Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

Reed concealed his alarm in the confessional of his journal. "The Sky look like snow and everything indicates a storm, god for bid. ... Night closing fast, the Clouds still thicking. Terror, terror. I feel a terrible foreboding but dare not Communicate my mind to any. Death to all if our provisions do not Come in a day or two and a storm should fall on us. Very cold, a great lamentation about the Cold."

In the entire ordeal of the Donner Party, no one ever revealed a more acute fear.

Perhaps they had been a little too generous with the food they left at the lake camp and Alder Creek, for their own supplies had run short, and now they were weakened from half rations. Three men had gone ahead in hopes of finding a cache left by the rescue party on the way in, but so far there was no sign of their reappearance.

At least there was work to do, something to pry the mind from the waiting. Wood had to be gathered for a fire. Without a fire they might not survive the night. So those who were able scrounged around for some downed branches, the thicker ones for the fire, the boughs for beds to provide a little insulation from the incessant snow. If they could get some food and start a decent fire, then maybe, just maybe, they could withstand the onslaught coming from the sky.

As they worked, they must have stolen glances to the west, longing for the return of their comrades, and to the sky, eager for some change, a shaft of blue, literally a ray of hope.

But all they could see was the clouds.

SNOW STARTED FALLING EARLY IN THE NIGHT, and with it the wind rose into what Reed remembered as "a perfect hurricane." They were camped amid a stand of tall timber in a shallow valley just beneath the summit. Rectangular, with one of the short ends facing the pass, the little depression funneled the winds so that they raked the campsite ferociously. Blown sideways, snowflakes and ice crystals turned into tiny pellets of buckshot. The wind screamed through the tree branches. The temperature plummeted.

In his diary, Reed noted that he tried to keep watch for the men returning from the cache, but that would quickly have proved impossible, and useless anyway. Given the conditions, the advance scouts were either dead or holed up somewhere. "My dreaded Storm is now on us," Reed wrote. "Crying and lamentations on account of the Cold and the dread of death from the Howling Storm." Children began to weep. Some of the men prayed for their lives.

They all circled the campfire, their backs outward, away from the flames, then piled up snow behind the circle, creating a windbreak that gave them at least marginal shelter. Peggy Breen was still nursing her youngest child, a daughter named Isabella, so she got down on her knees, pulled a blanket and shawl over her shoulders and head, and tried to let the baby take some nourishment.

The fire had been built on a platform of green logs, but still it had melted the snow beneath, forming a pit. At one point, fifteen-year-old John Breen collapsed—"I fainted or became stupid from weakness," as he put it—and would have fallen into the fire hole if a quick-witted companion had not caught him by the leg. His mother rushed over to revive him. His jaws had locked shut, but somehow she forced in a bit of lump sugar, which brought him back to consciousness.

With the temperature so low, the fire was an absolute necessity, but as conditions worsened some of the men gave out physically and could no longer feed the flames. Reed went blind, probably a delayed form of snow-blindness from reflected sunlight earlier in the day. Whatever the cause, he could not see the flames even when he stared straight into the campfire.

By default, the crucial job of tending the fire fell to William McCutchan and Hiram Miller. Like McCutchan, Miller had originally been part of the Donner Party but went ahead on the trail and thus avoided entrapment. In Miller's case, he joined a mule train early on during the journey and far outpaced the lumbering wagons.

McCutchan and Miller fed the fire relentlessly, and there were those in the group who thought that if the two men had failed, everyone might have died. Years later, McCutchan gave the credit to his colleague: "Miller being a man of Herculean strengths and indurance was the life and savior of the party."

Morning brought no relief. The storm raged on, creating a white-out, snow as present in the air as on the ground. Looking into the wind, visibility stretched to less than twenty feet. The sky—"the light of Heaven," Reed called it—was an unknowable mystery.

Maintaining the fire grew ever more strenuous. The snow pit was now fifteen feet deep, although still the bare ground could not be seen. If the fire itself slid down into the hole, it would be too far away to give off much warmth, and so in addition to feeding the flames, men had to tend the platform of green logs laid across the pit. The supply of wood gathered the previous night was exhausted, so they had to go out into the storm and find nearby trees to fell, then drag the wood back. Even with the warmth of exertion, they could only work in ten-minute shifts before the cold forced them back into the fire circle to regain feeling in their hands and feet. Then they would head back out again.

Peggy Breen had a few seeds and a little tea and sugar, but for all practical purposes they were without food. So long as the storm continued, there was no chance of anyone arriving with supplies, and certainly none of hunting, so as their hunger deepened they could do nothing but bide time. In the lore of the Donner Party, the site became known as Starved Camp. "Hunger, hunger is the Cry with the Children and nothing to give them," Reed wrote. "Freesing was the Cry of the mothers with reference to their little starving freesing Children. Night closing fast and with the Hurricane Increases I dread the coming night."

THE DROPS THRUMMED ON THE ROOF above Virginia Reed's head. She was safe now, down in the valley, in California, out of the endless winter, generously sheltered in a real house with a real roof, not a makeshift cabin topped with a hide. But lying awake at night, she listened to the steady patter. She knew that in the mountains above, the raindrops were snowflakes, an infinity of snowflakes piling up into inches and feet and yards. Earlier in the day, she had seen her mother standing in the doorway for hours, looking up at the mountains.

Somewhere up there, Virginia knew, her father and siblings struggled against the snow, struggled to reach, as she had done, bare earth and soft grass and a spring rain.

THE BLIZZARD BELLOWED ON INTO ITS SECOND NIGHT at Starved Camp. The fire failed, snuffed out by wind and snow and cold. McCutchan jumped up and managed to rekindle it, piling up the driest pine logs he could find in their meager supply.

Reed slumped into some sort of half-coma, near death. McCutchan and Miller grabbed him and shook him back to consciousness, slapping and shaking and rubbing him until he stirred. Patty Reed lay in her blankets, unable to move, listening to the men screaming at her father, "Reed! Reed! Wake up man, speak! Reed! We will all die! Wake up! Great God, Reed! Come! Come! You must not die now!" At times, she recalled, they swore at him.

"The Hurricane has never Ceased for ten minuts at atime during one of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed," Reed wrote, adding that he hoped never to see such a thing again. "Of all the praying and Crying I ever heard nothing ever equaled it. Several times I expected to see the people perish by the extreme Cold."

At times, the wind was so strong that it seemed one of the nearby trees might topple and crush the little camp. "Snowing and blowing, hailing, sleet and so cold," Patty Reed remembered. "I have not words."