The Indifferent Stars Above (19 page)

It is difficult for us, with our twenty-first-century view of the earth—replete with satellite imagery, the Internet, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, GPS systems, and high-resolution topographical maps—to comprehend just how potentially terrifying it was for the snowshoe party to come to any fork in what they imagined to be their route to salvation. They knew all too well that a wrong turn, any wrong turn, could mean the difference between living and dying. And the landscape was beginning to tell them that they had in fact already made just such a wrong turn, but they didn't know where or when. All they knew was that they were now profoundly lost, and it was beginning to eat at their minds.

By the morning of Christmas Eve, a hard, steady, cold rain had set in over the western flanks of the Sierra Nevada. During the night it had soaked Sarah and her companions, chilling them, bringing on spasms of shivers, and setting their bones to aching. They managed to build a smoky fire, but they had unknowingly camped above a snow-covered stream. The fire melted through the snow and suddenly dropped into the stream. They crawled to the hole it left behind and peered down into the dark void. They could hear the icy water running below.

As the day wore on, it grew colder. Relatively warm, wet, sub-tropical air that had been flowing into the Sierra from the southwest had begun to collide with an Arctic low-pressure system and the colder air that it had brought down from the Gulf of Alaska. The rain turned to sleet. Everyone in the company was ashen-faced now, but the faces of some of the men especially began to take on an almost
blue pallor. Franklin Graves shook violently and incessantly in his wet clothes. Young Lemuel Murphy began to rant and rave incoherently. So did Patrick Dolan.

Both Dolan and Lemuel Murphy were likely suffering from a toxic combination of woods shock, hypothermia, and hunger-induced psychological stress. But another factor might also have been at work within Dolan's increasingly stressed psyche. Just twenty-four hours before, he had drawn the lot that told him he was to be murdered, a piece of information that could only have induced enormous psychological trauma. In a similar incident in 1765, sailors aboard a storm-damaged ship called the
Peggy
in the Atlantic, facing starvation after eighteen days without food, killed a black slave and ate him. Several days later they were ready to kill again, but no more slaves were available. So they drew lots. A foremast man named David Flatt drew the fatal lot. Flatt asked that the execution be postponed until the next day, but during the night he grew first deaf and then delirious. The next morning the crew was rescued, but by then it was too late for David Flatt. He had become permanently deranged.

The snowshoers made no effort to leave the camp. It was clear by now that at least some of them would never see California. The question was whether any of them would see it, whether someone would die quickly enough to save the rest.

It continued to grow colder. Lying on the snow under wet blankets, shuddering convulsively with the cold, men and women alike began to cry out in anguish, to no one in particular or to God, begging for deliverance, for food, for warmth. Harriet Pike found a small patch of her cloak that was still dry inside, between the shoulders, and pulled out bits of raw cotton batting. With shaking hands, using sparks from Eddy's flintlock rifle and the cotton as tinder, the men finally managed to get a fire going. But when they went to chop more wood for the fire, the head of the hatchet flew off the handle and was immediately lost deep in the snow.

Antonio, the young Mexican drover, crawled over to the fire and lay down. After a while his hand fell into the fire pit, and he did not remove it. Someone pulled it away, but the second time it fell into the fire pit, nobody bothered to move it. He was dead.

The storm intensified and the temperature dropped sharply as night came on. The wind picked up, and the tops of the pine trees around the party began to tilt over to the northeast. It started to snow hard, extinguishing the fire. By 10:00
P.M.
the wind was howling through the trees, blowing the snow horizontally, plastering it against tree trunks and boulders. Franklin Graves stopped shivering. His face was blue, his pupils dilated, his limbs rigid, his breathing shallow. Eddy crawled over to him, looked him in the face, and told him he was dying. Graves said that he did not care. But he called out for his daughters.

