declaration that even greater horrors lay unstated:
O Mary I have not wrote you half of the truble we have had but I hav Wrote you anuf to let you now that you don't now what truble is. But thank the Good god we have all got throw and the onely family that did not eat human flesh. We have left every thing but i dont cair for that. We have got through.
Still, she wanted no part of hopelessness, harbored no desire to discourage those who might follow: 'Dont let this letter dishaten anybody.' She offered a single piece of advice, an admonition that might have served as the motto not only for the grand migration west but also for much of life: 'Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can.'
THAT SUMMER, GEN. STEPHEN WATTS KEARNY, who had commanded the American armies in California during the brief war with Mexico, left Sutter's Fort to return east. When he reached Truckee Lake, he stopped to inspect the cabins, snowless now and surrounded by the natural hustle of a short mountain growing season— wildflowers and green grass, does nursing fawns, the flutter of butterflies and the buzz of mosquitoes where once could be heard only the murmured prayers of the starving.
Human remains lay about, the flesh mummifying in the dry mountain air and the bones scattered in the cabins. Edwin Bryant, the newspaper writer who had traveled the first part of the westward journey with the Donners and who was now going east with Kearny, described the scene as 'human skeletons ... in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed.'
Kearny ordered a pit dug in one of the cabins and the bones thrown in, 'melancholy duties to the dead,' as Bryant phrased it. The cabin was torched, the men standing around hatless and solemn as they watched this impromptu pyre in the wilderness.
At Alder Creek, Kearny found George Donner's body, and with it the final evidence of Tamzene Donner's steadfast devotion. Before leaving for the lake cabins, she had wrapped her husband's remains in a sheet, the closest approximation of a decent burial she could provide.
FOR A FEW OF THE SURVIVORS, the tragedy of the Donner Party proved an unshakable ghost. Nancy Graves, Elizabeth's daughter, married a Methodist minister and had nine children but was haunted by the knowledge that she had participated in the cannibalism of her own mother at Starved Camp. As a girl, she burst into tears at the memory.
Decades later, she refused to help the writer C. F. McGlashan, who was working on a history of the party. 'I have no information to impart,' she wrote in her only postcard to him, 'and do not wish my name mentioned. I hereby notify you not to use my name in that connection.' She signed her name as Mrs. R. W. Williamson, omitting any use of Graves, the maiden name that would identify her as a member of the cursed emigrant contingent.
Eliza Donner, by contrast, cherished her place in history. She married a promising young attorney named Sherman Houghton—he went on to serve two terms in Congress—and later she took up a vigorous correspondence with McGlashan. In her late sixties she published her memoir, The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. On the cover and title page, she identified herself as Eliza P. Donner Houghton, embracing her maiden name as much as Nancy Graves had spurned hers.
Most survivors reflected neither Graves's reluctance toward the past nor Donner's enthusiasm for it. Most simply moved on, constructing new lives and displaying the remarkable resilience of the human soul. They married, reared children, tilled farms or built businesses, cherished advances and rued setbacks. They stopped by a saloon on Saturday and a church on Sunday. Some died young. Some saw their dotage.
James Reed never lost his on-the-make optimism and eventually touted the Gold Rush with the same heedless confidence that had once led him down the Hastings Cut-Off. 'The gold is still plenty, plenty, plenty, and will continue plenty through this century and the next, and the next!' he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1849, after the family had settled in San Jose. 'You find it in the big hills, you find it in the little rivers, you find it in the little branches, you find it in the little narrow indentations made on the surface of the earth during brief showers.' Nor did the capacity for boasting desert him. Real estate was booming, and he was glad to say he had shown the wisdom to invest. 'As for myself I have a share and a fair share, too, after all my misfortunes.'
Margret Reed, who had worked so diligently to keep her children alive, never found the robust health that California seemed to promise and died at forty-seven, fifteen years after the tragedy. Virginia eloped at sixteen and eventually had nine children. Her sister, Patty, had eight. Neither of the Reed sons had children. For a time, they both lived with Patty. Virginia Reed fulfilled the personal pledge she had made in the mountains and, against her parents' wishes, became a Roman Catholic.
The Breens repaired to the Mission at San Juan Bautista, where they were feted as conquerors of the harsh mountains, ensconced in the best house in town and bathed in Mexican hospitality. 'Nothing that could add to the comfort of the sufferers was left undone,' James Breen wrote later. In time the family prospered. Edward Breen, the boy whose fall from the saddle broke his leg so badly that it was nearly amputated, grew into a strapping man of more than six feet tall. He was an excellent horseman.
By some weird coincidence, three of the other Breen sons—Patrick Jr., Simon, and James—died within three months of each other in 1899.
The Donner orphans found homes where they could. Two of the three little daughters of Tamzene Donner were taken in by a German couple who lived near Sutter's Fort. The Reeds took some of the others.
The Murphy and Graves children were orphans too. Mary Murphy eventually married a prominent local man named Charles Covillaud. When a town sprang up near their home along the Yuba River, it was named Marysville in honor of Covillaud's wife. Simon Murphy, one of the last children rescued, returned to his home state of Tennessee and later served in the Civil War. So far as is known, he never returned to California.
Two of the Graves girls married men who assisted in the rescue efforts, although neither ever actually reached the high camps. Sarah married William Dill Ritchie, who six years later was caught with stolen mules and lynched. Mary, the belle of the train, froze her feet so badly during the journey of the Forlorn Hope that for three months she could not wear shoes. She married a rescuer named Edward Pyle Jr., who was murdered in 1848. After the trial Mary cooked meals for the murderer. She did not want him to die before the hanging day.
Billy Graves went east the next summer, where he soon grew weary of incessant questions about his titillating ordeal. He told the story 'so many thousand times,' he remembered later.
William Eddy, who lost his wife and two children in the tragedy despite his own heroic efforts, married twice more, the first ending in divorce. He died in 1859, on Christmas Eve.
Jean Baptiste Trudeau, one of the few single men to survive, never forgot the suffering of the mountains. Years later, when he was a poor man scraping out a hard and dangerous living as a fisherman, he said that even if he were offered half the state of California, he would refuse to spend another winter like the one he endured with the Donner Party.
Lewis Keseberg suffered more than anyone else, although in many ways this had more to do with public perceptions than actual events. On his arrival at Sutter's Fort, whispering rumors painted him a ghoul. The gossip compounded until, motivated by an especially wagging and malevolent tongue, Keseberg sued one of his own rescuers for defamation. The jury found in Keseberg's favor but concluded that his slanderers had broken tarnished goods: Damages totaled one dollar. In time he became a public caricature, the demented ogre who had relished his cannibalism. Business setbacks pushed him into poverty. Even the lottery of biology struck against him: Two of his daughters were born with disabilities that rendered them, in the language of the day, 'idiots.' Keseberg came to see himself as Job, singled out by God for afflictions designed to test his soul. He died a poor man, his burial unrecorded.
For brief periods in the years after the Donner Party, though, Keseberg enjoyed business successes. During one of them, he ran a Sacramento hotel, the Lady Adams. It might be strange enough that the putative fiend chose to enter a business where he would host weary travelers, but public fascination with the Donner Party was such that even that irony was insufficient. It may or may not be true, but the accepted lore of the tale came to be that the most notorious cannibal of the Donner Party eventually opened a restaurant.
THE FATES OF THE RESCUERS PROVED AS MIXED as those of the survivors. Selim Woodworth overcame the inauspicious start to his career as a naval officer. He commanded a supply ship during the remainder of the
