Desperate Passage Read online

  From the sink, previous California-bound trains had headed south, marching down the eastern flank of the Sierra, searching constantly on their right for a mountain pass, a doorway through an imposing granite wall. (One group managed to get wagons to the Owens Valley, along the eastern edge of the modern state of California, but that marginal success didn't count for much. To the pioneers, reaching California meant crossing the

  Sierra.) The Stephens Party, on the other hand, headed west from the sink rather than south. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune, they had encountered a Paiute Indian who led them to a river running out of the Sierra Nevada. The banks were wooded and grassy, crucial for supplying fuel for the campfires and feed for the oxen. They named it the Truckee, which they mistakenly thought was the name of the Indian who led them to it.

  They followed the river, then a creek that branched away due west, and finally, amid November snow flurries, found a lake at the base of the mountains, the granite face above them rising almost as high as the Empire State Building. They abandoned six of their eleven wagons so they could double-team those that remained and then carried the supplies and freight to the summit so the wagons could be taken over empty. Part of the way up, a sheer vertical face about ten feet high stood in their way, seemingly impassable for any wheeled vehicle. They unhitched the wagons and drove the oxen up a narrow defile in the cliff. Then they reyoked the animals and lowered chains to the wagons, which were hauled straight up the ledge, the oxen pulling from above and the people pushing from below. They crossed the summit on November 25, 1844, the first party to take wagons over the top of the Sierra Nevada.

  The feat was in some ways a hollow victory. More than half the wagons had been left behind, those that crossed the summit had been taken over without freight, and on the way down the western slope the wagons had to be abandoned altogether, not to be recovered until the following summer. For much of the time the very survival of the emigrants had been in doubt. They were lucky to encounter an Indian willing to guide them, perhaps just as lucky to make it up and over the Sierra without some serious injury or other calamity. Still, wagons had been taken all the way through to California, and if something could be done once, it could be done again.

  More than a year passed before news reached the East, but by the spring of 1846 word of the new wagon route to California was spreading. Men returning from the West talked up the discovery, and the newspapers began to publish enthusiastic accounts, including one wildly optimistic assessment that the Stephens-led group had found a "very good road." Enthusiasm for California heightened. In Independence, where the wagon trains readied themselves to head out over the prairies, camps buzzed with excitement about California's climate, said to be good for people and crops alike. One joke had it that when a Californian reached heaven, the archangel Gabriel said the man should return home—"a heap better country than this." For the first time in the brief history of the wagon trains, California surpassed Oregon as the destination of choice. A newspaperman in Independence claimed to have seen just one wagon bound for Oregon. "The word," he wrote, "is California." When Tamzene Donner's family set their wagons and their futures toward "the bay of Francisco," they were joining a rushing tide of optimistic Americans headed west.

  ***

  AT FORTY-FOUR, Tamzene Donner had already endured one tragedy in life, showing a resiliency that would sustain her in the ordeal yet to come. Born in Massachusetts, she went south as a young woman to work as a schoolteacher. While living in North Carolina, she married and had a baby, a son who looked just like his father. But then, in three horrific months toward the end of 1831, the bedrock of Tamzene's life crumbled beneath her feet. For reasons that are not clear—perhaps an epidemic of some sort—all those closest to her died in quick succession: her son in late September, a premature baby daughter in November, her husband on Christmas Eve. Shattered and alone, she began the long process of reconstructing her life, chronicling the stages of her emotional convalescence in an extraordinaiy series of heartfelt letters to her sister.

  "Weep with me if you have tears to spare," she wrote in Januaiy 1832, just a month after her husband's death. Later that year she grew so ill she thought she might die, an idea that did not entirely frighten her. "Sister I could die very easily. One after one of the bonds that bound one to earth are loosened and now there remains but few." The following spring, she remained deeply depressed, with little to look forward to except the occasional letter from her sister. She was plagued with nightmares, dreaming that she was wandering aimlessly while looking for lost relatives, or that she saw her sister "wasting with sickness." By 1836, five years after the deaths, she was struggling to reclaim her optimism. She resolutely insisted that despite everything, she was a lucky woman—"Think not I am unhappy. Far from it. I realize that on me heaven has been lavish of its blessings"—and was obviously proud that her abilities as a schoolteacher had allowed her to survive on her own. Responding to her brother's offer to "take care" of her, she wrote her sister, "I am abundantly able at present to take care of myself and to supply every necessary and unnecessaiy want."

  Eventually she fled the South and its personal ghosts, taking a job as a schoolteacher in Illinois. "Think you that my wandering feet will rest this side the grave?" she wrote. Her health was improving, and she had even regained a sense of humor: "You need not fear having a brother in law, for I know not a man old enough for me in the county." Not completely healed, she had at least found an equilibrium. "To say that I have any particular source of anxiety or cause of unhappiness I cannot. To say that I have any particular pleasure I cannot. Life moves on as smoothly and quietly as a summer stream." She loved the prairie. The broad vistas—the wildflowers, the grasslands, the sunsets that spread a swath of crimson across the skyline—gave a sense of possibility. "I stop, I gaze and am awestruck."