Distraught, Sarah and Mary Ann sat by their father weeping. They hugged him and pulled him close and chafed his limbs and tried to warm him. He spoke to them slowly and weakly, his speech slurred by hypothermia. He said that their mother's life and the lives of their brothers and sisters depended on their making it through the mountains to get help. He pleaded with them to do whatever it took to survive. He told them his body must be used for food, and that they, too, must eat human flesh. Then he turned to the eighteen-year-old widow, Harriet Pike, who also sat by his side, and reminded her of her babies, Naomi and Catherine, back at the lake.

At about 11:00
P.M
., Franklin Ward Graves died in the driving snow, with his daughters at his side.

For Sarah, as for Mary Ann, the devastation must have been nearly complete. Her father had been among the most hale and hearty of men and, adult though she now was, her stalwart protector since childhood. With him now dead, lying stiffly out in the open, snow already beginning to cover his blue-white face, she and her sister faced two cruel possibilities—dying miserably, as their father had, or following his dying wishes. It was a hideous choice. And even if they followed his wishes, they knew it might stave off death for only a short time. Sarah had one consolation that Mary Ann did not, though. When she retreated, sobbing, from her father's body, she had the arms of a loving husband in which to shelter, at least for as long as he lived.

Without more substantial shelter, though, more of them were likely to die before the night was out. The snow was falling even more heavily now, slanting through the air on the bitter-cold wind. It frosted the
men's beards and clung to the women's long hair, whitening them, aging them. It buried anything that did not keep moving. They began to lose sensation in their toes and fingers and faces. They knew enough of extreme conditions to know that frostbite would soon begin to burn and blacken their extremities if they did not take action.

Then William Eddy remembered a bit of frontier lore he had picked up from some Rocky Mountain trappers. He gathered together the twelve people still alive and instructed eleven of them to lie in a circle on the snow, as closely packed together as they could get, with their feet pointing in toward the center of the circle. The twelfth person was to sit upright in the middle of the circle, at the intersection of all the feet. Eddy then arranged their blankets over their heads so that the person in the middle of the circle held one end of each blanket aloft. The other end of each was draped over the head of its owner and secured there with bits of wood or with snow. The end result was a low, circular tent that would entrap their body heat and shelter them from the biting winds.

It worked well. The snow falling on the outside of the blankets soon added its own insulating value to the shelter. Maintaining it required no more expenditure of energy than to change the person in the center from time to time and occasionally shake excess snow off the blankets. They began at least to feel sensation coming back into their extremities.

Outside, the storm moaned and whistled through the pine trees all night. The sun rose at 7:18 on Christmas morning, but the storm continued to rage, and as the day wore on, it showed no signs of abating. Psyches that had begun to crumble outside the shelter continued to do so within it. Breathing one another's exhalations, lying in the stench of one another's filth, cramped by starvation, they listened wearily as Patrick Dolan in particular continued to mutter and to rave. When they tried to sleep, they dreamed of food. When they awoke, they heard Patrick Dolan still shrieking.

Dolan thrashed about under the blankets. He began stripping off his clothes. Then he tried to crawl out into the storm. Eddy struggled to wrestle him back under the blankets, but Dolan wriggled free, crawled out of the shelter, and floundered off into the blowing snow,
half naked. Eventually he returned to the shelter but simply lay down in the deep snow outside until the men dragged him back in and held him down.

Survival psychologists call reactions like Patrick Dolan's attempt to run away from the others the “hide-and-die syndrome” or “terminal burrowing.” Like the paradoxical undressing that Dolan also exhibited, it is indicative of the final—terminal—stage of hypothermia, and between 25 and 50 percent of hypothermia victims experience it before they die.

By late afternoon Dolan's breathing grew shallow, his body grew rigid, and he died. The men dragged his body out into the snow and laid it alongside those of Franklin Graves and Antonio.

 

A
t the lake camp, Christmas Day brought little cheer, little to celebrate.

