the still-frozen snow. After only four miles, they began encountering survivors strung out along the trail. Death- mask faces pressed around the rescuers, pleading paupers desperately chanting, 'Bread. Bread. Bread, Bread.' Bakers had been at work in anticipation of the moment, so the rescuers dug into their provisions and offered sustenance to the bony, grasping hands. In his diary, Reed referred to the survivors as 'the poor unfortunate Starved people.'
A shout went up for Margret Reed, and then another to promise that her husband was among the rescuers coming up the trail. She fell to her knees in joy and relief. Virginia Reed ran to embrace her father, fell again and again, then at last folded herself into his arms. Little James Reed Jr., who had vowed that every step brought him nearer to his father, must have celebrated his vindication. It was February 27, the first time the Reeds had seen each other since the patriarch's banishment from the Donner Party back in the russet days of autumn. 'The meeting was very affecting,' one witness wrote with nineteenth-century understatement.
But then Margret breathed horrifying news to her husband: Two of their children were still trapped. James Reed urged the survivors to keep going, then mustered his men and started back up the mountains. Within minutes of a reunion that ended almost five months of separation, Reed was off again, waving farewell to half his family in a frantic attempt to save the rest.
AT THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, THE SURVIVORS were perched at a threshold of desperation. They had all endured the unendurable—months of hunger so sharp it twisted the belly, meal after meal of boiled leather, the slow deaths of comrades and family. Yet now there was hope. Rescuers had made it through once. Perhaps others would too. If only breath and blood could be kept active for a few more days, a lifetime might still stretch out ahead.
Out in the snow lay the food they needed, buried in the shallowest of graves and preserved by the icy cold. At last someone took a knife— perhaps it was one of the Donners, perhaps it was Mrs. Murphy making good on her vow to eat Milt Elliott, perhaps it was someone else. There may have been a conversation: arguments back and forth, tears and angst, the frank necessity pitched against the age-old taboo. Or it may have been a silent consensus, a sudden and collective acceptance of the unavoidable. Someone took a knife and went out into the snow.
IRONICALLY, PEOPLE WHO ARE STARVING can be killed by an overabundance of food. To survive a prolonged period of malnourishment, the body begins to consume itself, burning off fat and then eating through muscle. As the process accelerates, the body begins to plunder the tools it needs to process nutrients, so that eventually a person who is desperately craving food can be killed by a gluttonous feast. In recognition of such perils, modern relief workers are provided with guidelines for the gradual refeeding of famine victims.
The potential dangers of uncontrolled gorging by starvation victims was known even amid the primitive medical knowledge of the nineteenth century, and so when the survivors reached a camp where Reed had stationed one of his men with supplies, the emaciated emigrants were doled out only limited portions. The adults recognized the necessity of this restraint, but to twelve-year-old William Hook, it must have seemed a stubborn and perplexing denial. For months he had eaten almost nothing, had watched his family members wither and die for lack of food. Now an abundant larder was being kept cruelly beyond his reach.
As he lay awake at night, his stomach knotted with a ravenous hunger. His mouth watered at the memory of the meager meal he had been given. At some point, temptation overwhelmed obedience, and he wriggled from his bedroll and snuck quietly to the food cache. For the first time in months, he could eat as much as he wished, and he began inhaling food, gorging himself in a hushed, private feast. Within hours, he was deathly ill. He was given tobacco juice to make him vomit, but when the party was ready to move on, William was too sick to march, so he was left behind with an adult attendant and two other youngsters who could not go on. At one point, apparently sick, William went out on the snow and crouched down, resting on his hands and knees. He was approached by eleven-year-old Billy Murphy, who had been left behind with frostbitten feet. Billy put a hand on William's shoulder, speaking to him and urging him to come back into the camp. William fell over, already dead. Billy and the camp attendant took some biscuits and dried beef from William's pockets and then buried him under a tree where the snow had melted.
Billy's shoes had been cut off, and with no extra pairs on hand, he had no choice but to walk the rest of the way barefoot. They caught the main group of survivors three days later, and four days after that—on March 7—the whole party reached Johnson's Ranch, the end of their journey. After a winter of unending white, the lowland spring seemed a riot of colors and life: the green of the grass, the varied hues of early flowers. Even the soft brown of bare and unfrozen dirt was an enlivening change. 'I really thoughtT' remembered Virginia Reed, 'I had stepped over into paradise.'
23
Weeping
George Donner looked away and wept. His three youngest children, the three little girls who remained in the bedraggled tent at Alder Creek with their parents, had been so pitifully hungry, their sunken faces so heartbreaking. Yet George and Tamzene had been unable to satisfy their daughters' pleading. No more rescuers had come to help. No hunter had provided meat.
Out of options, they went out into the snow to dig up the shallow graves of loved ones. At first, the only body that could be found was that of Jacob Donner, George's brother, who had died back in December. His widow gave her permission, and the flesh of his limbs was sliced away.
The girls ate, but George could not bring himself to watch. He had uprooted his prosperous and settled family and dragged them across a desiccated continent in search of a better life, and the great endeavor had come to disaster. The girls ate, and noticed their father's tears.
THE NASAL HONKING OF GEESE sliced through the cold night air, and Patrick Breen lay in bed listening. It was early for the birds to be flying north. They might easily reach their summering grounds before spring loosed the grip of winter. They were at the forefront of their migration, as prompt as the Donner Party had been tardy.
FROM THE SHELTER OF THE FOREST, pitying eyes peered in toward Breen's cabin. During the months of their entrapment, the emigrants had assumed they were alone, seeing no other human presence until the first rescuers arrived from California. In fact, they had been watched ever since they first drove their ox teams up into the mountains.
The Washoe Indians lived in the eastern Sierra Nevada. They spent summers near Truckee Lake and winters at lower elevations, but hunting parlies would have returned to the lake even in the colder months. The Washoe had no written language, but their oral traditions recount a long observation of the strange invaders from the east. At first, the Washoe watched the wagon trains wend up the river canyons and thought the long processions looked like some giant, monstrous snake. Most of the trains disappeared over the crest of the mountains, of course, but the Washoe saw that one group stalled just at the onset of winter and then settled in at makeshift camps. The Indians had heard tales of the Spanish missions in California, where Native Americans were essentially enslaved, and so they were understandably reluctant to contact whites. But as the condition of the Donner Party slowly worsened, the Washoe's fear turned to sympathy, and on the morning after Breen heard the geese flying over, one courageous ambassador approached the cabins.
He wore a heavy backpack and, so far as Breen could see, was alone. He approached from the lake, on snowshoes with strings made of bark. He said something the emigrants could not understand and left five or six small roots as an offering of food. Then he walked off toward the east. 'Where he was going I could never imagine,' remembered John Breen, Patrick's teenage son.
The roots looked like onions and tasted like sweet potatoes, but the texture was stringy, 'all full of little tough fibres,' Breen wrote. Still, the emigrants devoured the gift gratefully. The Washoe never approached again. By now, they had seen things that convinced them the strangers were inhuman.
