So a couple of weeks ago I found myself in an email conversation about the Donner Party – I find myself in all kinds of conversations – and in the course of this, I realized that, outside of the cautionary tale told in some junior high class or other and ghost stories told at camp that claimed that if you spent the night in Donner Pass all of the ghosts of the cannibalized people would come out and EAT YOUR LIVER and your heart RIGHT THERE and then you'd be stuck in Donner Pass FOREVER until the next group of ignorant people came by to spend the night and you, or more specifically, your ghost, could eat them and yes YOU WOULD HAVE TO EAT HUMAN LIVERS DRIPPING WITH BLOOD. (Always shouted; thus my capital letters.) It was quite a story when combined with marshmallows.
(Writing it down now, as a writer of the occasional horror and ghost tale, I rather wonder why the story didn't go further –that the ghosts of the Donner Party were busy gobbling up the livers of wary travellers so that they could increase and increase their numbers until they had enough ghosts to sweep down from the California mountains and EAT US ALL. Actually, now that I've thought about it, let's add this to the ghost story.
I must also add that I have since then spoken to numerous people who have driven through Donner Pass and skied all over Lake Tahoe without seeing a single hint of a ghost, which is terribly disappointing.)
Ghost stories aside, however, my ignorance of the Donner Party was fairly profound, so I decided to change that and read through Ethan Rarick's Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, which may be the most gruesomely compelling book I have read in some time.
Rarick doesn't address the ghost stories at all, but draws on the various and sometimes conflicting records of the survivors and their rescuers, as well as the few letters written by those that did not survive, additional information about the Mexican War, previous reports of naval cannibalism, and meteorological and statistical and psychological studies (the last to help answer the question of why, in the Donner Party, the women tended to survive when the younger able bodied men tended not to, except for the injured Lewis Keseberg, the last to leave the camp, his reputation as a cannibal permanently cemented.
What makes this particularly compelling, I think, is that the book and the reader both know that the Donner Party is mostly doomed: the question is how it ended up in this state. As Rarick shows, it began with a series of comparatively minor disasters that led to delays, and more delays, and then more delays, and then tension and fear, which led to abysmal decision making, which led to misunderstanding of weather patterns, which then led to death and eating one another. It has that compelling train wreck quality to it – although that's a poor metaphor; none of this would have happened if the Donner Party had been able to take a train to California.
Instead, what they took were wagons, pulled by very slow walking oxen. Rarick discusses this eventually disastrous decision (although, to be fair, hundreds of others chose oxen that year and survived the trip, mostly by not getting delayed by other things and by following directions) by noting the differences between oxen and the faster if less profitable at the end of the trip mules. Not only were their oxen slow, but they started a little late – not much, just a little – and they didn't have a chance to rest up for a couple of weeks before the trip, as other groups did. They spent more time burying one of their members, dealing with floods and mosquitoes, abandoning a beloved pony on the side of the road.
By the time they reached a literal folk in the road, a chance to choose between two paths, they were already exhausted and worried about running late. And so, they listened to people with excellent financial reasons to lie, unaware of the deception. If they had not been tired, if they had not known how time they needed to make up, they might not have tried the trail that led to the Great Salt Lake desert.
Rarick argues, fairly conclusively, that this choice, more than the weather, was what doomed so many of the Donner Party. The desert is difficult to cross even with modern vehicles; in oxen drawn wagons it's agonizing. The emigrants lost many of their animals and their possessions, and had to waste valuable time heading back to pull things out of the desert – and still ended up abandoning food. And once across, they could not go back.
This led to the next bad decision, to try to press on to California instead of wintering in the valley of what is now Reno. It wasn't, they argued, that late in the year yet; they would have to slaughter all of their animals if they wintered in what is now Reno; they would be safer wintering in California. And so they pressed on, only to find the snow falling and falling.
Even then, as Rarick notes, had they turned back about 35 miles or so, back to now-Reno, they might well have wintered more or less comfortably. Instead, deciding that they could not turn back, and realizing that most of the group could not continue immediately, they built makeshift cabins in the falling snow. (The Donner families, lingering a few miles behind, barely even had the makeshift cabins.) The snow fell, and fell, covering their animals.
And things got worse.
I couldn't put the book down in the next chapters, as again and again various groups and individuals tried to break away to find help, food, rescue, as they tried to eat boiled ox skins and slowly turned to the horror of eating their dead companions, to the point of murdering two of them (the Native Americans) for that purpose. (This is particularly awful since the two Native Americans had actually arrived to help rescue the party, and although some Native Americans stole some of the Donner group's animals, other Native Americans helped feed and succor the group along the way and were instrumental in saving some of them. The relationships between whites and Native Americans, at least in this book, were not particularly cut and dried.)
Rarick also takes a moment to discuss how the Donner Party story has been told and retold, as a tale of inspiration and heroism, as a cautionary tale, as a tale of laziness and poor choices (this last often for financial reasons by people desperate to get people to head out to California and convince prospective emigrants that really, the trip wasn't that bad and no, most people heading to California did not end up getting eaten.)
But it's not in the end the cannibalism that leaves the greatest impression, but rather the other tragic details: the death of the boy who, offered food again, could not understand that a starving body must eat only limited amounts at first, and killed himself through overeating; the image of a woman who, probably disoriented from her ordeal and near starvation, sent her children off in the care of strangers while she returned to sit by her dying husband, a decision that cost her life, and more. It is grim, it is gripping, and I can't exactly recommend it to anyone, but if you are mesmerized by tales of utter disaster, this is absolutely the book for you.
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time_shark), Nicole Kornher-Stace (
