The Indifferent Stars Above (27 page)

By morning the fire had melted a pit nearly ten feet across and perhaps ten feet below the surface of the snow. Counting heads, Reed and McCutchen discovered that five-year-old Isaac Donner was dead and already frozen stiff in his blanket.

The storm continued all through the day. Reed and McCutchen went to and fro, every ten or fifteen minutes, climbing out of the pit in search of wood, braving the wind that cut through their clothes like cold steel. They were almost entirely out of food now and their stomachs were cramped with pain. Peggy Breen began to weep, then to pray, and then to rage at the men—shaming them for being paid three dollars a day to save them and yet letting them all freeze to death like little Isaac Donner. Her lamentations grew even louder when her son John, sitting on a log sloping down into the hole, slipped and tumbled headfirst toward the center of the pit. McCutchen caught the boy and saved him from horrible burns, but a bit later seven-year-old Mary Donner slipped and badly burned one of her feet in the fire. Peggy Breen grew quieter and began to recite Catholic devotions.

They all dreaded the coming of another night, but it came nonetheless. Reed had begun to have trouble with his vision, and by nightfall he was so entirely snow-blind he could not even see the fire blazing before him. Now it was mostly up to McCutchen to keep the fire going. As the hours wore on, the snowfall began to taper off, but temperatures plummeted and the cold grew lethal. Reed later called the night “one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed and I hope I never shall witness such…. Of all the praying and Crying I never heard nothing ever equaled it.”

In the flickering light in the pit, Peggy Breen heard Nancy Graves call out to her mother repeatedly to come and cover her, but Elizabeth Graves responded weakly that she could not, that she was too tired. Then Elizabeth Graves's breathing grew irregular. She began to make sounds that alarmed Peggy Breen, unnatural sounds, she thought. One of the men got up and examined Elizabeth, shook the snow from her blanket and re-covered her. Elizabeth rolled over awkwardly to one side, her arm akimbo, and then did not move anymore. Peggy Breen waited a bit and then crawled over to her and found her already cold to the touch. Nancy Graves took her feeble baby sister
into her arms and sat next to her mother's body. At eight, she was now the oldest member of her family still alive in the mountains.

By about noon the next day, March 7, the snow had stopped falling. Reed and McCutchen gathered their men together and talked about what they should do. Then Reed announced their decision: He and McCutchen and the other men would continue until they came to one of their caches or to Woodworth's party and then send someone back with food. He was taking his own children with him, he said, and he would also take fourteen-year-old Solomon Hook, who seemed to be up to the trek.

The Graves children and Mary Donner were clearly too feeble to go—most of them were too weak to even crawl out of the hole in the snow. But the Breens were not as malnourished as most of the others, and they seemed to be more robust. Reed and McCutchen tried to talk Patrick Breen into making the attempt, along with his family, but Breen would have none of it. He and his family would stay here and wait for relief, he insisted. Reed called his men to his side and made them witness Breen's decision. If Breen's family died, their blood was on Breen's own head and not Reed's, he said. The men cut three days' worth of firewood and then called for Solomon Hook to join them. Hiram Miller took Tommy Reed on his back, Reed took Patty by the hand, and they walked off to the west.

The trees that the men had felled when they'd first arrived had tipped into the hole and now projected upward out of it at awkward angles. In order to stay warm, fourteen-year-old John Breen climbed down one of the trees deeper into the pit. Then he cut steps for the others to help them descend. At the bottom of the pit, Nancy, Franklin, Jonathan, and the baby Elizabeth Graves huddled by the fire, along with the Breens and seven-year-old Mary Donner. At least they now had protection from the wind, but none of them had eaten anything in more than two days. Up on the rim of the pit, rigid and cold, lay the bodies of Elizabeth Graves and Isaac Donner.

 

T
he same day that Reed and McCutchen walked away from the miserable pit in the snow that would eventually come to be called
“Starved Camp,” Reason Tucker, Aquilla Glover, and the rest of the First Relief led their band of survivors along the Bear River, through rolling, oak-studded hills. At about three that afternoon, they finally arrived at Johnson's Ranch.

