The Indifferent Stars Above (28 page)

Down in the pit, a circle of living children, pale and skeletal, sat around a fire. For several days Patrick Breen had been bringing them bits of meat to roast on the fire. One of the children, eight-year-old Nancy Graves, did not yet know that the flesh she had been eating was her mother's—a revelation that when it came would so devastate her that it would lead to bouts of sudden, intermittent sobbing in her childhood and a sense of guilt from which she would never entirely recover.

 

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ancy Graves's later emotional distress was just one small thread in a much broader fabric of mental anguish that inevitably afflicted many of the Donner Party survivors and rescuers alike for years following the disaster. Even as Sarah and the other rescued emigrants at Johnson's Ranch waited to learn whether their loved ones would ever
emerge from the mountains alive, silent and sinister processes were at work within them, processes that in many cases would transform the way they viewed and experienced the world for the rest of their lives.

Not all disaster survivors suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related syndromes, but large numbers do. Overall, 25 percent of people subjected to a traumatic event develop PTSD, but that number can more than double to 59 percent or higher among survivors of disasters. The precise rate varies according to a variety of factors, many of which were stacked against Sarah and her sisters. For one thing, females are four times more likely than males to develop the disorder when subjected to the same trauma. Children and young people suffer at higher rates than do more mature adults. Indeed, 100 percent of children who witness the homicide of a parent develop PTSD. And Sarah and her siblings had also experienced a witches' brew of additional traumas, each of which raised their risk: anticipation of suffering or danger to come, close exposure to dead bodies, witnessing the death of a loved one, the long duration of an ongoing trauma, a clear threat to their own lives, the loss of home and hearth, and experiencing physical pain or injury.

None of this, of course, even begins to touch the particular trauma that Sarah, Mary Ann, and Nancy Graves had suffered, along with a number of other Donner Party survivors—that of having eaten and seen eaten the flesh of their companions. Regardless of the necessity of having done so, they had violated a fundamental human taboo, and it was almost inevitable that they would experience significant amounts of guilt and its close cousin, shame. The two are not quite the same thing: Guilt revolves around feeling bad for what you have done; shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person because of what you have done. Guilt can actually be therapeutic, because inherent in the emotion is the idea that you can change your behavior and end the problem. Shame is a far more toxic emotion, because it implies that your character has been polluted by your actions. Deep-seated shame typically leads to a variety of anger-related emotional problems, particularly hostility and aggression.

Psychiatric researchers have only recently begun to understand that traumatic stress produces not just psychological changes but
physical changes in the body, particularly in the brain. The hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for regulating memories and putting information into context—shrinks by as much as 8 percent, some of its cells killed by an excess of stress hormones such as cortisol. Under stress the amygdala—an inch-long, almond-shaped structure responsible for regulating emotions—becomes overactive, lighting up with activity like a pinball machine. The levels of neurotransmitters that regulate nerve impulses in the brain become unbalanced: Serotonin levels plunge; norepinephrine levels soar.

All this results in a kaleidoscope of psychiatric symptoms that plague victims of PTSD: panic attacks, flashbacks, dissociation (in which the patient feels detached from his or her own body), phobias, irrational avoidance of anything imagined to be related to the trauma, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, emotional numbness, intrusive thoughts, and in extreme cases even psychosis and suicide. Among children there is sometimes a tendency to see “ghosts,” apparitions that are apparently hallucinations brought on by the disorder. And to round out the misery, the vast majority of PTSD victims simultaneously suffer from at least one other psychological disorder, a full 80 percent experiencing depression and/or substance abuse.

The toll that traumatic stress takes is not confined to the brain and the psyche, though. Along with a host of other problems, chronic, recurring stress of the type associated with PTSD suppresses the immune system, rendering the entire body vulnerable to a variety of infectious agents. Researchers have for some time also noted high incidences of mortality from coronary heart disease among disaster survivors. It now appears that this is due, at least in part, to elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels brought on by hormonal changes at work in the bodies of disaster survivors.

