Desperate Passage Read online

  From the jumping-off point at Independence to the crossing of the Continental Divide, the path for all westward travelers was identical. Everyone needed to reach the easy transit through the Rockies, so everyone traveled up the Platte and the Sweetwater, like ships aiming for a strait before reaching the open ocean. But west of the mountains, no similar geographical narrows constricted the traffic. Depending on their intended destination and their personal preferences, emigrants were now free to follow different routes. It was the first time they made a real decision about their course, and for the Donner Party, no choice would ultimately prove more important nor rest on a shakier foundation.

  ***

  JAMES REED MUST HAVE BEEN PONDERING the options for weeks. Marching along hour after hour, California-bound emigrants would have found it impossible not to weigh the impending alternatives, for in a certain sense the wagons were going in the wrong direction.

  Central Missouri and Northern California—the beginning of the journey and the end—are roughly on the same line of latitude. A straight-line trip would have produced a far different path: across Kansas, then through Colorado south of what is today Denver, then across Utah and Nevada before arriving at Sutter's Fort, the site of modern Sacramento. The wagons would never have rolled through an inch of Nebraska or Wyoming. But nineteenth-century emigrants lived in desperate need of the holy trinity of wagon travel—water, wood, and grass—and thus they were slaves to the meanderings of rivers and the haphazard location of mountain passes. For those headed to California, the trip traced a huge arc, northwest for the first thousand miles out of Independence, then at some point southwest toward the destination. This was partly because the trail had first been broken to Oregon, but it had far more to do with the path of the Platte River and the location of South Pass. Crossing the Rockies, emigrant wagon trains were almost two hundred miles north of both Independence and Sutter's Fort. Yet the traditional trail would take them farther north still, up to Fort Hall, in what is today Idaho, before starting a long southward swing toward California. Not surprisingly, emigrants were tempted by the idea of a more direct route, one that was both enticingly straight and dangerously unknown.

  Travelers knew that an alternate course existed because it had been described, albeit briefly, in a book that some of the wagons carried, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, written by a young lawyer from Ohio named Lansford Warren Hastings. Hastings had first gone west four years earlier, in 1842, when he signed on with a wagon train organized and captained by Elijah White, who had been appointed Indian sub-agent for Oregon. Hastings quickly displayed both ambition and a talent for self-promotion. He was only in his mid-twenties and inexperienced in the ways of the West, but when White's term as captain expired, Hastings was elected as his replacement. The new captain was "an aspiring sort of man," one fellow emigrant remembered, "and he worked it so that he got the command."

  Once in Oregon, Hastings grew dissatisfied and decamped south to California, where the unbounded possibilities suited his striving soul. Hoping to attract American settlers to this new homeland, he set to work on his book, which combined travelogue observations from his own western adventures—salmon abounded in the Oregon rivers, California priests thrilled to cockfights—with practical advice for would-be pioneers. The final two chapters were a how-to list for emigrants, a do-it-yourself guide to crossing the continent. Never shy, Hastings made plain his preference for California over Oregon, and even dangled the gleaming lure of a shortcut. In a brief passage, Hastings noted that once the wagons crossed South Pass, California-bound emigrants could leave the Oregon Trail and head southwest to the Great Salt Lake rather than continue northwest into Idaho. From the lake, they could turn due west, cross the desert beyond the lake, and then take aim for California. Hastings offered little detail about the new route, and for good reason: He had never set foot on an inch of it.

  Still, cocksure of his own skills as a literary evangelist, Hastings began dreaming of the multitudes his book might seduce. By the winter of 1845-46—the same winter during which the Donners and the Reeds were laying plans and readying equipment and stockpiling supplies for the long trip west—Hastings was literally plotting a California boom, laying out a town near Sutter's Fort. A bold army of pilgrims would bring culture to a benighted land, he thought. "A new era in the affairs of California, is about to arise," he wrote to the American consul in Monterey in March 1846. "These now wild and desolate plains must soon abound with all the busy and intresting scenes of highly civilized life." He had even begun to chat up the outsized idea that perhaps California should break away from Mexico and declare its independence, as Texas had done less than a decade before, and there were those who got the impression that Hastings envisioned himself as the future president of this would-be California Republic.

