used as a lubricant. As an animal product, it was theoretically edible, and so Reed used the bucket's tar paddle to scrape up a ball of tallow about the size of a walnut. As repulsive as it sounds—old, congealed animal fat that had been sitting beneath a coating of tar—they each ate a piece, and then Herron had another. They walked on, but Reed went only fifty yards before his stomach rebelled and he became 'deadly sick and blind.' He had to stop and rest against a rock, leaning his head on the muzzle of his gun. He looked so ashen that Herron asked if he was dying.
In time, they spotted wagons belonging to a group of emigrants who had stopped to rest their cattle at a place called Bear Valley. Amazingly, they also found Charles Stanton, one of the two men who had left the Donner Party six weeks earlier to ride to California and fetch supplies. Stanton had safely reached Sutter's Fort and now was returning to the company with mules loaded with flour and dried meat. William McCutchan, the other volunteer and a man whose wife and baby daughter were among the emigrants, had also reached Sutter's Fort but had been too sick to return, so it was Stanton, the diminutive bachelor with no relatives at risk, who started back eastward over the Sierra.
Reed and Stanton exchanged news and then, as soon as possible rode off in opposite directions: Reed westward, toward Sutter's Fort and more supplies, Stanton eastward, toward the struggling party he had vowed to rescue.
BACK ON THE HUMBOLDT RIVER, the main contingent of the Donner Party was enduring a fresh adversity: conflict with Indians. Hollywood depictions notwithstanding, violence between wagon trains and tribes was actually quite rare. Over the long span of history, of course, the European conquest of the Americas was devastating to native peoples, seizing their homelands and effecting a genocide on the population. In North America, British, French, and Spanish settlement reduced the pre-Columbian population by at least half, perhaps far more than that. Estimates vary hugely, but it's clear that the European triumph cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. But in the shorter term, the overland migration to the West actually produced far less bloodshed than has commonly been portrayed in the popular culture, either in vintage movies that depicted all Indians as bloodthirsty savages preying on innocent families or in more recent fare that reversed the roles. John D. Unruh Jr., the best historian of the overland migration, tried to count the deaths of emigrants at the hands of Indians, and vice versa, using reasonably reliable contemporary sources. His admittedly imprecise tally for the two decades between 1840 and i860 found only 362 emigrants killed by Indians and—even more surprising—only 426 Indians directly killed by emigrants. Even among the few hundred deaths Unruh could identify, most occurred in 1849 or later, when the Gold Rush increased traffic on the trail drastically, unavoidably exacerbating discord with Indians. In some early years, Unruh found no deaths directly attributable to emigrant-Indian skirmishes. In 1846, the year of the Donner Party, he recorded only four emigrant deaths and twenty Indian fatalities.
Typically, emigrants started the journey with great fear of the Indians but soon found their concerns unwarranted. At Fort Kearny in Nebraska—two hundred miles or more into the journey—a correspondent reported in 1850 that most of that year's trains had yet to even see an Indian. When the two groups did encounter one another, relations were usually friendly. Indians gave directions to those who were lost, helped extract wagons that were stuck, provided water or firewood to families short on provisions, and in at least one case rescued a drowning man. Mutually beneficial business deals were common, with Indians hired to serve as guides, guards, interpreters, and packers. So peaceful was the trip that some emigrants concluded almost all dangers were mythological and discarded their weapons. Lansford Hastings, who had written the guidebook read by many emigrants of 1846, noted that earlier parties had disarmed in what is today Idaho. In 1850 one party was no farther than western Nebraska when they lightened their load by throwing out their guns.
Almost all emigrants viewed the Indians with what we would regard as gross racism and sometimes acted on an attendant belief that they could behave toward natives in any way they liked. There are stories not only of kidnapping but of wanton murder. But there were also many cases of emigrant-Indian interaction that were charmingly human and universal. Heinrich Lienhard, ahead of the Donner Party on the trail in 1846, once struck up a sign-language friendship with a Shoshone by asking him to dig some edible roots. Lienhard ate one of the roots—it reminded him of a parsnip—and enjoyed it. But that night he suffered horribly from stomach cramps and diarrhea, so when the Indian brought him more roots in the morning Lienhard was aghast. 'Since I could explain why only by signs, I bent over forward, held my stomach with both hands, and groaned as if I had severe stomach pains. Then I imitated a certain sound with my lips that could come only from another part of the anatomy, and at the same time I made a quick gesture to my behind. The Indians understood completely, and they all burst out in a storm of laughter. My friend laughed loudest of all, and threw his roots at my back. We naturally joined in the laughter and parted as good friends in spite of all.'
When trouble did arise, emigrants sometimes found that Indians were wrongly blamed. In 1844 a minister named Edward Parrish noted in his journal a developing crisis that was by turns a story of suspicion and exculpation, all in a single morning: 'Preparing to make an early start, But the cattle are not all lined up. Indians accused of driving them off. Indians not guilty—cattle found.' White criminals sometimes disguised themselves as Indians, although in at least one case the ruse failed. In 1859 a woman was raped by five apparent Indians, although she was able to identify her attackers as white men because, in the words of a government report on the incident, 'They had not taken the precaution to paint the whole body.'
We have fewer written records revealing the Native American perspective about the migration, although we know that some chiefs initially urged cooperation and amicable relations. The West was a polyglot place, after all.
Aside from hundreds of distinct Indian tribes, there had long been French, British, and American trappers and traders, occasionally even Spanish explorers roaming up from the south. It would not have been immediately obvious that the new groups of white people in covered wagons represented a stark departure from the past. When the emigrants did begin to appear, one record of Indian perception suggests a progression of emotions not unlike that of the emigrants: initial fear followed by a growing acceptance and realization of common humanity. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, the daughter of a chief, remembered that when she was a girl, her people first heard stories of slaughter and even cannibalism by emigrant trains. Caught too near a band of approaching whites, the little girl's mother became so fearful that she briefly buried her two children alive as a way to hide them, propping sage bushes over their exposed faces to provide more cover.
If a single rough grain of contention abraded the relationship between emigrants and Indians—at least from the perspective of the emigrants—it was the theft of horses and other stock. For California-bound trains, theft was worst of all along the Humboldt, a hardscrabble region inhabited by Indians whom the emigrants denounced as 'diggers.' The name came from the native practice of using a stick to dig for edible roots and grub, but it was also meant to suggest that the local Indians were primitive, filthy people. Mark Twain denounced them as 'the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen,' and the perception continued into the twentieth century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard DeVoto, who in another context chastised Americans for insufficient comprehension of Indian life and folkways, described the 'diggers' as people without a culture, even insisting that many were 'physically decadent.' In fact, the Indians of the Great Basin—mostly Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute—had shrewdly adapted to their difficult surroundings. The digging that earned the white men's epithet was a reasonable way to reach foodstuffs, but it was hardly their only method of acquiring nourishment. They snared game, irrigated small plots of land, and collected large quantities of pine nuts, some of which were buried in order to preserve them for the winter months. DeVoto was wrong about a lack of culture: They were renowned for their artistic basketry, painted hides to depict important events, and specified rites to mark mileposts of life such as the birth of a couple's first child. Though hardly the richest native people of North America, neither were the Indians of the Humboldt River the filthy savages reported by the emigrants.
At every step of the journey, the Donner Party fit the pattern of emigrant-Indian interaction: initial fear, then friendly relations, then trouble along the Humboldt. The fear began before the trip did. On the long winter nights in the months before they left, Virginia Reed's grandmother entertained the girl with yarns about a relative supposedly kidnapped and held captive by Indians for five years, tales that so frightened Virginia she would back up against the nearest wall, lest a marauder attack her with a tomahawk from behind. When the Donner Party wagons encountered Indians operating a ferry service across the Kansas River, Virginia wondered if the strange entrepreneurs would sink the vessel halfway across so as to drown their white passengers. No such confrontation occurred, of course, and by the time they reached Fort Laramie, the members of the Donner Party were comfortable enough with Indians to invite them for meals. But conflict began almost as soon as they hit the Humboldt. A yoke of
