wagon was as good as new, maybe better. But Eddy could also exaggerate his role in a story. There were those who thought him a liar, the kind of man who made himself the hero of every tale he told. He was capable, a fellow emigrant remembered, of 'eulogizing himself.'
A group of native German speakers stuck together, although they were not all actually Germans. The most important was Lewis Keseberg, a tall, blue-eyed, thirty-two-year-old Prussian Emigre who spoke English, French, and German and would eventually learn Spanish. Before leaving Europe for the United States he had married Philippine, who was almost a decade younger than he and pretty and, some said, flirtatious. They endured a troubled union. A nasty temper plagued Keseberg, and he sometimes directed his vitriol at his wife, a habit that offended some of his fellow travelers on the journey west. More than one member of the Donner Party remembered Keseberg beating Philippine, a 'humble and unassuming' woman who was 'cowed down.' 'He treated her like a brute,' recalled Virginia Reed. 'She was afraid of him and yet made all sorts of excuses for him.' James Breen remembered Keseberg, a tall and powerful man, as 'quick tempered and irritable.'
The Wolfingers were another German couple, young and childless although apparently wealthy. Doris Wolfinger spoke little English but impressed eveiyone with a regal bearing, not to mention elegant clothes and expensive jewelry. There were several young, single men among the 'Germans,' and one old man known only as Hardcoop, a cutler from Cincinnati who wanted to see the west before returning to his two children in Belgium.
Patrick Dolan was one of the few bachelors who was not working his way west as a teamster. A neighbor of the Breens back in Iowa, Dolan had vouched for Patrick Breen when the Irishman took the oath as a naturalized American citizen. Perhaps thirty-five or forty, Dolan was not as rich as some of the well-established family men, but he had made a success of himself. He sold his farm in Iowa and went west with a wagon and some cows. Optimistic and jovial by nature, he was popular with the children.
The first task for this emerging new group was to pick a leader. Surely the men had been eyeing each other for some time, drawing one another aside or wandering by someone else's campfire to discuss the likely candidates, glances thrown back over their shoulders to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Perhaps some men campaigned for the job while others refused it. As the wagons prepared to pull away on their new course, the men finally gathered around to settle the matter.
Reed, the only man keeping a regular diary at that point, failed even to mention the decision. We do not know with certainty that he wanted the job, but he was an obvious potential choice. Assuming he expressed an interest, it's easy to see why he was passed over. He was aristocratic and headstrong and rubbed people the wrong way. He was not the kind of man to win a popularity contest. But he was also not the kind of man to bring up someone else's victory in his own journal.
Charles Stanton, who had been so excited to cross the Continental Divide, had the courage and commitment of a leader, but he was a young man traveling alone, far less established than the older family men. The same was true of William Eddy, whose family was small and young. Patrick Breen headed a big clan, but he was an Irishman and a Catholic, and nobody volunteers to be led by an outsider.
And then there was the easiest choice of all: George Donner, the older of the two Donner brothers, a friendly fellow with enthusiasm and goodwill. He led one of the three families from Springfield that lay at the core of the group. Perhaps he wasn't the most commanding of men, but then all the captain needed to do was get the group moving in the morning and pick the campsite at night. In a pinch, somebody else could even take those duties. Maybe Donner was a little malleable, but better that than a self-important blowhard like Reed.
They counted the votes, and the new company assumed the name by which it would enter history.
BILLY, THE PONY THAT HAD CARRIED Virginia Reed so joyfully across the plains, could go no farther. Worn down by the long days of endless walking, he simply stopped. James Reed could have shot him to save the beast a lingering death, but perhaps Virginia could not stand the idea, and so instead they simply abandoned the exhausted little animal by the trail.
Virginia agonized at the harsh ethos of the western trail: keep moving or die. 'When I was forced to part with him, I cried until I was ill, and sat in the back of the wagon watching him become smaller and smaller as we drove on, until I could see him no more.'
7
Gambling
Edwin Bryant decided to gamble. The newspaperman was now well ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, for his lingering doubts about the pace of the wagon trains had finally crystallized into action. At Fort Bernard, Bryant and his traveling companions traded their wagon for pack mules and rode ahead as fast as they could.
More than a week before the Donner Party, he reached Fort Bridger, a small trading post along the Black's Fork of the Green River in what is today the southwestern corner of Wyoming. Fort Bridger was the last chance to decide which route to pursue toward California, since in effect it offered a second chance at the decision the emigrants had faced at the Parting of the Ways. As at the Parting, the trail split at Fort Bridger: To the right lay a well-established route via Fort Hall; to the left was the untried Hastings Cut-Off.
When Bryant arrived, Lansford Hastings was there, touting his new course. But so too was the legendary Joseph Walker, a mountain man with decades of experience in the west. Walker 'spoke discouragingly' of the Hastings route, Bryant wrote.
Nonetheless, Bryant and his friends resolved to risk the new path. The whole trip west was a risky venture, and the timid were still on the farm, a thousand miles back and probably regretting the missed opportunity.
But Bryant also worried about the families farther back on the trail, the ones with which he had begun the journey. With their ponderous ox-drawn wagons, they should try no new and untested routes. At their slower pace, they would spend longer in the desert. With their livestock, they required more water and feed. And then there were the children. Family men should stick to the proven and rutted road. 'Our situation was different than theirs,' Bryant recalled. Single men on mules 'could afford to hazard experiments, and make explorations. They could not.'
Bryant could not wait around at Fort Bridger to voice his reservations in person. Even on the relatively fast mules, he still wanted to keep moving. Fortunately, an alternative was at hand. Louis Vasquez, who owned and operated the fort along with Jim Bridger, offered to see that letters were held for the oncoming wagons. Undoubtedly thankful for the kindness, Bryant scrawled out his doubts in messages to some of the key men, one addressed to James Reed. Then he rode off, trusting that the honorable men who ran Fort Bridger would see the missives safely delivered.
THE DONNER PARTY REACHED THE FORT nine days later, on July 27, a Monday, and pitched camp in a pleasing meadow half a mile downriver, hoping the rich valley grasses would rejuvenate their exhausted oxen. To let the animals rest, the emigrants planned to stay a few days.
As soon as the stock was turned loose and the bedrolls unpacked, the men went looking for Hastings. According to his own letter, he was supposed to be at the fort, waiting to guide them on his new and untested cut-off. It was crucial that they find him. Since Hastings's proposed route had hardly been traveled before, it bore none of the guide-posts that dotted heavily traveled trails—wagon tracks, well-worn fords, old campsites. Without Hastings, the Donner Party would be forced to feel their way along blindly, following a trail that did not really exist through terrain they did not know.
Yet Hastings was nowhere at the fort. He had gone ahead with other wagons. He had promised to wait for those who heeded his call, and now he had vanished. For Reed and the Donner brothers and the others of their company, it must have come as a brutal shock. They had banked their fate on an unreliable man.
Another option remained: the branch of trail leading northwest, toward Fort Hall. Take it, and soon enough they would be back in the ruts of the main route, perhaps even reunited with those to whom they had bid farewell at the Parting of the Ways. Clyman's knowledgeable warning about the Hastings Cut-Off argued for that option, and now so did Hastings's failure to wait for them.
One more stone might have tipped the scale, but the warning letters from Bryant lay as hidden as a miser's
