1847

 

Lincoln without his beard.

January 1-January 17: The survivors of the Forlorn Hope [see: 1846] continue to stumble forward. Snow has crusted. Snowshoes are not always necessary, and gradually, they work their way down to where bare patches of ground can be seen. The historian, Bernard DeVoto writes: 

“gradually” is a word: the meaning is men and women who are all but dead falling forward step by step through a white desolation … five or six miles a day, a mile or two when the flame burned weaker. Fosdick was almost dead. The dried flesh of their companions was gone. Getting down to country where bare ground was common enough to justify it, they made another meal: they cooked and ate the rawhide of their snowshoes. After that there was nothing to eat. Everyone but Eddy wanted to kill the two Indians. Eddy would not; he told the Indians what was being considered and they silently disappeared. 

 

When the others faltered, Eddy and Mary Graves pushed on. They found signs in the snow where a deer had spent a night in a sheltered spot. They waited – and prayed it would return. Finally, they saw the creature. Eddy was too weak to raise his rifle and aim in normal fashion. So he used a “swinging snapshot,” wounded the animal, then crawled forward, and cut its throat. That night Eddy and Graves slept soundly, within gunshot of the others. 

Farthest behind, Jay Fosdick heard them fire shots of encouragement. If he could get to them, he told his mother, he would live. 

But he died and Sarah wrapped his body in their remaining blanket and laid down beside him to die. She did not die but woke again in the morning and started out alone, only to meet some of the others who were coming back to find the Fosdick corpses – to get meat. Specifically, “with instruction to get Mrs. Fosdick’s heart.” They got Jay’s heart instead and Sarah saw it roasted on a stick. Eddy called the survivors in, and they spent the day drying as much venison and human flesh as they had not eaten. (5/409)

 

Only two men were left. William Foster was breaking down. He suggested killing Mrs. McCuthen, saying she was a delaying the others. Eddy was furious. He tested out a sturdy club, tossed it to Foster, and went after him with a knife. The four women wailed and stopped the fight. Eddy promised to kill Foster if he harmed any of the women. They stumbled upon the Indians’ bodies lying in the snow, and Foster butchered them, and the survivors ate again. Eddy ate only grass. The survivors split into two groups. 

They often saw deer, some at close range, but Eddy could not raise the rifle for a shot. They rested every quarter of a mile, Eddy had to use two hands to climb over a log, the smallest hummock threw them, and the women would fall and weep like infants and then rise and totter along again.

 

They came upon a village of Diggers, who wailed to see these specters. They gave them acorns to eat. Eddy could not get them down. A chief gave him a handful of pine nuts, on January 17, and he revived. They set out again, but after a mile, everyone gave up. 

“Eddy refused to die,” DeVoto says. Two of the Diggers helped him stagger for six more miles, until finally, they reached a shack near Johnson’s ranch. Young Harriet Ritchie came to the door. Eddy asked for bread and she burst into tears. The Forlorn Hope had reached safety after 33 days. 

They had set out with six days of food, two mouthfuls per day. (5/411)

 

* 

February 4: The Californians begin organizing a rescue effort to save the trapped Donner Party. Fourteen men set out. William Eddy had had less than three weeks to recover. Caleb Greenwood was 83. He and John Turner, another mountain man, recalled one eyewitness, “could do all the swearing for our army in Mexico and then have a surplus.” The men who offered to help knew they would be risking the same fate they wanted to save the Donners from. 

A base camp was set up high in the mountains. From there Eddy and another man were sent back with the horses. Two volunteers would guard the camp. The remaining ten would travel on foot, carrying packs weighing as much as seventy-five pounds. In the thin air and the high peaks, three gave out, and could go no farther. 

Seven remained, plowing through the deep snow, mile after mile, single file, taking turns breaking a path. Of the remaining members of what was called the “First Relief,” one contemporary wrote: “I will again give you a list of their names, as I think they ought to be recorded in letters of gold.” They were: Aquilla Glover, Riley Septimus Mootrey, the newlywed [see: 1846], Reasin Tucker, known as “Dan,” and two sets of brothers, Sels and Ned Coffeemeyer, two ex-sailors, and John and Daniel Rhoades. (5/414)

 

* 

“Well Mother, if you never see me again, do the best you can.” 

February 18: The rescuers go up and over the divide and head down. It took all day to reach the lakeside huts, where half of the survivors were camped.   

They could see no smoke, they could not even see the huts, since they were buried deep, till they came right up to them at sunset. They shouted, wondering if anyone were still alive, and something like a woman came up out of a hole in the snow. (It was Mrs. Breen, who had started to take Mrs. Reed outside to whisper her belief that Virginia Reed was dying.) The others crawled up the ramp of frozen snow to mew at the seven men from beyond the mountains…They looked like mummies, their wailing was cracked and tiny, their cries broke into lunatic talk. Around them at the top of the ramp, in the sunset, lay the bodies of those who have died since the last storm, dragged so far and left uncovered.

