regained the main trail along the Humboldt River, the waterway that would guide them across what is now the state of Nevada. Rejoining the traditional road had been a milestone: For the only time in his long diary, Reed noted the party's location even before mentioning the date.
But the Humboldt itself proved a disappointment. Drought plagued the West in 1846, and the river had withered until it was 'more a succession or chain of stagnant pools than a stream of running water.' At places the soil was so dry that it resembled ash. Ricked up by the draft animals into vast white clouds, the dust caked the emigrants' hair and skin until they were 'as cadaverous as so many corpses.' The Humboldt was better than Hastings's nonexistent shortcut, but it was hardly easy. The hard work and long days and constant exertion still sapped the body and frayed the nerves. And then on Monday, October 5, the wagons reached the hill where Snyder refused to double-hitch.
As Snyder and Reed argued, Reed barked that they should get the teams to the top of the hill and then settle the matter man-to-man. Snyder insisted on a more immediate brand of satisfaction. He raised the butt end of his ox whip and struck Reed in the head. At almost the same moment, Reed pulled a hunting knife and lunged at Snyder, stabbing him deeply in the chest. As soon as the fight began, it was over, Snyder collapsed to the ground with a mortal wound, Reed gashed across the head, both men soaked in blood. Snyder's friends carried him up the hill and laid him on the ground, but there was nothing anyone could do for him, and within minutes he was dead.
The company cleaved in two, both figuratively and literally. The Graveses and their friends pitched camp near the top of the hill, Snyder's body lying nearby and surely fueling anger at Reed. The Reeds stopped near the bottom of the hill, perhaps with the Eddys, who seem to have taken Reed's side almost immediately. Opinion was as divided as the tents, split between those who thought Reed had merely defended himself and those who denounced him as a murderer. Later, Reed's friends and family members recalled a man deeply saddened and working to make amends: casting the knife away in disgust, rushing to Snyder's side to hear his dying words, offering boards from his own lone remaining wagon for a coffin, standing at the gravesite till every clod of dirt had been patted down over the body.
Nobody knew quite what to do. They had quit the United States when they crossed the Continental Divide— the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase—and so technically they were no longer subject to American law. Nevertheless, the developing credo of the western migration was one of remarkable commitment to legal procedure. When crime struck, emigrants typically formed courts to try the defendant, often with a rather elaborate legal structure that included a judge, jury, and lawyers for both the prosecution and defense. In at least one case, a 'sheriff ' was appointed to watch over the jury, which returned its verdict in writing. Nor were these show courts. Emigrants took great pains to ensure some element of fairness, often recruiting people from other companies to act as judge or jury so as to gain greater impartiality. In some cases, even though the wagons were racing against time, parties halted their progress to find suitable jurors in other companies or spent precious hours tracking down suspects or investigating a crime scene.
Yet for a variety of reasons, it was hardly clear that the Donner Party would observe the niceties. For one thing, there were no other companies nearby to provide a ready pool of disinterested jurors. For another, there was no agreed-upon set of rules. The Russell Party—the company in which the Donners and the Reeds first traveled— had established a set of bylaws, but these were mostly concerned with procedural matters like organizing the day's march and assigning guard duty, not punishing capital crimes. In any event, the rules had been adopted before the Donners and the Reeds joined the company, and when they and the other families split off from the main emigration to follow the Hastings Cut-Off, there was, as far as we know, no discussion of the legal procedures that might apply to the newly formed party. In later years, most emigrant parties abandoned the practice of formal bylaws for precisely this reason. Companies divided and reformed with such frequency that the original signers were often long gone by the time the rules were actually needed.
Worse still for the Donner Party, their nominal leader was not at hand. As happened periodically throughout the journey, the train had, for whatever reason, split in two a few days before the fight, and the Donner families were traveling separately, two days ahead on the trail. Revealing the tenuous nature of hierarchy in emigrant trains, nobody thought to ride ahead and fetch the elected leader of their band, and so the half dozen or so family groups now camped at opposite ends of the fatal hill were left to their own devices to settle a matter of life and death.
As is often the case with explosive moments of trauma, even the eyewitnesses could not agree on precisely what happened. The cause of the original dispute was never exactly clear. Perhaps it centered on Snyder's refusal to double-team. Perhaps it was about the order or pace of the climb. The teams may have become tangled. Snyder may have started to beat his animals or use foul language. There was no unanimity on which man struck first, or whether Margret Reed, who had stepped in as peacemaker, was hit as well. Reed's backers always maintained that Snyder took the blame for the whole thing with his dying words, but that too was disputed.
Favoritisms and resentments bubbled to the surface. Snyder had been a popular fellow, an upbeat and jovial type who liked to take the hind gate off the wagon at night and use it as a dance floor, entertaining the camp with a jig. In contrast to the ostentatious wealth with which Reed began the journey, Snyder was a young man trying to make it on his own, having struck a deal with Franklin Graves to work his way west in return for his board. He was handsome in a rugged, outdoorsy sort of way, and he may even have been romancing Mary Ann Graves, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his employer and the belle of the train.
By contrast, Reed was disliked. His haughtiness rankled from the start, and he had been the biggest advocate of the Hastings Cut-Off, now plain to all as a disaster. Lewis Keseberg may well have harbored some private grudge against Reed—there were those who said that early in the journey Reed upbraided Keseberg harshly for beating his wife or using foul language in the presence of Reed's wife—and now the German apparently tried to exact his revenge by propping up his wagon tongue, the silent call for a hanging.
Most of the emigrants opposed anything so drastic. 'Perhaps the intimate friends of Snyder favored extreme measures, but this sentiment was not generally approved,' remembered James Breen, who was only five at the time but talked about the event later with his older brother.
Instead, in what must have been a compromise of sorts, the emigrants turned to the most common form of serious punishment meted out on the overland migration: banishment. Executions certainly occurred—almost always by hanging or firing squad—but it was much more common that wrongdoers were simply forced out on their own, perhaps because the emigrants recognized that most trailside killings were not premeditated murders but, as in the case of Reed and Snyder, sudden explosions of temper, what one historian aptly called 'unleashed antagonisms, small personal matters greatly magnified.' By avoiding a killing, banishment also helped to keep the peace among those who remained in the company, a consideration that may well have influenced Reed's case. It's easy to imagine that Reed and his supporters would have tried to fight off an execution.
In later years, when the Gold Rush crowded the trail with thousands of wagons, some emigrants began to complain that banishment lacked the needed severity, so easy was it for the expelled man to latch on with some nearby company. But that was hardly the case for Reed. The emigration of 1846 was far smaller, and in any event the Donner Party was lagging far behind all the other companies. Told that he would have to ride alone to California, he faced the real possibility of death.
At first he refused, and while we have no evidence, it seems reasonable that he must have contemplated another option: abandoning the train with his entire family and pushing ahead on their own. The idea had a certain minimal plausibility. The Graves clan had been alone on the trail until it caught the Donner Party west of Fort Bridger, and the Reeds, with five employees, made a comparably sized group. But there were also sound reasons suggesting that it was impractical for the family to forge onward unaided. Their losses in the salt desert had reduced them to borrowed oxen, and the owners might have demanded their animals back. What was more, the Reeds had precious few supplies left, and without the help of fellow emigrants, they would have been reduced solely to hunting for food.
Talking over the family's options, Margret Reed emphasized their scarce provisions and told her husband that if he refused the banishment and somehow avoided a hanging by the other emigrants, he might simply watch his children starve. If he rode ahead, he might return with food and save them all. Indeed, some people remembered Reed's departure as motivated less by the killing and more by a desire to push forward quickly. He left, Mary Ann Graves insisted, 'because he would rather travail with one man than the company.' Whatever the exact mix of reasons, Reed mounted up and struck out alone, his head wounds swathed in bandages.
When he caught the Donner families farther along on the trail, he offered a sanitized version of his
