between 4:00 and 6:00, forming the wagons into a corral once again. If they were passing through a region where they feared Indian attack, the horses and oxen were driven inside the ring of wagons; if not, they were turned loose to graze, although guards were still posted to protect against wolves or other predators. Occasionally, the mosquitoes were so thick that emigrants feared for the health of the livestock, so the animals would be penned or picketed and fires lit nearby in hopes that the smoke would drive away the insects. To save space for the livestock inside the ring of wagons, tents and campfires were placed outside. Men worked on repair jobs or cared for the animals, while women and children fetched water for cooking and gathered wood or buffalo dung—euphemistically known as 'chips'—for fires. In the evening, if exhaustion could be held at bay, a fiddler might scratch out a tune. If spirits were high there might even be singing or a little dancing. At the end of the night, families took to their tents and guards took up their weapons, although frequently the sentries fell asleep.
In all, there were nearly five hundred wagons in this moving community, perhaps half headed to California, half to Oregon. Unfortunately for the Donners and the Reeds, they were near the rear of the long column. In letters home, others traveling with them claimed to be trailing by design, convinced that their slow pace helped preserve their livestock. The lead wagons, they believed, were working the animals too hard. Draft stock were priceless. Driving the poor animals until they collapsed was the ultimate example of short-term thinking, a way to make a few extra miles now and suffer more later. The race, in the end, would go to the tortoise, not the hare.
THE WAIL OF A NEWBORN sang out from one of the wagons, a happy broadcast carried along by the stiff prairie wind. Philippine Keseberg, a young German immigrant going west with her husband and three-year-old daughter, lay back, exhaled, and cradled her new baby boy. They named him for his father. Farther back on the trail, the family wagon had tipped over, throwing Philippine from the bed and plunging her into a pool of water, but the accident seemed to have had no major ill effects, and Lewis Keseberg Jr. emerged into the world as the newest member of the migration.
Although he would be the only trailside baby born to the members of the Donner Party, little Lewis was hardly unique. It was not uncommon for women to give birth during the journey, nor, interestingly, less than nine months after its completion. Pregnancy rarely slowed the trains, at least for long. Maybe the Kesebergs spent a little extra time in camp the next day, or perhaps the other women lent a hand with the family's washing, but Philippine Keseberg and her son, like everybody else, kept moving west.
LIKE ALL TRAVELERS, WESTERING EMIGRANTS wanted a record of their great adventure, so many of them found time around the campfire or along the trailside to keep a journal. In all, there are hundreds of such recollections, an archival treasure trove that accounts for much of what we know about the pioneer experience. Of the original Donner Party group that set out from Springfield—the Donners and the Reeds—the only surviving diary of the early portions of the trip was kept by Hiram Miller, a Mend of Reed's who had signed on to work as a teamster for the Donners. Remarkably, Miller's record did not emerge into the public eye for a centuiy. For decades, it lay unnoticed in the basement of a family home, and only in 1946 did a Reed descendant donate it to a museum in Sacramento.
Miller was apparently a no-nonsense fellow, for most of his entries offer nothing more than the daily distance traveled and the location of the nightly campsite. There is nothing about his ideas or emotions, nothing about his comrades in the train, not even a note about the weather. His chronicle reveals more about nineteenth-century spelling and punctuation than about the scenery. The day after the wagons crossed from the south branch of the Platte to the north branch, a striking piece of territory and a milestone of the trip, Miller's entire entiy reads, 'and from their wee traveled up the plat a Bout 18 mills and Camped near the plat.' The next day, he allowed himself a rare burst of comparative lyricism:
And from their wee traveled up the plat a Bowt 12 miles and Camped near the plat By a fine Spring. No timber. Off to the left of the Spring on the Bluffs is a Beautiful pine ridge, the first that i have Seen on the Rout.
Still, for all its just-the-facts simplicity, Miller's diaiy allows us to trace the movements of the Donners and the Reeds with some precision, especially when it is pieced together with the letters and journals of other emigrants traveling nearby.
With each mile up the Platte, the party slowly departed the vast grasslands of the Great Plains and entered the kind of arid, high-desert country that dominates the American West. Along the river valleys, bluffs soared higher into the broad open skies, 'rugged and sterile, exhibiting barren sands and perpendicular ledges of rock.' Wagon wheels sank eight or ten inches into the dry, sandy soil, the oxen straining to keep the axles turning. Shallow and muddy, the water of the Platte tasted terrible, but there was nothing else to drink, so the emigrants forced it down.
The terrain threw up memorable landmarks everywhere, and the wagons began to pass them daily. On June 22 Courthouse Rock loomed up, though many people thought it looked nothing like a courthouse. On the 23rd it was Chimney Rock, a spire that could be seen for thirty-five or forty miles. They guessed its height at anywhere from 200 to 800 feet; it was probably 450 or 500 feet, although weather has now eroded it significantly. The next day the wagons rolled beneath Scott's Bluff, a sandstone face rising straight up out of the flatland. The landscape brought fanciful thoughts to mind for an emigrant named Charles Stanton, who wrote to a relative back east to describe the 'knobs, or hills. or bluffs, or whatever else they may be called.... The wagons will often wind along under these bluffs, and, in their broken appearance, you can trace houses, castles, towns, and every thing which the imagination can conceive.' One formation, he wrote playfully, looked like a citadel placed there to guard 'the genii and spirits which dwell in the caverns and deep recesses of the ragged peaks.'
THE DONNER CHILDREN STARED WIDE-EYED at the family's breakfast guests, two Sioux warriors in full regalia: beads, feathers, seashells acquired by trade all the way from California, pieces of colored tree bark, even the hair of scalps they had taken in battle. It was all 'tastefully arranged,' according to George Donner, who, true to his gregarious nature, had invited the visitors to join the family meal. 'The Indians all speak very friendly to us,' Donner wrote in a letter to a friend back home.
They had stopped at Fort Bernard, a grand name for what was in fact nothing more than a small log building built by a trapper at the very eastern edge of what is today the state of Wyoming. Just eight miles farther along the trail stood Fort Laramie, an adobe-walled quadrangle enclosing the space of half a football field, perhaps a little more, and containing watchtowers and a two-story administrative building. Like almost all the 'forts' of the West in 1846, these were not military facilities, merely private trading posts, although eventually the federal government would buy Fort Laramie for four thousand dollars and station troops there until 1890. For now, though, the name 'fort' seemed a little grandiloquent. Amused, Biyant put 'Fort Bernard' in quotation marks in his book.
The neighborhood bustled. Between the two forts, there were fur trappers, traders, passing emigrants, and hundreds of Sioux preparing to make war against the Crow. It was by far the largest community of people the emigrants had seen since jumping off.
'Our journey has not been as solitary as we feared,' Donner wrote to his friend. Like his wife in her earlier letter written along the Platte, Donner was optimistic. 'I can say nothing except bear testimony to the correctness of those who have gone before us,' he wrote. A month and a half after leaving Independence, they had avoided serious accident. 'Our company are in good health. . . . Our supplies are in good order.' With a touch of pride, he noted that their preparations had served them well. Even the wagons were in good shape. The covers shed the rain quite nicely.
5
Fine Style
At 9:00 A.M. on Saturday, July 4, the Donners and the Reeds and some other families gathered near their campsite along Beaver Creek, a stream lined with box elder and willows. Brightly colored wildflowers poked through
