Cannibalism

by Bill Schutt

  “I’m sure she knows what color underwear the Donners all wore,” I told my wife, Janet, during a phone call later that night.

  But Johnson, an enthusiastic historian and researcher, was also living proof that many of the mysteries surrounding the Donner Party remained unsolved, including the one we would be working on at Alder Creek. It was a mystery that involved the leader of the Donner Party—the very person for whom the group had been named.

  On Nov 1, 1846, the pace-setting travelers whose journey had been halted at the mountain pass that would one day bear their name, decided to backtrack several miles to Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), where they had passed an abandoned cabin that the members of a previous wagon train had constructed two years earlier. Now they would overwinter there. The pioneers quickly built two more cabins and crowded in as best they could. It was a decision that would be, perhaps, their greatest mistake.

  With the benefit of hindsight, questions have arisen as to why the Donner Party did not simply backtrack another 30 miles, which would have enabled them to overwinter outside of the Sierras altogether. Among the possible explanations was their utter lack of knowledge about exactly where they had chosen to camp. Unlike other wagon trains, they had hired no seasoned mountain men to guide them.

  The 21 members of the Donner Party who had lagged behind the pacesetters never made it to Truckee Lake. Nor did they experience the crushing disappointment of the final mountain pass. A broken wagon axle had halted the group, which included George Donner, his brother Jacob, their families, and several teamsters. They eventually made it to the Alder Creek Valley, two miles west of the emigrant trail and eight miles from the Truckee Lake cabin, when the winter storm caught them completely in the open. According to survivor Virginia Reed, they “hastily put up brush sheds, covering them with pine boughs.” Although the intention seems to have been to use Alder Creek as a quick rest stop before a final push into California, the weather and their weakened conditions dictated that, like those stranded at Truckee Lake, there would be no further travel until the spring thaw.

  By now, George Donner had been incapacitated by what began as a superficial wound to his hand he received while repairing their wagon. As the days and weeks passed, the infection had crept up Donner’s arm, and he would spend the last four months of his life trapped in a drafty shelter built beneath a large pine that future generations would refer to as the George Donner Tree. Here the head of the Donner Party would become a helpless observer of the horrors that would soon overtake his family and those who worked for him.

  Now the Donner Party, separated by eight miles and trapped in hurriedly constructed versions of Hell, faced a winter of starvation and madness. Nearly half of the group would die and many of those would be eaten, some of them by their own relatives.

  The day after standing atop Donner Pass (where the only requirements we faced had been a reliable set of brakes in our rental car), Kristin, John, Ken, and I were at Alder Creek, hiking away from the well-worn trails and their educational signage. Kayle led us around an L-shaped stand of ponderosa pines and into a meadow covered with white flowers.

  She looks different now, I thought, watching the dog at work. No distractions.

  With her nose to the ground, the border collie made several passes over a bare-looking patch of ground, halting abruptly several times, only to double back over the same spot. Then she stopped, sat, and quickly pointed her nose to the ground. As my companions and I watched, Kayle stood up, moved about a yard farther, and repeated the same motion.

  John turned to me. “Those are alerts. Two of them.” I had learned previously that when a HHRD dog detects the scent of decomposed human remains, it responds with a trained action (like sitting) called an alert.

  “But we’re a half mile from the 2004 archaeological dig,” I responded. “Nowhere near where the bodies are supposed to be buried.”

  Kayle’s handler flashed a wry smile, then turned to his dog, “Good girl, Kayle. Good girl.”

  On December 16, 1846, a party of 17 men, women, and children stranded at the Truckee Lake Camp fashioned snowshoes and attempted a break-out. Early on, two of them who had started the trip without the makeshift footwear decided to turn back. The group of now 15, which also included a pair of Miwok Indians who had joined the company in Nevada, would become known as “The Forlorn Hope,” and they would be making their attempt through the heart of a storm-blasted winter in the country’s snowiest region.17 According to Kristin Johnson, sometime around January 12, the survivors stumbled into a small encampment of local Indians who gave them what food they could spare (mostly seeds and acorn bread).18 They guided the wraith-like figures partway down the mountain, but they did so warily. The pitiful travelers were not only frozen, but some of them had become seriously unhinged.

  On January 17, 1847, Forlorn Hope member William Eddy reached the Johnson Ranch (no relation to Kristin Johnson), located at the edge of a small farming community in the Sacramento Valley. By the time he staggered up to one of the cabins, Eddy looked more like a skeleton than a man. The skin of his face was drawn tightly over his skull and his eyes were sunken deeply into their sockets. His appearance sent the cabin owner’s daughter away from her own front door shrieking in terror. Several horrified locals reportedly retraced William Eddy’s bloody footprints into the forest and discovered six more survivors—a man and five women. The Forlorn Hope had departed the Truckee Lake Camp 33 days earlier with barely a week’s worth of short rations. Eight of them eventually perished—all males, and according to Kristin Johnson, “there’s no question” that seven of the dead were cannibalized.

  Nearly 160 years later, science writer Sharman Apt Russell wrote about the results of a 1944–1945 Minnesota University study on the effects of semi-starvation.

  Prolonged hunger carves the body into what researchers call the asthenic build.19 The face grows thin, with pronounced cheekbones, atrophied facial muscles account for the ‘mask of famine,’ a seemingly unemotional, apathetic stare . . . the clavicle looks sharp as a blade . . . Ribs are prominent. The scapula(e) . . . move like wings. The vertebral column is a line of knobs . . . the legs like sticks.

  Had modern physicians been present to monitor the surviving members of The Forlorn Hope, in all likelihood these unfortunates would have exhibited most of the physiological signs of starvation: low resting metabolic rates (the amount of energy expended at rest each day), slow, shallow breathing, and lower body temperatures (which would have been present even without the frigid conditions).20 Another bodily response to starvation is low blood pressure, a condition that can lead to fainting, especially upon standing up. Like the lethargic movements that characterize starving people, these physiological changes are the body’s involuntary attempts at conserving energy.

  Changes in the starved body occur at the biochemical level as well, and in the case of the Donner Party, catabolic biochemical pathways would have internally mimicked the cannibalistic behavior to come, this time at the cellular and molecular level.21 In other words, their hunger-wracked bodies would have begun to consume themselves. At first, carbohydrates stored in the liver and muscles would have been broken down into energy-rich sugars. Fat, an energy-packed connective issue (which also functions as an insulator and shock absorber in places like joints and around organs like the kidneys), would have been metabolized next. Depending on the individual, these fat stores could have lasted weeks or even months. Finally, proteins, the primary structural components of muscles and organs, would have been broken down into their chemical components, amino acids. In effect, during the latter stages of starvation, the body’s system of metabolic checks and balances hijacks the energy it requires, obtaining it from the chemical bond energy that had previously been used to hold together complex protein molecules. This protein breakdown (in places like the skin, bones, and skeletal muscles) produces the wasted-away look that characterizes starvation victims.

  Besides physiological and behavioral effects of starvation, researc
hers have identified changes that occur in groups experiencing food shortages or famines. In 1980, anthropologist Robert Dirks wrote that social groups facing starvation go through three distinct behavioral phases. During the first phase, the activity of the group increases, as do “positive reciprocities.” This can be thought of as an initial alarm response during which group members become more gregarious as they confront and attempt to solve the problem. Although emotions may run high, communal activity increases for a short time. The second phase occurs as the physiological effects of starvation begin to exhibit themselves. During this time, energy is conserved and the group becomes partitioned, usually along family lines. Non-relatives and even friends are often excluded. Acts of altruism decline in frequency with a concurrent increase in stealing, aggression, and random acts of violence.

  The third or terminal phase of starvation is often characterized by a complete collapse of anything resembling social order. Efforts at cooperation also fall off, even within families. The rate of physical activity also decreases to near zero as the exhausted and starving individuals remain motionless for hours, basically doing nothing. Some victims of starvation do not fall into these broad patterns. These individuals are capable of heroic gestures. They are also capable of murder and cannibalism—and sometimes both.

  In his book The Cannibal Within, Lewis Petrinovich argues convincingly that survival cannibalism is an evolved human trait that functions to optimize the chances of survival (and thus, reproductive success) for the cannibal. “It is not advantageous to be a member of another species, of a different race, or even to be a stranger when people are driven by starvation. The best thing to be is a member of a family group, and not be too young or too old.”

  Only three years before the Minnesota University study, which came to be called the Minnesota Experiment, starvation was taking place on a massive scale in a major European city. For the inhabitants of Leningrad, the horror extended beyond the limits of a supervised research project.

  Today known as St. Petersburg, Leningrad was a major industrial city and the birthplace of the Russian Revolution. In June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—a massive, three-pronged assault against the Soviet Union. By September, the nearly three million Leningraders were completely surrounded by German and Finnish forces. With little advance preparation by the local authorities, food shortages and dwindling fuel supplies had become grave concerns. The city’s zoo animals were killed and consumed, and soon after, people began butchering and eating their pets. In a textbook example of shortsightedness, most of the city’s food reserves were housed in a series of closely spaced wooden structures that were destroyed after a single bombing raid by the Luftwaffe.

  On September 29, 1941, Adolf Hitler wrote, “All offers of surrender from Leningrad must be rejected. In this struggle for survival, we have no interest in keeping even a proportion of the city’s population alive.” German commanders were forbidden from accepting any type of surrender from the city’s inhabitants. “Leningrad must die of starvation,” Hitler declared.

  With essential supplies all but cut off, living conditions within the embattled city plummeted along with the temperatures, which routinely reached -30 degrees Fahrenheit, in what became a winter of record-breaking cold. Although daily artillery and aerial bombardments claimed citizens at random, far more Leningraders died of exposure, sickness, and especially starvation. As a result, by December 1941, the unburied dead were accumulating by the tens of thousands.