For the first time since she had left the lake camp on snowshoes more than two and a half months before, Sarah saw Billy, Eleanor, and Lovina. At some point that afternoon or evening, Sarah and Mary Ann must have faced the grim task of telling their younger siblings that their father was dead, along with Jay. But the younger children had better news to report. So far as they knew, their mother and the rest of their brothers and sisters were still alive in the mountains, and Selim Woodworth, James Reed, William McCutchen, and other good men were on their way to rescue them.

 

I
n the mountains two of the three hearty young men that Reed and McCutchen had left behind to care for the survivors had meanwhile reconsidered their willingness to stay. Not long after the Second Relief left, Charles Stone had hiked from the lake camp to Alder Creek and talked to Charles Cady. They would be better off out of there as soon as possible, they'd decided.

When a horrified Tamzene Donner heard that Cady was about to abandon her and the rest of the Donner family, she struck a desperate deal with the two of them—for a good sum of gold, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they agreed to take her three youngest daughters over the mountains. Once again she stood outside her tent and wept as she watched men lead her children off through the snow, the last of them this time—six-year-old Frances, four-year-old Georgia, and three-year-old Eliza.

When Cady and Stone arrived at the lake camp, they deposited the three girls in the cold, dank, recesses of the Murphy cabin. The only other souls in the cabin were the feeble skeleton who was Levinah Murphy; her one-year-old grandson, George Foster; her emaciated eight-year-old son, Simon; and a gaunt, hollow-eyed, and increasingly desperate Louis Keseberg. Cady and Stone decided to take shelter elsewhere, likely in the abandoned Breen cabin.

By the time the blizzard that had pinned down Reed, McCutchen, and their party near the summit had finally blown over, Cady and Stone had again revised their plans. With so much fresh snow on the ground, it would be hard enough hiking even without small children to carry, they decided. They assembled their packs and headed out across the ice of Truckee Lake, leaving the Donner girls behind with Levinah Murphy in the cabin built up against a boulder. For the Donner girls, it must have been a harrowing moment—their hopes for escape suddenly dashed as they were left in a fetid cabin with a woman who appeared to be more dead than alive.

Two or three days later, Cady and Stone hiked through Summit Valley, just west of the pass, where they found a deep, wide hole in the snow with a blue curl of wood smoke arising from it. On the edge of the hole lay a dead woman and a dead child. The young men peered down into the hole. At the bottom, a ragged woman, a cluster of children, and one emaciated man lay on their backs, staring up at them with hollow eyes. Charles Stone and Charles Cady turned their backs on the hole and quickly resumed their way westward.

 

C
ady and Stone overtook Reed and the Second Relief farther down the Yuba, and shortly after that they all came across Selim Woodworth and his men encamped in the snow near Yuba Gap. With Woodworth were William Eddy and William Foster. The two survivors of the snowshoe party had set out from Johnson's Ranch several days before, no longer willing to wait for someone else to rescue what remained of their families. Eddy had already learned that Eleanor and his daughter, Margaret, were dead, but he still hoped to save his three-year-old son, James. Foster learned now from Reed that his son, George, was alive in the Murphy cabin.

Reed told Woodworth that he had left more than a dozen survivors in desperate straits ten or twelve miles to the east. He exhorted Woodworth to press ahead as quickly as possible to rescue them. Woodworth polled his men and asked if they would go forward. But Woodworth's men studied Reed's and McCutchen's stricken and haggard faces, and the corpselike survivors, and promptly announced
that they would go no farther. Foster and Eddy pleaded with them and offered to pay any amount, but Woodworth's men calculated that Eddy and Foster were most likely destitute and unable to fulfill their promises. Reed spoke up, promising to make good on whatever Eddy and Foster offered. But the men were unmoved. Eddy and Foster, desperate, said they would continue alone, without provisions. Reed took them aside and told them it would be suicidal and finally got them to agree to retreat temporarily to Bear Valley until something could be worked out.

When they reached the valley, Woodworth again refused to go into the mountains himself, but he finally agreed to pay out government funds to the tune of three dollars per day to any man who would go, and to pay an additional fifty dollars to any man who would bring out a child not his own. Eddy separately agreed to pay fifty dollars to Hiram Miller, who had just come down with the Second Relief, to return with them. Foster paid the same amount to a second man, William Thompson.

