Old Bones - Douglas Preston Page 0,8
the ‘Lost Camp.’ It was a small group in the rear, consisting in part of Reinhardt and Spitzer, a family named Carville, and one Albert Parkin, who deserted his family to seek a new life in California. Nobody is sure what happened but it’s likely that, in the confusion of the snowstorm, this group lost the trail and went up a dead-end canyon beyond the mouth of the Little Truckee River. They ended up snowbound deep in the mountains, miles from the main party. Some said the Lost Camp was located in a dark valley, cut off from the sun, encircled by rocky cliffs. So many legends have grown up about the camp that it’s hard to tease out the truth.
“At any rate, all the stranded travelers remained snowbound for months, as storm after storm dumped twenty-five to thirty feet of snow on them. It buried the rough lean-tos and crude shelters they had managed to cobble together. In these filthy hovels, they huddled and starved and began to die, one by one. They ate the last of their supplies. Then they ate their oxen and horses. Then they ate their dogs. And then they started digging up the frozen bodies of their companions.
“They peeled off the flesh and cooked it. They went for the organs, eating the livers and hearts, intestines and lungs. They cracked the bones for marrow and split open the skulls for the brains. When all that ran out, they boiled the bones for grease.”
Benton took a moment to shift in his chair and glance at the distant horizon. Nora and Salazar were silent.
“I should add that not everyone partook. Many refused to eat human flesh. Even today, historians debate just how many of the party became cannibals. As more died of starvation, it meant more food became available for those left alive. It’s almost impossible to imagine what it must have been like, day after day, week after week, stuck in those dreadful camps, overcrowded with men, women, and children in stuffy dens, where the air was so foul from fecal waste and rotting human flesh that it could hardly be breathed. In desperation, a group of fifteen men finally set off to cross the mountains into California to summon help. Seven made it—and then only by eating their companions who had died along the way.
“In February, the first relief expedition arrived. They saw scenes of horror that almost defy comprehension. One rescuer later described coming across some children sitting on a log, their faces smeared with blood as they ate the half-roasted liver and heart of their own father, body parts scattered around them.
“That first rescue expedition could only save a few: they themselves almost starved to death crossing the Sierras to reach the stranded travelers. Tamzene and George Donner were still alive when the first relief party arrived, but Tamzene refused to leave her husband, who was dying of a hand infection. A second rescue expedition brought additional people out of the mountains, and a third, but Tamzene refused to leave George, even while her own children were carried out.
“At some point during all this, a man named Asher Boardman showed up at Donner camp by Alder Creek. It was at the end of February. He had fled the Lost Camp, and alluded to how the place had descended into a kind of cannibalistic madness. Boardman was an itinerant preacher and said he’d run away when his own wife, Edith, tried to kill and eat him. Boardman ended up dying of starvation and exhaustion a few days later, about the time the third rescue expedition arrived.
“All this and much more Tamzene recorded in her journal.
“Finally, in April, the fourth and final relief effort arrived. But in the aftermath of the third rescue expedition, many more had died and the cannibalism had actually accelerated. What those last rescuers found was even more shocking than what had come before. In the Alder Creek camp, they found no one alive. George Donner was dead, his body lying in the melting snow, butchered and partially dismembered, his head split open and brains removed. There was, however, no sign of Tamzene. The rescuers went on to a rude campsite nearby, where they found a single living man named Keseberg. Next to him was a frying pan with a human liver and lungs in it. Under pointed questioning, he admitted they were the remains of Tamzene. He had been eating her body for weeks, he said, and the liver