soon after reaching Keseberg's wretched hovel. He seemed almost enthusiastic about his own resourcefulness— Tamzene Donner's flesh was 'the best he had ever tasted'—but evasive about the property of the other emigrants. 'He appeared embarrassed, and equivocated a great deal,' then insisted that he had no property from any of the other families. But when the rescuers searched him, they found silks and jewelry worth two hundred dollars, and a brace of pistols that had once belonged to George Donner. Hidden in his waistcoat, they found $225 in gold.
They began threatening him, insisting that the other rescuers would hang him unless he came clean. A rescuer named John Rhoads decided to play the good cop and took Keseberg off to one side. If he owned up to everything, Rhoads said, he would be well treated and given help in getting down to the settlements. Through it all, Keseberg maintained his innocence.
The interrogation continued the next day, this time reinforced by the other rescuers. Fallon asked about a large amount of gold that George Donner had reportedly been carrying, and then grabbed a rope and threatened to hang Keseberg if he kept feigning ignorance. He fashioned a noose and threw it around Keseberg's neck, then pushed him to the ground and yanked the rope tight. At last, Keseberg relented and led them back to a spot near Alder Creek where he had buried the Donners' money.
The rescuers took him down to the settlements, but before the whole party left the mountains, they asked Keseberg why he had not eaten the ox meat. He replied that it was too dry. Humans made better eating. The brains made an excellent soup.
THAT WAS THE TALE TOLD IN FALLON'S DIARY, although Keseberg offered a different story. Left alone when Levinah Murphy died, he resisted the idea of cannibalism for four days after his provisions gave out, finally resorting to the grisly option so that he might live to support his family:
There was no other resort—it was that or death. My wife and child had gone on with the first relief party. I knew not whether they were living or dead. They were penniless and friendless in a strange land. For their sakes I must live, if not for my own. ... I can not describe the unutterable repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less eating, a corpse. It makes my blood curdle to think of it! It has been told that I boasted of my shame—said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and disgusting.
Too weak to move the bodies of the dead, Keseberg lay in his cabin surrounded by corpses, and at times became so unnerved that he put his pistol in his mouth and fingered the trigger.
Late one night, Tamzene Donner arrived, cold and fatigued, her clothes frozen into ice. She said that George had died, and now she was intending to walk over the mountains alone, for she had to reach her children. She refused Keseberg's offer of human flesh, so he put her into bed and covered her as warmly as possible. By morning she was dead, and Keseberg was again alone.
He had promised Tamzene that he would retrieve the family's money and use it for her children, so when he felt strong enough he hiked over to Alder Creek. He buried the silver in a spot marked by a low-hanging tree branch and packed the gold back toward the lake cabins. Halfway there, the snow gave way beneath his feet, and he plunged down into a stream running beneath the snow. As he fell, he threw out his arms and managed to fall no deeper than his armpits, and then eventually managed to hoist himself from the hole. By the time he reached his cabin, he was half-frozen.
The next morning, he awoke to human voices. He rushed outside and saw the rescuers coming toward him, the relief that had seemed an impossible dream. But to his astonishment, they did not greet him with joy but with a simple and gruff demand: 'Where is Donner's money?'
Worried about keeping his promise to Tamzene that the money would go to her children, Keseberg would not answer, begging instead for a bit of food. The men refused and threatened to kill him if he failed to hand over the money. With no other choice, he gave them the gold and told them where to find the buried silver. Heading down the mountains to safety, they offered no help to the pathetic, weakened fellow. Instead they concentrated on shuttling down two packs, each filled with booty, and left Keseberg to struggle into camp on his own.
WHOSE VERSION TO BELIEVE? In the common lore of the Donner Party, then and for 150 years to follow, Fallon's picture of Keseberg as a bloodthirsty ghoul held sway, perhaps because it intermingled with and reinforced an image already in the public mind. Even before Fallon's journal appeared, a newspaper account claimed that one of the survivors—unnamed but obviously Keseberg—took a child to bed with him and ate the youngster before morning, then ate another before noon the next day. Such yarns obviously involved scurrilous exaggeration if not outright falsehood, but Fallon's diary echoed the theme. Almost as soon as Keseberg came down from the mountains, the stories blossomed into the most damning rumor possible: He had murdered Tamzene Donner so that he might eat her body.
Surely the Fallon diary is, at best, half true. Donner Party scholars have long observed that the language —'evinced confusion' and 'evident reluctance' and the like—is too refined for Fallon's rough-hewn life. And there is a lyrical quality at points that seems foreign to a mountain man's pen: 'A painful stillness pervaded the place.' Nor was it long before little pieces of the story began to crumble: A newspaper retracted the claim that it was Eleanor Eddy's body near the cabin door, and a summertime traveler found George Donner's body months later, apparently not mutilated. Furthermore, it seems incredible that Keseberg would have praised human flesh as moister and more succulent than beef.
And yet the diary must be right in describing Keseberg and the camp in hideous terms. By the time the final rescuers arrived, Keseberg had been alone for days, perhaps weeks, surviving on nothing more than human flesh. He had no choice but to crudely butcher the bodies, and probably had little energy to dispose of the remains. Indeed, a more sober and less biased source suggests precisely such a scene, without attributing to Keseberg the morbid enthusiasm reported by Fallon. More than thirty years after the tragedy, Reason Tucker, who led the first relief party and participated in the last, wrote of bones scattered about and skulls opened to get at the brains. It was a place, he said, of 'Death & Destruction.'
ON ONE POINT, THERE COULD BE NO DISPUTE. When Keseberg and the final group of rescuers arrived at Johnson's Ranch in the closing days of April 1847, the ordeal of the Donner Party was over. Of the eighty-one people who had been trapped by the early autumn snow at the eastern edge of the Sierra, thirty-six had died and forty-five had survived. No one remained at the high camps. For the Donner Party, the journey was finished.
30
A Beautiful Country
The warmth of spring seeped through the rich riverbed land of the Napa Valley as surely as the cold had penetrated the huts at Truckee Lake. Barely two months after her rescue, Virginia Reed's mind was already turning to gentler matters. She wrote her cousin back in Illinois and boasted of her new homeland as a hunting ground for husbands:
Tel Henriet if she wants to get Married for to come to Callifornia. She can get a spanyard any time.
It was only mid-May, but beef and bread had fattened the survivors' once-skeletal forms. 'We are all verry fleshey,' Virginia reported, as though this were an astonishing fact. Her mother weighed 140 pounds, or, as Virginia styled it, '10040 pon.' In all, California had proved a worthy haven, a land of warm days and cool nights, of wide valleys and stout horses. 'It is a beautiful Country,' she wrote. 'It aut to be a beautiful Country to pay us for our trubel getting there.'
Not that the tragedy had vanished from Virginia's mind. Her letter gave a long, detailed account of much that had happened—one of the most valuable versions among all the Donner Party records—and then added a