To what extent Sarah and her siblings suffered from any stress-induced symptoms we can never know with certainty. There was no formal knowledge of these syndromes in their time. No one had recourse to the wide variety of treatments available today, ranging from recently designed psychotropic medications to hypnosis, to eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, to elaborate cognitive-behavioral therapies and carefully controlled reexposure techniques.
For the most part, people were expected to keep their emotional problems to themselves. If Sarah suffered, she, like most of her fellow survivors, did so largely in silence and mostly unaware of why they were experiencing the problems they were. But Mary Ann Graves gave some insight into what she and likely her sisters were all experiencing many years later, when she said sadly, “I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again,” encapsulating even in those few words two of the principal symptoms of PTSD—recurring recollections of the trauma and emotional numbness.

 

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t the crest of the Sierra Nevada, the men of the Third Relief were stunned by what they had found at the pit in the snow and uncertain what to do next. It seemed unlikely that any of these people, except perhaps Peggy Breen and her eldest son, John, could walk out of the mountains unaided, but Peggy Breen announced that she would not leave without her husband and all of her children. Eddy and Foster wanted to push ahead immediately to the lake camp to look for their young sons. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley, there only as hired hands, wanted to return to Bear Valley as quickly as possible with the three surviving Graves children and Mary Donner. That, though, would mean leaving all of the Breens behind to wait for yet another relief effort, or for those who were going on to the lake camp to return.

The men stood in the snow discussing it. Finally a vote was taken. All except for twenty-year-old John Stark were for leaving the Breens. When his name was called, Stark stepped forward and said, “No, gentlemen. I will not abandon these people. I am here on a mission of mercy, and I will not half do the work. You can all go if you want to, but I shall stay by these people while they and I live.”

Early the next morning, the party divided. Before dawn, Eddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson resumed traveling east toward the pass and the lake camp. Charles Stone picked up the emaciated baby, Elizabeth Graves. Howard Oakley picked up the shrunken frame of Mary Donner, whose feet were too badly burned to allow her to walk. John Stark took charge of all the rest, placing Jonathan Graves on his back
among his blankets and other gear and then leading Nancy Graves and the Breens step by step down the length of Summit Valley, traveling westward. As the smaller children grew exhausted from floundering through the snow, they took turns climbing onto John Stark's broad back, sharing the ride with Jonathan.

 

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ddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson arrived at the lake camp before noon. Eddy and Foster hurried to the Murphy cabin, where they had last seen their sons alive on December 16. The two men rushed into the dark cabin and found a group of spectral figures crouched in the corners and lying on beds of pine boughs. In the dim light, they could make out the three youngest Donner girls—Frances, Georgia, and Eliza. Levinah Murphy was there, too, gaunt, wild-eyed, and disheveled. Her son Simon was there. And a startled and feral-looking Louis Keseberg was there as well. But the two boys for whom Eddy and Foster had come searching were nowhere to be seen. Eddy confronted Keseberg and demanded to know what had become of them. Keseberg told him flat out—the boys had died and been eaten. Enraged, Eddy threatened to kill Keseberg then and there, but the man was so emaciated and frail-looking that he resolved instead to wait until they got to California to commit the deed.
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Eddy and Foster were in no mood to linger in the presence of Keseberg. But as they tried to figure out what to do next, Simon Murphy noticed a haggard woman wandering through the woods as if in a daze. It was Tamzene Donner, come in search of her daughters. When she was brought into the cabin, her girls threw themselves into her arms and kissed her, but she was distracted, confused, not sure what was happening here.

The men, worried about another storm cutting them off on the pass, went outside to discuss how to proceed. When they reentered the cabin, they announced abruptly that everyone who was able to travel had to leave now. Almost as soon as they had met, Tamzene and
her daughters were torn apart again. Hiram Miller picked up Eliza, Eddy picked up Georgia, Thompson picked up Frances. Foster picked up Simon Murphy. Levinah Murphy could not bear to see her youngest son go. Lying in her bed, she rolled over to face the wall. The men carried the children up out of the cabin to the open snow and hurriedly bundled them in warm clothes.

Tamzene Donner was frantic. Eddy and Foster urged her to come with them. She begged them to give her time to return to Alder Creek to see if her husband was still alive, but they would not chance lingering here another night. Jean Baptiste Trudeau and Nicholas Clark, on whom she had largely depended, were determined to leave with the Third Relief. As the men carried her children away, Tamzene cried out to them, “Oh, save, save my children!”

They trudged off through the woods and onto the ice of Truckee Lake. At Alder Creek, Elizabeth Donner was dead or soon would be. Only four living members of the Donner Party would be left behind in the mountains—George and Tamzene Donner, Louis Keseberg, and Levinah Murphy.

 

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ddy and Foster caught up with and passed the remainder of the Third Relief several days later. John Stark, still carrying one or more of the smaller children on his back at a time, was moving slowly, leading Nancy Graves and the Breen family as they hobbled down the Yuba River. Later the same day, they passed Stone and Oakley, carrying the baby Elizabeth Graves and Mary Donner. The next morning they found Selim Woodworth and his men still encamped on the Yuba. When they told Woodworth that there were still four people in the mountains who ought to be rescued, Woodworth again declined to attempt an immediate rescue. His priority, he said, was to return to Mule Springs and arrange transportation to Johnson's Ranch for those who had already been brought out.

Two or three days later, Stark, the Graves children, and the rest of the Third Relief and their evacuees staggered into the camp at Mule Springs, where they found a pack train full of supplies, replete with all the food they could want.

After a few more days of riding mules and horses over muddy trails, they finally arrived at Johnson's Ranch late at night. It was the next morning before the new arrivals could see what they had striven to reach ever since leaving Illinois the previous spring. Many years later John Breen, who had just turned fifteen when he arrived, recalled that first California dawn.

But there were hard things that had to be said, and hard things that had to be accepted. William Eddy had lost his entire family. William Foster had to tell Sarah that their only child was dead. Eight-year-old Simon Murphy had to tell his ten-year-old brother, William, they would almost certainly lose their mother. Nancy Graves, just eight, had to tell Sarah and the rest of her older siblings that their mother was dead, that their brother Franklin was dead, and that all their money was lost. There was so much anguish in William Johnson's two-room adobe that day that little Eliza Donner, who had just arrived with the Third Relief, had to flee the house to escape the heartrending scenes.

And no one could have been more devastated than Sarah by the time the sun rose that day. Everything for which she and Jay had wished, and almost everyone she had ever depended on, were now irretrievably gone. Almost everything she'd had to fear as she lay recovering at Johnson's was now in fact unfolding—she was suddenly both penniless and the titular head of a family of seven younger siblings, the youngest of whom was an infant girl who looked for all the world like a toy skeleton.

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ver the next six weeks, the last few horrific scenes of the Donner Party tragedy played themselves out high in the Sierra Nevada.

On April 13 one final expedition left Johnson's Ranch for the mountains. This one was not so much a relief party as a salvage operation, though it would come to be known as the Fourth Relief. The two Donner families were believed to have been carrying a large amount of gold and silver with them, as well as manufactured fabrics—calicoes and linens and silks that were precious commodities in California—jewelry, books, and other valuable goods.

William “Le Gros” Fallon, a mountain man of prodigious size, led the expedition. He and two others—Joseph Sels and John Rhoads—were to undertake the operation under terms and conditions set out by John Sinclair, who was acting both as the local alcalde and also as protector of the Donner children's interests. Since both Elizabeth and Jacob Donner were known for a fact to be dead, Sinclair decreed that Fallon and his men were to receive half of whatever booty was found, the other half to go to their orphans. If George and Tamzene Donner
were found alive, the party was to negotiate directly with them for the terms on which they and their property would be extracted from the mountains. If they were found dead, the three men were once again to receive half the proceeds, to be apportioned by Sinclair, with the other half going to the Donners' orphaned children. Once again William Foster went, presumably to salvage what he could of his own possessions before someone else did. And Reason Tucker also decided to go along, as much for humanitarian as for financial reasons.

On April 17 the Fourth Relief reached the cabins at Truckee Lake at a little after noon. No one there was alive. Reason Tucker, who had already seen bodies lying in the snow on his previous visit, was nevertheless shocked by the charnel houses that the cabins had become since he had last been there.

Eleanor Eddy's and Levinah Murphy's partially butchered bodies lay in the snow, as did the remains of others whom the men could not identify.