  As conditions worsened, social order began to unravel and violent criminals took to the streets. Leningrad’s citizens were robbed or murdered for the food they carried home from the market or for the ration cards that allotted them as little as 75 grams of bread per day.22

  According to historian David Glantz, 50,000 Leningraders starved to death in December 1941 and 120,000 died in January 1942. Archivist Nadezhda Cherepenina reported that during the month of February 1942, “the registry offices recorded 108,029 deaths (roughly 5 percent of the total population)—the highest figure in the entire siege.”23

  Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote that once the harsh winter took hold, most of Leningrad’s population was reduced to eating bark, carpenter’s glue, and the leather belt drives found in motors. But there were exceptions. “These were the cannibals and their allies—fat, oily, steely-eyed, calculating, the most terrible men and women of their day.”

  As rumors of cannibalism swept the city, so too did reports of kidnappings. It was said that children were being seized off the streets “because their flesh was so much more tender.” Women were apparently a popular second choice because of the extra fat they carried.

  “In the worst period of the siege,” a survivor noted, “Leningrad was in the power of the cannibals.”

  Just as ominous, perhaps, was the sudden availability of suspicious-looking meat in Leningrad’s central market. The traders were new as well, selling their grisly wares (which they claimed to be horse, dog, or cat flesh) to those shoppers with enough money to buy them. According to numerous survivor accounts, meat patties made from ground-up human flesh were being sold as early as November 1941.

  Also detailed were the gruesome finds made by those assigned to deal with the thousands of dead bodies that were stacking up at the city’s largest cemeteries and elsewhere. After dynamiting the frozen ground, “[the men] noticed as they piled the corpses into mass graves that pieces were missing, usually the fat thighs or arms or shoulders.” The bodies of women with their breasts or buttocks cut off were found, as were severed legs with the meat cut away. In other instances, only the heads of the deceased were found. People were arrested for possessing body parts or the corpses of unrelated children.

  But beyond the diaries and the accounts of Leningraders who lived through the siege, what other evidence for cannibalism has been uncovered? No physical evidence survives, no bones with cut marks suggestive of butchering or signs that they had been cooked. The inhabitants of Leningrad buried their dead, as difficult as the task had been, then tried to get beyond the nightmare they’d lived through.

  As for official word, “You will look in vain in the published official histories for reports of the trade in human flesh,” Salisbury wrote in 1969, and this remained so until relatively recently. All mention of cannibalism-related incidents had been purged from the public record, apparently because Stalin and other Communist Party leaders wanted to portray Leningrad’s besieged citizens as heroes. Leningrad was the first of 12 Russian cities to be award the honorary title “Hero City” for the behavior of its citizens during World War II. That said, anything as unpleasant as eating one’s neighbors would have cast Leningraders in something far dimmer than the glorious light mandated by their leaders.

  In 2004, the official reports made right after the war by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were released.24 They revealed that approximately 2,000 Leningraders had been arrested for cannibalism during the siege (many of them executed on the spot). In most instances, these were normal people driven by impossible conditions to commit unspeakable acts. Cut off from food and fuel and surrounded by the bodies of the dead, preserved by the arctic temperatures, Leningrad’s starving citizens faced the same difficult decisions encountered by other disaster survivors, that is: Should they consume the dead or die themselves? According to an array of independent accounts as well as those from the NKVD, many of them chose to live.

  On December 26, 1846, only ten days after leaving the Truckee Lake Camp, the members of The Forlorn Hope were lost deep in the frozen High Sierras. Only a third of the way into their nightmarish trek, they reportedly decided that without resorting to cannibalism they would all die. At first the hikers discussed eating the bodies of anyone who died, but soon they began to debate more desperate measures: drawing straws with the loser sacrificed so that the others might survive.

  It was a procedure that had become known to seafarers as “the custom of
the sea,” a measure that provided (at least in theory) some rules for officers and their men should they find themselves cast adrift on the open ocean. Sailors drew straws, with the short straw giving up his life so that the rest might eat. In some descriptions, the person drawing the next shortest straw would act as the executioner. Although heroic in concept and theoretically fair in design, modified versions of “the custom of the sea” were sometimes less than heroic and anything but fair.

  In perhaps the most famous case, in 1765, a storm demasted the American sloop Peggy, leaving her adrift in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. On board were the captain, his crew of nine, and an African slave. They had been en route to New York from the Azores with a hold full of wine and brandy. After a month, they had nothing to eat but plenty to drink, a fact driven home when the spooked captain of a potential rescue vessel took one look at the Peggy’s ragged-looking crew of drunks and promptly sailed away. The Peggy’s captain, perhaps fearing for his own life, remained in his cabin, armed with a pistol.

  Soon after the alcohol-thwarted rescue, the Peggy’s first mate appeared below decks, informing his captain that the men had already eaten the ship’s cat, their uniform buttons, and a leather bilge pump. They had decided to draw lots, with the loser served up as dinner. The captain waved the mate away with a loaded pistol but the man returned moments later to report on the lottery results. By an incredible coincidence, the slave had drawn the short straw. Although the “poor Ethiopian” begged for his life, the captain was unable to prevent the man’s murder, later writing that as they prepared to cook the body, one sailor rushed in, tore away the slave’s liver, and ate it raw.