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

by Daniel James Brown

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.”

Bridger and Vasquez had run the trading post since 1843, but by the summer of 1846 they faced an uncertain future. With most of the emigrant traffic now taking the more northerly route from the Parting of the Ways to Fort Hall, there was little reason for their establishment to continue in business—unless Lansford Hastings’s cutoff, which began at their doorstep, should become the established route to California. If that were to happen, Fort Bridger would not only survive but flourish.

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.

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.

A Donner Party survivor later told J. Quinn Thornton, author of one account of the snowshoe expedition, that the men had been ready to give up well before the women. The deep stupor into which their calamities had plunged the most of them often changed to despair. Each seemed to see inevitable destruction, and expressed in moans, sighs, and tears the gloomy thoughts over which their minds were brooding. Of the women, though, the same survivor said, Most of them manifested a constancy and courage; a coolness, presence of mind, and patience. . . . The difficulties, dangers, and misfortunes which seemed frequently to prostrate the men, called forth the energies of the gentler sex and gave them a sublime elevation of character, which allowed them to abide the most withering blasts of adversity with unshaken firmness.

When she first looked into the survivors’ eyes, Gregson was startled by what she saw looking back at her, and she later marveled at it. I shall never forget the looks of those people, for the most part of them was crazy & their eyes danced & sparkled in their heads like stars.

Margret Reed felt the same way. With no remaining resources of her own, reduced to eating the Breens’ cast-off bones, she was going, and so were all her children, even three-year-old Thomas. As long as they could walk, they were going to get out of there, or die trying.

They had not gone far, though, before three-year-old Thomas Reed and eight-year-old Patty Reed gave out. Tucker and Aquilla Glover told Margret Reed the two children would have to go back to the cabins. Months later Virginia Reed described the scene in her letter to her cousin Mary. O Mary that was the hades thing yet to come on and leiv them thar. [We] did not now but what thay would starve to Death. Martha [Patty] said, well ma if you never see me again do the best you can. the men said thay could hardly stand it. it maid them all cry.

Six-year-old James Reed Jr. was up to his waist in the snow, but somehow he kept going, clambering over ice-slick boulders and wading through deep drifts of powder. With every step, he told his sister Virginia resolutely, he was “getting nigher Pa and somthing to eat.”

John Denton began to fall behind. Reason Tucker held back, waiting for him, but the young Englishman had grown weak and snow-blind, and it was clear that he could not continue. The others could not wait for him. Tucker built a platform of pine saplings and kindled a fire on it for him. He sat the young man down, took an expensive coverlet from his own backpack, and wrapped him in it. Tucker assured him that help would arrive soon, though both men must have known that there was little prospect of that.

When it was time to push on in the morning, Philippine Keseberg, who had seen her only other child buried in the snow back at the lake camp, would not part with her daughter’s body. She sat clutching Ada to her breast, would not relinquish her, would not move on without her. Finally, as most of the others began to trudge away, Tucker sat down with her: “I told her to give me the child and her to go on. After she was out of sight, Rhoads and myself buried the child in the snow best we could. Her sperit went to heaven her body to the wolves.”

Reed, by now, had grown desperately concerned about the lives of his own two children as well as all the others in his charge. He later remembered that he watched helplessly as “the pitiless snow beat fiercely against their thinly clad and weak forms; their blood grew chill in their veins, and death, with glaring eyes, stared them in the face.”

When a horrified Tamzene Donner heard that Cady was about to abandon her and the rest of the Donner family, she struck a desperate deal with the two of them—for a good sum of gold, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they agreed to take her three youngest daughters over the mountains. Once again she stood outside her tent and wept as she watched men lead her children off through the snow, the last of them this time—six-year-old Frances, four-year-old Georgia, and three-year-old Eliza. When Cady and Stone arrived at the lake camp, they deposited the three girls in the cold, dank, recesses of the Murphy cabin.

All except for twenty-year-old John Stark were for leaving the Breens. 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.”