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November 23 - November 27, 2023
Most of all I like their honesty. Bones have their secrets, but they tell no lies.
The culprit behind the ague was one of the world’s great scourges, a nasty little parasite of the genus Plasmodium
So when settlers like Franklin and Elizabeth Graves chose to build their homes near water and woods rather than on the open, windswept prairies, they chose to make mosquitoes their close neighbors and constant companions.
They bought up land in towns that did not exist, except in their imaginations. They bought into potential railroads that carried phantom passengers from one imaginary town to another. The speculative fever rose and spiraled out of control. The result was the catastrophic collapse, in April and May 1837, of 343 of the nation’s 850 banks.
In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!
Polk had earlier tried to buy California on the cheap, but that having failed, he had resolved simply to take it. The dispute over Texas had given him the opening he wanted, and it dovetailed nicely with a carefully choreographed campaign of presidential deception
The urge to expand the nation’s territory was almost universal, and it seemed self-evident to most Americans that they had a natural right to as much of the continent as they desired.
What an idea it gives us, and what an insight into human nature—HOPE, the bright, beaming star is ascendant in their sky, alluring them on.
emigrants must “enter on their journey on, or before, the first day of May; after which time they must never start, if it can possibly be avoided.” On the consequences of not doing so, he was even more pointed: “Unless you pass over the mountains early in the fall, you are very liable to be detained by impassable mountains of snow until the next spring, or perhaps forever.” On the day that Sarah, Jay, and the rest of the Graves clan stepped aboard the ferry at Parrott’s Landing, May Day was already more than three weeks in the past.
Among these friendships, those that would prove the most important, in unexpected ways far down the line, involved several families headed up by particularly large men—men who were outsize not only physically but, as it would turn out, also in the quality of their character and the quantity of their courage.
Sarah’s generation was among the first European Americans to behold it and would also be among the last to see it in all its pristine glory, so rapid were the transformations that were coming.
He also knew that the better route was only theoretically better, and he likely did not want to be present if and when the Donner Party found out anything to the contrary.
it had taken them sixteen days to make just thirty-five miles through the Wasatch Mountains. They had been told it might take a week.
Much of this intimacy with death began to diminish during the Civil War. Only commercial institutions and the government could deal with the scale of death that the war produced.
The end result was that at the close of the war, by dint of sheer numbers, the corpse had begun to lose some of its sacred nature, and the handling of the dead had begun to be done mostly by strangers.
In all of this, of course, death has become ever more abstracted, pushed ever further into the background and out of sight, something to be taken care of by those who do such things.
In the end, Hastings’s shortcut had added roughly a month to Sarah’s journey.
For the first time, the anxiety that had been eating at the company for weeks gave way to something close to stark terror.
Modern disaster psychologists have found that bold, decisive leadership greatly improves any group’s ability to survive the early stages of an impending catastrophe.
our bodies must maintain their inner workings within about a 6-degree range if we are to remain reasonably functional, and within a 20-degree range if we are to remain alive.
their bodies were already fighting a silent, internal war between death by fire and death by ice, swinging back and forth between thermal extremes in a way that threatened to destabilize their regulatory systems and their bodies’ precious reserves.
As John Leach points out in Survival Psychology, science has long recognized that under some circumstances people are able “to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause.” In other words, we are able, sometimes, to will ourselves to death, or at least to cease willing ourselves to live.
Death was the rule, life the exception. Life was at best a transitory dream, set in a universe that was entirely indifferent to his fate.
people living in conditions of extreme stress often undergo a process of psychic deadening. They stop experiencing ordinary human feelings such as compassion and understanding.
In the three full months since they had all become entrapped, he was the fourteenth member of the Donner Party to die, all of the dead, so far, male.
Scattered about the cabin, where Tucker and Glover had seen bodies covered by quilts a week and a half before, human bones now lay, with shreds of pink flesh still clinging to them.
In the end, of the eighty-seven people who emerged from the Wasatch Mountains as official members of George Donner’s company, forty-seven had died as a result of the tragedy. The toll had fallen disproportionately on the males in the company.
Keseberg—publicly and privately reviled as a voluntary cannibal and likely a murderer as well from the time he arrived in California—watched
They must each have found something in their hearts—some quality of faith and hope so powerful and reassuring that it caused them not to shrink from but to embrace the human heart’s seemingly inexhaustible proclivity to populate the future with what it hopes to find there.
Looking out at the confusion of green mountains and purple canyons below me, it struck me with full force—in a way that it could not have if I hadn’t seen it for myself—that only a madman, or a serious salesman, could look at that landscape and propose taking a party of heavily laden wagons through it.
Survival psychologists have since discovered that the people who are most likely to live through extreme, life-and-death challenges are those who open their eyes to the wonders of the world around them, even as their own lives hang in the balance. To appreciate beauty is to experience humility—to recognize that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment. And humility, it turns out, is key to recognizing that in order to survive, you must adapt yourself to the environment, that it won’t adapt to your needs.