  The problem for Hastings was that the American emigration—the linchpin on which all his grand plans relied—might bypass California altogether, choosing Oregon instead. And so in the early months of 1846, he decided to ride out onto the trail and lobby for California as the emigrants' goal. If settlers could not be trusted to find California, then California—in the person of Lansford Warren Hastings—would go and find settlers.

  ***

  HASTINGS LEFT SUTTER'S FORT on April 11, a month before the Donners and the Reeds jumped off from Independence. He gathered a small party and started over the Sierra, intending to travel his proposed cut-off backwards, from west to east, and then to await the emigration on the main trail. As the wagons rolled up, he would recruit them for California.

  Joining Hastings was James Clyman, who lent extraordinary experience to the group. Born in Virginia little more than a decade after the Revolutionary War, Clyman grew up on land owned by George Washington, from whom Clyman's father leased a parcel. As a young man he went west as a fur trapper, distinguishing himself with displays of ingenuity and determination. He completed, for example, the first known circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake. In 1827 he returned east to take up business in Wisconsin and Illinois, but nearly two decades later, in 1844, he decided once again to go west. He was almost fifty, perhaps looking for a better climate or perhaps just seeking a little of the old adventurous spirit of his youth, a nineteenth-century version of a midlife crisis. He went first to Oregon, then the next year to California, and by the spring of 1846 was ready to return home. Wisely choosing not to make the trip alone, he joined up with Hastings.

  From the beginning, the old explorer doubted the feasibility of Hastings's proposed cut-off—"my beleef is that it [is] verry little nearer and not so good a road as that by fort Hall," Clyman recorded in his journal—and the farther they went the more his apprehension deepened.

  By the time he stood amid the desiccated bleakness of the Great Salt Lake Desert, Clyman was awestruck by the lifeless vista. "In fact this is the [most] desolate countiy perhaps on the whole globe," he wrote in his journal, "there not being one spear of vegitation and of course no kind of animal can subsist." At the lake itself, he looked about and recorded simply that he was surrounded by "wide spread Sterility."

  When Hastings and Clyman and the others of their little party at last completed the cut-off and rejoined the traditional trail, Hastings stopped to wait for the approaching emigrants, but Clyman kept on going, encountering one wagon train after another coming from the other direction. By extraordinary chance, he found an old friend—James Reed. Fourteen years earlier, Clyman and Reed had served together in the Black Hawk War, when the Sauk and Fox Indians tried to reclaim their tribal lands from white settlers and were massacred by U.S. troops. Clyman and Reed mustered in as members of Capt. Jacob M. Early's Company of Mounted Volunteers on the same day, along with another unknown private, Abraham Lincoln. "We didn't think much then about his ever being

  President of the United States," Clyman wrote decades later, after Lincoln's assassination.

  At Fort Laramie, the two old friends talked late into the night, Reed questioning Clyman about what la
y ahead on the trail, Clyman trying to warn Reed about the desolation he had just seen in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Remembering the conversation years later, Clyman said he told Reed to "take the regular wagon track, and never leave it—it is barely possible to get through if you follow it, and it may be impossible if you don't."

  "There is a nigher route," Reed replied, insistently, "and it is of no use to take so much of a roundabout course." Clyman acknowledged that the Hastings Cut-Off might be straighter, but again warned his old friend that it might also be impassable.

  Clyman was a rare combination, half southern gentleman, half mountain man. "Deliberate in all his movements," as one contemporary remembered, he was kind and well read, and his voice still held the syrupy tincture of an antebellum upbringing. But he was also an old denizen of the West, a man with hair that reached his shoulders and a forest of whiskers and a sun-burnished face glazed to the hue of "smoked buckskin." He was the kind of man, in other words, who should have received his due from greenhorn settlers. Some of those at Fort Laramie did listen, changing their plans and following the traditional route, or even striking out for Oregon rather than California. By rights, Reed should have been among those who heeded Clyman's advice. The two men had fought a war together, after all, a shared experience that often creates an unbreakable bond.

