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Gruesome Sights
Climbing up into the higher elevations after leaving the members of the first rescue party, James Reed and his men began to plunge down to their waists in powder, the deep snow grabbing them like a demon from the netherworld. The men heaved themselves back to the surface, searched around for some firmer bit of footing, then launched another stride that would take them a yard closer to the summit and, almost surely, deliver them back into the depths.
By midday the sun simmered snowfields into mushy bogs, impossible to walk on. The men lay down to take what rest they could, then rose at midnight, thinking the dependable night chill had again hardened the snow. But still the surface gave beneath their feet, so they waited another two hours and then at last resumed their climb by stars and moonlight and the coming dawn. Reed estimated the snow at thirty feet deep, the same guess Tucker made while marching in with the first relief party.
Soft snow and exhaustion again forced them into an early camp, a delay that cornered Reed into a difficult decision. He and most of the others were spent and needed a full night's rest. But three of the men— Charles Cady, Nicholas Clark, and Charles Stone—somehow found a reserve of energy. They could keep climbing through the night, they insisted, although it was now their second night with almost no sleep. The risks of separation were obvious. A splintered party could more easily fall prey to some accident, and if caught by a blizzard would have fewer bodies for sharing warmth or chopping firewood. Already the saga of the Donner Party and its rescuers was a fractured tale, small groups scattered about like icebergs calved from a glacier: some safe in California, others at the mountain camps, still others in between. To split off a small group yet again might invite disaster.
Yet Reed also knew the desperation of those in the mountain camps, including two of his own children. He knew that for those still alive at the lake cabins and Alder Creek, the odds lengthened with each passing moment, the seconds ticking away until midnight on an executioner's clock. If Cady, Clark, and Stone could march through the night and reach the camps a few hours sooner, they might save lives. Reed told the men they could keep going, and so as he and the others bedded down on the snow, the tiny breakaway group hiked off into the dark.
They approached within two miles of the lake cabins but then spotted a party of about ten Indians. In fact, the Washoe had given aid to the Donner Party, but the three men quickly assumed the Indians were hostile, presuming they had killed those in the cabins. They huddled together and spent the remainder of the night camped without a fire, fearing that flames might attract the attention of the Indians and invite attack.
Morning dawned clear and pleasant, and for the second time a rescue party walked toward the cabins at Truckee Lake thinking that all those inside were already dead.
DESCENDING THE CRUDE SNOW STEPS of the cabins, the rescuers found a gruesome sight. Some of the emigrants were still alive, but around their hovels lay partially butchered corpses, 'fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of famine.' Limbs and skulls littered the ground, even the hair of those who had been consumed. When they moved on to the Alder Creek site, they found the children of Jacob Donner eating his heart and liver raw, the blood still on their chins.
At least that is the story that Reed and his men recounted in a version that first appeared in the Illinois Journal on December 9,1847, nine months after the rescues, in an article based on Reed's notes, though written by someone else. In a later retelling, Reed made no mention of discovering cannibalism, but on the other hand he never refuted the
Parts of the newspaper account seem exaggerated or melodramatic, as though they might have been added by a writer looking to make an extraordinary story even better. Skulls are said to have filled camp kettles, for example, although few people forced to resort to survival cannibalism actually eat the heads of their former comrades. But on the broader point—that cannibalism had occurred at both the lake cabins and the Alder Creek site—there is little reason to doubt Reed and his men. For one thing, it should come as no surprise that the survivors were eating human flesh. Cannibalism had already occurred in the saga of the Donner Party among the members of the Forlorn Hope, the survivors of which had been able to reach Johnson's Ranch only by eating the dead. Furthermore, people at both mountain camps had already acknowledged their plans for cannibalism. The Donners had told members of the first relief party that they would begin eating human bodies soon, and Levinah Murphy had told Patrick Breen of a similar strategy for survival. A week had passed since the departure of the initial rescuers, who had been able to leave few supplies, and yet no one had died.
Most important, some of the survivors later described their cannibalism, including Mary Donner, two weeks shy of her eighth birthday, and Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who was doing much of the work at the Donner camp. Perhaps most convincing of all is the un-adorned candor of Georgia Donner, who had just turned five. It was Georgia who remembered her father crying and turning away, and she also recalled a macabre moment in which her aunt, Betsy Donner, asked, 'What do you think I cooked this morning?' and then answered her own question, 'Shoemaker's arm.' Georgia seems to have resisted any temptation to embellish her tale, for she was frank in admitting what she did not know. 'When I spoke of human flesh being used at both tents, I said it was prepared for the little ones in both tents. I did not mean to include the larger children (my half sisters) or the grown people, because I am not positive that they tasted of it.'
Such plain and apparently reliable testimony later came into question as doubts were raised about the practice of cannibalism at Alder Creek. Chiefly, these came from Eliza Donner, who turned four in the midst of the events and who later developed an iron determination to disprove allegations of cannibalism by her family. She wrote her own account of the Donner Party's ordeal, and her great triumph came during an interview with Trudeau when he recanted his earlier testimony. But this occurred decades after the entrapment, and he was telling his interviewer exactly what she yearned to hear.
The controversy cropped up again in 2005, when an archaeological team excavated the Donner families' cooking hearth and tested some of the bone fragments found there. When none of the bones proved to be human, many casual followers of the tale concluded that this finding repudiated the possibility of cannibalism. But in fact, it would have been astonishing to find archaeological evidence of cannibalism at Alder Creek. In the acidic soil of the conifer forests of the high Sierra, uncooked bone disintegrates quickly. The only bones found by the archaeologists —the only ones still there to find—were cooked. But the likelihood is small that the families at Alder Creek would have cooked any human bones. In typical cases of survival cannibalism, the desperate sufferers slice flesh from the cadavers and cook only this gruesome 'meat.' Not until after the supply of flesh is exhausted are the bones boiled, so they too can be eaten.
But at Alder Creek, cannibalism would have occurred for no more than a week. There were four full-grown adult bodies at hand (al-though it's possible that one or two had been lost in the deep snow), and it is unlikely that the handful of survivors would have stripped away all the flesh, requiring the cooking of bone. This is even more true if Georgia Donner's account is correct, since she suggests that the adults may not have participated. It seems unlikely that a few small children and a single teenager would have eaten all the flesh off even a single body in less than a week. So there is a high probability that when the archaeologists scrutinized their diggings for physical proof of cannibalism, they were searching for something that no longer existed. And there is an equally high probability that when James Reed and the other men of the second relief party arrived at the high camps, they saw the plain evidence all around them.
WHEN REED EVENTUALLY REACHED THE MOUNTAIN CAMPS, he walked up to the Breen cabin to find his daughter Patty sitting on the roof, her feet dangling on the snow. In the shanty he found his son Tommy, and knew that at least for now all the members of his family were alive.
'Informed the people that all who ware able Should have to Start day after tomorrow,' Reed wrote in his journal. 'Made soup for the infirm... and rendered evry assistance in our power.'
The next morning, Reed and three of his men hiked over to the Alder Creek camps, where agonizing decisions had to be made. Betsy Donner allowed the rescuers to buy the personal property of her late husband, Jacob, whose partially cannibalized body lay nearby. No one recorded her motive, but perhaps she thought that the
