LITTLE HARRIET MCCUTCHAN SHRIEKED in agony. Lice. The hastily erected cabins and tents of the Donner Party had never offered comfortable accommodations, and as the entrapment lengthened, conditions worsened. The interiors were crowded and dank, redolent of sweat and smoke and mildew. Survivors sometimes referred to the 'inmates' of a given cabin, and the analogy was apt. Weather trapped people inside for days. So did the weakness and lethargy of slow starvation. Bathing must have been a vanished luxury, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to wash the bedding and clothes, including the diapers of the babies.
Then there were the lice. Harriet, who was only a year old, suffered more than the others. Even decades later, Patty Reed remembered 'the terrible screames of that poor little one.' No parent could comfort the tot. Her father, William, had ridden ahead to fetch supplies from Fort Sutter and then been unable to return. Her mother, Amanda, had left with the Forlorn Hope, reckoning that the only way to save her child was to go and fetch help. The Graveses agreed to care for the little girl, but there wasn't much they could do about the lice. She scratched until she bled, so they tied her tiny arms straight by her sides. Then they tried to block out the fact that she was still screaming.
MILT ELLIOTT DID NOT WANT TO DIE with strangers. As the days and weeks wore on after the aborted escape attempt with Margret Reed, he felt himself fading and thought the end might come soon. But he was living in the Murphy cabin and hardly knew the people there. Margret and her children were over in the Breen cabin, and Elliott felt a yearning to be with them. He was, after all, a Reed by feeling if not by blood, so close to his employers that he called Margret 'Ma.' And so he dragged his failing body over to the Breen shanty, where he lay down just to the left of the fireplace and dozed off.
But if Elliott wanted to die in the Breen cabin, that was the one thing Patrick Breen was determined to avoid. Watching a man die might demoralize his family. They might lose heart, and heart was one of the keys to survival. Breen insisted that Elliott return to the Murphy cabin that was now his home. Breen had already taken in Margret and her children. That was enough to ask.
Margret Reed roused Elliott and helped him toward the other cabin. Along the way, she gave him a pep talk.
LIKE ELLIOTT, ELIZA WILLIAMS ALSO ACHED at the separation from the Reeds, her employers and surrogate family. She had found shelter in the Graves cabin, but twice she walked over to the Breen shanty. She was sent away both times. 'She wont eat hides,' Breen recorded in his diary. 'Mrs. Reid sent her back to live or die on them.'
TWO HUNDRED MILES TO THE WEST, in the small coastal community of Yerba Buena, residents awoke to find the streets and sidewalks and lampposts glazed with ice almost a quarter inch thick. They pulled their collars tight as they hastened through their morning errands, the better to get back inside and sidle up to a fireplace or a woodstove. It was, the old-timers said, an unusually cold winter.
AT TRUCKEE LAKE, SNOW STARTED FALLING again a little after sunrise on Friday, January 22, the flakes ghosting down in the half-light of dawn. By 10:00 AM. Breen had concluded that another blizzard was upon them. By nightfall the wind was screaming, the snow swarming down in a storm as horrific as any they had yet encountered. It kept up for the better part of four days, and when the storm finally broke for good, Philippine Keseberg walked over to the Breen cabin to say that her son, Lewis Jr., who had been born along the trail during the soft days of summer, had died three days before. If there was any comfort to be offered the grieving mother, it was that her daughter, Ada, was still alive.
ON THE NIGHT OF A FEROCIOUS BLIZZARD, Virginia Reed lay awake in her bed, listening to the howling storm. 'I could not sleep,' she recalled, 'was lying there in that little dark cabin under the snow, listening to the pitiless storm, so cold and hungry.' Physical measures suggested the hopelessness of their plight, so she turned to the spiritual.
Back in Illinois, she had been drawn to the local Catholic church, preferring its candlelit solemnity to what she regarded as the feigned and theatrical spiritualism of her family's tent-revival creed. The attraction deepened as she watched Patrick Breen read Catholic prayers by the glow of a lit piece of kindling, a visual echo of the luminous and shimmering Mass she remembered. Now, as the storm raged outside, she found herself on her knees, vowing that if the God to whom the Breens prayed so fervently would allow her to survive, she would join the Catholic church they cherished.
LANDRUM MURPHY HAD BECOME THE MAN of his family. At the journey's beginning, he had been a mere teenager, two older sisters and their knowledgeable husbands above him in the family pecking order. But his brother-in-law William Pike had been killed in a firearms accident back on the trail, and then his two older sisters and his remaining brother-in-law, William Foster, risked everything with the Forlorn Hope. Land-rum was left as the closest thing to an adult partner for his harried mother, now the caretaker for Landrum, three younger siblings, and three grandchildren.
Two weeks after the entrapment Landrum turned seventeen, an age when a boy's chief ambition is to become a man, and surely he took it upon himself to do what he could, to labor with the heaviest camp chores and comfort the smallest children. No longer a mere uncle to toddlers, he had become the surrogate father to a family.
The work wore on him. By mid-January, Breen noted in his diary that Landrum was 'crazy last night.' Two days later, the young man was 'very low, in danger if relief dont come soon.' A week after that, he was bedridden. His desperate mother walked over to the Breen cabin and pleaded with Peggy Breen for a little meat to give the boy. Breen consented, but by the time Levinah Murphy returned with the precious morsel, her son was too far gone to eat. A little past midnight on the last day of January, just a week after the Keseberg baby's death, Landrum Murphy slipped away.
IT HAD BEEN THREE MONTHS since they were trapped, and deaths came now in rapid succession, like the steady striking of a clock. Every two or three days word went around camp of some new fatality: Landrum Murphy on January 31; the McCutchan baby on February 2; the Eddy baby on the 4th; Eleanor Eddy, grieving her baby's loss, on the 7th; Augustus Spitzer on the 8th; and then Milt Elliott, still amid the strangers with whom he did not wish to die, on the 9th.
Survivors struggled to dispose of the corpses. Proper graves were out of the question—digging down to soil was unimaginable—so instead the bodies were merely hauled outside and covered with snow. The baby Margaret Eddy's tiny body lay in the cabin for three days, surrounded by people who were barely alive themselves, until finally her mother died and someone decided they should be buried together. John Breen, a teenager who had himself been ill, roused the necessary energy and laid them to rest. Margret Reed told her children that when she and Levinah Murphy removed Milt Elliott's body from the cabin, they were so weak they had to drag it by the hair.
IT WAS SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY how the Reeds' little lapdog Cash had survived this long. He was the last of the family's five dogs, the same animals that saved their masters' lives by providing a warm-blooded blanket against the cold winds of the Great Salt Lake Desert. With food supplies dwindling, there was nothing to spare for the little creature, and yet here he was, still barking and panting and nuzzling against the youngsters on the cold nights. Patty Reed thought that perhaps he had survived by catching crickets in the vermin-infested cabins. But in time, the family was faced with the unavoidable necessity, and Cash himself was sacrificed for the greater good. 'We ate his head and feet & hide & evry thing about him,' Virginia Reed remembered later. The grim canine stockpile lasted a week, and then the ever-struggling Reeds once again faced starvation. At times they ate an unappetizing mush produced by taking the bones from which the Breens had gnawed their sustenance and boiling them for days on end.
The Breens still had a little meat, but by and large they refused to share it, understandably calculating that it would be needed for the paramount goal of their own survival. Peggy Breen ached with anxiety, 'very uneasy for fear we shall all perrish with hunger,' as her husband put it in his diary.
