Snow Mountain Passage (24 page)

The days were somewhat nicer, at least in the early weeks, when most of the early snow had melted off the valley floor. The lake hadn’t frozen over yet. When the sun came out, the sharp blue sky made the evergreens greener, and the blue lake bluer. Sometimes I would take Tommy on a long walk to the lake and make up stories about all the things we’d do when we got to California. I would describe the armies coming across the mountains to rescue us. When we got to the shoreline I would point to the pass and tell him that’s where they would come from, hundreds of men with horses and bugles and wagons full of biscuits and buttermilk and johnnycake and cornmeal mush and fried bacon and apple pie. I would tell him we would see papa first. He would ride through the pass waving his hat, and his horse would rear back and kick its hooves high in the air.

By the time I finished such a story I would be hearing papa’s voice. The first time I heard it, I thought he was already at the top of the summit, calling down to us. Later on I knew his voice was inside my head, and he was talking right to me from wherever he might be, and I would answer. I’d tell Tommy to wait by a big log. I’d walk down to the water’s edge, and we’d have conversations.

“I didn’t forget you, darlin’,” he would say.

“I know it, papa. We didn’t forget you, either.”

“How do those boots feel now?” he would ask.

“Some folks have worn out their boots. But these are still snug.”

“Well, you know I try to take care of my little girl.”

“We miss you, papa. Will you get here pretty soon?”

“You just sit tight, darlin’. It won’t be long.”

“Don’t give up, papa,” I would say. “Don’t you ever give up.”

Sometimes I’d go walking by myself, just to talk to him. Late one afternoon I was standing like that when I heard rocks click behind me. I thought it was Tommy, or Virginia coming to call me back to the cabin. But it was Salvador, heading for the water with his fishing gig.

He looked down at me with an odd smile on his brown face, as if whatever I was doing he approved of—talking to the water, talking to the mountains, talking to papa. Maybe in his mind it was all the same thing.

He hunkered next to me and looked out across the lake, the way I was looking. It was getting cold, but I didn’t care. I liked having Salvador next to me like that, with our frosty breath and the water lapping right in front of you.

After a while he said softly, “Pat-ti. Tu padre ‘sta bien.”

I was pretty sure this meant papa was all right, though the words themselves could have meant just about anything. The very sound of his voice was like a wave of comfort through the air. My chest was thick with gratitude. I threw my arms around his neck and nearly knocked him off balance.

With wide eyes he said, “Cuidado, señorita.”

“Si, señor,” said I, holding tight.

His free arm squeezed me, then he stood up and walked on along the lakeshore toward an outcropping of rocks where he could stand.

Salvador had tied some points of bone to the end of a pole. Late in the day, when the glare was off the water, he would try to spear some trout, though he never had much luck, since they seldom came in close enough. Some days he’d get one or two, which was more than the other men would get, who fished with hooks but had not fished for trout before. In the three weeks between when we got there and the lake froze, they never did seem to figure out the bait.

* * *

TWICE MORE THAT
first month Salvador and Luis and Charlie Stanton had started for the pass, leading small parties who hoped to get through and bring back some help. Both times the snowdrifts higher up had stopped them. They had hardly returned from the second attempt and begun to thaw out, when Bill Eddy called at each cabin, saying they had to give it one more try.

“We can’t wait around for somebody else to come and find us,” I heard him say. “We’ll just flat starve to death.”

About the time a third bunch was ready to try the pass, a storm hit us, a big one. There was nothing much to do but burrow in and wait. For eight days it snowed without a break. Nobody at the lake camp, except for Uncle Billy Graves, had ever seen such snow or heard of it or imagined that something from the sky could simply bury you like that. Years later I would look through the guidebooks everyone had read before we started out. Not one of them says anything useful about snow of any kind, apart from advising you to leave Missouri soon enough not to get caught in it.

Our cabin was buried to the roofline. Milt Elliott had to climb out through the chimney to dig away snow so we could use the door. Elsewhere, the people with animals still alive had lost them all. They wandered off and fell over frozen and got covered where no one would find them for months. It was disastrous. With that kind of snow there’d be no more game. Bill Eddy had probably shot the last grizzly roaming around loose that winter. Rations had to be cut, and it started another round of blaming.

