known trail was a near guarantee of death. Angry and stupefied, they turned back toward the lake with Stanton.
At nightfall, they were still high in the mountains, and the wee hours turned bitterly cold. The following morning broke clear and sunny, and they reached the cabins at midnight, grateful for the shelter, frustrated at the failure, and right back where they had started.
15
The First Death
Patrick Breen took out a few sheets of paper that had somehow survived the cross-continental journey and folded them so as to fashion a small booklet. Inevitably, human beings record the circumstances of their existence —we paint our stories in caves or write them in books or record them on film—and Breen had decided to make himself the chronicler of the Donner Party's entrapment.
What prompted this decision remains a mystery, but he proved diligent at the task, writing daily entries for more than three months, never missing a day, not even because of Christmas or illness or hellish travails that would have sapped the resolution of most men. His entries are typically short, almost always practical, occasionally revealing a deeply held religious faith or a keen observation about his fellow emigrants. Taken together, they constitute the only surviving daily record kept by a member of the Donner Party during its captivity.
The first entry was made November 20, three weeks after the initial entrapment and the day before the escape attempt that would end with Stanton's stubbornness. Breen noted that the forward party had arrived at the lake at the end of October, had tried to cross the mountains twice before settling in for the winter, and had already killed most of their cattle, 'having to stay here untill next Spring & live on poor beef without bread or salt.' The next day Breen noted the departure of the twenty-two hikers, and then two days after that their sad reappearance: 'the Expedition across the mountains returned after an unsucesful attempt.'
Remarkably, the marchers—Breen called them 'our mountaineers'—were ready to try again just three days later, intending to leave on Thursday, the 26th, so long as the weather allowed. But the evening before, a low and cloudy sly let loose a blizzard, huge snowflakes falling so thickly that visibility faded to a few feet. The storm raged for days, eliminating any hope of immediate escape and reducing Breen's diary to serial images of wintry repetition.
On the 27th: 'Continues to snow. . .. Dull prospect for crossing the Mountains.' On the 28th: 'Snowing fast.. . . Snow 8 or 10 inches deep. Soft wet snow.' On the 29th: 'Still snowing. Now about 3 feet deep.' On the 30th: 'Snowing fast . . . about 4 or 5 feet deep, no drifts. Looks as likely to continue as when it commenced.' On December 1: 'Still Snowing. . . . Snow about 5 1/2 feet or 6 deep. ... No going from the house. Completely housed up.' It was vivid testimony to the mind-numbing stasis of a Sierra blizzard, and in time it led the emigrants to a blunt realization that mountain weather could hold them as securely as any prison. In the midst of it, Breen was reduced to summing up their immobility in a single, gripping phrase: 'no liveing thing without wings can get about.'
Snow finally stopped falling on December 3. The night was clear, and although the sky was cloudy in the morning, the emigrants were hopeful. 'Snow lying deep all round,' Breen noted in his diary. 'Expecing it to thaw a little today.' The optimism proved premature, and a few hours later he was forced to add an addendum of resignation. 'The forgoing written in the morning. It immediately turned in to snow & continued to snow all day & likely to do so all night.' The real break came the next day, when clouds raced by in the sky but neither snow nor rain pelted down. 'It is a relief to have one fine day,' Breen wrote.
But the blizzard had effectively cut their food supply when they could least afford it. The remaining cattle and horses had been left unstaked—another example of the emigrants' inexperience with mountain winter—and now the massive snowfall simply buried the beasts, with no way for the emigrants to find the frozen corpses. At the Alder Creek camp, one of the Donner teamsters used a long stick with a nail on the end to poke down into the drifts, hoping to strike a carcass, but he had no luck. Even Stanton's precious mules were lost beneath the muffling layer of white, a tragic irony that made the circumstances of the previous escape attempt all the more heartbreaking. His determination to keep the animals alive now seemed utterly pointless. The cabins grew buried too. As the snow depth increased to the height of a man and more, the little huts increasingly sat in holes, depressions dug out by the occupants.
The physical marks of starvation follow a set pattern, and now they must have afflicted the emigrants. Cheekbones and ribs and shoulder blades protruded. Muscle-bound arms shriveled to sticks. Joints ached. Buttocks grew so bony that sitting became painful. Skin dried and scaled to the rough texture of parchment. Around the fire or across the cabin, emigrants stared at the kind of gaunt, skeletal figure that would eventually be associated with death camps. Irritability spiked, even among those who were normally even-tempered. The cold dug deep into the bones, more painful than in past winters. Blood pressure sagged so low that someone who leapt to his feet too quickly could faint.
Often, the emigrants remained 'housed up' even after the weather cleared. 'The people not stiring round much,' Breen wrote on the 8th, although it was a fine day. Weakened by their diminishing rations, they were finding it 'hard work to [get] wood sufficient to keep us warm & cook our beef.'
By the next day, at least one emigrant had grown so weak he could no longer care for himself. Augustus Spitzer, a mysterious figure about whom little is known, had been living in Keseberg's lean-to, but now he staggered down the snow-steps leading to the Breen cabin and fell into the doorway. He was too weak to get up without help, and it was obvious that the harsh conditions of the lean-to were more than he could bear. The Breens took him in, though he was so enfeebled that he required nursing just to survive.
Stanton too was short on food, although his pleas for help landed on deaf ears, perhaps because of his role in the failure of the previous escape attempt. In his diary, Breen noted that some of the families had very little beef left. 'Stanton trying to make a raise of some for his Indians & Self,' he wrote. 'Not likely to get much.'
TWO WEEKS HAD PASSED since the children's clothes or blankets had been dry, and Tamzene Donner was worried. When the family couldn't get a fire started, she kept the girls tucked into bed even at midday in hopes of keeping them warm, but the idea hardly worked if their bedclothes were soaking.
In the tents at Alder Creek, it was getting harder and harder to maintain decent conditions. For one thing, labor was in short supply. When the axle broke on one of the Donner wagons—the accident that left poor little Eliza temporarily buried beneath a jumbled crush of household goods—George and Jacob went to work shaping a replacement. But as George Donner held the wood and his brother swung the axe, the tool slipped and came across the back of George's right hand, opening a long diagonal gash from the wrist almost to the little finger. An infection rose, and soon the arm lay useless at his side. Jacob Donner took up no slack, for he had always been sickly, and now a good many of the younger men began to fade as well. The result was that most of the work devolved to a teenager, Jean Baptiste Trudeau, a sixteen-year-old with a frontier background who had joined the company at Fort Bridger as a hired hand. It was Trudeau who searched for the animal carcasses buried under the snow, plunging downward with a long pole with a nail at one end, hoping that his improvised fishing hook might come up with a tuft of hair or hide to signify success. Memories varied as to Trudeau's work ethic—he viewed himself as a workhorse, some thought him a layabout—but whatever the details of his efforts, the relative lack of able-bodied men meant that circumstances at the Alder Creek camp suffered even more.
Dry wood was a treasure. Fetching it was a fatiguing and sometimes impossible task, and so there were the heatless days that imprisoned the Donner daughters in their beds. On nights when a fire had been kindled, a large kettle was placed atop the coals, and the children gathered round and pressed their hands against the warm comfort of the pot.
Tamzene struggled for a semblance of domesticity. Every morning, she took her daughters in her lap and brushed out their hair. Schoolteacher to the core, she entertained them with Bible stories as she loosened the tangles. Often she chose Joseph's faithful persistence through years of slavery or Daniel's deliverance from the fearsome horrors of the lions' den—tales of tribulation and perseverance and eventual triumph.
