The Great Divide

THE YEAR OF DECISION: 1846--Bernard DeVoto--Little, Brown ($3.50).

In January 1846 universal peace seemed assured at last: Biela's comet was about to wipe out the world. But, as comet and Earth rushed toward the fatal conjunction, a watcher in the U.S. Naval Observatory saw the "ominous and inconceivable" happen--Biela's comet split in two. This lucky break permitted history to crowd into the balance of that amazing year a series .of events (of which the Mexican War and the westward migration are best known) that cause Historian Bernard DeVoto to believe that 1846 was the great divide in U.S. history. He has written this book to prove it.

Before 1846, the U.S. was a long front yard facing the Atlantic Ocean, with a big back pasture behind the Appalachian fence. The country was shut off from the Pacific by Mexico in California, and the British claims to the Oregon territory. During 1846, the U.S. occupied the Pacific coast from the 49th parallel to Lower California, and became a continental power. At the same time the stage was cleared for a new issue: Who was going to run this continental power--the free-labor North and West, or the slave-labor South? "At some time between August and December, 1846," says Historian DeVoto, "the Civil War had begun."

Six main events hurried the U.S. to ward history's great divide: 1) President James K. Folk's handling of the Mexican and Oregon questions; 2) Zachary Taylor's campaign in northern Mexico; 3) Kearny's campaign in the Southwest; 4) Kearny's and Fremont's campaigns in California; 5) the Mormon colonization of Utah; 6) the westward surge of U.S. farmers and mechanics. The Year of Decision (Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April) also includes one of history's greatest horror stories, the anthropophagous annals of the Donner expedition.

History as Inexperience. The year of decision really begins in the White House with James K. Polk scheming to get California away from Mexico, Oregon from England. "Who is James K. Polk?" Americans asked when he was nominated. They still ask. Yet Polk, says Historian DeVoto, was "the only 'strong' president between Jackson and Lincoln." He had "guts," "integrity," could not be "brought to heel." But he was also "pompous," "suspicious," "secretive," "humorless," "vindictive." He believed that "wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies." He made an effort to be generous, sometimes confided to his diary: "Although a Whig he seems a gentleman."

There are glimpses of the amateur statesman Polk conspiring with (and getting double-crossed by) Mexican General Santa Anna, who was supposed to sell out Mexico for $30,000,000. When war came, Polk was all but crushed by his Presidential burdens. Says DeVoto: "Deliberately carrying twin torches through a powder magazine ... he made no preparation for either war. . . . He did not know how to make war or how to lead a people." Result : "Time after time the extemporized organizations broke down. . . . Millions of dollars were wasted, months were lost." But at last "the first modern industrial war somehow . . . succeeded."

There were incredible marches, incredible hardships, equally incredible battles. Volunteers had almost no discipline. Early in the war, "the depots and bases filled with whores, sutlers, and gamblers, were already a continuous jamboree and vicious with crime." One Maryland regiment "suffered attrition from delirium tremens." A Kentucky regiment had to be "ordered to the rear in disgrace, for rape."

The story of Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's conquest of the Southwest is more epic and just as robust. Kearny had volunteer trouble too. As he boarded a steamboat before the start of his expedition, he ordered the sentry not to let the volunteers follow him. But they stormed the gangplank. Cried one of the new conquistadors, slapping his commander on the back: "You don't git off from us, old hoss! For by Ingin corn we'll go plum through fire and thunder with you. What'll you drink, General? Don't be back'ard! Sing out!" Kearny shocked his volunteers by ordering wine.

By the Waters of Sugar Creek. Among the book's most successful sections are those in which Utah-born Bernard DeVoto describes the exodus of the Mormons from the time they were driven from Illinois. The flight from Nauvoo ("The city of the Lord God Jehovah King of Kings. ... In February, 1846, it was fallen--that great city") is memorable. "Acres of ice" floated in the Mississippi. "The ferries were jammed with men, women, children, horses, oxen, cows, swine, chickens, feather beds, Boston rockers, a miscellany of families and goods hastily brought together in the fear of death. The boats dumped them on the Iowa shore and turned back for other, identical freights--American refugees fleeing a city under threat from an enemy. . . .

"Nine miles inland they reached a timbered stretch, on Sugar Creek, and here they pitched a camp. . . . Winter night came up beyond the grove. Supper was whatever you had brought with you. . . . Afterward, they sang hymns, prayed, and listened to instruction from the elders. . . . That night on Sugar Creek nine babies were born. . . ."

The Great Migration had started the year before. But there were enough emigrants in 1846 so that their trains stretched for hundreds of miles across the Great Plains. Among them was a group later to be known as the Donner party. Few of the Donners ever reached California, but they became more famous than most of the settlers who did.

Villain of the piece was an unscrupulous publicity man, Lansford W. Hastings, the original California booster. Hastings had written the book of the year, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California. In it he had said: "The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco." Says DeVoto: "When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage . . . neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate man. . . ."

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.

Something Like a Woman. In February seven men of the First Relief got over the divide. The huts in the first camp were buried so deep the seven men could not see them. They called. "Something like a woman came up out of a hole in the snow." Others "crawled up the ramp of frozen snow to mew at the seven men from beyond the mountains. . . . They looked like mummies."

The First Relief took back 21 survivors, many of them children. On the way down the divide, they met the Second Relief. Outside one hut, the Second Relief found a dismembered body. There was an entry concerning it in the diary of one of the travelers, Patrick Breen: "Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him." She had. At the Donner family huts, Tamsen Donner had just sent a man to beg Elizabeth, Jacob Donner's wife, for a meal. The man was just returning with a leg of Elizabeth's husband. "At the sight of the rescuers, he tossed the now unneeded leg back on the butchered corpse." Jacob Donner's children "were sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half roasted liver and heart of the[ir] father. . . ." None of the elder Donners touched it.

Sac of Bestiality. Possibly the most horrible episode was discovered by the Fourth Relief. Lewis Keseberg, a German, had been left by his own request in the camp with Tamsen Donner and her dying husband. The Fourth Relief found a kettle full of pieces of George Donner, but there were legs of oxen which were lying around uneaten. Keseberg avoided the rescuers. He had long been suspected of stealing from the other members of the party. At last the rescuers cornered him "lying down amidst the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights."

They could not find Tamsen Donner. Keseberg later denied that he had killed her. But there in the camp he told the rescuers that "he ate her body and found her flesh the best he had ever tasted." They took Keseberg, "now a mere sac of bestiality," over the great divide down into California which had become America while he was developing his taste.

Historian DeVoto justifies his detailed retelling of the Donner story by saying that "it is as the commonplace or typical just distorted that the Donners must be seen." The emigrant train was "the village on wheels," the U.S. in miniature. So, like the reader, Author DeVoto goes on & on in a sick fascination, unable to free himself from the sense that the Donners are simply an extreme case of any society that has lost the will to get its members over one of history's divides.

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