Desperate Passage Read online

  And then there was the easiest choice of all: George Donner, the older of the two Donner brothers, a friendly fellow with enthusiasm and goodwill. He led one of the three families from Springfield that lay at the core of the group. Perhaps he wasn't the most commanding of men, but then all the captain needed to do was get the group moving in the morning and pick the campsite at night. In a pinch, somebody else could even take those duties. Maybe Donner was a little malleable, but better that than a self-important blowhard like Reed.

  They counted the votes, and the new company assumed the name by which it would enter history.

  ***

  BILLY, THE PONY THAT HAD CARRIED Virginia Reed so joyfully across the plains, could go no farther. Worn down by the long days of endless walking, he simply stopped. James Reed could have shot him to save the beast a lingering death, but perhaps Virginia could not stand the idea, and so instead they simply abandoned the exhausted little animal by the trail.

  Virginia agonized at the harsh ethos of the western trail: keep moving or die. "When I was forced to part with him, I cried until I was ill, and sat in the back of the wagon watching him become smaller and smaller as we drove on, until I could see him no more."

  7

  Gambling

  Edwin Bryant decided to gamble. The newspaperman was now well ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, for his lingering doubts about the pace of the wagon trains had finally crystallized into action. At Fort Bernard, Bryant and his traveling companions traded their wagon for pack mules and rode ahead as fast as they could.

  More than a week before the Donner Party, he reached Fort Bridger, a small trading post along the Black's Fork of the Green River in what is today the southwestern corner of Wyoming. Fort Bridger was the last chance to decide which route to pursue toward California, since in effect it offered a second chance at the decision the emigrants had faced at the Parting of the Ways. As at the Parting, the trail split at Fort Bridger: To the right lay a well-established route via Fort Hall; to the left was the untried Hastings Cut-Off.

  When Bryant arrived, Lansford Hastings was there, touting his new course. But so too was the legendary Joseph Walker, a mountain man with decades of experience in the west. Walker "spoke discouragingly" of the Hastings route, Bryant wrote.

  Nonetheless, Bryant and his friends resolved to risk the new path. The whole trip west was a risky venture, and the timid were still on the farm, a thousand miles back and probably regretting the missed opportunity.

  But Bryant also worried about the families farther back on the trail, the ones with which he had begun the journey. With their ponderous ox-drawn wagons, they should try no new and untested routes. At their slower pace, they would spend longer in the desert. With their livestock, they required more water and feed. And then there were the children. Family men should stick to the proven and rutted road. "Our situation was different than theirs," Bryant recalled. Single men on mules "could afford to hazard experiments, and make explorations. They could not."

  Bryant could not wait around at Fort Bridger to voice his reservations in person. Even on the relatively fast mules, he still wanted to keep moving. Fortunately, an alternative was at hand. Louis Vasquez, who owned and operated the fort along with Jim Bridger, offered to see that letters were held for the oncoming wagons. Undoubtedly thankful for the kindness, Bryant scrawled out his doubts in messages to some of the key men, one addressed to James Reed. Then he rode off, trusting that the honorable men who ran Fort Bridger would see the missives safely delivered.

  ***

  THE DONNER PARTY REACHED THE FORT nine days later, on July 27, a Monday, and pitched camp in a pleasing meadow half a mile downriver, hoping the rich valley grasses would rejuvenate their exhausted oxen. To let the animals rest, the emigrants planned to stay a few days.

  As soon as the stock was turned loose and the bedrolls unpacked, the men went looking for Hastings. According to his own letter, he was supposed to be at the fort, waiting to guide them on his new and untested cut-off. It was crucial that they find him. Since Hastings's proposed route had hardly been traveled before, it bore none of the guide-posts that dotted heavily traveled trails—wagon tracks, well-worn fords, old campsites. Without Hastings, the Donner Party would be forced to feel their way along blindly, following a trail that did not really exist through terrain they did not know.

