On March 3, James Reed went to Louis Keseberg’s lean-to shanty at the lake camp. The last time the two men had had anything to do with each other was back on the Humboldt River on October 5, when Keseberg had stood in the sand exhorting the others to get a rope and hang Reed from the yoke of his wagon.
Keseberg was now so feeble that he could do no more than to lurch about in the shanty. His face was shrunken, his thin brown beard long and scraggly, his clothes filthy and infested with lice. Reed took Keseberg’s clothes from him. Then he got a bucket of water and warmed it at the fire and took a rag and bathed the man’s reeking body. He combed his hair and dressed him in clean clothes. He gave him a bit of flour and about a half pound of jerked beef, all he could spare from his own pack. He told Keseberg that he would come back in two weeks and carry him over the mountain. Then he went out into the snow to join McCutchen and the other rescuers, who had been busy washing many of the children and clothing them in fresh flannel.
It was midday already, late to be starting out, but Reed wanted to make some progress toward the summit before nightfall. So the men of the Second Relief, after leaving one of their number, Charles Stone, to look after those who would remain at the lake camp, set off through the woods with seventeen survivors trailing behind them—this time three adults and fourteen children.
Many of them were better clothed than they had been in months—in addition to the fresh flannel clothes for the children, Reed had brought twenty-two new moccasins to replace the worn-out shoes of the emigrants. The adults all carried something, or someone. They carried some biscuits and a bit of jerked beef, perhaps a blanket or a quilt. Many of the men carried children whose parents already had their arms full with other children. Peggy Breen carried four pounds of coffee, a few strips of beef, a bit of tea, and a lump of sugar tied in a bundle at her waist so that her arms were free to carry her infant, Isabelle. Patrick Breen limped along carrying three-year-old Peter. No one was more burdened down, though, than Elizabeth Graves. She carried one-year-old Elizabeth and something that she knew that Jay would not want her to leave behind, the violin he had brought across the plains. And something else, even more valuable, and much heavier—the hoard of silver coins that some of the men had helped her retrieve from the floor of her family wagon.
Thus encumbered, slogging through slushy snow, they did not get far that first day. By late afternoon they had gone only partway up the length of the lake, and so they made a camp on a bare patch of ground on the lakeshore, just about two miles from the cabins. The weather had been warm and clear for more than two weeks now, and the members of the party counted their blessings as they contemplated the rate at which the snow was melting. That evening, as twilight faded to night, Patrick Breen took Jay Fosdick’s violin and serenaded the others, the notes rising and falling plaintively as an almost-full moon rose over the cabins to the east. The spirits of many in the party began to lift for the first time in weeks.
The next morning, though, as the party prepared to push on, someone made a joke about Elizabeth Graves’s coins, and whether the men should play a game of euchre to determine who should get them. Elizabeth was not amused. For her the bag of coins must have rapidly been becoming a cruel burden, both psychologically and physically. Essentially useless to her in her present circumstances, it was nevertheless the vessel in which all her hopes and the hopes of her children lay. Particularly with Franklin dead, as she must by now have divined he was, it represented the only form of financial security she had. But with the cliffs of the pass looming ahead and a small child to carry, the heavy coins also represented an encumbrance that might well mean the difference between living and dying. And surrounded by men—many of whom she did not know and some of whom were here primarily to make money—she had no real assurance that it would not be taken from her whether she lived or died.
As the rest of the party set off toward the western end of the lake, Elizabeth Graves hung back until the others were out of sight. She measured out a distance of about thirty feet from a large rock, scratched a shallow hole in a patch of bare earth, and buried the coins. Then, clutching her infant daughter, she hobbled ahead to join the others.
Once again they made only two miles that day and camped at the western end of the lake, under the forbidding granite cliffs that led up to the summit. Their evening meal was spare that night. Reed had grown alarmed at how little they had left in the way of provisions, so everyone was limited to a bit of gruel made from their remaining flour. On the morning of March 5, Reed calculated that he had only enough left for two scanty meals for each person, enough for breakfast and dinner that day, then nothing more until they reached their first cache. Late that afternoon they struggled across the summit and arrived at the remains of the camp that the First Relief had made on their way toward the lake. Tucker and Glover had left behind a platform of green logs on which to build a fire. The camp was located in an exposed spot at the eastern end of a long meadow just west of the pass.
