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

by Daniel James Brown

The emigrant generation of the 1840s has been endlessly depicted in film and television productions, almost always in highly stereotyped ways—a string of clichés about strong-jawed men circling the wagons to hold off Indian attacks and hard-edged women endlessly churning butter and peering out from under sunbonnets with eyes as cold and hard as river-worn stones. The emigrants of the 1840s deserve better. They were, on the whole, a remarkable people living in remarkable times. Just how remarkable they were has largely been camouflaged for us, not only by the stereotyping and the mythologizing but by the homespun ordinariness of their clothes, the commonplace nature of their language, the simple virtues they held dear, and the casual courage with which they confronted long odds and bitterly harsh realities. The men among them did, in fact, sometimes circle their wagons to defend against potential Indian attacks, though the attacks were anticipated far more often than they ever occurred. But the men also lay awake at night agonizing about what they had gotten their families into, schemed to take advantage of one another, sobbed under the stars when their children died, lusted after women half their ages. And the women did, of course, churn a great deal of butter, but they also studied botany, counseled troubled teenagers, yearned for love, struggled with domineering husbands, and made wild rollicking love deep in the recesses of their covered wagons. Like all people in all t...

In The Emigrants’ Guide, while he had made California out to be virtually a land of milk and honey, he had also sung the praises of Oregon, a destination that many of the emigrants felt was more easily and more safely reachable than California. He had written his paean to Oregon, however, before he had worked out his arrangement with Sutter. Emigrants who went to Oregon would not be interested in driving the Mexicans out of California, nor in purchasing lots in Suttersville. Hastings needed to divert them. Luckily, from his point of view, in The Emigrants’ Guide, he had inadvertently given the California-bound emigrants an extra incentive to head his way—a shortcut to California, a road that would shave several hundred miles off the trip. The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of St. Francisco, by the route just described. At the time he had written about it, the mention of the potential shortcut probably hadn’t meant much to Hastings.

Meek and his cutoff.

Meeks Crossing...film from the 2010s

They emblazoned the cotton with the words “California Republic.” Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power.

Death—especially before the Civil War—was an up-close and personal kind of thing in nineteenth-century America. It came visiting so frequently that no one could ignore it or hide from it. Every villager in the northern half of the country was familiar with the slow tolling of church bells, and many knew how to read in the rhythm of the bells a coded language announcing how old the victim was and of which gender. At any given time, almost any woman knew another who was dressed in formal mourning clothes, sometimes for months or years on end. Every child was familiar with the sight of somber funeral processions winding through the streets. And it was often the corpse of another child that he or she saw passing slowly by. 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.

even young women like Sarah often began to lose teeth in their early twenties, one reason for the stern, closed-mouth faces that look back at us from daguerreotypes taken in the 1840s.

They worked their way carefully and deliberately into the structure of each animal, probing with bloody, cold-numbed fingers for the openings in the joints where they could separate the parts with just a few cuts. Where they had to, they sawed through thick bones, but mostly the animals came apart easily under their expert hands. The women took the tails and got out hatchets and chopped them into short sections for making oxtail soup. Women and boys and girls stacked up the lean hindquarters and forequarters and sections of ribs and vertebrae with shreds of flesh still clinging to them, burying them in snowbanks for refrigeration. When they were done, the snow around all three cabins was crimson. But fresh snow was still falling steadily, and it soon erased every sign of the butchery. They wiped their knives clean and put them away for now, none of them yet knowing the terrible irony that lay latent in what had just unfolded here.

Snowbound, frightened, and half starved, the Curtises were in the process of cooking the last piece of the family dog in a Dutch oven when Reed and McCutchen appeared. The two men provided Mrs. Curtis with some flour, and she set about baking bread. Then all of them sat down to a meal of bread and dog, the latter of which, after some hesitation and considerable sniffing, McCutchen tasted gingerly and finally pronounced “very good dog.”

they had encountered ten feet of snow, much of it fluffy powder into which they promptly sank up to their thighs. With every new step, each of them had had to pull a boot free from the snow, lift a knee up to his or her chest, swing a leg forward, shift his or her weight to the suspended leg, plunge forward a half a yard, and then repeat the whole process over and over. Even at sea level, the effort would have exhausted anyone. Here, at almost six thousand feet, it left them gasping for breath with every few steps, their hearts pounding wildly in their chests. Before they had even gotten truly under way, the snow had defeated the strongest of them.

Silently and implacably, serious hunger began to work its way into each of the cabins at the lake that week. 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. Deprived of food, our brains conspire with our guts to make their mutual needs our foremost and most immediate concern. 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. When our blood-sugar levels begin to drop, our brains grow displeased—we get uncomfortable, we grow tired and irritable, we develop pounding headaches. Our stomachs also rumble in complaint. If they still find themselves empty after this complaining, they begin to produce the hunger hormone ghrelin and send it via the bloodstream to our lower brains, which promptly begin to shriek their own complaints all the more loudly. At this point we are going to eat, or try darned hard to eat. If for some reason we can’t eat, or can’t eat very much, a number of other physiological and psychological processes then begin to kick in.

By the time Sarah and her father had walked much of the way across the continent, they likely were far more fit than is now average and had acquired very high percentages of muscle mass. The greater the amount of muscle, the higher the caloric demands of the body. Second, the calculations don’t take into account the often bitterly cold environment in which Sarah, her father, and everyone in the Donner Party were operating. In those kinds of conditions, even lying in bed, the body requires far more calories than normal.

So whether the outside temperature is 110 degrees as we trek across the salt flats of Utah or 10 degrees as we sleep in the snow on Donner Pass, 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.*

As Sarah and Jay struggled up the face of what would eventually be called Donner Pass on December 17, 1846, they knew nothing of hypothermia or hyperthermia. But under all the layers of sweat-soaked wool in which they were swaddled, 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.

The robust young men who had wrangled cattle, cut brush, driven oxen, and rolled boulders out of the paths of wagons for the Donners and Reeds for months had begun to die, unable to subsist on a diet of roasted mice and strips of toasted buffalo robe.

It may have been, for one thing, that they were at least partly mistaken as to what was killing them. Their growing malnutrition was rapidly breaking down both their psychological defenses against madness and their physiological defenses against the cold, all of which must have contributed to an overwhelming sense of impending doom. 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.

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.