The Indifferent Stars Above (16 page)

Another low-pressure system had slid down out of the Gulf of Alaska. The next day, Thanksgiving Day, it began to snow again. This time it would go on for nearly a week, a week during which all the mules that Stanton had refused to abandon on the summit would wander away, die, and disappear under six or seven feet of fresh snow.

 

S
ilently and implacably, serious hunger began to work its way into each of the cabins at the lake that week. Hunger is perhaps the strongest and most unyielding of human urges, according to Sharman Apt Russell, author of
Hunger: An Unnatural History.
Because it is so directly tied to our survival, it handily outcompetes most of our other emotions for our attention. It pesters us first, then nags us, and finally screams at us if we are unwilling or unable to satisfy its demands.

Deprived of food, our brains conspire with our guts to make their mutual needs our foremost and most immediate concern. Our bodies require approximately two hundred grams of glucose per day to function normally, at least half of that fueling just one particularly vital organ, the brain. When our blood-sugar levels begin to drop, our brains grow displeased—we get uncomfortable, we grow tired and irritable, we develop pounding headaches. Our stomachs also rumble in complaint. If they still find themselves empty after this complaining, they begin to produce the hunger hormone ghrelin and send it via the bloodstream to our lower brains, which promptly begin to shriek their own complaints all the more loudly.

At this point we are going to eat, or try darned hard to eat. If for some reason we can't eat, or can't eat very much, a number of other physiological and psychological processes then begin to kick in.

In a study at the University of Minnesota in 1945, a group of volunteers, all young, healthy men, underwent a yearlong experiment during which they were subjected to severe caloric restrictions. As their bodies began to react to the reduced amount of food, the young men first began to notice periods of dizziness. Then they became sensitive to cold, asking for extra blankets even on warm summer days. Their metabolisms began to slow down, their blood pressures began to drop, and their hearts began to shrink. Their lung capacity began to diminish. They generally began to lose strength and endurance. As time went on, they became possessive and defensive about whatever food they had, guarding it jealously from others. They became increasingly omnivorous, stopped disliking certain foods, and began to crave greater amounts of salt and other seasonings.

All this and more began to unfold for Sarah and Jay and their companions at the lake camp. No one was actually starving yet, for there were still small portions of lean beef to eat, meager and unpalatable as it was. The leanness of the meat, though, began to exacerbate the situation. The human body requires a certain amount of fat in order to digest and extract nutrients from meat, so even as they ate what they called their “poor beef,” the Donner Party began to find that they were deriving little nutritional benefit from it.

As hunger hardened its grip on them, Billy Graves and some of his sisters hiked out onto the frozen surface of Truckee Lake, dug their way down through the snow, and sawed a foot-and-a-half square out of the hard lake ice below them. They pushed the plug of cut ice out of the way so they could lie on their bellies and peer into the dark depths. And sure enough, from time to time fat and silvery lake trout flashed by in the long column of light descending from the hole. They lowered hooks and lines and lay on the ice for hours, peering down, watching the flashes of silver, catching nothing.

 

L
iving conditions deteriorated steadily at the lake camp as the snow began to bury the cabins. The emigrants cut steps into the snow so that they could climb from their doorways up to the surface, but the interiors of their cabins grew dark and increasingly fetid. There was virtually no light except for the flickering of the fires. Smoke from the fires continuously stung the eyes of everyone who stayed inside. And even inside, even with the insulating effect of the snow piled up around the cabin, the cold gripped them without sur-cease. Their hands and feet ached around the clock, ached with the kind of dull, relentless pain that gets down into your bones and lives there and will not ease up.

In the Graveses' half of the double cabin, Sarah and Mary Ann and their mother crouched around their own fire, over which was suspended a Dutch oven in which they cooked small bits of the stringy beef they retrieved from the snowbanks outside. The rich but perishable organ meats and the best cuts of beef were almost certainly long gone by now, consumed within the first few days after the slaughter of
the oxen. What was left was largely muscle and gristle. There was almost nothing now with which to supplement the meat, and no salt with which to season it. The more they ate of it, the more it began to taste like pasteboard to them. Sarah and her mother and Mary Ann tended, around the clock, to the younger children in the cabin, who were bored, miserably cold, and increasingly cranky. Five-year-old Franklin Jr. and the baby Elizabeth in particular wailed and whimpered.

