marching toward cooling lakes or lush, verdant meadows or even magnificent cities dotted with grand homes and shaded, regal avenues. If there was any other living thing for miles, the emigrants could not see it. 'The hiatus in the animal and vegetable kingdoms was perfect,' wrote Edwin Bryant, the journalist who had once traveled with the Donners. The desert, he said, was 'unearthly.'
By midday on Wednesday, September 2, the members of the Donner Party had been marching through this lifeless vacuum for more than two days with little sleep or rest. It had been three days since they passed the last spring with drinkable water, and the oxen began to give out. The line of march elongated—families pulling ahead if they could and lagging behind if they could not—but even the forward-most group could not make it with all their wagons. So teamsters unhitched their animals and drove them onward, hoping merely to keep the beasts alive and return later for the abandoned cargo. Teamsters kept their eyes on Pilot Peak, an aptly named and plainly visible mountain at the desert's western edge with a well-known freshwater spring at its base.
The Reeds struggled near the rear of the line. James Reed decided to ride ahead to fetch water and then return, telling his hired teamsters before he left that if necessary they should unyoke the oxen and drive them forward, along with the cattle he was taking west as livestock. Reed reached the encampment beneath Pilot Peak about dark, just a few hours after the other families had made it. He stayed for an hour, drinking from the spring and resting, and then started back toward his family. Sometime before midnight, he encountered his own teamsters, driving his oxen and cattle toward the spring, and told them to water the animals and then follow him back out onto the desert.
He found his family in the morning, and together they kept a day-long vigil, peering vainly to the west in hopes of seeing the returning teamsters and animals. By nightfall, with their water running low, it was clear that another day on the desert might prove fatal, so they decided to abandon the wagons and set out on foot for the spring, carrying some bread and what little water they had left. James Reed carried the youngest child, three-year- old Thomas; the other three children walked. The youngsters eventually grew exhausted and lay down to sleep, covered as much as possible by shawls. A wind kicked up—James Reed remembered it as 'a cold hurricane'—so he and Margret sat upwind of their children, their backs forming a makeshift break, and encouraged the family's five dogs—Tyler, Barney, Trailor, Tracker, and Cash—to crowd around for more warmth. 'It was the couldes night you ever saw,' thirteen-year-old Virginia wrote later in a letter. 'The wind blew and if it haden bin for the dogs we would have Frosen.'
If they needed an incentive to get moving again, it came by accident before dawn, when one of the dogs suddenly jumped up and began barking. The others did the same, and as the Reeds roused themselves, one of the family steers suddenly bolted out of the night and ran straight for them. Luckily it changed course, although, as Reed noted diyly, 'There was no more complaining of being tired or sleepy the balance of the night.'
Resuming their march, they reached the wagons of Jacob Donner, whose oxen had also grown so weak that they had been unhitched and driven ahead to water. From the Donner family, Reed learned why his teamsters had never returned with the livestock: As they approached the spring at Pilot Peak, the unyoked animals sensed water and bolted into the desert, and now were missing. (The animal that ran at the Reed camp in the night had obviously wandered around and eventually stumbled across the family, almost literally.) Once again, Reed temporarily abandoned his family, leaving them with the
Donners, and walked ahead to the spring, where the other families were camped and waiting. That night, Reed and Jacob Donner returned to the desert and brought out the Donner wagons, which now carried the Reed family as well. Five and a half days after they walked away from the last freshwater spring on the eastern edge of the desert, all the members of the Donner Party had made it across.
They spent nearly a week camped at Pilot Peak, alternately resting, searching for missing cattle, and going back into the desert to bring up wagons that had been left behind. Perceptions varied as to the cause of the delay, doubtlessly deepening existing tensions within the group. Reed remembered later that most everyone had lost some stock, universalizing the cause of the delay; others thought they were hunting specifically for Reed's animals, as though he alone were the cause of the extra effort. Two days after the Reeds and the Donners reached the spring, some of the men set out for the Reeds' abandoned wagons, the farthest out on the salt flats. Judging by Reed's own journal and modern archaeological evidence, the wagons were probably about twenty-five miles from Pilot Peak, a hard day's travel. In one case, Reed and the others may have freed a wagon by digging a small pit, perhaps a yard wide and a foot deep, at the same time discarding a broken wheel and replacing it with a spare. Since most of their cattle had been lost, the Reeds were forced to permanently abandon two of their three wagons, leaving behind most of their household goods.