 

Life in those buried huts since December 16, two months before, when the Forlorn Hope departed, is hardly to be understood. Over them were the storms and the sunny, bitter days and the sunny, gentle days. Around them was phantasm, whose figures were both real and unreal. Their minds peeled down to anger and dread out of which bubbled the primitive delirium for which physicians to the diseased soul probe. (5/414-415)

 

Margaret Reed had meanwhile tried to lead an escape party. They were gone five days, but had to turn back. Virginia Reed later admitted, “I could get along very well while I thought we were going ahead, but as soon as we had to turn back I could hardly walk.” 

At Alder Creek, only one hide remained to be boiled, and eleven survivors. Tamsen Donner told rescuers that if they did not get food soon they would eat what they so far had refused. 

The rescuers gathered up 23 people, with hopes of leading them back over the mountains. It quickly became clear that Tommy Reed, three, and Patty Reed, eight, were too weak to go, and they had to be sent back. Patty was calm. “Well, Mother,” she said, “if you never see me again, do the best you can.” 

“The men said they could hardly stand it: it made them cry,” Virginia Reed wrote later. Glover swore an oath to Mrs. Reed that he would return and save her children. 

Breen was keeping a diary. DeVoto provides brief snippets which tell a tale of horror: 

It details the weather and the deaths, not much language spent on suffering or despair. The great winds, the great snows, how the hides and bones were holding out, sometimes a prayer remembered from the [Catholic] Mass or the litany, and who died – that is what Patrick Breen put down. How the Graveses confiscated the hides that Margaret Reed had bought with promises, how Milt Elliott made good his demand that Margaret be given a hide – the Keseberg baby died last night – “Eddy’s child died last night,” February 5, with Eddy climbing toward Bear Valley in the rain to save little Margaret’s life. Then Mrs. Eddy is growing weaker – Spitzer dies – Mrs. Eddy dies – Keseberg never gets up from bed (Breen had his suspicions of Keseberg and listed the valuables he hoarded, which might not have been his at first) – “Milt Elliott died last night at Murphy’s shanty,” the last friend of the Reed family gone – John Denton, the English gunsmith, growing weaker – Mrs. Graves takes back the hide that Milt had got for Mrs. Reed (title to it really vested in John Augustus Sutter) – “wind SE all in good health Thanks be to almighty God Amen” – and the First Relief arrives. (5/416)

 

The snow was as deep as the flat base of the sculpture. 
(Author's photo - from an old slide.)

Mootrey and Glover took the two Reed children back to the camp – but the Breens refused to take then in – until the two rescuers made detailed promises of reward – and, at last, added threats. 

The rest went ahead. Denton failed on the trail – and they wrapped him in a blanket, built a fire, and hoped against hope he might revive and follow. They reached a spot where they had cached food – found it eaten by martens – sent Mootrey and Coffeemeyer [DeVoto fails to specify which brother], the two strongest ahead. Glover and Dan Rhoads were exhausted, and had to go with them. On the evening of the fifth day, Mootrey and Coffeemeyer return with two packs retrieved from another cache at Bear Valley. But they also had to announce that they had not met any other relief parties where they had hoped. In the morning they started out again. “They must be seen in a line stretching westward below the peaks,” DeVoto writes, “among the evergreens, in the snow and silence of the heights.” 

Fortunately, the Second Relief had been coming on and met the First, with its survivors – after they came close to running out of food themselves. James Frazier Reed was leading the second rescue party. 

He wrote: 

Left camp on a fine, hard snow, and proceeded about four miles, when we met the poor, unfortunate starved people. As I met them scattered along the trail, I distributed some bread that I had baked last night. I gave in small quantities to each. Here I met my wife and two of my little children. Two of my children are still in the mountains. I cannot describe the death-like look all these people had. “Bread!” “Bread!” “Bread!” “Bread!” was the begging cry of every child and grown person. I gave all I had to give them and set out for the scene of desolation at the lake. I’m now camped within twenty-five miles of the place, which I hope to reach by traveling tonight and tomorrow.

 

His wife fainted when she heard a call that her husband was near; but Virginia ran to him, fell, and ran again over the crusted snow, finally tumbling into his arms. Soon after, the survivors reached a supply camp – as Californians continued to organize help. One of the rescuers asked Virginia to marry him. She was not yet 14. Three months later, she wrote a cousin in Springfield, Illinois, “Tell the girls that this is the greatest place for marrying they ever saw and that they must come to California if they want to marry.” She stood at the altar herself, before the year was out (5/418-419).

 

* 

“The will of the individual soldier to stand his ground.” 

February 22-23: Santa Anna, with 18,000 men, attacks Zachary Taylor’s army of 5,000 at Buena Vista, in a narrow valley at the foot of the mountains. 

McMaster notes that a son of Henry Clay died in the fight and Jefferson Davis was wounded. Better for two countries, the United States, and the Confederate States of America, had the latter been killed. (97/321) 

Bernard DeVoto describes the fight: 

Santa Anna had worked a prodigy: he had succeeded in raising a large army from a nation that was half in revolt against him, he had armed and equipped it, and had made it a fine fighting force. It was a good army, it fought with sustained fury, it came exceedingly close to winning the two-day battle, and it might well have won it if Santa Anna’s own courage had lasted long enough to send it into action on the third day. At the end of that day the Americans had broken every assault but had been pushed back, were disorganized, and had let the Mexicans work round their flanks within striking distance of their rear. However, the heroic defense, though it had not broken the spirit of the Mexican army, had broken Santa Anna’s nerve. On the morning of the third day, instead of attacking again, he was already in retreat. The retreat became a panic, the army melted away, and it was only by what amounted to another miracle that he raised an army to oppose [Winfield] Scott.

