The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

A number, in fact, had already taken a chance and settled in Oregon. A few had even put down roots in California. Among the latter, an even smaller number had complied with the Mexican government’s requirement that they obtain official immigration documentation and become naturalized Mexican citizens. Most simply ignored both the Mexican government and its requirements and thus became California’s original illegal immigrants.

He told of the “vast extent of its valleys and plains,” the “unexhausted and inexhaustible resources,” and “the extraordinary variety and abundance of its productions.” He assured his readers of California’s “salubrity of climate.” And he forestalled concerns about the rights of the Mexican Californians by painting them as little more than savages.

Hate hate hate

The problem—and it was a substantial one, as he was just beginning to realize—was that Hastings had never taken his own shortcut, which ran directly through the Wasatch Mountains. In fact, except for a few trappers and a mounted expedition under the command of John C. Frémont and Lieutenant Theodore Talbot the previous fall, no one had ever attempted the route, certainly no one riding farm wagons laden with twenty-five hundred pounds of goods drawn by teams of plodding oxen. Anyone who had done so would not likely have suggested it to anyone else.

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 that would find a disconcerting parallel early in the twenty-first century.

Polk was determined to defend and expand his executive powers against any congressional interference. He was also at times stubborn and narrow-minded. Historian Bernard DeVoto said of him that he was “pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains.” And apparently he counted anyone who disagreed with him about Mexico and California as primary among the spooks and villains.

Hmmm who else does this sound like maybe even someone who was president recently

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. The administration had crafted its rhetoric carefully, advertising the impending conflict as a defensive war, not as the war of conquest that it in fact would be.

Of all the many tips, encouragements, admonitions, and suggestions that Lansford Hastings dispensed in The Emigrants’ Guide to California and Oregon, the best of them had to do with timing one’s departure. On this he was both honest and correct when he said that the 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.

Broken clock, right once a day, etc etc

And above all they were fiercely self-reliant, unflinchingly independent. In the trying weeks and savage months ahead, though, they would find that one man’s freedoms could become another man’s fetters.

This book is full of lines that make me go “woahhhh dude” and this is one of them

Then she summed up her state of mind in words that would eventually grow monumentally ironic and chilling: “Indeed if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”

:-/

There was at least one dissenting opinion, but it was a woman’s and therefore not likely to carry much weight. Forty-four-year-old Tamzene Donner, George’s wife, was downcast and apprehensive. She could see nothing but folly in the notion of following a man they did not know over an unproven route. She could not shake her growing suspicion that Hastings might turn out to be, as she was later reported to have put it, merely another “selfish adventurer.”

In the first half of the century, depending partly on where they lived, and how well, between a fifth and a third of all children died before the age of ten.

On September 26 they reached the main fork of the Humboldt River. There they rejoined the established emigrant road, finally completing Hastings’s cutoff. It had taken them sixty-eight days to reach this spot after leaving the road at the Parting of the Ways on the Little Sandy. Some of those who had stayed on the older road had made it in as little as thirty-seven days. In the end, Hastings’s shortcut had added roughly a month to Sarah’s journey.

Modern disaster psychologists have found that bold, decisive leadership greatly improves any group’s ability to survive the early stages of an impending catastrophe. As floodwaters rise or a wildfire approaches, there generally is little time to waste building consensus, forging compromises, or worrying about other people’s feelings. Tough decisions have to be made; bold actions have to be taken before a dangerous situation can evolve into a desperate one. From all we know about him, Franklin Graves seems to have fit the profile of just such a leader.

Hunger is perhaps the strongest and most unyielding of human urges, according to Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History. Because it is so directly tied to our survival, it handily outcompetes most of our other emotions for our attention. It pesters us first, then nags us, and finally screams at us if we are unwilling or unable to satisfy its demands.

Our bodies require approximately two hundred grams of glucose per day to function normally, at least half of that fueling just one particularly vital organ, the brain.

In a study at the University of Minnesota in 1945, a group of volunteers, all young, healthy men, underwent a yearlong experiment during which they were subjected to severe caloric restrictions.