The cost of the desert crossing had been incalculable. In all, they had lost thirty-six cattle, either because the animals bolted and ran off or because they simply could go no farther and collapsed. George Donner and Lewis Keseberg each abandoned a wagon, but it was clearly the Reeds whose fortunes had been the most deeply damaged. Left with only one ox and one cow, they were forced to borrow an extra team merely to pull their one remaining wagon, the richest family in the train reduced to accepting frontier charity. Even among the families who made it through with their animals and wagons intact, the livestock had suffered, weaker now as draft animals and scrawnier as a potential supply of meat. Perhaps most significant, the company was increasingly divided and dispirited, families eyeing each other as sources of hindrance rather than help. When the Reed family divided its provisions, which could not fit into the one wagon that remained, the result was a near-universal sense of martyrdom and grievance, the Reeds convinced they had generously victualed their comrades, the other families certain of their beneficence in helping the newly impoverished. Like most wagon trains, the Donner Party had never been a truly unified force, but now it was more fragmented than ever, wilting in both spirit and body. John Breen, who was fourteen at the time of the journey, thought back to the desert passage years later and recalled simply, 'Here our real hardships commenced.'
THEY STARTED FORWARD AGAIN on a morning when a snowstorm dusted the nearby hills, a reminder of the advancing calendar that, as John Breen remembered it, 'made the mothers tremble.' In fact, desperation was beginning to suffuse more than just the maternal contingent of the Donner Party. Fearful that their provisions might not carry through to California, the company agreed that each family would inventory its foodstuffs, then provide a written status report to Reed, another sign of his de facto status as leader. The result was apparently pessimistic, for Reed suggested that two riders hurry on to Sutter's Fort, fetch fresh supplies, and then backtrack to meet the rest of the party somewhere on the trail. His recent setback on the desert had hardly diminished Reed's enthusiasm for the expansive gesture: He wrote a letter to Sutter personally guaranteeing payment for the supplies, assuming he eventually reached California.
The resupply effort would be an astonishingly dangerous mission—two men alone would be easy prey for hostile Indians or unscrupulous emigrants in other trains, or even simple mishap—and so it would have to be strictly a matter for volunteers. None of the men with large families—Reed himself, the Donner brothers, Graves—stepped forward, perhaps because they dared not abandon their wives and children, perhaps because they were too old, perhaps both. Either the hired hands were unwilling or their employers balked at losing the help, so it was left to men with smaller, younger families or to those traveling alone. The first to step forward was William McCutchan, a giant of a man with a bushy mane of hair who was going west with his wife, Amanda, and their toddler daughter, Harriet. Left behind by some previous train for unknown reasons, they had joined the Donner Party at Fort Bridger, apparently traveling without a wagon and carrying what supplies they could on a horse and a mule. His offer was conditional: The rest of the party must vow to help his wife and daughter, a reasonable demand that was granted quick acquiescence. The other volunteer was Charles Stanton, the former Chicago merchant hoping to rekindle some inner flame after a bout with depression, who said he would go if someone provided a mount. His family now assured of aid, McCutchan agreed that Stanton could take his mule.
Physically, the men were opposites—Stanton diminutive, McCutchan said to be six-feet-six—but there were plenty of other reasons to find them a strange selection. McCutchan had not even been a member of the Donner Party for most of the trip, and Stanton was a bachelor with no relatives or loved ones in the train, and thus a man who might balk at returning if he reached safety in California. But absent other volunteers there wasn't much choice, so the unlikely pair of couriers packed food and blankets onto their saddles and set off toward the west.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WEEKS Edward Breen swung into a saddle. Through the Wasatch, when the young man's labor had been desperately needed to help clear the way, he had been lying in a wagon, his broken left leg