 

For the Americans it was a desperately near thing. It turned out a victory after all, a victory won by [Gen. Zachary] Taylor’s subordinates and the courage of the private soldier. Everyone who has ever written about it has paid tribute to Taylor, sitting on his white horse, absolutely without fear or even concern, inspiring a whole army by his coolness, and giving history and the Presidential campaign of ’48 a tagline, “a little more of the grape, Captain Bragg.” But it was Captain Bragg and the other offices of artillery (T.W. Sherman, George Thomas, John Reynolds), it was Jefferson Davis and the First Mississippi Rifles, above all it was anonymous platoons, who won the battle. The will of the individual soldier to stand his ground under fire and cavalry charge, to take enormous losses without fleeing, to go on shooting long after military logic would have had him running to the rear – that was what counted when the balance hung at dead center. … The army was shot to pieces in two days of murderous fighting that was frequently hand-to-hand, but it was still full of fight – and it held the field. Thus ended the military career of Zachary Taylor. His former son-in-law had won the election for him. (5/470-471)

 

Santa Anna had recently returned from exile, on a promise to drive American forces from Mexican soil. According to DeVoto, “his one valuable characteristic” was great energy, and he had set about successfully transforming a “pressed soldiery from a mob to an army.” (5/280)

* 

February 27: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow completes his first draft of the poem, “Evangeline.” It will be published in November, and help make him famous. 

After the death of his first wife, Longfellow is distraught. In 1836, however, while traveling in Switzerland, he meets Fanny Appleton, 18, the daughter of a Boston textile magnate. 

As James Marcus writes in a book review for The New Yorker, “Brilliant, beautiful, as book-besotted as her future husband, she was clearly hard to resist.” 

What Fanny sought in a suitor … was “intellectual engagement above all else.” She had already batted away numerous candidates, and when she first encountered Longfellow, in Interlaken, Switzerland, in the summer of 1836, he did not strike her as a potential soul mate. “Mr L. very inquisitive,” she wrote in her diary one night, sounding a little fatigued. She seems to have found him a harmless nerd, whose idea of a good time was to read aloud from his own journals or to translate German ballads on the fly (with Fanny supplying some of the best lines).

 

When Longfellow left, in August, to take up his Harvard appointment, Fanny seemed almost surprised by her sense of loss. But he was captivated by her. After she returned to America with her family, in 1837, he bombarded her with notes, books, articles, and a pair of castanets – this last gift ushering in a long period of silence. The strange fact is that Fanny kept Longfellow waiting for seven years. He suffered bouts of depression, informing one friend that “a leaden melancholy hangs over me: – and from this I pass at times into feverish excitement, bordering on madness.” He took the bold step of publishing a novel, “Hyperion,” whose young lovers were plainly patterned on himself and Fanny, and made sure that she got a copy. Yet even this four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page billet-doux failed to move her. (In a letter to a friend, she dismissed it as “desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the Author’s mind.”) 

 

In 1843, however, Fanny and Henry crossed paths again at a party, and soon decided to marry. Longfellow later described this new beginning as his “Vita Nuova of happiness.” 

He began working on his poetry, especially longer pieces. “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie” was published in November. It made Longfellow a national celebrity. “He was henceforth not merely a poet but a creator of American mythology – which Americans, in what many still regarded as a history-starved wilderness, bought by the cartload,” Marcus writes. “‘Evangeline’ went through six printings in a matter of months.” 

He was now widely acclaimed: “I read your poems over and over,” Nathaniel Hawthorne assured his old Bowdoin classmate. “Nothing equal to some of them was ever written in this world.” John Greenleaf Whittier also praised “Evangeline,” writing: “Eureka! – Here, then, we have it at last! An American poem, with the lack of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.” Even Walt Whitman declared that Longfellow’s “influence is like good drink or air. He is not tepid either, but always vital with flavor, motion, grace.” 

What, exactly, were his peers responding to? “Evangeline” is a good place to start. The poem is a verse narrative – a romance, really – built on a factual foundation: Britain’s expulsion of the Acadians from what are now the Canadian Maritime Provinces between 1755 and 1763. This was essentially an act of ethnic cleansing, and Longfellow is alert to the tragedy of the Acadian exile. But the engine of the poem is Evangeline’s search for her lover, Gabriel, dragged away by the British on a ship and dumped somewhere in the American outback. Her odyssey plays to Longfellow’s strengths as a pastoralist, on display in the famous first lines:

 

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and

the hemlocks,

 

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct

in the twilight,

 

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and

prophetic . . . 

 

Marcus also notes that the poet could produce more than romantic tales, including “a memorable couplet about an epidemic in Philadelphia.” 

