by Jon E. Lewis
On 19 October Charles Stanton returned from Sutter’s Fort. With him were two of Captain Sutter’s Indian guides and a mule train of food. At Truckee Meadows they fed and rested. Not until 23 October did the pioneers’ wagons begin snaking, towards the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The first snow of winter began to fall, a month early. The wagons ground upwards. At Alder Creek, George Donner’s wagon broke an axle, the remaining 15 schooners going around the hapless family and on to the high water that is now Donner Lake. There, on the evening of 28 October, they camped in cabins abandoned by earlier overlanders. A final push and they would be through the mountains. That night a snowstorm struck. When the emigrants awoke in the morning, the ground was deep in snow and the Truckee Pass was blocked. The Donner Party was snowbound in the high sierras.
Panic set in. Some emigrants hurriedly fashioned tents out of their wagons’ canvas tops, others holed up in the shanties. The Donners themselves failed to arrive. Eventually, Charles Stanton waded back to Alder Gulch, where he found George and Jacob Donner bedridden. Mrs Tamsen Donner was feeding them, her five children and their hired hands on strips of cowhide. They could not be moved to the main camp up at the lake. Blizzards continued to howl down from the mountains. The animals began to die in droves, of cold, or of suffocation in the drifts. Patrick Breen Sr, an Irish-born farmer and patriarch of the Breen clan amongst the emigrants, commenced writing a diary, his thoughts turned inwards by the ordeal. On December 1st he noted:
Still Snowing wind W about 5½ or 6 feet deep difficult to get wood, no going from the house Completely housed up looks as likely for snow as when it Commenced, our cattle all Killed but three of four of them, the horses & Stantons mules gone & Cattle suppose lost in the Snow no hopes of finding them alive.
The first emigrant died of starvation on 15 December. He was Bayliss Williams, a hired man of the Reeds. It was clear that someone must go for help, or the whole party would perish from hunger. Fifteen of the strongest survivors (eight men, five women and the two Indian guides) volunteered to try to reach Sutter’s Fort. Led by Charles Stanton, the “Forlorn Hope”, as the party of volunteers was called, left on 19 December wearing improvised snowshoes and carrying six days’ rations.
Shortly after the volunteers left, news came up to Donner Lake from Alder Gulch of four deaths among the party there. By now all the cattle had long since died, and for most there were only hides left to eat. Patrick Breen shot his dog Towser for food. The drifts reached the roofs of the shanties. “We pray to the God of mercy to deliver us from our present calamity,” wrote Breen on the first day of 1847, while he and the others huddled waiting for rescue.
It was a long time in coming. The “Forlorn Hope” had run into tribulations beyond comprehension. Stanton had developed snow blindness and was left to freeze to death. A violent storm on Christmas night caused the demise of four of the party through hypothermia. The starving survivors stripped the flesh from the bones of the dead, roasted it and ate it, their weeping eyes unable to look each other in the face. The remaining flesh was carefully packed and labelled, so that no one would eat their kin. The band struggled on. Two more men died and were eaten. When this obscene food ran out the Indians, who had refused to eat human flesh, were shot and butchered. Finally, the survivors stumbled into Johnson’s Ranch on 18 January 1847. Of the 15 who had hazarded the journey from Donner Lake, only seven – two men and five women – came through alive.
A small rescue party, the first of four, was sent out and reached the lake camp on 19 February to find many of the emigrants dead, others half mad. Twenty-three of the skeleton-like survivors decided that they were strong enough to be led out of the Sierra graveyard. The rest, too weak to walk, clustered around the stoves, and waited for a larger relief force, expected at any moment.
The second relief was delayed by snowstorms. The food at Donner Lake and Alder Gulch again ran out. Like the “Forlorn Hope”, the emigrants in the camps turned to cannibalism. Patrick Breen wrote in his diary on 26 February, in his first mention of human flesh-eating:
. . . Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. [Milford Elliot, a teamster for James Reed] & eat him, I dont [think] that she has done so yet, it is distressing The Donnos [Donners] told the California folks [the first rescue party] that they [would] Commence to eat the dead people in 4 days, if they did not succeed that day or next in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow & did not know the spot or near it I suppose They have done so ere this time.
