Desperate Passage

to the lake briefly, but now she would return to Alder Creek. He might already be dead—she told her daughters as much—but she insisted that she go and see. If he was dead, she would return immediately and walk out with the rescue party.

But while Tamzene was still in sight, the rescuers, standing on the snow before the cabins with the children, yelled to her that they had no intention of waiting. They were going on, and she could come or not. It was her choice. She must have known that this was her last chance, must have realized that her choice wasn't merely about sacrificing herself but about choosing which members of her family would have to share the burden. Either she could let her husband die alone or let her children grow up without a mother.

She knew what her daughters would face; her own mother had died when she was young. But perhaps she thought back to her first family, to the long years of darkness after their deaths, to the new life she had found through her marriage to George. Perhaps she had simply made a promise she could not break. None of her daughters ever described a hesitancy, a pause, a flicker of irresolution. She just kept walking.

And then the parting was done, the rescuers hauling the children off toward the pass, toward safety and away from their mother. 'There was hardly time for words or action,' Georgia Donner remembered, 'and none for tears.'

It was the last time the Donner girls ever saw their mother. Years later, they could not remember what she looked like.

HEADING WEST, THE MARCHERS FOUND A SMALL PACKAGE on the snow, apparently dropped by Stone and Cady, containing silk skirts that Tamzene Donner had given to the men she thought were saving her daughters. The Donner girls were wearing the best clothes they had left— petticoats and linsey-woolsey dresses—but after months of entrapment they must have been sodden with snow and rich with vermin. The men pulled out knives and, as best they could, quickly recut the newly found clothes to fit the girls in makeshift ways, then tied them to the youngsters.

Before it had been killed and consumed, the Donner family dog had eaten Frances's shoes, and so now she was wearing a pair of her mother's, too big by far. They kept falling off as she tried to pull her feet out of the deep holes in the snow made by the adults' footsteps. Eventually a rescuer named Thompson, who was in charge of her, got tired of pulling the oversized shoes out of the snow and putting them back on her, so he left them and told her to walk in her stocking feet. After a time, he took pity on her and took off his mittens, using them as a pair of moccasins for her feet and going bare-handed himself. Later, he told her that if she walked up a hill he would give her some sugar. 'The sugar was something to climb for so I got my prize,' she recalled.

Some incentives were less generous. Frances was walking, but Eliza and Georgia were being carried. The men tired, put them on the snow, and told them they too must make their own way. The girls refused to budge, so the men reached down and gave them each a spanking. 'There was a crying bee,' Frances remembered.

But somehow the girls kept going, some of the smallest children to make the long journey without either parent present. Georgia said later that when she thought of the rescuers' efforts, the agonies faded. 'I do not feel like I ought to complain.'

***

JOHN BREEN AWOKE TO A WONDERLAND. His rescue and delivery from Starved Camp was complete, as was that of his family members, but they had arrived at Johnson's Ranch late at night, well after dark. In the morning, he found a world he had not seen for months:

The weather was fine. The ground was covered with fine green grass and there was a very fat beef hanging from the limb of an oak tree. The birds were singing from the tops of the trees above our camp and the journey was over. I stood looking on the scene and could scarcely believe that I was alive.

ONE LAST RELIEF EFFORT REMAINED. A small company set out in late March from Johnson's Ranch, mostly consisting of veterans of earlier rescue parties who found the will to try again. They reached the snow, but then quickly abandoned the effort. There were stories that the snow, touched by the first kiss of spring, was now so soft that progress was impossible. Another recollection held that a fresh storm blew in and blocked their way.

Or perhaps they just gave up. The only people who could conceivably be rescued were Keseberg and Tamzene Donner, and both of them had been healthy enough to travel when the previous party left the lake. Rescuers could be forgiven for a reluctance to risk their own lives to save people who had failed to save themselves. Whatever the reason, the last little party turned around and headed back down the mountains. If anyone was still alive at the high camps, they would have no rescue soon.

29 The Last Man

By mid-April, a month had passed since the last relief party had left the lake camp. Little hope prevailed that anyone remained alive. Survival on almost nothing but human flesh seemed an impossibility, nutritionally and psychologically, particularly since the handful of emigrants left behind would have had few comrades to bolster their morale.

The principal idea now was to bring in property rather than persons. John Sinclair, the local alcalde for the area around Sutter's Fort, cut a deal with a small group of would-be salvage agents led by a flamboyant mountain man named William Fallon, a giant known as 'Le Gros' but also reputed to be so agile that he could pluck a sixpence from the ground while riding a galloping horse. The men would be allowed to keep half the property they collected from the camps of the two Donner families, including gold and silver. Sinclair, acting as an ad hoc child welfare agency, would take the other half and use it for the benefit of the orphaned Donner children. The contract specifying the terms of the deal made no mention of survivors until after the financial details were spelled out at length, and even then the treatment was perfunctory, addressing the issue of survivors' property rather than their lives. So when, about two weeks later, Fallon reemerged with a last surviving member of the Donner Party in tow, the small communities around Johnson's Ranch and Sutter's Fort buzzed with curiosity: How had anyone stayed alive so long? What had happened up there?

***

SIX WEEKS LATER, the California Star landed on the newsstands of San Francisco with an answer, courtesy of Fallon's diary. Fallon and his men had arrived to find the lake cabins deserted—at least by the living. The bodies of the dead lay everywhere, 'terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and sculls scattered in every direction.' A woman's body, thought to be that of Eleanor Eddy, lay near the entrance, 'the limbs severed off and a frightful gash in the scull.' Most of the flesh had been eaten from the bones, and 'a painful stillness pervaded the place.'

At the Alder Creek camps, the mood proved equally eerie. Jacob Donner's tent had been ransacked. Household goods—books, calicoes, shoes, furniture—lay everywhere. The bloody evidence of cannibalism presented a gruesome scene:

At the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with human flesh cut up, it was from the body of Geo. Donner, the head had been split open, and the brains extracted therefrom, and to the appearance, he had not been long dead, not over three or four days at the most.

The carcass of an ox lay nearby, apparently preserved—and perhaps hidden—for much of the winter in the snow, yet almost wholly uneaten.

They spent a day packing—camping and working amid the dreadful scene—and then half the group started back for the lake cabins, the other half staying to cache whatever property they could not carry. When they returned to the lake, they were surprised to find Lewis Keseberg alive, lying next to 'a large pan full of fresh liver and lights.'

Keseberg said he was the lone survivor. Tamzene Donner, relatively healthy when the previous rescuers departed, had lost her way trying to hike from Alder Creek to the lake cabins, spent a night on the snow, and died