The Indifferent Stars Above (23 page)

It was nearly midnight by the time they reached Sarah and the others, lying in the mud where they had collapsed that morning. They were all alive, although nearly naked and so malnourished and hypothermic that they were hardly able to sit up, let alone walk. But they ate ravenously the food that was offered to them; then they wept and cried out and begged for more. When it was given to them, they ate until they grew ill and vomited, the food overwhelming their shrunken digestive systems. Then they ate more.

All that night at Johnson's Ranch, women continued to bake bread and stew beef. On the morning of January 18, a second contingent of men—Matthew Ritchie, William Johnson, Joseph Verrot, and
Sebastian Keyser—set out on horseback with the fresh supplies, trailing a string of extra horses behind them. Without an Indian to guide him, Ritchie followed Eddy's bloody footsteps for more than six miles through the brush. It took them all day to reach the survivors.

Late that night, moving through dark oak woods, Sarah and Mary Ann finally approached the Ritchies' makeshift cabin by the Bear River. What they remembered for the rest of their lives was not the cabin itself but rather the warm, yellow lamplight that shone out through loose chinking—light coming to them through the black night as if miraculously, beckoning them to come back in out of the cold, to the hearth of humanity.

 

T
he next day an Indian runner was sent splashing through the flooded lowlands west of Johnson's Ranch to the home of John Sinclair, the new, American-designated alcalde, or chief magistrate, of Northern California. When the runner returned, he carried on his back something that Sarah and her sister needed nearly as badly as food and rest—a large pack of clean, fresh women's clothes.

But it would take far more than clean clothes to heal Sarah's soul. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the few white women at Johnson's Ranch, and later at Sutter's Fort, devoted themselves to nursing the survivors of the snowshoe party. One of those who tended to them was a young Englishwoman who had immigrated to California the year before, Eliza Gregson. When she first looked into the survivors' eyes, Gregson was startled by what she saw looking back at her, and she later marveled at it.

T
he news that Sarah and her companions had carried out of the mountains—news of whole families snowbound and starving—startled and horrified the handful of American settlers living at Johnson's Ranch. For many of those who had themselves so recently made it through the mountains, a sense of shared purpose, a sense of common humanity, and a sense of Christian duty all demanded that they do something to help their countrymen. But to launch any kind of successful rescue effort, they knew they would need far more resources than could be mustered at Johnson's squalid establishment. They would need food, blankets, horses, mules, and, above all, men willing to hazard their lives in the high Sierra in midwinter. Those were commodities that they could hope to find only at Sutter's Fort, some forty miles away. William Eddy scrawled out a letter detailing the dismal situation in the mountains and imploring Sutter's aid, and Johnson sent it off to the fort by way of a foot courier.

The Tuckers and the Ritchies began to slaughter beef cattle and to dry the meat. They cut hides into strips with which to make
snowshoes. William Johnson put some of his Indian laborers to work grinding wheat into flour in stone
matates.
The whites used coffee mills to grind still more wheat. George Tucker and William Ritchie and other young men rode through the surrounding countryside searching for enough horses and mules to pack the supplies into the mountains. And they waited for more men and supplies from Sutter's.

Meanwhile, Sarah and the other survivors lay abed in various cabins alongside the Bear River at Johnson's Ranch, stunned and desolate, trying to recover. Mary Ann—whose feet were so swollen and injured that she would not be able to wear shoes for three months—spent some of her time writing letters to her mother, hoping that the rescuers would carry them into the mountains for her.

By January 25, her twenty-second birthday, Sarah must have begun to fully absorb the fact that she was a widow. She had much to grieve for in the loss of the two principal men in her life—her husband and her father—and all that they had so recently been to her.

And she had new practical worries as well. When she had left her father's family and married Jay, she'd moved from one financial dependency to another. With both now dead, she faced the cold fact that she had no particular means of support. And at twenty-two she was no longer a child in any sense of the word, and no one would be likely to treat her as such.

 

T
he relationship between adults and children and the line demarcating the distinction between the two were shifting in the 1840s, as were many other aspects of life. In the world into which Sarah had been born in 1825, American ideas of who exactly was a child and who an adult, and how children should be treated, were still shaped largely by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century attitudes. In that world, children had for the most part been thought of as miniature adults. As a result, the treatment of children and the expectations placed on them had often been exceedingly harsh and unforgiving by modern standards. These attitudes had resulted in the widespread abuse of even very young children, particularly in Great Britain, where eight-and nine-year-olds were sometimes put in chains and
harnessed to carts in coal mines and made to drag the heavy carts for as many as eighteen to twenty hours a day.

Many of these attitudes toward children came to America with the first English colonists. As early as 1619, hundreds of pauper children were abducted in England and shipped to Virginia, to be bound out to service on farms and in manufactories with no pay. And as the Industrial Revolution brought large-scale manufacturing to America's cities late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries, the demand for cheap labor soon had urban children working long hours in abysmal conditions. In 1790, Samuel Slater, an early American manufacturing magnate, set the trend when he realized that he could run his factory most economically if he dispensed with hiring adults and employed only children, from seven to twelve years old, to staff his first factory in Rhode Island.

As Sarah and her siblings were growing up, town boys whose parents wished them to learn a trade were often sent away from home by the age of fourteen to serve seven-year apprenticeships. Country boys much younger than that worked alongside their fathers from dawn to dusk. Country girls like Sarah and her sisters also worked grueling hours on their farmsteads from the time they could chop kindling or tote a bucket of water into the house. And by thirteen or fourteen, many of them were married and running households of their own.

By the 1840s, though, forces were at work that would eventually begin to ameliorate the situation for children, both in Britain and in the United States. Popular literary works like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem “The Cry of the Children” and Charles Dickens's
Oliver Twist
—both widely read in America—began to change attitudes. Romantic notions about the natural innocence of children began to clash with the harsh reality portrayed by Dickens and meld with Victorian sentimentality. In 1842, Massachusetts limited the workday of children under twelve to ten hours. Six years later, in 1848, the state of Pennsylvania passed the first minimum-age law, outlawing the employment of children under twelve in textile mills.

In keeping with a burgeoning American emphasis on individualism and self-improvement, the emphasis in child rearing began to
shift from breaking the child's will to developing the child's inherent capacity to make his or her own way in the world. To be sure, methods often remained harsh, and the widespread abuse of children in American factories and sweatshops continued largely unabated throughout much of the remainder of the century, fed by a steady stream of immigrant children from Europe. But at least change had been in the wind as Sarah was growing up.

And, of course, most emigrant parents in 1846 loved their children no less than do modern-day parents, and they were no less anxious about them when danger threatened, as their behavior in the Sierra Nevada was demonstrating that winter. They, as much as any of us who are parents today, wanted to turn their children out into the world well equipped to have happy and productive lives. But their frame of reference, their concept of what would best accomplish that aim, remained in the 1840s fundamentally different from ours. Few of us today can imagine our daughters in a wedding bed at thirteen, nor our sons sent away to work full-time at fourteen, but both were still comfortable ideas for most of Franklin and Elizabeth Graves's peers.

So when Sarah had left home a married woman at twenty-one, all the expectations of adulthood had already long since settled squarely on her shoulders. And when she arrived at Johnson's Ranch, all those expectations remained in force, despite the horror of what she had just been through. As she contemplated her new status, the one light that she could look to in the darkness of her inner world was the hope that her mother and younger siblings were still alive and that the cache of coins her father had hidden in the family wagon was still in her mother's safekeeping. Meanwhile, everything in her future depended on the men hurrying around outside making preparations for a rescue. So far, though, nobody had gone anywhere.

 

A
s Sarah lay in bed at Johnson's Ranch, her mother was fighting for her brothers' and sisters' survival in ways that illustrate just how fiercely many emigrant mothers were devoted to the welfare of their children. Elizabeth Graves and Margret Reed, struggling to
keep their respective broods alive, were waging a low-level war. Margret Reed, living now in the Breens' cabin, possessed only bits of ox hide with which to feed her children, and these bits of hide were a half mile distant, stretched out on the roof of the double cabin where Elizabeth Graves was still living. Beyond scraps cut from them, she could rely only on whatever ox bones the Breens chose to offer her. From time to time, Peggy Breen slipped Virginia Reed small pieces of poor beef, but only rarely. And in the end Margret Reed knew that Peggy Breen, like any mother, would feed her own children before any others.

In Elizabeth Graves's half of the double cabin also, there was now nothing to eat but hides. On January 21 the Reeds' cook, Eliza Williams, waded through the snow from the Graveses' cabin, where she had been living, to the Breens' cabin. There she implored her mistress for a bit of beef. She could not digest the scraps of hide that Mrs. Graves provided her, she said. But with nothing but the same for herself and her children, Margret Reed could offer Eliza no help. Patrick Breen made a simple notation on the result of the encounter in his diary that same day: “Mrs. Reid sent her back to live or die on them.”

