by just being earless with their fire arms.' Occasionally, the circumstances were simply bizarre. In one case a gun went off accidentally because the hammer caught on a woman's skirt.
But Pike's death offered a broader lesson too. In less than a month, the Donner Party had lost four of its members: Snyder stabbed, Har-coop abandoned, Wolfinger the victim of an unknown fate, Pike shot accidentally. Even before the mountain entrapment that would mark their tale for generations, the Donner Party was proving the hazards of the way west. Life was risky everywhere—cholera was cholera, no matter where it struck—but the weight of the historical evidence suggests that death was more common for emigrants who braved the trip than for their more timid brethren back home. A budding new industry recognized the risks. Only three years before the Donner Party headed west, the first commercial life insurance company in the United States was founded, sparking a quick proliferation of competitors. But almost all the policies forbade travel beyond the Mississippi River, so likely was it that the companies would have to pay beneficiaries. Not until the Gold Rush sent thousands of policyholders scurrying toward the Pacific did the insurers allow western travel, and even then there was typically a surcharge on premiums, an added tariff for adventure in America's great natural wonderland.
ALONG THE TRUCKEE, THE WAGONS snaked through the river canyon, fording the current again and again, the water pushing up against the wheel rims. At times the canyon pinched to a sheer-walled gorge that barely offered room for a trail.
Then on one of the endless days marching westward they finally saw a cheering site ahead of them. Stanton bumped along at the head of a little mule train, returning with supplies, just as he had promised. After bidding farewell to Reed on the west slope of the Sierra, the intrepid Stanton had crossed the mountains with two Indians sent along by John Sutter, and now, somewhere on the eastern side, he reappeared before his old companions. Provisions were extraordinarily low, but Stanton brought flour and fresh meat, and the Dutch ovens soon produced biscuits. Patty Reed loaded her apron and distributed the welcome victuals to the children—one biscuit apiece. 'I don't know when we had had bread before,' remembered Frances Donner. 'It was a great treat to us then.' For the Reeds, Stanton brought another godsend as well: news that James Reed had made it safely over the mountains. Stanton recounted his meeting with Reed, 'not fur from Suters Fort,' as Virginia Reed described it, and said that although Reed had eaten only three times in a week, he was at least healthy enough to ride onward.
To the bedraggled, half-starved members of the Donner Party, it must have seemed that the worst of their problems had passed. They had already endured more than many emigrants ever did. Leaving the main road, they had been forced to hack a new path through the Wasatch and then to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert, a more desiccated and debilitating environment than most trains ever encountered. Comrades had been deserted callously and killed violently, and a man had been banished to the wilderness. At various points, water and provisions had run so low as to threaten the very survival of the party. Yet now they had a replenished larder and, perhaps more important, a guide who could lead them over the lone obstacle still to be conquered. Stanton had crossed the Sierra twice, once westward to fetch supplies, once eastward to bring them back. What was more, he was a man they could trust, not merely one of their own but a selfless volunteer who had proven his fealty merely by reappearing. Surely he could lead them all over the mountains to safety. Surely the ordeal was done.
Part 2
Tribulation
13
A Great Snowy Range
By the time westward emigrants reached the Sierra Nevada, they had completed all but a hundred miles of a two-thousand-mile journey. Yet that final, brief stretch constituted a singular and frightening obstacle as testing as any they had yet endured.
Lying almost entirely within the modern state of California, the Sierra Nevada is the largest single mountain range in the contiguous United States. (The Rockies and Appalachians, although covering a greater area, are collections of geologically distinct chains.) Slathered across an area almost as large as the Alps are more than five hundred peaks that exceed 12,000 feet in elevation, including Mt. Whitney, at 14,494 feet the highest point in the country, save Alaska. Such pinnacles are the topmost portion of a vast and mostly subsurface mass of granite, actually consisting of hundreds of individual pieces but known collectively to geologists as the Sierra Nevada batholith. Millions of years ago, this underground behemoth thrust upward through the earth's surface, eventually transforming what had been a range of low hills into the majestic spires visible today. The boost was greater in the east than in the west, so that the mountains tilted as they grew, and the Sierra Nevada came to be a range with two starkly different slopes: precipitous on the east side of the summit ridge, gradual on the west. This geology mattered to the overland migration because it meant that as the wagons creaked slowly toward the final obstacle of the journey, they faced not a staircase of gently rising foothills but a dizzying cliff face of nearly vertical escarpments, some of which dropped thousands of feet from the alpine heights to the desert floor beneath.
As if to double the curse, the geological challenges of the Sierra are matched by climatic ones, for the mountains offer some of the snowiest conditions on the continent. On April 2,1772, a Spanish missionary named Pedro Font spied the peaks from 120 miles away and described them in his journal as 'una
The earliest meteorological records for the Sierra owe their existence not to a desire to measure the range's ferocity but to conquer it. When the transcontinental railroad subdued the Sierra with ties and track, Southern Pacific maintenance crews began to record weather conditions on a daily basis. Fortunately for the study of the Donner Party, the line goes right over the point at which the emigrants aimed to cross the ridge of the Sierra. Thus we have weather records for the spot dating back to 1870, the longest stream of meteorological data for any location in the Sierra.
The resulting picture is one of almost mythical snowfall. In 1938, apparently using a particularly conservative method of measurement, the railroad crews recorded a winter-long total of sixty-eight feet. Because snow compacts—the heavier new snow on top pressing down the old layers beneath—the amount on the ground at any one time is less than the seasonal accumulation, but Donner Pass can still feature extraordinary totals. It is not uncommon to have fifteen feet of snow on the level, and that is far from the maximum. In 1880, just a decade after the railroad opened, the diligent observers of the Southern Pacific recorded a depth at Donner Pass of thirty-one feet, enough to cover a three-story building.
TWO THOUSAND MILES FROM THE SLOWLY MOVING WAGONS of the Donner Party, a storm rose from the unruly waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Evaporation sent countless tons of water vapor pirouetting up into the sky, loading up the clouds like soaked sponges. Winds gathered strength until they howled across the whitecaps like a flood down a gully. The jet stream began to push the front southward, shoving it along at the speed of a hardworking freight train.
The storm smashed into the redwood forests at the mouth of the Humboldt River, almost up by Oregon, dropping sheets of rain that soaked deep down into the roots, ensuring another lush green winter at the ocean's edge. The heart of the maelstrom rushed farther south, cascading over the coast ranges, whipping through the
