The Indifferent Stars Above (11 page)

With this assurance from Reed, the party turned southwest. At first the new route seemed a good one, rising gradually through a
broad canyon bordered by more of the familiar sagebrush-covered hills through which they had traveled for many weeks now. But soon the canyon began to grow narrower and the climb steeper. When they arrived at the head of the canyon, they could, for the first time, get a good look at the jumble of mountains that lay ahead of them. Following Reed's blazes, they descended from the first ridge and turned up another canyon, crossing and recrossing the same stream, but the route soon became choked with brush.

This was not the kind of brush that one could cut through with a few lopping swings of an ax nor root out with chains dragged between teams of oxen. This was a miniature forest—ten or twelve feet tall. Along with the usual willows, cottonwoods, and aspens that grew in dense stands close to the trickles of water in the streambeds, there were large numbers of scrubby hardwood trees—mostly Gambel oak and big-tooth maple. The aridity of the summer climate, the wind that buffeted it in spring and fall, and the snowfall that weighed it down in the winter had all worked together to compress, compact, and toughen the vegetation. The oaks in particular—stout and multitrunked—proved formidable roadblocks. Teams of men with axes had to attack each one individually, and the dense, heavy wood did not yield easily to their blades.

By August 15 the wagons could go no farther. The company made an encampment. Then Franklin Graves and Jay Fosdick and Billy Graves and all the able-bodied men and boys went forward and began the herculean task of cutting a road up the last and steepest canyon toward the narrow pass above them. Progress was slow, and Reed soon grew irritated, feeling that the men were not working as hard as they ought. It took three long days of backbreaking labor before the oxen could finally drag the wagons up into the gap.

Even then their troubles were not over. The western side of the mountain was just as steep and just as densely covered in brush. They quickly found that it was nearly as hard to get heavily laden wagons down a brush-cloaked mountain as it was to get them up. It took another three days of bushwhacking and a series of harrowing descents of precipitous mountainsides before the company finally worked their way down. And then they arrived unexpectedly at one last morale-
crushing obstacle—a boulder-and brush-clogged narrowing at the outlet of the final canyon leading out into the Salt Lake Valley.

Turning around was unthinkable, but they had no heart for cutting more brush and rolling more boulders out of their way. Finally they decided to assault a steep hogback ridge that lay to their southwest. One by one they yoked each wagon to long strings of oxen—as many as twenty-four at a time—and then drove them laboriously up the slope. Each time the oxen reached the top, someone had to lead them back down and do the whole thing over again. Mothers carrying infants, toddlers churning short legs, old men gasping for breath—they all struggled individually up the grass-slick hill, crawling as much as walking as the grade got steeper.

Finally, on the afternoon of August 21, Sarah, her family, and the rest of the Donner Party stood atop what is now called Donner Hill, gazing out at the Salt Lake Valley with a profound sense of relief. The landscape that lay before them looked to be lush with grass and water and certainly much flatter than the country they had just traversed. But even as they contemplated the pleasant prospect of level roads ahead, many of them also began to wrestle with a deepening sense of anxiety. Counting the time they had waited for Reed to return from his rendezvous with Hastings, it had taken them sixteen days to make just thirty-five miles through the Wasatch Mountains. They had been told it might take a week. Still ahead of them was what Hastings had told them would be a taxing but manageable forty-mile dry drive across the salt desert, followed by hundreds of miles of sage and sand hills and alkali desert before they reached the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, still the greatest obstacle between them and California. By any means of reckoning, they were now terribly behind schedule. What exactly it would cost them was a mystery that none of them could yet divine, but it was a question that was beginning to work on them all, a worm that was burrowing its way ever deeper into their hearts and minds.

For many of them, there was now no doubt that Lansford Hastings could not be trusted. But for some of them another niggling doubt was beginning to grow. Why had James Reed—with his haughty manner, his self-assurance, his fancy family wagon, his hired hands,
and his personal servants—listened to Hastings and led them into the trap from which they had just emerged? For the Graves family, for Sarah and Jay Fosdick, and for John Snyder, whose first and only knowledge of Reed was what they had witnessed in the past eleven days, the doubts were more than niggling. But they kept their thoughts about Reed to themselves, for now.

A
fter descending from the Wasatch into the Great Salt Lake Valley, Sarah and Jay and the rest of the Donner Party worked their way across the valley, trying to find dry ground on which to traverse marshes along the Jordan River. After they crossed the river, they traveled around the south end of the great lake—pale blue and frothy, its verges white with wind-whipped foam and a crust of salt.

George and Tamzene Donner's wagons lagged behind the others. They were nursing Luke Halloran, the tubercular young man whom they had taken into their wagon back at Fort Bridger. At about 4:00
P.M.
on August 25, Halloran, who had come west for the sake of his health, died with his head resting in Tamzene Donner's lap. The following day the Donners caught up with the rest of the company in the Tooele Valley. There they dug a grave in the salty soil and laid Halloran's body next to that of another emigrant, John Hargrave, who had died there just two weeks before.