Not until the very end of February did the main relief force, burdened with heavy food packs, manage to fight their way through the last of the winter storms. It was led by James Reed, who had managed to find his way to California alone. As he climbed towards the camp, he met his wife and two of their children coming down with an earlier relief. He pressed ahead, and in two days found his other two children alive, both well and in the care of Mr Glover, a fellow Freemason. (The Reeds and the Breens were the only families to survive the Donner tragedy without loss.) Reed’s joy was tempered by the cannibalistic scenes he found as he moved through the cabins, where human “bones and skulls . . . filled camp kettles.” For most of the living at Donner Lake and Alder Gulch, the Reed relief meant survival. Some, though, were still unable to be moved. They included George Donner and his wife Tamsen, who refused to leave her husband’s side.
For these last pitiful few another relief was organized. It was sent up in the April thaw under the command of Captain Fellun. To Fellun and his men fell the last and worst sights of the Donner tragedy. Fellun committed these to his journal “Entered the cabins,” he wrote on 17 April 1847, “and a horrible scene presented itself – human bodies terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and sculls [sic] scattered in every direction. One body, supposed to be that of Mrs Eddy, lay near the entrance, the limbs severed off and a frightful gash in the skull. The flesh from the bones was nearly all consumed . . .”
Fellun then trudged over to Alder Gulch. “At the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with human flesh cut up, it was the body of Geo. Donner, the head had been split open, and the brains extracted therefrom . . .” Donner’s wife, Tamsen, was also dead.
Although the Fellun party had expected to find several emigrants still alive, they found only one, Lewis Keseberg. He was in a lamentable condition, haggard and wild. His subsistence on human flesh had lasted so long that he refused anything in its place.
Of the 87 emigrants who had set out from Fort Bridger on the Hastings Cutoff, 39 died in the Sierras.
Westward With God
The emigrant families who went west over the trails were a God-fearing people. Something about the limitless sky and the vastness of the land inclined the mind to religion. Missionaries went into the wilderness to baptize the heathen Indians and to tend their remote and scattered settler flocks. Spiritual “awakenings” periodically gripped and fevered the frontier, giving birth to new sects: the Campbellites, the Shakers, the Millerites and the Oneida Colony. The most important of them, for the history of Western expansion, was Joseph Smith’s “Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints”.
In 1827, according to Joseph Smith’s own account, he was visited by the angel Moroni, who revealed to him the whereabouts of the gold-leaved The Book of Mormon, which contained missing parts of the Bible and God’s own purpose for Smith. Since Smith, a 21-year-old New York farmer’s son, was near illiterate, a pair of magic glasses was attached to the book, enabling him to read and interpret it. What he learned from the golden tablets was that in ancient times two lost tribes of Israel had found their way to America. The savage Lamanites (from whom the American Indians were descended) had then slaughtered all the civilized Nephites, but not before their chief prophet, Mormon, had written their history in hieroglyphical “Reformed Egyptian” on golden plates. Smith’s sacred mission was to build a new, true, Christian Church.
Smith published The Book of Mormon in 1830 (the bill was paid by an enthusias
tic local farmer) at the God-revealed price of $1.75 a copy, later reduced to $1.25. With five followers, Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints on 6 June 1830 at Fayette, southeast of Rochester, New York. Personable, energetic and with a flair for persuasive oratory, Smith recruited converts rapidly. He also aroused hatred and hostility from non-believers or “Gentiles”. His house was assaulted by mobs, fellow “Saints” shot at in the street.
After prayers for guidance, Smith took his followers west, to Kirtland, Ohio. From this Stake of Zion proselytes were sent forth, and a thousand people converted, among them Brigham Young. A new Mormon colony was founded at Independence, Missouri. The industry of the Saints was boundless. At Kirtland they built their own mill, store, bank and printing press and started work on an inspiring temple.
Such prosperous, clannish success only attracted more of the hatred which had driven the Mormons out of New York. Smith was tarred and feathered in Kirtland. The governor of Missouri called out the militia against the Saints in 1838, asserting “that the Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State.” Nineteen unresisting Mormon men and boys were killed at their village of Haun’s Mill.