“So death flooded life, and, o’erflowing its natural margin, 

Spread to a brackish lake, the silver stream of existence.”  

* 

February 28: Mexican forces defending Chihuahua, 4,000 strong (although about a thousand are armed with machetes) are in for a shock. This army did not have anyone like Santa Anna to drill it 

and he was the only one who could make marksmen out of peaceable, oppressed people not used to bearing arms. Its general was a trained engineer but neither he, his soldiers, nor the supporting population had acquired any respect for their enemy. Throughout the war Mexican armies were always being half paralyzed at the beginning of an action by the discovery that the cowardly gringos would fight. As scouts reported the approach of [General Alexander] Doniphan’s command, an exhilaration seized Chihuahua. Battle rhetoric in newspapers, broadsides, and the sermons of priests promised everyone an overwhelming victory. About a thousand people went out to make a bleachers at the expected battleground, and the army took with it a thousand prepared ropes. They would make a coffle in which to lead the captured Americans to Mexico City. (5/396-397)

 

Doniphan’s command baffled the enemy by sidestepping a strong line of fortifications they had built. Then the Americans used six small cannon they had carried along for hundreds of miles to outrange and outshoot the Mexican forces. “They broke the Mexican lancers, battered in the redoubts, and shot concentrations of infantry to pieces.” 

By comparison, 

The Mexican [artillery] pieces were old, their powder was bad. The solid shot they fired came up visibly, bounding and ricocheting. The farm boys [with Doniphan] watched them come, yelled their appreciation of the show, made bets with one another, and dodged so successfully that the only casualties were horses.

 

DeVoto continues: “The Missourians were shooting in earnest but the truth is that the Mexicans, who had had no practice with arms and had been battered by artillery, mostly contented themselves with hoisting their pieces over the parapets and discharging them at the horizon.” 

A charge of American cavalry, and artillery fire at close range, broke Mexican lines – with some soldiers fleeing all the way back to Chihuahua, fifteen miles away. American losses in the battle were two killed, seven wounded. Enemy losses totaled 300 dead, at least that many wounded, 40 taken prisoner. (5/398-399) 

The next day, American forces occupied the city. 

A private in Doniphan’s army summed it up: “We rode through the principal streets and public square, and on a rocky hill on the south side of the city fired a national salute in honor of the conquest, stole wood enough to get supper, and went to bed as usual among the rocks.” (5/400) 

Doniphan’s thousand men had marched 3,500 miles in just over a year. “They were heroes in their home town, the newspapers printed their adorned stories, the ecstasy lasted for a while. Then they were just farmers again.” (5/406)

 

* 

“The final catastrophe of the Donner party.” 

March 1-March 7: The Second Relief makes it to the lake cabins. James Reed finds Patty and Tommy Reed still alive, and Patty is given the task of giving one biscuit to every survivor. At the Murphy cabin one of the rescuers sets to work, washing the children’s clothes. Little James Eddy and George Foster had not been able to leave their beds for two weeks. Everyone had lice. It was only nine days since the First Relief came and went, but the living had reached the extremity. Milt Elliott’s body lay outside – he had been dismembered and partially eaten. Reed and McCuthen helped bathe Keseberg, who was disabled. (His wife and daughter, Ada, had been taken out with the first rescue team.) 

Hiram Miller, a hero on the Second Relief, had been a driver for George Donner as far as Independence Rock, but then rode ahead, reaching California safely. 

At Alder Creek, it was even worse. Tamsen had had to ask Jacob Donner’s wife Elizabeth for food – and was sent Jacob’s leg. The rescuers found Jacob’s children “sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half roasted liver and heart of the father, unconscious of the approach of the men, of whom they took not the slightest notice even after they came up.” Elizabeth Donner had not eaten and was near death. George Donner was dying, but Tamsen refused to leave his side. 

The Second Relief took out seventeen more survivors – under the assumption that Passed Midshipmen Selim Woodworth, who had the authority and responsibility on the California side of the mountains to aid rescue in any way he could was coming on with the biggest party and plenty of supplies. They expected him to arrive any day, perhaps tomorrow. DeVoto explains: 

Woodworth was not coming; he never came. He was taking his comfort in camp and nourishing what, compared with the courage of the others, can only be called an ignominious cowardice. So the return of the Second Relief, which should have been the most successful, constitutes the final catastrophe of the Donner party.

 

 The rescuers did not tell the survivors that many of their friends and family, thought safe, had already died. Mrs. Graves was bringing the violin of her dead son-in-law along, thinking he could soon play. Patrick Breen played on it for hours, the first two nights out, believing he and the others were at last safe. Then on March 6, another blizzard caught them. Reed writes in his diary: 

The men up nearly all night making fires. Some of the men begin praying. Several of them became blind. I could not see the light of the fire blazing before me nor tell when it was burning. … The snow blows so thick and fast that we cannot see twenty feet looking against the wind. I dread the coming night. Three of my men only able to get wood. “Hungry,” “Hungry,” is the cry with the children and nothing to give them. “Freezing!” is the cry of the mothers who have nothing for their little, starving, freezing children. Night closing fast and with it the hurricane increases. (5/423)

 

For two days and three nights, the storm buffeted them all. Isaac Donner died. He was only five.