On January 30 the struggle between Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves reached a new pitch. Graves—a woman her former neighbors in Illinois remembered years later to be extraordinarily generous—seized the hides and various other goods that Margret Reed had left at her half of the double cabin. She dragged them into her side of the cabin and announced that she would not return them until Margret Reed paid her back for the cattle that Franklin had sold to her when they'd first become snowbound in November. Nobody recorded the words that followed between Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves, but one can imagine. John and Edward Breen, Patrick's teenage sons, went to the Graveses' cabin later that same day to try to recover Margret's goods by force or by diplomacy, but when they returned, they had only two paltry pieces of hide to show for the effort.

At the Murphy cabin that night, a third mother, Levinah Murphy, with no resources to fight over, watched in despair as her seventeen-year-old son, John Landrum, ceased his delirious ranting, took a few last rattling breaths, and died. In the three full months since they had
all become entrapped, he was the fourteenth member of the Donner Party to die, all of the dead, so far, male.

 

O
n February 4, under gloomy skies, fourteen men finally set out from Johnson's Ranch in an attempt to reach the emigrants at Truckee Lake. Reason P. Tucker and another of that year's newly arrived emigrants, Aquilla Glover, led the expedition—which in time would come to be called “the First Relief.” Sixteen-year-old George Washington Tucker accompanied his father. Colonel Matthew D. Ritchie also went along, as did two newly arrived emigrant brothers, Daniel and John Rhoads, a young man named Riley Septimus Moutrey, several sailors, a German with the nickname of “Greasy Jim,” a half-witted boy named Billy Coon, Jotham Curtis, whom James Reed had rescued from Bear Valley back in November, and a still-emaciated William Eddy.

They made their way up the emigrant road alongside the Bear River, traveling through a wet landscape of manzanita, sprawling oak trees, and spindly digger pines. The road was bad, and the horses and mules repeatedly got bogged down in mud, requiring the men to unload the animals each time and pull them out with ropes, then reload them. It rained intermittently at first. Then, two or three days out, the skies opened up and torrential rain slanted down in sheets. On February 9 they reached the snow line, and after four miles of leading the horses and mules through snow up to the animals' bellies, they made an encampment at Mule Springs at an elevation of 3,849 feet.

The next day Eddy, still too weak to once again assault the high country, turned back with the pack animals. He did not yet know it, but both his one-year-old daughter, Margaret, and his beloved wife, Eleanor, were already dead, their bodies lying in the snow outside the cabins at the lake camp. The rate of dying at the lake was accelerating rapidly now. Since February 1, in addition to Margaret and Eleanor Eddy, Amanda McCutchen's one-year-old daughter, Harriet, and Augustus Spitzer and Milt Elliott had all died.

Reason Tucker and Aquilla Glover cached a portion of the provisions at Mule Springs for their return trip and left the boys, George
Tucker and Billy Coon, to watch them. As the remaining men started to climb higher, each of them carried roughly fifty pounds of supplies on his back, along with a blanket, a hatchet, and a tin cup.

On the morning of February 14, they faced the daunting prospect of making the steep climb out of Bear Valley to Emigrant Gap and then beginning to work their way among the high granite peaks to the east. Three of the men refused to go farther. Tucker pleaded with them and offered five dollars per day out of his own pocket for those who would continue, but in the end only seven men started up the ridge.

They traveled in single file, each man taking a turn going out ahead of the others to beat a path through the snow, then falling back to the end of the line. Once they reached the top of the ridge, they followed a sinuous course, winding among trees and around the sides of peaks. Aware that they, like the snowshoe party, could easily become lost in this terrain, they set fire to dead pine trees that they came to along the way, both to serve as markers for their return trip and to show the route to additional rescuers who they hoped would soon be following them.

They went on like this for the next several days, until, on February 17, they camped just short of the summit overlooking Truckee Lake, where they again built a log platform on which to kindle a fire. They guessed the snow to be as deep as thirty feet here.

 

O
n February 18 the First Relief carefully descended the granite cliffs and crossed the frozen lake. Just before sunset they approached the woods where they had been told they would find the lake camp. The snow was, by their reckoning, about eighteen feet deep here, and they could see no sign of life. Daniel Rhoads described what happened next.