27
Alive Yet
On a cold night, the mountains can be as quiet as a graveyard. Unless the wind kicks up, there is nothing to hear but the voices of your comrades and the crackling of the campfire.
Selim Woodworth and his men, however, turned their ears to something else—other voices, farther off. He sent emissaries to investigate and found the little party that had walked away from Starved Camp: James Reed and two of his children, William McCutchan, Hiram Miller, and the others. By chance, the two parties had almost literally stumbled into one another.
Reed and the others had mostly bedded down for the night, and they were too tired to move, but they asked that some food be brought over from Woodworth's camp, and for the first time in days, they went to sleep with the satisfying feel of a meal in the belly.
THE FIRE AT STARVED CAMP STILL BURNED, but it had fled from those it was intended to warm. Melting the snow, the flames had sunk so far down into a pit that the survivors felt little heat. Peggy Breen stared down into the hole, fifteen, twenty, perhaps even twenty-five feet deep.
At first she must have looked with despair, but then suddenly there was a tiny moment of joy. At the bottom of the hole, she thought she could make out bare ground. If so, if the fire had burned all the way through the winter's slow accumulation of snow, then it would sink no more. If they could descend to meet it, they would once again find some warmth.
She roused John, her teenager, and urged him to climb down. Using a felled treetop as a makeshift ladder, he did so, and then called up that she was right. He was standing next to the fire on warm, unfrozen earth.
She climbed down herself to investigate, then ascended once more and began to shake people from their slumbers. As they woke, she urged them down toward John, and in time everyone who was still alive was down in the pit. Eleven people had to crowd in, but at least they were out of the wind. At least they had the fire again.
WILLIAM EDDY AND WILLIAM FOSTER, BOTH OF WHOM had survived the brutal journey of the Forlorn Hope, bore a special determination to get back into the mountains. Each man hoped to save his own child. Eddy's wife and daughter had died back in early February, something he would have been told by the survivors who walked out with the first rescue party, but his son, James, might still be alive. Foster's wife had come down with him in the Forlorn Hope, but their only child, a son named George, was still back at the lake.
Eddy had briefly joined a previous relief effort, but he had been unable to keep up with the grueling pace. Now, both he and Foster were ready to attack the Sierra, so they borrowed horses at Johnson's Ranch and swung into the saddle. They rode hard until the snow was too deep, switched to hiking, and caught up with Woodworth about the same time Woodworth collided with Reed. By this time Cady and Stone were there too, so that with the exception of Nicholas Clark, the lone rescuer still at the high camps, all the rescuers were together, both those going into the mountains and those going out.
As the groups huddled together to decide what to do, Reed had good news: Eddy and Foster might be in time. When he had left the lake cabins about a week earlier, both their sons had been alive. The boys had been in dreadful condition, but Reed and his men had done what they could, bathing the youngsters and putting them in fresh clothes.
Suddenly Woodworth, who had never gone anywhere near the high camps, was being urged from all sides to mount another relief effort. There might still be people alive at three different locations— Starved Camp, the lake cabins, and Alder Creek.
But Woodworth would not move. He claimed to need a guide, although Reed noted that the tracks of his descending party were plainly visible. He warned Eddy and Foster of the dangers, although both men had walked out of the wilderness in the teeth of the winter with no guide, few provisions, and virtually no equipment. Both Reed and Eddy, and perhaps others too, thought Woodworth was a coward. Reed eventually provided some notes that were used as the basis for a newspaper story portraying Woodworth as a man who 'quailed' in fear. Eddy told his story to one of the Donner Party's earliest chroniclers, who described Woodworth as a man who 'had become tired from carrying his blanket.'
Woodworth finally relented, to a degree. He would not go himself but promised that the government, which was funding his activities, would pay three dollars a day plus a fifty-dollar bonus for any man who carried out a child not his own. Eddy and Foster later claimed they paid two of the men themselves.
With the promise of pay, a little party came together. Remarkably, two of those who agreed to go back had just walked down with Reed: Hiram Miller, who was something of a bull, and Charles Stone, perhaps hoping to redeem himself for bypassing Starved Camp on the downward trip. Three other men said they would go too, so as soon as supplies were rounded up and stuffed into packs, seven men set out on yet another rescue effort, this one quite possibly the last. The money was an inducement, but it took real courage to go. They all knew what another blizzard could mean.
FOR ALL THAT PEGGY BREEN WAS THE MAIN force of energy at Starved Camp, it was one of the children who first broached the obvious. Seven-year-old Mary Donner suggested that they should eat the dead bodies on the snow above them. She told the Breens that she had already eaten human flesh back at Alder Creek, perhaps lessening the strain of breaking the great taboo. Apparently the others agreed, and at some point Patrick Breen, who had regained a little strength, climbed up with a knife.
In an account of the story largely based on an interview with Peggy Breen, the writer Eliza Faraham maintained that only Mary Donner and the remaining Graves children actually ate from the bodies, but it is simply not believable that the Breens refused. Given the length of time of their entrapment and their condition, they must also have participated in the cannibalism, as much a necessity for them as it had been for so many others in their company.
They spent days there, enduring a gruesome tableau as awful as anything in the entire story: eleven people living in a hole, most of them children, unable to see anything but each other and the camp-fire and the sky above, someone occasionally climbing up to slice flesh from the bodies—family members to some of those below—and then returning to their claustrophobic world of ice and desperation.
By the end, when Peggy went up to fetch more wood, she had to crawl from tree to tree, then throw the cut branches along before her as she crawled back to the pit.
SHE HEARD THE RESCUERS BEFORE SHE SAW THEM. Her vision blurred by weakness, she had climbed up from the pit and sensed something coming toward her on the snow. She caught the undecipherable fragments of voices in the distance, and then at last heard someone say, 'There is Mrs. Breen alive yet, anyhow.'
On the snow lay three corpses, all crudely butchered. Survivors had begun by eating the bodies of the two dead children—Isaac Donner and Franklin Graves. From the body of Elizabeth Graves, they had eaten the breasts, heart, liver, and lungs.
The pit itself must have been appalling. Reed had departed five days earlier. Given their condition, most of the survivors had probably found it impossible to climb out unaided, and thus it's likely that one corner of the pit had been designated as a latrine. Although the depth of their fortress protected them from the wind and perhaps gave them some warmth, they were in other ways exposed to the elements. Snow must have sometimes cascaded down from the trees above. At night the cold would have seeped in. During the day the sun shone down mercilessly.
Still, in one sense it was a remarkable success story. When Reed and his men departed, there were thirteen people left alive at Starved Camp. The fact that eleven of them survived almost a week, essentially without shelter, in the middle of the Sierra, at high elevation, in winter, is astonishing.
There was no guarantee they would survive the trip out of the mountains, however. Most of them could not walk, and the deep snow made it impossible to bring in pack animals. Nor could all seven men of the relief party be expected to help. Eddy and Foster, understandably focused on plucking their own children from the high camps,
