As neighbors, they hardly huddled up with one another. The Graves/Reed cabin was said by some to be half a mile from the others, a ready reflection of the tensions coursing through the group. 'Father built his cabin where it was most sheltered from wind and storm and wood near by regardless of company interest, I supposed,' recalled Mary Graves. Patty Reed seemed to think that Franklin Graves led a slightly bull-headed bunch: 'he. & all of his family, had minds & wills of their own.'
THE TWO DONNER FAMILIES, INCLUDING George Donner, the ostensible leader of the enterprise, were involved in none of this, for they were miles to the rear.
Coming down a steep hill well before they reached Truckee Lake, the front axle broke on one of George Donner's wagons. The vehicle tipped, and the contents scattered into a heap. The two youngest children, three- year-old Eliza and four-year-old Georgia, were riding in the wagon, and their father and their Uncle Jacob rushed to pull them free. They found Georgia quickly and pulled her out, but Eliza lay hidden in the messy jumble, not answering her father's frantic calls. The two men tossed aside items until at last Jacob found his niece. 'You would not have stood it much longer,' remembered her older half-sister, Elitha. The men set to work fashioning a new axle, but the delay meant that the other wagons moved even farther ahead.
When the snow came the Donners were seven miles behind the rest of the company. Tamzene wanted to push onward and make a try at the pass, but her husband and brother-in-law ruled that an impossibility, and so they camped where they were, near a small stream called Alder Creek. They made a brief attempt at building a cabin, but the walls were only four logs high when a blizzard hit, rendering work impossible. The small wagons packed with possessions offered little room or comfort, so the families pitched what they described as 'tents,' although these may only have been quilts, coats, and other covers spread over boughs propped against a tree. An even cruder brush structure was also erected, variously described by survivors as a lean-to, a 'shed,' and a 'wigwam.' The conditions made the lake cabins seem luxurious.
In all, eighty-one people were trapped, about three-quarters of them scattered among the three cabins at Truckee Lake, the others at Alder Creek. The wails of babies competed with the giggles of toddlers, for the camps teemed with children, a reflection of the fact that the entire overland migration was a family affair. More than half of those trapped were under eighteen, and a quarter were five or younger. There were half a dozen babies.
WILLIAM EDDY KNEW HE WAS BEING GOUGED, but what choice did he have? Franklin Graves wanted twenty-five dollars for an ox carcass, and not even a good carcass at that. Alive, the animal had been mostly hide and bones. The remains were more baleful still. Back in Independence twenty-five dollars would have bought a full yoke, two healthy oxen ready to pull a wagon across the continent. Now it bought only a pathetic, emaciated carcass. From Graves's perspective, it was just good business sense, of course. For Eddy, it was an outrage.
The high price was perhaps the most striking example of the degree to which food supplies immediately became a paramount issue for the trapped emigrants. Larders varied from family to family. The Breens sat atop a hoard, for a good many of their cattle had come through unscathed. The Eddys, by contrast, had little. William Eddy started hunting and took a coyote the first day and an owl the next. But the meat soon ran short for a family of four, so Eddy set his jaw and agreed to Graves's exorbitant price.
Margret Reed stood in similar straits, dickering to save her children's lives. She promised that if others provided the Reeds with one cow now they would be repaid with two later, when everyone reached California. Given that her once-wealthy family had lost almost all its possessions and that her husband had ridden away to an uncertain fate, it was impossible for her to know if she could repay the debt, but the strategy worked anyway. She got two animals each from Franklin Graves and Patrick Breen. Sadly, the half-starved beasts provided little food. After walking nearly two thousand miles, they were so thin and weak that when they lay down on the snow they could hardly get back up again.
WHEN THE FIRST STORM HIT, snow fell for eight straight days with almost no break. To flatlanders from the Midwest and the East, it was a blunt introduction to mountain winter. Most families felt trapped until spring— building cabins was a sure sign of that—but visions of escape persisted. On November 12, almost as soon as the storm broke, about fifteen of the fittest set out to walk over the pass. They were almost all young and childless, although Franklin Graves, the independent-minded, fifty-something patriarch of his clan, went along, as did a couple of other parents. Stanton joined up, and so did the two Indians from Sutter's Fort, Luis and Salvador, which meant that the group had the incalculable benefit of guides who had seen the route before. Still, for all their advantages, they made almost no progress before the snow—soft and ten feet deep—forced them to turn around.
