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The Doomed. The Donners tried it—against the advice of a mountain scout who had just barely gotten through. There were 87 people in the doomed party—about half of them children, and half of these less than six years of age. "They were going to California ... to live out their days in the languorous, winterless country. . . . The younger children would grow up in a softer, more abundant life—and their gentility would not be impaired." George Donner's wife, Tamsen, took along "apparatus for preserving botanical specimens, water colors and oil paints, books and school supplies . . . for use in the young ladies' seminary which she hoped to establish in California."
Strange Weights. On Nov. 1, they first tried to get over the divide. Snow in the pass was five feet deep. "The terrible cold of the high places wrapped them round." They turned back. On Nov. 2 it rained. On Nov. 3, they were roused from an "apathy of despair" to try again. One Indian and a man named Stanton reached the divide. Stanton came back to the others. "They had reached the extremity. ... No more. Don't call on the outraged flesh or the defeated soul for what is beyond its power. Evening was coming up and they made a fire and stayed close to it, quarreling." In the morning, "strange weights woke them, their companions were sitting up from white mounds. . . . They understood." It had snowed. The pass to California was blocked.
In December ten men, five women and two boys tried it again. All but three of them had homemade snowshoes. They carried a blanket apiece and "minute rations" that must last six days. The first day they made four miles. The second day they crossed the divide, but they were snowblind and had only an ounce of food a day. Their feet froze. By Christmas Eve, they had been tramping nine days, two days without food. They had lost the trail. "To go on they must live, to live they must eat, but there was no food. But there was food." One of them suggested that they draw lots to see who should be eaten.
One William Eddy suggested that they select two men to shoot it out with revolvers. Then "in a moment the obvious became obvious to them. . . . Someone would die soon." A blizzard began. Their fire sank through the snow and went out in slush that welled around their knees.
William Eddy remembered that in blizzards the mountain scouts made a circle of people and put their blankets over them for tents. Soon the snow covered the fugitives' circle. That Christmas four of them died. The next day they butchered the bodies and dried some of the meat for the journey. The Indians and Eddy would not eat it.
Soon even the dried flesh gave out. They ate the rawhide from their snowshoes. They suggested killing the Indians. Eddy warned them. Silently they disappeared. Soon another man died. His wife saw her husband's heart "roasted on a stick." In January, Eddy, supported by two Digger Indians, "left bloody foot prints across six miles of rough ground" and reached a ranch. At last California knew what had happened to the Donners. Relief expeditions began to form at once.