With nothing they could do for the dead, and no one here living, Fallon and his men rummaged through the cabins for the next two hours, working in the stench of death, searching for valuables but finding little worth packing over the mountains. Then they set off for the camp at Alder Creek.

Along the way they came across the fresh tracks of a lone individual who had recently traveled through the snow, apparently moving away from Alder Creek. When they arrived at Jacob Donner's tent, they again found no one alive. But they did find trunks that had been broken open and goods that had been scattered about in all directions—bales of fabric, shoes, and schoolbooks. And once again they found bits and pieces of human beings. In a kettle inside the tent, they found what they took to be chunks of human flesh cut up into serving sizes. Nearby they found George Donner's severed head, his skull split open and the brains removed.

They ransacked both Donner tents looking for the stash of gold and silver coins that George and Tamzene Donner were thought to have brought with them. Failing to find it, they began packing up the most valuable of the other goods. Then they camped for the night.

In the morning Foster, Rhoads, and Sels returned to the lake camp, trying to follow the mysterious tracks in the snow they had come across the day before. When they arrived at the cabins, they were astonished to find Louis Keseberg, alive, lying among a heap of human remains next to a pan of brains and liver.

The men demanded to know where Tamzene Donner was. She had been in good health when the Third Relief left the lake camp on March 13. She was dead, Keseberg replied. Dead and eaten up. They asked where the Donners' money was. Keseberg said he knew nothing of any money. But the men tore open a bundle in the cabin and found silks and jewelry and a brace of George Donner's pistols. They searched Keseberg's person and found $225 in gold coins in his waistband. They took the money, and then they began to threaten Keseberg, telling him he would hang for this in California, pressing him into a corner and demanding again to know everything—what had happened to Tamzene, how he had come to have so much gold, what explained the tracks in the snow, where the rest of the Donners' money was.

Keseberg poured out his version of events—that Tamzene had come to his door one cold night after George Donner died and said that she was going to go over the mountains alone, to see her children. She had fallen into a creek on the way to the cabins and become chilled and died that night, Keseberg said. And he said that before she died, she'd told him where her money was hidden at Alder Creek and that he'd promised to get it and carry it to her children in California. It was he who had made the tracks, after spending a night in the Donners' tent and retrieving the gold. He knew nothing about any more money than that, he said.

Suspicious, disgusted, and frustrated, the men left Keseberg alone and returned to Alder Creek, where Tucker, Fallon, and a sailor named Ned Coffeemeyer had remained to pack up the Donners' goods. The following morning all of them returned to the lake camp, carrying as much as they could of what they had salvaged there. By
now they were convinced that Keseberg had murdered Tamzene Donner for food and concealed the rest of her money.

This time they were rougher with him. Fallon told someone to get a rope. He formed a noose and looped it around Keseberg's neck and threw him to the floor. Then he began to tighten the noose. Keseberg gasped and choked and finally cried out that he would show them where the money was if only they didn't murder him. Fallon loosened the rope, and after much delay Keseberg led Tucker and Rhoads off into the snow toward Alder Creek. The next morning they returned with $273 in silver that Keseberg had buried near the tents.

That afternoon the party set out for the return trip to California. They had more goods than they could carry, so they moved ahead by relays, each man carrying a bundle forward, depositing it on the ground, then returning for another. Keseberg, still lame from his foot injury back on the plains, limped along behind them as best he could and arrived late in camp each night. Several days out, as he prepared to make a cup of coffee, Keseberg noticed a bit of calico sticking out of the snow. Curious, he dug deeper and grabbed hold of something cold and solid. He tugged hard, and out of the icy tomb in which Reason Tucker had laid her two months before he pulled the frozen, blue-faced body of his daughter, Ada.

 

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few days later, the Fourth Relief rode into Johnson's Ranch on mules laden with salvaged goods, and the long, cruel saga of the Donner Party was finally over. But it had taken a terrible toll. In the end, of the eighty-seven people who emerged from the Wasatch Mountains as official members of George Donner's company, forty-seven had died as a result of the tragedy. The toll had fallen disproportionately on the males in the company.