  But if Clyman's warning resonated at all—a nettling abrasion undermining Reed's former certainty—such doubts were probably washed away two weeks later by another eastbound rider, this one a stranger rather than an old friend. Wales Bonney was traveling by himself all the way from Oregon to Independence—a daring if not foolish venture—and carried with him an impressive token of expertise: a letter from Hastings himself. The two men had met along the eastbound trail, and Hastings had given Bonney the letter to show to emigrants. The missive declared that Hastings would wait for the wagons up ahead and guide them along the new route mentioned in his book.

  That must have been exactly what Reed wanted to hear. He had not transformed himself from a fatherless boy into a wealthy and successful man by playing it safe. Nor had he started the journey west intending to avoid risks. Danger was inherent in what they were doing, no matter what route they took. Hastings was even putting himself in jeopardy to prove his new shortcut, guiding the wagons personally over the last and most treacherous portion of the journey. And if Reed considered the relative position of his wagons—near the tail end of the season's migration—he surely must have been encouraged to tiy anything that might save time. So he ignored the sound warnings of his old wartime friend Clyman and began talking to his fellow emigrants about the gamble of a lifetime: an untried shortcut through an unknown wilderness.

  ***

  ON JULY 19, THE DAY AFTER CROSSING the Continental Divide, the wagons reached a nondescript fork in the road that would soon be given a rather romantic nickname: the Parting of the Ways. To the right lay the branch northwest to Fort Hall, to the left the southwest route toward the Hastings Cut-Off. The next morning, most teamsters steered their oxen to the right, choosing the safety of an established trail. But a few families—the Reeds, the Donner brothers, a few others who had been traveling along in the same general pack of wagons—decided to bank on Hastings's promises. In all, about seventy people waved goodbye to their former companions and took the gentle bend toward the left. Most were upbeat, their spirits buoyed by the prospect of a shortcut that might save precious time. The exception was Tamzene Donner, who was wary. They had never met Hastings, she noted, and yet now they were trusting his word on an issue that might literally decide their fate.

  As a practical matter, the split at the Parting of the Ways was the true emergence of the Donner Party. Throughout the first half of the journey, as hundreds of wagons all rolled along the same route, traveling arrangements mutated ceaselessly, families or groups of families combining or withdrawing as the inevitable alliances and frictions developed and changed. Sometimes these changes were not even formally recognized. The Donners and Reeds, for example, had initially joined the Russell Party, which in turn became the Boggs Party when Russell resigned his post and was replaced by former Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, but it appears likely that along the Sweetwater River, they and some companions broke away from Boggs's leadership and traveled independently, although without any known organization or structure.

  But now the small group of wagons turning toward the Hastings shortcut would be on its own, traveling down a spur trail without close company, and so they decided to organize formally. With only a few small changes, the emigrants who veered to the left at the Little Sandy River would be the group that faced the coming ordeal in the mountains. The Donners and the Reeds still formed the core, but other large families would prove just as important in the long run.

  The Breens were a big Irish family, and devoutly Catholic. Patrick Breen, who was in his fifties, had been born in Ireland and emigrated to Canada in 1828. He married an Irish girl, Margaret Bulger, who was called Peggy, and eventually they settled on a farm near Keokuk, Iowa. The restlessness that pushed Patrick Breen from Ireland to Canada to the United States did not fade, and by the 1840s he was talking about joining the great migration west. Religion may have been one factor. Catholics were rare in Keokuk, but they dominated Mexican California. By 1846 he was ready to take the great leap, so he sold the farm and set out for the Pacific. By that time the Breens had seven children, six boys and a baby girl named Isabella. Not as wealthy as the Donners or the Reeds, they had no hired hands, but neither were they poor.