During the day the skies had begun to grow overcast, then leaden. Now they were nearly black with storm clouds, and the temperature began to plummet. An iron cold began to lash the tops of the trees fringing the meadow. Reed and McCutchen set the men to cutting pine boughs for beds and building a windbreak, piling snow and more pine branches around the fire platform. They felled several trees in such a way that they toppled over and intersected near the platform, to provide a ready supply of firewood. With nightfall rapidly approaching, there was not time to do much more. Reed found time, though, to scribble notes for a journal entry.
Night closing fast, the Clouds still thicking terror terror to many, my hartte dare not communicate my mind to any, death to all if provisions do not Come, in a day or two and a storm should fall on us. Very cold, a great lamentation about the cold.
By sunset the wind began to howl through the peaks around them. Later that night, snow began to slice down out of the sky, plastering everyone white as they huddled around the fire.
More than a century and a half after the fact, historians and climatologists still debate whether the Donner Party fell victim to unusually cold weather in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that they did.
Back on October 30, John Sutter had noted snow in the western foothills and said that “it was low down and heavy for the first fall of the season.” Aboard the U.S. naval sloop Portsmouth, anchored in San Francisco Bay for much of that winter, observers more than once noted snow on the hills surrounding the bay and, on one occasion, in San Francisco itself, both rare though not unheard of in the twentieth century. George Tucker, who spent the winter in the foothills of the Sierra, said that it had rained “nearly all winter and the country was all covered with water.” Daniel Rhoads said, “This last winter is the coldest has ever been known in Calafornia.” The next spring, eastbound travelers reported snow depths in the Sierra Nevada that today would be considered highly unusual so late in the season. Crossing the pass on May 1, 1847, just two months after Reed and the Second Relief became snowbound there, James Clyman reported drifts as deep as twenty or thirty feet near the summit. More than a month later, on June 7, John Craig encountered drifts still as deep as twenty feet.
There is anecdotal evidence, in fact, that the winter of 1846 was unusually cold across the Northern Hemisphere. At Fort Vancouver in the Oregon Country, the Columbia River was frozen over that winter. At their winter quarters in Nebraska, thousands of Mormons suffered terribly, and more than six hundred of them died, in bitterly cold blizzards that swept across the plains. Farther afield, on December 13, three days before Sarah and the snowshoe party departed the lake camp, Charlotte Brontë looked out the window of her father’s parsonage in Yorkshire and wrote a friend,
The cold here is dreadful. I do not remember such a series of North-Pole days—England might really have taken a slide up into the Arctic zone—the sky looks like ice—the earth is frozen—the wind is as keen as a two-edged knife.
The same bitter cold settled over Ireland that month, contributing greatly to the staggering misery and soaring mortality of desperate victims of the Potato Famine, a cataclysm that would in the following several few years claim perhaps a million lives.
In the Canadian Arctic, Sir John Franklin sat helplessly that winter on one of his two ships—the Erebus and the Terror—locked in ice at the south end of Peel Sound, off King William Island. Franklin, traveling south, had expected the passage to be ice-free when he entered it in September, as earlier explorers had reported, but he was quickly outflanked and entrapped by ice. What Franklin didn’t know—but ice-core studies conducted in the twentieth century would show—was that he had sailed into Peel Sound just at the beginning of what would turn out to be a five-year-long period of exceptionally cold weather in the Arctic.
Franklin died the following June, his ships still trapped in the ice. His crew remained aboard the ships, dying one by one for another harrowing year until, in April of 1848, 105 survivors finally abandoned the ships. On King William Island, they converted one of the ships’ boats to a fourteen-hundred-pound sled, piled supplies and personal possessions into it, and tried to escape overland. In the course of the next six miserable years every one of them died, wandering in the frozen wasteland, victims of lead poisoning from the canned food they were consuming, exposure, scurvy, and apparent cannibalism.
The scientific evidence for an exceptionally severe winter in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 is mixed. Tree-ring studies conducted in the 1980s by the University of Arizona suggest that it was a low-precipitation year—tree rings from samples taken at Donner Summit and downslope in the western Sierra Nevada do not show the kinds of growth that would be expected in a year of heavy runoff from a deep, wet snowpack. And yet stumps left behind by the Donner Party, presumably cut off a foot or two higher than the level of the snow, are known to have stood as tall as twenty-two feet, far above normal for the Donner Lake area.
