adults in their forties and over. Of those who were trapped in the mountains, only two older adults survived, Patrick Breen, thought to be fifty-one, and Peggy Breen, about forty, both of whom benefited from their family's relatively plentiful hoard of beef. The three other couples who were over forty—George and Tamzene Donner, Jacob and Betsy Donner, and Franklin and Elizabeth Graves—all died.
In the prime of life, the gender disparity was especially pronounced, so pronounced that it may in fact suggest another cause altogether. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died (Eleanor Eddy), while only one man lived (William Eddy). The other seven men in their twenties, men presumably in the best physical condition of their lives, all died, many of them early in the entrapment. Most of these men were distinguished, however, not only by their age but also by their life circumstances: They were traveling alone, typically as hired ands. The young women, by contrast, were all married, most with children, many with extended families.
To gauge the value of human connection, modern researchers have studied the health effects of social networks. Their findings buttress the common intuition that people are good for people. Those with interconnected lives—people who are married or have large families or many friends or whose lives in some way bring them into contact with others—enjoy longer, healthier lives. They sniffle through fewer colds, suffer fewer heart attacks, recover faster from the debilitating effects of strokes. Even the incidence of cancer is reduced. One study followed participants for nine years and found that those who were low in 'social capital'—the strings that bind us to others—were two to three times more likely to die than those with interwoven nets of human contact. Nor is this solely a modern phenomenon, alien to the Donners' day. An analysis of records from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp during the Civil War, reveals that Union captives were more likely to survive if they were imprisoned with friends, and that the closer the familiarity the greater the benefit.
The reasons for these benefits are less scientifically demonstrable but seem in many ways obvious. People draw tangible assistance from others—someone comes to check on them when they are old, for example—but they are also succored by the emotional support of love and friendship. Human beings are social creatures.
The Donner Party demonstrated anew this age-old truth. Those who were traveling with their families, especially the larger extended families, survived at rates far higher than those who were alone. Of fifteen people who were trapped in the mountains without a relative, only two survived: the Donner family employees Noah James and Jean Baptiste Trudeau. Many of the single people were among the first to die. Of the four men who died before Christmas at Alder Creek, three had no kin in camp: Sam Shoemaker, Joseph Rheinhard, and James Smith. Jacob Donner, sickly even before the trip, was the only family man among the four. Had the Donner Party been miraculously plucked from their misfortune on February l, almost no one with a family, save those who had gone with the Forlorn Hope and thus exposed themselves to incalculable additional danger, would have perished. The Donner Party is not merely a story of how hard people will struggle to survive, but of how much they need each other if they are going to succeed.
Survivors recognized that some of the young, single men lacked the incentive or tenacity to cling to life. A few months after the tragedy, James Reed wrote to a relative back east and told of the early passing of James Smith, one of his family's teamsters. 'He gave up, pined away, and died,' Reed wrote. 'He did not starve.'
ONLY TWO FAMILIES SURVIVED INTACT, the Breens and the Reeds. This was especially remarkable for the Reeds,
since James Reed's banishment left the couple's four children solely in the care of their mother, a woman who had once been so frail she had been unable to rise from her sickbed for her own wedding. Her afflicting headaches returned at least once during the winter, perhaps more. Because they had been forced to abandon so much during the crossing of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the Reeds began the entrapment with virtually no food or supplies, a penury that forced Margret to begging. Against all that, she somehow kept her four children alive.
Even her own husband, who had seen the pallor of his children's faces firsthand, could not quite seem to grasp the straits to which his family had been reduced, or the magnitude of his wife's accomplishment. Once, after the ordeal was done, the Reeds were discussing the fact that at Truckee Lake, the Reed children had found what they thought were flakes of gold. James asked his wife why she had not saved some. She could have been forgiven for punching him in the nose. Instead she looked at him with disbelief and told him that at the time, finding something to eat had seemed more important than all the gold in the world.
31
A Day of Renown
Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the
... Bodies of men, women, and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father—the mother that of her children—children that of father and mother.
Worse still, survivors had lost their most basic humanity. Once they would have 'shuddered and sickened' at the thought of cannibalism, but now they 'coldly' calculated which of their comrades would make future meals. Family members no longer cared for one another. Some preferred human flesh to the provisions of the rescue parties.
Earlier newspaper stories had described desperation and even cannibalism, but none had sketched so vivid a picture of depravity. Most of the details were false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Of the forty-five survivors, for example, only about half tasted human flesh. Perhaps another half dozen people resorted to cannibalism before dying. A precise count is impossible, nor would one matter. The abiding mark of the Donner Party was an act of desperation, nothing more. Faced with imminent starvation and death, the pioneers did what was necessary to survive. Eating the flesh of people who had already died wasn't barbaric or animalistic. It was the only logical and reasonable course of action open to those left alive.
But such caveats made no difference. Two weeks after the Star story the yarn was repeated in a paper in Monterey, this time embellished even more richly: Mothers had refused food to their famished children, then eaten the youngsters once they starved.
The mold was set. The story of the Donner Party went from paper to paper and mouth to mouth, spreading across the country in a titillating admixture of exaggeration, half-truth, and lie. The tall tales worsened in the retelling, as tall tales always do. Occasionally, even the survivors themselves spread bizarre and incredible anecdotes. Frances Donner once insisted that Eleanor Eddy 'died deranged:'
In the forenoon before she died she got the benches and arranged them in the floor in imitation of people and danced the cotilliion and other dances untill she was exosted and then died.
Such sagas found purchase in the public mind for several reasons, perhaps including, ironically, the fact that the Donner Party represented no great turn of history. For a story that has fascinated the national psyche for decades, it was an evanescent affair. Like the survivors, history trudged ahead. Migration to California plummeted the next two years, but almost surely that had more to do with the uncertainties of the Mexican-American War than with the distant travails of a few families. When gold glittered, the allure washed memories clean. A renewed flood of humanity started marching across the continent to California, willing to risk anything for a chance at life's mother lode.
