money would help her children, especially if she too died and left them orphaned. Boots went for $4 a pair, cordovan shoes $3, silk handkerchiefs $1.25 each. Donner's knife, the one item that wasn't some sort of garment, brought $1. A careful record was kept—subtotals for each man, the sums accurate to the penny—and in all the sale raised $118.81, presumably to be paid when the party reached California.
The harder decision for Betsy Donner must have been to divide her family yet again. Two of her children had gone out with the first relief, but five remained with her. The two smallest, Samuel and Lewis, were too weak to go, as was their mother, but she sent the three oldest, Solomon, Mary, and Isaac.
In the other Donner tent, the decision was more vexing. The three little girls were in relatively good health —'Stout harty children,' Reed called them—and so was Tamzene, their mother. But George Donner, beset by the infection from his injured hand, was too weak to move. Tamzene would not leave her husband alone, and Reed told her honestly that he expected another rescue party shortly—the group led by Selim Woodworth, the naval officer whose well-supplied expedition had been moving toward the Sierra when Reed entered the wilderness. Promised that more help was on the way, Tamzene decided to stay where she was and keep her three children with her. Having done what he could, Reed bundled up Betsy Donner's children and hiked back to the lake, where his own two youngsters waited.
Since being sent back from the group that escaped with the first relief, Patty Reed had become something of a surrogate mother for her little brother Tommy, and her father seemed to recognize her new status. Before leaving for Alder Creek, he had told her that she could have flour from the rescue provisions to make bread. Patty, who had just turned nine, knew the value of the foodstuffs lugged in by the rescuers, knew that none could be wasted, knew that lives might depend on the wise use of every morsel, and yet now her father was trusting her with the precious stores. She thought herself 'quite a little woman.' She beamed with pride.
She also set to baking, and when the rescuers returned from Alder Creek, well after dark, the alluring smell of fresh-baked bread wafted from the Breen cabin, a stark contrast to the previous months of deprivation. The men came in—'cold and hungry and tired and heartsick,' Patty recalled—and huddled around the fire for warmth. At one point, Patty promised everyone that all the bread was good—the portions she was serving to the strangers as well as those she gave to people she knew—and everyone laughed at her sweet pronouncement. 'The laugh,' she wrote later, 'did almost as much good as the bread.'
THE NEXT MORNING, REED AND THE OTHER RESCUERS led seventeen people toward the pass, once again most of them children. Elizabeth Graves took her four remaining youngsters, emptying out once and for all the big double cabin that had been built for her family and the Reeds. The Breens and their five children all left. Patrick Breen, who had so faithfully chronicled the travails of the party in his diary, ended with an astonished acknowledgment of the obdurate foe that had held them all captive. He had talked with old mountain hands among the rescue party, he noted. 'They say the snow will be here untill June.'
To help care for those unable to travel, Reed detailed three of his men to remain in the high camps—Clark and Cady at Alder Creek, Stone at the lake—assuring them that Woodworth would arrive soon with more help. Whatever meager provisions could be spared were left as well. Just fourteen survivors remained behind, most of them at the edge of death.
Those who walked away with Reed had endured more than four months of captivity, surviving numbing cold, debilitating disease, filth, boredom, and despair. They had divided their families in hopes that some might live while others died. They had watched their friends and family members starve, and at least some of them had been forced to cannibalize the bodies. Now their ordeal was about to get worse.
25
Terror, Terror
James Reed looked up into the sky and felt an abiding dread seize his heart. The sly was darkening, portentous clouds rolling up over the peaks. At this elevation, the clouds pressed close, looming down on a man like a monster from a nightmare.
They were three days out from the lake. Progress had been slow, and they had only surmounted the crest of the Sierra a few hours earlier. They were about as high—and about as exposed to the elements— as at any point on their journey.
Reed concealed his alarm in the confessional of his journal. 'The Sky look like snow and everything indicates a storm, god for bid. ... Night closing fast, the Clouds still thicking. Terror, terror. I feel a terrible foreboding but dare not Communicate my mind to any. Death to all if our provisions do not Come in a day or two and a storm should fall on us. Very cold, a great lamentation about the Cold.'
In the entire ordeal of the Donner Party, no one ever revealed a more acute fear.
Perhaps they had been a little too generous with the food they left at the lake camp and Alder Creek, for their own supplies had run short, and now they were weakened from half rations. Three men had gone ahead in hopes of finding a cache left by the rescue party on the way in, but so far there was no sign of their reappearance.
At least there was work to do, something to pry the mind from the waiting. Wood had to be gathered for a fire. Without a fire they might not survive the night. So those who were able scrounged around for some downed branches, the thicker ones for the fire, the boughs for beds to provide a little insulation from the incessant snow. If they could get some food and start a decent fire, then maybe, just maybe, they could withstand the onslaught coming from the sky.
As they worked, they must have stolen glances to the west, longing for the return of their comrades, and to the sky, eager for some change, a shaft of blue, literally a ray of hope.
But all they could see was the clouds.
SNOW STARTED FALLING EARLY IN THE NIGHT, and with it the wind rose into what Reed remembered as 'a perfect hurricane.' They were camped amid a stand of tall timber in a shallow valley just beneath the summit. Rectangular, with one of the short ends facing the pass, the little depression funneled the winds so that they raked the campsite ferociously. Blown sideways, snowflakes and ice crystals turned into tiny pellets of buckshot. The wind screamed through the tree branches. The temperature plummeted.
In his diary, Reed noted that he tried to keep watch for the men returning from the cache, but that would quickly have proved impossible, and useless anyway. Given the conditions, the advance scouts were either dead or holed up somewhere. 'My dreaded Storm is now on us,' Reed wrote. 'Crying and lamentations on account of the Cold and the dread of death from the Howling Storm.' Children began to weep. Some of the men prayed for their lives.
They all circled the campfire, their backs outward, away from the flames, then piled up snow behind the circle, creating a windbreak that gave them at least marginal shelter. Peggy Breen was still nursing her youngest child, a daughter named Isabella, so she got down on her knees, pulled a blanket and shawl over her shoulders and head, and tried to let the baby take some nourishment.
The fire had been built on a platform of green logs, but still it had melted the snow beneath, forming a pit. At one point, fifteen-year-old John Breen collapsed—'I fainted or became stupid from weakness,' as he put it—and would have fallen into the fire hole if a quick-witted companion had not caught him by the leg. His mother rushed over to revive him. His jaws had locked shut, but somehow she forced in a bit of lump sugar, which brought him back to consciousness.
With the temperature so low, the fire was an absolute necessity, but as conditions worsened some of the men gave out physically and could no longer feed the flames. Reed went blind, probably a delayed form of snow- blindness from reflected sunlight earlier in the day. Whatever the cause, he could not see the flames even when he stared straight into the campfire.
By default, the crucial job of tending the fire fell to William McCutchan and Hiram Miller. Like McCutchan, Miller had originally been part of the Donner Party but went ahead on the trail and thus avoided entrapment. In Miller's case, he joined a mule train early on during the journey and far outpaced the lumbering wagons.
