Beautiful Ruins (41)

The trains were always named for the prominent families, but William Eddy’s the closest thing to a decent frontiersman on this particular train, good hunter and tracker, humble to a fault. The first night out, the men from the wealthy families meet to discuss the trip and William steps to the fire to say that he’s worried: they’ve gotten a late start and he’s not sure about this route they’re taking. But he’s hushed by the wealthier guys and he just goes back to his ragtag wagon in the back of the train.

The first act is all action, descent—trouble. Right away the pioneers hit bad weather and wagon wheels breaking. There’s a villain in the party, a sturdy German immigrant named Keseberg, who’s scammed an old couple into joining his wagon, but when they’re out past civilization, Keseberg steals everything from the old people and turns them out, forcing them to walk. Only William Eddy takes the couple in.

The wagon train arrives in Utah, at the halfway point, strung out, weeks behind schedule. At night, the party’s cattle are scavenged by Indians. William Eddy is the best hunter, so he kills game along the way. But bad luck and bad weather continue to plague them, and they have to pay for taking this questionable route when everything breaks down on the great salt flats. We pan over this cracked, hard soil, the trail of wagons strung out for miles, cattle starting to fall dead, the settlers forced to stagger across a desert, family by family, horses walking blindly—the foreshadowing of the dissolution of society, everyone turning slightly feral except William Eddy, who retains his human dignity to help the rest of the party get across.

Finally, they make it to Nevada—but it’s October, weeks later than any group of pioneers has ever tried to make it through. The snows usually come in mid-November, so they’ve still got a few weeks to cross the Sierra Nevada Range, at the Wasatch Mountain pass, and they’ll be in California. But they must hurry. They walk and ride all night, hoping to make it.

Now we’re up in the clouds. But these aren’t fluffy clouds. They are dark and ominous, black masses of foreboding. This is our Jaws and these clouds are our shark. We’re tight on a single snowflake. We follow it down through the sky and see it joined by other flakes. Big. Heavy. We watch that first flake fall, finally coming to rest on the arm of William Eddy, dirty and unshaven. And he knows. His eyes go slowly to the sky.

They are too late. The snows have come a month early. The Donner Party is already in the mountains, and the snow is blinding—not just flakes . . . curtains of snow fall, making the passage more than difficult. It’s impossible. Finally, they enter the mountain valley, and there it is, right before them: the pass, a narrow gap in two rock walls, so tantalizingly close. But the snow here is already ten feet deep and the horses sink to their chests. Wagons bog down. On the other side of that pass is California. Warmth. Safety. But they’re too late. The snow makes the mountains impassable. They are in a bowl between two mountain ridges. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. Doors on both sides have slammed shut.

The ninety people split into two groups. Eddy’s larger group is closer to the pass, along a lake, while the second group, with the Donners, is a couple of miles back. Both groups rush to build shelter—three shanty cabins at the lakeside camp and two cabins farther back. At the first camp, near the lake, William Eddy has built a cabin for his wife and his little son and daughter and has allowed other stragglers to take shelter there, too. These cabins are really just lean-tos, covered with hides. Still the snows come. They quickly realize they don’t have enough food to last the winter and so they start rationing what cattle they have left. Then a blizzard comes and so much snow falls that the pioneers come out and realize their cows are buried. The pioneers poke sticks in the snow trying to find their dead cows. But they’re just . . . gone. And still the snow falls. The fires in their cabins keep the snow melted around them and soon they have to build steps up into the snow around their cabins, twenty-foot walls of white surrounding their shacks so that all you see is the smoke from their fires. Days pass horribly, desperately. For two months they live at the bottom of these snow pits, on starvation rations. They try to hunt but no one can kill any game except . . .

William Eddy. Weakened by hunger, he still goes out every day and manages to shoot some rabbits and even a deer. Earlier, the wealthy families wouldn’t share their cattle with him, but Eddy shares his meager game with everyone. But even that food is running out as the game moves down from the snow line. Then, one day, Eddy comes across tracks. He follows the tracks desperately, until he’s miles from camp. It’s a bear. He catches up to it and raises his rifle weakly . . . shoots . . . and hits it! But the bear turns and charges him. He can’t reload, and, nearly starved to death, he has to fight the bear with his rifle stock. He beats the wounded animal to death with his bare hands.

He drags this bear back to the camp, where the people are getting increasingly desperate. William Eddy keeps saying, “We’ve got to send a team for help,” but no one else is strong enough to go, and he’s obviously too worried about leaving his family behind to go himself. But now the game has gone down from the mountains, and the snow keeps falling, and finally one night he talks with his wife, who begins the film as a quiet woman, someone who has suffered life more than lived it. Now she takes a deep breath. “Will’m,” she says, “you’ve got to take those who are strong and go. Get help.” He protests, but she says, “For our children. Please.” What can he do?