The Jesuits headed north, into modern-day Montana, and the settlers cleaved off into separate companies bound for Oregon and California. To quicken the pace, the Oregon group abandoned its wagons immediately and rode and hiked to missionary Marcus Whitman's outpost at Walla Walla, then survived a harrowing raft trip down the Columbia River to reach the Willamette Valley. The Californians clung to their wagons far longer, finally abandoning them at the foot of the Pequop Mountains in what is today eastern Nevada. Even without the drag of the wagons, they were soon desperate and half-starved. They ate their horses and mules, then the oxen, finally crows and even a wildcat. Without maps or a specific sense of the route, they could easily have disappeared and been lost to histoiy. But they managed to survive, cresting the Sierra Nevada and then working their way down through the canyons and ridges of the western slope, finally reaching the grasslands of the San Joaquin Valley. On November 4, in what are now the outlying suburbs of San Francisco, the remnants of the Bidwell Party stumbled into a ranch owned by John Marsh, an American expatriate and charlatan who fled the United States one step ahead of an arrest warrant but then grew rich in the California sunshine. Regular people—not mountain men, but a schoolteacher and farmers and young adventurers—had reached the Pacific by land.
They had done so by abandoning their wagons, however, and wagons were critical to settlers. When a later party managed to take a few wagons all the way to Oregon, the focus of emigration fever shifted north. Pioneers heading for Oregon soon outnumbered the trickle to California, and for a time it seemed that Oregon would grow to be the colossus of the West.
Then, in 1844, a small group bucked the trend, declaring for California and holding to their destination against all warnings of doom. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party included fifty people at the start and fifty-two at the end, the result of a safe journey for the beginners and the addition of two babies along the way. The captain was Elisha Stephens, a blacksmith and trapper with a full white beard and an eccentric streak. The other namesakes were Martin Murphy, an Irish immigrant eager for the official Catholicism of Mexican California, and John Townsend, a doctor destined to become the first licensed physician in California. Like the California wagon trains of previous years—the ones that had been forced to abandon their wagons and pack over the Sierra—the group led by Stephens followed the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and then turned southwest down the Humboldt River through the deserts of what is now Nevada. They followed the Humboldt until it literally disappeared, for the Humboldt is an unusual river in that it does not feed to the sea but ends in a sink, a boggy lake from which there is no outlet. The water seeps down into the thirsty earth or evaporates into the blistering sky, and the Humboldt dies, a waterway conquered by a surrounding, merciless desert.
From the sink, previous California-bound trains had headed south, marching down the eastern flank of the Sierra, searching constantly on their right for a mountain pass, a doorway through an imposing granite wall. (One group managed to get wagons to the Owens Valley, along the eastern edge of the modern state of California, but that marginal success didn't count for much. To the pioneers, reaching California meant crossing the
Sierra.) The Stephens Party, on the other hand, headed west from the sink rather than south. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune, they had encountered a Paiute Indian who led them to a river running out of the Sierra Nevada. The banks were wooded and grassy, crucial for supplying fuel for the campfires and feed for the oxen. They named it the Truckee, which they mistakenly thought was the name of the Indian who led them to it.
They followed the river, then a creek that branched away due west, and finally, amid November snow flurries, found a lake at the base of the mountains, the granite face above them rising almost as high as the Empire State Building. They abandoned six of their eleven wagons so they could double-team those that remained and then carried the supplies and freight to the summit so the wagons could be taken over empty. Part of the way up, a sheer vertical face about ten feet high stood in their way, seemingly impassable for any wheeled vehicle. They unhitched the wagons and drove the oxen up a narrow defile in the cliff. Then they reyoked the animals and lowered chains to the wagons, which were hauled straight up the ledge, the oxen pulling from above and the people pushing from below. They crossed the summit on November 25, 1844, the first party to take wagons over the top of the Sierra Nevada.
The feat was in some ways a hollow victory. More than half the wagons had been left behind, those that crossed the summit had been taken over without freight, and on the way down the western slope the wagons had to be abandoned altogether, not to be recovered until the following summer. For much of the time the very survival of the emigrants had been in doubt. They were lucky to encounter an Indian willing to guide them, perhaps just as lucky to make it up and over the Sierra without some serious injury or other calamity. Still, wagons had been taken all the way through to California, and if something could be done once, it could be done again.
