Margret, along with the others, cut cowhide into strips, singed off the hair, and then boiled the leather into a gelatinous gruel. She traded the only valuable items she still had, James’s watch and his Masonic medal, for food. But when she had nothing left to barter and no hopes, she decided that she would try again to get over the mountain, accompanied by Virginia and her two employees, Milt Elliot and Eliza Williams. She begged people to take in Patty, James, and Thomas—they were too small to attempt the mountain. But no one wanted more mouths to feed. Finally, she persuaded the Graveses to take James, while Patty and Thomas went to the Breens’ cabin. Margret ripped herself from her crying children with promises she’d bring them back bread.
They started out the morning of January 4. But after five days in the mountains, with Virginia so weak she often crawled, and her feet nearly frozen, Margret decided they must turn back. By the time they returned, the cowhide that had served as their roof was gone, and the Reeds had no place to live. The Breens allowed Margret and her four children to stay with them. For Margret, though discouraged, it was enough just to have the family united once again. Peggy Breen, against her husband’s wishes, sometimes slipped small bits of food to the Reed children. At one point, sure that Virginia lay near death, Peggy took Margret outside into the snow and warned her to prepare for her daughter’s passing. But Virginia survived.
On January 22, another blizzard struck, bringing whiteout snows and screaming, pitiless winds that prevented sleep. After the travelers had been trapped for three and a half months, February brought deaths in quick succession. The living dragged the bodies outside and covered them with snow. People boiled cow bones. Margret had nothing, and those with small amounts of food understandably hoarded them for their own families. No one could survive much longer without help.
Yet they had not been forgotten. James Reed and William McCutchen had tried to get over the mountain in the fall but had been driven back by storms. They began a frantic wait to reach their families. Now, in February, money had been raised, and several rescue parties had gathered, with animals and food prepared and loaded. But storms and deep snow hampered the rescuers just as the merciless winter held the emigrants captive.
On February 18, the first relief party reached the lake, seeing no signs of life. But slowly, thin voices answered their calls, and faces began appearing out of the snow. The rescuers handed out jerked beef and biscuits. The next morning several trudged on to the Donner tents, where conditions were even worse than at the cabins.
An attempt had to be made to get out that very day; they could not delay. Again, families decided who should go and who should stay and await help. The rescuers evaded questions about the snowshoe group that had left months before. It was no use demoralizing starving people who now faced climbing over the mountains. The rescuers divided up what provisions they’d brought, chopped some firewood, and prepared to leave. No one knew if another storm would rage over the mountains and dash all their hopes.
Margret determined that she and all four of her children must go. The first relief set off with 23 skeleton-thin emigrants, most of them under the age of 14, including three three-year-olds who had to be carried. Once they were trudging up the mountain it became clear that little Patty Reed and Thomas Reed would not be able to go on. Reason Tucker, one of the leaders of the first rescue party, told Margret the children must go back, but he promised to see that they safely reached the lake cabins.
Margret refused, saying she would return to camp with the little ones and leave Virginia and James to continue the escape. Tucker quietly pointed out that the camp didn’t need another adult mouth to feed, and Virginia and James needed her help to get over the mountain. She must leave Patty and Thomas behind.
In anguish, Margret debated what was best and then asked Tucker if he was a Mason like her husband. He was, and she asked him to vow as a Mason that he’d make sure her children were cared for. If Margret’s heart had not already broken as she knelt to part with Patty and Thomas, it must have shattered as Patty said, “Well, Ma, if you never see me again, do the best you can.”26 Virginia remembered her sister telling Margret, “I want to see papa, but I will take good care of Tommy and I do not want you to come back.”27
Men turned away to hide their tears as Margret said goodbye to her children. Below at the lake, no one wanted the Reed children, but Tucker convinced the Breens to take them in, helped in part by promises that more rescuers and supplies were on the way. He did not know this for sure, but the promise worked.
The trudge up the mountain continued; the party struggled, climbing out of snow and then sinking in again. Five-year-old James Reed, too big to be carried, worked extra hard, proclaiming every step took him closer to his father and food. Wet, then frozen, but always hungry, the group boiled the hems of buckskin pants and shoelaces.
