The Lake
PATRICK BREEN: ”Monday, December the 21st. Milt got back last night from the Donner’s camp. Sad news. Jacob Donner, Sam Shoemaker, Joseph Rhinehart and James Smith are dead. The rest of them in a low situation. Snowed all night.
Thursday, December 31st. Last of the year. May we, with God’s help, spend the coming year better than the past, which we propose to do if almighty God will deliver us from our present dreadful situation. It is our prayer, if the will of God sees it fitting for us. Amen. Freezing hard every night. Looks like another storm. Snow storms are dreadful to us.”
NARRATOR: On January 10th, 1847, the United States Marines took Los Angeles from the Mexicans. In all but name, California now belonged to the United States. With the fighting over, James Reed rushed to San Francisco to raise money and men for the relief of his family and friends.
At sunset on January 17th in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Harriet Ritchie heard a knock on the door of her family’s cabin. In the doorway stood a bleeding skeleton of a man. In a faint voice he asked if he could have some bread. Harriet burst into tears and helped William Eddy into bed. The six other survivors of the ”forlorn hope” lay a short way up the trail. Only two of the ten men had made it through. All five women had survived.
When he was well enough to speak, William Eddy told a hellish story. He spoke of the camp of death and of wandering 18 days more, lost in the deep mountain snows; of Sarah Fos*censored*, who had to watch her husband die, then see his heart roasting on a stick; of the bloody footprints that led them to where the Indians Lewis and Salvadore, who had fled as far as they could, were lying side by side in the snow, too weak to move; how William Foster, insane, shot each of the men through the head and how the starving survivors used the murdered men for food. The alarm went out.
DANIEL RHOADS: ”February 3rd. They gave the alarm that the people would all die without assistance. It was two weeks before any person would consent to go. Finally, we concluded we would go or die trying, for not to make any attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us and California as long as time lasted.”
NARRATOR: On February 5th the first small relief party left Johnson’s ranch and struggled slowly up into the snowy mountains. A second party led by James Reed was two days behind them.
PATRICK BREEN: ”Friday, February the 5th. Peggy very uneasy for fear we shall all perish with hunger. We have but a little meat left and only part of three hides. Mrs. Reed has nothing left but one hide and it is on Graves’s shanty. Eddy’s child, Margaret, died last night.
Monday, the 8th. Spitzer died last night about 3:00 o’clock. We will bury him in the snow. Mrs. Eddy died on the night of the 7th.
Wednesday, the 10th. Milt Elliot died last night at Murphy’s shanty. Mrs. Reed went there this morning to see after his effects.”
VIRGINIA REED: ”Everyone had gone to bed, but I could not sleep. Looking up through the darkness with my hands clasped, I made a vow that if God would send us relief and let me see my father again, I would be a Catholic.”
NARRATOR: One afternoon Peggy Breen motioned Margaret Reed outside to tell her that her daughter, Virginia, was dying. They were all dying.
On February 19th, 1847, seven freezing, exhausted men of the first relief party struggled over the summit and came within sight of the lake.
DANIEL RHOADS: ”At sunset we crossed Truckee Lake on the ice and came to the spot where we had been told we should find the emigrants. We looked all around, but no living thing except ourselves was in sight. We raised a loud hello. And then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her, several others made their appearance, in like manner coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine and I never can forget the horrible, ghastly sight they presented. The first woman spoke in a hollow voice, very much agitated, and said, ‘Are you men from California or do you come from heaven?’ ”
NARRATOR: The rescuers were shocked by what they found. Twelve emigrants had died and bodies lay everywhere on top of the snow, covered with quilts. Forty-eight still clung to life, but some had gone mad and others were too far gone to be revived. Somehow, Margaret Reed had managed to keep all her children alive. So had Peggy Breen and Tamsen Donner. So far, none of the survivors at the lake had been forced to eat human flesh.
There was no time to waste. The rescuers could take only 24 of the starving emigrants out with them. The Breens agreed to wait for the next relief party. So did the Donners. George was too sick to move and Tamsen would not leave his side. On February 22nd, the first relief party started back. There was almost no food to spare for the 31 desperate people left behind.
PATRICK BREEN: ”Friday, February the 26th. Hungry times in camp. Mrs. Murphy said she thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t think she has done so yet. It is distressing.”
NARRATOR: The ordeal of the Donner Party was far from over. For two more months four relief parties battled the terrible snow and cold of the Sierra Nevada to try to save the starving emigrants. The scenes enacted in the mountains during those two months would never be forgotten. When the first relief party left the lake, eight-year-old Patty Reed volunteered to stay behind to care for her three-year-old brother Thomas, who was too small to walk through the huge drifts. ”Well, Ma,” she told her anguished mother, ”if you never see me again, do the best that you can.”
VIRGINIA REED: ”We went over a great, high mountain, as steep as stair steps, in snow up to our knees. Little James walked the whole way over in snow up to his waist. He said every step he took he was getting nigher Pa and something to eat.”
NARRATOR: Two children had died and more were failing fast when the first relief party caught sight of something moving towards them through the trees. It was the second relief party. James Reed was leading it.
JAMES REED: ”Here I met my own wife and two of my little children. Two still in the mountains. I cannot describe the death-like look of them. ‘Bread, bread, bread’ was the begging of every child and grown person.”
NARRATOR: When she heard her husband’s voice, Margaret Reed stumbled in the snow and almost fainted. They had been separated for five months. Reed was certain his family had perished.
When James Reed and the second relief party reached the lake, Patty and Thomas were still alive. The rest of the camp was a shambles. Ten more emigrants had died and the survivors had begun to eat the dead.
