make it after all, safe and sound, to new lives in California. Perhaps they would even forget—or at least forgive—the foolishness of the Hastings Cut-Off and the ugly trouble with Snyder.
But as they climbed the western slope, Reed and McCutchan found no trace of their families, instead encountering a stranded and starving emigrant couple from another company. Desperate for food, the couple had butchered their dog, the last piece of which was now cooking in a Dutch oven. A storm had prevented Reed and McCutchan from lighting a cookfire, so they were famished, and Reed wrote later that they quickly accepted the couple's offer of a canine meal:
Raising the lid of the oven, we found the dog well baked, and having a fine savory smell. I cut out a rib, smelling and tasting, found it to be good, and handed the rib over to Mr. McCutchan, who, after smelling it some time, tasted it and pronounced it
They provisioned the stranded couple, then moved on through snow that grew deeper with each added increment of altitude—knee-high, then up to their waists, finally so deep that the horses would rear up on their hind legs and crash down with their front feet, sinking until only their noses and the top portions of their heads were visible. Sensing the hopelessness of the task, the Indian helpers sent by Sutter deserted in the night, and the next day Reed and McCutchan abandoned the horses and forged ahead on foot. At last, still well short of the crest of the mountains, they could go no farther, 'the snow being soft and deep,' and they stopped to face the unavoidable.
Both men had every motivation to fight onward; their families were stranded up there somewhere. But then again, they would hardly be much help as dead men. And for all they knew, the trapped emigrants might not be truly desperate. When McCutchan and Reed left the main party—McCutchan in mid-September, Reed in early October—the Donner Party still possessed a small but decent herd of cattle. Only later, along the Humboldt River, did the emigrants encounter hostile Indians who killed dozens of the animals. Nor did Reed and McCutchan know where the emigrants had stopped. The location could have been worse than it was—atop the pass, for example— but it might also have been better. For all they knew, their families were trying to winter over at a substantially lower elevation, and doing so with an ample larder of meat on the hoof.
At last, prudence and reality won out over the urge toward a foolish if courageous heroism. The two men took a last longing look, and turned their backs on the mountains that held their families captive. 'I state,' McCutchan wrote a quarter century later, 'that it was utterly impossible for any two men to have done more than we did in striving to get in to the people.'
The crestfallen pair retreated to Sutter's Fort, where the proprietor validated their decision. Reed described how many cattle the company possessed when he was banished, and Sutter, unaware of the later losses on the Humboldt, did some rough calculations. If the emigrants butchered the animals immediately and froze the meat in the snow, he said, they should have enough to eat until the spring thaw made it feasible to bring them out.
The families trapped in the mountains did not know it, but their last slim chance of immediate help had vanished. They were on their own.
THE FIRST NECESSITY WAS SHELTER, and so the men rummaged in their wagons for axes and saws. In the wake of their final attempt at the summit, the leading group had carefully picked its way back down the mountain face, retracing the way toward Truckee Lake. As they descended, they could peer straight down into the basin that would be their home for months to come.
It was not a hospitable place to spend the winter. Sitting at almost exactly six thousand feet in elevation, the lake averages more than fifteen feet of snow each year. And although large—roughly three miles long and a half mile wide—the lake can easily freeze over during a cold winter, as it did in 1846, when the emigrants found it impossible to successfully ice-fish.
So why did the Donner Party stop there? Truckee Meadows, the welcoming valley where Reno sits today, is thirty-five miles east and fifteen hundred feet lower, a substantial difference in the dead of winter. The wagons had come right through the Meadows before starting their climb up the Truckee River, so the emigrants knew the valley was there.
It was an option that must have crossed their minds. George Tucker, whose family was in a company just ahead of the Donner Party on the trail—a company that had itself barely slipped over the mountains in time— wondered about a tactical retreat. Tucker's family had stopped to winter at Johnson's Ranch, the first settlement west of the Sierra, but they knew the Donner Party was behind them on the trail. Looking up at the snow, just as Reed and Sutter had done, Tucker hoped that the Donners and their comrades had retraced their steps back down the river to find a location 'where they could winter their stock and find some way of sustaining life til Spring.'
If the Donner Party considered that alternative, no one ever mentioned it in a diary or journal or letter, at the time or in the years to come. Partly it was the triumph of hope over realism. They kept thinking that perhaps they could sneak over the mountains—maybe there would be a break in the weather or a little rest would revive their strength—and so wintering at the base of the range kept them closer to their goal. So too would they be closer to the prospect of rescue. They knew Reed, McCutchan, and Herron were on the west side of the mountains, and any or all of them might return, just as Stanton had.
Then there was simple exhaustion. After nearly two thousand miles on the trail, giving back ground must have seemed a dispiriting idea. Who wanted to keep walking—in the wrong direction—just to drop a few hundred feet? How much better to stay put, to finally take a breather from the endless marching. 'We arrived here betraveled, weary, already half-starved, and almost desperate,' remembered William Murphy, who was then ten. 'My friends, what would you have done, indeed? ... Behind you is a desert two thousand miles uninhabited to the Missouri River; before you is—what? There is no San Francisco, no Sacramento... no nothing.'
But the most significant reason for staying at Truckee Lake may have been their ignorance of the territory into which they had wandered. Back at home, Midwest winters froze noses and turned fingers numb, but a storm was fierce if it dropped three feet of snow. For the most part, the men and women of the Donner Party had no experience with the kind of mountain climate they were about to experience, no idea that snowstorms could bury livestock or buildings or a decent-sized tree. In the end the extraordinarily deep snows of the Sierra Nevada would have much to do with their suffering, but in the beginning their expectations were a blank. The families must have stayed at the lake, in other words, in part because they knew so little about it. Had they understood more about their surroundings, they might have left.
Fortunately, one cabin already existed, which may have been another reason for staying. Two years before, another party of emigrants had been forced to abandon its wagons and livestock and cross the pass on foot. One man stayed behind to guard the prized possessions, and the cabin where he passed the winter still stood. It was in bad shape; the rain poured through a roof that was nothing but boughs spread across the top of the walls. But it was better than nothing, and the Breens moved in immediately, perhaps because they were the first to come back down from the final assault on the pass, perhaps simply because they were one of the bigger families.
The other clans pulled out tools and set about building shelters from scratch. They felled trees, dragged the logs to the building sites, hewed out notches at both ends, hoisted them up as the walls rose—exhausting labor under any circumstances, let alone for people who had just walked nearly two thousand miles. The Muiphys saved themselves some sweat by erecting their cabin against a huge rock, the face of the boulder serving as one wall. The Graves and the Reeds—or really the Reeds' teamsters, since the family itself now consisted only of Margret and her children—pitched in together, building a 'double cabin,' a large structure with a fireplace at each end and a dividing wall running down the middle, 'leaving a few chinks in the partition through which we might talk to plan a way out of this prison,' as Patty Reed remembered.
The smaller families found homes where they could. Amanda McCutchan found room for herself and her infant daughter with the Graveses. The Murphys took in William Eddy and his wife and two children. Stanton and the two Indians from Sutter's Fort managed to bunk with the Reeds. Keseberg apparently wanted a roof of his own, or perhaps no one would house him, but he was still lame from his wounded heel and could manage only a rough hovel, a lean-to really, banking tree boughs against the side of the old cabin that now housed the Breens.
