The Indifferent Stars Above (15 page)

And there was another, even tougher, piece of calculus that had to be worked through before anyone slaughtered any livestock. The Breens and the Graveses likely had a half dozen oxen each, but the Murphys had fewer, the Eddys had only one, and Margret Reed, with five children crowded into her half of the double cabin, had none. If something weren't done to equalize the situation, she and her children were going to die here, and far sooner than the rest of them.

Still, when Margret Reed approached Franklin and Elizabeth Graves and asked to buy some oxen, they must have flinched at the question. To surrender even a single animal would diminish the prospects that they, their nine children, and their son-in-law would survive what lay ahead. And they were not disposed to think well of any of the Reeds. What they viewed as John Snyder's murder was still fresh in their memories. They could not let the woman and her children starve before their eyes, though, so they sold her a pair of haggard but still-living oxen on credit, to be paid back two for one if and when they reached California. The Breens sold Margret Reed two more. For twenty-five dollars, Franklin Graves sold William Eddy one ox that had already starved to death.

Over the next several days, each family set about killing and butchering most of their remaining oxen. It was a messy business. Killing an animal as large as an ox, even an emaciated one, takes some doing. Those who had percussion rifles of a large enough caliber could try shooting the animals, aiming for the heart or the base of the brain, but it was hard to penetrate the skull or hit a vital organ. The other option was to make the killing more personal, grabbing the beasts by the horns and slitting their throats or sinking an ax head into the tops of their skulls, or simply smashing a sledgehammer into their broad foreheads.

Once the animals were dead, they commenced butchering them. Country men like Franklin Graves and Jay Fosdick knew their way around the inside of a carcass. They tied ropes around the rear legs of
the oxen and hoisted them partway up into a pine tree and cut their throats to drain the blood. They slipped sharp knives under the hides to loosen sinews, then peeled the hides off the red, glistening bodies. They dragged the hides to their cabins and incorporated them into their roofing materials. Then they cut the shrunken bellies open, hacked their way into the chest cavities, cut the esophagi and diaphragms loose, and pulled out the entrails, carefully separating anything they could use from the offal they would feed to the dogs. Under the circumstances, they planned to use nearly everything themselves.

Up to their elbows in gore, they slit open stomachs for tripe. They cut out hearts, livers, kidneys, spleens, and pancreases and put them into bloody buckets. They cracked open skulls with axes and scooped out the brains. They pried open the great slobbering mouths and cut out the tongues.

They worked their way carefully and deliberately into the structure of each animal, probing with bloody, cold-numbed fingers for the openings in the joints where they could separate the parts with just a few cuts. Where they had to, they sawed through thick bones, but mostly the animals came apart easily under their expert hands. The women took the tails and got out hatchets and chopped them into short sections for making oxtail soup. Women and boys and girls stacked up the lean hindquarters and forequarters and sections of ribs and vertebrae with shreds of flesh still clinging to them, burying them in snowbanks for refrigeration.

When they were done, the snow around all three cabins was crimson. But fresh snow was still falling steadily, and it soon erased every sign of the butchery. They wiped their knives clean and put them away for now, none of them yet knowing the terrible irony that lay latent in what had just unfolded here.

 

A
s the company began to hunker down in the high Sierra, James Reed was slogging through the western foothills, trying to travel east. John Sutter had provided him with thirty horses, a mule, large amounts of flour, a hindquarter of beef, and two more Miwok vaqueros to help manage the horses. William McCutchen, who had recovered
from his illness at Sutter's Fort, had joined him. Both men were determined to make it back to their families.

Two days after setting out, though, they ran into heavy rain and sleet, and by the time they got to Bear Valley, two feet of snow lay on the ground. At the head of the valley, they came across a tent in which two emigrants—Jotham Curtis and his wife—had taken refuge after crossing the mountains. Snowbound, frightened, and half starved, the Curtises were in the process of cooking the last piece of the family dog in a Dutch oven when Reed and McCutchen appeared. The two men provided Mrs. Curtis with some flour, and she set about baking bread. Then all of them sat down to a meal of bread and dog, the latter of which, after some hesitation and considerable sniffing, McCutchen tasted gingerly and finally pronounced “very good dog.”