JAMES REED: ”Among the cabins lay the fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of the famine. There lay the limbs, the skulls and the hair of the poor beings who had died from want and whose flesh preserved the lives of their surviving comrades who, shivering beneath their filthy rags and surrounded by the remains of their unholy feast, looked more like demons than human beings. They had fallen from their high estate, though compelled by the fell hand of dire necessity.”
NARRATOR: The fiercest storm of the winter broke over the second relief party as they struggled to cross the mountains. For two days the emigrants and rescuers huddled around a fire that sank slowly into the snow. It was there that the third relief party found them 10 days later.
RELIEF PARTY MEMBER: ”The picture of distress was shocking indeed. They had consumed two children of Jacob Donner. Mrs. Graves’s body was lying there with almost all the flesh cut away from her arms and limbs. Her breasts were cut off, her heart and liver taken out. Her little child, about 13 months old, sat at her side, one arm upon the body of its mangled mother, sobbing bitterly, crying, ‘Ma! Ma! Ma!’ ”
NARRATOR: When the third relief party reached the lake, only seven emigrants remained alive. Tamsen Donner was among them, still remarkably strong for all she’d been through. George, who was dying, begged her to leave. Tamsen refused. She would not let her husband die alone.
The fourth relief party was delayed one full month by the ninth and final blizzard of what was the worst winter ever recorded in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They found Lewis Keseberg in his cabin, delirious, surrounded by the half-eaten dead. No one else was alive. Tamsen Donner’s body was never found. Keseberg confessed to eating her remains.
On April 21st, the last relief party left the lake. On April 25th, the reached Bear Valley. All of the survivors of the Donner Party had now come out of the mountains. It had been one year almost to the day since the Donners and the Reeds had left their homes in Springfield, Illinois.
JOHN BREEN: ”It was long after dark when we got to Johnson’s ranch, so the first time I saw it was early in the morning. The weather was fine. The ground was covered with green grass. The birds were singing from the tops of the trees and the journey was over. I could scarcely believe that I was alive. The scene that I saw that morning seems to be photographed on my mind. Most of the incidents are gone from memory, but I can always see the camp near Johnson’s ranch.”
VIRGINIA REED: ”California, May 16th, 1847. My dear cousin: I take this opportunity to write to you to let you know that we are all well at present. I am going to write to you about our troubles in getting to California. We had good luck till we come to Big Sandy. We had to stay in the California mountains all winter without Pa. We had not the first thing to eat.”
NARRATOR: Of the 87 men, women and children in the Donner Party, 46 survived, 41 died: 5 women, 14 children and 22 men, counting John Sutter’s Indians, Lewis and Salvadore, who had risked their lives to save the emigrants. Two thirds of the women and children made it through. Two thirds of the men perished. Of all the families, the Donners suffered the most. All four adults and four of the children died. All of the Reeds survived. So did all of the Breens.
The story of the Donner disaster quickly spread across the country. Newspapers printed every word of all the letters and diaries, along with wild tales of men and women who had gotten to enjoy eating human flesh. Emigration to California fell off sharply and Hastings’s cutoff was all but abandoned.
Then, in January, 1848, gold was discovered in John Sutter’s creek. By late 1849 more than 100,000 people had rushed to California to dig and sift near the streams and canyons where the Donner Party had suffered so much. In 1850 California entered the union as the 31st state. Year by year, traffic over what was now called Donner Pass increased. The lake became a tourist attraction and a favorite vacation spot year-round. The terrible ordeals of the Donner Party passed into history and legend. Relics from the camps, bits of china, buttons and nails, wood shavings from the cabins became popular souvenirs. Almost a century later, trees the emigrants had shorn off at snow level still stood as a vivid reminder of the fierce winter of 1846.
Mr. STEGNER: Oh, it’s got everything. It’s a Greek tragedy. It’s a great test of human character. Some people came through it heroically and some of the people in that party were far from heroes and they got worse as the conditions got worse, so that it was as if the sheep and the goats, the blessed and the unblessed, sorted themselves out against a background of terrible hardship and tragedy.
NARRATOR: Most of the men, women and children of the Donner Party were rapidly absorbed into the population of California. Mary Graves, survivor of the ”forlorn hope,” was married in May, before the snows had even melted. The Breens settled in San Juan Bautista, where Patrick became a prominent rancher. Alone among the survivors, Lewis Keseberg spoke openly of eating human flesh and was reviled as a man-eater and ghoul. During the Gold Rush, he made his fortune and in 1851 opened a restaurant in Sacramento. George and Tamsen Donner’s orphaned children were soon split up. Eliza and Georgia were adopted by a Swiss couple who lived near Sutter’s Fort.
VIRGINIA REED: ”My dear cousin: We are all very well pleased with California. It is a beautiful country. It ought to be a beautiful country to pay us for our trouble getting there. Tell Henrietta if she wants to get married to come to California. She can get a Spaniard anytime.”
NARRATOR: To her father’s dismay, Virginia Reed kept the vow she’d made in the cabin by the lake and converted to Catholicism. When eight-year-old Patty Reed arrived in California, she pulled from her ragged dress a little bundle. In it was a lock of her grandmother’s hair and a tiny doll she had carried with her all the way from Springfield. She died in 1931 at the age of 93. James Reed never spoke in public of the killing of John Snyder. He settled his family in San Jose, made money in real estate and gold and became one of the town’s leading citizens. Margaret Reed’s sick headaches disappeared and never returned.
Lansford Hastings moved to San Francisco and went back into law, but was too restless to make a go of it. During the Civil War he proposed leading an army west to seize Arizona for the Confederacy. After the war he published The Emigrants’ Guide to Brazil and died in 1870 trying to establish a colony of ex-Confederates in South America.
VIRGINIA REED: ”Oh, Mary. I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is. But thank God, we are the only family that did not eat human flesh. We have left everything, but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives. Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”
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