The Mormons backtracked east to Illinois, where a liberal law allowed them to establish a virtually independent state at Nauvoo. There, on the banks of the Mississippi, Smith and his congregation turned a malarial swamp into a shining and populous city. Under Smith’s theocratic rule, thousands of Mormons tried to create an ideal society where no one went barefoot or hungry, and which was free from the sins of drink and smoking (although Smith himself continued to indulge in both).
Troubles, however, again descended on the Saints. Joseph Smith received a “call” from God to cast off monogamy. By 1844 Smith and many of his entourage had already done so. His bodyguard, John Scott, had five wives, Brigham Young more. (Nauvoo, unlike most pioneering settlements, had a surplus of women, many of them converts from Europe.) Some Mormons were outraged, and published a dissenting newspaper, the Expositor. Smith had it closed down, and the dissenters fled to the county seat at Carthage. Rumours of the Saints’ new marital practice had already reached Carthage. The dissenters confirmed it.
Outraged Illinois newspaper editors denounced Smith, and anti-Mormon mobs formed. To assuage the angry protesters, the authorities issued warrants for the arrest of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Smith, in turn, placed Nauvoo under martial law and donned his uniform of lieutenant-general of the Nauvoo Legion. Then, choosing against confrontation, he surrendered himself to the authorities at Carthage on 24 June 1844.
As Smith entered the Carthage jail he was struck by a premonition of doom. He confided to an aide, “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am as calm as a summer morning.” Three days later Joseph and Hyrum Smith were shot by a masked mob who stormed the jail. The bullets were fired at point-blank range. Hyrum died instantly. Joseph Smith, mortally wounded, shouted “O Lord, my God” and fell through a window to the ground below.
With Joseph Smith martyred, the leadership of the Mormon church was assumed by the senior apostle Brigham Young. The pragmatic Vermonter decided that the survival of the Mormons depended on their moving to a remote place beyond the malice and power of the Gentiles. They would have to go into the empty wilderness of the West.
Young had studied J. C. Frémont’s report of his 1843–4 expedition surveying the Oregon Trail, also the infamous Lansford W. Hastings’ guide to Oregon and California. From these he gleaned that the most isolated area in the West – and consequently that most unlikely to appeal to westering Gentiles – lay around the Great Salt Lake, nearly 1,400 miles away. This would be the Mormons’ new Promised Land.
The first 600 Saints to leave Nauvoo crossed the icy Mississippi into Iowa on 4 February 1846. The rest followed in a regular series of parties, almost military in their order of march and discipline. Young was a genius of leadership and organization. Bugle calls awoke the faithful each morning at five o’clock, and thereafter the day was divided into rigid periods for prayers, food, travel and rest. At 8.30 each evening the train halted, and was wheeled into a protective circle. By 9 o’clock everyone was asleep. As the detachments crossed Iowa they occasionally stopped to plant crops, which could be harvested by later trains of the Saints. In this way, 16,000 Mormons worked their way over Iowa to a staging camp they called Winter Quarters on the bank of the Missouri near present-day Omaha. Here over the summer and fall they built a vast temporary city, described by Thomas Leiper Kane in his The Mormons (1850):
This landing, and the large flat or bottom on the east side of the river, were crowded with covered carts and wagons; and each one of the Council Bluff hills opposite was crowned with its own great camp, gay with bright white canvas, and alive with the busy stir of swarming occupants. In the clear blue morning air the smoke streamed up from more than a thousand cooking fires. Countless roads and by-paths checkered all manner of geometric figures on the hillsides. Herd boys were dozing upon slopes; sheep and horses, cows and oxen, were feeding around them, and other herds in the luxuriant meadow of the then swollen river. From a single point I counted four thousand head of cattle in view at one time. As I approached the camps, it seemed to me the children there were to prove still more numerous. Along a little creek I had to cross were women in greater force than blanchisseuses upon the Seine, washing and rinsing all manner of white muslins, red flannels and parti-colored calicoes, and hanging them to bleach upon a greater area of grass and bushes than we can display in all our Washington Square . . .