  In time, she was ready again to consider courtship. In Springfield, Illinois, she met a local farmer, George Donner, a man in some ways her opposite. If she was the lettered Yankee, he was the garrulous southerner. Born in North Carolina in the years just after the Revolutionary War, Donner had traveled through Kentucky, Indiana, even Texas, settling finally in Illinois. He was the kind of man people liked, a big fellow known around Sangamon County as "Uncle George." The nickname fit. He was more avuncular than firm, a friendly presence who was neither a natural-born leader nor merely a face in the crowd. Almost two decades older than Tamzene, he had been widowed twice and had ten children from those first two marriages.

  They courted, then married in 1839 and soon began a family of their own that would eventually grow to include three daughters. It was a comfortable life. They owned 240 acres in two parcels, including their home, sixty acres of planted fields, and an orchard of apple, peach, and pear trees. "Our neighbors call us rich," Tamzene admitted. As a wife and mother she gave up teaching but indulged her intellectual bent by starting a "reading society," an antebellum version of a book club.

  By 1842, ten years after the death of her first family, Tamzene Donner had started anew. With her baby daughter asleep in a cradle beside her, she paused on a spring day, the window open to the scent of apple blossoms, to write yet again to the sister who had so often received letters of woe. "Things have turned around very much to my satisfaction," she wrote. Her husband was kind, her children a constant delight. A decade after a calamity that would have destroyed many people, Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: "I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world."

  ***

  THE DONNER FAMILY'S relative affluence was not atypical of those who made the great westward migration. Reaching the Pacific Coast was an expensive proposition. Months of travel that produced no income, then the cost of establishing a new home in a new place—these were not expenses to be borne by the destitute. The very rich were rare in the wagon trains, but often the families heading for Oregon and California were substantial people, with established and successful lives. The Donners' depar
ture from Springfield had been announced in the local paper, and they had hired younger, stronger men to go along on the trip and do the hard work of driving the teams. George Donner had been able to afford a recruiting advertisement touting the fact that his jobs offered the chance at a trip to California for free. "Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? . . . Come, boys!" People even said later that the Donners were carrying ten thousand dollars, some of it sewn into a quilt for safekeeping.

  But for all their money, the Donners and their traveling companions, the Reeds, were just unremarkable families from Illinois, ready to join the great migration to the west. The problem was that they were late. James Reed had been told repeatedly to reach Independence by the first of April, or the middle of the month at the latest. The advice was needlessly extreme; nobody "jumped off" that early. Emigrants had to wait for spring grasses to grow so the animals would have forage. But if the Donners and Reeds had reached the town by late April or May 1, they would have had a chance to rest both themselves and their animals, to "recruit" their strength, as they would have put it. For some reason, however, the two families did not leave Springfield until mid-April and reached Independence only on May 10. The bulk of the California-bound emigrants were already out on the trail. The Spring-field families took but a day to rest their oxen and other livestock, then hustled out of town in hopes of catching up. It was less obvious at the time than it would be later, but the sad fact was that the journey had barely begun, and the core of what would become the Donner Party was already lagging behind.

  2

  Catching Up

  Margret Reed fretted. It had been a week of hard travel since they left Independence, but at last they had caught the main body of California-bound emigrants, a sprawling company led by a slightly pompous Kentucky lawyer named William Henry Russell. The extent of Russell's domain—nearly fifty wagons and 150 adults—offered a safety-in-numbers bulk that appealed to the Reeds and the Donners. But camp gossips spread the word that past applicants to the party had sometimes been rejected, and Margret feared that she and her family would also be turned aside.

  Once, Margret had been a high-spirited young woman, dashing around on horseback with reckless abandon and proving herself an independent soul. Engaged at eighteen to an older man, she fell for one of her fiance's younger friends, a would-be groomsman named Lloyd Backenstoe. Margret broke off the engagement and transformed Backenstoe from a groomsman to a groom, marrying him and having a daughter, a girl they named Virginia. But in 1834, just four days before their second wedding anniversary, Backenstoe died in a cholera epidemic, leaving Margret alone with a young child just months after her twentieth birthday. Widowhood stole her youthful zest, and when she married James Reed a little more than a year later, she was still bedridden with grief and sickness. During the ceremony, he stood next to the bed holding her hand. The ensuing years did little to improve her health. She suffered from "nervous sick headaches," migraines that debilitated her for days on end, and sometimes from fever and chills as well. The move to California was, in part, an effort to find a gentler climate.

  Risking the venture was typical of her husband, a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned. James Reed liked the people he liked, despised those he didn't, and struck some as haughty, perhaps the legacy of the Polish nobility from which he supposedly was descended. He had made a success of himself under difficult circumstances. Born in Northern Ireland, he was brought to Virginia as a child by his widowed mother, a fatherless boy in a new country. As a young man he moved to Illinois and later served with Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hawk War. At home in Springfield after the war, he hustled through a series of businesses: furniture manufacturing, a sawmill, the railroads.

