murderous deserts. They had listened to the blandishments of a huckster promoting a shortcut that did not exist. Most important of all, they had fallen behind their fellow emigrants. That was the one unpardonable sin of the whole great venture, and now their penance was upon them.

  The Donner Party is always remembered, of course, for the transcending horror that its members would be forced to endure. Unquestionably, the story says much about the mix of desperation and courage that allows human beings to survive seemingly impossible ordeals. But the tale also reflects a simpler and more practical truth about the journey to the American West—that it was a headlong dash for safety.

  Pioneer families left Independence as soon as the warmth of spring gave them diy ground to travel over, crossed the broad middle of the continent at the height of summer, and—they hoped—reached the temperate climates of the Pacific before the first snows of winter closed the mountain passes. There was little room for error. Even at the slow gait of an ox or the creaking roll of a wagon, the journey was a race against time.

  The Donner Party pushed that hurried schedule to the absolute limit and had spent much of the summer trailing in the dusty wheel ruts of the other wagons of 1846. For weeks now they had brought up the rear, the last, lonely party on the road from the comfortable familiarity of the Midwest to the alluring opportunities of the Pacific.

  Yet they had endured, and pushed on, and were within reach of success. They faced one last barrier—the Sierra Nevada, the steep mountain range that separates California from North America's Great Basin. It was early November, snow was thick on the ground, and cold rains and dark clouds gave a hint of storms to come. A trailing band of the party— including the Donner families, for whom the group was named—was a few miles behind, but this forward group was approaching the pass that would take them over the mountains and down into the foothills, and then into the broad, verdant grasslands of California's Central Valley. Only another two miles, perhaps three, and they could start down toward their new lives. Two men had scouted ahead and predicted that if everyone kept moving, the entire group could crest the pass and make it through. But by the time the scouts returned, nothing could induce the weaiy party to move. The day's struggle had been monumental just to get this far, it was twilight already, and someone had managed to start a campfire, an irresistible bulwark of warmth and solace. The emigrants had settled around the fire and insisted they would camp there through the night and cross the pass in the morning.

  Then the snow began falling, the "dreaded snow," as one survivor later wrote. It sizzled into the campfire, piled up on the backs of mules, covered tracks from earlier in the day. By morning, at least a foot of fresh powder had fallen. The drifts were far deeper still, the pass ahead a frozen barricade. The day before, escaping the mountains had seemed an arduous task that would require all that human beings could give. Now, it was simply impossible. They had no choice but to retreat down the mountainside, retracing their path so they could pitch camp at a lake far below, either to await a lucky break in the weather or, more likely, to winter over until the spring thaw. Even there the snow could pile to twenty feet and more. Drifts could cover cabins, even trees. Temperatures were sure to fall well below freezing. Game—their only potential source of fresh food—would be vanishingly scarce.

  The Donner Party was trapped by a cruel combination of geography and time. Behind them lay nearly two thousand miles of wilderness; ahead, an impassable range of mountains. Behind them lay the days they had wasted; ahead, months of merciless winter. No longer could they afford fanciful thoughts of new homes and farms and lives. Now the men and women and children of the Donner Party were reduced to a single, elemental goal: to survive.

  Part I

  Journey

  1

  Jumping Off

  Sitting in her tent on the soft grass of a prairie spring, Tamzene Donner contemplated the vast expanse of wilderness she was about to enter and decided to bid her sister one last goodbye. She reached for a fresh sheet of stationery and carefully noted the date—May 11, 1846—and the location: Independence, Missouri. The next day she would begin a journey as exciting and dangerous as any that could be imagined.

  Tamzene and her family were headed for "the bay of Francisco," two thousand miles away in California, a trip she guessed would take four months. The great migration of which they were a part literally engulfed them on the prairie. Tamzene guessed seven thousand wagons might be going west, and while the real number was less than a tenth so large, rigs stood everywhere. Owners tightened the wagon covers, laid out tack for the morning hitch, hammered home a final repair. Mounds of supplies vanished as crates and trunks and burlap bags disappeared into the wagon beds, stowed in precise array. Flying pans and tools and overalls succumbed to a final cleaning. Oxen and mules and horses grazed in the warmth of the sun, their tails flapping against ever-present flies. Children capered at play. The sounds—the edge of a tent flapping in the wind, the neighing of horses, the barking of dogs, greetings and farewells and talk of the trail ahead—mixed with the smell of sod and manure and campfires and freshly laundered calico. "I can give vou no idea of the huny of this place at this time," Tamzene wrote.

  Tamzene and her husband, George, were going west with five children, their own three young daughters and George's two older daughters from a previous marriage. George's brother Jacob and his wife, Betsy, had come too, with their seven youngsters. So too had the Reeds, James and Margret and four children, another family from the Donners' hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Together, the three families had left Springfield a month earlier, but the trip thus far had been an easy prelude, an undemanding ramble through farmland and towns. The real voyage to California began here, at Independence, a boomtown at the edge of the frontier.