Jay and Franklin and Billy spent much of their time out in the relentless snowfall with Stanton and Luis and Salvador, foraging for firewood. The dry pine limbs that had littered the ground when they arrived at the lake had by now disappeared under the snow, so they tried to knock dead limbs out of trees. Finally they took to felling living pines, cutting them off just above the snow line with crosscut saws, bucking them into short lengths, and splitting them with axes. But the work was exhausting, and they came back from these wood-cutting expeditions cold, wet, and spent. The green wood they brought in burned poorly, filling the cabin with even more smoke.

Everyone's clothes were perpetually damp. There was no way to bathe at all now. Lice, bedbugs, and fleas continued to infest their bedding. The cabin reeked of wet wool, sweat, unwashed bodies, urine, and excrement. To relieve themselves, day or night, Sarah and her family had either to use chamber pots or to emerge from the cabin into the bitter cold outside, climb up steep steps cut into the snow, walk a reasonable distance from the cabin, and squat in the cold, stinging snow.

On the other side of the log partition that separated the two halves of the cabin, just eight or nine inches away, Margret Reed, her albino servant Baylis Williams, and his sister Eliza labored under similarly miserable conditions to provide for the Reed children. Margret Reed was carefully rationing her very limited supply of meat, and Baylis, who was likely getting the least share, was beginning to grow noticeably weak. To pass the time, Patty Reed played with the small wooden doll she had hidden away back on the western edge of the salt desert.

At the Murphy cabin, where there were seventeen mouths to feed, only scraps of beef were left from the two oxen they had started with at the beginning of the month. William Eddy went out to hunt every
day but seldom returned now with anything more than an occasional squirrel. In the Breen cabin, Patrick was suffering bouts of agonizing pains from kidney stones. On November 29 he and his sons managed to kill the last of their oxen, but his wife, Peggy, had to do most of the butchering the next day. On December 1, as the snowstorm continued unabated, Patrick Breen wrote in his diary, “Difficult to get wood no going from the house completely housed up…. The horses & Stanton's mules gone & cattle suppose lost in the snow no hopes of finding them alive.”

Things were even worse for those at the Donner brothers' camps on Alder Creek. Their tents and brush shanties did almost nothing to keep out the cold and snow. Their clothes were wet day and night. Most of their cattle had been lost in the first storm and buried under the snow. By now George Donner's cut hand had become badly infected, throbbing with pain and swelling up to twice its normal size. The infection was beginning to creep up his arm. When he went foraging for firewood, he had to carry it back bit by bit cradled in the crook of his right arm. Jacob Donner, frail to begin with, had also begun to weaken noticeably and now spent most of the time prostrate in his tent. Tamzene and Elizabeth Donner rationed out meager bits of beef to their children.

By far the worst off, though, were the single men living at Alder Creek—particularly James Smith, Samuel Shoemaker, and Joseph Reinhardt. Living under a brush cover in the snow with no oxen, no resources of their own, and asked to do much of the heavy work for the ailing Donner brothers, they had begun to sink from the outset. By early December they'd been reduced to catching mice with their hands, roasting the tiny bodies over a fire, and consuming them whole. When that fare proved inadequate, they had begun to cut strips from their buffalo robes and eat them.

 

A
t the lake camp, the failed attempts at crossing the mountains began to exact a noticeable physical toll on those who had made the effort. The laws of supply and demand were starting to catch up with them, particularly the strongest and most energetic among them.

It is possible, under certain circumstances, to live for a very long time with very little food, or even with no food. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, and American Indians—just to name the most obvious examples—have all at various times in history embraced extended fasting as a means of attaining heightened levels of spirituality. Saints of various sorts have fasted for months. In the nineteenth century, so-called hunger artists often fasted for twenty, thirty, or in one case forty-four days without apparent permanent harm to themselves. In 1981 the IRA's twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Sands survived 66 days on a hunger strike before he died. Another twenty-seven-year-old man in Scotland survived an astonishing 382 days on nothing more than water, potassium, and sodium supplements. His trick: He started his fast weighing 456 pounds. Paradoxically, though, you can starve to death in as little as two to three weeks. It all depends on the math.

How many calories a particular individual needs to consume depends on numerous variables, the most important being his or her age, height, weight, and degree of activity or inactivity. Nutritionists typically use a formula known as the Harris-Benedict equation to figure out how many calories a subject needs to consume simply to maintain his or her current weight. The equation produces a number called the basal metabolic rate, or BMR. When converted from metric to English units of measure, it looks like this for women:

 

BMR = 655 + (4.35 × weight in pounds) + (4.7 × height in inches)-(4.7 × age in years)

 

The equation is interesting because by making a couple of educated guesses about Sarah's weight and height, we can use it to figure out roughly what her basic caloric needs were when she became snowbound in November 1846. Both Sarah's mother and father were notably tall and thin. If we assume conservatively that she was something like five feet eight inches tall and weighed perhaps 125 pounds, the formula tells us that Sarah would have required about 1,612 calories per day. But that assumes she was lying in bed, night and day, expending no more energy than required to eat, breathe, think, maintain a
core body temperature, and carry on the other business of keeping her body functioning.