  Yet Hastings was nowhere at the fort. He had gone ahead with other wagons. He had promised to wait for those who heeded his call, and now he had vanished. For Reed and the Donner brothers and the others of their company, it must have come as a brutal shock. They had banked their fate on an unreliable man.

  Another option remained: the branch of trail leading northwest, toward Fort Hall. Take it, and soon enough they would be back in the ruts of the main route, perhaps even reunited with those to whom they had bid farewell at the Parting of the Ways. Clyman's knowledgeable warning about the Hastings Cut-Off argued for that option, and now so did Hastings's failure to wait for them.

  One more stone might have tipped the scale, but the warning letters from Bryant lay as hidden as a miser's heart. Bridger and Vasquez had opened their fort just three years before, in 1843, as a trading post and way station for westward emigrants. The location seemed first-rate. Fort Laramie was well back to the east, on the other side of the Continental Divide; Fort Hall was still 150 miles away, at least a week's hard travel. Fort Bridger would do a booming business selling supplies and livestock to weary travelers. What's more, it was on the main road. The primary emigrant trail—the route that led to Fort Hall and then to Oregon and California—passed right by the new establishment.

  But in a striking case of bad luck, Fort Bridger was bypassed the very next year. In 1844 a party of emigrants blazed what came to be known as the Greenwood Cut-Off, a shortcut that saved several days' travel but went nowhere near Fort Bridger. When emigrants steered to the right at the Parting of the Ways, it was actually the Greenwood Cut-Off they were taking. By 1846 the shortcut had become the main road, and almost nobody was going by way of Fort Bridger. Bridger and Vasquez found themselves stranded on a back road, like an old-fashioned motel too far from a new interstate.

  Hastings's proposed route offered a solution. His cut-off required that emigrants use the old and now largely abandoned trail down to Fort Bridger before striking off through the Wasatch and along the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Unavoidably, families that took the Hastings Cut-Off would roll right past Bridger and Vasquez. So perfectly did the needs of Hastings and Bridger mesh that rumors of pay-offs circulated, although some of the gossip suggested that Hastings was paying Bridger and some that it was the other way around.

  For Bridger and Vasquez, therefore, Bryant's discouraging letters were a potential disaster. If word got around that the cut-off was too dangerous for emigrants with wagons, families would continue to take the Greenwood route, never approaching Fort Bridger. Business would collapse.

  The solution was as obvious as it was devious. When the Donner Party arrived, Bridger said not a word about the warning from Bryant, the emigrants' old traveling companion. Instead, he claimed the Hastings Cut-Off was a "fine level road." rich with grass for the livestock and well watered most of the way. The shortcut might save hundreds of miles over the old route via Fort Hall, he insisted. A benign explanation washed away Hastings's absence: The route he had initially explored contained a stretch without water, and now he had gone ahead to scout for an even easier trail.

  Even without reading Bryant's letter, Reed and the other members of the Donner Party should have been suspicious of Bridger's enthusiasm. Anyone could see that the trading post was in danger of being marooned, an anachronism past which the modern trail detoured. Clyman had already offered cautionary words at Fort Laramie, and it's possible that at Fort Bridger the emigrants heard doubts yet again. Walker, the legendary mountain man who had warned Bryant about Hastings's route, may still have been there when the Donner Party arrived, telling people of his doubts. But if
Reed heard of Walker's views, either directly or through local gossip, he seems to have disregarded them. Far from wondering about Bridger's possible motives in promoting the cut-off, Reed fell for the man. Bridger and Vasquez, he wrote, were "very excellent and accommodating gentlemen" who could be trusted to do business with emigrants "honorably and fairly."

  So far as we know, no one else raised any strong objections, and so the wagons turned away from the tested trail to California. In less than two weeks, the Donner Party had faced essentially the same dilemma twice: Stay with the traditional route or take a chance on Hastings's promises. Both times they made the same decision. Sooner than they could imagine, they would have reason to wonder about the wisdom of their choice.

  8

  A New and Interesting Region

  The young rider bounced off his mount and thudded sickeningly into the hard earth of Wyoming. The fall knocked Edward Breen out cold, and when he regained consciousness his left leg throbbed with pain. Adults arrived and examined the boy and found a bad break between the knee and ankle. There was no doctor in the company, but they were only a little ways beyond Fort Bridger. Perhaps someone there boasted medical training. A rider galloped off, and in time he returned with the nearest thing to a doctor the fort had to offer, "a rough looking man with long whiskers" who had probably acquired what medical knowledge he had through long experience on the frontier. He unrolled a small bundle he was carrying and produced a short saw and a long-bladed knife, obviously the tools of amputation.

  Edward shrieked at the sight and began begging his parents to prohibit the operation. It was no easy decision. If the leg didn't set properly—and what were the odds of that in a jouncing wagon?—gangrene could fester. The boy could die. But Edward was adamant, and in time his parents agreed. They gave the would-be surgeon five dollars for his trouble and sent him on his way. Edward exhaled and tried to lie easy.

  ***

  CHARLES STANTON BASKED IN THE SUMMER SUN, letting it warm both his body and his spirit. Snow-capped mountains glittered in the distance, yet another sign that the emigrants had long since left behind the flat-lands of their midwestern homes. Taking up a letter he had written to his brother two weeks earlier, Stanton added a short, optimistic postscript. "We take a new rout to California, never travelled before this season; consequently our route is over a new and interesting region." Perhaps too new and interesting. It was August 3, three days since the Donner Party had pulled away from Fort Bridger, and yet Lansford Hastings remained a ghost.

  Then, on the sixth day out from the fort, they found some shadow of the phantom. Someone spotted a note protruding from the top of a sagebrush and called out to tell the others, and when they reached it they found it was from Hastings. In a way, it was a remarkable find—the paper could have blown away or been taken by an animal or simply overlooked—but in fact it was a common method of trailside communication. Paper being valuable, emigrants occasionally used whatever lay at hand for their impromptu billboards—pieces of wood or even buffalo skulls.

  The wagons had reached Weber Canyon at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, the steep and rugged range that lay between Fort Bridger and the Great Salt Lake. Up ahead, the forward group led by Hastings—the Harlan-Young Party—had already spent a grueling week struggling down the forbidding canyon, which grew narrower as it went. Wagons crossed and recrossed the river, sometimes driving straight down the rocky bed, with no guarantee they might not topple. One man watched some of his comrades trying to build a road through the canyon and proclaimed in his journal that it was "an exhibition of most consumate folly."

  Hastings had never intended to travel down the canyon; a guide working for him had taken the wagons down that route while Hastings was briefly away. Now, in the note he left for the Donner Party, Hastings urged the trailing emigrants to stop where they were and send a messenger ahead so that he could return and take them along another route through the Wasatch. Finding the note, the men of the Donner Party huddled together and decided that three riders would search out Hastings while the rest of the party waited and rested. Ever at the center of events—and at least partly responsible for convincing the others to chance the shortcut—James Reed was chosen to go, along with Charles Stanton and William Pike, a son-in-law in the big Murphy clan. They mounted up, waved goodbye to their families and comrades, and rode off into the mountains to pursue the vanishing "guide" on whom they had staked so much.

  ***

  THE THREE MEN RODE HARD, but by the time they caught Hastings they had crossed the Wasatch and descended to the beginning of the pancake-flat country that nuzzles up against the Great Salt Lake. None of the three had ever met Hastings, but somewhere in camp they were introduced. Reed must have noted acidly that his party relied on Hastings's promise to guide them from Fort Bridger, only to arrive and find that he had already left. Now they were here to collect on the promissory note. Hastings should return and show the way.

  Hastings agreed, and he and Reed headed back toward the Wasatch, Reed on a fresh, borrowed mount. Stanton and Pike, their horses gasping for water and rest, stayed behind, promising to follow along when they could.