WHY WOULD YOU SUBJECT YOURSELF TO THAT

It is possible, under certain circumstances, to live for a very long time with very little food, or even with no food. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, and American Indians—just to name the most obvious examples—have all at various times in history embraced extended fasting as a means of attaining heightened levels of spirituality. Saints of various sorts have fasted for months. In the nineteenth century, so-called hunger artists often fasted for twenty, thirty, or in one case forty-four days without apparent permanent harm to themselves. In 1981 the IRA’s twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Sands survived 66 days on a hunger strike before he died. Another twenty-seven-year-old man in Scotland survived an astonishing 382 days on nothing more than water, potassium, and sodium supplements.

Paradoxically, though, you can starve to death in as little as two to three weeks. It all depends on the math.

Nutritionists typically use a formula known as the Harris-Benedict equation to figure out how many calories a subject needs to consume simply to maintain his or her current weight. The equation produces a number called the basal metabolic rate, or BMR. When converted from metric to English units of measure, it looks like this for women: BMR = 655 + (4.35 × weight in pounds) + (4.7 × height in inches)-(4.7 × age in years)

All their bodies could do in response was to quietly and efficiently begin to cannibalize themselves in order to provide energy to the brain and other vital organs. Sarah and Jay and their companions discovered that they were beginning to feel weak. They began to grow gaunt. Their eyes began to sink deeper into their faces. Their fingers grew bony. Ribs and other bones began to protrude in ways they had not previously. And as all these transformations took place, they began to peer into one another’s increasingly angular faces with a growing sense of alarm and incredulity.

This is horrifying take note Stephen King

No one would be turning around this time. There was no reason to come back without provisions, and plenty of reasons not to. Returning empty-handed would only mean starving and watching one’s family starve. They also knew that anyone who could not keep up would have to be left behind to die a cold and lonely death.

The packs contained blankets, a little coffee and sugar, some tobacco, and about eight pounds of dried beef for each of them.† This, they thought, if they rationed it carefully, would see them through for the six days that they calculated it would take them to make it through to Johnson’s Ranch in the western foothills. They believed that Johnson’s was thirty or forty miles to their southwest. In fact it was sixty-six as the crow flies, at least seventy-five by the route they would attempt.

Aside from the direct dangers posed by hyperthermia and hypothermia, Hackett’s study suggests that the temperature fluctuations that occur within the bodies of climbers place enormous physiological stresses on the body as it struggles mightily to return itself to the state of thermal homeostasis on which it depends for survival. This additional stress, added to all the other stresses of climbing—the thin air, the extreme exertion, the unrelenting need for concentration, the glare of the sun, the threat of frostbite, and so on—is sometimes what pushes climbers’ bodies over the edge, into a kind of death spiral.

Charles Stanton probably died psychologically before he died physiologically. 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. Whether to cling to that fragile dream, Parrado realized then and there, was up to him as it is up to all of us, moment by moment. Whether to embrace what we are all thrust into, squealing with astonishment and rage, or to fall back into the comfortable, dark, quiet realm of the insentient.

For weeks he had dwelled in despair, doing little to help himself or his family, until finally one day he sat down at a table in the tent, bowed his head upon his hands, and sat motionless until he died.

Mood

For the first time in days, they now believed they would live at least a few more days, but they also knew that for the rest of their lives they would bear a terrible awareness of what they had done here on this day. For three of them—Sarah, Mary Ann, and Sarah Foster—the psychic burden was all the more crushing for knowing that at one of the adjoining campfires someone was at that moment eating their father or brother.

Most people faced with starvation, most of the time, choose to die rather than resort to cannibalism. The prohibition against eating human flesh is as ancient and fundamental a taboo as can be found.

But there have also been large-scale examples of survival cannibalism, many of them in disturbingly recent times.

By as early as 1959, the famine was so widespread in some rural parts of China that peasants began to eat the corpses of their fellow villagers, particularly the corpses of children. When they ran out of corpses, some families took to starving their infant daughters and then exchanging the bodies with those of their neighbors’ daughters so that nobody would have to eat his or her own children. They made soup out of them.