More than a year passed before news reached the East, but by the spring of 1846 word of the new wagon route to California was spreading. Men returning from the West talked up the discovery, and the newspapers began to publish enthusiastic accounts, including one wildly optimistic assessment that the Stephens-led group had found a 'very good road.' Enthusiasm for California heightened. In Independence, where the wagon trains readied themselves to head out over the prairies, camps buzzed with excitement about California's climate, said to be good for people and crops alike. One joke had it that when a Californian reached heaven, the archangel Gabriel said the man should return home—'a heap better country than this.' For the first time in the brief history of the wagon trains, California surpassed Oregon as the destination of choice. A newspaperman in Independence claimed to have seen just one wagon bound for Oregon. 'The word,' he wrote, 'is California.' When Tamzene Donner's family set their wagons and their futures toward 'the bay of Francisco,' they were joining a rushing tide of optimistic Americans headed west.
AT FORTY-FOUR, Tamzene Donner had already endured one tragedy in life, showing a resiliency that would sustain her in the ordeal yet to come. Born in Massachusetts, she went south as a young woman to work as a schoolteacher. While living in North Carolina, she married and had a baby, a son who looked just like his father. But then, in three horrific months toward the end of 1831, the bedrock of Tamzene's life crumbled beneath her feet. For reasons that are not clear—perhaps an epidemic of some sort—all those closest to her died in quick succession: her son in late September, a premature baby daughter in November, her husband on Christmas Eve. Shattered and alone, she began the long process of reconstructing her life, chronicling the stages of her emotional convalescence in an extraordinaiy series of heartfelt letters to her sister.
'Weep with me if you have tears to spare,' she wrote in Januaiy 1832, just a month after her husband's death. Later that year she grew so ill she thought she might die, an idea that did not entirely frighten her. 'Sister I could die very easily. One after one of the bonds that bound one to earth are loosened and now there remains but few.' The following spring, she remained deeply depressed, with little to look forward to except the occasional letter from her sister. She was plagued with nightmares, dreaming that she was wandering aimlessly while looking for lost relatives, or that she saw her sister 'wasting with sickness.' By 1836, five years after the deaths, she was struggling to reclaim her optimism. She resolutely insisted that despite everything, she was a lucky woman—'Think not I am unhappy. Far from it. I realize that on me heaven has been lavish of its blessings'—and was obviously proud that her abilities as a schoolteacher had allowed her to survive on her own. Responding to her brother's offer to 'take care' of her, she wrote her sister, 'I am abundantly able at present to take care of myself and to supply every necessary and unnecessaiy want.'
Eventually she fled the South and its personal ghosts, taking a job as a schoolteacher in Illinois. 'Think you that my wandering feet will rest this side the grave?' she wrote. Her health was improving, and she had even regained a sense of humor: 'You need not fear having a brother in law, for I know not a man old enough for me in the county.' Not completely healed, she had at least found an equilibrium. 'To say that I have any particular source of anxiety or cause of unhappiness I cannot. To say that I have any particular pleasure I cannot. Life moves on as smoothly and quietly as a summer stream.' She loved the prairie. The broad vistas—the wildflowers, the grasslands, the sunsets that spread a swath of crimson across the skyline—gave a sense of possibility. 'I stop, I gaze and am awestruck.'
In time, she was ready again to consider courtship. In Springfield, Illinois, she met a local farmer, George Donner, a man in some ways her opposite. If she was the lettered Yankee, he was the garrulous southerner. Born in North Carolina in the years just after the Revolutionary War, Donner had traveled through Kentucky, Indiana, even Texas, settling finally in Illinois. He was the kind of man people liked, a big fellow known around Sangamon County as 'Uncle George.' The nickname fit. He was more avuncular than firm, a friendly presence who was neither a natural-born leader nor merely a face in the crowd. Almost two decades older than Tamzene, he had been widowed twice and had ten children from those first two marriages.
