Reed argued that was crazy, but to no avail, and he started down the mountain. Within two days Elizabeth Graves and her son Franklin, age five, were dead. The fire pit had sunk deeper in the snow, out of sight, but the remaining sufferers huddled to it, praying and crying; they had been without food going on four days. In Donner lore, this became known as Starved Camp.
On March 11, long after it was to have gotten under way, the seven-man third party of relief left the base of the mountain for what by then everyone knew was a ghastly situation. Led by a rancher, big John Starks, the party included William Eddy of the Forlorn Hope and William Foster, who had murdered the Indians, each desperately anticipating that he would find his remaining son alive atop the mountain. Not far above the snow line they discovered beside the ashes of a fire the body of John Denton, an Englishman who was left behind by the first relief party after he could not go on. In his hands Eddy found a pencil and a piece of paper, on which in his final hours in the snow he’d been writing down pastoral poems of his native soil.
Next afternoon they came upon the spot where Reed had told them he’d left Breen and the others. “Suddenly they stood upon the brink of a great cup, twenty-five feet deep, melted into the snow. At the bottom a fire burned on a piece of bare ground about the size of an ordinary room, and about it was a jumble of blankets and children and hideous things.” In the center were Patrick and Peggy Breen, alive, but lost in some kind of macabre reverie. “The body of Mrs. Graves lay there with the flesh nearly all stripped from arms and legs. Her breasts were cut off and her heart and liver taken out, and all of these were boiling together in a pot upon the fire. Her year-old baby sat wailing, with one arm resting upon the mangled body of its mother. Little remained to be seen of the corpses of two children.” Such was the description given by Donner chronicler George Stewart and cannot be improved upon. The rescuers fished the sufferers out of their pit of death, fed them, and sent them down the mountain in the care of Starks and two other men, while Eddy, Foster, and two others continued up to the camps at the summit.
Traveling light, they crossed the pass next morning and reached the camps by midday. They saw what the earlier parties had seen, only worse. After the Breens left, Lavinia Murphy, a fifty-year-old grandmother, had been looking after four-year-old Georgie Foster and three-year-old James Eddy, but both boys were now dead. And gone.
The story was horrendous and confused, for Lavinia was half out of her mind from starvation. But as they pieced it together the wretched German Keseberg had taken young Georgie to bed with him one night and in the morning he was dead. An account later given by the young Donner girls tells that Keseberg “hung the body up in the cabin,” then ate it, and did likewise to young James Eddy.
Keseberg, whose children had starved but whose wife had gone out with the first relief, was probably the most execrable participant in the entire Donner affair. It will be recalled that he had endangered the entire wagon train by robbing an Indian grave for a buffalo robe, abandoned old Hardcoop to his fate along the trail, and finally offered the tongue of his wagon to hang James Reed. Of course Keseberg denied wrongdoing with the children, but William Eddy, for one, did not believe him and later told an interviewer he would have killed him on the spot if he had not been such a pathetic creature—filthy, emaciated, and cringing.
Again there was need for more triage, and Eddy knew he had to move fast. The problem with all the parties of relief was that because the pass was clogged with snow they could not bring up wagons, or even pack animals with food, but only the small amounts they could carry on their backs. Salvation, then, lay in moving the sufferers off the mountain. So Eddy wanted to start down that very afternoon, before another storm might assail them.
Six survivors left with the third relief: children aged from four to sixteen and one adult member of the second relief who had stayed behind. The younger children had to be carried on the backs of the rescuers. They got beyond the pass that same day. Left behind were Tamsen Donner, who again would not leave her dying husband; her son George, four, who was too sick to move; Lavinia Murphy, who took care of the children and was blind and too sick; and Keseberg, who said he was also too ill to go.
By March 18 all relief parties had returned to safety and the survivors were being cared for in ranches all over the Sacramento River valley. Two more youngsters would die of complications as a result of their ordeal. Young Virginia Reed, who had secretly taken the gun to her father when he was banished, finally got to see the Eden that California was supposed to represent. She wrote to a cousin back east, “California is a beautiful country. We have left everything but I don’t care for that—we got through.”
