FRANKLIN GRAVES MADE THE CASE PLAINLY: There was no alternative but to try again. By early December, a month into the Donner Party's mountain captivity, escape parties had been forced to turn back repeatedly, and it would have been easy to lose heart and passively await rescue.
Graves would have none of it. He was sure they should try again to hike out, this time with better planning and equipment. Putting his Vermont heritage to use, he began to make snowshoes, sawing lengthwise through the oxbows, the U-shaped pieces of wood that fit under the necks of the oxen and attached to the yoke. The shape was suitable for the frame of a snowshoe, and by weaving strips of rawhide crosswise and lengthwise, Graves was able to fashion a reasonably effective sole.
Going from cabin to cabin, he recruited members for the proposed new party, mounting a logical and largely indisputable case. The more people in camp, the quicker the food supply dwindled. If a contingent of healthy adults took minimal rations and made a headlong push for Sutter's Fort, the remaining supplies might be stretched—just barely—until the hikers could summon help and return. It was a risky calculus, but unavoidable. 'It is our only choice.' Graves insisted. In his diary, Breen recorded the preparations: 'Stanton & Graves manufacturing snow shoes for another mountain scrabble.'
Two of the young teamsters, Milt Elliott and Noah James, set off on foot for the Alder Creek camp to tell the Donner families of the new plan. Stanton, industrious as always, found a small piece of paper and neatly wrote out a note to George Donner asking for a pound of tobacco and the loan of a pocket compass, 'as the snow is so very deep & in the event of a storm it would be invaluable.' He added that the troublesome mules were 'all strayed off,' and asked that if any of the animals wandered through the Alder Creek camp the Donners get news to the lake cabins as soon as possible.
But the same day Elliott and James left, the weather turned foul, and as a diarist Breen was once again reduced to redundant invocations of helplessness. 'Commenced snowing about 11 Oclock.... Snows fast,' he wrote on December 9, a Wednesday. Then on Thursday: 'Snowed fast last night with heavy squalls of wind. Continues still to snow.' And Friday: 'Snowing a little.' And Saturday: 'Continues to Snow.' And Sunday: 'Snows faster than any previous day.' Finally, after four and a half days, the storm cleared, and Monday morning broke sunny and fine. 'Don't thaw much,' Breen noted, 'but fair for a continuance of fair weather.'
Elliott, who had intended to join the snowshoe party, had yet to return from Alder Creek with the much- needed compass, but the clear weather was too good an opportunity to pass up. The hikers needed to leave immediately, and so it was decided that they would not wait for Elliott's return. He and James had walked away from the lake cabins on the same day the blizzard began, after all, and it was likely they had frozen to death before they even reached the Donner family tents. The snowshoe party would simply have to forge ahead by dead reckoning, one more handicap to an already hazardous undertaking.
INEVITABLY, PEOPLE BEGAN TO WONDER about the chances of their own demise. Franklin Graves had spoken of a morose expectation that he would die in the mountains, the victim of divine retribution for driving Reed from the party and abandoning Hardcoop in the deserts of Nevada. Still, it was a remarkable fact that after more than a month of captivity, no one had actually died.
That changed the night of December 15. Baylis Williams was a young man working for the Reed family, a mysterious figure whose sister Eliza was also a Reed family employee. Years later, Patty Reed wrote that Baylis was an albino who worked by night and slept by day, a peculiar description but almost the only one we have. We know nothing of his exact condition when the party arrived at the lake, and little of his deterioration thereafter, although given that the Reed family had almost no food it is easy to imagine that he slowly faded into weakness and starvation. Billy Graves, who was then seventeen, remembered that Williams lost his mind and eventually 'was insane.' In any event, on the evening of the 15th, as the snowshoe party was busy preparing to depart the next morning, Williams died.
There was little time for grieving, but the death must have played on everyone's mind. When the hikers tied on their snowshoes and walked away from the cabins the following morning, they knew with more certainty than ever that the families they were leaving behind could not last much longer, that help must be fetched or everyone would die.
16
The Forlorn Hope
For all that it is usually considered an unspeakable atrocity, cannibalism has a long and rich history. People have eaten people for thousands of years and for countless reasons: to appease gods, to honor ancestors or shame enemies, to cure disease, perhaps even to set a hospitable table for guests. Some stories may be exaggerated or even false; many of the more grisly versions were reported by European explorers eager to paint the natives as bloodthirsty savages in need of Christian salvation. But modern evidence suggests that at least some accounts are indisputably true. Archaeologists have found human remains showing the apparent signs of butchery or cooking, and a few years ago scientists studying a Colorado site used by the ancient Anasazi reported that they had found fossilized human fecal matter containing digested human tissue. Somebody, for some reason, was eaten.
Far better documented are more recent cases in which people who were isolated and starving resorted to eating human flesh because they had little choice, what experts sometimes call 'survival cannibalism.' Seafaring disasters produced the most numerous examples. Prior to the invention of radios or electronic safety beacons or airplanes from which a search might be conducted, a shipwreck or sinking often stranded people for weeks or months. Whether they were marooned on an island or drifting in a lifeboat, their only hope of rescue was that another ship, by purest chance, might come within sight. Often, other ships failed to materialize and eating the dead became the only hope for survival. The practice became so common that one authority on the subject described it as 'normal.' If a stranded crew managed to survive by some other means, they sometimes felt compelled to proclaim the fact to their rescuers, lest the typical assumption of cannibalism go unchallenged. Because there were so many cases, the chronicles of sea-going cannibalism are long and varied, and they illuminate the topic's dark history in striking ways.
One of the most closely documented examples occurred in 1710, after the
London, bound for Boston. The journey was almost complete when a December gale blew up off the coast of Maine and ran the ship aground on a small rock island, barely a hundred yards long and perhaps half as wide. The mainland was visible in the distance. The crew abandoned ship, and by the following morning all that was left of their vessel was debris: wood and canvas and a little of the cheese they had been carrying as cargo. Using the ship's timbers, they built a boat in hopes of escape, but the surf smashed it to bits as they attempted to launch. Later they built a small raft and successfully put it to sea with two men aboard, but they both drowned. For nearly three weeks they survived by harvesting what little edible material they could find: a few weeds and two or three mussels per day per man. They drank rainwater or melted snow. Then the ship's carpenter died, and the awful possibility of cannibalism presented itself. With no other choice, they cut up the corpse and began to eat. Three crew members refused to join in at first, but by the next morning they all did. The captain rationed the meat, and within a few days they were rescued by a passing ship.
Other cases were more gruesome. Occasionally survivors on a derelict would take a half-eaten body and hang it in the rigging, as if in a slaughterhouse. On one ship a woman was said to have cut the throat of her recently deceased husband, insisting that if his blood was to be drunk she had the greatest right to the ghastly beverage. There are records of sailors refusing to eat human flesh, but there are also cases where cannibalism began relatively quickly, as if sailors felt no great need to delay the practice until the last conceivable moment. In 1835 the
If nature failed to provide a carcass, sailors sometimes killed someone specifically for food, the result of a far
