At sunset, crossed Truckee Lake on the ice and came to the spot where we had been told we should find the emigrants. We looked all around but no living thing except ourselves was in sight and we thought that all must have perished. We raised a loud halloo and then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her, several others made their appearance in like manner coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine and I never can forget the horrible, ghastly sight they presented. The first woman spoke in a hollow voice: “Are your men from California or do you come from heaven?” – Daniel Rhoads
A thousand feet below Donner Summit, in February, 1847, a relief party including Rhoads found the camp where the Donner Party, fragile from months of an especially brutal Sierra Nevada winter, was attempting to survive until spring by the shore of the lake now named for them. A month later, rescuers would report unmistakable signs of cannibalism at the camp and the sensationalist story would define their legacy, dwarfing the remarkable series of increasingly ominous events during the previous summer and fall which caused the pioneers narrowly miss the window to scale the summit by a single night. Those mishaps, not the grisly scenes in the Sierra, remain the most compelling part of the story in my mind.
In 1846, insurance companies refused to insure travel west of the Mississippi River and US law did not extend west of the Rockies. Trails were in the process of being blazed by rough men, the Donners and Reeds choice to listen to one of them – Lansford Hastings.
Hastings claimed to know of a shortcut that would shave three to four hundred miles off their journey, and though they had received advice to avoid the Hastings Cutoff, in July the Donner-Reed wagon train, consisting of 87 pioneers, diverged from the larger party of emigrants at a fork in the trail at South Pass, taking the left fork toward Fort Bridger as the rest of the emigrants turned down the right fork toward Fort Hall.
A rapid series of setbacks followed in the next months. The Donners spent weeks cutting a trail through the Wasatch Mountains – a trail which Mormon pioneers would use in their own westward migration the following year – before crossing the Great Salt Flats now known as Bonneville. The flats spanned eighty miles rather than the forty reported by Hastings, and much of their livestock disappeared, running off in a mad search for water.
In late September, the Donners sight cottonwood groves along the Humboldt River, and rejoin the California Trail, a month behind those who chose the established route and having traveled an extra 125 miles. Cottonwoods are known as the tree of life because they are hardy despite fluctuating water levels. Their presence along the Humboldt must have been a welcome sight after the Nevadan high desert, but the white snowy fluff that gives them their name and which they shed was a foreshadowing of the future. The worst was to come.
In a span of two weeks in October, terrible things took place. A member of the party is fatally stabbed when James Reed attempts to break up an altercation and Reed is banished and forced to abandon his family in order to escape frontier justice by hanging. An elderly Belgian man named Hardkoop is cast out of a wagon and no one else takes him into their wagon. He falls behind and is not seen again. Paiute raids result in the death and theft of almost fifty oxen. A murder is premeditated and carried out. A man accidentally shoots his brother in law, who is buried along the trail. By the time the party reaches Truckee Meadows in late October, the party has lost almost a hundred head of livestock and the families are no longer traveling together. Dissension is rife and each group is fending for itself.
In the first days of November, having rested in the foothills and repaired their equipment, a group of emigrants set camp for the night on a ridge in the high Sierra within sight of the summit, too tired to push on. The next morning, they wake with a heavy weight on their chests and, unable to see anything, scramble upright into a world blanketed by a sheet of freshly fallen snow five feet deep. The path to the summit is obscured and impassable.
In December, cannibalism becomes reality with the consumption of the dead after all animal hides and carcasses are consumed. The native guides who had camped with the pioneers see the writing in the snow and escape in the night, but are tracked, shot and eaten, having been unable to go far in the deep drifts and the freezing chill of night.
It isn’t until mid-January that a party of survivors calling themselves the Fornlorn Hope manage to trek down the mountain, half dead, to report how much livestock the group has lost and how unprepared they are to survive a Sierra winter. Throughout February and March, rescuers based out of Sutter’s Fort (in what is now the Sacramento area) hike to the Donner camp, but unable to carry much without pack animals, they arrive in a condition not much better than the survivors. The walk back down the mountain is no easier.
It isn’t until April that the weather turns fair enough to rescue with ease, and on April 21st, the last survivor leaves the lake. He is Louis Keseberg, whose family has perished during the winter, and who survives on the bodies of the dead. He is the one who cast Hardkoop out of his wagon, leaving him to die on the trail.
Of the 48 survivors, Keseberg is the most unlucky. Newspapers print lurid exaggerations of his cannibalistic tendencies, accusing him of murder and of preferring human to animal flesh. Children stone him in the streets and eventually, he simply avoids going out of doors. What damns him most is not only the imagery of human bones in pots, but his refusal to leave the lake camp until the very end. What kind of man chooses to hunker down in a frozen hell rather than spring on one after another chance to walk out with rescuers? What kind of man is suited to a life of solitary cannibalism? Keseberg never manages to shake those questions in his lifetime.
But what metric do the rest of us have to measure his experience against? None of us could claim to have had an experience so harrowing and so extreme. Who knows what the man was thinking or feeling? He may have been frozen with grief for his family. Or he may have regressed into a primal survivalist mode. Or both. An experience so out of our own range defies sympathy. We only have surfaces to look at.
How do we tell the difference between what seems and what is?