As Mark McLaughlin points out in his book The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm, the explanation appears to be that light precipitation in the Sierra Nevada does not necessarily mean either warm weather or scant snow. In fact, it may well mean the opposite. Cold air creates light, deep snow—powder. An inch of precipitation may produce twelve inches of snow if the air is relatively warm. But the same inch of precipitation will produce as much as twenty inches of snow if the air is cold enough.
So it seems that while the Sierra Nevada did not have more storms than usual that winter, the ten major storms it did have were very cold and left very deep accumulations of snow. The first of them came early, at the end of October, and the last of them came late, in March, just as James Reed and the Second Relief arrived at the long meadow east of Donner Summit and set up camp.
And they could not, in many ways, have picked a worse place to camp. Surrounded on three sides by high granite crags—now called Mount Disney, Mount Judah, and Donner Peak—and located at the very crest of the Sierra Nevada, the landscape in which they were encamped is perfectly configured to trap massive amounts of snowfall. Open to the west, and thus to the full brunt of cold, Arctic storms blown in off the Pacific, the bowl-like landscape captures, in fact, an average of forty-one feet of snowfall per winter. That is why in 1938, less than a hundred years after the Second Relief camped here, Walt Disney chose it as the site for what is now the thirty-seven-hundred-acre Sugar Bowl Ski Resort. The snow here, at sixty-eight hundred feet, is dry, powdery, and copious even in a year of normal precipitation—more copious, in fact, than at any other ski resort in California. And that is why the Central Sierra Snow Lab, a high-tech, instrument-laden facility that studies the extreme meteorological conditions of the high Sierra, is located just down the road. For experiencing blizzards in the Sierra Nevada, this is the place to be.
All through the night of March 5, the storm that had caught the Second Relief near the summit continued to intensify. The party formed a circle around the fire, their feet pointing inward, lying close to one another. Elizabeth Graves held her baby, Elizabeth. Nancy, Jonathan, and Franklin Jr. lay close by. Peggy Breen clutched her own infant daughter, Margaret, to her breast, letting her suck, though Peggy’s milk had ceased to flow some days before. Periodically she peeked under her cloak at the skeletal baby to see if she was still alive, surprised each time to find that she was. Next to her, Patrick Breen and four more of their children crushed up against one another.
William McCutchen and James Reed and some of the other men got up now and then to forage for firewood, but each time they did so, they had to go farther out into the icy, black void beyond the firelight.
As the night wore on, the radiant heat emanating from the fire, ablaze on the large platform of green logs, began to melt a wide hole in the snow under the logs. The platform and the fire slowly started to sink into the hole. Some of the men gave up on gathering firewood and instead began to pray. Reed, McCutchen, and a few others continued gathering wood and shoring up the berm, frantically trying to keep the wind and blowing snow from extinguishing the fire. McCutchen, returning from one of his wood-foraging trips, sat with his back to the fire trying to warm up, so numb that he was not aware his clothes had ignited until all four of the shirts he was wearing were burned from his back.
Reed, by now, had grown desperately concerned about the lives of his own two children as well as all the others in his charge. He later remembered that he watched helplessly as “the pitiless snow beat fiercely against their thinly clad and weak forms; their blood grew chill in their veins, and death, with glaring eyes, stared them in the face.”
By morning the fire had melted a pit nearly ten feet across and perhaps ten feet below the surface of the snow. Counting heads, Reed and McCutchen discovered that five-year-old Isaac Donner was dead and already frozen stiff in his blanket.
The storm continued all through the day. Reed and McCutchen went to and fro, every ten or fifteen minutes, climbing out of the pit in search of wood, braving the wind that cut through their clothes like cold steel. They were almost entirely out of food now and their stomachs were cramped with pain. Peggy Breen began to weep, then to pray, and then to rage at the men—shaming them for being paid three dollars a day to save them and yet letting them all freeze to death like little Isaac Donner. Her lamentations grew even louder when her son John, sitting on a log sloping down into the hole, slipped and tumbled headfirst toward the center of the pit. McCutchen caught the boy and saved him from horrible burns, but a bit later seven-year-old Mary Donner slipped and badly burned one of her feet in the fire. Peggy Breen grew quieter and began to recite Catholic devotions.
They all dreaded the coming of another night, but it came nonetheless. Reed had begun to have trouble with his vision, and by nightfall he was so entirely snow-blind he could not even see the fire blazing before him. Now it was mostly up to McCutchen to keep the fire going. As the hours wore on, the snowfall began to taper off, but temperatures plummeted and the cold grew lethal. Reed later called the night “one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed and I hope I never shall witness such…. Of all the praying and Crying I never heard nothing ever equaled it.”