The next day, as Reed and McCutchen began to climb out of Bear Valley on horseback, the snow was thirty inches deep. As they went higher, the snow grew deeper. The Miwoks were a people of the valleys and foothills, and as afraid of Sutter as they might be, they would have none of this. That night they disappeared into the pines. In the morning Reed and McCutchen abandoned all but the nine best horses and continued. As they approached headwaters of the Yuba River, though, the horses struggled to make headway. They began to rear on their hind legs and then fall forward into drifts so deep that they were buried up to their noses.

The two men left the last of the horses mired helplessly in the snow and continued on foot. Almost immediately, though, they found themselves wallowing through snow so deep and loose that with each step they sank up to their chests. Exhausted, they finally conceded that they could go no farther. They took a last look eastward through the falling snow at the gray granite peaks that separated them from their loved ones—perhaps as close as ten or twelve miles to them at this point—and turned around.

 

A
t the lake camp, there was talk of trying again to cross the mountains. Despite all he had done in preparing a winter camp for his family, Franklin Graves had no intention of simply staying at
Truckee Lake and watching them slowly starve. He, more than perhaps anyone else in the company, was determined to break out of the mountains and get help. With the Donner brothers laid up at Alder Creek, he was the oldest man in camp and, as he must have been beginning to realize, the most senior.

In many ways he was a natural to lead an escape attempt. He likely knew more about winter survival than all the other men in the camp combined. Living out of doors, or close to it, had always been his natural inclination. He was physically large and strong. He could read the weather, construct a sound shelter, and hunt with the best of them. He didn't get rattled easily. He persevered when faced with adversity. Perhaps most important, he didn't give a damn about what others thought of him.

Modern disaster psychologists have found that bold, decisive leadership greatly improves any group's ability to survive the early stages of an impending catastrophe. As floodwaters rise or a wildfire approaches, there generally is little time to waste building consensus, forging compromises, or worrying about other people's feelings. Tough decisions have to be made; bold actions have to be taken before a dangerous situation can evolve into a desperate one. From all we know about him, Franklin Graves seems to have fit the profile of just such a leader.

So when the snow finally stopped falling on November 12, Graves wasted no time in trying again to escape. The first attempt at crossing the pass had bogged down when the women carrying children could go no farther, so this time the only women who would go would be two who had no children, and whom he could trust to keep going, Sarah and Mary Ann Graves. Most of the healthy men in camp would constitute the rest of the company—Franklin himself; Jay Fosdick; William Eddy; William Foster; a few of the Donners' teamsters; two of Reed's teamsters; and Charles Stanton, Luis, and Salvador to act as guides. They improvised packs, loaded a few meager supplies on Sutter's mules, dressed in heavy layers of wool and flannel, and set off with the mules, wallowing through the snow toward the granite wall at the west end of the lake.

Even before the sun set over the pass that had been their first
objective that evening, though, they staggered wearily back into camp. At the far end of the lake, they had encountered ten feet of snow, much of it fluffy powder into which they promptly sank up to their thighs. With every new step, each of them had had to pull a boot free from the snow, lift a knee up to his or her chest, swing a leg forward, shift his or her weight to the suspended leg, plunge forward a half a yard, and then repeat the whole process over and over. Even at sea level, the effort would have exhausted anyone. Here, at almost six thousand feet, it left them gasping for breath with every few steps, their hearts pounding wildly in their chests. Before they had even gotten truly under way, the snow had defeated the strongest of them.

The next day William Eddy—with the meat from his two oxen already dwindling away—borrowed William Foster's muzzle-loading rifle and resumed the long, cold hunting expeditions he had been making for some days now. There was little in the way of game, though. The local deer had all retreated to lower elevations, and the bears mostly had gone into hibernation. Thus far Eddy had been forced to settle for an owl one day, a coyote another day, and an occasional squirrel, all of which Eleanor Eddy had turned into miserable meals for their family.