To figure out anyone's true caloric requirements, the Harris-Benedict equation requires one further step—assessing that person's level of activity and then multiplying the BMR by a factor corresponding to that level. If we peg Sarah as a “very active” woman, as she certainly was during those frantic weeks in November and December of 1846, we must multiply her BMR by 1.9. This yields an estimate that Sarah required about 3,063 calories per day—roughly five and a half Big Macs—simply to maintain her weight. By way of comparison, in 2007 the average American woman consumed an average of 2,679 calories per day.
*

If we run the similar but slightly different Harris-Benedict equation for males and make similar estimates about Franklin Graves's height, weight, and age, we discover that Sarah's father needed to be taking in something like 3,646 calories a day, considerably above what the average American male now eats. These figures, though, probably understate by a good deal the number of calories that Sarah and her father were burning, for two reasons: First, they assume a person of average fitness and with an average amount of muscle mass. By the time Sarah and her father had walked much of the way across the continent, they likely were far more fit than is now average and had acquired very high percentages of muscle mass. The greater the amount of muscle, the higher the caloric demands of the body. Second, the calculations don't take into account the often bitterly cold environment in which Sarah, her father, and everyone in the Donner Party were operating. In those kinds of conditions, even lying in bed, the body requires far more calories than normal.

The net result was that for some time now they had been burning calories a good deal more rapidly than they were taking them on board with their daily rations of lean beef. All their bodies could do in response was to quietly and efficiently begin to cannibalize themselves in order to provide energy to the brain and other vital organs. Sarah and Jay and their companions discovered that they were
beginning to feel weak. They began to grow gaunt. Their eyes began to sink deeper into their faces. Their fingers grew bony. Ribs and other bones began to protrude in ways they had not previously. And as all these transformations took place, they began to peer into one another's increasingly angular faces with a growing sense of alarm and incredulity.

I
n the first two weeks of December, Franklin Graves was still determined to make a break for it, despite the string of earlier failures. He knew that the most recent report that anyone in California had heard regarding their situation was whatever James Reed and Walter Herron, who had left the company far back in the Nevada desert in early October, might have told them. That meant that for all John Sutter or anyone else in California knew, the company might at this moment be wintering in reasonable comfort in Truckee Meadows, with access to plenty of game and plenty of grass to keep the oxen alive. There was, therefore, no particular reason to believe that anyone would come looking for them before spring. If even a few of them could get through, somebody might be able to keep what seemed about to happen here from actually happening.

So within the close confines of their cabin, the Graves family set up a manufactory for snowshoes, something that Franklin had used as a boy in Vermont and that he hoped would be the means of their salvation. With help from Charles Stanton and others, they dug
through the snow searching for abandoned oxbows—the U-shaped pieces of bentwood that fit under the necks of the oxen and connected them to their yokes. Franklin carefully split these lengthwise along the grain of the wood to produce from each one a matched pair of thinner but still-substantial bows. Sarah and her siblings cut long, narrow strips of rawhide from the skins of the slaughtered oxen and wove them together tightly in a crisscross pattern over the frames provided by the bows. When they added wider rawhide straps to hold their feet in place, they had durable, if heavy and cumbersome, snowshoes, each about two feet long and a foot wide. By early December they had fifteen pairs of them stacked in the cabin.

On December 9 one of the Donners' teamsters, Augustus Spitzer, left the Keseberg shanty, where he had been staying. Like many of the single men, he had few resources to fall back on, and it is unlikely that the Kesebergs had much that they were willing to share. Apparently nearing starvation, Spitzer staggered around the corner of the Breens' shanty to their entrance, descended the snow steps, and collapsed full length through the doorway. Patrick and Margaret Breen dragged him the rest of the way into the dark cabin, another mouth to feed.

On that same day, Charles Stanton sent a note to the Donners at Alder Creek.

Stanton remained an essential element of any plan for escape. He was the only one in the company who had crossed the summit and returned, and everyone counted on him and the Miwoks to find the way. But if he was going up that mountain yet again, he aimed to
make sure that he had not only a compass with which to navigate, with or without the Miwoks, but also sufficient tobacco for his pipe. If he made it through to California for a second time, he intended to stay put this time. But Franklin Graves, he knew, would be coming back for the rest of his family as quickly as possible.

