The Great Salt Lake and the salt flats that stretch beyond it are among the most desolate places on earth. Even today, to travel across this desert wilderness on a modern six-lane highway is a daunting prospect. The salt flats yawn across a space that seems limitless, absolutely white, absolutely flat, treacherously soft, the horizon eaten away by dancing mirages.
It was a sight that filled Virginia Reed with dread: “a dreary, desolate, alkali waste” in which not a living thing could be seen; “it seemed as though the hand of death had been laid upon the country.”117 Although the company had been given to believe that they would have to travel just forty miles across this desert, it was in fact many times that distance. In order to make up some of the time they had lost in the canyons, for three days and two nights they labored painfully onward without a break, “suffering from thirst and heat by day, and piercing cold by night.” On one night the cold and wind were so bitter that Virginia believed that if it were not for the fact that her father placed all five of their dogs around his children for warmth, they would have died of exposure.
Although they had stocked up—as they thought—with an ample supply of water and grass for their livestock, it was not enough. Very soon their oxen and other livestock began to collapse from exhaustion and thirst. The Reeds at this point had eighteen head of cattle with them, an investment that was essential to their plans for a new life in California. In desperation, Virginia’s father sent his drivers off with them to a water source he had eventually been able to find ten miles away, but at the first scent of water the steers, crazed with thirst, had stampeded and were lost from sight. Despite the fact that every man in the company turned out to help them find the livestock, only one was ever found.
A further week had now been lost in this fruitless hunt. The Reed family, who had been by far the wealthiest of the group, were now in a frighteningly vulnerable state. All but one of their oxen were long dead (poisoned by drinking alkaline water at Bridger’s fort), and now all their cattle, except for one steer, were gone too. “My father and his family were left in the desert, eight hundred miles from California, seemingly helpless.” Had it not been for the fact that they were lent two yoke of oxen by others in the company they would have been completely stranded. As it was, these together with their one ox and one steer yoked together might just be able to pull one of the smaller wagons. The once-magnificent Pioneer Palace Car, with its sprung seats, comfortable feather beds, and even its looking glass, still miraculously unbroken, was now abandoned to the desert winds. All their possessions, except for the few things they were able to cram into the smaller wagon, were cached in the desert.
An inventory of all their provisions was now made, from which it was clear that no one in the company had enough food left to last them until they reached California. Two volunteers, Charles Stanton and William McCutchen, now set out alone, ahead of the rest of the company, to try to reach Captain Sutter, at Sutter’s Mill, on the western side of the Sierra Nevada, and ask him for help.
The rest of the company limped painfully on. On October 5 they reached Gravelly Ford, on the Humboldt River. It was here that “a tragedy was enacted which affected the subsequent lives of more than one member of our company.” A fight broke out between Milton Elliott, the Reeds’ driver, and another teamster, John Snyder. In Virginia Reed’s version of the story, this had occurred when Snyder began to beat his oxen around the head with the butt end of his whip. When James Reed tried to calm him down, an altercation ensued. Snyder “struck my father a violent blow over the head with his heavy whip-stock.” Mr. Reed, in what he would later claim was self-defense, pulled out a hunting knife and stabbed him.
The wound proved fatal. Although James Reed would always claim that he had only acted in self-defense, the other members of the Donner party did not accept this as an excuse, and a council was held to decide what his punishment should be. In the heat of the moment, some thought he should be lynched or hanged right there and then, but, happily, saner voices prevailed. Instead, in a judgment that under the circumstances was almost as harsh, it was decided that he should be banished into the desert. “It was thought more humane, perhaps, to send him into the wilderness to die of slow starvation or be murdered by Indians,” Virginia Reed wrote. “My father was sent out into an unknown country without provisions or arms—even his horse was at first denied him. When we learned of this decision, I followed him through the darkness . . . And carried him his rifle, pistols, ammunition and some food.”
The rest of the Reed family had no choice but to stumble on without him. For all that theirs was a pitiful situation, it was better than that of some of the others. One couple, the Eddys, having lost everything they had, including their yoke of oxen, were forced to walk. Eleanor Eddy carried her baby daughter in her arms while her husband William shouldered their three-year-old boy and their sole remaining provisions: “three pounds of sugar, some bullets, and a powder horn.” Another of their company, William Pike, was accidentally shot in the back with a pistol and died soon after, suffering “more than tongue can tell.” All this while the Sierra Nevada, the largest contiguous mountain range in North America,76 was getting ever closer—the last great obstacle that remained between them and their dream.
What they saw, as they rode slowly onward, filled them with new fear. Even though it was only the middle of October, snow had already begun to fall. Winter had set in a whole month earlier than expected. “All the trails and roads were covered,” Virginia Reed remembered, “and our only guide was the summit which it seemed we would never reach.”
There was only one event during this time to cheer them. One day, Charles Stanton suddenly appeared before them at the head of a mule train, bringing them not only the promised supplies, including flour and fresh meat, but also two Mexicans to help guide them over the mountains. Although Stanton’s companion on the mission to resupply the company, William McCutchen, had been too ill and exhausted to attempt to recross the mountains, Stanton brought the welcome news that James Reed had also made it safely to Sutter’s Mill.
Since 1841, several passes across the Sierra Nevada had been known to settlers, but it was not until 1844 that one had been found wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Even then it had proved a physically excruciating task: the wagons had had to be completely emptied, their tops removed, and the wagon bases hoisted over the ridges, before being repacked on the other side. Now, in the cold and the snow, with time running out, it seemed all but impossible.
“Despair drove many nearly frantic,” Virginia wrote. “Each family tried to cross the mountains, but found it was impossible. When it was seen that the wagons could not be dragged through the snow, their goods and provisions were packed on oxen and another start was made, men and women walking in the snow up to their waists, carrying their children in their arms and trying to drive their cattle.” But it was no use. Even with the Mexicans from Sutter’s Mill to help them, the trail could not be found. Eventually, a halt was called.
At this point Charles Stanton went on ahead with the two guides to inspect the way himself. When he came back, he reported that he had found what he thought might be the pass, but a crossing would only be possible if no more snow fell. “He was in favor of a forced march until the other side should be reached, but some of our party were so tired and exhausted with the day’s labor that they declared they would not take another step; so the few who knew the danger that the night might bring yielded to the many, and we camped within three miles of the summit.”
It was a disastrous decision. That night was one of heavy snow. “Around the campfires under the trees great feathery flakes came whirling down. The air was so full of them that one could see objects only a few feet away,” Virginia would recall. “The Indians (Mexican guides) knew we were doomed, and one of them wrapped his blanket about him and stood all night under a tree. We children slept soundly on our cold bed of snow with a soft white mantle falling over us so thickly that every few moments my mother would have to shake the shawl—our only covering—to keep us from being buried alive.”
The next morning it was clear to everyone that their worst fears had been realized. Whatever chance they had had of crossing the mountains before winter set in was now gone. Although they were only a hundred miles short of their destination, and just three miles short of the pass, there was nothing for it but to wait the winter out.
Eighty-one people were now trapped in the Sierra Nevada. Of these, more than half were children under eighteen, and a quarter were aged under five. The party now split up into two camps. One of the other families with the Reeds, the Breens, were fortunate in that they were able to use a cabin that had been built by the Murphy-Schallenberger company two years previously on the shore of a lake, then known as Truckee Lake (named after Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather).77 It was very small, had no door, and only had branches for a roof—altogether a damp, miserable space, but at least it provided them with some kind of shelter. The others hastily built two other double cabins nearby. These refuges were known as the “Breen Cabin,” the “Murphy Cabin,” and the “Reed-Graves Cabin” after the four principal families who sheltered there. Stanton and the two Mexicans, Luis and Salvador, took shelter with the Reeds.
The rest of the party, including the two Donner families, were altogether less fortunate. They camped in a small valley just below the lake, now known as Alder Creek Valley. “The snow came on so suddenly that they had no time to build cabins, but hastily put up brush sheds, covering them with pine boughs.”
It was clear to everyone that the remaining cattle, brought with such painful effort across the salt desert, would not survive the winter. These were now slaughtered, and the meat was cut up and buried in the snow to preserve it. All the Reeds’ cattle, except for one steer, had been lost in the Great Salt Lake, so Margaret Reed made an arrangement with one of the other families, promising to pay them back in kind, with two cows for each one, when they reached the California valley.
It was the beginning of November when they first made camp by the lake; the conditions were not now likely to improve until at least March. Huddling together in their makeshift huts, they were now faced with the prospect of four months of brutal winter cold. “The misery endured . . . in our little dark cabins under the snow would fill pages and make the coldest heart ache.” Food, such as they had, was rationed to almost nothing. “Poor little children were crying with hunger, and mothers were crying because they had so little to give their children.” Some chewed twigs and the bark from trees in a desperate attempt to quell their hunger pangs. Others killed their dogs and ate them.
Before long, most were so weak they could scarcely walk. Even the men had barely strength enough to gather wood. Storms, sometimes lasting as many as ten days at a time, raged around the fragile huts, and “some mornings snow would have to be shoveled out of the fireplace before a fire could be made.” When the weather made it impossible to go out to gather firewood, they were reduced to cutting chips from the log walls.
Christmas Day was approaching, but to the now-starving families “its memory gave no comfort,” Virginia Reed remembered. But on the day itself, “which passed without observance,” something happened that must have seemed at the time like nothing short of a miracle. “My mother had determined weeks before that her children should have a treat on this one day.” She had hidden away a cache of a few dried apples, some beans, a length of tripe, and a small piece of bacon. “When this hoarded store was brought out, the delight of the little ones knew no bounds. . . . And when we sat down to our Christmas dinner mother said: ‘Children, eat slowly, for this one day you can have all you wish.’ So bitter was the misery relieved by that one bright day, that I have never since sat down to a Christmas dinner without my thoughts going back to Truckee Lake.”
This tiny reprieve did not last long. The snow was now so deep that it was higher than the roofs of the huts. As they huddled together for warmth, it was clear to everyone that they were no longer on a short allowance but were actually starving to death. Their bodies began to show the classic symptoms: “cheekbones and ribs and shoulder blades protruded. Muscle-bound arms shriveled to sticks. Joints ached. Buttocks grew so bony that sitting became painful. Skin dried and scaled to the rough texture of parchment.”118 Looking at the gaunt faces of her children, Margaret Reed could bear it no longer and “determined to make an effort to cross the mountains.”
Margaret was not the only one desperate enough to attempt to cross the mountains in the midwinter snows. Several other forays had already been made by the famished settlers, “but all who tried were driven back by the pitiless storms.” On December 16, a group of seventeen people—ten men, five women, and two children, the youngest of whom was ten—had set off in an attempt to reach Sutter’s Mill and get help. Led by William Eddy, they had been wearing snowshoes crudely fashioned from ox bone and rawhide and had taken supplies with them which, with strict rationing, they hoped would last them six days. But they had never returned, and nothing was known of their fate.
Much later, they would learn that of this group of seventeen, known as the “Forlorn Hope” party, seven had survived. Those who made it through to Sutter’s Mill included two men and all five of the women. Instead of the six days that they had predicted, it had taken them a month. Under these conditions, there had only ever been one means of survival. While everyone in the party was still alive, various gruesome options were discussed: one suggestion was to cast lots to decide who would be killed and eaten; another was that two of the men should fight a duel, the one to be killed agreeing in advance that his body might be consumed by the others. But both these plans were rejected. In the end, the first of the party to be cannibalized was a man named Patrick Dolan. One evening, Dolan had lost his head completely. Tormented by the effects of severe hypothermia, he had stripped off all his clothes and boots and run from their makeshift shelter, out into the frozen night. The others had tried to wrestle him back to their fire, but it was too late. When Dolan died shortly after, his body was quickly cut up and consumed by the rest. The others in the party who died in quick succession after that were also cut up and eaten. Some of their bodies were roasted and devoured on the spot; other parts were preserved in strips for later occasions.
It was only toward the end of their appalling ordeal, and by now suffering the most extreme psychological and physical torments brought about by near starvation, that they considered murder. The Graves family would later maintain that William Eddy tried to lure Mary Graves away from the rest so he could kill her. Another of the group (and, apart from Eddy, the only other man to survive), William Foster, was also said to have suggested murdering three of the women for food. But since all the women survived, neither of these accusations could ever be proved. In the end, it was only the two Mexican guides, Luis and Salvador, who would suffer this fate. Already harrowed by extreme exposure, they were found to be “collapsed and near death.” William Foster took his gun and shot them both through the head.119
Back at Truckee Lake, of course, the rest of the company knew none of this. When no help seemed to be forthcoming, Margaret Reed feared the worst. All she knew was that if she did not do something, her children were going to die. Leaving the younger ones behind in the care of the Breens, on January 4, 1847, she took Virginia and her two servants, the maid Eliza and their teamster Milt Elliott, and set off to find help.
For a while all went well. Milt had fashioned himself a pair of snowshoes and the others followed in his tracks. In their already-weakened state, walking through the snow was such debilitating work that sometimes Virginia had to crawl up the steeper inclines on her hands and knees. Eliza gave up on the first day and returned alone to the camp. The others staggered on for another four days, climbing “one high mountain after another only to see others higher still ahead.”
One night they fell into an exhausted sleep, “lulled by the moan of the pine trees” all around them and “the screams of wild beasts heard in the distance.” The next morning they awoke to find that the heat of the fire had melted the snow all around them, that their little camp had sunk many feet below the surface, and that they were “literally buried” in a well of snow. “The danger was that any attempt to get out might bring an avalanche upon us, but finally steps were carefully made and we reached the surface.” Virginia now found that one of her feet had become so badly frostbitten that to climb any farther was impossible. There was nothing for it but to return to camp. As it turned out, they reached it just in time, “for that night a storm came on, the most fearful of the winter, and we should have perished had we not been in the cabins.”
The failure of their rescue attempt was the bitterest of blows. Margaret Reed, mother of four children, the youngest of whom, Thomas, was only three, now had to face the fact that her children would almost certainly starve to death or, worse, that she herself would die and leave them alone.
Others had already begun to die. The first of the Reed party to go was Eliza’s brother, Baylis, who had been in delicate health even before they left Springfield. Next, and most shocking to Virginia, was Milt Elliott—“our faithful friend, who seemed so like a brother.” With what little strength they had left, she and her mother dragged his body outside, where his corpse now joined a gruesome graveyard of several others lying nearby on the snow. No one had the strength to bury their dead. “Commencing at his feet,” Virginia remembered, “I patted the pure white snow down softly till I reached his face. Poor Milt! It was hard to cover that face from sight forever, for with his death our best friend was gone.”
There was now no food left at all. In desperation, they took down the raw buffalo hides with which their hut had been roofed, but the meagre scrapings they were able to get from them, when boiled, “were simply a pot of glue.” With no covering left on their hut, they took shelter with the Breens. Virginia believed that she was only kept alive by the kindness of Mrs. Breen, who when she saw that Virginia could not eat the hide, slipped her small pieces of meat from her own supply.
Unlike the Reeds, the Breens were Catholic, and prayers were regularly said by them, both night and morning. One night, when she was sure that all was now lost, Virginia went down on her knees and prayed. “All at once I found myself on my knees with my hands clasped, looking up through the darkness, making a vow that if God would send us relief and let me see my father again, I would be a Catholic.”
Shortly after, it must have seemed to her as though her prayers had been answered. On the evening of February 19, shouts were heard through the gathering dusk. “Mr. Breen clambered up the icy steps from our cabin, and soon we heard the blessed words, ‘Relief, thank God, relief.’ ”
The rescue party, which had set out from Sutter’s Mill, was a group of men led by Captain Reason Tucker. All this while James Reed had been at Sutter’s Mill, frantically worried about the safety of his family. When their wagon train had not arrived the previous autumn, and fearing the worst, he had already made one rescue attempt but had been turned back by the adverse weather conditions. His subsequent efforts had been hampered for altogether different reasons. In April 1846, war had finally broken out between Mexico and the US. When James Reed had finally arrived at the mill, Captain Sutter had told him that all the able-bodied men who might have been able to make up a rescue party had “gone down the country with Frémont to fight the Mexicans.” Sutter had advised him to go to Yerba Buena (soon to be renamed San Francisco) and make his case to the naval officer in command there. While he was away, the “Forlorn Hope” party had limped into Sutter’s Mill. Theirs was a shocking tale. As Virginia Reed put it: “Their famished faces told the story.”
In the absence of James Reed, John Sutter himself had arranged for the relief party that had now reached them. The feelings of the survivors can barely be imagined. “But with the joy, sorrow was strangely blended,” Virginia Reed remembered. “There were tears in other eyes than those of children; strong men sat down and wept. For the dead were lying about on the snow, some even unburied, since the living had not had strength to bury their dead.”
A few days later, on February 22, a party of twenty-three of the strongest survivors, including Margaret Reed and her four children, started out—the rest being too weakened from starvation even to attempt such a journey. They had not gone far before it became clear that two of Virginia’s siblings, Patty and Tommy, were simply not strong enough, “and it was not thought safe to allow them to proceed.” There was nothing for it but to send them back to the cabins to await the arrival of their father, with the next relief party. “What language can express our feelings? My mother said that she would go back with her children—that we would all go back together. This the relief party would not permit.” One of the coleaders of the rescue party, Aquilla Glover, gave her his most solemn promise that if her husband (who, they believed, would be following soon after) did not come, he would return himself to save them. “It was a sad parting—and a fearful struggle. The men turned aside, not being able to hide their tears. Patty said, ‘I want to see papa, but I will take good care of Tommy and I do not want you to come back.’ Mr. Glover returned with the children and, providing them with food, left them in the care of Mr. Breen.”
They now fell into a pattern of travel that must have seemed oddly familiar to Virginia. Their rescuers forged the way ahead in their snowshoes, making tracks for the others to follow in. The only one who could not manage this was Virginia’s little five-year-old brother, James. “In order to travel he had to place his knee on the little hill of snow after each step and climb over.” Margaret Reed did her best to coax him along, “telling him that every step he took he was getting nearer papa and nearer something to eat.”
At night they lay down on the icy snow to sleep, “to awake to find our clothing all frozen, even to our shoe-strings.” During the day the sun reflected so dazzlingly against the white snow that it was painful to their eyes, while its heat melted their frozen skirts, “making them cling to our bodies.” In this painfully slow way they stumbled on, in single file, exhausting hour after exhausting hour.
After two days, John Denton, who had been a teamster for the Donner family, gave out. He declared that it was simply impossible to go on and asked that the others continue without him. “A fire was built and he was left lying on a bed of freshly cut pine boughs, peacefully smoking.” Later, when the second relief party finally found him, “poor Denton was past walking.” A little poem was found by his side, “the pencil apparently just dropped from his hand.”
It was not long before disaster struck yet again. In order to lighten their packs, on their journey to the cabins Captain Tucker had ordered that the provisions needed for the return journey should be cached in a certain place by hanging them from a tree. When they returned to the hiding place, they found to their consternation that wild animals had found and either destroyed or eaten everything that was there. “And again, starvation stared us in the face.”
