kept going toward the pass, taking two other men along with them.
That left three rescuers staring down into the pit at Starved Camp. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley each picked up a child and started walking, arguing that given their party's limited manpower, the best they could do was save a handful of the survivors and abandon the rest. The third rescuer, however, balked at such a brutal triage.
John Stark's ancestors bequeathed him a streak of toughness. His father hewed a life from the wildlands of Kentucky; his mother was a cousin of Daniel Boone. Like many of those involved in the rescue efforts, he too had been an emigrant in 1846, going west with his wife and children and her extended family. His father-in-law and brother-in-law helped in the early stages of the relief effort, although neither ever made it to Truckee Lake. Stark was a big man—he weighed 220 pounds, a giant for the day—and stubborn in the best sense of the word.
As his colleagues walked away, he faced the seemingly impossible task of rescuing nine people single- handedly: all seven members of the Breen family and the two older Graves children, Nancy and Jonathan. Perhaps he pondered the strength of his pioneer ancestors. Perhaps he just refused to give up on a job. Perhaps he thought of his own overland migration and realized that with a little bad luck it might be he and his wife and his children looking up from the pit.
He decided he would not simply pick up a child and leave the others to die, as his comrades had. He would bring them all in. He would carry the little ones, encourage the older ones, bolster the adults, drag the whole party down out of the snow.
So he launched an extraordinary one-man relay. Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process. Again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough. When they asked about his stamina, he said that once they were out of the snow he would eat something and take a rest. Somehow, he even coaxed or cajoled or bullied Patrick Breen down from the camp, although initially everyone thought that the family patriarch could not walk. In the end, all the survivors from Starved Camp made it down to safety.
The Breens treasured Stark's heroism, then and for the rest of their lives. When the party finally got down out of the snow, Peggy Breen was astonished to hear Woodworth take credit for the rescue. 'I thank nobody but God and Stark and the Virgin Mary,' she replied. Years later, Billy Graves, who heard the story, noted that she put Stark second, behind only God and ahead of the Madonna. 'I think he deserved it,' Graves wrote.
28
None for Tears
Nicholas Clark, the sturdy rescuer detailed by James Reed to stay with the Donner families, made sure he was out of earshot of the tents. He was outside with Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who had also been taking care of the Donners. Clark confided that he planned to leave, perhaps at the arrival of the next rescue party, perhaps even sooner. Nobody could blame him. George Donner was already half dead, and surely incapable of ever leaving the mountains. The three little Donner girls had been sent off with Stone and Cady, and Clark, who was at Alder Creek, had no way of knowing that the tots had been abandoned at the Truckee Lake cabins. The girls' mother, Tamzene, was healthy enough to go whenever she wanted. The only other people at Alder Creek were Betsy Donner and two of her children, Samuel and Lewis, but they too were all but dead. For Clark to stay any longer would be to risk his own life just so he could chop firewood for people who were going to die anyway. He admitted he was afraid he might starve to death, a reasonable fear given the struggles faced by the other rescuers in getting back down to civilization.
Trudeau had an even stronger case. He had been healthy enough to leave with either of the first two relief parties but had been prevailed upon to stay and help care for the Donners. Like Clark, there wasn't much more he could do by staying, so he vowed that he too would leave at the first opportunity. 'I have been here four months,' he told Clark, 'and it is my turn if anybody's.'
The two men set out for the lake cabins, and when they arrived were astonished to find the three little Donner girls. For days, Clark had been assuming that Cady and Stone had fulfilled their pledge to Tamzene Donner and taken her daughters over the mountains. Instead, here they were, stuck in a cabin with Keseberg and the Murphys. Clark stayed the night, then went back the next morning to Alder Creek to tell Tamzene that her daughters remained in danger.
Tamzene bent over the bed of the husband she had nursed for months. He drifted toward death every day now, weaker and weaker. She detested the idea of leaving, for it was obvious that he might die while she was away, but there was simply no choice but to go and make some arrangement for the girls. She bundled herself up in the warmest of the tattered clothes she had left, took one last look back toward George's sickbed, and headed for the lake.
THE LITTLE RESCUE PARTY LED BY William Eddy and William Foster burst into the cabin with the frenetic energy of adrenaline and emotion. Everyone was talking at once. 'They came in like they were most wild,' remembered Frances Donner. 'We were frightened at first.'
Eddy and Foster asked about their sons: three-year-old James Eddy and two-year-old George Foster, tots left behind when their parents fled with the Forlorn Hope or simply died. Both fathers had rushed back into the mountains determined to save their sons. That had been the justification for leaving children behind, after all—that the parents could summon help and return in time. Now Eddy and Foster wanted to know if they had made it. There must have been a mortified silence, eyes shifting downward, then perhaps a sad and subdued confession. Both little boys were dead, and yet that was not even the worst of it. Their bodies had been cannibalized by the survivors. By one account, Eddy grew so enraged with Keseberg over the cannibalism that he vowed to kill him later, a threat that was never fulfilled.
But the rescuers found four living children—Simon Murphy and the three little Donner girls—and resolved to save them all. Clark and Trudeau would go along too. Keseberg still refused. That left two women, Tamzene Donner, who had reached the lake cabins, and Levinah Murphy. Murphy had herded her extended clan on the great migration: herself, seven children, two sons-in-law, and three grandchildren. The family had slowly dwindled—some went out with the Forlorn Hope, some with the first relief parties, some died—while she herself had withered and weakened. But she kept Simon alive—he was her youngest—and she was kind to the Donner girls after they were abandoned at the cabins. Keseberg had ordered the girls to stay in bed, insisting that otherwise they were underfoot. Levinah enforced no such rule. When Keseberg left to gather wood, she let the girls get out of bed and play, a benevolence they would not forget.
She was far too weak for the journey out, a fact she recognized and did not protest, perhaps because she could reflect with pride that she had done all she could for her own children and the children of others. 'As we were ready to start,' remembered Georgia Donner, 'Mrs. Murphy walked to her bed, laid down, turned her face toward the wall. One of the men gave her a handful of dried meat. She seemed to realize that we were leaving her, that her work was finished.'
HAVING REACHED THE LAKE CABINS, Eddy and Foster had no intention of hiking the extra distance to Alder Creek. The warning of Starved Camp rang with clarity: Parties in the open could be trapped by a sudden blizzard and held for days, pushed to shocking desperation. The only sane thing was to keep moving, to get up the mountains and back down again as quickly as possible. Dawdling begged calamity.
From the standpoint of the rescuers, no real purpose would be served by going to the Donner family tents. Everyone there—George Donner; Jacob's widow, Betsy; and her two sons, Lewis and Samuel— was dead or dying. None would see spring. Better to turn around, leave now, and make it back down to Johnson's Ranch before another storm struck.
But Tamzene Donner was adamant. She would not leave her husband so long as he drew breath. There was no hope he would live, but she would not let him die alone. To check on her girls, she had been forced to come over
