THE CHAMBERLAIN FAMILY, COUSINS OF DANIEL WEBSTER--JEFFERSON GRAMMAR
SCHOOL--FURTHER CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS OF THE DONNER PARTY--PATERNAL
ANCESTRY--S.O. HOUGHTON--DEATH TAKES ONE OF THE SEVEN SURVIVING
DONNERS.
Our school home in Sacramento was with friends who not only encouraged
our desire for knowledge, but made the acquirement pleasant. The head
of the house was Mr. William E. Chamberlain, cashier of D.O. Mills's
bank. His wife, Charlotte, was a contributor to _The Sacramento Union_
and leading magazines. Their daughter, Miss Florence, taught in the
public schools; and their son, William E., Jr., was a high-school
student, preparing for Harvard.
In addition to their superior personal attainments, Mr. and Mrs.
Chamberlain, each--for they were cousins--had the distinction of being
first cousins to Daniel Webster, and this fact also served to bring to
their home guests of note and culture. Georgia and I were too closely
occupied with lessons to venture often beyond the school-girl precinct,
but the intellectual atmosphere which pervaded the house, and the books
to which we had access, were of inestimable advantage. Furthermore, the
tuition fees required of non-resident pupils entitled them to choice
of district, and we fortunately had selected Jefferson Grammar School,
No. 4, in charge of Mr. Henry A. White, one of the ablest educators in
the city.
Several resident families had also taken advantage of this privilege,
and elected to pay tuition and place their children under his
instruction, thus bringing together forty-nine energetic boys and girls
to whet each other's ambition and incite class rivalry. Among the
number were the five clever children of the Hon. Tod Robinson; three
sons of Judge Robert Robinson; Colonel Zabriskie's pretty daughter
Annie; Banker Swift's stately Margaret; General Redding's two sons; Dr.
Oatman's son Eugene; beloved Nelly Upton, daughter of the editor of
_The Sacramento Union_; Daniel Yost; Agnes Toll, the sweet singer; and
Eliza Denison, my chum.
At the end of the term, _The Daily Union_ closed its account of the
public examination of Jefferson Grammar School with the following
statement: "Among Mr. White's pupils are two young ladies, survivors of
the terrible disaster which befell the emigration of 1846 among the
snows of the California mountains."
Even this cursory reference was a matter of regret to Georgia and me.
We had entered school silent in regard to personal history, and did not
wish public attention turned toward ourselves even in an indirect way,
fearing it might lead to a revival of the false and sensational
accounts of the past, and we were not prepared to correct them, nor
willing they should be spread. Pursued by these fears, we returned to
the ranch, where Elitha and her three black-eyed little daughters
welcomed our home-coming and brightened our vacation.
Almost coincident, however, with the foregoing circumstance, Georgia
came into possession of "What I Saw in California," by Edwin Bryant;
and we found that the book did contain many facts in connection with
our party's disaster, but they were so interwoven with wild rumors, and
the false and sensational statements quoted from _The California Star_,
that they proved nothing, yet gave to the untrue that appearance of
truth which is so difficult to correct.
The language employed in description seemed to us so coarse and brutal
that we could not forgive its injustice to the living, and to the
memory of the dead. We could but feel that had simple facts been
stated, there would have been no harrowing criticism on account of long
unburied corpses found in the lake cabins. Nor would the sight of
mutilated dead have suggested that the starving survivors had become
"gloating cannibals, preying on the bodies of their companions." Bare
facts would have shown that the living had become too emaciated, too
weak, to dig graves, or to lift or drag the dead up the narrow snow
steps, even had open graves awaited their coming. Aye, more, would have
shown conclusively that mutilation of the bodies of those who had
perished was never from choice, never cannibalistic, but dire
necessity's last resort to ease torturing hunger, to prevent loss of
reason, to save life. Loss of reason was more dreaded than death by
the starving protectors of the helpless.
Fair statements would also have shown that the First Relief reached the
camps with insufficient provision to meet the pressing needs of the
unfortunate. Consequently, it felt the urgency of haste to get as many
refugees as possible to Bear Valley before storms should gather and
delays defeat the purpose of its coming; that it divided what it could
conscientiously spare among those whom it was obliged to leave, cut
wood for the fires, and endeavored to give encouragement and hope to
the desponding, but did not remain long enough to remove or bury the
dead.
Each succeeding party actuated by like anxieties and precautions,
departed with its charges, leaving pitiable destitution behind; leaving
mournful conditions in camp,--conditions attributable as much to the
work of time and atmospheric agencies as to the deplorable expedients
to which the starving were again and again reduced.