Eddy shot two ducks on the first day back in camp, but it was the next day that he hit the hunter's mother lode. He crossed the tracks of a grizzly bear, a notoriously ferocious animal that lone hunters typically avoided. A single shot rarely fells a grizzly, and in the age of muzzle-loading rifles, the significant time required for reloading could be a fatal interval. But two ducks will not feed a family for long, so Eddy pursued his giant prey. He saw the bear about ninety yards away, nose down and digging for roots. Hiding behind a fir tree, Eddy put his one spare rifle ball into his mouth to speed reloading, then took steady aim and fired. The animal reared up on its hind legs and charged, Eddy trying to reload as fast as possible. By the time he finished, the bear was virtually upon him. He dodged around the tree to buy himself another split second, then raised the rifle and fired his last shot. The bullet hit the animal in the shoulder, disabling but not killing it. Out of ammunition, Eddy picked up a club of some sort, presumably a tree branch, and hit the bear in the head with all his might, a blow that finally ended the battle. When he examined the corpse, he found that the first shot had hit the bear in the heart, a wound that would have slowed and weakened the animal. Had the first shot been less true, Eddy would almost surely have been killed. The animal weighed eight hundred pounds, but Eddy convinced Franklin Graves to bring out oxen and drag it back to camp. They got in after dark, dividing the meat among Eddy, Graves, and William Foster, who had loaned his gun to the rifle-less hunter. Eddy claimed he also gave some to the impoverished Reed family.
Lone and weakened hunters do not normally take grizzlies with just two shots and a club, and since Eddy was the only survivor who ever recounted the tale, there were those in the ensuing decades who suspected the whole thing was a fabrication, a grab for glory by a man renowned for bragging, or at least that the animal was misidentified, and that Eddy's trophy was not a grizzly but the far smaller and less ferocious black bear. But in the 1980s, excavations at the site of the Murphy cabin, where Eddy lived, revealed bear bones among the remains of cattle. Judging by the size of a bear tooth that was found, scientists concluded that the emigrants may indeed have eaten a grizzly.
THEY LUCKED INTO A RUN OF GOOD WEATHER—the nights cold but the days clear and warmer, the snow almost melting away completely at the lake—and a week after the first escape attempt, twenty-two people marched out of camp to try again.
They reached the top of the pass, even crossed it and started down the western side according to some accounts. But finally the mules could go no farther, the snow being too soft and the animals too exhausted. The only choice now was to kill them and pack out what meat could be quickly butchered or even just abandon the beasts to their fate. Then suddenly Stanton balked. He had promised to return the mules to Sutter's Fort, where he had borrowed them from Sutter himself, and Stanton intended to keep his word. He had returned to the entire company based on nothing more than a promise, and he would abide by his vow now just as he had then. Stanton insisted that he, Luis, and Salvador would take the mules back to the lake.
Arguments erupted. Turning around now was insane. They had vanquished the mountains and were heading downhill. Food was in perilously short supply back at the cabins. It was imperative that somebody get through to California, and here was the best opportunity. They had come so far, worked so hard, and now an unbending little man was ready to throw it all away just for a promise over a few mules. Sutter wouldn't want people to die for mules; nobody would. Sutter would understand that dire circumstances demand hard decisions. If necessary, somebody else in the company would pay for the damn mules. By returning with provisions, Stanton himself had already risked his life to give them a reasonable chance at survival. Now he was heightening the odds of their demise.
Through it all, Stanton stood as immutable as the granite mountains beneath his feet. Dedication to principle had calcified into obstinacy. He and the Indians were going back, mules in tow.
The rest of the little group considered its options. They could go ahead on their own, but Stanton and the Indians were the only ones who knew the way. An unguided journey through snow-covered mountains without a
