might take through the mountains. 'He gave me the direction,' Reed wrote later.
Then, his duty grossly unfinished, Hastings turned away from Reed and rode off to the west. For the rest of their journey, the members of the Donner Party would never again speak with the man who had promised to lead them.
Consigned to his own ingenuity, Reed rode down off the mountaintop and found an Indian trail, which he began following back toward the wagons, blazing trees to mark the path more clearly. He rode back into the ring of the Donner Party corral on Monday evening, August 10, four days after he, Stanton, and Pike had gone ahead to find Hastings. Eveiyone must have crowded around eagerly to hear his report, in which he told of Hastings's refusal to come back and act as guide. The canyon route of the Harlan-Young Party was too risky, he insisted. Many of the wagons would be destroyed. On the other hand, the path he had just blazed through the Wasatch was 'fair, but would take considerable labor in clearing and digging.'
There is no record that Reed and the others discussed another option, one they should at least have considered: backtracking to Fort Bridger, returning to the traditional trail, and forsaking Hastings's chimerical cut-off altogether. Traveling from Fort Bridger to their current position had required six and a half days, but since they now knew the country the return trip would have been quicker. And they now had abundant evidence of Hastings's rash judgment, if not mendacity. Clyman had told them the shortcut was probably impassable. Hastings had promised to wait for them at Fort Bridger, then gone ahead without them. Then he had promised to return and guide them through the Wasatch, only to abandon them with little more than a wave of his hand toward a route he had never taken. Surely they did not want to be seen as fainthearts who lost courage in a crisis, staggering back into Fort Bridger ignominiously. But on the other hand, their circumstances had changed—they no longer had any promise of a guide to show them the way—and when fresh evidence emerges settled decisions must often be revisited. Judicious reappraisals were common on western trails. The same year as the Donner Party, one group of emigrants took the so-called Applegate Cut-Off toward Oregon, a new and reputedly easier route. But just fifteen miles past the fork, they found a handwritten note warning that it was two or three days to grass and water, a dangerous and difficult haul. Consultations were held, and the group resolved to change its destination and make for California.
For the Donner Party, backtracking would have cost precious time, but their only other options were equally grim: try to follow the Harlan-Young Party's disastrous route through Weber Canyon, or take their chances with Reed's newfound path, which had never been traversed by wagons of any kind, which in fact barely existed at all. Still, Reed 'reported in favour' of the new route, as he put it in his diary, and no one was in a position to argue. Of those who were present, only he had seen the narrow end of Weber
Canyon, and only he had crossed the Wasatch. If he thought the mountain route was the better way—and it may have been—it was simple logic to bow to his judgment. Reed seemed to acknowledge that he bore some special responsibility for the decision. In his journal, he noted that his account of the mountains 'induced the Compay to proceed.'
So, as they had before, the men of the Donner Party ignored the increasing evidence that Hastings was a charlatan and vowed to forge ahead along his untried bearing.
UNTIL NOW THE JOURNEY HAD BEEN ACROSS the open plains or up the relatively gentle slope of the Rockies, and always in the wake of those who had gone before. But in the Wasatch, the Donner Party began to bushwhack, clearing a road through a thicket of mountain forest as impenetrable as a jungle. Virginia Reed thought it was incomprehensible to those who were not there:
Only those who have passed through this country on horseback can appreciate the situation. There was absolutely no road, not even a trail. The cannon wound around among the hills. Heavy underbrush had to be cut away and used for making a roadbed.
In one canyon the trail crossed the same creek thirteen times, the teamsters weaving from bank to bank in search of clearance. Frustrated, James Reed thought they were making even less distance than they were.
Then suddenly progress stopped entirely. They were approaching a pass across what is now known as Big Mountain, and the pace of road building grew so glacial that moving the camp seemed pointless. Instead the men simply walked out every morning, hacked away what little territory they could, and then returned to the exact same campsite at night. Reed's journal entries became terse concessions of stasis: 'in Camp all hands Cutting and opning a road through the Gap' and 'Still Clearing and making Road in Reeds Gap.' Then at last he allowed himself a quiet and exhausted declaration of triumph: 'Still in Camp and all hands working on the road which we finished.'
They rolled across the pass using the road they had just hewn from the forest, and then down an incredibly steep and treacherous descent on the other side. A search party located Stanton and Pike, unseen since Reed had been forced to leave them behind with the Harlan-Young Party near the Great Salt Lake. The two men had spent days trying to rejoin the Donner Party, struggling through the mountains and, at least according to one account, nearly starving to death. But no sooner had the group regained its two lost members and crossed over Big Mountain than it faced another seemingly immutable natural enemy—a canyon so clogged with heavy timber that the wagons again remained in camp while the men went to work. They chopped and sawed for two days before moving the wagons up, but then found the veiy end of the canyon so barricaded with foliage that it seemed impervious to road-building. The only option was to take the wagons over a frighteningly steep hill at the side of the canyon, a climb so precipitous that there was a real danger of rolling backwards down the grade. Virginia Reed remembered that almost every ox in the train was required to pull each wagon up the slope, which would mean that thirty or forty animals were needed to drag a single vehicle. But in time they reached the summit and were rewarded with a view of the valley of the Great Salt Lake. 'It gave us great courage,' remembered fourteen-year-old John Breen. Reed's journal entry, by contrast, does not even mention the struggle over the final hill and seems strangely nonchalant: 'this day we passed through the Mountains and encampd in the Utah Valley.'
More than at any other point on its long and emotionally powerful journey, the Donner Party's passage through the Wasatch created a tangible historical legacy. Just a year later, in the summer of 1847, Mormon emigrants used the route while seeking a haven for their faith. At times, the Mormons had to scour the earth for the faint traces of the Donner Party's presence, wagon ruts still vaguely visible. In other places, the residue of the 1846 journey was more obvious—a cleft through the thick forests that was plain evidence of the tenacity with which the new road had been hewed. Only at the end did the Mormons depart from the Donner trail. The final, infuriating gorge that defeated the Donner Party—forcing them to haul up over the nearby hill—was cleared by the Mormons in less than a day and became Emigration Canyon, the main entryway to the Latter-Day Saints' lonely, pious kingdom of Deseret.
The Donner Party's Wasatch crossing had required more than two weeks, a debilitating loss of precious time. It was now August 22. Soon the debilitating heat of summer would give way to the crisp nights of fall. The delays that had beset the earlier portions of their journey—the high water of the Kansas River, the death of Sarah Keyes, the mysterious Sabbath lull that followed their Fourth of July celebration—were nothing compared to the slog through the mountains. Maybe it had been the best of a bad set of options. Maybe it would have taken longer to follow the Harlan-Young Party down Weber Canyon or to backtrack to Fort Bridger and the traditional trail. But the hard facts of the calendar could not be denied. At Fort Bridger, Reed had optimistically predicted that they might reach California in seven weeks. Crossing the Wasatch had required a third of that time, all for a paltry thirty-five miles. Virginia Reed remembered that by the time the Donner Party cleared the mountains and reached the exotic shores of the Great Salt Lake, they were 'worn with travel and greatly discouraged.' They had six hundred more miles to go.
9
Unearthly
If the Donner Party received any brief encouragement as it struggled against the Wasatch Mountains, it must have come from the startling realization that other emigrants were even farther behind. At some point during the