With trembling hand Georgia turned the pages, from the sickening
details of the _Star_[18] to the personal observations of Edwin Bryant,
who in returning to the United States in the Summer of 1847, crossed
the Sierra Nevadas with General Kearney and escort, reached the lake
cabins June 22, and wrote as follows:
A halt was called for the purpose of interring the remains. Near the
principal lake cabin I saw two bodies entire, except the abdomens
had been cut open and entrails extracted. Their flesh had been
either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to dry
atmosphere, and presented the appearance of mummies. Strewn around
the cabins were dislocated and broken skulls (in some instances
sawed asunder with care for the purpose of extracting the brains).
Human skeletons, in short, in every variety of mutilation. A more
appalling spectacle I never witnessed. The remains were, by order of
General Kearney, collected and buried under supervision of Major
Sword. They were interred in a pit dug in the centre of one of the
cabins for a cache. These melancholy duties to the dead being
performed, the cabins, by order of Major Sword, were fired and, with
everything surrounding them connected with the horrible and
melancholy tragedy, consumed.
The body of (Captain) George Donner was found in his camp about
eight miles distant. He had been carefully laid out by his wife, and
a sheet was wrapped around the corpse. This sad office was probably
the last act she performed before visiting the camp of Keseberg. He
was buried by a party of men detailed for that purpose.
I knew the Donners well; their means in money and merchandise which
they had brought with them were abundant. Mr. Donner was a man of
about sixty, and was at the time of leaving the United States a
highly respectable citizen of Illinois, a farmer of independent
means. Mrs. Donner was considerably younger than her husband, an
energetic woman of refined education.
After Georgia left me, I reopened the book, and pondered its
revelations, many of them new to us both; and most of them I marked for
later investigation.
Bryant found no human bones at Donner's camp. His description of that
camp was all-important, proving that my father's body had not been
mutilated, but lay in his mountain hut three long months, sacred as
when left by my little mother, who had watched over him to the pitiful
end, had closed his eyes, folded his arms across his breast, and
wrapped the burial sheet about his precious form. There, too, was
proof of his last resting-place, just as had been told me in sight of
Jakie's grave, by the Cherokee woman in Sonoma.
The book had also a copy of Colonel McKinstrey's letter to the General
Relief Committee in San Francisco, reporting the return of the first
rescuers with refugees. In speaking of the destitution of the
unfortunates in camp, he used the following words sympathically:
When the party arrived at camp, it was obliged to guard the little
stock of provisions it had carried over the mountains on its back on
foot, for the relief of the poor beings, as they were in such a
starving condition that they would have immediately used up all the
little store. They even stole the buckskin strings from the party's
snowshoes and ate them.
I at once recognized this friendly paragraph as the one which had had
its kindness extracted, and been abbreviated and twisted into that
cruel taunt which I had heard in my childhood from the lips of
"Picayune Butler."
A careful study of Bryant's work increased my desire to sift that of
Thornton, for I had been told that it not only contained the "Fallon
Diary," but lengthier extracts from the _Star_, and I wanted to compare
and analyze those details which had been published as "Thrilling Events
in California History." I was unable to procure the book then, but
resolved to do so when opportunity should occur. Naturally, we who see
history made, are solicitous that it be accurately recorded, especially
when it vitally concerns those near to us.
[Illustration: Photograph by Lynwood Abbott. THE CROSS AT DONNER LAKE]
Shortly before school reopened, Georgia and I spent the day with cousin
Frances E. Bond; and in relating to her various incidents of our life,
we spoke of the embarrassment we had felt in class the day that Mr.
White asked every pupil whose ancestors had fought in the war of the
American Revolution to rise, and Georgia and I were the only ones who
remained seated. My cousin regarded us a moment and then said:
"Your Grandfather Eustis, although a widow's only son, and not yet
sixteen years of age, enlisted when the Revolutionary War began. He was
a sentinel at Old South Church, and finally, a prisoner aboard the
_Count d'Estang_."
She would have stopped there, but we begged for all she knew about our
mother's people, so she continued, mingling advice with information:
"I would rather that you should not know the difference between their
position in life and your own; yet, if you must know it, the Eustis and
the Wheelwright families, from whom you are descended, are among the
most substantial and influential of New England. Their reputation,
however, is not a prop for you to lean on. They are on the Atlantic
coast, you on the Pacific; so your future depends upon your own merit
and exertions."
This revelation of lineage, nevertheless, was an added incentive to
strive for higher things; an inheritance more enduring than our little
tin box and black silk stockings which had belonged to mother.
An almost indescribable joy was mine when, at a gathering of the
school children to do honor to the citizens who had inaugurated the
system of public instruction in Sacramento, I beheld on the platform
Captain John A. Sutter. Memories both painful and grateful were evoked.