  By the time he decided to go west he was a man of means, and he did not mind if others knew of his status. Reed would never sew his money into a quilt, as George Donner did. Reed put his wealth to use, perhaps even flaunted it. Before leaving Illinois, he corresponded with a friend in Independence, picking up tips on what to bring. Reed's friend warned against skimping—"Don't be puny, get a good outfit"—and Reed heeded the advice. He had a special wagon built with an entrance on the side, like a stagecoach, and high-backed seats with handy storage areas beneath the cushions. Extensions built out over the wheels added room. A small stove, vented by a pipe running through the canvas top, provided heat on cold mornings or at night.

  There were those who found Reed hard to take, but he was a born leader, and when his wagons and those of the Donner brothers rolled into the camp of the Russell Party, it was Reed who took the initiative. Hoping to make a good impression, he scrubbed the trail grime off his face and then went to see the captain.

  Russell's position was less authoritative than it sounded, for wagon trains were remarkably democratic organizations. Out on the open prairie, emigrants were beyond the reach of the law, so to provide some semblance of order they usually formed into companies, electing officers to organize daily progress and settle disputes. Someone had to assign guard duty and get things moving in the morning, after all. But anything created by a show of hands could be undone just as easily. Companies shifted constantly, adding or subtracting members. Smaller groups split off, latecomers joined, individual families decided for whatever reason to change traveling companions. So too could captains be deposed, and thus they were closer to being first-among-equals than commanders of a hierarchy. Still, competition for the honor was fierce, politics carrying into the wilderness even if the law did not. Russell, who had once served in the Kentucky legislature, was undoubtedly proud of his post.

  To Reed he proved "kind and obliging." The captain immediately gathered the men of the party in the center of the camp and gave a speech recommending that Reed and the Donners be admitted. Russell said he knew Reed by reputation and would vouch that he was a gentleman. Somebody moved that the new families be allowed into the company, and every hand went up to signify assent. Russell walked over to Reed's wagons to meet his family, a pleasant little visit. "We are all in good spirits," Reed wrote.

  REED'S BUOYANCY WAS A LITTLE OVERSTATED, for one member of the group was suffering. Sarah Keyes, Reed's mother-in-law, was ill, too ill for the journey, really. She was seventy and afflicted with "consumption," probably tuberculosis, but she had insisted on going. Margret Reed was her only daughter, and Keyes had no intention of living out her days with her daughter and grandchildren vanished over the horizon. She may also have hoped to meet one of her sons, who had already gone west. So James Reed outfitted a special wagon designed to provide a comfortable ride for his mother-in-law, and Keyes began a trip that often defeated those half her age. The early stages seemed to do her good, her health and spirits improving by the day, but the recovery did not last. By the time the Reeds joined the Russell Party, Keyes had stopped eating. One of her eyes throbbed with pain. Increasing blindness left her unable to see a coffee cup placed near at hand.

  The next morning, Keyes confided in her son-in-law. The trip had sapped her remaining strength, she told James, and she did not expect to live long. He thought the same thing, for it was plain that the old woman was fading. Unless there was "a quick change," he wrote in a letter back home, "a few days will end her mortal carear."

  ***

  SIX DAYS LATER, THE EMIGRANTS STOOD looking down into the churning waters of the Big Blue River, muddy and menacing and wide as a football field. Driftwood bobbed on the swift surface. Trains typically forded here, in what is now northern Kansas, but rains had raised the water level until it was nearly even with the banks, and the normally gentle ford was instead a wagon-wrecking torrent. They were only hours too late. Two companies ahead of them had reached the river the night before, crossed safely, and could now be seen in the distance, rolling west over the broken landscape.

  That night a thunderstorm hit. "The whole arch of the heavens for a time was wrapped in a sheet of flame," one man remembered. In the morning the river was
higher than the night before, and the emigrants had to accept that they were stuck, probably for days.

  Fortunately, they found a delightful place to wait. A few hundred yards short of the river lay a bountiful spring in a cool and shaded gully, the water "of the most excellent kind." There was good wood for campfires and grass for the stock, and even a short, steep hill nearby that offered a splendid view of the countryside. Edwin Bryant, a newspaperman going west who was the wordsmith of the group, dubbed the site "Alcove Spring," presumably because he thought a small cliff in the gully formed a natural alcove. Another man carved the new name in one of the rocks. Characteristically, Reed engraved his name and the date in big, bold letters.

  Such an agreeable campsite should have done them good, but as they waited for the river to fall, Sarah Keyes's health flagged. She grew speechless, weakened before their eyes, and then, still in the presence of the daughter she had vowed not to leave, drew a final labored breath. The men of the party had already started work on a raft so the wagons could be floated across, but the rites of the dead took precedence. The men felled a cottonwood tree, hewed it into planks, and hammered together a coffin. About sixty or seventy yards from the trail they dug a grave. John Denton, a young Englishman traveling with the Donners, found a gray stone and carved on its face the dead woman's name and age.