and did not know where they were going. As rations dwindled, they could afford nothing but the smallest meals, if that. At night, lacking shelter, they simply stopped where they were, building their small fire and then huddling around it as temperatures plummeted and winds howled. In the morning, they simply rose and started walking.
At one point, Mary Graves thought she glimpsed smoke in a deep gorge off to the right. Believing it might come from a cabin or at least a campfire, she convinced the men to fire the gun as a signal, but there was no answer. She began bellowing down into the canyon periodically, but that too was met with silence.
STANTON STRUGGLED MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, as though all his past heroics had drained the sum total of his energies. Snow-blindness left him stumbling, and on the morning of the sixth day, December 21, he lingered by the fire smoking his pipe. One of the women asked if he was coming, and he responded that he would join them soon. Maybe they thought he really would follow. Maybe they knew he was finished and left him in peace. He didn't come into camp that night, and though they waited the next day, hoping that he might arrive, he never appeared. No one had the strength to go back and search.
Stanton had reached safety once, at Sutter's Fort back in the crisp days of autumn, and it would have taken a hard man to damn him had he chosen to stay and save himself. Instead, he kept his word and went back to aid a company in which he had no family or close friends. Now, in his hour of need, he had been abandoned to his fate. There was probably no other choice. A man can't be carried all the way out of the Sierra. Stanton, like the others, had to walk or die. But as he sat in the warmth of his dying fire, the irony must have struck him. In the spring, would-be rescuers found his bones.
BY CHRISTMAS EVE THE SNOWSHOERS HAD GONE without food for three days, maybe four. Eddy found some bear meat in his knapsack, placed there secretly by his wife, but there is no evidence he shared it. For weeks, everyone had been on starvation rations, and combined with the rigors of their journey, the lack of food for even a few days put them in a desperate situation. The women were still fairly strong, but some of the men were fading.
Like so many stranded sailors before them, the members of the Forlorn Hope began to mull over the most extreme options. Someone proposed a fatal game of chance, casting lots to decide who would be killed and eaten.
In a sign of their despair, at least some members of the group agreed, but it wasn't unanimous, and the idea was dropped. As an alternative, Eddy proposed that two men—it's not clear if he suggested specific candidates— each take a pistol and shoot it out, agreeing ahead of time that the loser would be consumed. But that plan too was rejected.
A blizzard roared down out of the sky, and they hunkered down to ride it out, too weak to keep moving even in good weather, let alone a screaming gale. Their fire went out, and in the raging storm they were unable to relight it. Eddy tried to use gunpowder, but the powder horn blew up and badly burned his face and hands. On Christmas, people started to die. The first was a Mexican laborer known only as Antonio. The next, a few hours later, was Franklin Graves, the man who helped make the snowshoes that brought them over the pass. There were stories for years afterward, perhaps true, that as Graves died he urged his daughters to use his body for food.
In a desperate attempt to find warmth, they created a makeshift tent by sitting together in a tight circle and laying blankets over their heads, letting the snow pile up above them. They avoided freezing to death, but the confined space was hellish. The blizzard howled relentlessly as they crowded together in their man-made snow cave, shoulder to shoulder, shivering and praying, blank and bony faces trading stares. Their only hope was to outlast the storm, to conquer nature's wrath with human patience, and so they sat there for three unending days, with nothing to do but try to stay alive. 'Could not proceed; almost frozen; no fire,' Eddy noted the day after Christmas.
In time the strain grew unbearable. Patrick Dolan, the bachelor who had traveled with the Breens, lost his head and stripped off his coat and hat and boots and ran out into the open weather, behavior that we now know might have reflected severe hypothermia. They wrestled him back into the circle, but he was too weak to recuperate. Sitting there among them, he died soon afterward. Next was Lemuel Murphy, the boy who had trudged on even when his younger brother turned back.
When the storm finally broke, Eddy climbed out of the huddle and managed to light a nearby pine tree on fire. Gathering around for the warmth, the other survivors sat there as if in shock, not even moving when burning branches fell from the tree. It was obvious they had to eat immediately if they were to survive. With the rapid succession of deaths, one of the earlier objections to cannibalism was now moot, since corpses were at hand and no one had to be killed. Still, the exact moment and manner of the decision remain a mystery. Relying on interviews with survivors, early chroniclers of the Donner Party glossed over the decision, perhaps out of a nineteenth-century sense of propriety. The first-person accounts offer a straightforward description of events, not a revelation of the emigrants' inner turmoil. Mary Graves, for example, said simply that after the snowstorm eased, the party traveled onward, 'subsisting on human flesh.'
The first ugly dilemma was who to eat. As a rule, people resorting to cannibalism almost always choose outsiders as their first victims, and, as much as possible, the Forlorn Hope followed form, trying to avoid the relatives of the living. Franklin Graves's body lay nearby, but his two daughters were still alive and present. One of Lemuel Murphy's older sisters was among the group. That reduced the choice to Dolan or Antonio, the Mexican laborer. Racial and ethnic minorities have often been the first victims of cannibalism, but in this case Dolan was selected, perhaps for a reason as gruesome as any that could be imagined. He had died more recently than Antonio, and in cases of survival cannibalism the relatively warm blood of the newly deceased is often the first thing consumed.
Deciding to eat Dolan's flesh was merely the beginning of a process that is almost as challenging physically as it is mentally. Human beings are large animals, and it is no easy job to butcher one. The captain of the
Once the butchering is begun, it often follows a grotesque pattern. A common first step is to disfigure the corpse, eliminating the grim reminders that survivors are about to eat a fellow human, perhaps a friend or relative. In lifeboats, the heads might be cut off and thrown overboard, sometimes the hands and feet too. If decapitation is not performed, the eyelids might be closed to avoid the disturbing blank 'stare' of the dead. The heart and liver are often cut out and eaten immediately. Pieces of flesh can usually be cut from the arms or legs or torso, either to be cooked or consumed raw. To preserve the meat, thin strips are often dried, either over a fire or simply by laying them in the sun. Brain matter has been swallowed raw. Lungs have been eaten. Marrow has been sucked from bones cracked open with a rock.
The members of the Forlorn Hope cut pieces of flesh from Dolan's arms and legs and cooked them over a fire they managed to kindle. If their experience was like that of other groups forced to the same extreme, they ate the first small pieces haltingly, in silence, each person deep in private contemplation. The taboo dispelled, they moved to the other bodies after Dolan, eating some of the abominable meat and drying the rest so they could carry it with them. When they finally departed the camp on December 30, two weeks had passed since they walked away from the lake. Five members of their little band had died, almost all subsequently consumed as food. The Forlorn Hope was now reduced to just ten people, five men and five women.
By Eddy's estimate, they made four miles the day they broke camp and six the following day, which was New Year's Eve. They must have noted New Year's Day, but Eddy made no mention of it in his journal, recording only that they 'passed a rugged canon,' perhaps the deep crevice carved by the North Fork of the American River. At some point that day they had to climb the side of a gorge so steep that they grabbed plants growing from the near-perpendicular walls and pulled themselves up. They were wandering, heading generally to the west but uncertain exactly where they were or where they should go.
When their supply of human flesh ran out, they began eating the rawhide strings of their snowshoes. Then Luis and Salvador vanished, almost surely out of justified fears that the group might kill and eat them.
