were doomed.
Then, within hours of their arrival, they departed, tramping off single file toward the lake, their charges trailing behind. Sparing what she could, Tamzene Donner took some string and tied a threadbare blanket around her stepdaughters' shoulders, hoping it would serve as a shawl in the daytime and a bedroll at night.
The drama was all so quick that it seemed a little unreal. For months the Donners, like every other trapped family, had prayed for the joyous arrival of help from across the mountains. But no trumpets heralded the great moment. Instead it was just three exhausted men bearing scant food, not much news, and precious thin hope. Tamzene's youngest daughter, three-year-old Eliza, didn't even understand what had happened. Only afterward did she comprehend the sad and brutal truth that the long-awaited rescuers had just come and gone.
REASON TUCKER WAS A BIG, RANGY VIRGINIAN with an uncompromising desire to help the stranded emigrants. When William Eddy first stumbled down out of the mountains, Tucker was among the handful of men who saddled up horses and rode out into the night to bring in the trailing members of the Forlorn Hope. And then, in the early stages of the rescue mission, it was Tucker who personally guaranteed the men's wages, a promise that preserved the whole expedition from collapse. Tucker had no relatives in the Donner Party, nor even, so far as we know, any particularly close friends, and yet he never balked at the dangerous business of deliverance.
But as Tucker led the survivors away from the Alder Creek camp and back toward Truckee Lake, the enormity of the experience overwhelmed him, and the vigor that had brought him so far sheered away like an avalanche sheeting down a mountainside. 'On the road back I gave out,' he confided to his diary, although he displayed characteristic pioneer stoicism and offered no more detailed explanation. In time, he recovered and trudged onward through the dimming light of late afternoon. He reached the lake cabins at sundown, narrowly avoiding the nocturnal cold that might have transformed him from rescuer to victim.
Trailing in Tucker's wake, twelve-year-old Leanna Donner struggled even more. Even at the start, she was so weak that others doubted she would reach the crest of the first hill. As the day wore on, she began to cry, then sat down on the snow, refusing to go farther. Her older sister, Elitha, urged her on, promising that the cabins of the lake camp were just over the next hill. Leanna struggled to her feet, plodded to the crest of the rise, and saw nothing. Again she collapsed and wept. Again Elitha pushed her forward. The cycle repeated until at last they saw the smoke curling upward from the cabin chimneys, a magical lure that drew them on. 'When we reached the Graves cabin it was all I could do to step down the snow steps into the cabin,' Leanna remembered later. 'Such pain and misery as I endured that day is beyond description.'
She had gone seven miles; now she had to cross the Sierra.
PATRICK BREEN PUT AWAY HIS DIARIST'S PENCIL, for the sudden presence of strangers in camp meant the first chance for fresh conversation in months. On the two days after Tucker and the others returned from Alder Creek, Breen scratched out the most meager of entries: 'pleasant weather' the first day and 'Thawey warm day' the second.
People were moving around again, rejuvenated by the knowledge that the snow and the mountains and the winter could be conquered. 'The sight of us appeared to put life into their emaciated frames,' one rescuer wrote. Yet there wasn't much to do. To rest the rescuers, it had been decided that they would not begin the return journey until Monday, four days after their arrival. In the meantime the survivors at the lake cabins filled the dreary hours with the same heartrending calculus that had already occurred at Alder Creek: families assessing the cold odds of life and death and deciding who would make the Herculean effort to escape and who would stay and wait.
Back in December, the Forlorn Hope had consisted almost entirely of adults, several of whom were parents with children back at the cabins. The remaining adults could care for the youngsters, and without provisions the trip was just too risky for the young. So the adults left and the children stayed.