Once again, in a way that must have seemed nothing short of miraculous at the time, help was at hand. Just in time they were found by the second relief party, fourteen men who had finally been mustered by James Reed. Some of the party, recounted Virginia Reed, were traveling ahead of the others, “and when they saw [us] coming, called out: ‘Is Mrs. Reed with you? If she is, tell her Mr. Reed is here.’ We heard the call; mother knelt on the snow, while I tried to run to meet papa.”
There was no time to lose. Learning that his remaining two children, Patty and Tommy, were still at the cabins, James Reed “seemed to fly over the snow,” reaching Truckee Lake in just two days, on March 1. To his inexpressible relief, Patty and Tommy were still alive, although “the famished little children and the death-like look of all made his heart ache.”
Leaving seven days of provisions and three of his men behind to look after those who were too weak even to stand, James Reed now set off with a party of seventeen—“all that were able to travel.” They had not advanced more than a few miles before a storm broke. “One who had never witnessed a blizzard in the Sierra can form no idea of the situation.” Virginia’s father and his men worked frantically throughout the night to build a makeshift shelter for the dying women and children, the shrieking of the storm mixing with the “cries of the half-frozen children, and the lamenting of the mothers.” At times the force of the tempest burst forth with such violence “that he felt alarmed on account of the tall timber surrounding the camp.”
As Captain Tucker had done, James Reed had cached provisions for the return journey along the way. Just before the storm had set in, three men had been hastily sent to retrieve them, but they were too late and were unable to make their way back through the blizzard. “Thus, again, death stared all in the face. . . . At one time the fire was nearly gone; had it been lost, all would have perished.”
The storm lasted for three days and three nights. By this time James Reed was completely snow-blind, and he would have died had it not been for the exertions of two of his men, William McCutchen and Hiram Miller, “who worked over him all night.”
The storm did eventually die out, and once more they were on their way, Hiram Miller carrying little Tommy in his arms. For a while, Patty was able to walk alongside them, but soon it became clear that she was at the end of her strength: “Gradually everything faded from her sight, and she too seemed to be dying.” In Virginia Reed’s account, it was only thanks to the fact that her father now found “some crumbs [of bread] in the thumb of his woolen mitten,” which he was able to give her, having first warmed and moistened them between his own lips, that she was saved. From here, the men took it in turns to carry her to safety.
In total, four separate relief parties made their way over the Sierra Nevada that winter. Of the eighty-one men, women, and children who had become trapped in the mountains, only forty-two survived. Almost all of them had, by the end of their ordeal, been reduced to eating the bodies of their dead in order to survive. Of the thirty-one in the Donner-Reed party who had set out from Springfield the previous April, only eighteen reached their destination, west of the Sierra Nevada. Among them, miraculously, was the entire Reed family.
“Words cannot tell how beautiful the spring appeared to us coming out of the mountains from that long winter,” Virginia Reed wrote in her later account. “I remember one day, when traveling down the Napa Valley, we stopped at noon to have lunch under the shade of an oak. . . . I wandered off by myself to a lovely little knoll and looked up and down the green valley, all dotted with trees. The birds were singing with very joy in the branches over my head, and the blessed sun was smiling down upon all as though in benediction. I drank it in for a moment, and then began kissing my hand and wafting kisses to Heaven in thanksgiving to the Almighty for creating a world so beautiful.”
Virginia Reed wrote her version of events long afterward, but in doing so she drew on a letter that she had written just a few months after her rescue.78 It is an altogether cruder, less sentimental report, but no less vivid, and perhaps closer in spirit to the thirteen-year-old survivor of those desperate months of death and survival in the Sierra Nevada.
“O Mary,” she wrote to a cousin back in Springfield, “I have not wrote you half of the truble we have had but I hav Wrote you anuf to let you know 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 don’t cair for that.” She ended her letter, “We have got through but Dont let this letter dishaten anybody and never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can.”120