Golden Gate, casting long and threatening shadows across Sutter's Fort. At last the clouds began their long climb up into the Sierra, aiming directly for the pass the emigrants intended to use. As the clouds rose, they cooled. Gaseous molecules condensed into liquid droplets; droplets froze into ice crystals; crystals coalesced into snowflakes. The flakes grew too heavy to resist the call of gravity. It began to snow.
THE NIGHTS WERE GETTING COLDER Early risers found the buffalo skin blankets rimed with hoarfrost and the water buckets glazed over with ice as thick as a windowpane. The peaks before them were sheathed in clouds, a sign of storms that spurred the prudent to push on as fast as possible.
Some families drove themselves harder than others, and the company again broke into pieces, the Breens and some other families in front, the two Donner clans lagging behind at the rear, an uncertain array of small groups in between. On October 31 the forward group reached Truckee Lake, a pristine swatch of blue that sits at the base of a massive, nearly vertical slope reaching more than a thousand feet straight up into the high Sierra. At the top lies the pass for which the emigrants were aiming, a notch between the peaks. If you are headed west from the lake, there is nowhere to go but up.
Snow covered the ground at the lake, the depth increasing with every added foot of altitude, but the lead families made a quick try for the summit anyway. It proved a hopeless attempt, for they had no guide. Charles Stanton and the two Indians from Sutter's Fort, Luis and Salvador, were the only members of the company who had been over the pass, but they were with some of the trailing families. Unable to follow the route through the snow, the lead group retreated to the lake and waited until the following day, when Stanton and some others caught up. They decided that the following morning they would make a try.
Some hung back, preferring the relative safety of the lake to the exposed heights above. William Foster dictated a note authorizing Milt Elliott, one of the teamsters, to buy mules and cattle in California on Foster's behalf and promising to pay for the animals once he arrived. The Breens, who had led the previous day's attempt, probably abandoned the second day's effort sooner than most. John Breen remembered them advancing no more than two miles before the heavy snows brought them to a downhearted halt. 'We were compelled to retrace our steps in despair,' he wrote.
Others forged on: the Reeds, the Eddys, the Graves family, Stanton and the two Indians. Lewis Keseberg went along, though he was too lame to walk. Weeks earlier, when he was out hunting geese, Keseberg had stepped on a willow stub that had punctured his moccasin and pierced the ball of his foot. As the party reached the Sierra, he still could not put weight on it, and so he made the great push up the mountains in a saddle.
Writing to her cousin a few months later, Virginia Reed remembered the start of that day's climb in almost plucky terms. 'Well we thought we would try it so we started,' she wrote. Rain had been falling at the lake, and some of the flatlander emigrants naively hoped that it had rained higher up the mountains as well, beating down the powdery snow and creating a firmer walking surface. Instead, they learned a hard lesson of life in the Sierra: Rain in the valleys is almost always snow at higher elevations. 'The farther we went up the deeper the snow got,' Virginia remembered. As on the day before, the wagons were soon abandoned in favor of pack animals, but the process was slow and troublesome, the oxen trying to dislodge the unfamiliar loads, the people grumbling and debating about what would be taken, what left behind. 'One wanted a box of tobacco carried along; another, a bale of calico, and some one thing and some another,' as Keseberg recalled.
One of the mules handled the drifts better than the others, so the animal was put at the head of the line to stamp down a trail, but in time it too began to pitch headfirst into the swallowing snow. Stanton and one of the Indians scouted ahead and reached the summit, but when they returned to urge a final push, they found a party collapsed in exhaustion. A campfire had been kindled on the snow, and the desperate and dispirited emigrants clung to it like a raft amid the sea. Stanton insisted that if no more snow fell the pass could be crested, but it was useless counsel. Whether from fatigue or despair, no one would move. They bedded down, intending to forge ahead in the morning.
But in the night, the storm that would prove the ultimate undoing of the Donner Party reached them at last. Snow pummeled down so heavily that it almost buried the unsheltered emigrants. Margret Reed tried to stay awake, brushing the snow from her children. Keseberg remembered waking at one point to feel a heavy weight pushing down on his chest, impeding his ability to breathe:
Springing up to a sitting posture, I found myself covered with freshly fallen snow. The camp, the cattle, my companions, had all disappeared. All I could see was snow everywhere. I shouted at the top of my voice. Suddenly, here and there, all about me, heads popped up through the snow. The scene was not unlike what one might imagine at the resurrection, when people rise up out of the earth.
Daylight brought a grim realization: The snow was far too deep to go on. Plainly, there was no chance of reaching the pass and descending the other side. Not that reaching the crest would have guaranteed their safety. A long slog down the western slope of the Sierra would have awaited, something that might have proved beyond their weakened bodies. Or they might have been trapped near the top of the pass, at high altitude and exposed to the weather's full brunt. They might have all died there, mere bones to be found the following spring.
But at least there had been some hope. At least they had still been moving forward, going in the direction of their goal. Now they could face nothing but the bleak truth. 'The rest you probably know,' Keseberg wrote years later, reflecting the resignation that must have suffused the group. They turned around, retraced their labored steps from the day before, and headed down toward the lake they had just left.
The bold and desperate vanguard of the Donner Party had failed the final, terrible test of the great gamble of their lives. Leaving as soon as spring allowed, marching an extra mile or two in the gathering gloom of dusk, seizing a promised shortcut in the hope of saving time and distance—all these had been aimed at a single goal, to cross the mountains and reach safety before the changing of the seasons wreaked a vengeful havoc. Now it had all come to naught. 'We had to go back...,' Virginia Reed remembered, 'and stay thare all Winter.'
14
This Prison
James Reed reached Sutter's Fort just as his family and the others were approaching the Sierra. The first storm of autumn greeted Reed's arrival, sending a torrent of rain down upon John Sutter's keep.
At the fort, Reed found William McCutchan, the tall, bushy-haired man who had left his wife and daughter with the main party six weeks earlier to ride ahead for supplies with Charles Stanton. McCutchan had been too sick to go along when Stanton returned, but now, his health restored, he was ready to go back for his family. He talked with Reed, and the two men—both fathers with children in the mountains—decided to set out on a desperate mission of rescue. Sutter offered a discouraging assessment. Looking up at the peaks coated in white, the master of the fort declared ominously that the snow 'was low down and heavy for the first fall of the season.'
Sutter had fled his native Switzerland when a failed business overwhelmed him with debts. He made his way to St. Louis and then on to the West—New Mexico and Oregon and even Hawaii before finally settling in California, where in time he took Mexican citizenship. Blessed with a generous land grant from the territory's governor, Sutter built an adobe fort on a little rise near the Sacramento River, with Indian laborers to do most of the work and cannon in the guard towers to discourage marauders. He dealt in furs and cattle and brandy, and by 1846 Sutter's Fort was well established as both the end point of the overland migration and the hub of the burgeoning American community in California.
Sutter looked generously upon overland pioneers, either because he was also an immigrant or because they might buy supplies at his fort. When Reed and McCutchan resolved to launch their rescue effort, Sutter provided Indian helpers and some supplies—flour and a hind-quarter of beef. Reed and McCutchan lashed the provisions to a train of packhorses and set out as quickly as possible.
Optimistic and confident as always, Reed hoped they might not have to cross the peaks. Perhaps the wagons had slipped through the vise just in time and were already rolling down the western slope. If only he and McCutchan could get up there with some fresh provisions, the whole bruising trial might be over. Everyone would
