Graves's oxen was stolen by two Indians who wandered into camp and stayed the night, at one point helping to put out a grass fire. Two days later, Graves lost a horse, again apparently to thieves. Farther down the river, all of Graves's remaining horses trotted away under the reins of new and unknown owners. Then the serious depredations began. In a single night nineteen head of cattle went missing. A few days later the overnight guards, apparently thinking the danger had passed with the darkness, came into camp for breakfast. When they gulped down their last swig of coffee and rose to prepare for the morning march, they discovered that twenty-one more animals had disappeared in the time it took a man to eat a rasher or two of bacon. The losses imperiled transportation—cattle pulled the wagons—but the real cost was far greater, and one the emigrants could not yet fully appreciate. A good portion of the Donner Party's potential food supply had vanished.
12
The Mouth of Hell, the River of Life
Down the dwindling waters of the Humboldt, they set their course by taking aim toward Lone Mountain, a desert butte that reminded some emigrants of pictures they had seen of ancient Mayan pyramids. A broad, open meadow provided good fodder for the stock—the coarse grass 'as thick as hair on a Dogs back'—and then they were at the Sink, the strange and somber spot where the river died. In wet years it formed a broad, shallow lake; in a drought it simply vanished into the desert. Most years it was something in between, a boggy marsh that one slightly poetic Gold Rusher described as 'a veritable sea of slime, a slough of despond, an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison,' all of which created 'the appearance of utter desolation.' Given the conditions of 1846, the Donner Party almost surely found little or no water in what was sometimes called, too optimistically, Humboldt Lake. James Clyman, the mountain man who had tried to warn Reed about the Hastings Cut-Off, had passed by the area earlier in the year and spied 'the most thirsty appearance of any place I ever witnessed The whole of several large vallies is covered in a verry fin clay or mud which has vimited from the bowels of the earth.'
At the end of the sink stood a strange earthen berm, perhaps twenty feet high, extending across the riverbed. Probably created by the wave action of an ancient lake, this natural dike guarded a small slough where emigrants were known to fill every available vessel, sometimes even using their boots for water storage. They were eager to collect all the water they could because they were about to enter a stretch of the journey almost as brutal as the desert just beyond the Great Salt Lake. With the Humboldt now gone, they needed to cross to the Truckee River, which would lead them toward the pass over the Sierra Nevada and into California. But between the Humboldt and the Truckee lay a desolate forty-mile desert.
Like most trains, the Donner Party tried to cross at night, hoping the cooler temperatures would ease the agony of the long, waterless push. At 4:00 AM., halfway across, they found a hot springs, where steam spewed up from the ground 'like the mouth of hell,' as a later emigrant wrote. Brackish and foul-tasting, the water was still good enough to drink once it was cooled, and in the meantime offered the chance to make coffee or tea. Eddy got some coffee from the Donners and made some for his wife and children, who seemed to get a boost of energy. They rested for a time, then started again a few hours later and drove all through the day, then into the wee hours for the second straight night. For the last ten miles, deep sand covered the road, and the animals slipped and slid as they heaved the wagons through. When the Gold Rush hit a few years later and the trail turned into a crowded highway, the rotting corpses of collapsed animals lined the route. One man reported in 1849 that he and his companions had to stop 'every few yards' to rest their teams, despite the overpowering stench of decay. 'All our traveling experience,' he wrote, 'furnishes no parallel to this.' The Donner Party was no exception: Three yoke of cattle died of fatigue.
But at the end of the desert, a verdant reward awaited. After hundreds of miles of the arid, rocky sterility of the intermountain West, the Truckee River was a thing of beauty, a cool and inviting oasis lined with trees. No member of the Donner Party left a direct record of the moment they saw the river, but if their experience was like that of other trains, the arrival at the Truckee was an occasion for glee. For weeks they had seen virtually no trees; now they rushed toward a river lined with a shady bower of cottonwoods and willows. They paused a moment or two to scan the trees for hidden Indians, then turned loose the animals and ran toward the clear, clean water. They waded out into the knee-deep stream and, side by side with the stock, drank long and delicious draughts. Elisha Brooks, who made the trip in 1852, remembered her first sighting of the Truckee as though it were a mirage or a miracle. 'We beheld the green banks and crystal clear waters of the Truckee River by the morning sun; and it was to us the River of Life.'
Still, the Donner Party that arrived at those resuscitating riverbanks was a slowly disintegrating unit, both materially and spiritually. The Eddys were nearly destitute now, their wagon and possessions abandoned back on the Humboldt when Indians stole their last yoke of oxen. With no other choice, they had resolved to finish the journey on foot, Eleanor carrying their baby daughter and William shouldering their three-year-old son, three pounds of sugar, some bullets, and a powder horn. (His rifle no longer fired, but apparently he assumed he could borrow one later.) Margret Reed, her children, and her employees were hardly better off. They had been forced to abandon their wagon shortly after James Reed's departure, and although for a time they borrowed a lighter vehicle from the Graveses, soon they too, like the Eddys, abandoned most of their property. 'We had to cash all of our close except a change or 2,' Virginia Reed wrote. The Breens agreed to haul the family's last few garments, and three-year-old Thomas Reed and five-year-old James Reed were put aboard their two remaining horses. The fact that a three- year-old boy was not joined by another rider offered plain testimony to the pathetic condition of the animals. The other Reeds walked, although across the desert the Donners let them ride in a wagon. Worst of all was the fate of a German named Wolfinger, reputedly a rich man. When he stayed behind to dig a cache for his wagon before the desert crossing from the Humboldt to the Truckee, he mysteriously disappeared, and the various recollections of survivors could never quite clarify the circumstances.
So with the party still struggling, it's not surprising that talk soon turned toward another effort to secure more provisions from California. Stanton and McCutchan, the two volunteers, had been gone for more than a month, and no one knew if they had even survived to reach Sutter's Fort, let alone return. As for Reed and Herron, occasional trailside notes had offered evidence of their initial survival, but no one knew their ultimate fate. It was conceivable that none of the four men had reached safe haven across the mountains.
The two men who emerged as the would-be saviors this time were the sons-in-law of Levinah Murphy, the Mormon widow leading a three-generation clan. William Foster was married to Murphy's oldest daughter, William Pike to the second oldest. They had joined the family somewhat by chance. In the winter of 1842, when the Murphy family was leaving Nauvoo, Illinois, for Tennessee, ice floes captured their ship and held it fast in the Mississippi River. Foster and Pike were both crew members, and as the vessel lay motionless, romances flowered with the two oldest Murphy daughters, sixteen-year-old Sarah and fourteen-year-old Harriet. Both couples were wed four days after Christmas, and by the time they went west four years later, the Fosters had one young child, the Pikes two.
For an engineer on a riverboat, William Pike was a man of glorious pedigree. His grandfather had been an officer in the Revolutionary War; his uncle was the explorer Zebulon Pike, the discoverer of Pike's Peak. At the time of the Donner Party expedition, William was in his early thirties, an impressive and intelligent figure with a mechanical bent, a man almost as old and experienced as his mother-in-law. It says something about his standing in the company that near the start of the Hastings Cut-Off, when three men were needed to ride ahead and find the company's absent guide, Pike was one of those chosen. Now, he was ready to begin a risky new venture with a man he surely must have trusted, his former shipmate and current brother-in-law. But as the two men readied supplies and equipment, a small pistol that was being loaded somehow fired, striking Pike in the back. One of his wife's sisters remembered that he lived for half an hour, suffering 'more than tongue can tell.'
Accidents with firearms on the trail were more common than might be expected, especially given our modern conception that everyone in the nineteenth century was a backwoodsman or a hunter. In fact, many emigrants were new to life in the wild, as nothing so vividly attests as their experiences with weapons. More than once, someone pulled a gun from a wagon muzzle-first—and paid for the mistake with his life. Gold Rusher Andrew Orvis shot himself in the hip and noted that 'there has been several kiled and wounded on the road in the same way