You can imagine the accusations, as families blamed one another, blaming whoever had been fool enough to let their cattle wander, blaming the storm, blaming Lansford Hastings again for leading us there, and some of them still blaming papa, though they also hoped some miracle would bring him and Bill McCutcheon through the snow with a rescue party. They couldn’t make up their minds about papa. One day he was “the Villain.” The next day he was “the Deliverer.” I heard Bill Eddy say the Jim Reed he used to know would be doing all he could, but if it was
this
hard for a person to get out, wouldn’t it be just as hard coming in from the other side?

For Eddy it was all the more reason to try the mountain one more time. Families had to cut through their differences, he said, and pool whatever supplies they had and plan one more expedition.

Some agreed. Some did not. Some were already too discouraged, running out of food, running out of energy, running out of will. Some just wouldn’t budge. There was no leader anymore, no one in charge. George Donner was five miles back, at Alder Creek, and no one else had been elected captain. Patrick Breen had slaughtered most of his cattle early on and had enough frozen beef stored away, he figured his wife and seven kids would be better off sitting still. As for Lewis Keseberg, he couldn’t travel more than twenty yards. The thorn in his foot had got so bad he seldom left his cabin. Maybe he was like Patrick, and figured he didn’t need to—not yet. For all his failings, Lewis was well organized, a good planner, a good packer. He knew how to store things and maintain his equipment. Back in the desert, when everyone else was running low, he still had provisions stocked, flour and sugar and coffee and so forth. Some had made it clear to the lake camp. He and Patrick both figured they could last awhile, so they were going to stay put. But the Eddys, they were like us, living one meal at a time. In Bill’s view the only chance to save his family was to make it across while he still had some muscle for the trip. I’ll say this much for him: he was never one to give up without going to the limit.

And I’ll say this for Uncle Billy Graves: he finally remembered something that would give these hikers a lot better chance. Using rawhide thongs and strips of hickory that came out of the oxbows, he had fashioned some snowshoes. Why he hadn’t thought of it sooner is still a mystery to me. Maybe the big snow took him back to his early years, before he’d settled in Illinois, when he spent a few winters in Vermont.

There must have been sixty of us in those cabins near the lake. Fourteen decided to go, including Uncle Billy and his older son and his daughter Mary Ann, and Bill Eddy, and William Foster, and Charlie Stanton and the two Indians, who were leading again since those three had already traveled the whole route. I remember that Charlie’s derby was gone. His beard had grown down to conceal his throat. He had scarves wrapped around his head and a floppy cap he’d made out of a scrap of tenting.

The day they left, the skies were clear, one of those dazzling times when you want to believe the world is a kind place after all. Nowadays you will see postcards of Donner Lake featuring just such a scene, with a caption across the bottom saying, “Sierra Winter Idyll.” I know people who collect such cards. I can’t look at them for long. They remind me of the day the Snowshoe Party said good-bye.

You don’t set forth into that kind of country in December unless you have more to lose by staying than by going. We all knew they were risking their lives. At the same time, fourteen people leaving meant fourteen fewer mouths to feed. It’s humbling to think back on how little food they took for the journey, one strip of jerky per person per day, each strip about twelve inches long. They had a six days’ supply. That’s how long Charlie imagined it would take to make Bear Valley.

To lighten the loads, they were taking only one rifle, and I remember that William Foster carried it. It seemed wrong that he would be the one, considering he had shot his brother-in-law in the back with that pepperbox pistol. But I guess it was his rifle. After that shooting, Foster’s eyes always had a startled look that repelled me and intrigued me too. I never saw him blink. As his cheeks sunk in, from the short rations, his eyes seemed to grow. I would never go near him, but I remember watching him strap on the rifle, fascinated by his wide, staring eyes.

Foster was leaving a young wife behind and a four-year-old son. Uncle Billy, he was leaving six children behind. I remember him trying to say good-bye to his wife, how hard it was to speak. He was in his late fifties then. He looked twenty years older. The long privation had caught up with him. He was the oldest person at the lake camp, a kind of elder who might have taken charge, but he was not a man to take charge. This too showed in his haunted face. His eyes seemed to say that if he himself had been capable of more, things might have gone another way.

