Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

The next day they remained in camp, their second straight day of making no distance. It was Sunday, and they told themselves they were keeping the Sabbath, but if so religion came upon them suddenly. Never before had they failed to travel on a Sunday. More likely they were nursing hangovers from the previous day's festivities and managed to convince themselves that another day of rest would do them good. No need to sprint during a marathon, after all. It was the height of summer, and it would be months and months before the long, warm days faded into cold winter nights. Plenty of other companies were camped nearby, making about the same pace. Everybody was part of a massive moving community, and nobody seemed panicked. If anyone asked George Donner, he might have noted, as he did in a letter back home, that the journey seemed far from solitary. There was safety in such numbers. True, they were toward the back of the line, but they could always make an extra push somewhere down the trail.

ON MONDAY MORNING THEY BROKE CAMP sharply and "mouved off in fine Style," as Reed jotted down in the diary he was now keeping. They made sixteen miles, maybe twenty, the wagons rolling along beneath the towering snow-capped spire of 10,272-foot Laramie Peak, the tallest mountain that many of the emigrants had ever seen and the plainest proof yet that they were slowly climbing into the Rockies. The Platte showed a change too: the shallow, muddy river of the plains was now a clear, tumbling mountain stream.

The buffalo hunting remained superb. On the 9th, Alphonso Boone, a grandson of Daniel Boone and an emigrant bound for Oregon, rode into camp to say he and some other hunters had killed eight of the animals and would be happy to share the meat. During a hunt the next day, Reed wounded a buffalo and then managed to drive it right up to the wagons, as though it were a daily cow being herded to the barn.

At about the site of present-day Casper, Wyoming, they finally left the Platte, the river that had been their principal guide for a month, and aimed for the Sweetwater, which would take them on the last portion of their journey into the Rockies. Even as they gained elevation, the summer heat held its force. For six straight days the high temperature averaged 102—brutal conditions for twenty-mile marches.

The trail struck the Sweetwater near one of the most famous landmarks of the entire journey: Independence Rock. It is an unmistakable site, a huge hunk of sloping granite shaped roughly as though someone had taken a cereal bowl and turned it upside down. The rock rises up from a particularly flat stretch of valley floor, the Sweetwater River winding by on one side. The day after Reed herded his buffalo to the wagons, the Donner Party drove to within a few miles of the great sight, which they estimated, with fair accuracy, to be six hundred yards long and 140 feet high. The next day was Sunday, and for the second week in a row they paused for services, taking the chance to rest and write letters. Virginia Reed wrote to her cousin, among other things describing the death of her grandmother, Sarah Keyes, weeks earlier. "We miss her verry much. Every time we come into the Wagon we look at the bed for her." Still, like so many of the adults in their letters, she insisted on a resolute optimism. "We are all doing well," she wrote, "and in hye sperits."

The next day, Monday, they headed over to the rock for a closer look, but ironically were disappointed. Considering the fame of the place, they expected it to be so high that the top could barely be seen. But compared to the mountain peaks that lined both sides of the river valley, the rock itself appeared "tame and uninteresting." Still, if they climbed to the top—and surely some of them must have—they were treated to a striking panorama. Behind them, along the way they had just come, spread the open and treeless plain of the valley, stretching down to the horizon, spotted here and there with similar, smaller hummocks of rock. Before them, along the way they must go, the Sweet-water snaked ahead, beckoning them toward an astonishing sight—a 370-foot-high gorge known as Devil's Gate where the river sliced through some nearby mountains.

They stopped to noon at the Gate, and most of the company walked over from the trail, which ran a little to the south of the chasm, to take a look. Three days later, they got their first glimpse of the Wind River Mountains. Perhaps the sight spurred them on, for they made especially good progress, passing three other companies in a single day. The next morning, however, started with an argument. The younger men wanted to stay in camp for a day to hunt buffalo and rest the cattle; others said that a delay would only give away the advantage they had just gained, allowing the other companies to sweep past them and use whatever pastures lay ahead for their own stock. The latter faction won, and they rolled out of camp.

Their goal now was the culminating achievement of the first half of the journey: South Pass, a broad and relatively easy crossing of the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide. In the middle of North America's most dominant chain of mountains, South Pass was a natural blessing for expansionism. At 7,550 feet, it's low—many passes in Colorado top 10,000 feet—and the upward slope toward the pass is, at least by the standards of mountain passes, a forgivingly gentle grade. It's also at roughly the right line of latitude. Wagons rolling along the Platte River were aiming, more or less, directly toward South Pass. Lewis and Clark, by contrast, had crossed the Continental Divide far to the north, along what is now the border between Montana and Idaho, using a pass that one western historian described as "more barrier than portal."

South Pass had been known to Native Americans for centuries, but white explorers first crossed it in 1812, when it was traversed by a small party returning from the Oregon outpost established by fur trade magnate John Jacob Astor. The ease and utility of South Pass went largely unnoticed, however, for the next twelve years, until Crow Indians recommended it as the route for a group of fur trappers led by a young mountain man named Jedediah Smith. Trappers soon made the pass the preferred path to the Far West, and when in 1836 the missionary Marcus Whitman took the first wagon over, his wife, Narcissa, became the first white woman to cross the Continental Divide. By 1846, the year of the Donner Party, South Pass was the universally accepted avenue through the Rocky Mountains.

To this day, the landscape approaching the pass remains unchanged. Windswept and treeless, the trail crosses an arid desert more than a mile in the sky, an escarpment named Pacific Butte standing just to the left of the trail and offering an easy navigational aid. Ironically, for all the importance that the emigrants gave to the moment, the exact point at which the Continental Divide was crossed was often unclear. The trail rose steadily toward a ridgeline that seemed far too modest for the spine of North America, then fell away mildly on the other side. A little farther on, a set of springs fed a small, meandering creek whose waters ran west, and often it was only here that emigrants fully realized they had crossed from one watershed to another. Accordingly, it was named Pacific Spring and was a common point for celebrations.

On Friday, July 17—the day that began with an argument about moving on or hunting—the Reeds and the Donners and their companions mistook a subordinate rise for the summit and thought for a time that they had crossed the Divide. The balloon burst that night, when they camped on a river running east. If they had already conquered the Divide, the rivers would be running west, eventually to empty into the Pacific. Instead, they had once again found the meandering Sweet-water.