Three more men also agreed to go on the terms offered by Woodward. One was a volunteer from San Francisco, Howard Oakley. Another was Charles Stone, who might have begun to feel guilty about leaving the Donner girls behind, or who might simply have wanted the additional money that hauling one of them down the mountain would fetch. And the third was one of the Graves family's traveling companions from back on the plains, the tall, bearlike John Schull Stark, Matthew Ritchie's son-in-law.

The following morning the seven of them set out for the high country. Even as they began the climb out of Bear Valley, though, Eddy's and Foster's hopes had already been dashed up in the mountains. Three-year-old James Eddy was dead in the Murphy cabin. And a night or two before, Louis Keseberg had taken one-year-old George Foster into his bed with him. In the morning the boy was dead. As Levinah Murphy and the three Donner girls looked on in abject horror, Keseberg took the boy's limp body from the bed, carried it to a wall, and hung it on a peg, like a piece of meat.

 

F
or nearly a week after Reed, McCutchen, and the rest of the Second Relief departed the makeshift camp at Summit Valley, the people they had left behind there struggled to survive in the pit that their fire had melted in the snow. The hole had grown deeper and wider until it was fifteen feet in diameter and twenty-four feet deep, reaching now all the way down to the bare earth.

As the days dragged on, Patrick Breen largely gave up on living. For the most part, he simply lay listless on the muddy ground, staring up at the circle of sky above him. But Peggy Breen struggled to nurture the nine children there—her own five, Mary Donner, and three of Elizabeth Graves's orphans. The number of Graves children needing care had diminished by one shortly after Reed and McCutchen had left, when five-year-old Franklin Ward Graves Jr. died. The Breens had dragged the boy's body up out of the pit and laid it in the snow near his mother's and Isaac Donner's bodies.

For the first few days, Peggy Breen brewed small amounts of tea from her diminishing supply of tea leaves and doled it out to the children, to warm them more than nourish them. She rationed out small bits of sugar from the lump she had carried up the mountain, and dispensed some seeds she had also brought along. Every few hours, day and night, she or Patrick or their oldest son, John, crawled up one of the trees that had fallen into the pit and stumbled through the nearby woods searching for downed firewood. Each time they scanned the horizon for signs of rescuers, but each time there was nobody to be seen, no motion save the stirring of pine trees in the wind. Patrick Breen slid further into despair.

The weather was fair and relatively warm, and during the days some of them crawled up to the edge of the pit and sunned themselves, storing up warmth for the nights ahead, averting their eyes from the bodies that lay in the snow staring vacantly at them. But the nights were brutal. Without cloud cover, the warmth of the day was radiated quickly back out into the black void of space. As they lay in the pit, staring at white sheets of stars spread across the opening above them, they shivered and shook convulsively, aching with the pain of the cold. In the mornings their thin blankets and clothes were board-stiff, crusted over with a thick white rime.

As the week wore on, the sugar and the seeds and the tea began to run out, and finally there was nothing at all left to alleviate the stabbing hunger cramps of the children in the pit. All of them were profoundly emaciated, and with no body fat to insulate them, their internal temperatures hovered near the hypothermic range. Finally seven-year-old Mary Donner, the toes of her feet blackened by frostbite and the burns she had suffered after falling into the fire, could not stand the hunger pangs any longer. She suggested that they eat the dead.

 

S
everal days later, at about four o'clock in the afternoon of March 12, William Eddy, William Foster, and the rest of what was now the Third Relief trudged up the length of Summit Valley on snowshoes. At the far end of the valley, they could see a large, dark void in the snow from which was emanating a column of wood smoke. As they approached the column of smoke, they saw that there were bloody bones strewn around the lip of the crater. When they got closer, they saw what appeared to be a woman's body lying in the snow. It was hard to tell, though. Elizabeth Graves's body had been stripped of much of its flesh. The heart and the liver had been cut out of her chest and abdomen, and her breasts had been cut off. The rest of the bones were small ones, children's bones.