It was Young’s intention that the Mormons should wait out the winter on the bank of the Missouri in something like comfort. However, the winter of 1846–7 was terrible beyond his belief. Seven hundred Saints died of exposure, starvation and disease. But their faith held firm.
As soon as the first spring sun appeared, the Mormons were on the move. The first group out – the “Pioneer Band” – was led by Brigham Young, and consisted of 148 trailblazing volunteers in 73 wagons. To avoid clashes with Gentile pioneers, Young took a route along the north bank of the Platte instead of the Oregon Trail on the river’s south bank. Rain made travel uncomfortable, but failed to dampen spirits or slow the steady progress. May found the Pioneer Band carefree and chasing buffalo, and so joyous did they become that Young had to remind them of their religious obligations: “Joking, nonsense, profane language, trifling conversation and loud laughter do not belong to us. Suppose the angels were witnessing the hoe-down the other evening, and listening to the haw haws . . . would they not be ashamed of it?”
The chastened Mormons pushed on past Fort Laramie. At Casper they built two ferries to cross the river, leaving a party behind to convey other emigrants. (Gentiles had to pay; Saints travelled gratis.) On 27 June 1847 – the third anniversary of Smith’s martyrdom – Young’s advance party crossed South Pass.
In the foothills of the Rockies they encountered the trapper Jim Bridger. He was discouraging, and informed them that the Great Salt Lake region was too dry to support anything except cactus. He offered to give them $1,000 for the first bushel of corn they grew there. Undaunted, Young pressed ahead.
On 22 July 1847, after a trip of three months across plains and peaks, the Mormon wagon train rounded Big Mountain. According to Mormon accounts Young, sick with mountain fever, sat up, looked out over the Great Salt Lake Valley and said: “It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.”
The valley was as dry as Bridger had said. But the soil was fertile. Young threw off the sickness and began organizing irrigation, and laying out a plan for the capital of his new nation, where each adult male would have a town house as well as a farm. “We propose,” wrote Young, “to have the temple lot contain 40 acres, that the streets will be 88 feet wide, sidewalks 20 feet, the lots to contain 1¼ acre, eight lots a block.” The Mormon state would be independent and sovereign. Its name would be Deseret, after the Mormon word for honeybee.
With the coming of
spring 1848, Mormon hands turned to the sowing of wheat in a huge 5,000-acre field. The rains were unseasonally good, and the wheat did well – until May, when dark clouds of crickets descended and consumed the ripening corn. In their despair the Saints turned to prayer. As if by miracle, flocks of seagulls appeared and fell on the crickets. Half the crop was saved, sufficient for the winter of 1848, even for a population swollen by migration to 4,000.
The next year Young’s state-building dream received a setback when Congress refused to accept Deseret as part of the Union; instead, they created the Territory of Utah (included within it was present-day Nevada). To appease Young, he was declared Governor.
As a means of boosting the population of Deseret, Young dispatched missionaries to the United States, and to Britain and Europe. The response was overwhelming, partly because of the missionaries’ zeal, partly because of the secular lure of a new life in the open spaces of the West. To aid matters, the Mormons offered prospective emigrants a repayable loan to get to Deseret. The response from Britain, in particular, was phenomenal. A deterioration in Albion’s economy encouraged thousands from the Valleys of South Wales and other industrial centres to follow the Mormon call. Some 33,000 left Britain for the Mormon Zion in 1851 alone, transported across the Atlantic in special emigrant ships, and on by train to the Missouri. At Fort Leavenworth or Winter Quarters they were provided with teams and wagons and given instruction in plains travel. On reaching Utah they were provided with employment and a home.
When the Mormon Perpetual Emigration Fund ran low in 1855, Young displayed his usual ingenuity. An edict went out from his office: “The Lord through his Prophet, says of the poor ‘Let them come on foot, with hand carts or wheel barrows, let them gird up their loins and walk through and nothing shall hinder them!’ ” Hundreds of simple two-wheeled hardwood handcarts were made, costing a fraction of the price of a Prairie Schooner. Between 1856 and 1860, some 2,962 Mormon converts from Europe walked the 1,300 miles from Iowa to Salt Lake City, pushing or pulling their handcarts. As they went they sang:
