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Overview
The tragedy of the Donner party constitutes one of the most amazing stories of the American West. In 1846 eighty-seven people—men, women, and children—set out for California, persuaded to attempt a new overland route. After struggling across the desert, losing many oxen, and nearly dying of thirst, they reached the very summit of the Sierras, only to be trapped by blinding snow and bitter storms. Many perished; some survived by resorting to cannibalism; all were subjected to unbearable suffering. Incorporating the diaries of the survivors and other contemporary documents, George Stewart wrote the definitive history of that ill-fated band of pioneers; an astonishing account of what human beings may endure and achieve in the final press of circumstance.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547525600 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Longest Way Round
Tamsen Donner was gloomy and dispirited as the wagons pulled aside; Mr. Thornton noted it in his diary. The others were in high spirits at the prospect of the new route ahead, but she felt they were relying only on the statements of a man of whom they knew nothing personally and who was probably some selfish adventurer.
The place of Reparation was the Little Sandy. Willows lined the creek where the shallow, clear waters ran over yellowish sand. Lupin bloomed on the camping ground. The grass among the willows was trampled by the hoofs of many oxen. Back from the stream the sagebrush country began, and across sandy rolling table-lands the emigrants could look away toward buttes and snow-capped mountains in the distance.
To the right the wheel tracks, scarcely to be called a road, bore away for Oregon and California over Greenwood's route. To the left was the way to Fort Bridger, leading to the new cut-off south of the Great Salt Lake. With last farewells said, Governor Boggs, Mr. Thornton, and the greater number of the emigrants turned their wagons off to the right, but Mr. Reed, "Uncle George" Donner and his brother Jake, the "Dutchmen," and a few others kept to the left. The day was July 20, 1846.
In the smaller company were twenty wagons, each lurching ahead as its oxen shouldered their heavy way along. To this point their owners had merely formed part of the great emigration of that year, and as companies with confusing rapidity had formed, and broken, and reformed under different leaders, the emigrants thus finally grouped together had now traveled in company, now apart. Before the time of the separation at the branching of the roads, the Donner Party cannot be said to have existed.
That it ever existed at all, was the result of one man's scheming. On July 17, while the emigrants had been toiling up to the Continental Divide at South Pass, a horseman had come riding to meet them, and had handed round an open letter. With an almost imperial sweep it was addressed "At the Headwaters of the Sweetwater: To all California Emigrants now on the Road." It told of war between the United States and Mexico (although the emigrants knew of that already), and urged that all those making for California should concentrate into large parties against danger of Mexican attack. It gave information also of a new and better route which the writer had recently explored, and urged the companies to take this road to the south of the Great Salt Lake; he himself would wait at Fort Bridger to guide them through. It was signed Lansford W. Hastings.
The letter brought a new subject for talk around the campfires on the three evenings which followed. The very name of Hastings carried much weight, for every one knew of his book describing Oregon and California and the routes thither. It had done much toward inspiring the heavy emigration of this season. And here was the author himself, whose words must be true because they were in print, come to meet the trains and like another Moses guide them through the wilderness. Some of the emigrants had copies of Hastings's book with them, and from it they could see to their greater assurance that this idea of a new and better route was not a sudden notion with the author. In clear black and white on page one-thirty-seven they could read:
The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of St. Francisco.
Even before receiving the letter, the emigrants had happened to meet near Fort Laramie a few men just come from California, and from them had learned something of Hastings and his latest doings. To explore the way, it appeared, he had left Sutter's Fort in the Sacramento Valley late in April, and risked his life in crossing the still unmelted snows of the Sierra Nevada. Such energy and devotion for the welfare of others (for was he not bringing them warning of the war?) spoke well for the man. Some of these returning Californians, one old trapper especially, gave warnings against the new route — but was not some one like Hastings, who had written a book, rather to be trusted than these uneducated frontiersmen?
