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

by Daniel James Brown

Each time, though, on the following morning another family faced the brutal necessity of turning their backs and walking away, leaving the body of a loved one behind in a lonely grave in a desolate landscape to which they knew they would never return.

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.”

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.

BMR = 655 + (4.35 × weight in pounds) + (4.7 × height in inches)-(4.7 × age in years)

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.

They spent much of the remainder of the day hunting for the hatchet, their snowshoes, and their packs, all of which had disappeared under the snow. As they tried to gather wood without the hatchet, someone broke a dried pine branch from a tree, and a mouse ran out and scurried away. They all chased it, shouting and thrashing through the soft snow in pursuit of it. Thirteen-year-old Lemuel Murphy, who was growing increasingly demented, seized the mouse, thrust it into his mouth, and ate it alive.

Under the blankets, Lemuel Murphy finally quieted down. His sister, sobbing, held his head in her lap until, at about 2:00 A.M., he ceased breathing. Then they rolled his body out into the moonlit snow and closed the circle tighter, down to ten now. The next day they set about the task of butchering meat.

Now that they had crossed the line, their hunger put itself foremost in their thoughts. So at some point shortly after they had taken these organs from the bodies, they stopped and sat down to their first unthinkable meal. They put the meat on sharpened stakes and held it out over glowing coals, roasting it until they judged it done, or done enough. The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat, and, unbidden, it stimulates the appetite mightily, activating the salivary glands, awakening the gut, grabbing the attention of the brain. So when it had cooled enough that it did not burn their lips, they sat down in the snow, weeping, their eyes averted from one another’s faces, and took their first few tentative bites. Then they ate.

Before long she came across William and Sarah Foster and Mary Ann, who were backtracking, looking for her and Jay. When Sarah told them that Jay was dead, the Fosters wasted no time. They asked Sarah point-blank if they might eat him. Sarah must, by now, have been beyond any expectation of sympathy from her companions. She must in fact have been beyond any expectation of any sort of mercy from the indifferent Fates. She looked at the Fosters and said simply, “You cannot hurt him now,” and continued up the trail with Mary Ann. The Fosters went on to where Jay’s body lay and began to butcher it, severing his legs and arms from his trunk, packing onto their backs as many pieces of him as they could carry.

Late that night, moving through dark oak woods, Sarah and Mary Ann finally approached the Ritchies’ makeshift cabin by the Bear River. What they remembered for the rest of their lives was not the cabin itself but rather the warm, yellow lamplight that shone out through loose chinking—light coming to them through the black night as if miraculously, beckoning them to come back in out of the cold, to the hearth of humanity.

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.

At the Murphy cabin that night, a third mother, Levinah Murphy, with no resources to fight over, watched in despair as her seventeen-year-old son, John Landrum, ceased his delirious ranting, took a few last rattling breaths, and died. 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.

The next day Eddy, still too weak to once again assault the high country, turned back with the pack animals. He did not yet know it, but both his one-year-old daughter, Margaret, and his beloved wife, Eleanor, were already dead, their bodies lying in the snow outside the cabins at the lake camp. The rate of dying at the lake was accelerating rapidly now. Since February 1, in addition to Margaret and Eleanor Eddy, Amanda McCutchen’s one-year-old daughter, Harriet, and Augustus Spitzer and Milt Elliott had all died.

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?”

That is why in 1938, less than a hundred years after the Second Relief camped here, Walt Disney chose it as the site for what is now the thirty-seven-hundred-acre Sugar Bowl Ski Resort.

Psychiatric researchers have only recently begun to understand that traumatic stress produces not just psychological changes but physical changes in the body, particularly in the brain. The hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for regulating memories and putting information into context—shrinks by as much as 8 percent, some of its cells killed by an excess of stress hormones such as cortisol. Under stress the amygdala—an inch-long, almond-shaped structure responsible for regulating emotions—becomes overactive, lighting up with activity like a pinball machine. The levels of neurotransmitters that regulate nerve impulses in the brain become unbalanced: Serotonin levels plunge; norepinephrine levels soar.

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.

O Mary I have not wrote you half the truble [we have had] but I have Wrote you anuf to let you [k]now what truble is. . . . Don’t let this letter dishaten anybody never take no cutoffs and hury along as fast as you can.

Fifteen-year-old Mary Murphy spoke for many of those who had been orphaned by the ordeal when she wrote that same month, i hope i shall not live long for i am tired of this troublesome world and i want to go to my mother.

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.

Led into the wilderness by a lie, led astray at times by their own dreams and ambitions, dazzled by the glare of sun off salt, and confounded by snowstorms, they had found themselves blundering ever more blindly through terra incognita as they moved west.

But I think what Sarah’s story tells us is that there were in fact heroes in the Donner Party, and that heroes are sometimes the most ordinary-seeming people. It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars.