The Indifferent Stars Above (34 page)

 

L
ater that spring I went to Corralitos, to search for Sarah's bones. And then I went home and tried to decide: What—after all my reading and traveling—was I to make of the hard life of Sarah Graves Fosdick Ritchie Spires?

Some have argued that the survivors of the Donner Party were not heroes, that they simply did as anyone would do—fight as hard and as long as they could to survive. On one level I think this is true. Much of
the recent research into survivor psychology reveals that what people ordinarily do under extreme conditions is fairly predictable. For the most part, when we are severely stressed, like caged lab rats we bite and claw and squeal until we escape or die. Seen thus, Sarah was simply one of those who struggled and was strong enough to escape.

But I think there is another level to Sarah's story. When I think about Sarah, I think about the nights when Jay serenaded her with his fiddle under a silver spangle of stars on the prairie, and about the night she knelt beside him as he lay dying in the muddy snow of the California they had dreamed about together. I think about the moment when she walked away from her mother for the last time on snowshoes, and about the Christmas Eve she sat shivering by her father as he begged her to use his body for food. I think about every excruciating step she took through the Sierra snow, trying to bring relief to her mother and her siblings. I think about the birth of her first child, and the day men came to tell her that his father had been hanged as a thief. I think about the loveliness of Corralitos in March, about the apple and pear blossoms coming down in showers outside her doorstep, and about her fighting for her last breaths on an old walnut bed just a few steps away from all that loveliness.

What to make of her story? I'm not sure the language even has words that are adequate to the task. But I think what Sarah's story tells us is that there were in fact heroes in the Donner Party, and that heroes are sometimes the most ordinary-seeming people. It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars. We can hazard the ravages of chance. We can choose to endure what seems unendurable, and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. We can awaken to the world as it is, and, seeing it with eyes wide open, we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair. When all is said and done, I think the story tells us that hope is the hero's domain, not the fool's. Because we dare to hope—even when doing so might undo us—we leave the worlds we create behind us, swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations.

November 1846

In early November 1846, the Donner Party scrambled to erect shelters at the south end of Truckee Lake and at Alder Creek five miles to the northeast. As the winter wore on, most of those who belonged to large family groups stayed in their original shelters. As conditions deteriorated, however, many of the single people changed locations, trying to find better opportunities for survival. The following illustrates where each member of the party sheltered during the first frantic weeks. Each person's location and age, where known, is given as of November 12, 1846. Where precise ages are unknown, approximate ages are given in brackets.

T
HE
L
AKE
C
AMP

T
HE
A
LDER
C
REEK
C
AMP

D
IED
B
EFORE
R
EACHING THE
S
IERRA
N
EVADA

A
RRIVED IN
C
ALIFORNIA
B
EFORE THE
E
NTRAPMENT

O
ne of the most heartening things about writing a book is how many people always seem to step forward to lend a helping hand. I take it as a positive sign about the state of the world. It suggests that books matter to people, that the bringing forth of books strikes people as a communal responsibility, much as a group of people trapped in an elevator with a pregnant woman about to go into labor might feel they have a common stake in making sure the baby arrives safely.

With that in mind, I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people who have lent a hand in bringing this book wailing into the world. First, I'd like to thank Sarah's great-granddaughter, Kathy Larson, and her husband, Gary, for all the family information and the photographs that they have unstintingly shared with me. Both have been invaluable resources.

I'd also like to pay particular thanks to Kristin Johnson for undertaking the very considerable task of reviewing the manuscript, for her many corrections and constructive comments about it, and for making a number of valuable documents available to me.

A number of other researchers and archivists have also been very helpful. In particular, I am indebted to Juanita D. Larimore and Marilyn Sherwood Kramer for making available Graves family photographs and genealogical information; Judy Malmin for help with the history of Corralitos; Dorothy Folkerts of the Marshall County Historical Society; Judy Russo at Sutter's Fort State Park Archives; the staff of the Bancroft Library in Berkeley; and the staff of the Jean and Charles Schulz Information Center at Sonoma State University.

