The Indifferent Stars Above (12 page)

During the night a bitterly cold wind came up and the salt dust began to fly again. Finally the Reeds stopped and set their children down on a blanket and piled more blankets and shawls on top of them. When the children still complained about the cold, their parents arranged all five of the family dogs—Tyler, Barney, Trailor, Tracker, and Cash—on top of the blankets. Then the elder Reeds sat down on the windward side of the children and waited. At dawn they saw that they were not far from Jacob Donner's wagon. Elizabeth Donner took Margret Reed and her children into the wagon and tried to warm them up. James Reed pushed ahead, leaving his family behind for a second time, heading back to the springs in search of help. Later that day Jacob Donner and William Eddy returned and finally brought the remainder of the women and children still stranded on the salt flats safely in to the springs below Pilot Peak.

For nearly a week, the company stayed at the springs, bringing abandoned wagons in off the salt, resting what was left of their cattle, and desperately searching for the cattle that they had lost. Sarah and Jay and Franklin Graves had managed to save most of their livestock, so Billy Graves volunteered to help James Reed search for the eighteen oxen he was missing. The pair of them spent two long days and a night searching the salt flats in vain, much of the time chasing after rocks that the mirage effect magnified to the size and reconfigured to the shape of oxen. Finally Reed, with only one ox and one cow remaining, realized that he would have to abandon many of his possessions and ask others to carry much of the rest in their wagons. Told that she would have to leave most of her things behind, eight-year-old Patty Reed spirited away a small wooden doll, hiding it from her parents' sight lest they confiscate it. To make up a team, Reed borrowed oxen from Patrick Breen, William Pike, and Franklin Graves.

 

O
n September 10 the company awoke to the unsettling sight of snow on the higher reaches of Pilot Peak. Fourteen-year-old John Breen later remembered the reaction of some of the women in the company: “The apprehension of delay from this cause, and of scarcity, made the mothers tremble.” They took an inventory of all their provisions. The results confirmed what many of them already suspected: They did not have sufficient food to last them through to California. Someone would have to go ahead to get help. As he had when someone had needed to ride ahead and overtake Lansford Hastings at the Great Salt Lake, Charles Stanton stepped forward and volunteered. So did the Kentuckian William McCutchen.

As Stanton and McCutchen set off on horseback for California, they presented a study in contrasts, Stanton at five feet five riding side by side with “Big Bill” McCutchen at six feet six. The two men carried a letter from James Reed promising to repay Sutter for any provisions he could send back with Stanton and McCutchen.

On September 11 the rest of the company broke camp and left the Salt Lake Valley behind them. Faced with another long drive without any prospect of water, they traveled all that day and all that night. Reed's family wagon soon proved too difficult for the enfeebled oxen he had borrowed to pull, so on September 12 he stopped to again lighten the wagon by burying more of his family's remaining possessions. On September 13 the company camped near some shallow springs at a place that Reed called in his diary “Mad Woman Camp.” He offered no explanation for the name except to say that “all the women were mad with anger….” Whether the circle of women had hardened against the men, for getting them into this, or against one another, we do not know, but either way the bonds between and among families were rapidly fraying under the desert sun.

 

I
t's hard for us in the twenty-first century to comprehend just how squalid life on the trail in the 1840s could be. As they struggled across Nevada, Sarah and Jay lived somewhat as we now do when we go camping or hiking—except that they had no weatherproof polyester tents, no rechargeable Coleman lanterns, no flashlights, no toiletries,
no propane stoves, no double-insulated iceboxes, no mosquito repellent, no subzero goose-down sleeping bags, no self-inflating air mattresses, no sunscreen, no GPS trail finders. And at four or five months minimum, it was an awfully long camping trip, at sixteen hundred miles an awfully long hike.