They had been entirely without food for just six days at most. People have lived far longer than that without food, even in very cold environments. Despite the tremendous rate at which they were burning calories, they likely had considerable time to go before they actually starved, perhaps weeks. It may have been, for one thing, that they were at least partly mistaken as to what was killing them.

To some extent they believed that Stanton, Antonio, Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan, and Lemuel Murphy had died of hunger, when in fact they almost certainly had died primarily of hypothermia. As a consequence the survivors might well have thought that they themselves were starving to death—it certainly must have felt as if they were. Then, too, they had already broken through the psychological barrier that ordinarily prevents us from seeing food when we look at one another. When Patrick Dolan had drawn the fatal lot, they had all been given license for the first time to turn their hungry eyes on a fellow human being and see a potential meal.

Mostly, though, what allowed the men of the snowshoe party to pull out the knives and what allowed both the men and the women to eat was likely something beyond an instinct for self-preservation and something well short of madness. All of them—except possibly Luis and Salvador, about them we just don’t know—had someone back at the lake camp whom they loved, someone who was depending on them to get through and send help. Their own survival meant more to them than simply continuing to live. It meant hope for those they had left behind.

Romantic notions about the natural innocence of children began to clash with the harsh reality portrayed by Dickens and meld with Victorian sentimentality. In 1842, Massachusetts limited the workday of children under twelve to ten hours. Six years later, in 1848, the state of Pennsylvania passed the first minimum-age law, outlawing the employment of children under twelve in textile mills.

How generous and progressive of them

On February 18 the First Relief carefully descended the granite cliffs and crossed the frozen lake. Just before sunset they approached the woods where they had been told they would find the lake camp. The snow was, by their reckoning, about eighteen feet deep here, and they could see no sign of life. Daniel Rhoads described what happened next. 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 of 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 very much agitated and said, “are you men from California or do you come from heaven?”

One of the children, eight-year-old Nancy Graves, did not yet know that the flesh she had been eating was her mother’s—a revelation that when it came would so devastate her that it would lead to bouts of sudden, intermittent sobbing in her childhood and a sense of guilt from which she would never entirely recover.

Not all disaster survivors suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related syndromes, but large numbers do. Overall, 25 percent of people subjected to a traumatic event develop PTSD, but that number can more than double to 59 percent or higher among survivors of disasters.

Regardless of the necessity of having done so, they had violated a fundamental human taboo, and it was almost inevitable that they would experience significant amounts of guilt and its close cousin, shame. The two are not quite the same thing: Guilt revolves around feeling bad for what you have done; shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person because of what you have done. Guilt can actually be therapeutic, because inherent in the emotion is the idea that you can change your behavior and end the problem. Shame is a far more toxic emotion, because it implies that your character has been polluted by your actions.

For the most part, people were expected to keep their emotional problems to themselves. If Sarah suffered, she, like most of her fellow survivors, did so largely in silence and mostly unaware of why they were experiencing the problems they were.

“I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again,” encapsulating even in those few words two of the principal symptoms of PTSD—recurring recollections of the trauma and emotional numbness.

When his name was called, Stark stepped forward and said, “No, gentlemen. I will not abandon these people. I am here on a mission of mercy, and I will not half do the work. You can all go if you want to, but I shall stay by these people while they and I live.”

Hero doing hero things

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.

Overall, Donner Party men died at nearly twice the rate of women (56.6 percent of the males, 29.4 percent of the females). They died much sooner, too. Fourteen Donner Party males died before the first female did. And it was men in their prime years who died earliest and in the largest numbers.

Bale, oddly, christened the property with what turned out to be a strangely apt name for some of its subsequent residents, “Rancho Carne Humana”—Human Flesh Ranch.

…but why tho

On March 28, 1871, at the age of forty-six, lying at home in an old walnut bed with a high headboard and a wide footboard, Sarah died. Her heart gave out. Years later her daughter Alice remembered that her mother looked peaceful but old far beyond her years as she lay in her deathbed.

Hastings then served as a major in the Confederate army during the Civil War,

embittered by defeat but undiminished in his capacity for pursuing bad ideas,

Lol gottem

We all play on a field of chance every day of our lives.

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.

Much of the recent research into survivor psychology reveals that what people ordinarily do under extreme conditions is fairly predictable.