Some of the rescuers pushed ahead, hoping to meet help—and they did. James Reed and his relief party ran into the first relief and eventually came upon the strung-out line of emigrants, holding out bony hands and pleading for bread. Someone shouted to Margret that her husband had come. She fell to her knees in joy while Virginia plunged, falling and lumbering, into her father’s arms. It was February 27.
But the happy reunion lasted only minutes. Margret told James that Patty and Thomas remained at the lake; he must go quickly and bring them out. So while Margret, Virginia, and little James continued west, James headed toward the camp, hoping to find his two children still alive.
On March 7, Margret, Virginia, and James reached Johnson’s Ranch to find grass and even wildflowers. It seemed like paradise to the children, but Margret ached with worry for her husband, for Patty and Thomas. She stood in the cabin doorway for hours, looking up at the mountain, hoping to see signs of them, not knowing that more unspeakable horrors faced her loved ones.
James arrived at the cabins to find Patty and Thomas still alive. The rescuers clearly saw that people had survived by eating the dead, for half-butchered bodies lay about on the ground. The rescuers made soup with the provisions they’d lugged in, and Patty baked bread with the precious flour. They must leave camp the following day. Again, people agonized—who had strength to leave, who would send their children on, who would stay with the weak and dying. Seventeen people left camp with James Reed’s rescue team, including the Breen family and the remaining family of Elizabeth Graves. Others remained at the lake.
By the third day, the party had reached a high crest of the mountain. Exposed completely to the elements, people cried with cold and ached for food. As gray clouds thickened, James Reed wrote in his journal, “Terror, terror.” By night, the snow came, blowing sideways and howling, pelting them with ice. People wept and prayed. The snow blinded James. They kept a fire going. Daylight brought no relief—the storm raged on. The fire sank slowly into the snow. “Hunger, hunger is the Cry with the Children and nothing to give them,” wrote James, “Freesing was the Cry of the mothers with reference to their little starving freesing Children.”28 Safely at Johnson’s Ranch, Margret knew a storm raged in the mountains and felt sick with fear for her family.
Before the storm abated, James lay near death, but he recovered enough to go on. As James prepared to leave, others simply lay in a state of collapse. A Donner child had died; Elizabeth Graves was nearly dead. Reed argued and urged them on. He then called another man to witness that he’d done the best he could—he had not abandoned them. The rescuers stacked up a three-day supply of wood for the 13 people who stayed on the mountain, and they left with only three children from the camp—Patty, Thomas, and Solomon Hook, Jacob Donner’s stepson.
Again suffering from snow blindness, James kept his little party staggering on. When Patty faltered, he tied her to his back with a blanket. Fellow rescuer Hiram Miller carried Thomas and helped James up when he fell. Fearing for Patty’s life, James fed her scrapings of meat he’d saved in the thumb of his mitten.
With great relief they met another rescue effort coming toward them and car
rying food for empty bellies. Reed told them of the others stranded on the mountain. The third relief found 11 survivors; they’d lived by eating the dead. This rescue included William Eddy and William Foster, who’d survived the ordeal of the snowshoe escape. Sadly, they arrived too late at the lake camp to save their own little children. By April, the last survivor had been rescued. Thirty-six people had died; 45 had survived. Death spared only two families, the Breens and the Reeds. Margret had somehow kept her brood alive, and Virginia noted they were the only family that had lived without eating human flesh.
The story of the Donner Party became a sensation, with reporters embellishing the more gruesome details as the months and years passed. At the time, many acknowledged openly what they’d done to survive. Other people, at other times and places, have done the same. They were ordinary men and women, families with children, trapped in horrendous circumstances. A few survivors later denied they’d turned to cannibalism. Recent excavations have found no evidence of human bones among the boiled bone fragments. But the emigrants most likely did not boil the bones of the dead; they sliced what they needed from the bodies and left them.
