Pacific Spring and was a common point for celebrations.
On Friday, July 17—the day that began with an argument about moving on or hunting—the Reeds and the Donners and their companions mistook a subordinate rise for the summit and thought for a time that they had crossed the Divide. The balloon burst that night, when they camped on a river running east. If they had already conquered the Divide, the rivers would be running west, eventually to empty into the Pacific. Instead, they had once again found the meandering Sweet-water.
They reached the real Divide the next day, Saturday, July 18, stopping for lunch right at the ridgeline. The days had been hot, and the cold wind at the crest felt good. Coming down the other side they decided to bypass Pacific Spring, fearing that the cattle would get mired in the boggy ground. But they needed water, and so Reed rode ahead on Glaucus to scout. At dusk he charged back at a full gallop with disappointing news. There was no water ahead, and the wagons needed to turn back toward a small gully they had already passed. It had little water and no grass, but nothing better could be found. Another scout, probably one of the Donner brothers, had become lost, so once they pitched camp, they fired off their guns and lit signal fires on the surrounding hills, and the missing man finally rode in about midnight. The next day, the poor campsite proved more costly than they had realized. The water had been bad, and some of the livestock died. The Donners lost two oxen, and Reed lost 'old Bailey.' probably a steer.
To say that crossing the Continental Divide was a milestone of the westward journey is an understatement. As they rolled across South Pass, emigrants had traveled more than a thousand miles, and were, roughly speaking, halfway to their goal. The Donners had been on the trail a little more than two months and were near the rear of the line, but by no means were they shockingly behind. From the adults to the children, they remained confident. If the second half of the trip took as long as the first, they would reach into his bones, it was crossing the Continental Divide. The next day, he stopped to write his brother and realized that the water at his feet would pour into the Green and then to the Colorado and then to the Gulf of California:
Thus the great day-dream of my youth and of my riper years is accomplished. I have seen the Rocky mountains—have crossed the Rubicon, and am now on the waters that flow to the Pacific! It seems as if I had left the old world behind, and that a new one is dawning upon me.
He couldn't have known it then, but in time he would have the chance to display his newfound vigor in ways he could not imagine. Even beyond the standards of the other members of the Donner Party, Stanton would prove his courage and risk his life.
6
The Crucial Decision
From the jumping-off point at Independence to the crossing of the Continental Divide, the path for all westward travelers was identical. Everyone needed to reach the easy transit through the Rockies, so everyone traveled up the Platte and the Sweetwater, like ships aiming for a strait before reaching the open ocean. But west of the mountains, no similar geographical narrows constricted the traffic. Depending on their intended destination and their personal preferences, emigrants were now free to follow different routes. It was the first time they made a real decision about their course, and for the Donner Party, no choice would ultimately prove more important nor rest on a shakier foundation.
JAMES REED MUST HAVE BEEN PONDERING the options for weeks. Marching along hour after hour, California-bound emigrants would have found it impossible not to weigh the impending alternatives, for in a certain sense the wagons were going in the wrong direction.
Central Missouri and Northern California—the beginning of the journey and the end—are roughly on the same line of latitude. A straight-line trip would have produced a far different path: across Kansas, then through Colorado south of what is today Denver, then across Utah and Nevada before arriving at Sutter's Fort, the site of modern Sacramento. The wagons would never have rolled through an inch of Nebraska or Wyoming. But nineteenth-century emigrants lived in desperate need of the holy trinity of wagon travel—water, wood, and grass—and thus they were slaves to the meanderings of rivers and the haphazard location of mountain passes. For those headed to California, the trip traced a huge arc, northwest for the first thousand miles out of Independence, then at some point southwest toward the destination. This was partly because the trail had first been broken to Oregon, but it had far more to do with the path of the Platte River and the location of South Pass. Crossing the Rockies, emigrant wagon trains were almost two hundred miles north of both Independence and Sutter's Fort. Yet the traditional trail would take them farther north still, up to Fort Hall, in what is today Idaho, before starting a long southward swing toward California. Not surprisingly, emigrants were tempted by the idea of a more direct route, one that was both enticingly straight and dangerously unknown.
Travelers knew that an alternate course existed because it had been described, albeit briefly, in a book that some of the wagons carried,
Once in Oregon, Hastings grew dissatisfied and decamped south to California, where the unbounded possibilities suited his striving soul. Hoping to attract American settlers to this new homeland, he set to work on his book, which combined travelogue observations from his own western adventures—salmon abounded in the Oregon rivers, California priests thrilled to cockfights—with practical advice for would-be pioneers. The final two chapters were a how-to list for emigrants, a do-it-yourself guide to crossing the continent. Never shy, Hastings made plain his preference for California over Oregon, and even dangled the gleaming lure of a shortcut. In a brief passage, Hastings noted that once the wagons crossed South Pass, California-bound emigrants could leave the Oregon Trail and head southwest to the Great Salt Lake rather than continue northwest into Idaho. From the lake, they could turn due west, cross the desert beyond the lake, and then take aim for California. Hastings offered little detail about the new route, and for good reason: He had never set foot on an inch of it.
Still, cocksure of his own skills as a literary evangelist, Hastings began dreaming of the multitudes his book might seduce. By the winter of 1845-46—the same winter during which the Donners and the Reeds were laying plans and readying equipment and stockpiling supplies for the long trip west—Hastings was literally plotting a California boom, laying out a town near Sutter's Fort. A bold army of pilgrims would bring culture to a benighted land, he thought. 'A new era in the affairs of California, is about to arise,' he wrote to the American consul in Monterey in March 1846. 'These now wild and desolate plains must soon abound with all the busy and intresting scenes of highly civilized life.' He had even begun to chat up the outsized idea that perhaps California should break away from Mexico and declare its independence, as Texas had done less than a decade before, and there were those who got the impression that Hastings envisioned himself as the future president of this would-be California Republic.
The problem for Hastings was that the American emigration—the linchpin on which all his grand plans relied—might bypass California altogether, choosing Oregon instead. And so in the early months of 1846, he decided to ride out onto the trail and lobby for California as the emigrants' goal. If settlers could not be trusted to find California, then California—in the person of Lansford Warren Hastings—would go and find settlers.
HASTINGS LEFT SUTTER'S FORT on April 11, a month before the Donners and the Reeds jumped off from Independence. He gathered a small party and started over the Sierra, intending to travel his proposed cut-off backwards, from west to east, and then to await the emigration on the main trail. As the wagons rolled up, he would recruit them for California.
