But now they had no real place to live. There had been no time to build proper roofs when the company was first trapped, so the cabins had simply been covered with the hides of the butchered oxen. Cupboards bare, the Reeds had been forced to begin eating hides sooner than most families, and the only way to get them was to pull down their own roof. Margret Reed left a hide for her younger children to eat when she tried to escape, but it must have been one of their last, for by the time she returned the family's half of the double cabin was roofless, and thus uninhabitable. They had literally eaten themselves out of house and home.
Milt Elliott and Eliza Williams finagled housing where they could— Elliott with the Muiphys and Williams with the Graveses—but the rest of the Reed clan took shelter in the Breen cabin. The family's separation during the escape attempt had taken its toll, and the reunion was cherished all the more. 'We could sit by the same fire, sleep under the same roof, kneel on the ground togeather and pray,' Virginia Reed wrote later. 'I never even think of that Cabin but what I can see us all on the ground togeather praying, some one holding the little pine Candle. I was very fond of doing that, and while we we[re] giving him light we were receiving light.'
The Breen cabin was now more crowded than ever, but occasionally camaraderie flowered. The two families chatted, sometimes passing 'pleasant hours' that leavened the sheer horror of their lot. 'We used to sit and talk together and sometimes almost forget oneself for a while,' Virginia Reed recalled. The few books they possessed went from hand to hand, read again and again to stave off boredom. Occasionally, even food was shared. The Breens still had some meat, and while Patrick Breen was apparently determined to hoard the precious victuals for his family, his wife, Peggy, could not help but slip tiny nibbles to the Reed children. In at least one case she thought it a gesture of compassion rather than utility, a way to ease suffering rather than sustain life. She was so convinced of Virginia Reed's impending death that she took Margret Reed up out of the cabin and onto the snow, out of earshot of both women's children, to suggest that Margret prepare for her daughter's demise.
18
Taking the Field
As Margret Reed and her children fought for their lives, her husband was involved in a more literal fight. By the time James Reed arrived in California, the United States and Mexico were at war.
Beginning in the 1820s, American settlers hungry for cheap land poured into Texas, which was then a part of Mexico. The Mexican government, eager for growth in what had been a dusty backwater, welcomed the influx, but in time tension developed. The Americans chafed under Mexican laws that required Catholicism and prohibited slavery, provisos often ignored by the Protestant, slaveholding settlers. In turn, Mexican officials resented the truculent independence of the newcomers, who soon outnumbered the Mexicans. In 1830 the Mexican government prohibited further American settlement, angering the Americans who were already there. By mid-decade, the Americans were in revolt, and in 1836 they defeated the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won their independence.
For the better part of a decade the Republic of Texas trundled along, but the idea of American annexation loomed up inevitably, in part because the Texans were happy to be absorbed. Mexico had never recognized Texan independence, however, nor was there even agreement as to where the border lay. When negotiations on these issues faltered, President James Polk ordered American troops into the disputed border region, a provocative act sure to enflame Mexican sensibilities. In April 1846 a skirmish predictably broke out between Mexican and American troops, a minor incident that was seized on by Polk as justification for war.
Word of the outbreak of war reached the area around Independence, Missouri, in May, just as the Donner Party was setting out, but after that the emigrants had no way of getting news. They must have wondered what was happening, since their intended destination of California was part of Mexico, and thus as Americans they might be received as citizens of a hostile power.
When Reed reached Sutter's Fort in late October, he found that the war had in fact spread to California, and that newly arrived American settlers were organizing a volunteer military effort against the Mexicans. He and William McCutchan launched their valiant two-man rescue attempt, but when they returned to the fort and accepted the impossibility of an immediate winter rescue, Reed joined the war effort.
He rode south for San Jose, an old Spanish settlement below San Francisco, where he took time first for a little personal business. Optimistically laying the groundwork for his family's future life, he walked into the magistrate's office at the Pueblo de San Jose and forged his wife's name on a land claim. (He also submitted a forged claim for Baylis and Eliza Williams, two of his snowbound employees.)
By Christmas, as Margret was thrilling her children with their 'feast' of dried apples and tripe, James was serving as the first lieutenant to a volunteer cavalry unit of American settlers. On January 2, as Margret was planning her desperate escape attempt, James and the other Americans engaged several hundred Mexican loyalists—probably themselves volunteers—in what came to be known as the Battle of Santa Clara. The Americans won the first skirmish, chasing the Mexicans from a grove of trees, although the Mexican cavalry soon regrouped and charged the Americans 'in beautiful style.' 'They are, indeed, fine-looking horsemen,' wrote Reed, who had so cherished his own acclaim as the owner of the best mount in the wagon train. The Mexicans alternately retreated and charged until finally the Americans found themselves at the bank of a small creek, their horses knee-deep in mud. 'The enemy were popping away in fine style,' Reed recalled, 'and I do assure you we returned compliments without much delay.' The Americans had the only artillery piece—'Every now and then the cannon would discharge at them,' Reed said—and it seems to have made a difference. The Mexicans broke ranks, and that night sent a white flag into the American camp to ask for terms of surrender.
It was hardly the bloodiest engagement in martial history—the Mexicans eventually reported three dead and five wounded, while one American took a minor head wound—but it pleased the ever-proud Reed. 'I am heartily glad that I had such an opportunity to fight for my country,' he wrote ten days later to John Sutter. 'I feel by so doing I have done my duty and no more, but I am still ready to take the field in her cause, knowing that she is always right.'
More than pride, the little battle seems to have won Reed a promotion. In the wake of the victory, Reed was appointed by American naval officials to take command of the mission at San Jose. He took up his duties, but he also found time to improve his land claim by planting some pear and apple trees and even a little barley. Then he sat back and awaited what he hoped would be an early California spring. Warm weather would help the barley to sprout, of course, but far more important, it would give Reed another chance to try to reach his family.
19
Our Present Calamity
Patrick Breen began the new year with a plea for divine relief: 'We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present Calamity if it be his Holy will,' he wrote in his diary on New Year's Day. But the failure of the Reed family escape attempt soon dimmed whatever flickering optimism the holidays had generated, and on Friday, January 8, the day after the bold little group returned to the lake camps, Breen summed up the company's situation with candid pessimism: 'prospects Dull.'
A new blizzard started cascading snow upon them, and by the fifth day of steady accumulation the threatening walls of white had climbed higher than the cabins. 'Must be 13 feet deep,' Breen wrote. 'Dont know how to get wood this morning. It is dredful to look at.'
Even the Breens' relatively bountiful supply of meat was coming to an end. Like other families before them, they resorted to increasingly desperate measures. Early in the entrapment, Patrick Dolan, who had lived in the Breen cabin until he walked away with the Forlorn Hope, threw his tobacco on some portion of his meat supply, a careless and foolish act that risked invaluable foodstuffs. In the month since Dolan left, the tobacco must have contaminated the beef in some indescribable way, but now the Breens were ready to eat nearly anything. They forced down the ruined meat but paid a price. The wretched fare sickened Peggy and Edward.