Now it was the other way around. Most of the adults were dead, too sick to travel, or forced to remain in camp to care for children so young they could barely toddle. The new group would be led by relatively healthy adults—the rescuers—with at least some basic provisions, so the parents of the Donner Party took the opportunity to send away their older offspring. Patrick and Peggy Breen sent away two of their seven children. Elizabeth Graves chose the three oldest of her brood to go. Levinah Murphy dispatched two of her three remaining children and one of her two remaining grandchildren. Lewis Keseberg was still hampered by the injured foot that had rendered him a mule passenger during the futile assault on the mountain pass in the fall, but his young wife risked the attempt with her only surviving child, whom she planned to carry. Margret Reed, desperate as always to reach her banished husband, declared that she and all four of her children would flee.
The resulting roster was astonishingly juvenile. As the column marched out of camp, the seven rescuers were pursued by twenty-three skeletal emigrants, most of whom were fourteen or younger, a good many with no parent accompanying them. It was a procession that would today be considered a school parade: two fourteen- year-olds, two thirteen-year-olds, three twelve-year-olds, an eleven-year-old, a ten-year-old, two eight-year-olds, a five-year-old, and, carried in the arms of others, three three-year-olds.
Before long it was plain that two of the Reed children—eight-year-old Patty and three-year-old Thomas— could not go on. Aquilla Glover, along with Tucker a co-captain of the rescue party, recognized the hard truth and told Margret Reed that two of her children would have to go back. He would see them safely to the cabins, he said, then hustle back to catch up. Reed balked. She declared that she too would return to the lake and stay there with Patty and Thomas, letting her two other children go ahead with the party.
Glover took her gently to task, arguing that her return would only add to the number of mouths to feed at the lake. By forging on, she could help Virginia and James, the two older children, and she could effectively conserve the limited provisions that would have to sustain everyone at the cabins. Glover even promised that if they met no other rescue party, he would return and bring out the children, a courageous commitment that could have cost him his life. Reed pondered the unimaginable choice before her, then asked if Glover was a Mason like her husband, a distinction in which he took great pride. Glover said he was, and Reed asked him to back up his vow by tying his commitment to the honor of the fraternal society. Glover gave his word as a Mason, and Reed bent to bid two of her children farewell.
'Well. Ma.' said Patty, 'if you never see me again, do the best you can.'
STRUGGLING BACK TO THE LAKE CABINS, the two Reed children were hardly greeted with glee. They would have to return to the Breen cabin, where they had been living before they left with the rescuers, and the Breens were understandably reluctant to share their sparse provisions with two more hungry mouths. They had already housed the Reed family for weeks, and now it was presumed they would feed and shelter two of the children longer still. Resentment welled up, and initially they refused to let the children enter.
Two rescuers who had brought the youngsters back lobbied for the Breens' forbearance. Fresh relief parties would arrive shortly, they insisted, with more supplies and a renewed determination to pluck the remaining survivors from the mountain prison. Slowly, grudgingly, the Breens relented. Patty and Thomas padded down the snow steps they had climbed only that morning, back into the dark and wretched cabin they had briefly escaped.
MARGRET REED MUST HAVE TURNED IT OVER in her head a thousand times. She had just walked away from two of her children, leaving them to a fate she could not fathom or predict, and now she had nothing to do, save walk and walk and walk.
The third day out from the lake, an Englishman named John Denton crumbled. Denton was a likable figure, a man who had proven himself handy around camp. When Sarah Keyes died back at the Big Blue River, it was Denton who hefted a chisel and carved her name on a tombstone. As the company endured its winter captivity, he bore up better than most of the other young single men, the majority of whom were long since dead. But the journey toward safety sapped his last reserve. He struggled to keep pace, pushing himself with desperation, but in time it became plain that he could not go on.
Not wanting to hinder the others, he asked to be abandoned, so they built a fire on a small platform of green logs, chopped some extra firewood, and left what food they could spare. Reason Tucker laid a crude bed of evergreen boughs next to the fire and provided a blanket to ward off the worst of the cold. Putting up a brave face for a man he was forced to abandon, Tucker vowed to send back help soon, but he knew it was a pointless promise. Denton knew it too. He gave Tucker a brace of pistols he was carrying and told him to keep them in case the worst