* It has been suggested this was because they had a higher metabolism and required more nourishment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Political Treachery,
Military Insubordination,
Discovery of Zion, and the
Salvation of Children
After Colonel Doniphan and his Mounted Missouri Volunteers defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of the Sacramento they marched triumphantly twenty miles south into the state capital of Chihuahua City. There they remained for two months—while the Donner party underwent its ordeal in the California mountains—in splendid debauchery: gambling, wenching, bathing in the public water fountain, and carving their names into trees in the town plaza. They had no money to finance most of these activities because they had not received a red cent of government pay since leaving Fort Leavenworth, but luckily there was the captured Mexican army money chest from the Sacramento battle, which was barely enough to see them through. In addition to the requisite chicken fights, card games, and fandangos, the Missourians also drank excessively, fought among themselves, attacked citizens, boasted, ravished females, and abused property. Doniphan lamented that his men were “wholly unfit to garrison a town or city.”
But as all good things must end, just when the fragrance of Chihuahuan jacaranda began to waft on April breezes, Doniphan received orders to join General Wool at Saltillo, a monthlong, 600-mile march, complete with jornadas, exhausting mountains, and other unpleasant features. Even so, the men were glad to go and “everyone, to express his joy, got drunk,” for time was drawing near to the expiration of their one-year enlistment. During their term of service, the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers had achieved great distinction in the annals of Missouri and the U.S. Army.
When they reached Saltillo they would have marched more than 3,500 miles from Fort Leavenworth—longer even than Kearny—and heaven only knew how many more by the time they got home. In the vernacular of the day they had “seen the elephant”: had come down the Santa Fe Trail and chased the Mexican army out of Santa Fe; continued on into the frozen mountain wastes of New Mexico to (temporarily, as it turned out) subdue several tribes of wild and murderous Indians. They marched down El Camino Real, scuffled across desolate jornadas, won resounding victories at the Battles of the Brazito and the Sacramento, and captured the huge Mexican state of Chihuahua. Not bad work for a rabble of Missouri farm boys who, just a year ago, were off to see the world.
Even so the army, and the war, were not quite finished with the First Missouri; it had one final—and completely noble—task to attend to, which involved great danger, but the Missourians did not shirk and neither did they quail.
Ahead of Doniphan’s main column, the irrepressible Captain Reid and nineteen of his cavalry troopers were scouting and patrolling near the city of Parras when they came upon a distressing scene. A band of sixty-five Comanches* had descended upon the town from the mountains, murdered eight or ten citizens, robbed their houses, and made off with two hundred horses and three hundred mules. They also kidnapped nineteen girls and boys of the town who, considering standard Comanche practices at the time, would be either ransomed, enslaved, or tortured to death.
As in New Mexico, Indian depredations in northern Mexico had reached a crisis level. Captain Hughes summed it up in his diary. “Since 1835† the India
ns have encroached on the frontiers of Mexico and laid waste many flourishing settlements, waging a predatory warfare and leading women and children into captivity. Cavalry scouts were told that the residents of Parras were in much distress … and besought Capt. Reid to interfere in their behalf.”
Even though Mexico was at war with the United States, said the town leaders, “it did not become the magnanimity of the American soldiers to see them robbed and murdered by a lawless band of savages.” Reid agreed with the logic in this plea and set out tracking the band toward the mountains. They came upon a hacienda where fourteen other Doniphan troopers under Lieutenant George P. Gordon were drawing water for the army and Reid enlisted them in the posse.
Then a cloud of dust on the horizon revealed a party of Indians and a large herd. Servants at the hacienda said this was the same band that had attacked Parras and that the kidnapped children were with them. They said the Indians intended to water their stock there. Reid, now in command of thirty-five men, quickly set up an ambush, sending out the owner and several of his servants “to decoy the Indians into the hacienda. The feint succeeded. When the Indians came within half a mile, the order was given to charge upon them, which was gallantly and promptly done.”