 

D
eath—especially before the Civil War—was an up-close and personal kind of thing in nineteenth-century America. It came visiting so frequently that no one could ignore it or hide from it. Every villager in the northern half of the country was familiar with the slow tolling of church bells, and many knew how to read in the rhythm of the bells a coded language announcing how old the victim was and of which gender. At any given time, almost any woman knew another who was dressed in formal mourning clothes, sometimes for months or years on end. Every child was familiar with the sight of somber funeral processions winding through the streets. And it was often the corpse of another child that he or she saw passing slowly by. In the first half of the century, depending partly on where they lived, and how well, between a fifth and a third of all children died before the age of ten.

Whether that of a child or that of an adult, the nineteenth-century corpse was considered a sacred object. Then, as now, it was typically treated with elaborate care and much ritual, but in the early nineteenth century it was almost always immediate family members who provided the care and performed the rituals themselves. Family members—usually female—washed and shaved the body and dressed it in a shroud. They took the body's measurements so that male family members could set about building a coffin.
*
When all was ready, they laid the body in the coffin and set it somewhere in the home, usually in a parlor or sitting room. When they had ice, they sometimes put it under a board beneath the body; when they didn't, they put a rag soaked in vinegar over the face, believing that this would slow decomposition. Typically, the room was decorated with black crepe, the furniture removed, the mirrors covered with white cloth. The body, once laid out, remained in the home for from one to three days, during which time friends and neighbors came to help keep watch over it, sitting by its side day and night until the time for burial arrived.

These long, communal vigils typically involved the sharing of food and drink and thus allowed the living—the family and the friends of the deceased—an opportunity to reconnect and assure themselves
that their own social connections would survive the presence of death among them. The vigils also served a second purpose—to allow the living to make certain that the deceased was in fact deceased. Only by watching the body for several days could they reliably put to rest a fear that ran rampant in the nineteenth century—that they might bury someone alive.

When the vigil was over, the body was taken solemnly to the graveyard in a funeral procession, often with a stop along the way at a church or meetinghouse for a public funeral. Once again it was the deceased's family and friends who dealt with the needs of the body, hoisting it and carrying it, feeling the weight and heft of death on their own shoulders. And often it was they who dug the grave and then shoveled the dirt back onto the coffin, personally laying their loved one in the bosom of the earth.

Much of this intimacy with death began to diminish during the Civil War. Only commercial institutions and the government could deal with the scale of death that the war produced. Traveling embalmers followed both armies from battlefield to battlefield, making it possible in many cases to prepare the bodies of the slain for transport back home. Sometimes the dead traveled by train hundreds of miles back to the villages from which they had come; sometimes they traveled by wagon. Either way, for the first time, large numbers of bodies were washed, shaved, dressed, and laid out not by the family but by members of a newly minted profession, government-hired undertakers. The end result was that at the close of the war, by dint of sheer numbers, the corpse had begun to lose some of its sacred nature, and the handling of the dead had begun to be done mostly by strangers.

Since then the trend has accelerated, giving birth to a death industry that now hauls in as much as $24 billion a year in the United States. This industry offers the amazing gamut of products and services that anyone who has lost a loved one is aware of, among them grief counseling, refrigeration, makeup for the corpse, hairdressing, visitation rooms, recorded music, limousine service, airline shipping, and containers ranging from $39 cardboard cremation boxes to $20,000 mahogany caskets. Lately, new technologies have allowed the industry to capitalize on fresh opportunities like virtual memorial services
delivered to the bereaved via streaming video, DVD remembrance montages, and a special printer ink that can be mixed with cremation ashes and then used to print out photographs of the deceased. In all of this, of course, death has become ever more abstracted, pushed ever further into the background and out of sight, something to be taken care of by those who do such things.

When Luke Halloran was buried in the salty soil of Utah, there was no close relative to wash the body and lay it out, though it is likely that the Donner women performed the task themselves. There was no bell to toll, no formal mourning clothes to be worn, no church in which to hold a service. Many of the intimate rituals of his time had to be cut short or dispensed with, but at least Luke Halloran received some sort of funeral. In the weeks and months ahead, the Donner Party would find it increasingly difficult to manage even the most rudimentary attempts at solemnizing the deaths that would occur among them.

 

F
or the next several days, the company pushed westward following the wagon ruts left by Lansford Hastings and the emigrants traveling with him, skirting low ranges of hills. Where they could find grass and sweet water, they laid in extra supplies for the hard crossing of the salt desert they knew was just ahead. Eddie Breen lay in the back of his family's wagon, the ends of his broken leg bones slowly beginning to knit.

On Monday, August 31, from a low pass in the Cedar Mountains, they saw for the first time the vast white expanse of the salt desert shimmering before them. Lansford Hastings had told them the crossing would be about forty miles, but they could see now that in fact it would be nearly twice that. To make matters worse, the last spring they had come across had been foul, the water brackish and reeking of sulfur, and they knew that out on the salt they would have to share with their cattle what water they already had stored in kegs.

