Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(38)
It began to snow.
On the morning of November 1, the 59 members of the Donner Party in the lead group awoke to discover that five-foot snowdrifts had obliterated the trail ahead of them, transforming what they had expected to be a final dash through a breach in the mountains into an impossible task. It soon became apparent that there would be no crossing over the Sierras until the following spring. And so the dejected pioneers were forced to turn back, leaving behind the boulder-strewn gap that would become known as the Donner Pass.
A day before our trek across Alder Creek meadow, I had stood with Kristin Johnson and two of her colleagues in the Donner Pass, at the very same spot where the cross-country journey of the Donner Party had come to a halt. Looking down from the mountain, I was suddenly impressed by how resourceful and tough these pioneers had been to have made it even this far.
“I’d have never gotten up here,” I said, before gesturing toward the lake that stretched to the far horizon, far below. “I would have died way down there somewhere.”
Johnson, who I’d only met the day before, thought I was joking, but then the look on my face told her I wasn’t.
The two of us had been corresponding about the famous pioneers for several years, and we’d finally flown into Reno; Johnson from her home in Salt Lake City and me on the Sardine Express out of JFK. After renting a car, we headed into the Sierras to meet up with Johnson’s friends, former private investigator Ken Dunn and Kayle’s human partner, John Grebenkemper. I’d found Johnson to be friendly, funny, and gregarious. She was also a walking, talking encyclopedia regarding anything remotely related to the Donner Party, which was mostly fascinating but could be exasperating as well.
“I’m sure she knows what color underwear the Donners all wore,” I told my wife, Janet, during a phone call later that night.
But Johnson, an enthusiastic historian and researcher, was also living proof that many of the mysteries surrounding the Donner Party remained unsolved, including the one we would be working on at Alder Creek. It was a mystery that involved the leader of the Donner Party—the very person for whom the group had been named.
On Nov 1, 1846, the pacesetting travelers whose journey had been halted at the mountain pass that would one day bear their name, decided to backtrack several miles to Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), where they had passed an abandoned cabin that the members of a previous wagon train had constructed two years earlier. Now they would overwinter there. The pioneers quickly built two more cabins and crowded in as best they could. It was a decision that would be, perhaps, their greatest mistake.
With the benefit of hindsight, questions have arisen as to why the Donner Party did not simply backtrack another 30 miles, which would have enabled them to overwinter outside of the Sierras altogether. Among the possible explanations was their utter lack of knowledge about exactly where they had chosen to camp. Unlike other wagon trains, they had hired no seasoned mountain men to guide them.
The 21 members of the Donner Party who had lagged behind the pacesetters never made it to Truckee Lake. Nor did they experience the crushing disappointment of the final mountain pass. A broken wagon axle had halted the group, which included George Donner, his brother Jacob, their families, and several teamsters. They eventually made it to the Alder Creek Valley, two miles west of the emigrant trail and eight miles from the Truckee Lake cabin, when the winter storm caught them completely in the open. According to survivor Virginia Reed, they “hastily put up brush sheds, covering them with pine boughs.” Although the intention seems to have been to use Alder Creek as a quick rest stop before a final push into California, the weather and their weakened conditions dictated that, like those stranded at Truckee Lake, there would be no further travel until the spring thaw.
By now, George Donner had been incapacitated by what began as a superficial wound to his hand he received while repairing their wagon. As the days and weeks passed, the infection had crept up Donner’s arm, and he would spend the last four months of his life trapped in a drafty shelter built beneath a large pine that future generations would refer to as the George Donner Tree. Here the head of the Donner Party would become a helpless observer of the horrors that would soon overtake his family and those who worked for him.
Now the Donner Party, separated by eight miles and trapped in hurriedly constructed versions of Hell, faced a winter of starvation and madness. Nearly half of the group would die and many of those would be eaten, some of them by their own relatives.
The day after standing atop Donner Pass (where the only requirements we faced had been a reliable set of brakes in our rental car), Kristin, John, Ken, and I were at Alder Creek, hiking away from the well-worn trails and their educational signage. Kayle led us around an L-shaped stand of ponderosa pines and into a meadow covered with white flowers.
She looks different now, I thought, watching the dog at work. No distractions.
With her nose to the ground, the border collie made several passes over a bare-looking patch of ground, halting abruptly several times, only to double back over the same spot. Then she stopped, sat, and quickly pointed her nose to the ground. As my companions and I watched, Kayle stood up, moved about a yard farther, and repeated the same motion.
John turned to me. “Those are alerts. Two of them.” I had learned previously that when a HHRD dog detects the scent of decomposed human remains, it responds with a trained action (like sitting) called an alert.