Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

One plausible theory was that, in effect, manliness killed the men. Much of the hard physical labor, both on the overland journey and during the entrapment, fell to the males. Men broke trail, drove the wagons, hitched and unhitched the teams. So far as we know, hunting was an exclusively male chore. Perhaps, therefore, the men were already weaker than the women when the party arrived at the Sierra, and then weakened still more as the taxation of masculine camp duties conflicted with a steadily diminishing diet.

But in the nineteenth century, female work was hardly for the frail. Women hauled water for cooking and washing. They produced the meals using cumbersome iron skillets and bully Dutch ovens. Female arms and shoulders stirred the butter churn and rasped the family clothes across the washboard. At least on the open prairie, gathering firewood was more a woman's job than a man's. And walking was everyone's lot, especially as the draft animals deteriorated. The women, in other words, may have been just as exhausted as the men after months of travel.

That suggests that the greater male death rate may have been due to biology as well as behavior, a supposition buttressed by modern science. On average, women have a higher percentage of body fat than men. Fat acts as a storehouse for energy, meaning that as women starve, they have greater reserves on which to draw. Men, by contrast, begin to burn valuable muscle much faster. That difference only exacerbates another female advantage: Since women are, on average, smaller than men, they need fewer calories. The men confronted a dual curse. They needed more food than the women, and once their bodies began the internal process of self-consumption, the women were better equipped to endure it. Bravado aside, masculinity proved a deadly disadvantage.

Age intermingled with gender as a determinant of survival. In fact, statistical analyses have found that age trumped other factors. The young and the old, beset with too little exposure to life's abrasions and too much, always die first and most in tragedies. In the Donner Party, children under five exhibited a high death rate, as did adults in their forties and over. Of those who were trapped in the mountains, only two older adults survived, Patrick Breen, thought to be fifty-one, and Peggy Breen, about forty, both of whom benefited from their family's relatively plentiful hoard of beef. The three other couples who were over forty—George and Tamzene Donner, Jacob and Betsy Donner, and Franklin and Elizabeth Graves—all died.

In the prime of life, the gender disparity was especially pronounced, so pronounced that it may in fact suggest another cause altogether. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died (Eleanor Eddy), while only one man lived (William Eddy). The other seven men in their twenties, men presumably in the best physical condition of their lives, all died, many of them early in the entrapment. Most of these men were distinguished, however, not only by their age but also by their life circumstances: They were traveling alone, typically as hired ands. The young women, by contrast, were all married, most with children, many with extended families.

To gauge the value of human connection, modern researchers have studied the health effects of social networks. Their findings buttress the common intuition that people are good for people. Those with interconnected lives—people who are married or have large families or many friends or whose lives in some way bring them into contact with others—enjoy longer, healthier lives. They sniffle through fewer colds, suffer fewer heart attacks, recover faster from the debilitating effects of strokes. Even the incidence of cancer is reduced. One study followed participants for nine years and found that those who were low in "social capital"—the strings that bind us to others—were two to three times more likely to die than those with interwoven nets of human contact. Nor is this solely a modern phenomenon, alien to the Donners' day. An analysis of records from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp during the Civil War, reveals that Union captives were more likely to survive if they were imprisoned with friends, and that the closer the familiarity the greater the benefit.

The reasons for these benefits are less scientifically demonstrable but seem in many ways obvious. People draw tangible assistance from others—someone comes to check on them when they are old, for example—but they are also succored by the emotional support of love and friendship. Human beings are social creatures.

The Donner Party demonstrated anew this age-old truth. Those who were traveling with their families, especially the larger extended families, survived at rates far higher than those who were alone. Of fifteen people who were trapped in the mountains without a relative, only two survived: the Donner family employees Noah James and Jean Baptiste Trudeau. Many of the single people were among the first to die. Of the four men who died before Christmas at Alder Creek, three had no kin in camp: Sam Shoemaker, Joseph Rheinhard, and James Smith. Jacob Donner, sickly even before the trip, was the only family man among the four. Had the Donner Party been miraculously plucked from their misfortune on February l, almost no one with a family, save those who had gone with the Forlorn Hope and thus exposed themselves to incalculable additional danger, would have perished. The Donner Party is not merely a story of how hard people will struggle to survive, but of how much they need each other if they are going to succeed.

Survivors recognized that some of the young, single men lacked the incentive or tenacity to cling to life. A few months after the tragedy, James Reed wrote to a relative back east and told of the early passing of James Smith, one of his family's teamsters. "He gave up, pined away, and died," Reed wrote. "He did not starve."

ONLY TWO FAMILIES SURVIVED INTACT, the Breens and the Reeds. This was especially remarkable for the Reeds,

since James Reed's banishment left the couple's four children solely in the care of their mother, a woman who had once been so frail she had been unable to rise from her sickbed for her own wedding. Her afflicting headaches returned at least once during the winter, perhaps more. Because they had been forced to abandon so much during the crossing of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the Reeds began the entrapment with virtually no food or supplies, a penury that forced Margret to begging. Against all that, she somehow kept her four children alive.

Even her own husband, who had seen the pallor of his children's faces firsthand, could not quite seem to grasp the straits to which his family had been reduced, or the magnitude of his wife's accomplishment. Once, after the ordeal was done, the Reeds were discussing the fact that at Truckee Lake, the Reed children had found what they thought were flakes of gold. James asked his wife why she had not saved some. She could have been forgiven for punching him in the nose. Instead she looked at him with disbelief and told him that at the time, finding something to eat had seemed more important than all the gold in the world.

Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the California Star peered through a green eyeshade and a wafting helix of cigar smoke and approved a story for that week's paper. Typesetters bent over their trays, and ink-stained fingers soon began laying down the metal letters that would spell out the horrors of the Donner Party. "A more shocking scene cannot be imagined," the piece began, "than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains."