Snow Mountain Passage (41 page)

As the men pushed through the heavy drifts they left tracks so deep I was climbing from one to the next. I must have decided to try and cut a track of my own. I remember being in the middle of a wide white field that had no borders, and suddenly it was warm, instead of cold. The air around me was filled with light, and the light was warm, and my angels were coming back. I saw them floating across this field of white, tiny in the distance, far across the field of white, floating toward me. This time the music came from a chorus of voices, thousands of tiny angel voices filling the air while the angels surrounded me. They were the same color as the snow. They were pure white. It was a blinding white, with a pure light that shone through as they floated. This time I was floating among them. I felt like I too was an angel in the snow. I danced with them and sang with them, my voice joined theirs, as I sang out their names. They were all familiar to me. We were angels together. I knew all their names.

I was dancing in the whiteness, whirling my arms, floating on a blanket of white angel wings. I felt no weight. It was pure light. I too had wings. When I felt strange arms wrap around me, I tried to pull away. These were not the arms I wanted, human arms bulging with cloth. I reached for the snowbright angels, but papa’s voice was saying, “Patty. Patty. Get up now, darlin’. Get up. It’s me. It’s papa. C’mon. C’mon now.”

If I’d had the strength to cry I would have. I wanted to go with them. I could have. I was ready to. The cold came creeping in again, so cold it hurt all through my body, hurt my feet, my hands. I watched my angels float away and disappear. It was papa brought me back. He rubbed my hands and feet and neck and arms and found the last scrap of food that could be found for twenty miles in any direction. It was just crumbs, this pitiful thimbleful of crumbs and specks of leftover bread crust he had scraped from the bottom of a sack sometime before we set out. It reminds me now of things you hear people say to exaggerate how much food was consumed at a holiday dinner. “Ol’ Walter, he scraped up every last crumb on his plate and he hollered out for more.” Well, that is literally what it had come to. That’s how close we were to starving.

Papa had stuffed a mash of crumbs about the size of a large pecan down into the end of one finger of his glove, saving it for the direst moment, which, in his view, now had come. In the hope that he could call me back toward the living he put these crumbs onto his own lips to soften and moisten and warm them. Then he placed them on my lips so I could draw them in. I swear to you I can still recall the taste, for I had not had a morsel to swallow in forty-eight hours. It was the sweet clear taste of grain. If you know the taste of biscuits made from wheat flour without much salt and left standing a day or two—it was just a dusty whisper of that taste. I guess it reminded my body it was still alive and still had things to do.

I opened my eyes and saw his face very close, his skin burned bright red and blistered white by the wind, his eyes bloodshot and raw and cold and strained with the fear that I would die right there in front of him. Then his eyes squeezed shut a little, toward a painful, broken smile.

“That’s my Patty. C’mon now, darlin’, we’re going to make it now. We’re all going to make it through.”

From then on he carried me. I was half dreaming, dozing in and out. I don’t remember much about the next few days. The men were so feeble from lack of food they moved along like cripples and often had to stop and rest. I knew we passed some others going in with another rescue team. Much later I would learn that they found the Breens at the bottom of a deep pit the fire had melted down through twenty-five feet of snow. They’d spent a week up there with no shelter and nothing to eat but the wasted bodies of Betsy Graves and her young son and one of the Donner children who’d died on the worst night of the storm.

Poor Betsy, who’d given mama so much grief over those two pitiful cattle, she too had stayed behind, afraid to move on. She died from exposure the day after we left, then she kept the Breens alive until the third rescue got there. And who can judge them for the taking of such flesh? Surely not I.

If things had gone another way, that could have been us at Starved Camp. That could well have been us. Another blizzard, another couple of nights like the ones we’d had—who knows what our little party would have resorted to? Who knows how close any one of us might have come to ending up like the Breens?

Luckily papa spied some food hanging from a pine limb, left by the men he’d sent forward before we started the summit climb. More should have been stashed along the way, but bears and martens had broken into the packages. The men themselves, they were caught in the same storm that stopped the rest of us and barely got out with their lives. It was one mishap piled upon the next. All those well-laid plans had been broken into pieces by the weather and hungry animals and the awful distances you had to cover on foot and the slow pace of emaciated children, along with the unexplainable absence of the cargo team—which was not all that unexplainable once you found out what a task they’d had fighting the Sacramento River in flood time.

Somewhere above Bear Valley we finally ran into their advance party, and from that day onward there was enough for all of us to eat. At Mule Springs animals were waiting, and relief crews. Pretty soon we were low enough on the western slope you could see patches of good green earth again. Another day brought us out to Johnson’s Ranch.

Papa had rigged another sling to carry me on his back, and I clung to him the way I’d held to Salvador when we followed the Truckee west out of the desert. I was wishing we could ride on like that forever. We would ride to the ocean and plant vegetables and live off the land. We would take Tommy with us, of course. But mainly we would just keep on riding. I didn’t think about mama. I realize now I wasn’t letting myself think about her. In my mind I could see Virginia and James Junior somewhere up ahead, looking just as they’d looked before we left Springfield. I did not see mama.

It was forty miles from Johnson’s to the ranch where they were staying. I didn’t see her until we reached the gate. She’d been waiting there for days, and her eyes were brimming over with relief and love and pain and heartache. Some ranch hands lifted me out of the sling. She scooped me up. It wasn’t forgiveness I felt. There was nothing to forgive. I guess I was wiser than I had been. In that instant I knew her. I knew all she had endured. A great warmth poured through me, sadness and gratitude all swelling together.

While mama held me, a cloud of ducks flew past. It was the middle of March. Weak as I was, it made the spirit soar to see all that green, flat country, so well watered, right on the edge of bursting forth, with living creatures everywhere you looked, or so it seemed to me. It could have been the first day of creation, and that flock of ducks had just been born among the tules. In the whole history of the world they were the first ducks to swarm up from the banks of the wide river and try their wings.

SOONER OR LATER
we all straggled down out of the snow, the families who’d survived, and the pieces of families. Six months earlier there’d been eighty-seven in our wagon party. All told, forty-eight had come through the winter, among them Patrick and Peggy and their seven kids. After the third rescue team helped them get to Sutter’s, they sat still again, while they built up enough strength to move. There’d been days when I hated Patrick, but I see now I’d already left my hatred back in the mountains that had set so many demons loose. Everyone knew the grim details of how they’d fed themselves at Starved Camp. It was another story the reporters could not leave alone. Around the fort people would watch them with covert eyes or sometimes stare with shameless and undisguised fascination. “It’s awful to think about,” you’d hear someone mutter. “Still, you got to give ‘em credit. They brought every last one of their young’uns through, they surely did.” Before long the Breens were heading south, away from so many questioning eyes, to a warm valley where a Franciscan padre befriended them, gave them a sheltered place to camp and heal.

The last one to leave the cabins was Lewis Keseberg. When the fourth and final rescue team reached Truckee Lake, they found him alone, still nursing his infected foot, surviving on the remains of those who’d died around him, various children, the widow Murphy, and Tamsen Donner too, who’d stayed with her husband to the end. The fellows who brought Keseberg out described detestable sights inside his den, kettles where flesh was cooking, arm and leg bones strewn indoors and out. During his weeks of solitude, they said, his humanity had slipped away, he had become a monster, addicted to his ghastly diet. Once they all got back to Sutter’s, Keseberg disputed these charges, claiming his only other choice was death by starvation. But few listened. He became an outcast. Boys threw rocks and called him “cannibal.” He felt safer on the river, for a while working as a schooner pilot, thanks to Captain Sutter, who took pity on him, perhaps because they both spoke German and had relatives back in Europe.

It was a season for pity. Everyone, it seems, found a benefactor. The rancher who took us in said we could stay through the summer if need be, and for a month or so it looked like we would. The trek out had nearly broken papa’s health. For two weeks he was laid up, his toes frostbitten, his hands bent like claws. He’d lost some sight in one eye. For that matter we were all laid up. Tommy almost died. He was like a campfire that dwindles down to the last dim glow of the final ember. Little by little, mama brought him back, though for months he couldn’t walk more than fifteen or twenty minutes before he’d lose his breath.

About the time we all got to where we could hobble around and take short hikes across the field, a wagon appeared in the yard one afternoon. It was something like the wagons we’d left in the Salt Desert, a mule-drawn Conestoga with canvas curving over high hoops. The driver said he’d come to carry us to Napa Valley, where a friend of papa’s awaited our arrival. He referred to the miller who’d helped papa put his rescue team together, the one who’d dreamed in advance of people held captive by the mountain snow. Though he had never been near those mountains, he had dreamed this vivid dream three nights in a row and forever after felt bound to papa and to our family, since he knew without a doubt that we were the very ones revealed to him in his vision.

The miller had got word of our whereabouts. He wanted to help out any way he could. He too was inviting us to stay as long as we needed, and papa took him up on it. With so much coming and going right there around the fort, drifters and refugees and other families like ours wondering what was going to happen next, papa figured there’d be more room at the miller’s ranch, as well as more peace and quiet.

The next morning we were pioneers again, riding along in a covered wagon, almost like when we’d started out from Springfield, rolling across the Sacramento Valley toward another mountain range, on one more leg of our trip to California, except this time it wasn’t papa’s wagon or papa’s mules, and we didn’t have anything to load but our bodies and the clothes we wore and a few odds and ends brought from the lake camp and one big canvas tent papa bought on credit from Captain Sutter.

Just like he promised, we had made it through at last, our whole family. I owed my life to him, and it was heaven to be together again, though I can’t forget, as I think back, that if it weren’t for papa we would never have found ourselves split apart in the first place and in such a dire fix. And saying that doesn’t mean I love him any less. I don’t love him any less. I don’t. You couldn’t have stopped him. Or stopped them. Or stopped any of it. Not with an army division and a long row of cannon on the banks of the Missouri River telling everybody to turn right around and go back home. It was his own desire and refusal to be thwarted that had put us on the trail and led us up to that high altitude and also brought him back into the mountains to carry on the journey, and right in there somewhere is the very nub and mystery of it all.

I
N THE COASTAL
valleys sheets of color spread across the grass and climb the slopes, blue-purple lupin, poppies, goldfield, paintbrush, fiddleneck, white and yellow daisies. Here and there owl’s clover lays a broad magenta stripe. Up and down the land, swarms of color charm the eye, while the rivers carry barges once again. Between the port and Sutter’s, cargo schooners ply the Sacramento. Floodwaters have receded, though the rivers run full, as snow melts in the high country to feed the many creeks and trickling tributaries and flow to sea level, surrounding the delta islands, merging with the salty tides that fill the bay.

Ships of war that held the north have sailed away, heading back around Cape Horn for Boston and Long Island, or making stops at Mazatlán, Acapulco, closer to the battlegrounds where the war with Mexico will continue through the summer. As a show of force a thousand new troops have landed at Monterey, rowdy, restless Army volunteers. Other ships have come with new commanders to oversee the transfer of power. New American alcaldes are appointed. Edicts spill forth in English and in Spanish, pages full of words to govern actions in this far-off and barely governed corner of the world.

The Californians—the vaqueros, the politicians, the men and women of the ranching families—are still divided among themselves. Some refuse to hear these pages, mistrusting foreigners and their promises. Others welcome the words and welcome the Americans, now that the fighting is done, glad to be free of Mexico’s corruption and indifference, and believing they will soon have an equal place in the new democracy they’ve heard so much about.

The emigrants are divided too. Some listen to the edicts, some ignore them, figuring they did not travel all this way to be ruled by captains and commodores. They fan out among the towns and fertile valleys. Twelve hundred came across last fall. Some say it was closer to fifteen hundred. Already more are on their way, more wagons, more oxen, more wanderers and renegades, more families with their heirlooms and their guidebooks, though not as many as set out last spring, since the news of what befell those trapped through the winter has reached the eastern papers. Lurid, bloodthirsty tales have made some would-be travelers cautious. First the war, they think, and now this? Maybe they’ll wait a year and weigh the wisdom of a continental crossing. They haven’t heard much from the wagon trains that made it through in good time. They only hear about the one that didn’t. And so it is in Alta California, where neighbors and drinking pals do not trade stories about travelers who arrived intact. They vie with one another to embellish the dark story from the mountains. Like the snowmelt with its many sources, the story trickles down to sea level. Everyone wants to talk about it, everyone but the survivors, who only wish to get on with their lives.