As they learned more of Hastings, the emigrants must have been impressed. He was young for a leader, only in his middle twenties. But there was a certain dash about him, and his self-confidence was infectious. Luck seemed to be with him. In '42 he had taken a train safe to Oregon through hair-breadth adventures with the Sioux. He had returned east by way of California and Mexico, and then in '45, just the last winter, had crossed the Sierra in the middle of December, got through to Sutter's on Christmas Day just ahead of the first big snowstorm which would have frozen him stiff as a poker.
And here he was again, turned up chipper as a jay-bird, after crossing a thousand miles of mountains and deserts full of Injuns. It's a good thing to take your chances along with some one who's lucky. Gamblers know that, and if you weren't something of a gambler, you shouldn't be crossing the plains — not in '46. People who weren't for taking chances shouldn't head their oxen west from Missouri.
Nevertheless, a certain shrewdness kept most of them from following Hastings. Didn't he most likely have an ax of his own somewhere to grind? They had taken enough chances to set out on this danged road at all. The way by Fort Hall might be long, but "the longest way round is the shortest way home," as they said back in the states.
At Fort Bridger, a hundred miles away, Hastings was waiting. Some emigrants from preceding parties had already gone to join him. Their wheel-tracks ran ahead, plain-marked in the granite sand, as the Donners and their friends swung off to the southwest.
Along the trail for Fort Bridger went the twenty wagons, high-wheeled and canvas-covered, their long line bobbing and dipping over the hummocks. For some trapper or wandering Indian looking under his hand from a distant mountainside, it was only another emigrant train going west. Weeks of prairie sun and rain and sun again had bleached the wagon-tops to a dead bone-white that shone out for miles over the dull sagebrush plain. Beside each wagon walked the driver calling his monotonous "Gee!", "Haw!", and "Whoa!", cracking and plying the long-lashed ox-whip over his two or three yoke. Driving oxen was man's work. The women sat in the front seats of the wagons knitting. Children peeped out from front and rear, their heads often bleached almost as white as the wagon-canvases. The family dogs trotted alongside. The few men like Reed and Stanton who were lucky enough not to be ox-drivers explored ahead on horseback, or cantered across the plain with Virginia Reed on Billy, her pony, galloping beside. At the tail of the wagons dust rose from the herd of loose cattle — milch cows, spare oxen, and saddle horses, urged along by some of the boys and an extra man or two.
The only mark to distinguish this train from twenty others was one great wagon looming out over all the rest, rolling along behind four yoke of oxen. Faithful Milt Elliott, Reed's most trusted driver, guided them. The wagon itself was gigantic. Reed had had it built for the special comfort of his family, particularly for his ailing wife and her mother, Mrs. Keyes. The old lady, however, yielding apparently to age rather than to the exhaustions of the journey, had died before they were well out on the plains. The wagon seemed almost a memorial to her. Instead of the usual entrances at front and rear it had easy steps at the side, which led into a veritable little room amidships. Here were comfortable spring seats such as the best stage-coaches used, upon which the women from other wagons liked to sit cozily chatting as the wagon moved along. For wanning the compartment on cold mornings an actual sheet-iron stove had been set up, its pipe carefully conveyed through the canvas top. The wagon might almost be called two-storied, for a second floor had been laid across it. On this level were the beds, while beneath, high enough for a child to crawl about in, were compartments for storing the food and the canvas bags full of clothing. This was the Reeds' home on wheels, and here Eliza Williams, the hired girl, cooked, washed, and even churned butter as the wheels rolled westward.
