The Indifferent Stars Above (40 page)

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Probably a species of
Grindelia.

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Members of the family
Simuliidae,
these tiny, humpbacked, bloodsucking flies attack both livestock and humans. Their bites sometimes cause severe pain and swelling in sensitive humans, and badly bitten livestock sometimes die as a result of acute toxemia or anaphylactic shock. Occasionally they die of asphyxiation, literally suffocated by the masses of insects clogging their throats and nostrils.

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Many a nineteenth-century woman, knowing that death was approaching, sewed her own shroud, and many a man constructed his own coffin.

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Vaquero,
Spanish for “cowboy,” is the origin of the English word “buckaroo.”

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Not all the Reeds would later appreciate Franklin Graves's efforts, though. One surviving Reed eventually wrote tartly that Graves had built so far from the rest of the cabins “because he wished to, for he, & all of his family, had minds & wills of their own.”

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In 1984 a team of archaeologists from the University of Nevada at Reno conducted a thorough dig at the site of the Murphy camp and found a wide variety of small artifacts, among them the bones of both oxen and a grizzly bear.

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Up sharply from 2,158 calories in 1970.

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They may also have been waiting for Milt Elliott to return from Alder Creek with the compass Stanton had requested from the Donners in his letter of December 9.

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A pound of beef jerky—essentially the type of beef they carried—yields an average of about 1,208 calories, according to modern packaging labels.

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Interestingly, whole-body hyperthermia is now sometimes deliberately induced in clinical settings to weaken and damage cancer cells.

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They didn't know it, but the river in the canyon to their south ran, many miles downstream, directly past Sutter's Fort. Had they had a modern inflatable raft and the skill to navigate Class-5 rapids, they could have been at the fort within a day or two.

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It is possible that Margret Reed and Elizabeth Graves collaborated on Christmas Day to share the treasures they had hoarded. The fact that both managed to produce tripe for dinner suggests that they might have overcome the tensions that were building between them to make the day special for their children.

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At least one of the young men enrolled in the Minnesota hunger experiment—Franklin Watkins—suffered vivid dreams of eating insane people, just before he himself descended into hunger-induced psychosis.

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Roughly $7 billion worth of gold was extracted from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, in 2009 dollars.

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If they followed the custom of the closely related Maidu, they also would not touch the meat of the grizzly bear, because the bear might have eaten human flesh and to eat of it would be akin to cannibalism, widely taboo among the Indians of Northern California.

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Tucker had not brought Mary Ann Graves's letters to her mother for fear that any news of what had happened to the snowshoe party would demoralize those whom he hoped to lead out of the mountains.

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Eddy later attempted to make good on his threat in San Francisco but was stopped by James Reed.

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Just how astonishingly lucky we are to live in the twenty-first century is underscored by a quick look at historical longevity rates worldwide. The average citizen of the Roman Empire could expect to live to about twenty-five. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the average global life span was still only about thirty-six years. But by 1995 it had reached sixty-five, and by 2008 in the United States it was seventy-eight.

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The wheel was later replaced with an even larger, thirty-six-foot wheel. The Old Bale Mill remains a popular visitors' attraction today.

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While we generally think of the Gold Rush as having occurred in 1849, for those few who were fortunate enough to already be in California, it began in the spring of 1848. My great-uncle, George Tucker, was among those who were first on the scene, and by the summer of 1848 he had gathered enough gold to buy his own spread on the floor of the Napa Valley, at the age of eighteen.

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Not everyone thought Ritchie a good catch. Georgia Donner later recalled that some who knew Ritchie thought him to be “unworthy of her.” Georgia was only six at the time of the marriage, however, and her sources might have formed that opinion later, and perhaps in light of subsequent events.

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Tarwater was likely Martin Tarwater, a crotchety Sonoma County farmer whom Jack London met many years later. London lampooned Tarwater in a short story called “Like Argus of the Ancient Times.” London's fictional “John Tarwater” was hotheaded, oafish, and particularly averse to legal proceedings. “The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of a mustard plaster,” London wrote.

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The monument is, among other things, a grave marker. On June 22, 1847, General Stephen Kearny, leading an expedition eastward, paused at the lake camp. He ordered his men to gather the human remains and bits of shredded clothing that were scattered about the site and to lay them in a pit they had dug in the floor of the Breen cabin. Then they set the cabin afire and departed. Seventy-one years later, in June of 1918, three elderly ladies—Martha “Patty” Reed Lewis, Eliza Donner Houghton, and Frances Donner Wilder—looked on as the monument, standing on the site of the Breen cabin and the cremated remains, was formally dedicated.