  Tamzene had tried to write her sister
once before, but the letter had been laid aside, perhaps because the preparations for the trip had left no time, perhaps because it was simply too hard to say goodbye. The old letter had been soiled—she rued the waste of a nice sheet of pink paper—and so now she was starting again. One of her children played with "an old indiarubber cap"; another pestered her with questions.

  The children were the reason for the move, or at least part of the reason. A new life in the West would be "an advantage to our children and to us," Tamzene insisted, yet there was a hint in her letter of the anxiety anyone would have felt. "I am willing to go," she wrote. Willing, not eager.

  As if to reassure herself as much as her sister, she outlined their ample gear and provisions: three wagons, each pulled by three yoke of oxen, food, clothing, even a few head of dairy cows for milk and butter along the trail. She added news of another family member, then closed with a promise to write that was really an acknowledgment of just how difficult, perhaps impossible, that might be. "Farewell, mv sister, you shall hear from me as soon as I have an opportunity . . . . Farewell."

  ***

  AMERICA IN THE 1840s hummed with energy and growth and ambition. The summer of the Donners' journey, the country turned seventy years old—an adolescent age for a nation—and its youthful vigor was unmatched. Since the turn of the centuiy, the population had tripled. The geographic size of the nation had quadrupled. The gross national product had increased sevenfold. The United States was, in the words of historian James McPherson, "the wunderkind nation of the nineteenth century."

  Technology seemed to be conquering everything. Since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the country had been laced with man-made waterways. Steamboats, still a relatively new invention, plied the rivers carrying freight and passengers. Even the earliest railroads were belching along. Textile factories had supplanted individual weavers, rolling out affordable fabric by the ton. Inventors fashioned wonder after wonder: Samuel Colt the revolver, John Deere the steel plow, Charles Goodyear a vulcanized rubber that withstood heat and cold. The electric motor had been invented. America had the world's first dental school, and an American doctor had performed the first operation using general anesthetic. In 1844, Samuel Morse had sent the first telegraph message: "What hath God wrought?"

  Yet beyond Independence, this cacophonous modern world faded to a hush. To pioneers, Independence was the "jumping-off point," a phrase that rightly suggested the dramatic abandonment of safety, and to the men and women about to undertake the journey, it was a dividing line between civilization and wilderness. To the west, boundless grasslands stretched toward the sunset, an ocean of grass streaked here and there with the trees of a river bottom. There were no great cities. There were no cities at all. The largest community of the west was Santa Fe, with perhaps a few thousand residents, and that was far to the south of the intended path. Where American settlers were headed, there were only a few small settlements—and those were two thousand miles away in California and Oregon. In between, there was nothing save Indians and a handful of trading posts. On many maps the vast expanse was labeled as the "Great American Desert." In the parlance of the day, those who made the trip were invariably "emigrants," people leaving their countiy for an unknown shore.

  Some had personal reasons for going: a broken heart or a run of bad luck. Others were escaping hard times. An economic crash in 1837 had briefly halted the boom, touching off a painful depression. And yet the economy had started to grow again by the mid-i840s. Agricultural prices still had not rebounded fully, but the worst of the crisis was over.

  The more common reason for starting the journey was simply the continual theme of America: going toward the sunset in search of a better life. Almost from the day the United States bought its way into the western half of the continent, with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans began to dream of using their newly acquired land as a highway to the Pacific. The hard and barren prairies seemed beyond the hope of cultivation, but they could still serve a purpose: access to the rich river valleys of Oregon and California. To go by sea was a grueling prospect—months of churning through the

  South Atlantic, then battering around Cape Horn, then sailing up through the whaling waters of the South Pacific and at last to California. Typically the trip took longer by sea, at least five months compared to perhaps four by going overland. And it was often more expensive, especially since the overland migrant's costs might be recouped at the journey's end if he sold his oxen or wagon. It is no surprise that Americans wondered if the overland alternative might not be better.

  No one knew with certainty, because for the better part of four decades after the purchase, almost no Americans save a few hardy mountain men and a few inflamed missionaries dared venture into the Far West. The lack of experience did not, however, quiet a vigorous debate about the practicality of overland travel. The exploration party led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark endured countless hardships in reaching the Pacific, dragging a boat up the Missouri River for much of the trip, but after their return it was not long before Americans were being told that repeating such a trip might actually become routine. Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis in 1806, yet as early as 1813 the Missouri Gazette announced that wagons could reach Oregon with surprisingly little trouble. There was nothing along the way "that any person would dare to call a mountain," the paper claimed. Newspapers insisted that the trip to Oregon would soon be as simple as traveling among eastern cities, or even a carriage ride to a summer resort. The American Biblical Repository declared the path to the Pacific so inviting that it must have been "excavated by the finger of God." It was said in some quarters that crossing the Rocky Mountains was so easy that a man driving a wagon would hardly notice the rise.