In the flickering light in the pit, Peggy Breen heard Nancy Graves call out to her mother repeatedly to come and cover her, but Elizabeth Graves responded weakly that she could not, that she was too tired. Then Elizabeth Graves’s breathing grew irregular. She began to make sounds that alarmed Peggy Breen, unnatural sounds, she thought. One of the men got up and examined Elizabeth, shook the snow from her blanket and re-covered her. Elizabeth rolled over awkwardly to one side, her arm akimbo, and then did not move anymore. Peggy Breen waited a bit and then crawled over to her and found her already cold to the touch. Nancy Graves took her feeble baby sister into her arms and sat next to her mother’s body. At eight, she was now the oldest member of her family still alive in the mountains.
By about noon the next day, March 7, the snow had stopped falling. Reed and McCutchen gathered their men together and talked about what they should do. Then Reed announced their decision: He and McCutchen and the other men would continue until they came to one of their caches or to Woodworth’s party and then send someone back with food. He was taking his own children with him, he said, and he would also take fourteen-year-old Solomon Hook, who seemed to be up to the trek.
The Graves children and Mary Donner were clearly too feeble to go—most of them were too weak to even crawl out of the hole in the snow. But the Breens were not as malnourished as most of the others, and they seemed to be more robust. Reed and McCutchen tried to talk Patrick Breen into making the attempt, along with his family, but Breen would have none of it. He and his family would stay here and wait for relief, he insisted. Reed called his men to his side and made them witness Breen’s decision. If Breen’s family died, their blood was on Breen’s own head and not Reed’s, he said. The men cut three days’ worth of firewood and then called for Solomon Hook to join them. Hiram Miller took Tommy Reed on his back, Reed took Patty by the hand, and they walked off to the west.
The trees that the men had felled when they’d first arrived had tipped into the hole and now projected upward out of it at awkward angles. In order to stay warm, fourteen-year-old John Breen climbed down one of the trees deeper into the pit. Then he cut steps for the others to help them descend. At the bottom of the pit, Nancy, Franklin, Jonathan, and the baby Elizabeth Graves huddled by the fire, along with the Breens and seven-year-old Mary Donner. At least they now had protection from the wind, but none of them had eaten anything in more than two days. Up on the rim of the pit, rigid and cold, lay the bodies of Elizabeth Graves and Isaac Donner.
The same day that Reed and McCutchen walked away from the miserable pit in the snow that would eventually come to be called “Starved Camp,” Reason Tucker, Aquilla Glover, and the rest of the First Relief led their band of survivors along the Bear River, through rolling, oak-studded hills. At about three that afternoon, they finally arrived at Johnson’s Ranch.
For the first time since she had left the lake camp on snowshoes more than two and a half months before, Sarah saw Billy, Eleanor, and Lovina. At some point that afternoon or evening, Sarah and Mary Ann must have faced the grim task of telling their younger siblings that their father was dead, along with Jay. But the younger children had better news to report. So far as they knew, their mother and the rest of their brothers and sisters were still alive in the mountains, and Selim Woodworth, James Reed, William McCutchen, and other good men were on their way to rescue them.
In the mountains two of the three hearty young men that Reed and McCutchen had left behind to care for the survivors had meanwhile reconsidered their willingness to stay. Not long after the Second Relief left, Charles Stone had hiked from the lake camp to Alder Creek and talked to Charles Cady. They would be better off out of there as soon as possible, they’d decided.
When a horrified Tamzene Donner heard that Cady was about to abandon her and the rest of the Donner family, she struck a desperate deal with the two of them—for a good sum of gold, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they agreed to take her three youngest daughters over the mountains. Once again she stood outside her tent and wept as she watched men lead her children off through the snow, the last of them this time—six-year-old Frances, four-year-old Georgia, and three-year-old Eliza.
When Cady and Stone arrived at the lake camp, they deposited the three girls in the cold, dank, recesses of the Murphy cabin. The only other souls in the cabin were the feeble skeleton who was Levinah Murphy; her one-year-old grandson, George Foster; her emaciated eight-year-old son, Simon; and a gaunt, hollow-eyed, and increasingly desperate Louis Keseberg. Cady and Stone decided to take shelter elsewhere, likely in the abandoned Breen cabin.
