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

by Daniel James Brown

Mud was their constant companion—it squelched under the heavy feet of the oxen, it plastered the withers of their saddle horses, it flew out from under the turning wagon wheels, it splattered their clothes and their hair and their faces. They scraped mud from their boots, they daubed it from their eyes, they combed it out of their hair, they dug it out from under their fingernails, they tasted it in their food, and they cursed it all the while.

For many of the emigrants, St. Joe was a last chance to see a doctor before leaving the United States behind, a vitally important consideration for people who soon might find themselves a thousand miles from the nearest doctor. According to the local “card of rates” agreed upon by the physicians of St. Joe the previous year, one could have an abscess opened for fifty cents. For a dollar one could obtain medical advice or receive an enema. A troublesome tooth could be extracted for fifty cents, troublesome toes or fingers amputated for five dollars each, arms for ten dollars, legs for twenty. If an emigrant woman were to find herself in a delicate condition, she might choose to linger in St. Joe long enough to have her baby professionally delivered for five dollars, but there would be no volume discounts—twins would set her back ten.

None of this, of course, even begins to touch the particular trauma that Sarah, Mary Ann, and Nancy Graves had suffered, along with a number of other Donner Party survivors—that of having eaten and seen eaten the flesh of their companions. 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. Deep-seated shame typically leads to a variety of anger-related emotional problems, particularly hostility and aggression.