Maintaining any semblance of hygiene was particularly challenging. Like most people, the emigrants of the 1840s preferred to be as clean as possible. But for families like Sarah's, back home in Illinois, with no effective way to heat large quantities of water, bathing had been a seldom-indulged-in luxury. Men and women living on the frontier might take as many as one bath a week, but many took as few as a half dozen a year, and some as few as one a year. Here in the sands of eastern Nevada, bathing was a near impossibility. If it happened at all, a bath consisted of a quick, cold splash in a shallow, muddy stream, often a stream reeking of alkali or sulfur. For the most part, it just didn't happen, and so inevitably Sarah and everyone around her stank virtually all the time. They smelled not just of sweat but also of urine and excrement and menstrual blood and yeast infections and halitosis and tooth decay. Toothbrushes were a rarity, not patented in the United States until 1857 and not mass-produced until the 1880s. As a result, even young women like Sarah often began to lose teeth in their early twenties, one reason for the stern, closed-mouth faces that look back at us from daguerreotypes taken in the 1840s. Menstrual flows were controlled ineffectively at best with rags held insecurely in place by belts around the waist.

Laundering opportunities were hard to come by as well. On the few occasions when they camped in one place for more than one night, Sarah and her sisters did as much laundry as they could. If they had time, they boiled the clothes in large kettles suspended over campfires and then spread them on rocks or hung them on the wagons to dry when the group began to move again. But as water became scarcer, the intervals between laundering opportunities grew longer. When it was necessary, the women sometimes splashed perfumes and essential oils on their bodies to mask the odors emanating from their dirty clothes.

Like their clothing, their bedding also became encrusted with dust, sweat, and the oils their bodies naturally exuded, and this tended
to create fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of pests. The travelers battled body lice, head lice, bedbugs, and fleas in their wagons and tents. In the arid desert country of Utah and Nevada, their skin dried out and became scaly, their lips chapped, their eyes ached from the dust and the relentless glare of the sun. All in all, they were physically miserable much of the time.

 

F
or two weeks they traveled on, rattling through the hills of eastern Nevada, following Lansford Hastings's tracks around the south end of the Ruby Mountains on what later turned out to be an unnecessary 125-mile detour. On September 26 they reached the main fork of the Humboldt River. There they rejoined the established emigrant road, finally completing Hastings's cutoff. It had taken them sixty-eight days to reach this spot after leaving the road at the Parting of the Ways on the Little Sandy. Some of those who had stayed on the older road had made it in as little as thirty-seven days. In the end, Hastings's shortcut had added roughly a month to Sarah's journey.

They began to follow the shallow, sluggish Humboldt westward. As the days passed, they noticed increasing numbers of Shoshone Indians, short of stature, dark-skinned, and nearly naked but for breechcloths, watching them from hillsides as they passed. On September 29 two members of the Te-Moak band of Shoshones came into camp to barter and banter with the emigrants. They camped near the emigrants that night, and in the morning both they and two of the Graveses' oxen were gone. Two nights later more Shoshones spirited away one of Franklin Graves's best mares.

 

S
ince July 3, James Reed had been maintaining a daily diary that one of his fellow emigrants, Hiram Miller, had begun back in Independence in April. From the time Reed had taken over the diary, he'd mostly just noted distances the party had covered each day, road conditions, and occasional incidents of interest along the way. But on October 4 the diary concluded abruptly with one ambiguous word,
“Still.” It was the beginning, presumably, of an entry that Reed never finished, because of what happened the next day.

Exactly what happened in the Nevada desert on October 5, 1846, has been the subject of controversy ever since—interpreted and reinterpreted by historians and told and retold by many parties, not least of them members of the Graves and Reed families, for each of whom different truths have emerged from a welter of disputed facts. At its core, though, it was simply a nineteenth-century case of road rage.

After taking their noon break at the base of a steep, sandy incline called Pauta Pass, Franklin Graves, Jay Fosdick, and John Snyder began the arduous process of double-teaming their oxen to each of their three wagons in turn and driving them one at a time up the hill. Jay added his own team to Franklin's wagon and pulled it to the top, then returned with both teams and began to ascend with his and Sarah's wagon. John Snyder felt he could drive the third wagon up with one team and began to follow Jay up the hill. But his team of oxen became entangled with a team driven by Milt Elliott, who was struggling to make headway up the hill with Reed's family wagon. Reed, who had been out hunting with William Eddy, arrived at the scene on horseback to find Snyder quarreling with Elliott, cursing and whipping the oxen and trying to untangle the teams.

Reed dismounted. He and Snyder exchanged hot words over a wagon tongue that separated them. Snyder said Elliott had gotten in his way. Reed took Snyder to task for mistreating the oxen. Snyder raised his bullwhip and threatened to whip Reed. Reed started across the wagon tongue and drew a knife. Snyder struck him on his head with the butt of his bullwhip and then struck again. Margret Reed rushed between the two men, and one of the blows struck her on the head. Reed lunged and stabbed Snyder in the chest, puncturing his left lung. Snyder staggered a few feet before Billy Graves caught him in his arms and lowered him to the ground. And there in the Nevada desert, John Snyder, who had danced jigs on the tailgates of wagons back on the Platte and who had apparently caught the eye of Mary Ann Graves, died spewing blood into the hot sand.

Snyder had been popular, James Reed considerably less so. Reed's family and his teamsters gathered nervously around him at the bot
tom of the hill. Virginia Reed began dressing the wounds on her father-in-law's scalp. Sarah's family and most of the remainder of the company withdrew and encamped near the top of the hill. There they began a debate that would last through centuries about what exactly had happened. They took affidavits for a possible future trial in California, but feelings against Reed ran high, and some in the camp did not want to wait for California. Louis Keseberg propped a wagon tongue in the air and demanded that Reed be hanged from it forthwith. But some of the men gathered around Reed at the bottom of the hill—led by his teamsters—brandished rifles, and made it clear that they would fight rather than stand by and watch Reed be executed.

In the end the company decided to banish Reed with neither provisions nor weapons—the near equivalent of a death sentence in the desert, but one that would spare his wife and children the sight of their husband and father writhing at the end of a rope.

In the morning Reed offered to pry some boards from his wagon to construct a coffin for Snyder, whom he said he had always regarded as a friend. The offer was rejected, but Reed attended the funeral nonetheless. Snyder's body was lowered into the sand. Then Reed said farewell to his horrified and sobbing wife and children and set out on his prized gray mare, Glaucus, heading west alone.

That night Reed's daughter Virginia and Milt Elliott stole out of camp in the darkness, overtook Reed, and gave him his rifle, his pistols, some ammunition, and some crackers—all they could spare from the meager store of provisions they had left.

 

T
he company moved on, following the Humboldt southwest as it grew ever shallower, gradually devolving into a series of green, stagnant pools. They had expected to be in California by now, and their provisions were nearly depleted. Many families began to ration what food remained in their wagons.

Over the next few days, their fortunes continued to spiral ever more rapidly downward. Hearts that had long since begun to harden now became petrified. On October 7, Louis Keseberg put the elderly Belgian, Hardcoop, out of his wagon and told him he would have to
walk, though the old man's legs had given out days before. Hardcoop quickly fell behind, but that night a party of men went back and brought him into camp. By the next morning, it had become clear that Margret Reed's heavy family wagon, even emptied of most of its contents, was impeding the company's progress, and she was finally made to abandon it in the desert. Despite what had happened at Pauta Pass a few days before—or perhaps because of it—Franklin Graves turned one of his three wagons over to Mrs. Reed and her children.

Shortly after they got started that morning, Hardcoop hobbled up to William Eddy and said Keseberg had put him out again. Hardcoop pleaded for a ride, but everyone was walking now to spare the increasingly exhausted oxen, and Eddy told the old man he would have to walk, too. The old man limped on through the sand, but once again he quickly fell behind and was soon out of sight. That night it was bitter cold. Margret Reed, Milt Elliott, and William Eddy implored Keseberg to go back and try to find Hardcoop, but he refused. They tried Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves. Both of them had horses with which to make the attempt, but neither wanted to risk overtaxing his stock. Both refused. Some boys driving cattle into camp late that afternoon said that they had seen Hardcoop, his feet black, split, and swollen, sitting exhausted under some sagebrush some miles back. They were the last to see the old man alive.