By the time the blizzard that had pinned down Reed, McCutchen, and their party near the summit had finally blown over, Cady and Stone had again revised their plans. With so much fresh snow on the ground, it would be hard enough hiking even without small children to carry, they decided. They assembled their packs and headed out across the ice of Truckee Lake, leaving the Donner girls behind with Levinah Murphy in the cabin built up against a boulder. For the Donner girls, it must have been a harrowing moment—their hopes for escape suddenly dashed as they were left in a fetid cabin with a woman who appeared to be more dead than alive.
Two or three days later, Cady and Stone hiked through Summit Valley, just west of the pass, where they found a deep, wide hole in the snow with a blue curl of wood smoke arising from it. On the edge of the hole lay a dead woman and a dead child. The young men peered down into the hole. At the bottom, a ragged woman, a cluster of children, and one emaciated man lay on their backs, staring up at them with hollow eyes. Charles Stone and Charles Cady turned their backs on the hole and quickly resumed their way westward.
Cady and Stone overtook Reed and the Second Relief farther down the Yuba, and shortly after that they all came across Selim Woodworth and his men encamped in the snow near Yuba Gap. With Woodworth were William Eddy and William Foster. The two survivors of the snowshoe party had set out from Johnson’s Ranch several days before, no longer willing to wait for someone else to rescue what remained of their families. Eddy had already learned that Eleanor and his daughter, Margaret, were dead, but he still hoped to save his three-year-old son, James. Foster learned now from Reed that his son, George, was alive in the Murphy cabin.
Reed told Woodworth that he had left more than a dozen survivors in desperate straits ten or twelve miles to the east. He exhorted Woodworth to press ahead as quickly as possible to rescue them. Woodworth polled his men and asked if they would go forward. But Woodworth’s men studied Reed’s and McCutchen’s stricken and haggard faces, and the corpselike survivors, and promptly announced that they would go no farther. Foster and Eddy pleaded with them and offered to pay any amount, but Woodworth’s men calculated that Eddy and Foster were most likely destitute and unable to fulfill their promises. Reed spoke up, promising to make good on whatever Eddy and Foster offered. But the men were unmoved. Eddy and Foster, desperate, said they would continue alone, without provisions. Reed took them aside and told them it would be suicidal and finally got them to agree to retreat temporarily to Bear Valley until something could be worked out.
When they reached the valley, Woodworth again refused to go into the mountains himself, but he finally agreed to pay out government funds to the tune of three dollars per day to any man who would go, and to pay an additional fifty dollars to any man who would bring out a child not his own. Eddy separately agreed to pay fifty dollars to Hiram Miller, who had just come down with the Second Relief, to return with them. Foster paid the same amount to a second man, William Thompson.
Three more men also agreed to go on the terms offered by Woodward. One was a volunteer from San Francisco, Howard Oakley. Another was Charles Stone, who might have begun to feel guilty about leaving the Donner girls behind, or who might simply have wanted the additional money that hauling one of them down the mountain would fetch. And the third was one of the Graves family’s traveling companions from back on the plains, the tall, bearlike John Schull Stark, Matthew Ritchie’s son-in-law.
The following morning the seven of them set out for the high country. Even as they began the climb out of Bear Valley, though, Eddy’s and Foster’s hopes had already been dashed up in the mountains. Three-year-old James Eddy was dead in the Murphy cabin. And a night or two before, Louis Keseberg had taken one-year-old George Foster into his bed with him. In the morning the boy was dead. As Levinah Murphy and the three Donner girls looked on in abject horror, Keseberg took the boy’s limp body from the bed, carried it to a wall, and hung it on a peg, like a piece of meat.
For nearly a week after Reed, McCutchen, and the rest of the Second Relief departed the makeshift camp at Summit Valley, the people they had left behind there struggled to survive in the pit that their fire had melted in the snow. The hole had grown deeper and wider until it was fifteen feet in diameter and twenty-four feet deep, reaching now all the way down to the bare earth.
As the days dragged on, Patrick Breen largely gave up on living. For the most part, he simply lay listless on the muddy ground, staring up at the circle of sky above him. But Peggy Breen struggled to nurture the nine children there—her own five, Mary Donner, and three of Elizabeth Graves’s orphans. The number of Graves children needing care had diminished by one shortly after Reed and McCutchen had left, when five-year-old Franklin Ward Graves Jr. died. The Breens had dragged the boy’s body up out of the pit and laid it in the snow near his mother’s and Isaac Donner’s bodies.
For the first few days, Peggy Breen brewed small amounts of tea from her diminishing supply of tea leaves and doled it out to the children, to warm them more than nourish them. She rationed out small bits of sugar from the lump she had carried up the mountain, and dispensed some seeds she had also brought along. Every few hours, day and night, she or Patrick or their oldest son, John, crawled up one of the trees that had fallen into the pit and stumbled through the nearby woods searching for downed firewood. Each time they scanned the horizon for signs of rescuers, but each time there was nobody to be seen, no motion save the stirring of pine trees in the wind. Patrick Breen slid further into despair.
The weather was fair and relatively warm, and during the days some of them crawled up to the edge of the pit and sunned themselves, storing up warmth for the nights ahead, averting their eyes from the bodies that lay in the snow staring vacantly at them. But the nights were brutal. Without cloud cover, the warmth of the day was radiated quickly back out into the black void of space. As they lay in the pit, staring at white sheets of stars spread across the opening above them, they shivered and shook convulsively, aching with the pain of the cold. In the mornings their thin blankets and clothes were board-stiff, crusted over with a thick white rime.
As the week wore on, the sugar and the seeds and the tea began to run out, and finally there was nothing at all left to alleviate the stabbing hunger cramps of the children in the pit. All of them were profoundly emaciated, and with no body fat to insulate them, their internal temperatures hovered near the hypothermic range. Finally seven-year-old Mary Donner, the toes of her feet blackened by frostbite and the burns she had suffered after falling into the fire, could not stand the hunger pangs any longer. She suggested that they eat the dead.
Several days later, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of March 12, William Eddy, William Foster, and the rest of what was now the Third Relief trudged up the length of Summit Valley on snowshoes. At the far end of the valley, they could see a large, dark void in the snow from which was emanating a column of wood smoke. As they approached the column of smoke, they saw that there were bloody bones strewn around the lip of the crater. When they got closer, they saw what appeared to be a woman’s body lying in the snow. It was hard to tell, though. Elizabeth Graves’s body had been stripped of much of its flesh. The heart and the liver had been cut out of her chest and abdomen, and her breasts had been cut off. The rest of the bones were small ones, children’s bones.
Down in the pit, a circle of living children, pale and skeletal, sat around a fire. For several days Patrick Breen had been bringing them bits of meat to roast on the fire. One of the children, eight-year-old Nancy Graves, did not yet know that the flesh she had been eating was her mother’s—a revelation that when it came would so devastate her that it would lead to bouts of sudden, intermittent sobbing in her childhood and a sense of guilt from which she would never entirely recover.
Nancy Graves’s later emotional distress was just one small thread in a much broader fabric of mental anguish that inevitably afflicted many of the Donner Party survivors and rescuers alike for years following the disaster. Even as Sarah and the other rescued emigrants at Johnson’s Ranch waited to learn whether their loved ones would ever emerge from the mountains alive, silent and sinister processes were at work within them, processes that in many cases would transform the way they viewed and experienced the world for the rest of their lives.
Not all disaster survivors suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related syndromes, but large numbers do. Overall, 25 percent of people subjected to a traumatic event develop PTSD, but that number can more than double to 59 percent or higher among survivors of disasters. The precise rate varies according to a variety of factors, many of which were stacked against Sarah and her sisters. For one thing, females are four times more likely than males to develop the disorder when subjected to the same trauma. Children and young people suffer at higher rates than do more mature adults. Indeed, 100 percent of children who witness the homicide of a parent develop PTSD. And Sarah and her siblings had also experienced a witches’ brew of additional traumas, each of which raised their risk: anticipation of suffering or danger to come, close exposure to dead bodies, witnessing the death of a loved one, the long duration of an ongoing trauma, a clear threat to their own lives, the loss of home and hearth, and experiencing physical pain or injury.
None of this, of course, even begins to touch the particular trauma that Sarah, Mary Ann, and Nancy Graves had suffered, along with a number of other Donner Party survivors—that of having eaten and seen eaten the flesh of their companions. Regardless of the necessity of having done so, they had violated a fundamental human taboo, and it was almost inevitable that they would experience significant amounts of guilt and its close cousin, shame. The two are not quite the same thing: Guilt revolves around feeling bad for what you have done; shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person because of what you have done. Guilt can actually be therapeutic, because inherent in the emotion is the idea that you can change your behavior and end the problem. Shame is a far more toxic emotion, because it implies that your character has been polluted by your actions. Deep-seated shame typically leads to a variety of anger-related emotional problems, particularly hostility and aggression.
Psychiatric researchers have only recently begun to understand that traumatic stress produces not just psychological changes but physical changes in the body, particularly in the brain. The hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for regulating memories and putting information into context—shrinks by as much as 8 percent, some of its cells killed by an excess of stress hormones such as cortisol. Under stress the amygdala—an inch-long, almond-shaped structure responsible for regulating emotions—becomes overactive, lighting up with activity like a pinball machine. The levels of neurotransmitters that regulate nerve impulses in the brain become unbalanced: Serotonin levels plunge; norepinephrine levels soar.
All this results in a kaleidoscope of psychiatric symptoms that plague victims of PTSD: panic attacks, flashbacks, dissociation (in which the patient feels detached from his or her own body), phobias, irrational avoidance of anything imagined to be related to the trauma, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, emotional numbness, intrusive thoughts, and in extreme cases even psychosis and suicide. Among children there is sometimes a tendency to see “ghosts,” apparitions that are apparently hallucinations brought on by the disorder. And to round out the misery, the vast majority of PTSD victims simultaneously suffer from at least one other psychological disorder, a full 80 percent experiencing depression and/or substance abuse.
The toll that traumatic stress takes is not confined to the brain and the psyche, though. Along with a host of other problems, chronic, recurring stress of the type associated with PTSD suppresses the immune system, rendering the entire body vulnerable to a variety of infectious agents. Researchers have for some time also noted high incidences of mortality from coronary heart disease among disaster survivors. It now appears that this is due, at least in part, to elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels brought on by hormonal changes at work in the bodies of disaster survivors.
To what extent Sarah and her siblings suffered from any stress-induced symptoms we can never know with certainty. There was no formal knowledge of these syndromes in their time. No one had recourse to the wide variety of treatments available today, ranging from recently designed psychotropic medications to hypnosis, to eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, to elaborate cognitive-behavioral therapies and carefully controlled reexposure techniques. For the most part, people were expected to keep their emotional problems to themselves. If Sarah suffered, she, like most of her fellow survivors, did so largely in silence and mostly unaware of why they were experiencing the problems they were. But Mary Ann Graves gave some insight into what she and likely her sisters were all experiencing many years later, when she said sadly, “I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again,” encapsulating even in those few words two of the principal symptoms of PTSD—recurring recollections of the trauma and emotional numbness.
At the crest of the Sierra Nevada, the men of the Third Relief were stunned by what they had found at the pit in the snow and uncertain what to do next. It seemed unlikely that any of these people, except perhaps Peggy Breen and her eldest son, John, could walk out of the mountains unaided, but Peggy Breen announced that she would not leave without her husband and all of her children. Eddy and Foster wanted to push ahead immediately to the lake camp to look for their young sons. Charles Stone and Howard Oakley, there only as hired hands, wanted to return to Bear Valley as quickly as possible with the three surviving Graves children and Mary Donner. That, though, would mean leaving all of the Breens behind to wait for yet another relief effort, or for those who were going on to the lake camp to return.
The men stood in the snow discussing it. Finally a vote was taken. All except for twenty-year-old John Stark were for leaving the Breens. When his name was called, Stark stepped forward and said, “No, gentlemen. I will not abandon these people. I am here on a mission of mercy, and I will not half do the work. You can all go if you want to, but I shall stay by these people while they and I live.”
Early the next morning, the party divided. Before dawn, Eddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson resumed traveling east toward the pass and the lake camp. Charles Stone picked up the emaciated baby, Elizabeth Graves. Howard Oakley picked up the shrunken frame of Mary Donner, whose feet were too badly burned to allow her to walk. John Stark took charge of all the rest, placing Jonathan Graves on his back among his blankets and other gear and then leading Nancy Graves and the Breens step by step down the length of Summit Valley, traveling westward. As the smaller children grew exhausted from floundering through the snow, they took turns climbing onto John Stark’s broad back, sharing the ride with Jonathan.
Eddy, Foster, Miller, and Thompson arrived at the lake camp before noon. Eddy and Foster hurried to the Murphy cabin, where they had last seen their sons alive on December 16. The two men rushed into the dark cabin and found a group of spectral figures crouched in the corners and lying on beds of pine boughs. In the dim light, they could make out the three youngest Donner girls—Frances, Georgia, and Eliza. Levinah Murphy was there, too, gaunt, wild-eyed, and disheveled. Her son Simon was there. And a startled and feral-looking Louis Keseberg was there as well. But the two boys for whom Eddy and Foster had come searching were nowhere to be seen. Eddy confronted Keseberg and demanded to know what had become of them. Keseberg told him flat out—the boys had died and been eaten. Enraged, Eddy threatened to kill Keseberg then and there, but the man was so emaciated and frail-looking that he resolved instead to wait until they got to California to commit the deed.*
Eddy and Foster were in no mood to linger in the presence of Keseberg. But as they tried to figure out what to do next, Simon Murphy noticed a haggard woman wandering through the woods as if in a daze. It was Tamzene Donner, come in search of her daughters. When she was brought into the cabin, her girls threw themselves into her arms and kissed her, but she was distracted, confused, not sure what was happening here.
The men, worried about another storm cutting them off on the pass, went outside to discuss how to proceed. When they reentered the cabin, they announced abruptly that everyone who was able to travel had to leave now. Almost as soon as they had met, Tamzene and her daughters were torn apart again. Hiram Miller picked up Eliza, Eddy picked up Georgia, Thompson picked up Frances. Foster picked up Simon Murphy. Levinah Murphy could not bear to see her youngest son go. Lying in her bed, she rolled over to face the wall. The men carried the children up out of the cabin to the open snow and hurriedly bundled them in warm clothes.
Tamzene Donner was frantic. Eddy and Foster urged her to come with them. She begged them to give her time to return to Alder Creek to see if her husband was still alive, but they would not chance lingering here another night. Jean Baptiste Trudeau and Nicholas Clark, on whom she had largely depended, were determined to leave with the Third Relief. As the men carried her children away, Tamzene cried out to them, “Oh, save, save my children!”
They trudged off through the woods and onto the ice of Truckee Lake. At Alder Creek, Elizabeth Donner was dead or soon would be. Only four living members of the Donner Party would be left behind in the mountains—George and Tamzene Donner, Louis Keseberg, and Levinah Murphy.
Eddy and Foster caught up with and passed the remainder of the Third Relief several days later. John Stark, still carrying one or more of the smaller children on his back at a time, was moving slowly, leading Nancy Graves and the Breen family as they hobbled down the Yuba River. Later the same day, they passed Stone and Oakley, carrying the baby Elizabeth Graves and Mary Donner. The next morning they found Selim Woodworth and his men still encamped on the Yuba. When they told Woodworth that there were still four people in the mountains who ought to be rescued, Woodworth again declined to attempt an immediate rescue. His priority, he said, was to return to Mule Springs and arrange transportation to Johnson’s Ranch for those who had already been brought out.
Two or three days later, Stark, the Graves children, and the rest of the Third Relief and their evacuees staggered into the camp at Mule Springs, where they found a pack train full of supplies, replete with all the food they could want.
After a few more days of riding mules and horses over muddy trails, they finally arrived at Johnson’s Ranch late at night. It was the next morning before the new arrivals could see what they had striven to reach ever since leaving Illinois the previous spring. Many years later John Breen, who had just turned fifteen when he arrived, recalled that first California dawn.
It was early morning, the weather was fine, the ground was covered with fine green grass, and there was a very fat beef hanging from the limb of an oak tree, the birds were singing from the tops of trees above our camp and the journey was over. I [kept] looking on the scene and could scarcely believe that I was alive. The scene from that morning seems to be photographed on my mind.
But there were hard things that had to be said, and hard things that had to be accepted. William Eddy had lost his entire family. William Foster had to tell Sarah that their only child was dead. Eight-year-old Simon Murphy had to tell his ten-year-old brother, William, they would almost certainly lose their mother. Nancy Graves, just eight, had to tell Sarah and the rest of her older siblings that their mother was dead, that their brother Franklin was dead, and that all their money was lost. There was so much anguish in William Johnson’s two-room adobe that day that little Eliza Donner, who had just arrived with the Third Relief, had to flee the house to escape the heartrending scenes.
And no one could have been more devastated than Sarah by the time the sun rose that day. Everything for which she and Jay had wished, and almost everyone she had ever depended on, were now irretrievably gone. Almost everything she’d had to fear as she lay recovering at Johnson’s was now in fact unfolding—she was suddenly both penniless and the titular head of a family of seven younger siblings, the youngest of whom was an infant girl who looked for all the world like a toy skeleton.