From the safety and warmth of California in summer, Virginia wrote her cousin in Illinois. She had not written half of what they’d suffered, she said—how could she even describe it? But she offered a few words of wisdom: “Never take no cutoffs and hury along as fast as you can.”29
Margret never enjoyed the robust health she’d hoped for in the West. She died in 1861 at age 47, knowing her children and grandchildren prospered, far from the icy shadows of Truckee Lake. The Donner Party’s story magnified every danger of the overland trail to extremes. The fact that so many lived stands as a testament to the human spirit of survival.
Amelia Stewart Knight
On the Oregon Trail
On April 9, 1853, Amelia Stewart Knight, her husband Joel, and seven children—Plutarch, Seneca, Frances, Jefferson, Lucy, Almira, and Chatfield—left their home in Iowa for the Oregon Territory. For the next five months, Amelia kept a steady diary of their journey, and because a lady did not discuss such things openly, never once does she mention she faced this great adventure pregnant, once again.
Rain and cold marked the early days of the expedition as they crept along “out of one mud hole into another all day.”30 Facing life with only a tent or wagon cover for protection became a depressing obstacle of the journey. Late April storms blew down tents and capsized a few wagons. A few days after they began, they met their first Indians. “Lucy and Almira afraid and run into the wagon to hide,” Amelia reported. Soon, though, the children grew used to the Indians who often camped around the settlers, “begging money and something to eat.”
Amelia Stewart Knight. Oregon Historical Society
The journey cost money. The family paid up to eight dollars per wagon to be ferried across rivers whenever possible. They also shelled out cash at times for corn or hay to feed their livestock. Amelia worried over the health of each horse, milk cow, and ox, animals needed not only to sustain them for the trip, but to help establish the family in the Oregon Territory.
On May 5, the family joined another company of emigrants, swelling their party to 24 men and granting Amelia peace of mind with more protection. The next day they passed a train of wagons plodding back east. The head man had drowned a few days before while getting his cattle across the Elkhorn River. “With sadness and pity I passed those who perhaps a few days before had been well and happy as ourselves,” Amelia wrote.
River crossings clogged the trail—Amelia counted more than 300 other wagons waiting with them to cross the Elkhorn. At this spot, without a ferry, the family unloaded the wagons to shuttle their goods across in the tightest wagon bed a little at a time. With a long rope stretched across the river, men pulled everything to the opposite shore. The wagons themselves were broken down, carried over, and put back together, an incredible amount of work. “Women and children were taken last, and then swim the cattle and horses.” The family faced many river crossings on the long journey west, each one a descent into danger for people and animals.
Violent storms battered the wagon train through May, often preventing them from building a fire or pitching the tents. On those nights the family retired to bed with empty stomachs, sleeping the best they could in their soaked clothes. “I never saw such a storm,” Amelia penned on May 17. “The wind was so high I thought it would tear the wagons to pieces … in less than 2 hours the water was a foot deep all over our camp grounds.” A fearful display of crackling lightning killed several cows. At the end of May, the wagon train came upon a group of men skinning a buffalo, the first buffalo they’d encountered, and though only a carcass, the animal caused some excitement. “We got a mess and cooked some for supper,” Amelia wrote, “very good and tender.”
At times, the crowded trail seemed to stretch ahead of them forever, a long line of wagons and cattle. May 31 brought a bit of excitement when they found themselves tangled up with two large herds (called droves) of cattle and 50 wagons. “We either had to stay poking behind them in the dust or hurry up and drive past them,” Amelia explained. “It was no fool of a job to be mixed up with several hundred head of cattle, and only one road to travel in, and the drovers threatening to drive their cattle over you if you attempted to pass them. They even took out their pistols.” Amelia’s party steered off the road and went at a trot around the drovers, wagons, and cows. “I had rather a rough ride to be sure, but was glad to get away from such a lawless set…. We left some swearing men behind us,” she noted.
