departure: He was simply going ahead for provisions, in effect reprising the effort of Stanton and McCutchan, the volunteers sent out a few weeks before. One of Reed's teamsters, Walter Herron, was traveling with the Donners, but now he joined Reed, providing help and companionship that could easily prove crucial to survival.
In less than a month, Reed had been transformed from the richest man in the train to one of the poorest, and now he had been rejected altogether, forced to abandon his family and the few material possessions he retained. He was leaving his wife and children with a group of people who had just banished him, some of whom had wanted to kill him. And yet the loss may have been greater for the others than for Reed. For all his airs, he possessed admirable qualities. William Graves, who disliked Reed, acknowledged that he was 'as true as steel.' Reed often made the day-to-day decisions about where to camp or noon or water the stock, and the others had relied on his intelligence and tenacity. When three men were sent ahead to find Hastings and ask about the route, Reed was the only one who returned quickly. Through the Wasatch—and perhaps beyond—it appears that he was effectively the captain of the party, titles notwithstanding. Others recognized such traits. At Fort Bridger, Louis Vasquez turned to Reed when he wanted to recover three missing horses. The animals had strayed or been stolen, and Vasquez wrote out a short note in effect making Reed his agent. 'We do hereby authorise Mr. Jas. Read,' Vasquez wrote in a full, rounded hand, 'to take where ever he should find three horses stolen or strayed from us.' He could have turned to any man in the train, but Vasquez picked Reed. Now, short on both provisions and time and still hundreds of miles from its destination, the Donner Party would have to push ahead without its one true leader.
11
Abandoned
The old man struggled to keep up. The sterile terrain and the long journey had weakened the draft animals until they could no longer bear the extra weight of passengers in the wagons, so everybody was walking, even children and the elderly. Hardcoop, a Belgian whose first name is lost to history, was struggling along as best he could, but the muscles and bones and joints that had carried him through sixty hard years were finally giving way.
The same thing had happened the day before, after he had been booted from his normal seat in Lewis Keseberg's wagon. He had fallen so far behind that when the others pitched camp at night, they realized the old man was missing and dispatched a rider on a rescue mission. Hardcoop was found five miles back on the trail.
Now, the following morning, they were again on the march. It had been less than half an hour since they broke camp, and Keseberg had renewed his refusal to carry Hardcoop. Searching for a ride, Hardcoop asked William Eddy for a seat in his wagon. Eddy balked too. They were struggling through a sandy patch, where the loose ground sucked at the wheels, and Eddy thought his oxen could handle no extra weight. If Hardcoop could keep going on his own for a time, Eddy said, perhaps he could ride in the wagon when the trail improved. The old man vowed to forge ahead.
But when the emigrants stopped that night, they again found Hardcoop was missing, just as he had been the night before. Boys who had been driving cattle recalled him sitting by the side of the trail, physically played out and unable to go on. Another rescue ride so late at night was impossible, so they built a signal fire and hoped he might stumble in to camp. The night guards stoked the flames through the wee hours, but Hardcoop never appeared.
Eddy set about organizing a rescue effort, but he had no horse, so he asked Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves, the two men with saddle animals that could be used.
Breen said it was impossible to save the old man. Graves flashed with anger and said he would not risk losing a good horse to search for a man who was probably already dead. He declared he wanted to hear no more of the idea. Desperate, Eddy and two other men offered to walk back and search. The others said they would not wait. The night had been cold, perhaps too cold for a weakened old man to survive. Even if he was still alive, he could be miles in the rear, a half day's walk just to reach him. And what then? How would they get him back to the main parly? And what about the next day, or the next, or the next? This wasn't a militaiy unit, men bound to one another with unshakable allegiance. Nobody had promised Hardcoop anything. Out this far, you could look to your family members, but not much beyond that. If Hardcoop couldn't keep up, or so the argument must have gone, then sooner or later he was destined to die. They broke camp, hitched up the wagons, took a final look backward, and rolled out to the west. Parents must have told their children to stay extra close that day.
Keseberg has often been described as the villain of Hardcoop's abandonment, and there is little doubt he was a hard man, if not an overtly mean one. Yet Keseberg should not shoulder the blame alone. Eddy was the main source for the story, especially the details about his efforts at a morning rescue, yet even he admitted that the previous day he refused to let Hardkoop ride in his wagon when the old man asked for help, and Eddy apparently made no effort to learn what happened to him the rest of the day.
Nor did anyone else. On the day Hardcoop was left behind, most members of the party must have had some inkling of the old man's struggle, must have noticed that he was faltering or was sitting by the trail or was nowhere to be found at the noon break. Only the day before, after all, he had been unable to keep up; it would have required no great act of collective mercy or prescience to mind his progress with a protective eye. Anyone could have helped, but no one did.
Hardcoop would have labored on until he was past exhaustion. He had a son and daughter in Antwerp, and after the trip west he intended to return to Belgium and spend his declining years with them. If only he could somehow make it to camp, perhaps he would see them again, bounce grandchildren on his knee and spend a peaceful old age amid the pleasures of home. He had risked everything for one last adventure—a glimpse of this far-off place called California—and now the dream was darkening into nightmare. He could be halfway to Belgium now, not out here stumbling through the wilderness and fighting for his life.
If he made it through the night, he must have gazed at the morning horizon hoping for some approaching figure of rescue. Perhaps someone was coming back. Perhaps they had not forgotten him. Perhaps they would take pity on a weak old man. But at some point he faced the facts. He could go no farther forward, and they were not coming back. He may have just walked to the end and collapsed onto the trail when he was fully spent. Or perhaps he found some piece of shade where he could sit down and await the inevitable.
AHEAD ON THE TRAIL, THE BANISHED James Reed and his teamster Walter Herron had only one horse between them, so they took turns riding and walking, half the day in the saddle and half on foot. Freed from the wagon train's crawling pace, they made good time—close to forty miles one day and often twenty-five or more, by Reed's reckoning. His unfinished diary remained with his family, but now he continued the effort as best he could, using a scrap of spare paper to scrawl out a crude map, mileage notations, and a few taciturn comments. 'Hard pass. You must double teams,' he wrote at the start, presumably referring to the hill where he had killed Snyder.
Despite 'all the economy I could use,' as Reed wrote later, their provisions ran out in a few days, forcing them to hunt for food. Still, he and Herron survived the Nevada desert, even stopping long enough at a hot springs to use the scalding water to make a cup of tea. Near the lake where the rest of the party would eventually be trapped, Reed noted that they endured eight miles of 'the worst road in creaton,' and then began climbing into the Sierra Nevada. Game grew scarcer, and in any event they had little time for hunting if they wished to reach the California settlements and return with supplies before winter. The result was that starvation became a very real possibility. They managed to gather a few wild onions, but eventually they grew so famished that Herron wanted to kill the horse for meat, although Reed held him off, insisting that destroying their best means of transportation should be a last resort. At one point, while Herron was riding and Reed walking, Reed found a single bean, apparently dropped by previous emigrants, and they began scanning the ground. 'Never was a road examined more closely for several miles,' Reed wrote later. In all, they found five beans; Herron, who had briefly become delirious from hunger, ate three of them, Reed two.
Stumbling on some abandoned wagons, they ransacked the contents but found no food. Desperate, Reed checked a bucket slung under the bed of one of the wagons and used to store axle grease. He scraped away the tar normally used as grease and at the bottom found 'a streak of rancid tallow'—animal fat that was sometimes also
