Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

Soon Reed began to fall, although the indestructible Miller, who was already carrying Tommy Reed, heaved him back to his feet and sent him along the way. Even on her father's back, Patty weakened, until at last Reed realized that his daughter was dying, that she was almost gone already. At camp, Reed had taken a frozen, empty sack that once contained dried meat and held it over the fire. When it softened, he carefully scraped the inside seam, where a few tiny crumbs had clung to the fabric. He produced a teaspoonful, perhaps less, but even this was a treasure to be prized. Like a miser hiding a nugget of gold, he placed the tiny serving in the end of the thumb of one of his mittens, literally the last bite of food they possessed.

Now it was needed, so Reed carefully peeled off the mitten, plucked the frozen speck from its unorthodox storage bin, and placed it in his mouth to thaw. When it seemed edible, he took it from his lips and gently fed it to Patty by hand. She revived, and they went on, without even the smallest morsel in reserve.

PEGGY BREEN CHECKED ON THE SLEEPING CHILDREN one by one, holding a hand before every mouth and nose to wait for the soft exhale of breathy fog. But when she came to her James, who had been doing poorly, she felt nothing. Panic rose in her chest like a rush of rage. She called to her husband that his son was dying, pleading for his help.

"Let him die," Patrick replied. "He will be better off than any of us."

Even decades later, the memory of that instant was etched sharply in Peggy's mind. She said her heart stood still when she heard her husband's words. She sat stunned for a moment, then set to work, rubbing her son's chest and hands, trying to generate some circulation and breath once more. As she had when her eldest son, John, fainted and nearly fell into the fire, she broke off a piece of lump sugar and forced it into James's lips. He swallowed, moved his arms and legs a little, and then at last opened his eyes.

From the beginning of the relief effort, the rescuers marching into the mountains carried along motives as varied as their own lives. Some men strove to save their families. Some worked to fulfill a vow to old traveling companions. Some volunteered to save utter strangers. Some asked about the pay.

As time went on, intentions grew murkier, especially for Charles Cady and Charles Stone, two of the men whom Reed had detailed to stay at the camps and care for the survivors. The day after the main relief party walked away, Stone left his post at the lake cabins and hiked over to Alder Creek, where Cady had been stationed. Nicholas Clark, the third rescuer left at the camps, was out hunting.

Provisions were still plentiful, and there was every reason to believe help was on the way, but Stone and Cady decided they would flee. They struck a deal with Tamzene Donner, whose three little girls were still healthy enough to make it out. Stone and Cady agreed that in return for a fee, perhaps as much as five hundred dollars, they would take the girls. It was an offer that Tamzene had apparently already proposed to the members of Reed's now-departed relief party, who were too over-burdened with survivors to accept.

When the deal was done, Stone and Cady took the three little girls up the steps and stood them on the snow. Tamzene emerged and put on their cloaks—red and white for Eliza and Georgia, blue and white for Frances—then pulled the matching hoods up around their ears.

"I may never see you again," she told them, "but God will take care of you." Georgia thought her mother seemed to be talking more to herself than to them. and chilled them. In the morning, it had to be scraped off their covers before they could get up.

But once they were out of bed, Stone and Cady made a shocking and shameful announcement. They had no intention of taking the girls over the pass, as they had promised Tamzene. Instead, they were leaving the youngsters in the cabin and going on without any survivors at all. Their decision to flee, suspect from the beginning, was revealed as a disgrace. They were supposedly there on a rescue mission, but now they were leaving without rescuing a soul. They would not stay and care for the sick. They would not carry out a child. They were just leaving.

TWO DAYS LATER, THE DESERTERS HAD CROSSED the pass and were walking through Summit Valley when they passed Starved Camp. Cady and Stone noticed the site, for Cady said later that they passed it at about two in the afternoon, something he would not have been able to pinpoint if they had walked by unknowingly.

But amazingly, neither man offered to help. They did not stop and share their provisions. They did not offer to carry a child or lead a sick adult. They gathered no firewood. So far as we know, they did not even stop to offer words of hope or encouragement. Both were in relatively good condition; they were two of the three self-described "young spry men" who had gone ahead of the second relief party to reach the lake camps early. (To be fair, at some point Cady suffered frostbite on his feet, but that was a comparatively minor matter.) They had been in the mountains a relatively short time, and thus were hardly in the late stages of starvation. They had not even spent a night in the open, since the previous day when they first left Truckee Lake they had been turned back by the blizzard and retreated to the relative safety and warmth of the cabins.

Cady and Stone had once displayed the admirable courage of all the rescuers, perhaps more. Their willingness to forge ahead of the rest of the party on the way into the mountains showed both physical stamina and personal bravery. But at some point, both men lost their moorings. Perhaps the horrors they saw at the camps overwhelmed them. For whatever reason, the same tenacity with which they first rushed into the wilderness on an errand of mercy was now displayed as they rushed out in a desperate bid for self-preservation. Maybe the real surprise is that the other rescuers didn't do the same.

On a cold night, the mountains can be as quiet as a graveyard. Unless the wind kicks up, there is nothing to hear but the voices of your comrades and the crackling of the campfire.

Selim Woodworth and his men, however, turned their ears to something else—other voices, farther off. He sent emissaries to investigate and found the little party that had walked away from Starved Camp: James Reed and two of his children, William McCutchan, Hiram Miller, and the others. By chance, the two parties had almost literally stumbled into one another.

Reed and the others had mostly bedded down for the night, and they were too tired to move, but they asked that some food be brought over from Woodworth's camp, and for the first time in days, they went to sleep with the satisfying feel of a meal in the belly.

THE FIRE AT STARVED CAMP STILL BURNED, but it had fled from those it was intended to warm. Melting the snow, the flames had sunk so far down into a pit that the survivors felt little heat. Peggy Breen stared down into the hole, fifteen, twenty, perhaps even twenty-five feet deep.

At first she must have looked with despair, but then suddenly there was a tiny moment of joy. At the bottom of the hole, she thought she could make out bare ground. If so, if the fire had burned all the way through the winter's slow accumulation of snow, then it would sink no more. If they could descend to meet it, they would once again find some warmth.

She roused John, her teenager, and urged him to climb down. Using a felled treetop as a makeshift ladder, he did so, and then called up that she was right. He was standing next to the fire on warm, unfrozen earth.