It was he who had first sent food to the starving travellers in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was he who had laid his hand on my head,
when a forlorn little waif at the Fort, tenderly saying, "Poor little
girl, I wish I could give back what you have lost!"
To me, Captain Sutter had long been the embodiment of all that was good
and grand; and now I longed to touch his hand and whisper to him
gratitude too sacred for strangers' ears. But the opportunity was
withheld until riper years.
During our last term at school, Georgia's health was so improved that
my life was more free of cares and aglow with fairer promises. Miss
Kate Robinson and I were rivals for school honors, and I studied as I
never had studied before, for in the history, physiology, and rhetoric
classes, she pressed me hard. At the close of the session the record
showed a tie. Neither of us would accept determination by lot, and we
respectfully asked the Honorable Board of Education to withhold the
medal for that year.
About this time Georgia and I enjoyed a rare surprise. On his return
from business one day, Mr. Chamberlain announced that a
distinguished-appearing young lawyer, S.O. Houghton by name, had
stopped at the bank that afternoon, to learn our address and say that
he would call in the evening. We, knowing that he was the husband of
our "little cousin Mary," were anxious to meet him and to hear of her,
whom we had not seen since our journey across the snow. He came that
evening, and told us of the cozy home in San Jose to which he had taken
his young wife, and of her wish that we visit them the coming July or
August.
Although letters had passed between us, up to this time we had known
little of Mary's girlhood life. After we parted, in 1847, she was
carried through to San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, where her
maimed foot was successfully treated by the surgeon of the United
States ship _Portsmouth_. The citizens of that place purchased and
presented to her the one hundred _vara_ lot Number 38, and the lot
adjoining to her brother George. Mr. Reed was appointed her guardian
and given charge of her apportionment of funds realized from the sale
of goods brought from her father's tents. She became a member of the
Reed household in San Jose, and her life must have been cast in
pleasant lines, for she always spoke of Mr. and Mrs. Reed with filial
affection. Moreover, her brother had been industrious and prosperous,
and had contributed generously to her comfort and happiness.
Some weeks later, we took Mr. Houghton's report home to Elitha. We also
showed her a recent letter from Mary, sparkling with bright
anticipations--anticipations never to be realized; for we girls were
hardly settled on the ranch before a letter came from cousin George
Donner, dated Sacramento, June 20, 1860. From this we learned that he
had on that day been summoned to the bedside of his dying sister, and
had come from his home on Putah Creek as fast as horse could carry him,
yet had failed to catch the bay steamer; and while waiting for the next
boat, was writing to us who could best understand his state of mind.
Next, a note from San Jose informed us that Mrs. Mary M. Houghton died
June 21, 1860, leaving a namesake, a daughter two weeks old, and that
her brother had reached there in time for the funeral.
Of the seven Donners who had survived the disaster, she was the first
called by death, and we deeply mourned her loss, and grieved because
another little Mary was motherless. The following August, Mr. Houghton
made his first visit to Rancho de los Cazadores, and with fatherly
pride, showed the likeness of his little girl, and promised to keep us
all in touch with her by letter.
Mr. Houghton was closely identified with pioneer affairs, and we had
many friends in common, especially among officers and soldiers of the
Mexican War. He had enlisted in Company A of Stevenson's Regiment of
New York Volunteers when barely eighteen years of age; and sailed with
it from his native State on the twenty-sixth of September, 1846. After
an eventful voyage by way of Cape Horn, the good ship _Loo Choo_, which
bore him hither, cast anchor in the Bay of San Francisco, March 26,
1847, about the time the Third Relief was bringing us little girls
over the mountains. His company being part of the detachment ordered to
Mexico under Colonel Burton, he went at once into active service, was
promoted through intermediate grades, and appointed lieutenant, and
adjutant on the staff of Colonel Burton, before his twentieth year.
Following an honorable discharge at the close of the war, and a year's
exciting experiences in the gold fields, he settled in San Jose in
November, 1849, then the capital city. His knowledge of the Spanish and
French languages fitting him specially therefor, he turned his
attention to legislative and municipal matters. As clerk of the Senate
Judiciary Committee of the first session of the California Legislature,
he helped to formulate statutes for enactment, they being promulgated
in Spanish as well as English at that time. During the period between
1851 and 1860 he held several official positions, among them that of
president of the City Council; and on his twenty-fifth birthday he was
elected Mayor of San Jose. Meanwhile he had organized the Eagle Guard,
one of the first independent military companies in the State, and had
also been successively promoted from adjutant to ordnance officer, with
the rank of lieutenant-colonel, on Major-General Halleck's staff of the
State Militia. Moreover, he had completed the study of law in the
office of Judge W.T. Wallace, been admitted to the bar, and was now
actively engaged in the practice of his profession.
[Footnote 18: See Appendix for extract from _The California Star_.]