 

* 

March 8: Four of the rescuers take four of the children and start ahead. They cut wood enough for a fire to help the eleven who remain behind. Hiram Miller is carrying Tommy Reed. Patty Reed seems to be dying, but her father “had saved about a teaspoonful of crumbs in the thumb of his mitten. He gave it to her, he warmed her with his own body, and the child came back. Her heart rose too: ‘God has not brought us so far to let us perish now,’ she told them.” 

They reached the Yuba River and made camp. Cady and Stone caught up with them. They had no one with them – but did have a pack of  table silver, silk dresses, and other valuables that had been the Donners’. Tamsen had made up the bundle – worth something to start a new life in California, and offered the pair $500 to take her three children with them. She washed and combed Frances, George and Eliza, and dressed them in the warmest clothes. They got as far as the lake cabins. Stone and Cady left the children there. They went on – were driven back by a storm. 

In the Murphy cabin, Keseberg was wild and hideous. A child cried out for bread and Eliza Donner heard a man’s voice, Keseberg’s, “Be quiet, you crying children, or I’ll shoot you.” Once she woke to find six-year-old Frances – Eliza was not yet four – forbidding Keseberg to pick her up, screaming he wanted to kill her.” The men of the Second Relief were also done in – when Eddy and Foster met them coming down – after shaming Woodworth to advance. Woodworth’s band could see how beat everyone was, and most of his men hesitated to go forward. Eddy and Foster pleaded for help. John Starks, who had just come up, said he’d go. Hiram Miller, just down with Reed, said he’d reverse course. Reed suggested they all retreat to Woodworth’s luxurious camp in Bear Valley, and there promised high pay, until a few others agreed. 

Stone would also go back, redeeming himself, after the fact.

 

* 

President Polk worries about Whig generals. 

March 9: General Winfield Scott lands his forces at Vera Cruz, Mexico. His plan is to head directly for Mexico City, advancing through enemy territory, and not worry about being cut off. According to DeVoto, President Polk’s main concern, with the army, was that Whig generals like Zachary Taylor kept winning battles. He began to interfere with Taylor, but this allowed Scott to seize the moment. 

There was one man in the United States capable of fighting the war. If he had been allowed to fight it from the beginning, no such elaborate effort would have been required, for he would have destroyed the Mexican armies and occupied a paralyzing part of Mexico before the volunteer enlistments had expired. Winfield Scott was the last of the American equites [a higher class of Roman citizens who served in the cavalry], a relic from an age of nobler sentiments and grander attitudes. His egoism was colossal, his vanity was monstrous. At a time when all public men were tainted with literary exhibitionism, he wrote the most fatal letters. His intrigues vindicated the common conception of military operations as a department of political opportunity. But he was a great soldier. The campaign he was permitted to make was brilliant and victorious. He won the war.

 

Polk could not measure up to the needs of public leadership in wartime. He felt that the greatest of the burdens he was called upon to bear was the necessity of fighting a war with Whig generals. (5/200)

 

Later, Devoto writes, the president “tried to have Congress revive the rank of lieutenant general, so that he could put [Sen. Thomas Hart] Benton in charge of the war. Benton’s ignorance of war was absolute, but that was rather a virtue than a defect in Polk’s eyes...”  (5/469) 

Stone would also go back, redeeming himself, after the fact.

 

* 

President Polk worries about Whig generals. 

March 9: General Winfield Scott lands his forces at Vera Cruz, Mexico. His plan is to head directly for Mexico City, advancing through enemy territory, and not worry about being cut off. According to DeVoto, President Polk’s main concern, with the army, was that Whig generals like Zachary Taylor kept winning battles. He began to interfere with Taylor, but this allowed Scott to seize the moment. 

There was one man in the United States capable of fighting the war. If he had been allowed to fight it from the beginning, no such elaborate effort would have been required, for he would have destroyed the Mexican armies and occupied a paralyzing part of Mexico before the volunteer enlistments had expired. Winfield Scott was the last of the American equites [a higher class of Roman citizens who served in the cavalry], a relic from an age of nobler sentiments and grander attitudes. His egoism was colossal, his vanity was monstrous. At a time when all public men were tainted with literary exhibitionism, he wrote the most fatal letters. His intrigues vindicated the common conception of military operations as a department of political opportunity. But he was a great soldier. The campaign he was permitted to make was brilliant and victorious. He won the war.

 

Polk could not measure up to the needs of public leadership in wartime. He felt that the greatest of the burdens he was called upon to bear was the necessity of fighting a war with Whig generals. (5/200)

 

Later, Devoto writes, the president “tried to have Congress revive the rank of lieutenant general, so that he could put [Sen. Thomas Hart] Benton in charge of the war. Benton’s ignorance of war was absolute, but that was rather a virtue than a defect in Polk’s eyes...”  (5/469)

Scott - but in 1860.