They ventured out to the tabletop-flat salt desert that evening. The sun was low on the western horizon, and its light, glancing sharply off the white salt, cast improbably long shadows behind them. They
kept going. There was nothing to be gained by stopping on the bone-dry sagebrush edges of the salt flats, and they wanted to travel by night as much as possible to be spared the brutal daytime heat. When the sun set at 7:03
P.M.
, the moon, a bit more than half full, was almost directly overhead. As the last of the sunlight faded away, the white expanses of salt beneath their feet slowly became luminous with soft moonlight. At first the landscape must have seemed almost enchanting to Sarah and her sisters. This was a pale, softly glowing world unlike anything they could have imagined. And it was strikingly silent.

They walked alongside the wagons all night. Where the salt was dry, it crunched softly under their feet; where damp with brine, it quaked softly, as if they were walking on gelatin. At 1:20
A.M.
the moon slid behind the Pilot Range, still far to the west, and the pale white world quickly went black. It was hard now to keep track of their direction, to keep track of one another, and to keep track of the loose cattle that trailed behind the wagons. The heavens blossomed with stars, but the cold of the desert night deepened and tightened its grip on them. The iron-cold air was scented with brine, an odd metallic smell. They did not dare to take shelter in the wagons for fear the extra weight would exhaust their oxen, so they donned what they could in the way of cloaks or wrapped themselves in blankets and continued to walk, the miles stretching out endlessly before them in the darkness.

When the cold, pale dawn—shell pink and powder blue—finally broke at their backs a few minutes before 6:00
A.M
. Tuesday, they kept on walking. From time to time, they adjusted their course to the northwest, aiming for the base of the most prominent mountain on the western horizon, 10,720-foot-tall Pilot Peak. It was their beacon. At its base, they had been told, they would find a freshwater spring. But it seemed scarcely any closer than when they'd viewed it from the Cedar Mountains the day before. They had been walking for twenty-four hours by now, and vast tracks of salt plain still lay ahead of them. Their caravan was strung out for miles.

As they walked on and the sun rose higher behind them, they narrowed their eyes to slits against the relentless glare of the light reflected off the salt. A warm wind came up and blew powdery white salt dust
into their eyes. The wind itself tasted salty. Every so often they stopped and forked some grass out of the backs of their wagons and doled out water in buckets to the oxen, but before long the grass was gone and what little water was left had to be reserved for the humans.

They steered to the north of a peak rising abruptly from the floor of the salt flats. Called Floating Island, it seemed adrift on a shimmering silver sea, the mirage that lay around them now in all directions.

By midafternoon they were exhausted, weary of foot and limb, their throats parched, the mucous membranes in their nostrils desiccated, their lips cracked and tasting of salt. They were nearly blind from the glare of the sun. They at least could still take occasional sips of water. But their oxen, which had been pulling the wagons almost without rest for a day and a half now, could not, and they began to show signs of failing, still plodding forward in their yokes but pulling ever more slowly and reluctantly.

As the day wore on, both man and beast began to approach the limits of their endurance. The heat and the glare and the shimmering light started to play tricks on their eyes and on their minds. William Eddy, out front, was startled when he suddenly saw a phantom party of emigrants off in the distance, marching in lockstep with his family—men, women, horses, cattle, and dogs—all traveling in the same direction as he. When he stopped, they stopped. When he resumed, they resumed.

Elaborate mirages like this were not uncommon among those who hazarded the salt desert. Just a few weeks earlier, Edwin Bryant, standing at about this same spot in the salt desert, had seen something strikingly similar.

James Reed decided to leave his family and their wagon in the care of two of his hired men—Walter Herron and his albino servant, Baylis Williams—and ride ahead alone in search of water. He instructed his teamsters to take the wagons as far as they could and when the oxen could pull no further to unyoke them and drive them forward.

Night fell again, and with it oxen began to fail all across the salt desert, sinking to their knees, bellowing, and refusing to get up. Anxiety and exhaustion evolved into fear. William and Eleanor Eddy abandoned their wagons twenty miles short of Pilot Peak and went forward with their two young children afoot, driving their cattle ahead of them in the moonlight. The Donner brothers did as Reed had done, leaving their families in their wagons, unyoking the oxen, and continuing forward unencumbered.

The Eddys made it over a low saddle between two hills and across more salt flats and finally arrived at the springs at the foot of Pilot Peak at about 10:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, September 2. Sarah, Jay, and most of the rest of the company straggled in the same morning. The Donner brothers were still far out on the desert.

James and Margret Reed and their family were in the deepest trouble, though. James reached the springs sometime on the evening of September 2, but after resting his horse and securing some water he set out back onto the salt flats about an hour later. At 11: 00
P.M
. he came across his teamsters driving his oxen and cattle forward. He instructed them not to let the cattle loose once they scented water lest they stampede. Then he continued eastward. At about daylight on Thursday, September 3, he arrived back at his wagons. There he and his family sat in broiling heat under the canvas canopy of their large family wagon all day, expecting that their teamsters would arrive with water and
refreshed oxen at any time. What the Reeds didn't yet know was that their teamsters had lost nearly all of their oxen during the night. By the end of the day, their drinking water was almost exhausted, so James and Margret Reed set out on foot with their children, hoping at least to reach Jacob Donner's wagons some miles ahead.