Just how much each of the families huddled there felt the bitter irony of spending Christmas in such miserable circumstances depended to some extent on where they and their forebears were from. Christmas as we know it was, in some senses, just being invented in America in the 1840s. Families that hailed originally from New England, as did Sarah's family, might still have felt some sense of the strong disapproval with which their Yankee parents and grandparents and their Puritan ancestors had regarded any special treatment of the day. But by the end of the 1830s, the old severe views were beginning to slowly give way, even in New England. For the first time, meetinghouses were beginning to be decorated and ministers were beginning to preach sermons on Christmas themes. The thawing would take a long time, though. As late as 1869, schoolchildren in Boston could still be expelled for skipping school on Christmas Day.

But German and Irish immigrants were bringing different attitudes to the United States in the 1840s, slowly altering the American concept of Christmas and gradually popularizing not just the Christmas tree—which until then had been found only in German settlements in Pennsylvania—but also the traditions of gift giving, feasting,
decorating homes, and celebrating Christmas services with something of the elaborateness and joyousness of the Catholic liturgy. In 1842 the first commercial Christmas cards were printed. When Charles Dickens, immensely popular in America, published
A Christmas Carol
in 1843, it infused the American imagination with the revival of English traditions then under way in Victorian England, traditions like celebrating the day with roasted fowl, plum puddings, and the singing of carols.

By the mid-1840s, well-to-do families, particularly in New York and in the South, had begun to observe Christmas on a fairly elaborate scale. Arlington House, Robert E. Lee's home overlooking the Potomac in Virginia, was decorated with holly, ivy, and mistletoe. Gifts were given to family members and the household staff. A Yule log was set ablaze in one of the fireplaces, and the family attended special Christmas services at a nearby Episcopal church. On that particular Christmas Day in 1846, as the Donner Party huddled in the Sierra Nevada, Lee himself was fighting the Mexicans and living in a tent in Mexico. But a letter he wrote home to his family that day gives a sense of what Christmas at the Lee household was like.

Later that day, even in a tent in Mexico, Lee sat down to a feast of roast turkey and chickens and eggnog at a table decorated with oranges and pine boughs.

For most Americans of a mind to celebrate the holiday that year, though—in towns and villages like those that the Reeds and Graveses had come from—the Christmas observations had a more homespun flavor. Women baked cakes and other treats and slipped them into their children's caps and stockings that night. Men gathered and drank whiskey and hard cider and brandy. Sometimes they fired off guns or
set off firecrackers and exploded water-filled hogs' bladders as they did on the Glorious Fourth. Children attended socials or performed plays. Family members exchanged gifts—often homemade treasures like quilts that they had labored on throughout the year. Many of them sat down to a turkey dinner, lending an American twist to the English tradition of roast goose. And almost always they attended church, for in the end Christmas was above all a religious occasion for most of them, an occasion on which to contemplate the light that their faith brought to the darkest time of the year.

 

F
or the Donner Party, it was exceedingly hard to find the light that Christmas, though. At the lake camp, Patrick Breen was too enfeebled by hunger and too incapacitated by kidney stones even to gather firewood. Devoutly Catholic, he and his family strove to maintain their faith. In their cold, dark shanty, Patrick sat down to his journal and wrote about his family's observance of the day, that they “offerd our prayers to God this Cherismass morning the prospect is appalling but hope in God Amen.”

One of the most appalling prospects that faced Patrick Breen that morning was what seemed to be the imminent death of Augustus Spitzer, who still lay prostrate, barely clinging to life in a corner of the cabin.

In the Graves-Reed double cabin that morning, Margret Reed served her children the same gluey concoction of boiled ox hides that they had largely been subsisting on for weeks now. But later in the day, she had a holiday surprise. She had hidden away a few dried apples, some beans, a bit of bacon, and some tripe from the slaughtered oxen. These she slowly and carefully prepared and then laid before her wide-eyed children for their Christmas dinner. “Children,” she cautioned, “eat slowly,…for this one day you can have all you wish.”