 

* 

Commenting on the reliability of militia soldiers, Van Loon notes, 

As for the Mexican war, seven out of eleven of General Scott’s militia regiments had informed their commander-in-chief that they were “one year men,” that they had not enlisted for “the duration of the war” and had left their chief when he was within four days’ distance of Mexico City and had thereby delayed the capture of that important stronghold for almost a year. (124/384)

 

* 

A promise of a little sugar broken. 

March 11: The Third Relief finally gets going. Patty has revealed a bundle of treasures at Woodworth’s camp – having feared rescuers, anxious to get rid of any unnecessary weight, would make her throw it away. 

There was a tiny glass saltcellar, one of those jewels that are precious to children. There was a small wooden doll with black hair and black eyes. And there was a lock of gray hair, her grandmother’s hair. When Mrs. Keyes had died, way back at the Big Blue, Patty herself had snipped that lock before they buried Grandmother. (5/425)

 

Now the rescuers found – in the group Reed had left behind in the snow (their fire had sunk the full 25 feet into the drift, and now burned on bare ground) – that Franklin Graves, five, had died, as had his mother. Elizabeth Graves, one, “sat at her side…sobbing and crying.” Her corpse had also been cannibalized. Starks refused to leave any of these people behind and  “carried, jollied, bullied, bribed, and promised his flock through three and a half days – one of the biggest achievements of the whole story.” Everyone got down to safety in the end, and up came Eddy and Foster – and undaunted Glover, Coffeemeyer [again, DeVoto fails to specify which brother], and Mootry. When Eddy and Foster reached the huts at the lake, Mrs. Murphy, nearly dead, told them George Foster and James Eddy had not survived. 

The terrified Donner children thought then, and thought throughout their lives, that Keseberg, now a mere sac of bestiality, had killed little George Foster. They were probably right. Whether they were or not, Keseberg could stand there in the hut and remark to Eddy and Foster that he had eaten their sons. (5/427)

 

Simon Murphy was still alive, and his mother, the three Donner girls, and Tamsen, although she was in a daze. She had come from Alder Creek, hoping to get word of her children, who she thought had been led to safety. 

She refused rescue because George was still alive at the Alder Creek camp. Two hours later, the Third Relief, “merely four men of stout hearts,” as DeVoto says, started back. Miller carried Eliza Donner. The other children could walk. Keseberg and Mrs. Murphy were left behind, too sick to take out. (Those four men: Eddy, Foster, Thompson, and Miller.) On the way down, they found a pack of spoons and silks Cady had abandoned. Thompson sewed the dresses into “sleeping bags” for the three girls, dove-colored silk for Frances, light brown for Georgia, dark brown for Eliza. The girls wore them on the trail for warmth, as well. 

At one point, Miller promised Eliza sugar if she would keep going – even though he had to admit soon after he had none. 

The little girl was furious.

 

* 

March 17-23: They survivors with the Third Relief reach Sutter’s Fort. Virginia writes to her cousin: “It is a beautiful country. It is mostly in vallies and mountains. It ought to be a beautiful country to pay us for our troubles in getting to it.” 

All the Reeds, and all the Breens had survived. All the Donners were orphans – and Hiram Miller was made their guardian. 

Eddy lost his entire family. 

Five now remained behind, Tamsen and George Donner, their nephew Samuel, Mrs. Murphy and Keseberg. 

A Fourth Relief got stopped by snow – and the knowledge that everyone else might be dead by the time they arrived. Woodworth was in charge, a man DeVoto says “was just no damn good.” 

They started for the camps on March 23, but turned back.

 

* 

April 13: A last party sets out, mostly to salvage any property at the Donner camps they could. They found no one at the lake. They did find Mrs. Eddy’s body, the arms and legs sawed off, fresh evidence of the horrors that the survivors had endured. Alder Creek was even worse: 

The Donner property, broken upon by Keseberg and probably by Diggers as well, was scattered all about, “books, calicos, tea, coffee, shoes, percussion caps, household and kitchen furniture.” At the mouth of a hut – the snow had mostly melted away – was a kettle full of pieces of the body of George Donner. They judged that, amazingly, he had been dead no longer than four days. They noticed that legs of oxen, reclaimed from the snow that had preserved them, had not been eaten.

 

They made-up packs of valuables and four of them started back to the lake. There they found Keseberg, whose tracks they had seen in the melting snow and who had been keeping away from them. He was “lying down and amidst the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights.” (5/429)

 

Thomas Fallon, who led the last party, put a rope around Keseberg’s neck and demanded that he tell where Tamsen’s money had gone. He turned over $517. Cady and Stone had got about as much. The rest was probably lost – likely forever. No sign of Tamsen Donner could be found – though she had seemed in excellent strength three weeks before. Keseberg said she had come to his camp, raving about her children and dead husband. He put her to bed, he claimed, found her dead the next morning. He denied killing her. “Two kettles of human blood, in all supposed to be over a gallon” were found. He did admit “he ate her body and found her flesh the best he had ever tasted. He further stated that he obtained from her body at least four pounds of fat.” 

