Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

For brief periods in the years after the Donner Party, though, Keseberg enjoyed business successes. During one of them, he ran a Sacramento hotel, the Lady Adams. It might be strange enough that the putative fiend chose to enter a business where he would host weary travelers, but public fascination with the Donner Party was such that even that irony was insufficient. It may or may not be true, but the accepted lore of the tale came to be that the most notorious cannibal of the Donner Party eventually opened a restaurant.

THE FATES OF THE RESCUERS PROVED AS MIXED as those of the survivors. Selim Woodworth overcame the inauspicious start to his career as a naval officer. He commanded a supply ship during the remainder of the Mexican-American War, winning the respect of his men, and during the Civil War rose to the rank of commodore.

Hiram Miller remained a friend of the Reed family for decades, settling near them in California. Smallpox eventually swept through, infecting Miller, and after a time of quarantine in the local "pest house" he moved to the Reed home, where he was an invalid for the last five years of his life. They buried him in a cemetery nearby. Patty Reed, the little girl who had baked him bread when he arrived as a member of the second relief party, and to whom Miller had been kind, tended his grave for years.

William Fallon, the mountain man who led the last relief party, eventually went east but was traveling back to California in 1848 when he grew frustrated with the slow pace of the train and, with one other man, rode ahead. They were attacked and killed by Indians. Weeks later the main party found their bodies.

John Stark never got the public acclaim he deserved for his heroic rescue of the Breens from Starved Camp. In his report about the relief effort, Woodworth omitted Stark's name entirely, taking credit for those Stark saved. But his fine qualities drew recognition in other ways. He was the sheriff of Napa County for six years and even served in the state legislature. In 1875, when he was fifty-eight, the body that had sustained him through his remarkable performance in the mountains finally gave out. While pitching hay from a wagon, he had a heart attack and died.

Reason Tucker, the leader of the first relief party to reach the high camps, later spent two years in the gold fields, one with luck, one without. He built a fine home of split redwood near Calistoga, the back commanding an ostentatious view of the verdant Napa Valley, but later lost his estate in a dispute growing out of the settlement of Mexican land claims. A marriage collapsed amid uncertain circumstances, and in time he moved to Goleta, near Santa Barbara, where he lived out his days amid the gentle swells of coastal hills and ocean breakers. When he died, in 1888, he was buried beneath a white marble marker that reached back more than forty years to a moment of valor: "An honest candid worthy man—one of the heroic rescuers of Donner Party." Tucker would have liked the epitaph. He never forgot the scenes that greeted his arrival at the Truckee Lake cabins, an appearance that put the survivors in mind of angels. Years later, he could still see the rude huts and hear the emigrants' shouts of joy.

LANSFORD HASTINGS DREAMED HIS DREAMS to the end. The man who had envisioned a magical shortcut to California served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1849 and then moved to markedly bigger stages. During the Civil War he hatched a fruitless scheme to conquer Arizona for the Confederacy. When he died a few years later, he was trying to plant a colony of former southerners in Brazil, as though his former efforts to lure midwesterners to California had been insufficiently grand.

Other parties stumbled along the Hastings Cut-Off, the chimera that had so worsened the Donner Party's woes. But the route never became a main channel of the great migration, and a single bald fact testifies to the rigors of the inhospitable terrain: So far as is known, no one ever traveled it twice.

AS SHE TRIED TO WALK OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, before she died and her body was cannibalized, Elizabeth Graves had carried a heavier load than most. The Graves family wagon featured secret grooves in the middle of the bed—hiding places for the profit from the sale of the family farm back in Illinois. Before leaving the lake, rescuers helped Elizabeth pry up the coverings and recover the gold and silver, said to be eight hundred dollars in all. She lugged it along as best she could but eventually concluded she would have to stash it, perhaps because the rescuers were bantering about who would take the cash when she died, talk that was later dismissed as joking but must have seemed sinister to Elizabeth. So she hung back from the march one morning and buried the money, marking the location in her mind as best she could. So far as we know, she failed to tip off her children to the secret spot before her death a few days later, and so it seemed that the youngsters had lost their inheritance.

Then, on a spring day in 1891, almost half a century later, a miner named Edward Reynolds was digging for quartz on a hillside near Truckee when the glint of coin sparkled in his shovel. None of the pieces was dated after 1845, and the Graves children, now grown and graying adults, identified bite marks on a coin that had once been used as a family teething ring. Billy Graves, eighteen when his mother died, claimed the money.

In one of the last acts of her life, Elizabeth Graves had succeeded. She had saved the family inheritance for her children.

BY THE TIME THE COINS WERE FOUND, Truckee Lake had become Donner Lake. Today, the surrounding countryside is rife with other imprints of the great drama. The notch in the mountains above the lake is Donner Pass; a nearby summit is Donner Peak.

Men tamed those tormenting heights with remarkable speed. Less than a quarter century after the tragedy—well within the lifetimes of most survivors—workers laid the tracks of the transcontinental railroad across the pass. In time, a two-lane road followed for automobiles, then at last a superhighway that bears the brunt of winter and remains open through all but the fiercest storms. Donner Lake is surrounded by vacation homes. The little valley near the summit where the Breens passed their hellish ordeal in the snowpit is now a ski area, chairlifts shuttling skiers upward with ease, all to be followed by a hot chocolate and a cozy drive home.

Even a century ago, survivors marveled at the transformation. In 1892 Virginia Reed read a description of Donner Lake as a "pleasure resort" and sensed in the phrase strange evidence of all that had changed:

It seems ages since I was there yet I can feel the cold and hunger and hear the moan of the pines. Those proud old trees used to tell me when a storm was coming and seemed to be about the only thing there alive, as the snow could not speak. And now the place is a pleasure resort. The moan of the pines should cease.

Yet still the Sierra winter can rise and growl. Lay yourself open to the elements, and you may suffer as the emigrants of old. In 2004 a sudden blizzard in late October—about the same time of the year that the Donner Party was trapped—left thirteen hikers temporarily stranded. Two climbers in Yosemite National Park died.

FROM THE BEGINNING, ONE PLAIN TRUTH of the Donner Party saga stood out against the sexist assumptions of the age: Women toughed it out far better than the men. The first book to tell the tale, J. Quinn Thornton's Oregon and California in 1848, included a crude chart outlining the different survival rates for men and women. Thornton noted that twenty-eight men died compared to only eight women. Even accounting for the greater number of men in the party, Thornton found that men tended to die while women tended to live. Nineteenth-century sensibilities admitted no explanation for this outcome, and Thornton hazarded no guesses.