Of course, women in general now outlive men in North America and most of the rest of the world—by an average of about 5.3 years for girls born in 2003 in the United States.
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It has not always been so,
though. The greater longevity of women that we now take for granted in the United States is actually a trend that has emerged only in the last century and a half. After remaining largely unchanged for centuries, the human life span began to rise sharply in the 1840s, just as Sarah and her companions made their way across the country. While both genders benefited, the rate of acceleration was particularly dramatic for females, and by the end of the nineteenth century women began to open a gap that they have never surrendered. The average life expectancy for American women like Sarah, born in 1825, was well under forty; it has now more than doubled. Men now die earlier largely as a result of high rates of smoking, homicide, suicide, ischemic heart disease, war, and higher degrees of risk taking. Interestingly, men who have been castrated have been found to have a life expectancy 13.6 years longer than that of intact males.

In the world Sarah was born into, though, North American and European women could still expect to live only about as long as men. This was true, however, just among ordinary populations living under ordinary circumstances. The numbers were different then, as they are now, when those looked at are individuals living under extreme conditions, such as famine and life-threatening cold. In particular situations where men are able to take more than their fair share of resources, and inclined to do so, they sometimes do outsurvive women. But when scarce resources are shared more or less equally, the opposite is very much true.

Donald Grayson at the University of Washington has studied this phenomenon in relation to the Donner Party and come up with some interesting, and for those of us who are male, discomfiting, observations. Overall, Donner Party men died at nearly twice the rate of women (56.6 percent of the males, 29.4 percent of the females). They died much sooner, too. Fourteen Donner Party males died before the first female did. And it was men in their prime years who died earliest
and in the largest numbers. Of twenty-one men between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine, 66 percent died; of thirty women in the same age group, only 14 percent died.

Grayson's study implicated interesting factors in the differing mortality rates for males and females. Women, of course, generally have smaller bodies, and one would therefore expect that they would lose their core body heat to the outside environment more quickly than men. But in fact they actually retain core body temperatures better. This is partly because women have higher proportions of body fat and a higher proportion of that fat is located subcutaneously ( just under the skin). This, in effect, provides them with a layer of insulation and a survival advantage in extreme cold. Women also, on average, maintain lower skin temperatures than men, resulting in less temperature differential between the skin and the environment and therefore less heat loss.

Grayson also noted that men's larger muscle masses burn larger numbers of calories than women's do, simply in the ordinary business of moving about, let alone in doing the kinds of things that the men of the Donner Party had been forced to do. Long before they reached the Sierra Nevada, particularly in cutting a road across the Wasatch, the men had burned up much of the energy reserves stored in their bodies. Then they had burned up most of whatever was left by doing the largest share of the heavy work of building and maintaining the camps at the lake and at Alder Creek.

Perhaps the most interesting of Grayson's findings, though, was that, male or female, those who traveled with a large family group had a better chance of survival than those who were on their own. This is in keeping with other studies correlating survival with the size of social networks. Scientists are not sure why this effect takes place. Theories point to better sharing of critical information and scarce resources, better mutual aid in emergencies, better emotional support, and the possibility that the immune system is physically stimulated by close proximity to loved ones. At any rate, mortality in the Donner Party followed the trend, and again it worked heavily against the males. There were fifteen unattached men between the ages of twenty and forty in the Donner Party. Only three of them survived.

 

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s the survivors began to recover, many of them faced the task of letting the folks back home know, at least in part, what had happened. On May 16, Virginia Reed sat down and wrote what was probably the most heartfelt letter home from California that spring, addressed to her cousin Mary Keyes. As she moved toward the close of the letter, after detailing her family's sufferings, Virginia wrote in an unschooled way words that have since become emblematic of the entire Donner Party story.

Not all the survivors recommended that anyone hurry along to California, though. Fifteen-year-old Mary Murphy spoke for many of those who had been orphaned by the ordeal when she wrote that same month,

By May, Sarah and her siblings had been transported to Sutter's Fort. On May 23, Sarah picked up a pen and wrote a letter to her uncle Jonathan and aunt Nancy Blaisdell in Indiana. She wrote clearly and frankly about some difficult subjects, but with a degree of emotional detachment, and she made clear from the outset that she was not prepared to go into particulars about certain things.