Like humanity which is borne always one way in time, so the wagons moved on unreversing into the west, and like humanity which lives unescapably in the vivid present between the half-remembered past and the unknown future, so the emigrants moved overland between the horizon which shut down behind and the horizon which lifted up ahead, half forgetting the traveled road and ignorant of what landscape lay ahead beyond the next rise. As in the greater world, too, noble men and women housed there along with petty, the courteous with the boorish, and the courageous with the cowardly. Yet for the moment in a time of little stress those differences could pass unnoticed. Perhaps no one considered, any more than a man thinks of such matters in any gathering, that in that company were those who might sacrifice themselves along with those who might sacrifice others; those whose love would make of death a little thing, along with those whose hate would be as the venom of snakes. In that voluntarily joined company walked in all ignorance one who was to share the last ounces of food with another, and a third who was to refuse water to the babies of the first. There the slayer walked beside him who was to be the slain, and neither thought of blood. Beneath those wagon-tops lived unrealized the potentiality of heroism to the point of the quixotic, and the potentiality of depravities and degradations of which the emigrants at that moment could not have guessed or have given the name. A microcosm of humanity, to be tested with a severity to which few groups of human beings in recorded history have been subjected, destined to reveal the extremes of which the human body and mind are capable — and yet to the eye of the trapper or wandering Indian merely one more emigrant train going west.
CHAPTER 2
Muster-Roll
On the day after leaving the Little Sandy the company met to elect its captain. The task was most likely an easy one, for few of the party could meet the qualifications which the emigrants expected of a leader. The western American in spite of his intense democracy had a profound respect for property, so that the captain of a wagon-train was generally a man of substance. He was also expected to have reached an age which commanded respect, to be an American, and to be able-bodied. Of the emigrants in this particular party, two could meet these requirements.
One of them was George Donner, an elderly, prosperous farmer from the vicinity of Springfield, Illinois. He was of a gentle, charitable spirit; neighbors back home said that it appeared to be a positive pleasure for him to do a kind act. Born of German parentage in North Carolina, he had like so many of his generation come westward by stages — Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He had even spent a year in Texas. Migration by ox-team was nothing new to him, but always he had been behind the first advance of frontiersmen. In spite of his disposition toward wandering, he had attained much property so that he left the children of his first marriage, now grown to maturity, safely in possession of good farms in Illinois. In his sixty-second year and so known in familiar rural fashion as "Uncle George," he was now traveling west in ample manner. Three wagons rolled behind their oxen carrying his goods and the five children of his second and third marriages, all daughters, and the youngest only three years old.
Shepherding this brood was his third wife, Tamsen. Massachusetts-born, forty-five years old, she had gone west and had been a schoolmistress and already once a wife before marrying George Donner. In size she was a mere whiffet: barely five feet she stood, and her weight was less than a hundred pounds. Nevertheless she had sinewy physical stamina. As became her New England birth, she cherished a high sense of duty, but she had also, like her husband, a kind heart. Her book-learning and keen mind gained her the respect of the less tutored emigrants. She it was who had shown her misgivings over leaving the established road and following the promises of Hastings.
George Donner with his wife and his children, his hired servants and his cattle — there is about him something of the gray-bearded Biblical patriarch. Like Job in his prosperity God had blessed him. He did not, to be sure, count his wealth in camels and she-asses, but he had taken the road with twelve yoke of oxen and five saddle horses, along with milch cows and beef cattle and a watchdog. His three wagons overflowed like horns of plenty. They carried food, enough and much more than enough to take his household to California, and besides that, they were crammed with all sorts of gew-gaws to be given as presents to the Indians, and with bees, silks, and rich stuffs to be traded with the Mexicans for California lands. Tamsen had laid in books, school supplies, even water-colors and oils, everything necessary for the founding of a young-ladies' seminary for her daughters on the shores of the Pacific. And somewhere stowed carefully away in one of those wagons was an innocent-looking quilt into which had been neatly sewed bills to the amount, it has been reported, of ten thousand dollars.
But why, one may well ask, why with old age at hand, father of fifteen children, with grandchildren springing up around him, with wealth and position established — why did George Donner suddenly strike out upon a toilsome removal of himself and his family to California? He had, it seems, been reading some of the recently published accounts of the Pacific Coast, such as Senator Benton's speeches, Fremont's reports, and Hastings's guide. And what man, shivering in the November winds of Illinois, could resist those roseate descriptions of a happier land far away? — "Even in the months of December and January, vegetation is in full bloom, and all nature wears a most cheering, and enlivening aspect. It may be truly said that 'December is as pleasant as May.'" The road to this paradise, moreover, was represented as beset with few difficulties and only a spice of danger. It would be, they thought, "a pleasure trip." So we may consider George Donner merely one of the first of those many thousands of middle-western farmers who have felt the lure of balmy Pacific breezes and set out to "move" to California.