  Skeptics, on the other hand, decried the idea as madness. The trip was compared to a journey to the moon. Livestock would starve along the way. Indians would kill the pioneers. Women and children could not conceivably survive the rigors. Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York Tribune, insisted that trying to take a family west amounted to "palpable homicide."

  But the westward urge could only be contained for so long. The middle of the continent, which not so long ago had itself been wilderness, was starting to fill up and settle down, losing the edge that attracted a certain kind of man. Missouri joined the Union in 1821, Arkansas in 1836, Michigan the year after that. The result, by the 1840s, was a decade of expansionist fever. In 1844, James K. Polk won the presidency by promising to annex Texas in the south and Oregon in the north, in the latter case vowing a war if the British didn't abandon their claim as far north as Alaska. The following year, a New York journalist named John O'Sullivan coined a term for America's grand ambitions: It was the country's "manifest destiny" to occupy the continent from sea to sea, no matter that the British still claimed Oregon and that California was part of Mexico.

  By that time, western settlers had already started fashioning a continental country. They crafted new lives at the edge of the Pacific, assuming more or less that if Americans forged ahead, America would follow. The first wagon train went west in 1841, the brainchild of a twenty-one-year-old Missouri schoolteacher named John Bidwell. His Missouri land stolen by a claim-jumper and his imagination fired by tales of a California paradise, Bidwell organized the Western Emigration Society and drew pledges of commitment from more than five hundred would-be followers. When fewer than a hundred people showed up at the May rendezvous to start the trip, Bidwell plunged ahead anyway. Merely setting out on the journey was a remarkable display of courage. "We knew that California lay west," Bidwell wrote later, "and that was the extent of our knowledge." By luck, the emigrants encountered a party of Jesuit missionaries guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, an Irishman who had already spent a quarter-century in the West and was a legendary mountain man. Fitzpatrick led them all to the vicinity of Fort Hall, in present-day Idaho, where they split into three groups.

  The Jesuits headed north, into modern-day Montana, and the settlers cleav
ed off into separate companies bound for Oregon and California. To quicken the pace, the Oregon group abandoned its wagons immediately and rode and hiked to missionary Marcus Whitman's outpost at Walla Walla, then survived a harrowing raft trip down the Columbia River to reach the Willamette Valley. The Californians clung to their wagons far longer, finally abandoning them at the foot of the Pequop Mountains in what is today eastern Nevada. Even without the drag of the wagons, they were soon desperate and half-starved. They ate their horses and mules, then the oxen, finally crows and even a wildcat. Without maps or a specific sense of the route, they could easily have disappeared and been lost to histoiy. But they managed to survive, cresting the Sierra Nevada and then working their way down through the canyons and ridges of the western slope, finally reaching the grasslands of the San Joaquin Valley. On November 4, in what are now the outlying suburbs of San Francisco, the remnants of the Bidwell Party stumbled into a ranch owned by John Marsh, an American expatriate and charlatan who fled the United States one step ahead of an arrest warrant but then grew rich in the California sunshine. Regular people—not mountain men, but a schoolteacher and farmers and young adventurers—had reached the Pacific by land.

  They had done so by abandoning their wagons, however, and wagons were critical to settlers. When a later party managed to take a few wagons all the way to Oregon, the focus of emigration fever shifted north. Pioneers heading for Oregon soon outnumbered the trickle to California, and for a time it seemed that Oregon would grow to be the colossus of the West.

  Then, in 1844, a small group bucked the trend, declaring for California and holding to their destination against all warnings of doom. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party included fifty people at the start and fifty-two at the end, the result of a safe journey for the beginners and the addition of two babies along the way. The captain was Elisha Stephens, a blacksmith and trapper with a full white beard and an eccentric streak. The other namesakes were Martin Murphy, an Irish immigrant eager for the official Catholicism of Mexican California, and John Townsend, a doctor destined to become the first licensed physician in California. Like the California wagon trains of previous years—the ones that had been forced to abandon their wagons and pack over the Sierra—the group led by Stephens followed the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and then turned southwest down the Humboldt River through the deserts of what is now Nevada. They followed the Humboldt until it literally disappeared, for the Humboldt is an unusual river in that it does not feed to the sea but ends in a sink, a boggy lake from which there is no outlet. The water seeps down into the thirsty earth or evaporates into the blistering sky, and the Humboldt dies, a waterway conquered by a surrounding, merciless desert.