On January 5, Franklin Graves's son-in-law Jay Fosdick died and was cannibalized. His wife, Sarah, the oldest Graves daughter, forged onward through her grief. Eddy shot a deer the same day, but the venison seems not to have lasted long. They had been walking for three weeks, and now they were thoroughly lost, plodding through the confusing welter of canyons and ridges and ravines that constitute the Sierra's western slope. With Stanton dead and Luis and Salvador fled, no member of the group had ever been over the territory. About the only thing they could do was try to head both west and downhill. The result was agonizingly slow progress, and within days they once again faced the ultimate crisis: They were out of food.
THE LATE STAGES OF STARVATION ARE DIFFICULT to study, since obviously people cannot be denied food indefinitely purely to advance scientific research. Yet remarkably, some highly detailed observations about the effects of starvation have been made by individuals who were themselves starving. Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, produced an impressive study of the hunger they experienced and saw around them every day. So did British doctors held in Japanese internment camps.
Along with obvious physical changes such as weight loss, the doctors noticed striking psychological effects, among them a stark pattern of apathy and listlessness. Starving people simply lost their desire to act. They lay in bed, their faces pale, blank masks. Often, they were unable or unwilling to get up even to eat. In some cases, people died with food in their hands.
Ironically, enervation is often combined with irritability, as if starving people can find energy only for conflict.
In a landmark study conducted in 1944 and 1945, thirty-two volunteers at the University of Minnesota agreed to lose about a quarter of their body weight over a six-month period. All were conscientious objectors who had already shown themselves to be 'sincere and upright' in civilian public service projects before the experiment. But as the volunteers' hunger deepened, scientists monitoring their behavior found that minor differences led to major disagreements. The men 'blew up' at one another or grew annoyed with the kitchen staff, suspicious that perhaps the cooks weren't measuring the rations correctly. Some men refused to sit with others at the dining tables. Once, when one man licked his plate of every last morsel, another man told him that he sounded like 'a damn cow' and stormed off. To gauge their social skills, they were invited to parties, but their behavior grew boorish. To measure their motivation and abilities, they were asked to perform tasks, but their patience and commitment dwindled. One man quit his job of walking a small child to nursery school each day because he found her behavior so infuriating and worried about his own decreasing level of self-control. Some of the men began stealing food or, in one case, items associated with food: china coffee cups. Many of the men had hoped for spiritual enlightenment, but instead, according to a summary of the experiment, 'Most of them felt that the semistarvation had coarsened rather than refined them, and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.'
Desperate to keep moving and stay alive, the starving members of the Forlorn Hope fought off lethargy, but like the subjects of the Minnesota study, they fell prey to anger and division. Their cohesiveness as a group disintegrated. Near the beginning of their effort, they had waited, however briefly, for Stanton to rejoin them. They had also rejected the initial proposals for cannibalism, including those for a lottery or a fair fight. When they finally resorted to eating human bodies, it was only the flesh of those who had already died.
But now, suffering both the mental and physical ravages of extreme hunger, they began to contemplate murder. Accounts differ as to the precise plots, but it is clear that killing and eating each other seemed increasingly acceptable. The Graves family maintained for years afterward that Eddy had tried to lure Mary Graves away from the others so he could kill her, while Eddy insisted that the only other surviving man, William Foster, had suggested murdering three of the women for food. Eddy said he refused but threw Foster a stout club and then advanced on him with a knife, apparently trying to forcibly implement his earlier suggestion of a fight to the death, with the loser to be eaten. Some of the women separated the men before anyone was hurt.
When they came across tracks left by Luis and Salvador, all scruples vanished. Finding the two men collapsed and near death, Foster took the gun and advanced. He shot both men in the head, trying to justify the murders by insisting that the men would have died soon anyway, which might be true. No one intervened, and afterward the two bodies were butchered and eaten.
The deaths of Luis and Salvador were the only time during the ordeal of the Donner Party that anyone was killed to be eaten. The two Indians, about whom not much is known, probably had little choice but to accompany Stanton on his relief mission, but their courage is not lessened by that fact, and it is indisputable that they helped save the Donner Party before they were killed by one of its members. Several versions of the incident eventually appeared, including an account in an early Donner Party book almost surely based on Eddy's testimony, but in none of the stories was Foster condemned. He never faced legal punishment for his act, echoing the history of similar cases at sea.
The survivors had now lost enough altitude to be out of the snow, but even so it was difficult to keep moving. Eddy was shuffling so badly that when he came to a fallen tree, he couldn't find the energy to step over it. Instead, he bent down, put his hands on the log, and rolled himself across. They rested every quarter mile.
Finally they staggered across a trail and followed it to a small Miwok Indian village, where the startled residents provided acorn bread for these emaciated figures wandering out of the impassable mountains. Eddy could not tolerate the acorns, so he ate grass instead.
Even with help from the Indians, most of the group soon collapsed and could go no farther. Indomitable, Eddy willed himself ahead. Accompanied by Miwok guides, he walked eighteen miles in a single day, bloody footprints marking his path. A little before sunset, he approached Johnson's Ranch, the first American settlement on the western side of the mountains, and walked up to the small cabin of Matthew Dill Ritchie, who had brought his family over the mountains just a few months before. Eddy saw Ritchie's daughter and asked her for bread. She looked at him, registered his horrible condition, and burst into tears. It was January 17, exactly a month and a day after the members of the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake camp.
Fighting the coming darkness, men from the little community at Johnson's Ranch rushed out to find the other survivors, sometimes backtracking along Eddy's bloody footprints. The others were fed and then, the following morning, brought down and reunited with Eddy.
Of the seventeen who started with the Forlorn Hope, only seven reached their goal. Two turned back the first day, and eight others died. The survivors included two men—Eddy and Foster—and all five of the women, Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Foster, Amanda McCutchan, and Harriet Pike. Among the women, McCutchan was probably the oldest, and she was only about twenty-three. The others were so young that today they would be college undergraduates.
17
A Low Situation
Four days after the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake cabins, Milt Elliott appeared out of the snow like a specter from a wintry hell. More than a week had passed since Elliott and Noah James, another teamster, set off for the Alder Creek camp. A blizzard kicked up the day they left and blew for five straight days, so the logical conclusion was that they were dead. 'Thinks they got lost in the snow,' Patrick Breen wrote in his diary.
But now here was Elliott, stomping the snow off his boots and turning his backside before the fire. He and James had reached the Donner family tents the day of the blizzard and stayed ten days, and then somehow Elliott managed to hike all the way back to the lake by himself. He bore sad news, for people had started to die at Alder Creek. Jacob Donner was gone, along with three young, single men: Joseph Reinhardt, Sam Shoemaker, and James Smith. The rest of the Alder Creek group was doing poorly too, 'in a low situation,' as Breen phrased it.
The next day, December 21, Breen endured a severe attack of what he called 'the gravel'—kidney stones. In his diary he mentioned his quick recovery, adding, 'Praise be to the God of Heaven.' Religion was becoming ever more present in Breen's account, perhaps because Christmas was approaching, perhaps because he was seeking comfort and fulfillment amid the harshest of ordeals. Devoid of theology in the first few weeks, his little chronicle of events now turned to faith. 'Tough times, but not discouraged,' he wrote at one point. 'Our hopes are in God, Amen.' Two days before Christmas he began to read the Thirty Days' Prayer and then ended his diary entry with
