heart. Bridger and Vasquez had opened their fort just three years before, in 1843, as a trading post and way station for westward emigrants. The location seemed first-rate. Fort Laramie was well back to the east, on the other side of the Continental Divide; Fort Hall was still 150 miles away, at least a week's hard travel. Fort Bridger would do a booming business selling supplies and livestock to weary travelers. What's more, it was on the main road. The primary emigrant trail—the route that led to Fort Hall and then to Oregon and California—passed right by the new establishment.
But in a striking case of bad luck, Fort Bridger was bypassed the very next year. In 1844 a party of emigrants blazed what came to be known as the Greenwood Cut-Off, a shortcut that saved several days' travel but went nowhere near Fort Bridger. When emigrants steered to the right at the Parting of the Ways, it was actually the Greenwood Cut-Off they were taking. By 1846 the shortcut had become the main road, and almost nobody was going by way of Fort Bridger. Bridger and Vasquez found themselves stranded on a back road, like an old-fashioned motel too far from a new interstate.
Hastings's proposed route offered a solution. His cut-off required that emigrants use the old and now largely abandoned trail down to Fort Bridger before striking off through the Wasatch and along the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Unavoidably, families that took the Hastings Cut-Off would roll right past Bridger and Vasquez. So perfectly did the needs of Hastings and Bridger mesh that rumors of pay-offs circulated, although some of the gossip suggested that Hastings was paying Bridger and some that it was the other way around.
For Bridger and Vasquez, therefore, Bryant's discouraging letters were a potential disaster. If word got around that the cut-off was too dangerous for emigrants with wagons, families would continue to take the Greenwood route, never approaching Fort Bridger. Business would collapse.
The solution was as obvious as it was devious. When the Donner Party arrived, Bridger said not a word about the warning from Bryant, the emigrants' old traveling companion. Instead, he claimed the Hastings Cut-Off was a 'fine level road.' rich with grass for the livestock and well watered most of the way. The shortcut might save hundreds of miles over the old route via Fort Hall, he insisted. A benign explanation washed away Hastings's absence: The route he had initially explored contained a stretch without water, and now he had gone ahead to scout for an even easier trail.
Even without reading Bryant's letter, Reed and the other members of the Donner Party should have been suspicious of Bridger's enthusiasm. Anyone could see that the trading post was in danger of being marooned, an anachronism past which the modern trail detoured. Clyman had already offered cautionary words at Fort Laramie, and it's possible that at Fort Bridger the emigrants heard doubts yet again. Walker, the legendary mountain man who had warned Bryant about Hastings's route, may still have been there when the Donner Party arrived, telling people of his doubts. But if Reed heard of Walker's views, either directly or through local gossip, he seems to have disregarded them. Far from wondering about Bridger's possible motives in promoting the cut-off, Reed fell for the man. Bridger and Vasquez, he wrote, were 'very excellent and accommodating gentlemen' who could be trusted to do business with emigrants 'honorably and fairly.'
So far as we know, no one else raised any strong objections, and so the wagons turned away from the tested trail to California. In less than two weeks, the Donner Party had faced essentially the same dilemma twice: Stay with the traditional route or take a chance on Hastings's promises. Both times they made the same decision. Sooner than they could imagine, they would have reason to wonder about the wisdom of their choice.
8
A New and Interesting Region
The young rider bounced off his mount and thudded sickeningly into the hard earth of Wyoming. The fall knocked Edward Breen out cold, and when he regained consciousness his left leg throbbed with pain. Adults arrived and examined the boy and found a bad break between the knee and ankle. There was no doctor in the company, but they were only a little ways beyond Fort Bridger. Perhaps someone there boasted medical training. A rider galloped off, and in time he returned with the nearest thing to a doctor the fort had to offer, 'a rough looking man with long whiskers' who had probably acquired what medical knowledge he had through long experience on the frontier. He unrolled a small bundle he was carrying and produced a short saw and a long-bladed knife, obviously the tools of amputation.
Edward shrieked at the sight and began begging his parents to prohibit the operation. It was no easy decision. If the leg didn't set properly—and what were the odds of that in a jouncing wagon?—gangrene could fester. The boy could die. But Edward was adamant, and in time his parents agreed. They gave the would-be surgeon five dollars for his trouble and sent him on his way. Edward exhaled and tried to lie easy.
CHARLES STANTON BASKED IN THE SUMMER SUN, letting it warm both his body and his spirit. Snow- capped mountains glittered in the distance, yet another sign that the emigrants had long since left behind the flat- lands of their midwestern homes. Taking up a letter he had written to his brother two weeks earlier, Stanton added a short, optimistic postscript. 'We take a new rout to California, never travelled before this season; consequently our route is over a new and interesting region.' Perhaps too new and interesting. It was August 3, three days since the Donner Party had pulled away from Fort Bridger, and yet Lansford Hastings remained a ghost.
Then, on the sixth day out from the fort, they found some shadow of the phantom. Someone spotted a note protruding from the top of a sagebrush and called out to tell the others, and when they reached it they found it was from Hastings. In a way, it was a remarkable find—the paper could have blown away or been taken by an animal or simply overlooked—but in fact it was a common method of trailside communication. Paper being valuable, emigrants occasionally used whatever lay at hand for their impromptu billboards—pieces of wood or even buffalo skulls.
The wagons had reached Weber Canyon at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, the steep and rugged range that lay between Fort Bridger and the Great Salt Lake. Up ahead, the forward group led by Hastings—the Harlan- Young Party—had already spent a grueling week struggling down the forbidding canyon, which grew narrower as it went. Wagons crossed and recrossed the river, sometimes driving straight down the rocky bed, with no guarantee they might not topple. One man watched some of his comrades trying to build a road through the canyon and proclaimed in his journal that it was 'an exhibition of most consumate folly.'
Hastings had never intended to travel down the canyon; a guide working for him had taken the wagons down that route while Hastings was briefly away. Now, in the note he left for the Donner Party, Hastings urged the trailing emigrants to stop where they were and send a messenger ahead so that he could return and take them along another route through the Wasatch. Finding the note, the men of the Donner Party huddled together and decided that three riders would search out Hastings while the rest of the party waited and rested. Ever at the center of events—and at least partly responsible for convincing the others to chance the shortcut—James Reed was chosen to go, along with Charles Stanton and William Pike, a son-in-law in the big Murphy clan. They mounted up, waved goodbye to their families and comrades, and rode off into the mountains to pursue the vanishing 'guide' on whom they had staked so much.
THE THREE MEN RODE HARD, but by the time they caught Hastings they had crossed the Wasatch and descended to the beginning of the pancake-flat country that nuzzles up against the Great Salt Lake. None of the three had ever met Hastings, but somewhere in camp they were introduced. Reed must have noted acidly that his party relied on Hastings's promise to guide them from Fort Bridger, only to arrive and find that he had already left. Now they were here to collect on the promissory note. Hastings should return and show the way.
Hastings agreed, and he and Reed headed back toward the Wasatch, Reed on a fresh, borrowed mount. Stanton and Pike, their horses gasping for water and rest, stayed behind, promising to follow along when they could.
Reed and Hastings had not even reentered the Wasatch before Hastings yet again broke his word, announcing that he would not return to the stranded wagons and instead would simply point out the preferred route to Reed. There was no time to go all the way back, Hastings insisted. He needed to stay with the Harlan-Young Party and guide them across the salt desert west of the lake. Reed and Hastings camped together that night, and the next morning climbed a nearby peak from which Hastings vaguely indicated a course the Donner Party wagons