On November 14, though, Eddy got lucky and came across a grizzly bear digging for roots in an exposed meadow about three miles northeast of the lake camp. He leveled his musket, took a long shot, and struck the bear. But a grizzly is a hard beast to bring down, even with high-caliber bullets fired from modern rifles, let alone a single lead ball propelled by black powder. A full-grown male can weigh as much as 600 pounds, a female as much as 350 pounds, and every ounce of them is lethal. The bear, irritated more than wounded, turned and charged. A skilled hunter, Eddy had put an extra ball in his mouth as a precaution. He quickly removed it, reloaded the barrel with powder, rammed the ball home, and stepped behind a tree. As the bear closed on him and began to round the tree, Eddy stuck the barrel of the rifle to the animal's chest and fired again. This time the bear tumbled into the snow. Eddy grabbed a stout stick, jumped on the bear, and began to beat it about the head to make sure that it was dead. That night, well after dark, Eddy and Franklin Graves dragged
the carcass into camp behind a pair of the Graveses' last few living oxen.
*

On the way back into camp with the bear, traveling through darkening pinewoods, Franklin Graves had exchanged some somber words with Eddy. He wasn't about to give up, but he now believed that he would die here in the mountains, he confided, because God would punish him for his part in exiling James Reed back in the desert and his refusal to return to search for the old man, Hardcoop, a few days later.

The Eddys shared the bear meat with the Fosters, Graveses, and Reeds, and for all of them it was a godsend. But with so many mouths and stomachs to satisfy, the bounty it provided was nearly gone within a few days.

 

B
y November 21 it had not snowed for more than a week, and bare patches of ground began to appear at the lake. It seemed likely that there would be significantly less snow at the summit than before, so Franklin Graves pushed for making another assault on the pass. This time twenty-two people would go, virtually all of the adult men and half a dozen women and older children. The greater the number who left, the fewer mouths would have to be fed at the lake and the longer their diminishing stores would last.

Again Stanton, Luis, and Salvador led the way with Sutter's seven mules to beat down a path. The long sequence of sunny days followed by cold nights had produced a cycle of thawing and freezing that had left a hard crust on the surface of the snow. This time they did not sink into the drifts so readily. They made it over the pass the first day and camped in the snow near the summit that night. The next morning, in the valley just to the west, though, they encountered deeper snow, and by midday the sun began to soften its surface. Men could still walk, more or less, on the crust, but the mules were too heavy—they broke
through and sank up to their withers with each new step now. As the mules brayed and floundered in the snow, William Eddy argued for abandoning the animals and continuing, but Stanton refused. He had promised to return the mules to Sutter, and increasingly he seemed obsessed with the commitment.

Without Stanton or the Miwoks to guide them, the rest of the company knew they could not find their way down out of the mountains. Eddy offered to pay for Sutter's mules himself if need be, but still Stanton would not relent. Furious, Eddy ordered Luis and Salvador to lead the party on without Stanton and the mules, but Stanton intervened. He told the Miwoks—quite possibly correctly—that Sutter would hang them if they returned without the mules. Luis and Salvador refused to go on without the animals.

As the men argued, Sarah and Jay could look far off to the west, toward California. It was a bright, clear day. There was a cold wind at their backs. For as far as they could see under a pale blue sky, there was nothing but deep snow and the dark tops of pine trees. They turned around, facing into the bitter wind, and started hiking back over the pass and downhill into the somber shadows already falling over the lake from the surrounding peaks. So did everyone else. It was late in the afternoon before they arrived back at their cabins by the lake.

 

W
orking in a tiny notebook of his own making—just three and three-quarters by six inches—Patrick Breen had begun a diary on November 20 with the words “Came to this place on the 31st of last month…” On November 23, sitting in the cold gloom of his cabin, he noted the return of Sarah and Jay and the other would-be escapees, writing that “the expedition across the mountains returned after an unsuccessful attempt.” And then on November 25, he looked skyward and wrote, “Cloudy looks like the eve of a snow storm.”