In early June, the party passed Fort Laramie and found themselves surrounded by Lakota Indians anxious to trade beads and moccasins for bread. They faced scorching heat, in the upper 90s. Amelia recorded that there was “not a drop of water, nor a spear of grass to be seen, nothing but barren hills, bare and broken rocks, sand and dust.” In one incident the oxen became so “crazy for water” that they charged down into the Platte River still wearing their yokes. The family “had a great deal of trouble to keep the stock from drinking [alkaline water]…. It is almost sure to kill man or beast who drink it.”
A new villain, swarms of biting mosquitoes, joined the party. They made life even more miserable. Mountain snows brought some water relief but soon gave way to sandy desert, and Amelia fed handfuls of flour to the hungry oxen pulling the wagons.
On July 9, they reached the forks of the emigrant road, and Amelia hoped grazing would improve “as most of the large trains are bound for California.” As the thermometer climbed past 100 degrees, the heat sometimes proved too much for her, and she could barely crawl out of the wagon in the mornings to throw breakfast together. The stench along the road also sickened Amelia, an effect heightened by her advancing pregnancy; the smell of death, from cattle “lying in every direction,” hung like a foul blanket over the trail. “We are still traveling on in search of water, water,” she wrote in late July.
As July passed into August, each day like another, Amelia noted, “The roads have been very dusty, no water, nothing but dust and dead cattle all the day, the air is filled with the odor from cattle.” Some days they traveled for 20 miles without water.
Caring for her children under such conditions proved difficult, especially as she entered the last months of her pregnancy and exhaustion took its toll. Two-year-old Chat caused the most concern. She nursed him through a fever, caused by mosquito bites, Amelia believed. Then she nursed the gravely ill toddler through scarlet fever. Lucy and Almira suffered a miserable bout of poison ivy on their legs.
Twice Chat fell out of the wagon, and once he barely missed being run over by one of the tall wheels. Amelia wrote in her diary, “I never was so much frightened in my life.” In another scary incident, the family left Lucy behind—distracted, she’d been watching wagons cross a river and hadn’t noticed that her parents’ party had moved on. Miles later, when the company stopped to rest, another wagon train arrived with a very frightened Lucy in tow. Amelia was hor
rified when she discovered what had happened. She had assumed Lucy was riding in a friend’s wagon, and the friend had been told that Lucy was with her mother—so no one had missed the girl. The narrow escape shocked Amelia. “It was a lesson to all of us,” she wrote.
On July 25, a calf and one of their best milk cows died, a financial blow to the family and a personal loss for Amelia. “Presumed they were both poisoned with water or weeds,” she noted. “Left our poor cow for the wolves and started on.” August proved deadly for the cattle: another cow died, an ox drowned, and another ox dropped dead on the road, worn out with labor, heat, thirst, and lack of good grazing.
At the ferry for the Snake River, they found a unique service—Native Americans, for a fee, would swim the horses and cattle across, a job the Knights thankfully paid for. The Indians they met there “seemed peaceful and friendly.” The family bought salmon—the first they’d ever tasted—from Indian fishermen. Further along the trail, after searching in vain for fresh water, they ran into a group of Cayuse Indians who showed them the way to a spring. They also purchased a few potatoes, “which will be a treat for our supper,” noted Amelia.
By mid-August, the going was rough. Swift rivers tumbled over rocks, and mountains loomed. Heat gave way to frost, and water buckets froze over by morning. On September 6, they camped near the foot of the Cascade Mountains and prepared to cross, throwing away items and burning most of the deck boards on the wagons to lighten the load. Amelia washed clothes, exhausting herself to the point of illness.
The wagons crept up the steep, rough, and rocky road, twisting around holes and fallen trees. A primordial darkness settled over the trail as trees rose 300 feet into the air, blocking out much of the natural light. Yokes, chains, whole wagons, dead horses, oxen, mules, and cows littered the road. On Saturday, September 10, Amelia wrote simply, “It would be useless for me with my pencil to describe the awful road we have just passed over.” Large with child, she spent most of the day staggering through the trees alongside the narrow road, tripping and climbing over logs, often carrying two-year-old Chat in her arms. “I was sick all night,” she records, “and not able to get out of the wagon in the morning.”
Women of the Frontier Page 3