Maybe it was this very look that caused Mrs. Graves to turn and cry out and run back through the trees with arms flapping out from underneath her shawl. The night before, I’d heard them arguing, on the other side of the wall between our cabins, arguing about who was to leave and who was to stay. What was she supposed to do, she yelled, with her husband gone away, and taking her older son, and taking Mary Ann too, the only daughter she could count on?

I heard Uncle Billy’s mournful voice. “It has got to be.”

“We come all this way! We ought to all go together or stay put together!”

“Charlie says it’d be too hard on the young’uns. They’re too frail now.”

“Charlie? Charlie? What does Charlie know?”

“He’s been up there.”

“He don’t have no young’uns!”

“Just hush up now.”

“You can’t run off and not come back! Jim Reed did that! You can’t do that!”

“I said hush up. If I do wrong, God will punish me, not you.”

“I ain’t gonna hush up!”

“It has got to be …”

“WHAT HAS GOT TO BE?”

Years later I would understand what she went through that winter, what all the women went through, Mrs. Graves, and mama, and Peggy Breen and Keseberg’s young wife, and Bill Eddy’s wife. I had to grow up and get married and have a family of my own before I could begin to know the terror and the turmoil they had to live with and somehow hold inside, so they could just get one foot in front of the other, get from hour to hour and not be broken by the utter hopelessness that seemed to fill the valley, as their children shrank before their eyes, with snow covering the cabins now, and the cabins themselves nothing but half-trimmed logs thrown up so fast they hardly fit together.

Until that day I had seen Mrs. Graves as a witch sent to persecute mama. That morning I saw her as a wild snowbird flapping her wings, desperate to fly off through the trees.

As Uncle Billy watched her go, his face did not change. He watched her, then he took mama’s hand in both of his and gazed at her. His voice was raspy and faraway.

“Good-bye, Margaret,” he said at last. “May God forgive us all.”

“God has,” mama said. “And we will meet again in California.”

His eyes held hers, as if drinking in something he saw there that he would see only once. For me, at age eight, it was too painful to watch. It filled me with fear.

I had to turn away—and there was Salvador with his snowshoes strapped on. He had shuffled over next to me. He squatted down, so skinny he did not look like the same man who’d come riding along the Truckee River in October. Yet his eyes glowed in the same way when he spoke our little ritual exchange.

With a thin, sad smile he said, “Cuidado, señorita.”

“Si, señor,” I said. “Y tu también.”

He reached inside his coat and his shirt and pulled out a pendant that hung around his neck. He took off his hat, lifting the pendant over his long black hair, and handed it to me, a piece of shell on a fiber cord. I had seen seashells once or twice but never anything that could shimmer with its own inner light, pearly white and silver, with soft, rosy streaks that moved when the shell moved. Later on I would learn how people from his region had traded for centuries with the coastal tribes, skins and nuts for shells and salt. On that day I knew nothing about trading routes. I knew nothing about Indians. I knew nothing about the ocean or its creatures or where something this unique and beautiful might come from. I stared at the shell, then I turned to Salvador. He was looking at me the same way Uncle Billy had looked at mama.

“Vaya con Dios, señorita.”

“Gracias, Salvador. Muchas gracias. Y vaya con Dios.”

The others had shouldered their packs and bundles. He joined Luis and Charlie at the head of the line, and they started out, plodding through the pines. Those snowshoes were clumsy, homemade hoops, but they worked. Like the crisp blue sky overhead, it seemed to be a good omen, something we could hang new hopes on. This time the hikers would stay on top of the snow instead of sinking into drifts. I had no clear idea what awaited them up there. I imagined impossible peaks, and great mounds of snow, then somehow, beyond the pass, somewhere beyond all that, a wide sunny field spreading on forever.

We followed them as far as the iced-over lake, where we stood watching as they moved away along the shoreline, shuffling and plodding toward the white wall some of them had already climbed three times and would now have to climb again.