  Reed and Hastings had not even reentered the Wasatch before Hastings yet again broke his word, announcing that he would not return to the stranded wagons and instead would simply point out the preferred route to Reed. There was no time to go all the way back, Hastings insisted. He needed to stay with the Harlan-Young Party and guide them across the salt desert west of the lake. Reed and Hastings camped together that night, and the next morning climbed a nearby peak from which Hastings vaguely indicated a course the Donner Party wagons might take through the mountains. "He gave me the direction," Reed wrote later.

  Then, his duty grossly unfinished, Hastings turned away from Reed and rode off to the west. For the rest of their journey, the members of the Donner Party would never again speak with the man who had promised to lead them.

  Consigned to his own ingenuity, Reed rode down off the mountaintop and found an Indian trail, which he began following back toward the wagons, blazing trees to mark the path more clearly. He rode back into the ring of the Donner Party corral on Monday evening, August 10, four days after he, Stanton, and Pike had gone ahead to find Hastings. Eveiyone must have crowded around eagerly to hear his report, in which he told of Hastings's refusal to come back and act as guide. The canyon route of the Harlan-Young Party was too risky, he insisted. Many of the wagons would be destroyed. On the other hand, the path he had just blazed through the Wasatch was "fair, but would take considerable labor in clearing and digging."

  There is no record that Reed and the others discussed another option, one they should at least have considered: backtracking to Fort Bridger, returning to the traditional trail, and forsaking Hastings's chimerical cut-off altogether. Traveling from Fort Bridger to their current position had required six and a half days, but since they now knew the country the return trip would have been quicker. And they now had abundant evidence of Hastings's rash judgment, if not mendacity. Clyman had told them the shortcut was probably impassable. Hastings had promised to wait for them at Fort Bridger, then gone ahead without them. Then he had promised to return and guide them through the Wasatch, only to abandon them with little more than a wave of his hand toward a route he had never taken. Surely they did not want to be seen as fainthearts who lost courage in a crisis, staggering back into Fort Bridger ignominiously. But on the other hand, their circumstances had changed—they no longer had any promise of a guide to show them the way—and when fresh evidence emerges settled decisions must often be revisited. Judicious reappraisals were common on western trails. The same year as the Donner Party, one group of emigrants took the so-called Applegate Cut-Off toward Oregon, a new and reputedly easier route. But just fifteen miles past the fork, they found a handwritten note warning that it was two or three days to grass and water, a dangerous and difficult haul. Consultations were held, and the group resolved to change its destination and make for California.


  For the Donner Party, backtracking would have cost precious time, but their only other options were equally grim: try to follow the Harlan-Young Party's disastrous route through Weber Canyon, or take their chances with Reed's newfound path, which had never been traversed by wagons of any kind, which in fact barely existed at all. Still, Reed "reported in favour" of the new route, as he put it in his diary, and no one was in a position to argue. Of those who were present, only he had seen the narrow end of Weber

  Canyon, and only he had crossed the Wasatch. If he thought the mountain route was the better way—and it may have been—it was simple logic to bow to his judgment. Reed seemed to acknowledge that he bore some special responsibility for the decision. In his journal, he noted that his account of the mountains "induced the Compay to proceed."

  So, as they had before, the men of the Donner Party ignored the increasing evidence that Hastings was a charlatan and vowed to forge ahead along his untried bearing.

  ***

  UNTIL NOW THE JOURNEY HAD BEEN ACROSS the open plains or up the relatively gentle slope of the Rockies, and always in the wake of those who had gone before. But in the Wasatch, the Donner Party began to bushwhack, clearing a road through a thicket of mountain forest as impenetrable as a jungle. Virginia Reed thought it was incomprehensible to those who were not there:

  Only those who have passed through this country on horseback can appreciate the situation. There was absolutely no road, not even a trail. The cannon wound around among the hills. Heavy underbrush had to be cut away and used for making a roadbed.