A desperate battle ensued, and a number of Indians were killed during the initial onslaught. The others dismounted and defended themselves from behind rocks using steel-tipped arrows, two of which painfully wounded Captain Reid, who, nevertheless, led three charges against the horse thieves. The fighting went on for more than two hours, with no sign of the Indians giving up, when the stalemate was broken by the fortuitous arrival of the New Mexico trader, Manuel X. Harmony, a U.S. naturalized Spaniard, and twenty-five of Doniphan’s troopers who had been guarding his caravan. They pitched into the fight and the Indians fled, leaving behind seventeen dead—including their chief—many more wounded, a pile of stolen housewares, most of the horses and mules, and most importantly the kidnapped children, unharmed. For this Reid received a certificate of appreciation from the alcalde of Parras, in the name of the people. No Americans were killed.
One of those along for the adventure with trader Harmony was a German botanist, Dr. Frederick A. Wislizenus, who had the misfortune to be traveling in Mexico at the outbreak of war and had been held prisoner in Chihuahua until Doniphan came along. He noted that after the fight the Mexican servants had dragged the dead Indians into a pile and left them to rot in the sun. Never one to waste a scientific opportunity, Wislizenus “hacked off the head [of the chief] and displayed it on the wagon pole during the day and boiled it each evening to take the flesh off,” with the intention of presenting it eventually “to that distinguished craniologist, Professor Samuel G. Morton of Philadelphia.”‡ Even Doniphan’s men gave Wislizenus a wide berth.
When they reached Saltillo the Missourians learned that John Wool and Zachary Taylor had won a stunning victory over Santa Anna and a force three times their size at the Battle of Buena Vista. Not only that, but Winfield Scott and a large American army—including nine thousand troops taken from Taylor’s force—had made an amphibious landing at Veracruz, captured the city by siege, then defeated Santa Anna’s army again at Cerro Gordo, well down the road to Mexico City itself. Taylor by law could have kept Doniphan’s regiment in Mexico, but instead he sent them home with commendations for a job well done—even gave the sun-bronzed tatterdemalions a full military parade in review before they departed for the Gulf Coast to board steamships for New Orleans and points north.
Susan Magoffin and most of the Santa Fe traders had been following along with Doniphan’s force for protection from the Indians and Mexican banditti. They had sold most of their wares between Santa Fe, El Paso, and Chihuahua and would dispose of the rest at Monterrey and along the Rio Grande. For her part Susan, a devout Protestant, began attending Catholic Mass in El Paso, for want of any other organized religious options, and continued the practice in Chihuahua, secretly worrying whether she had become an idolatress. She didn’t know, as yet, that so many of the young officers of Kearny’s First Dragoons, the ones who gaily courted her friendship during the Santa Fe days and on the long ride down the trail, now lay dead and buried in the valley of the San Pasqual.
When Doniphan’s men took Chihuahua Susan and her husband, Samuel, were elated to learn that brother James had been removed south to Durango—still a prisoner but not executed as they’d feared. What they could not know then was that James was bribing his way out of his predicament and it would ultimately cost him “3,392 bottles of good champagne,” which so captivated his jailer that he handed over to Magoffin the incriminating letter from Kearny that fingered him as a spy. “If it is so unimportant,” the Mexican suggested, “then why don’t you burn it in the fire,” which is what Magoffin promptly did. The evidence thus consumed, he returned to the States to present the U.S. government with a bill for $50,000. Upon examination, it was discovered that Magoffin had billed the U.S. government for 3,392 bottles of champagne wine, and even Secretary of War Marcy was taken aback, according to the account of Colonel Cooke, who had vouched for Magoffin.
“Mr. Magoffin,” Secretary Marcy is reported to have said, “ten thousand dollars is a very large sum for wine.”
“Yes,” responded Magoffin, with gravity. “But Mr. Secretary, champagne at $37.50 a basket counts up pretty fast. Try it yourself sometime.”