Jennifer Pooley, my editor at William Morrow, embraced this project enthusiastically from the get-go, and I thank her for that. But I thank her even more for her very perceptive reading of the first draft and for setting me on a more profitable course with the second. And once again I extend my hearty thanks to my agent, Agnes Birnbaum, for tending to the many nitty-gritty details involved in the business side of writing a book.

Above all, I want to thank my wife, Sharon, and my daughters, Emily and Robin, for putting up with my absences while I traveled the country following Sarah; for reading and making many insightful comments on the manuscript; and for always being there, all my pretty chickens.

O
ne of the places that I have journeyed while following Sarah is across the landscape of Donner Party literature. I learned early on that it is an uncertain and sometimes treacherous terrain. I have climbed in and out of canyons of conflicting accounts, groped my way through a fog of mythology, and stumbled across arid plains devoid of even a sprig of useful information. But I have found it to be a fascinating and expansive land, well worth traversing.

Even before the last Donner Party survivors arrived at Johnson's Ranch in April 1846, people were beginning to write and to read about the tragedy. The first accounts to appear in two American newspapers just then springing up in California were, for the most part, both overly sensational and inaccurate. They talked of men casually deciding who would live and who would die, of mothers eating the flesh of their babies, of women callously cutting the tongues out of their husbands for a midday meal. These accounts, and others of the same sort in the years and decades that followed, gave birth to an impression of deliberate and widespread moral depravity that has largely defined the Donner Party in the popular imagination to this day.

As I mention in the preface to this book, the first serious attempt to tell the true story was made by Charles F. McGlashan, who corresponded with a large number of Donner Party survivors and then published his
History of the Donner Party,
first in serialized form in the
Truckee Republican
in 1879 and then in book-length form in July of that year. McGlashan's tone and style are sentimental, as is typical of nineteenth-century histories, and many facts have since come to light that undercut parts of his narrative. Nevertheless, it remains peerless simply because McGlashan was able to correspond directly with so many people who lived the tale.

Several other early book-length works also stand as important if sometimes dubious landmarks: J. Quinn Thornton's
Oregon and California in 1848;
Eliza W. Farnham's
California Indoors and Out;
Virginia Reed Murphy's
Across the Plains in the Donner Party;
and Eliza Donner Houghton's
The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate.
None of these works is entirely reliable as history, but all are, like McGlashan's
History,
based to some extent on firsthand accounts and are therefore irreplaceable. I have also found Edward Bryant's
What I Saw in California
to be especially valuable. Though Bryant—a cousin of the poet William Cullen Bryant—was not a member of the Donner Party, he traveled just ahead of Sarah and her companions and interacted with a number of them after their arrival in California. As a result, his book is rich in pertinent facts and descriptive detail about the world and the people that Sarah encountered both on the trail and in California.

There are also, of course, many important modern books about the Donner Party. Among those that I have found to be the most valuable are Dale Morgan's superb two-volume anthology of primary sources,
Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail;
Kristin Johnson's anthology of some of the less available accounts of the Donner Party,
Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party;
Frank Mullen Jr.'s day-by-day chronicle of the entire saga, entitled, not surprisingly,
The Donner Party Chronicles;
and Donald Hardesty's very interesting
The Archaeology of the Donner Party.

But all these books, and books in general, represent merely one province in the land of Donner Party literature. Many very valuable firsthand accounts appeared in newspaper articles from around the country shortly after the disaster. A large body of very useful scholarly and semischolarly works has appeared in more than a century's worth of journals that focus on western American history. And most important of all to serious students of the story,
a treasure trove of diaries and personal correspondence has been assembled in various libraries and archives in California. Principal among these, the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley houses the indispensable C. F. McGlashan Papers. The Sutter's Fort archives in Sacramento house another large collection of valuable papers donated by Martha J. (Patty) Reed Lewis. And the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, houses the useful Eliza Poor Donner Houghton Papers.

Early on I was lucky to come across one additional and particularly valuable resource. Kristin Johnson's Web site, “New Light on the Donner Party” at www.utahcrossroads.org/DonnerParty is an extraordinarily rich compendium of facts, dates, narratives, chronologies, links to other sources, digests of current research, biographical data, book reviews, statistics, anecdotes, and news for Donner Party buffs. What makes the site particularly valuable is Johnson's rigorous insistence on accuracy and her emphasis on dispelling myths associated with the tragedy. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Another excellent resource is Daniel Rosen's Web site at www.donner partydiary.com. Rosen offers a detailed, day-by-day chronicle of the major events in the Donner Party saga as well as links to other useful sites.

