happened. Tucker's bluffing confidence fooled little James Reed Jr., who asked to be left with Denton and the warmth of the flames. His mother refused, of course, and James and the others gathered up their meager provisions and moved on.
Alone, Denton made himself as comfortable as possible, then took out a pencil and a small journal. He began to write, revising as he went by rubbing out lines with a small India rubber eraser. Surrounded by endless white snow, his mind returned to verdant boyhood summers back in England: gazing at a brook, wandering through fields, sitting beneath 'the old witch-elm that shades the village green'—joys now impossibly distant. He finished his composition, and waited.
Weeks later, rescuers found his body sitting against a snowbank, his head down upon his chest.
PHILIPPINE KESEBERG CARRIED HER DAUGHTER, three-year-old Ada, for as long as her arms had strength. She had already lost one child on the journey, Lewis Jr., who had not survived to see his first birthday. Her husband was back at the lake, his injured foot precluding any walking, and it was easy to suppose he would die there. Ada might be the only family Philippine had left. Aching for a respite, she offered a gold watch and twenty- five dollars to anyone who would carry Ada, but no one accepted. Philippine recentered her resolve and marched on, but it was the daughter rather than the mother who could go no farther. Sometime that night, Ada died, the latest victim of hunger and cold.
In the morning, the others discovered that Philippine literally could not let go of her child. She clutched the tiny corpse like a pilgrim with an icon. Her mind reeled back beyond her son's death, beyond even the beginning of the journey, all the way back to her homeland of Germany. Before the Kesebergs crossed the Atlantic, Philippine had given birth to twins, Ada and another little girl they named Mathilde Elise. The tots had barely been a year old when the family came to America, and perhaps the journey proved too much for Mathilde, for she died two months after they arrived. Philippine must have been adamant that she would not lose Ada too, and yet now she had been helpless to prevent it, even as she held the child in her arms.
Reason Tucker stepped forward. They had to keep moving, and it was madness to carry a corpse. The child had to be left to a mountain grave. At last Philippine agreed and stumbled away with the others. Tucker bent to put the little body in the snow, covered it as best he could, and hurried to catch up. 'Her sperrit went to heaven,' he wrote of Ada, 'her body to the wolves.'
The grim band marched in single file, just as the rescuers had on the inbound trip, the leaders breaking trail with snowshoes and the others following in their tracks. Each morning they awoke to find their clothing frozen solid. Virginia Reed remembered that even her shoestrings hardened into immovable wires. They started the day's march the minute it was light, for it was easier to walk on the snow when it was still frozen hard rather than softening under the midday sun. Unexpectedly, the sun was in some ways a curse, its glare glinting off the snow until their eyes ached, its warmth melting their frozen clothes until they were soggy and dripping. Virginia, who was thirteen, tried to think of her wet smock as clinging like a fashionable dress.
Hunger deepened by the hour. Hopeful faces sank as they approached the food caches hung in trees by the rescuers on their way up the mountains. Animals had somehow reached many of the bags, gnawing them open and gorging on the contents. Tucker measured out what was left, dividing the rations as evenly as possible and urging his charges to be careful with the precious scraps, lest a lifesaving bite be wasted.
The last allotment was a double ration, two small strips of dried beef, each about the size of an index finger, meant to serve as both dinner that evening and breakfast the following morning. Leanna Donner could not muster the needed self-discipline, and she feasted on both meals at once. At dawn, she had nothing, so she sat in the half- light and watched the others nibble on their breakfasts. Her older sister, fourteen-year-old Elitha, who had kept Leanna going on the first day's fatiguing hike from Alder Creek to Truckee Lake, could not stand to see the girl sit by ravenously while others savored the precious taste of food. Elitha took her own small strip of meat and divided it neatly in two. Leanna, who remembered that the tiny morsels were then 'more precious than gold or diamonds,' never forgot her sister's help. 'How long we went without food after that,' she recalled, 'I do not know.'
The children scrounged desperately. Tucker's buckskin pants were frayed along the bottom, and so the youngsters began to cut off slices of the leather, crisping it in the fire and gnawing it down, in effect recreating the old meals of boiled hide that had sustained them at the lake. By their fifth day on the trail, the whole party was hungry enough to do the same. At noon, Tucker divided up some shoestrings, roasted them, and provided them to the marchers.
There was every possibility now that they all might perish, that they might, like John Denton and Ada Keseberg, survive the ordeal only to die amid the rescue. No one struggled more than little James Reed—at five the youngest of the children who were actually walking, as opposed to being carried by someone. He plunged down into the snow up to his waist, then propped his knee on the edge and struggled from the personal crevasse he had created, thrusting his foot forward to repeat the whole process. Every agonizing step, he told the others, brought him 'nigher Pa and somthing to eat.' To keep him moving, the adults surely promised him that it was true. Then they must have wondered if it was.
BACK IN THE CAMPS, silent questions of conscience stole through the shelters like a rumor going around town. Even before the rescuers left, the Donners tamped down the inhibitions of taboo and broached an obvious, if forbidden, topic. If they could not find the bodies of their frozen cattle under the layers of snow, they told the rescuers, they would soon begin to eat the dead.
The same horrifying desperation seeped through the lake cabins. The day after the rescue party left, the Breens shot their dog, Towser, and dressed out the meager body. The butchering knives pried little meat from the bones, for the animal was hardly more than skeleton and hide, but even so small and fleeting a bounty drew envy from the other cabins, half-dead neighbors begging for a chance at survival. Elizabeth Graves hobbled over from her cabin to ask for meat. Patrick Breen, whose family had long held the richest larder of the company, could see the longing inspired by his provisions. 'They think I have meat to spare but I know to the Contrary,' he wrote of the other families. 'They have plenty hides. I live principally on the same.'
The nights turned especially cold—'froze hard last night,' Breen wrote in his diary on four consecutive mornings—and the flagging emigrants could no longer guard the half-buried bodies of the dead against the wolves. The beasts edged ever closer to the cabin doors, and at night their howls rang through the shanties like the keening wails of ghosts.
Friday, February 26, dawned clear and warm after another arctic night, a brisk wind blowing out of the southeast. Patty Reed's jaw bulged with the swollen protrusion of a toothache, but Breen pondered more agonizing matters. Pulling out his pencil, he set to work on the day's diary entry with a fretful mind. Most families now recoiled at the disgusting boiled hides, he noted, although there were enough to go around. 'We eat them with a tolerable good apetite,' Breen wrote. 'Thanks be to Almighty God, Amen.' Then Breen turned to the real cause of his vexation. The day before, he confessed to the little diary, Levinah Murphy had come to his cabin and, like the Donner families before her, acknowledged the depth of their plight. Unless the wolves took it first, she intended to cannibalize the corpse of Milt Elliott, the Reed family's faithfiil helper. 'Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him,' Breen wrote straightforwardly. 'It is distressing.'
22
Threshold of Desperation
As Reason Tucker's initial relief party bulled its way up to the high camps and then started back down, James Reed was busy mounting a separate attempt at rescue, one that lagged behind Tucker's but ultimately would become intertwined with it. Discharged from his military duties after the Battle of Santa Clara, Reed rode north to the little town of Yerba Buena, which was about to shed its name for the more impressive San Francisco. He was armed with a petition informing the American naval commander that the Donner Party had been delayed 'from unavoidable causes' and was now trapped. The signers, prominent local residents from San Jose, asked that the government dispatch rescuers on snowshoes immediately.
Ushered in to see the top-ranking naval officer on the scene, Capt. J. B. Hull, Reed encountered a mixed