When last we left Colonel Cooke and his Mormon Battalion they were slouching out of the Sonoran desert toward God knew where, building a wagon road, of sorts, as they went. God knew where was at last revealed to be the intersection with General Kearny’s route near the cheerful Pima Indian villages, which they struck December 21, just as Kearny and Stockton were preparing to march out of San Diego to put down the Mexican uprising. All along, Cooke had been following a southern but parallel route to Kearny, but now he rose up out of the desert to what was the straightest path to southern California.
The Pima were good enough sorts to bring Cooke three-week-old letters left for him by Kearny and also Major Swords, Kearny’s quartermaster, who informed Cooke they had left eleven broken-down mules for him in care of the Indians. Lo and behold the Indians also brought the mules, now recuperated, minus a few that had died. The colonel appraised the Pima in his journal thusly, and their neighbors the Maricopa too: “They had the simplicity of nature, and none of the affected reserve and dignity characteristic of other Indians, before whites. At the sound of a trumpet, playing of a violin, the killing of a beef, they rush to see and hear, with delight or astonishment strongly exhibited.”
Cooke followed Kearny’s trail for the next month, deviating from time to time to break a new road—sustenance was a constant worry since there was little game, few plants, and sparse watering holes—before landing at Warner’s Ranch and learning of the distressing events in California and the deaths of so many friends. Cooke hurried on best he could, but he was burdened by the wagons and still charged with making a road. On January 21 his trusty guide Charbonneau returned from San Diego to report that the way “was unsafe from hostile Californians, and communication with General Kearny was now cut off.”
At that moment Kearny was marching on Los Angeles from the south, while Frémont’s battalion was marching from the north, “so that a direct march on Los Angeles from the east [by Cooke and the Mormon Battalion] was evidently the proper course.” The battalion quickly set out but three days later a dispatch rider appeared with news that it was over—Los Angeles secured, the Californios in retreat, and Kearny on his way back to San Diego. So Cooke altered his march and presented himself at San Diego four months and 1,095 miles from Santa Fe.
A few days later Cooke issued a proclamation that began in part: “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. Half of it has been through a wilderness where nothing but savages or wild beasts are found, or deserts where, for want of water, there is no living creature. With crowbar and pick and axe in hand we have worked our way over mountains which seemed to defy augh
t but the wild goat, and hewed a passage through a chasm of living rock more narrow than our wagons.”
These self-congratulatory “orders” went on in the etc., etc. fashion for a while, but the significant point was that they had “brought these first wagons to the Pacific” on an overland southern route, which meant that they had to build a road to do it, which in that day and time was like conquering worlds unknown, almost akin to discovering a new continent. And if one is tempted to point out that both Kearny and Doniphan shared equal or superior marches in terms of distance or hardship, it must be remembered that, as Cooke emphasizes, his men marched as infantry, afoot, not as mounted troops as had the other two. There is something to be said for that.
In any case Cooke was there in California with his Mormons, who so far had not fought anything but bulls, minus twenty-two who had died from illness or accidents along the way. More important, the money they had earned by their strenuous labors would soon help set into motion the greatest single human migration in American history up until that time—the descent of the Latter-Day Saints upon the Utah Territory.
Back at Winter Quarters in the frozen wastes of Nebraska, six thousand Mormons were encamped praying for spring, while six hundred had perished from the living conditions. It was Brigham Young’s intention to take the Saints forever out of reach of the United States, even if it meant living among Lamanites, who were beginning to look not so bad in comparison with the hated Gentiles.
With the $70,000 in pay and allowances earned by the Mormon Battalion and the proceeds from the fire sale of their homes and property in Nauvoo, the Saints were able to purchase supplies and some wagons for the great crossing.§ The group was organized military-like into divisions right down into companies of several hundred each. Brigham Young and seven of the twelve apostles would go ahead in the pioneer company. Nobody, including Young, knew exactly where they were going, but they went on the theory that some divine revelation would tell them when they got there. Since they considered themselves the lost tribe of Israel, they already understood that what they were looking for was nothing less than Zion itself.
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