  A woman headed one big clan. Levinah Murphy was only thirty-six but was already a widow with seven children and three grandchildren. Born to a prosperous family in South Carolina, she married her distant cousin four days after her sixteenth birthday and quickly began a family. When her husband died in 1839, Murphy was left to care for seven children. Apparently a convert to Mormonism, she moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, the home of Joseph Smith's new church, and then to Tennessee. No one knows exactly why she decided to go west, although she may have hoped to reunite with her fellow Mormons, who were already planning to flee the Midwest but whose final destination was uncertain. Her oldest children, nineteen- and eighteen-year-old daughters, were married and had children of their own but decided to go along. Murphy's brood was thus huge: her seven children ranging in age from eight to nineteen, two sons-in-law, and three toddling grandchildren.

  An Illinois couple, William Eddy and his wife, Eleanor, had two young children, a three-year-old son and a baby daughter. A carriage-maker by trade, William Eddy was talkative, ebullient, eager to help. Early in the trip, a wagon belonging to a group of single men broke an axletree, a common problem on the trail. A number of wagons rolled past, but Eddy and some other men stopped to help. Eddy set to work with the needed tools—a saw, augers, chisels, hammers, etc.—and fashioned a replacement for the broken axletree. By sundown, the owners thought, the wagon was as good as new, maybe better. But Eddy could also exaggerate his role in a story. There were those who thought him a liar, the kind of man who made himself the hero of every tale he told. He was capable, a fellow emigrant remembered, of "eulogizing himself."

  A group of native German speakers stuck together, although they were not all actually Germans. The most important was Lewis Keseberg, a tall, blue-eyed, thirty-two-year-old Prussian Emigre who spoke English, French, and German and would eventually learn Spanish. Before leaving Europe for the United States he had married Philippine, who was almost a decade younger than he and pretty and, some said, flirtatious. They endured a troubled union. A nasty temper plagued Keseberg, and he sometimes directed his vitriol at his wife, a habit that offended some of his fellow travelers on the journey west. More than one member of the Donner Party remembered Keseberg beating Philippine, a "humble and unassuming" woman who was "cowed down." "He treated her like a brute," recalled Virginia Reed. "She was afraid of him and yet made all sorts of excuses for him." James Breen remembered Keseberg, a tall and powerful man, as "quick tempered and i
rritable."

  The Wolfingers were another German couple, young and childless although apparently wealthy. Doris Wolfinger spoke little English but impressed eveiyone with a regal bearing, not to mention elegant clothes and expensive jewelry. There were several young, single men among the "Germans," and one old man known only as Hardcoop, a cutler from Cincinnati who wanted to see the west before returning to his two children in Belgium.

  Patrick Dolan was one of the few bachelors who was not working his way west as a teamster. A neighbor of the Breens back in Iowa, Dolan had vouched for Patrick Breen when the Irishman took the oath as a naturalized American citizen. Perhaps thirty-five or forty, Dolan was not as rich as some of the well-established family men, but he had made a success of himself. He sold his farm in Iowa and went west with a wagon and some cows. Optimistic and jovial by nature, he was popular with the children.

  The first task for this emerging new group was to pick a leader. Surely the men had been eyeing each other for some time, drawing one another aside or wandering by someone else's campfire to discuss the likely candidates, glances thrown back over their shoulders to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Perhaps some men campaigned for the job while others refused it. As the wagons prepared to pull away on their new course, the men finally gathered around to settle the matter.

  Reed, the only man keeping a regular diary at that point, failed even to mention the decision. We do not know with certainty that he wanted the job, but he was an obvious potential choice. Assuming he expressed an interest, it's easy to see why he was passed over. He was aristocratic and headstrong and rubbed people the wrong way. He was not the kind of man to win a popularity contest. But he was also not the kind of man to bring up someone else's victory in his own journal.

  Charles Stanton, who had been so excited to cross the Continental Divide, had the courage and commitment of a leader, but he was a young man traveling alone, far less established than the older family men. The same was true of William Eddy, whose family was small and young. Patrick Breen headed a big clan, but he was an Irishman and a Catholic, and nobody volunteers to be led by an outsider.