Fallon wrote:  

We asked Kiesberg why he did not use the meat of the bullock and horse instead of human flesh, he replied he had not seen them. We then told him we knew better and asked him why the meat in the chair had not been consumed, he said “Oh! It’s too dry eating!” the liver and lights were a good deal better, and the brains made good soup! (5/430)

 

“There would be souvenirs” at Donner Lake, according to Bernard DeVoto, “for years to come.” (5/463)

 

* 

“The disapproval of the community.” 

April 23: Chauncey Depew, later a robber baron, turns 13. Long after, in My Memories of Eighty Years, he described growing up in Peekskill, New York. His mother was a “rigid Calvinist” (123/11). Religion was a force in his life. “Church attendance was so unanimous that people, young and old, who failed to be in their accustomed places on Sunday felt the disapproval of the community.” 

His mother’s father and grandfather had “educated her with the care that was given to boys who were intended for a professional life.” (123/10) 

In those days ministers were not expected to preach politics. “But according to an old New England custom, the pastor was given a free hand on Thanksgiving Day to unburden his mind…” The Reverend Doctor Bacon, of Center Church, New Haven “was violently anti-slavery. His sermons were not only intently listened to but widely read, and their effect in promoting anti-slavery sentiment was very great.” (Book 123, but neglected to note page number.)

 

* 

Summer: John Sutter sends a carpenter, James Marshall, up the American River to build a sawmill.

 

* 

July 21: Fifteen thousand Saints reach Utah successfully, in part because their religious discipline on the trail was almost “military.” Crossing the Wasatch Mountains, they followed the “Donner road,” which was nearly impassible. But not quite – which would be the point. They improved the way as best they could. On this day they came over the mountains and glimpsed the valley ahead – and, as one recalled, “we could not refrain from a shout of joy.” Two days later, they located a camp where a stream divided. 

Orson Pratt wrote: 

Here we called the camp together, and it fell to my lot to offer up prayer and thanksgiving in behalf of our company, all of whom had been preserved from the Missouri River to this point; and, after dedicating ourselves and the land unto the Lord and imploring His blessings upon our labors, we appointed various committees to attend to different branches of business, preparatory to putting in crops, and in about two hours after our arrival we began to plow, and the same afternoon built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at that spot where we were ploughing was exceedingly dry. (5/451)

 

* 

“He was one of the finders and one of the makers of the West.” 

July 24: Brigham Young and the main body of exhausted Saints arrive in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. 

All across Iowa, DeVoto says, you can find clusters of graves, where the Mormons camped. Parkman met a few – found them “completely imbued with the true fanatic spirit – ripe for anything – a very dangerous body of men.” (5/433) 

DeVoto says of Young, that he saved his church, and “Utah is his monument.” He was a carpenter, a glazier, a mechanic, and built most of his own white cottage in Salt Lake City. He was 45. 

So he became the foremost American colonizer, the only man who succeeded in colonizing the desert in his century, it may well be the only one who will have proved to have colonized it successfully when all the bills are in. He had the genius of leadership, of foresight, of command, of administration, of effective will. … His God commanded him to establish Zion, to act where the great Joseph had only made promises. He was a great man, great in whatever was needful for Israel. Great in understanding, in will and fortitude and resolution, in finding the means which others could not find. Great in remembering also, in the command and management of men, in opposition and hostility and hate. A great leader, a great diplomat, a great administrator, and at need a great liar and a great scoundrel. He was one of the finders and one of the makers of the West. (5/439)

 

Mormon Tabernacle: Salt Lake City.

* 

The following account comes from The Making of the Great West by Samuel Adams Drake, written in 1887: 

The Mormons, or Latter Day Saints as they prefer to call themselves…are a religious community. [Their] teachings differ widely from those of any other Christian body in the land. For one thing, they allow polygamy, which is not only repugnant to the moral sense of the great body of Christian people, but to the laws as well.

 

Driven from Missouri (1838), and from Illinois ten [sic] years later, their leaders cast about for some place of refuge, so remote that persecution could not reach them, and where they might practise their religious forms freely. Like most religious sects the Mormons seemed to thrive upon persecution, for their numbers were constantly increased under it.

           

It was about this time that [John C.] Fremont’s description of the region about the Great Salt Lake arrested the attention of Brigham Young, the Mormon patriarch. Fremont had said the valley of Bear River, a tributary of this lake, made “a natural resting and recruiting station for travelers.” Its bottoms were extensive, water excellent, timber sufficient, and soil well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to so elevated a region. The great lake would furnish exhaustless supplies of salt. And he gave it as his opinion, that cattle and horses would thrive where grass and salt were so abundantly provided by nature. With these advantages he recommended it for civilized settlement.

 

Upon this, the Mormons, who were farmers and grazers, decided to form themselves in one great caravan, and travel to this Great Salt Lake. They started out with a hundred and forty-seven people and seventy-three wagons. On the 24^th of July, 1847, as the caravan slowly wound down the Wasatch Mountains, the exiles saw the plain of their New Jerusalem stretching out before them, but when they reached it they found nothing growing upon it but sage-bushes.

 

They however laid out their city at the foot of the hills, on a river which, as it runs from Utah Lake to Salt Lake, intercepts the streams coming down from the eastern hills. The Mormons call this river the Jordan, because of some fancied resemblance to the river of Palestine.