Against the patriarchal and gentle Donner, the only natural rival for the captaincy was his friend and associate, but a very different man, James Frazier Reed. Any contest between them must have been of a friendly nature, for the two had undertaken the trip in common and had traveled together all the way from Springfield. Reed was a younger man, only forty-six, and more practical reasons had swayed him in the decision to emigrate. For by his move to California he might well hope to escape the hard times afflicting the Mississippi Valley in the forties and to prosper even more than he had in Illinois. He hoped also that the already famous climate might benefit his invalid wife.
There was a touch of the aristocrat about Reed — and properly, for he was sprung from the line of an exiled Polish noble. Reedowsky the name is said to have been originally. The fierce and haughty Polish nature had not been greatly subdued by having its blood mingled with that of the stiffnecked and restless Scotch-Irish. By virtue of both lines of descent Reed was a man for quick decisions and decisive action. At Fort Laramie when the old trapper had talked about the Fort Hall road, Reed had spoken up: "There is a nearer way!" It was like him — to choose the nearer way. It was like him also to own the best and fastest horse in all the company, to carry with him the full regalia of a Master Mason, and to hold in reserve for its impression upon Mexican officials a certificate of his character signed by the governor and duly stamped with the eagle, shield, and sun of the Great Seal of Illinois.
Reed had been born in the north of Ireland, but had been in the United States since boyhood, and had spent most of his active life in Illinois. He had served in the Black Hawk campaign in the same company with lanky Abe Lincoln, also from Sangamon County. In Illinois Reed had prospered as a merchant, railroad contractor, and manufacturer of furniture, but lately had suffered some reverses in business.
Nevertheless he was even more wealthy than Donner, or at least made more display of wealth. On the Fourth of July, celebrated in the midst of the Rocky Mountains, he and his friends had toasted the occasion with wine and fine old brandy carried in his stores for a thousand miles. A hired man helped with the rough work of his camp, and hired drivers hired man helped with the rough work of his camp, and hired drivers cracked their whips over the oxen of his three wagons. His wife had Eliza Williams to cook and aid with the three smaller children. His thirteen-year-old stepdaughter Virginia had her own pony for gallops across the prairie. He himself dashed back and forth upon his prized gray racing mare, called in fine defiance of Latin gender, Glaucus.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ordeal by Hunger"
by .
Copyright © 1988 Theodosia B. Stewart.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface to the 1960 Edition,
Preface to the First Edition,
Illustrations,
Maps,
PART I,
Foreword,
The Longest Way Round,
Muster-Roll,
The Trap Clicks Behind,
The Wahsatch,
The Dry Drive,
The Long Pull,
Knife-Play by the River,
The Last Desert,
— And Closes in Front,
PART II,
Foreword,
In California,
Two Fathers,
Beyond the Wall,
Death Bids God-Speed,
The Snow-Shoers,
The Hunting of the Deer,
The Will to Live,
California Responds,
Yule-Tide by the Lake,
"Provisions Scarce",
The Seven Against Death,
"Old Dan Tucker's Come to Town",
The Children Walk,
Reed Tries Again,
Photos,
Reed Visits The Donners,
At the Head of the Yuba,
Cady and Stone,
Eddy and Foster,
Before the Last Plunge,
Interlude,
Fallon Le Gros,
PART III,
Foreword,
Causes,
Afterwards,
The Characters,
"Keseberg vs. Coffymere",
Taboo,
SUPPLEMENT — 1960,
Foreword,
Diary of Patrick Breen,
Diary of James F. Reed,
Letter of Virginia Reed,
Roster of the Donner Party,
Condensed Itinerary of the Donner Party,
Bibliography,
Notes and References,
Index,
About the Author,
What People are Saying About This
Ordeal by Hunger is compulsive reading—a wonderful account, both scholarly and gripping, of a horrifying episode in the history of the west.
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