The Sources section of this book contains a number of additional resources, many of which are referenced in the following notes.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

for no apparent reason: Nancy Graves's frequent bouts of crying at her school in San Jose were noted with concern by a school friend and related to Eliza Donner, who relayed the recollection to McGlashan on August 8, 1879: “I never recall my first schooldays in San Jose without thinking of poor little Nancy G——who used to cry during school time, and it often seemed to me that her heart would break…. We cried with her; and begged her to tell us what troubled her so much; and between sobs and sighs she told us of being at Starved Camp….” The full quotation can be found in Stewart, 313.

“the slow accretion of national mythology”: Stephenson, xvi.

much to say about her: Georgia Donner remembered Sarah fondly in a letter to McGlashan of October 2, 1879: “[I] have thought so much of Mrs. Fosdick that I have wondered why so little has been said concerning her…. She seemed to be very intelligent and sociable” [McGlashan Papers, folder 3].

P
ROLOGUE

emigrants of all ages: For more about the terrible toll that Asiatic cholera took on the emigrants of 1849, see Mattes, 82.

“draw you closer and closer”: Potter, 202.

“you for bread, bread.” Ibid. Bryarly was just one of many emigrants who looked for evidence of the Donner Party as they passed through the Truckee area in the years following the tragedy. In June of 1847, when General Stephen Kearny stopped at the site for the purpose of collecting and interring the human remains there, Edwin Bryant was among those traveling with him. Bryant described a macabre scene, quoted in McGlashan, page 328: “I saw two bodies entire, with the exception that their abdomens had been cut open and the entrails extracted. Their flesh had been either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to the dry atmosphere, and they presented the appearance of mummies. Strewn around the cabins were dislocated and broken skulls (in some cases sawed asunder with care, for the purpose of extracting the brains), human skeletons, in short every variety of mutilation.”

C
HAPTER
O
NE—
H
OME AND
H
EART

hung over Steuben Township: The phase of the moon and the time of the sunrise—like all my later mentions of the movements of the sun and the moon—are drawn from data available on the U.S. Naval Observatory's Web site. Online at www.usno.navy.mil.

river was black and swollen: Details about the weather and the state of the Illinois River are drawn from the
Illinois Gazette,
April 18, 1846.

in their origins and their ways: The histories of the Graves and Fosdick families are drawn from various online genealogical databases.

with a puncheon floor: The description of Sarah's family home and many other details of life in Sparland in the 1830s and 1840s are drawn from “Old Settlers of Marshall,” from “Mr. Graves and Family,” and from Perry Armstrong's oration delivered to the 1879 Old Settlers' Reunion at Lacon, reported by the
Henry Republican,
August 28, 1879, as well as from the remarks of other speakers on the same occasion. Additional details are from similar occasions recorded in the
Henry Republican
on June 13, 1872, and July 17, 1875. Other details about Sparland, Graves family history, the sale of the Graves property, Levi Fosdick's orchard, the departure for California, and the subsequent journey are derived from Spencer Ellsworth's
Records of the Olden Times: Or Fifty Years on the Prairies.

the bitterly cold winter of 1839–40: The story of Elizabeth Graves's visit to her neighbor is drawn from “Mr. Graves and Family.” A few additional facts are drawn from the 1840 and 1850 censuses for Marshall County, Illinois.

the genus
Plasmodium
—malaria: More about the pathology of malaria can be found in Hoyt Bleakley's paper “Malaria in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure” and in Michael Finkel's excellent
National Geographic
article “Bedlam in the Blood.”

Great Depression of the 1930s: For more about the financial deterioration in the late 1830s, see the chapter entitled “The Financial Panic of 1837” in Bancroft, as well as McLynn, 23.

“what a country this might be!”: Dana, 187.

with plucked beaver fur: My description of Lansford Hastings's appearance depends heavily on an account by emigrant John R. McBride, quoted in Bagley.

