the bet.
FROM THE MOMENT THE RESCUERS LEFT Johnson's Ranch, the squelch of mud served as the drumbeat of their march. The trail was so sodden that frequently they had to unburden the pack mules, drag them out of the muck, then reload the beasts and continue on. Within days, the men and equipment were so soaked that they needed an entire day of immobility just to dry out. There was no rain the next day, although they encountered a creek so swollen that the animals had to swim across. The provisions were tied to a log and floated over.
The little band reached the snow on Tuesday, February 9, six days and more than forty miles into their journey. Within hours, the mules were floundering 'belly deep,' and the next day William Eddy, who had somehow recuperated enough to join the rescue effort, was sent back with some of the exhausted animals. Two men were left with a cache of provisions, and the rest of the meat was divided into fifty-pound packs, a heavy load for men in deep snow.
They struggled on, but as they climbed higher the snow grew deeper every day. On Sunday, the 14th, three of the men simply refused to go farther. That meant only seven were left, and morale plummeted. There must have been some talk of a general retreat, for Reason Tucker, who had been named by Sinclair as one of two captains of the party, decided that a drastic step was needed. 'Under existing circumstances I took it upon myself to insure every man who persevered to the end five dollars a day from the time they entered the snow.' Tucker was taking on a significant financial risk, but perhaps he was motivated by a sympathetic compassion: He had crossed the plains himself the previous summer, even traveling briefly with the Graves family before they joined the Donner Party. The wage guarantee worked. 'We determined to go ahead,' Tucker wrote in his diary.
Each man took a turn at the head of the line, breaking trail by sinking knee-deep in the snow at every step. When the leader grew exhausted, he fell to the back, and the second man took over as pacesetter. To guide their return, they set fire to dead pine trees along their path. Every few days they hung a small bundle of meat from a tree, lightening their packs and providing a ready source of resupply on the trip home.
The hiking was fatiguing, brutal work, but when they made camp at night they somehow had to find the strength to fell saplings and make a platform for their campfire. Daniel Rhoads remembered that they usually roasted some meat for supper, 'and then throwing our blankets over our shoulders sat, close together, around the fire and dozed through the night the best way we could.'
They were extraordinarily exposed, and if a major blizzard hit, they could have been trapped as inescapably as the people they were trying to rescue. But for the most part, the weather held, and up they went, three miles on a bad day, eight miles on a good one. On the 17th, they reached the headwaters of the Yuba River, just beneath the pass, where they guessed the snow was thirty feet deep.
The following day they crossed the pass in the morning and descended the steep eastern slope of the range, the icy flatness of Truckee Lake spread below them. They reached the lake in the late afternoon, their long shadows reaching out as if to announce their presence. They trudged on to the far shore, at the eastern end, where they had been told the cabins lay. Well supplied and with some idea of where they were going, they had completed the journey in about half the time of the Forlorn Hope, yet still it had taken two weeks.
But where was everyone? No emigrants waved or danced or shouted gleefully to herald their arrival. In fact, no one could be seen at all. 'No living thing except ourselves was in sight,' Daniel Rhoads remembered, 'and we thought that all must have perished.' Probably they were just a little too late. Probably starvation or disease or despair had taken their ultimate toll. It was a reasonable assumption, but out of some desperate hope one of the rescuers let out a yell, 'a loud halloo.' Then they waited to see who, if anyone, was alive to answer.
21
From California, or Heaven?
The trapped emigrants had kept a yearning vigil westward, peering off toward the mountains and squinting their eyes against the blinding white glare of sun and snow. In his diary, Patrick Breen anticipated the arrival of help. 'Expecting some account from Suiters Soon,' he jotted down at one point. And then a few days later: 'Expecting some person across the Mountain this week.' At Alder Creek, Jean Baptiste Trudeau took a more direct approach. The young Donner family worker once climbed to the top of a tall pine tree near camp—an impressive and exhausting feat given his condition—so that he might catch sight of any arriving rescue party.
So it is ironic that when help finally arrived, no one was waiting. When the seven rescuers walked up to the lake cabins and let out their loud 'halloo,' the emaciated occupants were all inside their cramped and filthy quarters. As the rescuers stood waiting, hoping for a response and expecting none, Levinah Murphy finally emerged and climbed up the roughly hewn steps in the snow. She reached the surface and stared at these apparitions who had appeared in the midst of so unforgiving a wilderness. In a thin croak—'a hollow voice very much agitated,' remembered one of the rescuers—she rasped out a question: 'Are you men from California or do you come from heaven?'
Conditions staggered the rescuers. Emigrants whispered shallow breaths from gaunt frames, some unable to stand or walk. Bodies lay about, most buried as well as the waning strength of the survivors had allowed, though some merely covered with quilts. Inside, in the crowded cavelike cabins where the emigrants had passed three and a half months, the revolting glue of boiled hides and bones clung to grimy pots. Bedclothes reeked. Vermin flickered about. The stench overwhelmed.
Rescuers dug into their packs and doled out what little food they had to spare—jerked beef and biscuits 'made out of the coarsest flour' but to the emigrants as sweet as any baker's delicacy. Then the rescuers posted a guard over their remaining larder to prevent the famished survivors from raiding supplies needed for the return trip.
The lake cabins were only the first stop, and the next morning three of the rescuers took advantage of warm, clear weather to set off for the Alder Creek camp. A few hours later they arrived, finding the tent-bound Donner families in conditions that were, if it was possible, even worse than those at the lake. The rescuers huddled with George Donner immediately, talking over hard decisions that had to be made almost instantly. A blizzard could roar over the peaks at any moment, dropping fresh sheets of snow that would rise up around both rescuers and victims like the walls of a prison. The return march had to begin that very day, right away in fact, but it was plain that some of the emigrants were too weak to travel. So yet again, as when the Forlorn Hope set out, families faced a horrifying and brutal triage, deciding who would make a harrowing bid for salvation and who would remain behind, very possibly to die.
Softening the blow as best they could, the rescuers claimed that fresh parties were being raised in California, something that Sutter had promised but they did not know with certainty. They feigned ignorance about the gruesome ordeal of the Forlorn Hope, whose true experiences of death and cannibalism would have disheartened the remaining emigrants. William Eddy survived, the rescuers said, for their own expedition had been outfitted in response to his pleas, but as for the rest of the party they claimed to know nothing.
Betsy Donner had no choice but to stay behind. Her husband, Jacob, had died weeks before, and now she was sole parent to seven children, some of whom clearly were too young for the journey. She kept her oldest son, fifteen-year-old Solomon, with her, presumably deciding to risk his life so that he might help care for his youngest siblings. The two next oldest children, twelve-year-old William and ten-year-old George, she sent along with the rescuers.
In the other tent, George Donner was plainly too sick to go. The laceration on his hand—the gash he had received while trying to fix the wagon clear back at the start of the entrapment—had grown infected, and the fetid wound had crippled him. Tamzene Donner, his wife, was healthy enough to make a try for safety, but she refused to leave her ailing husband. She sent away her two stepdaughters—fourteen-year-old Elitha and twelve-year-old Leanna, George's children by a prior marriage—but kept her own three toddlers by her side.
The rescuers felled a pine tree, so the remaining emigrants would have firewood, and then measured out the pathetically small rations they could leave behind for each of those staying at the tents—a teacupful of flour, two small biscuits, and a few thin pieces of jerked beef as long as a forefinger. Such scraps might suffice until another rescue party arrived, and in any event common decency required some sort of allowance, even if the recipients