 

Finding all so barren about them, these people took counsel of the experience of their neighbors, the Pueblo Indians, who for want of wood build their houses of adobe, and for want of rain raise crops by watering them artificially. Thus Salt Lake soon grew out of an arid plain to be a city of gardens and running streams.

 

In setting forth the advantages of the Utah Basin, Fremont had described a portion of the neighbor republic of Mexico, with which we were then at peace, and in making their home the Mormons had been moved by a desire to go outside the limits of the United States, but were strangely brought back within them again when California was ceded to us.

 

Though shut out from the world, this strange colony steadily grew in strength and numbers. The Mormon Church had sent out its missionaries to make converts in other lands, for in the Union its doctrines were detested, and the community itself looked upon as little better than outcasts. So the increase was mostly from this source. Hence it was natural that the Mormon body should have in it less of the spirit of national feeling than other communities, and grow more and more away from the Union by reason of its isolation and the teachings of its rulers.

 

These teachings were embodied in a hierarchy, or, in other words, Church and State were one with the Church above the civil authority. The bishops, chief priests, and elders were the actual rulers, who both made and gave the law, and each member of the society gave a tenth of his living to the support of the Church. All who did not conform to the Mormon faith were denied any share in civil affairs. Thus the Mormons had set up in Utah a little republic of their own, which, in effect, excluded other citizens of the Union from a full share in its privileges. Though a republic in name it was a despotism at the root. In short, the Mormons had gone to Utah to found a society for themselves alone, in which none but their own people should find a welcome.

 

It followed that the Mormon state was looked upon as an element of danger, rather than strength, to the Union, for the place where it was founded was a natural stronghold from which the authority of the nation might be set at defiance, as soon happened.

 

Flourishing only by reason of their isolation, the Mormons looked with little favor upon the passing emigration, though they drew much benefit from it. They could sell their cattle, grain, horses and other supplies to the emigrants at high prices, but the steady march of these people toward the west threatened the security they wished to enjoy apart from the world. Though always hostile to the great westward movement, and sometimes resorting to violence to stay it, they Mormons have been made to contribute to its success, not indeed as free agents, but as instruments in the hands of destiny. Formidable only in seclusion, they have presented the anomaly of a handful of people throwing themselves against the wheels of progress. Though no longer formidable, they have done a notable work in making productive what was before considered an uninhabitable desert.

 

THE MORMON SECT was founded by Joseph Smith, a native of Vermont (1805), who claimed direct revelation from God, and in 1830 put forth the Book of Mormon, or Mormon Bible, as of Divine inspiration. The same year the Mormon Church began at Manchester, N.Y. Smith’s authority was absolute, like that of the Pope, and could continue only by apostolic succession. The Mormons went first to Ohio, next to Jackson County, Mo., then to Nauvoo, Ill., where Smith was killed by a mob (1844). They had little settlements at the Pueblo of the Arkansas and at Fort Bridger.

 

POLYGAMY, or plurality of wives. The Mormons claim to practise it in accordance with a revelation of the Divine will. It is however now made an offence by United States laws framed to reach it. (See the Edmunds Bill.)

 

THEIR CITY, elevated almost a mile above the sea, “was located mainly on the bench of hard gravel that slopes southward from the foot of the mountains toward the lake valley. The houses – generally small and of one story – have a neat and quiet look, while the uniform breadth of the streets (eight rods) and the magnificent distances usually preserved by the buildings (each block containing ten acres, divided into eight lots, giving each householder a quarter of an acre for buildings, and an acre for a garden) make up an ensemble seldom equaled. Then the rills of bright, sparkling, leaping water which glow through each street give an air of freshness and coolness which none can fail to enjoy.” Horace Greeley

 

UTAH is the name of an Indian tribe, said to mean “those who dwell on the mountains.” It was formed into a Territory, 1850. “The great basin, six hundred miles by three hundred, seems to have been a vast inland sea. The immediate valley in which Salt Lake lies is much its best portion, and with irrigation the soil is very productive.” A. D. Richardson. But for polygamy, Utah would long ago have been a State in the Union.

 

* 

August 19-20: General Winfield Scott defeats Santa Anna in two battles at Contreras and Churubusco. 

DeVoto notes: 

Again [Robert E.] Lee found the key to victory, again [Gen. Gideon] Pillow’s ineptness exposed the army to defeat, and again a first-class army outfought another first-class army whose generals lacked staying power and guts. … Scott personally directed the tactics that U.S. Grant was later to call faultless.

 

DeVoto says that between Washington’s time, and the Civil War, there was no other U.S. commander who could have done what Scott did – fighting six battles, and marching through enemy country for five months, till he reached Mexico City and took it. (5/474)

* 

December 22: Opposition to the war with Mexico is growing. Abraham Lincoln introduces his “Spot Resolution,” one of eight he offers, in the U.S. House of Representatives. Was the attack in April 1846, by Mexican forces on an American patrol led by Captain S.B. Thornton, just cause for war? 

The question is: 

whether the people of that settlement where Thornton was attacked, or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served on them, or in any other way.

 

His resolutions are tabled.