“abundance of its productions”: Hastings, 133.

“they are surrounded”: Hastings, 114.

“with human skulls”: Hastings, 116.

fifteen hundred dollars in cash: The deed of conveyance for this transaction, dated April 2, 1846, showing the amount is recorded in the Marshall County Courthouse Land Records, Book C, 580–81.

and were married: The date of Sarah and Jay's wedding is recorded at the Marshall County Courthouse, certificate #175, Book A, 23.

“civilizer that I know of”: Hurtado, 71.

lots in the new metropolis: For more about Suttersville and Hastings's arrangement with Sutter, see Hook.

“by the route just described”: Hastings, 137–38.

“fifteen or twenty thousand”: Lansford Hastings to John Marsh, March 26, 1846, reprinted in Morgan, 39–41.

C
HAPTER
T
WO—
M
UD AND
M
ERCHANDISE

to be underwater: Though they later made no reference to it, it is possible that in Iowa the Graves family fell in with a party of some thirty wagons that had started from “Iowa and the country east of it” bound for St. Joe and were delayed by the wet weather and bad roads, as recounted in the
Missouri Republican,
May 27, 1846, and reprinted in Morgan, 536.

“steamers of the largest class”:
Illinois Gazette,
April 18, 1846.

only about nine months old: The ages of the various members of the
Graves family are taken from Kristin Johnson's
Unfortunate Emigrants,
pages 295–96, except for the age of the baby, Elizabeth, which is taken from W. C. (Billy) Graves's “Crossing the Plains in '46” in the
Russian River Flag,
April 26, 1877. Ages here and throughout have been adjusted, where necessary, to account for the appropriate calendar dates, since Johnson uses July 31, 1846, as a baseline.

in high spirits: Farnham, reprinted in Kristin Johnson,
Unfortunate Emigrants,
140.

“in which were placed our beds”: Virginia Reed,
Across the Plains in the Donner Party,
reprinted in Kristin Johnson,
Unfortunate Emigrants,
266.

early in the twenty-first century: For more about James K. Polk's expansion of executive powers, see Borneman.

“saw spooks and villains”: DeVoto, 7.

“territory which we desire”: DeVoto, 191.

“War! War!”:
Illinois Gazette,
May 16, 1846.

better than he did: For more about James Clyman's life, see DeVoto, 54–58.

backs of wagons or into tents: For more on the typical sleeping arrangements among the emigrants, see Faragher, 69–70.

“alluring them on”:
St. Joseph Gazette,
May 8, 1846, roughly when Sarah likely arrived in town.

would set her back ten: Information on doctors' rates is from the city of St. Joseph's Web site at www.ci.st-joseph.mo.us/history/medicalrates.cfm.

“ten pounds of salt”: Hastings, 143.

most emigrant families: For more on what kinds of flour and other foodstuffs were available to the emigrants, see Williams, 7–9, and Faragher, 20–24.

at the hands of Indians in 1846: Unruh, 185.

none other than Lansford Hastings: Bagley, 14.

named the river aptly: For much more about the Meek Party, see Boyd, Bassett, and Mariah King's letter on the Oregon History Project's Web site at www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory.

“more swaring then you ever heard”: Samuel Parker, quoted on the Oregon History Project's Web site.

“and others say hang him”: John Herren, quoted in Boyd, 24.

scows that served as ferries: See Mattes, 116, for more about the ferries that transported Sarah and emigrants like her across the Missouri.

“if it can possibly be avoided”: Hastings, 147.

“or perhaps forever”: Hastings, 144.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE—
G
RASS

assembling itself in the woods: The party with which the Graves family seems to have set out from St. Joe was called the “Smith party,” though just who “Smith” was remains uncertain. The leading candidate is an Oregon-bound emigrant named Fabritus Smith, though he was only about twenty-six in 1846, a somewhat improbable age for the captain of a train full of strong-willed men and women. Some of the families who joined this party—among them the Graveses, the Ritchies, the Starks, and the Tuckers—are listed in the
St. Joseph Gazette,
August 27, 1847, reprinted in Morgan, 731–32.