Over the next few days, Franklin Graves made his way laboriously from shanty to shanty, once again recruiting the youngest and strongest of the company for the attempt. At the overcrowded cabin built against a boulder, he asked Levinah Murphy, “Are there any in your cabin, Mrs. Murphy, that want to go? It is our only choice.” It was an agonizing decision for the thirty-six-year-old widow and her family, but they finally settled on Levinah's married daughters, Sarah Foster and the newly widowed Harriet Pike. The two young mothers—both of whose breast milk had by now dried up—would leave their babies behind in Levinah's care. Sarah's husband, William Foster, would go, too. So would thirteen-year-old Lemuel Murphy and ten-year-old William Murphy. William was of such a slight build that they thought perhaps he could walk in the footsteps of the others, without snowshoes. William Eddy would go as well, but Eleanor would stay behind to care for their two small children.

At the relatively well-stocked Breen cabin, only the lighthearted bachelor Patrick Dolan elected to go. He was the one single man who owned enough beef to almost certainly survive the winter on his own, but he insisted that Margret Reed and her children should have some of it, the rest to go to the Breens. In the Kesebergs' lean-to, Charles Burger, the Donners' teamster, thought he would go, too, though he would attempt to do it without snowshoes.

At the Graves-Reed double cabin, the decisions were simpler. Of Margret Reed's four children, only Virginia was old enough to even be considered, but she had fallen ill in recent days, and it had become clear that she could not go. Salvador, Luis, and Charles Stanton had to go—they were the guides. Antonio, the Mexican drover, would go.

On the other side of the log partition, the Graves family made its own decisions. Elizabeth would stay behind to care for her children, with help from twelve-year-old Lovina and fourteen-year-old Eleanor. Billy would also stay behind, to chop wood, tote water, shovel snow,
and take care of the other heavy chores for his mother and younger siblings. Sarah and Jay and Mary Ann were young, strong, and vigorous. All would go. Mary Ann convinced Amanda McCutchen that she should go, even though it meant leaving her baby, Harriet, behind for Elizabeth Graves to care for. And, of course, the man to whom all eyes had now turned, Franklin Graves, would also go.

If anyone started out with a particular disadvantage, though, it was Franklin, for all his practical knowledge. At fifty-seven, he was more than twenty years older than the next-oldest men in the party, Patrick Dolan and Charles Stanton. In the long run, when stamina became the difference between life and death, the age gap might well prove telling. But Franklin Graves's children were on the verge of starving, and he did not intend to let them down.

They all knew that this would be the final attempt, that everyone's lives now hung in the balance, and that the odds were heavily weighted against them. No one would be turning around this time. There was no reason to come back without provisions, and plenty of reasons not to. Returning empty-handed would only mean starving and watching one's family starve. They also knew that anyone who could not keep up would have to be left behind to die a cold and lonely death.

 

T
hey bided their time, watching the weather, waiting for the right moment to make their break for the pass. By December 12 it had been snowing again for four days straight. The next day it continued, more heavily than before. Patrick Breen watched the snow mount around his shanty and observed in his diary that it “snows faster than any previous day…. Stanton & Graves with Several others making preparations to cross the Mountains On Snow shoes, snow 8 feet deep on the level….”

On December 14 the day finally broke clear and fine and rather warm, but the snowshoe party stayed at the lake. Hunger was their constant companion now, gnawing at them from the time they awoke every day until they fell asleep at night, and it urged them to do something, anything, as soon as possible. But with so much fresh powder sitting loose on the surface, they feared that they would quickly get
bogged down, even on snowshoes. So they waited. On the fifteenth, conditions were the same: clear and dry and relatively mild. The powder was still fluffy. That night, though, there was a change. The air was iron cold, and that was what they had been waiting for.
*

On the morning of December 16, the day once again dawned clear, but now, finally, there was a firm crust on the surface of the snow. In the Graves cabin, Sarah and Mary Ann donned heavy flannel pantaloons, garments that they had likely contrived themselves by altering their heavier dresses. They put on linen shirts, woolen coats, and cloaks. They pulled on woolen socks and battered boots. Franklin and Jay dressed in woolen trousers, woolen shirts, and woolen hats. Jay wrapped a black scarf around his neck. Those without scarves wrapped rags around their necks, anything to keep the cold at bay. Then they put makeshift packs on their backs. The packs contained blankets, a little coffee and sugar, some tobacco, and about eight pounds of dried beef for each of them.
^†
This, they thought, if they rationed it carefully, would see them through for the six days that they calculated it would take them to make it through to Johnson's Ranch in the western foothills. They believed that Johnson's was thirty or forty miles to their southwest. In fact it was sixty-six as the crow flies, at least seventy-five by the route they would attempt.

