gripped by handmade wooden splints. Now he moved gingerly at first, not wanting to risk some further trouble with the limb. His parents watched nervously, then breathed a sigh of relief as the boy touched his heels to the animal's flank and moved off.
SOME PLACES ON THE TRAIL SEEMED CURSED. The air or the water or the soil brought out the snippy side of people, all the collected antagonisms of a long journey simmering like a low-grade fever. Somebody remembered the time that Smith held up the train for no good reason. Or the way Jones always commandeered the best campsite. Or the fact that Johnson was lazy about guard duty. Or the way somebody talked too much or talked too little or just plain annoyed folks. Weeks and weeks and weeks of hard travel built up the pressure until something sparked an eruption, and sometimes it seemed to be nothing more than a spot along the path, even a good spot.
Up ahead of the Donner Party, Edwin Bryant and his friends in the mule train found one such spot when they camped in a grassy dale where springs bubbled up a water supply and the foliage offered rich feed for the animals. The next morning, two men argued over some minor slight, 'a very trivial matter,' Bryant wrote. The dispute grew heated until both men leveled rifles. Bryant thought the whole affair was crazy. Here they were in the middle of nowhere and people were threatening to kill the very comrades on whom they depended. He rushed into the middle of it and started giving both men a lecture, telling them that killing each other was as bad as an attack by some outsider. Tempers cooled and the barrels were lowered.
The Donner Party reached the same exact place five weeks later and weathered a broader if less acute quarrel—a war of the sexes. 'All the women in Camp were mad with anger,' Reed wrote in his diary. He gave no more details, other than suggesting that the site should be known as Mad Woman Camp.
Maybe it was just boredom that tweaked the nerves. After crossing the salt desert of Utah, the wagons entered what is today eastern Nevada and endured a repetitious geology where the earth has furrowed itself into a succession of small mountain ranges, like the lines of a wrinkled forehead. Heinrich Lienhard, traveling the same route but well ahead of the Donner Party, could not avoid echoing the region's monotony in his journal entries. 'We came into a valley which was veiy much like the one we had left,' he wrote. Then the next day: 'We went through another gap and came into a dry valley.' And the following day, after yet another mountain crossing: 'The valley lying before us was again broad, and resembled in eveiy respect the one we had just crossed.'
And then they squared up against the Ruby Mountains, the last obstacle on Hastings's ill-advised cut-off. On the other side of the mountains lay the Humboldt River, where they would rejoin the traditional trail. On his eastbound journey earlier in the year, Hastings had crossed the Rubies via a small, steep defile that later came to be known as Secret Pass, a route that required little detour. But Secret Pass was too rugged for wagons; another way had to be found. The point at which the trail collided with the mountains lay toward the northern tip of the range, and so the easiest and quickest choice would have been to turn north and circle around that end. But no one had ever taken that route, so nobody knew how close the wagons were to an easy passage. Guiding the Harlan- Young Party, days in front of the Donner Party, Hastings instead turned to the south—yet another mistake, this one born mostly of ignorance. He began paralleling the mountains, looking constantly to his right to find a workable pass.
When the Donner Party wagons came along, they were following the plainly visible tracks of the earlier group, and so they too headed south. They trudged along beneath the precipitous rise of the mountains for three days, interrupted by one baffling and inexcusable Friday on which they remained in camp, going nowhere and achieving nothing. Finally, they came to a shallow pass—Reed described it as 'a flatt in the mounton'—and followed it up and over the crest. Streams led them down the other side, and on September 26, a little west of what is today Elko, Nevada, they at last reached the Humboldt, where they found the main California trail that ran down from Idaho. The Hastings Cut-Off was finished at last.
It had been more than two months since they separated from the other California-bound trains along the Little Sandy. At Fort Bridger, the last place where they could change their minds and stick with the main trail, Reed had optimistically written that he hoped to reach Sutter's Fort in seven weeks by taking the cut-off. When they arrived at the Humboldt, more time than that had already passed, and they were still far from their goal. Edwin Bryant, their onetime traveling companion who had joined the Fourth of July celebration before trading in his wagon for mules, was now more than a month ahead.
Ironically, it was the presumed advantage of Hastings's route that was in fact its central flaw. Like a modern engineer building a freeway, Hastings laid his course with a straight-edge, heedless of the constraints of mountain or desert. In this, he was in some respects the first modern westerner, struggling to impose human preference on an unforgiving geography, but he was foolishly ahead of his time. Mountain men or militaiy units might conquer whatever barrier lay before them, but family wagons and livestock needed to treat the most difficult topography with grudging respect, circumventing obstructions rather than assaulting them. Travel by compass bearing alone was an arrogant fantasy. The traditional trail curved and buckled and detoured for a reason: Western terrain demanded a circumspect and sinuous approach. Crossing the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert—tasks more onerous than anything emigrants faced on the traditional trail—not only slowed progress horrendously but also weakened people and animals alike, both physically and mentally. Lienhard, the fellow emigrant who was ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, pondered the realities of the Hastings Cut-Off and declared in his diary that it would more appropriately be called 'Hastings Longtripp.'
In rough terms, the delay could be measured. Using information from Indians or other emigrants or even trailside notes, parties that used the Hastings Cut-Off could gauge themselves against those who had gone the traditional way. One group estimated they had lost seventy miles, at least four days of hard travel, probably more. Another party pegged their delay at nearly two weeks. For the Donner Party, the last of the groups along the cut- off, it was even worse. The gamble probably cost them a full month in lost time, as though they had simply stopped traveling and lollygagged about camp for thirty precious days.
Yet there was no time for recriminations or pouting, nothing to do but to keep moving. They could neither go back nor remain in place. Like their wagons, they had no brakes, no way of stopping the high-stakes journey on which they had wagered their lives and fortunes. The only alternative was to push forward, exhausted marathoners hoping for a second wind. They could not know that, as at every stage of their long ordeal, their situation would soon grow more precarious still. And this time, the fault would lie not with a hostile geography or an unreliable promise, but with the bitter divisions of their own comrades.
10
One Bad Hill
Most of the wagons had already climbed the long, sandy hummock. John Snyder, the teamster for the Graves family, was toward the back of the line when he began urging his charges up the slope. It was rough terrain— emigrants recalled it as a 'very bad ridge' or 'one bad hill'—and most men stopped to double-hitch, combining five or six pairs of oxen to haul just one wagon, like a truck driver dropping into a lower gear.
Snyder spurned such caution. Perhaps it was pride in his animals, or in his own skill as a teamster. Maybe he was just tired and exhausted and sick of the wearying delays. Maybe it was simple exuberance, for Snyder was a young man. Whatever the reason, he insisted his charges could conquer the hill unaided, and he started up the climb.
Suddenly there was trouble with the teams: confusion, a tangle of reins, animals shouldering their great bulks into one another, wagons crunching together. Angry words flew. Snyder and one of the Reed family teamsters shouted insults. James Reed himself stepped into the fray, and he and Snyder flared. After all those months of walking across a continent, the fatigue and the delays and the aggravations finally combined into one irresistible moment of wrath. Adrenaline shot through the veins. Fury rose in the chest. Fists clutched weapons and raised them in the air. Rage conquered all.
IT WAS BARELY A WEEK since the Donner Party had completed the disastrous Hastings Cut-Off and
