McCutchan and Miller fed the fire relentlessly, and there were those in the group who thought that if the two men had failed, everyone might have died. Years later, McCutchan gave the credit to his colleague: 'Miller being a man of Herculean strengths and indurance was the life and savior of the party.'
Morning brought no relief. The storm raged on, creating a white-out, snow as present in the air as on the ground. Looking into the wind, visibility stretched to less than twenty feet. The sky—'the light of Heaven,' Reed called it—was an unknowable mystery.
Maintaining the fire grew ever more strenuous. The snow pit was now fifteen feet deep, although still the bare ground could not be seen. If the fire itself slid down into the hole, it would be too far away to give off much warmth, and so in addition to feeding the flames, men had to tend the platform of green logs laid across the pit. The supply of wood gathered the previous night was exhausted, so they had to go out into the storm and find nearby trees to fell, then drag the wood back. Even with the warmth of exertion, they could only work in ten-minute shifts before the cold forced them back into the fire circle to regain feeling in their hands and feet. Then they would head back out again.
Peggy Breen had a few seeds and a little tea and sugar, but for all practical purposes they were without food. So long as the storm continued, there was no chance of anyone arriving with supplies, and certainly none of hunting, so as their hunger deepened they could do nothing but bide time. In the lore of the Donner Party, the site became known as Starved Camp. 'Hunger, hunger is the Cry with the Children and nothing to give them,' Reed wrote. 'Freesing was the Cry of the mothers with reference to their little starving freesing Children. Night closing fast and with the Hurricane Increases I dread the coming night.'
THE DROPS THRUMMED ON THE ROOF above Virginia Reed's head. She was safe now, down in the valley, in California, out of the endless winter, generously sheltered in a real house with a real roof, not a makeshift cabin topped with a hide. But lying awake at night, she listened to the steady patter. She knew that in the mountains above, the raindrops were snowflakes, an infinity of snowflakes piling up into inches and feet and yards. Earlier in the day, she had seen her mother standing in the doorway for hours, looking up at the mountains.
Somewhere up there, Virginia knew, her father and siblings struggled against the snow, struggled to reach, as she had done, bare earth and soft grass and a spring rain.
THE BLIZZARD BELLOWED ON INTO ITS SECOND NIGHT at Starved Camp. The fire failed, snuffed out by wind and snow and cold. McCutchan jumped up and managed to rekindle it, piling up the driest pine logs he could find in their meager supply.
Reed slumped into some sort of half-coma, near death. McCutchan and Miller grabbed him and shook him back to consciousness, slapping and shaking and rubbing him until he stirred. Patty Reed lay in her blankets, unable to move, listening to the men screaming at her father, 'Reed! Reed! Wake up man, speak! Reed! We will all die! Wake up! Great God, Reed! Come! Come! You must not die now!' At times, she recalled, they swore at him.
'The Hurricane has never Ceased for ten minuts at atime during one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed,' Reed wrote, adding that he hoped never to see such a thing again. 'Of all the praying and Crying I ever heard nothing ever equaled it. Several times I expected to see the people perish by the extreme Cold.'
At times, the wind was so strong that it seemed one of the nearby trees might topple and crush the little camp. 'Snowing and blowing, hailing, sleet and so cold,' Patty Reed remembered. 'I have not words.'
In the circle around the fire, five-year-old Isaac Donner was wedged in between his big sister Mary and Patty Reed. Sometime in the night he whispered a final shallow breath. Amid the noise and fear and confusion, the two girls did not notice his death until the morning.
With daylight came occasional breaks, a few minutes of calm before a resumption of the deluge, and as the day wore on, the storm slackened substantially. In time, the winds calmed and the snow stopped, and the sly made plain that the torrent was over.
At Alder Creek, Nicholas Clark, one of the relief party members left behind to care for the Donners, peered out of the tent and estimated that the storm had dropped six feet of fresh snow. Up near the summit, a thousand feet higher, there undoubtedly was more.