Finally they clambered out of their cabin and stood outside in the snow, bending over in the bright sunlight, strapping their new snowshoes to their boots. Now all that remained was to say farewells that they well knew might be their last. Amanda McCutchen had to give her baby a final kiss. Sarah and Mary Ann had to embrace their mother and their younger siblings one more time. Franklin Graves had to look Elizabeth in the eyes and tell her he would return. And then the moment inevitably came when those who were going had to turn their backs on those who were staying and begin to make their way off through the snowy woods.

It could not have been easy, but they were hastened on their journey by a sobering fact lying in the snow nearby. Earlier that morning, or the night before, Billy Graves had washed and shaved the cold, stiff body of Baylis Williams. Then he and John Denton had dragged Baylis out of Margret Reed's half of the cabin, cut through the hard crust of snow, and buried him six feet deep in the softer snow underneath. The dying that they had been anticipating and dreading for weeks now had begun.

They made their way to the Breens' shanty where they met up with the other snowshoers. More tearful partings took place. Harriet Pike had been as reluctant as Amanda McCutchen to leave her infant daughters behind, but unable to nurse her one-year-old, Catherine, she believed that the best thing she could do was to go for help. Yet she was in anguish now that the moment had come. So were Sarah and William Foster, leaving behind two-year-old Jeremiah George. Perhaps no parting was more difficult, though, than that between Eleanor and William Eddy. The two had been struggling together simply to keep their children alive, almost continuously since Paiutes had killed all their oxen in the desert two months before. Now, as William finally turned his back on Eleanor and his children and began to walk away, he was racked by silent, tearless sobbing.

The snowshoe party—what the historian Charles McGlashan would later call “the Forlorn Hope”—struck off through pinewoods toward the eastern end of Truckee Lake, wallowing in the snow as much as walking on it. Most of them had never used snowshoes, and they had a hard time getting the hang of it. Even with the frozen crust, their feet sank a foot or more into the snow with each step. With each subsequent step, they had to pull the bulky snowshoes free from the holes into which they had sunk on the previous step. They grunted and gasped at the labor of it. They fell forward and backward and sideways into the powder, trying to move forward with some degree of control and efficiency. Gradually they learned to manage the cumbersome snowshoes more effectively, but the effort required to use them was rapidly exhausting them even as they set out, and burning what would turn out to be precious calories at a furious rate.

Two of their number—Charles Burger and ten-year-old William
Murphy—had no snowshoes, and they were having an even harder time of it. Young Murphy quickly found himself up to his thighs. Burger, known by all as “Dutch Charley,” was short and stocky. His stout legs punctured the surface of the snow like pile drivers, and he had to try to bull his way forward by brute force, up nearly to his hips in snow.

They moved out onto Truckee Lake. The sky overhead was bright blue, and there was a light, cool breeze at their backs. By midmorning the sun warmed them, but its light reflected harshly off the white expanse of snow and ice covering the lake. As the sun moved farther to the west, out over the jumble of granite peaks at the far end of the lake, the glare began to strike them full in the face, dazzling their eyes and threatening to blind them, though they did not yet know that.

 

I
f you ski or snowboard or climb mountains, you likely have at least a passing awareness of snow blindness, though these days any reasonably good pair of sunglasses will protect you from its effects. Called radiation keratitis by medical professionals, snow blindness is caused by exposure of the eye to ultraviolet B rays (UVB). Unlike ultraviolet C, the most dangerous form of ultraviolet radiation, UVB rays are able to penetrate the ozone layer in the earth's atmosphere, though their strength is much diminished by its filtering effects. Under normal circumstances, at sea level, the eye can absorb UVB rays without damage. But with every thousand feet in elevation gain, the strength of ultraviolet rays increases by 5 percent. So at the elevation of Donner Lake, for instance, UVB rays are approximately 30 percent stronger than at sea level. The exposure of the eyes to UVB rays is greatly increased by the reflectivity of snow, and a snowy environment at high altitude is where one is most likely to suffer from snow blindness.

Under these circumstances, particularly after prolonged exposure, UVB rays irritate the superficial epithelium of the cornea. This produces an inflammatory response that results in symptoms ranging from mild irritation to acute pain, nausea, headache, temporary loss of vision, and even permanent blindness if the exposure continues long enough.

Snow blindness can be particularly insidious for those who are unaware of its dangers. Symptoms often lag the actual exposure to UVB by as much as six to twelve hours, so one may go blithely about his or her business unaware of the damage that is being done until it is too late.