BY THE TIME THE STORM SUBSIDED, Reed's eyesight had returned, and he declared that the party must rise and walk. Another blizzard might strike at any moment. They were without food, and they had no idea if they would be resupplied any time soon. Their own advance party—the three men sent ahead to hunt for the cache— might easily have died in the storm (in fact, they had survived but had been forced to head toward civilization, not back to help the others), and the separate party led by Woodworth, though long expected, had yet to materialize. To stay where they were would be suicide.
But some members of the party simply could not go on. Elizabeth Graves was near death, and it was unclear how her four young children could continue without her. Mary Donner had burned her foot in the campfire and could barely walk. Peggy Breen was holding up well, but Patrick was sickly and spent, just as he often had been at the lake. Two Breen sons struggled. John, the teenager who had handled so many of the chores around the family's cabin, was still recovering from his near-fatal collapse into the fire. James, who was six, was already far gone.
Looking around him at all of this, Patrick Breen announced that his family would stay. It was better to die by a warm fire than collapse into the snow somewhere out on the trail, he said. Perhaps another relief party would come through with provisions. Or perhaps even Reed and his men might make it to safety and send someone back.
Reed began to argue. They must get up and walk, he exhorted. To idle was madness. It would mean certain death. Repeatedly Reed implored them to move. Repeatedly Breen said they would not. Finally, Reed called over the other rescuers and asked them to serve as witnesses to the fact that he was not abandoning his charges, that Breen and the others were staying behind voluntarily.
In fact, both men were merely doing what they had to do. Reed was right that those who were able should push onward. But Breen was right that much of the party was in no condition to do so. Between his family and the Graveses, there were at least five children too young or too weak to walk. Among the adults, it's likely that Elizabeth Graves was unable to go anywhere at all, and so it's difficult to know how one would have convinced her four children to simply abandon their mother to a lonely death.
Nor could Reed and the other rescuers help much. Miller, the strongest of the bunch, planned to carry Tommy Reed, but the other men were apparently unable to take another child. Patty Reed remembered that Mary Donner was willing to go, but with her injured foot was unable to walk. In a letter years later, Patty said that her father asked if any of the other men could help her, but apparently no one stepped forward, and Patty produces no evidence that Reed himself offered to carry Mary, although she consistently portrays her father in the most positive terms possible. If the rescuers were unable to carry the children, then Breen was doubly right to say that for his family and the Graveses, with so many small youngsters, a continued march would have been foolhardy. Perhaps it was only with time that Reed grew sensitive to the idea that he had abandoned people. His diary, which includes an entry for that day, never mentions it, but his later accounts place a greater and greater emphasis on his efforts to exhort Breen to move.
The departing marchers stacked up what wood they could, estimating it at a three-day supply. The party now included just three people rescued from the high camps: Patty and Tommy Reed and fifteen-year-old Solomon Hook, Jacob Donner's stepson. Behind them, lying about on the snow, were thirteen people, most of them children: the seven Breens, Elizabeth Graves and her four offspring, and Mary Donner. They had no shelter, no food, no expectation that they would regain enough vigor to walk to safety unaided. They could do nothing but wait, whether for rescue or death.
SELIM WOODWORTH, THE MAN SO MANY PEOPLE were banking on, was heading toward the high country. After sailing upriver from San Francisco, Woodworth had reached Sutter's Fort in mid-February, then gathered supplies and made other preparations. On March 2, he was marching up the mountains when he encountered Tucker's first relief party coming down. He turned around and escorted them to safety, apparently arranging for their transportation to Sutter's Fort. Then he headed back into the wilderness. By now, the great blizzard was brewing, and it's likely that Woodworth spent the two days of the storm at Bear Valley, a well-known camping ground partway up the trail.
The reasons for his slow progress thus far would eventually become a topic of great debate. Defenders say
