One More River To Cross
Jane Kirkpatrick 2019 341 pgs

In all the many good stories about Donner Summit the story of the Stephens Murphy Townsend party is one of the best. It’s a story of tenacity, courage, strength, and survival as the party members faced the Sierra winter and the Sierra itself. The people did most things right and survived while “discovering” the Truckee route over Donner Summit and becoming the first group to reach California overland with wagons. They should have given their name to Donner Pass, Donner Lake, and Donner Summit. Instead, a less deserving group came along two years later and left their name everywhere.

Relatively few people know the story of the Stephens Party’s crossing of the Sierra. The reason is that it wasn’t news. They all survived with the party even increasing in size by two during the trek. We don’t report on things if they work out right. No one grabbed the survivors and wrote their stories as happened with the Donners. Even years later their story has been overshadowed by the Donners.

The story is amazing though, and deserves to be told. So, over recent years there’s been more attention. A video “Forgotten Journey” tells the story as does a novelized telling, Truckee’s Trail (which the Heirloom reviewed in our February, ’09 issue and which is on our website). We recently found One More River to Cross by Jane Kirkpartrick (2019) which is also a fictionalized account of the Stephens Party.

To quickly recap, the Stephens Party was aiming for California in 1844, two years before the Donners’ ill-fated trip. At the end of November they’d arrived at Donner Lake. There six people, including two women, broke off and followed the Truckee River to Lake Tahoe where they crossed the mountains and arrived at Sutter’s Fort. That’s story one. The rest of the party realized they’d not be able to get over the pass with all their wagons so they left half of them at Donner Lake. Seventeen year-old Moses Schallenberger volunteered to stay and guard the wagons with two other men. That’s story two. The rest of the party summited the pass and got as far as Big Bend, about twelve miles from the pass, where they realized they needed more help. The men volunteered to go ahead to Sutter’s Fort for food. They would then come back and rescue the women and children. That’s story three. Eight women and two men stayed at Big Bend with seventeen children, including two babies, one a newborn who the first white baby born in California. They’d wait for the men to return. That’s story four.

That’s all rich fodder for an exciting retelling. Unfortunately, there’s little information from real life to flesh out the stories. Not much was written down. Therefore authors wanting to tell the story have wide latitude to tell their own versions and must make up the details.

Before we even get to what Mrs. Kirkpatrick has done with her novel, we can consider our expectations. Each of those stories is compelling in the abstract and if we’re good at detail we can make them even more compelling. What was it like to be part of the six who broke away initially, one the sister of Moses Schallenberger? Why did they decide to break away? Were there arguments about it? Elizabeth Townsend left her brother at the lake and then left her husband who stayed with the main group. What were the dynamics of that? How did they get over the Sierra? They had no maps and only vague information from a Native American. Which route was the right one, among the many canyons to follow to the crest and which river drainage should they follow coming down the west side? How could they ever find Sutter’s Fort in the immensity of Mexican California? What was it like to camp out in the snow every night, weather every storm, and find food?

Then there’s Moses at Donner Lake in a rudimentary cabin that didn’t even have a door. He ended up spending the winter alone. What kind of a person would volunteer to let the main party go on while he remained behind? What was it like to part with his friends all of them thinking they never’ see him again after he took sick and headed back to the lake? How did he survive day to day? What was it like to be all alone for months in a cabin without even a door to keep the weather out? How did he deal with the continual loneliness? Spoiler alert: how did he react when he saw a man approaching in the distance, who’d been sent by his sister to rescue him?

What about the women and children at Big Bend? How did they react when the guys said they’d go for help and leave the woman children to fend for themselves in an even more makeshift cabin? What went through their minds over the ensuing months? How did they keep the children occupied? How did they keep their spirits up? How did they deal with the never ending cold? How did they react as their store of food diminished day after day? Worries must have compounded worries. Could they save their children? What if the men never came back?

Then there are the guys who got to Sutter’s Fort and were dragooned into a small “army” to help fight Mexico. How did they feel knowing their families were waiting and they were being sent off to fight? When would be they able to get back?

It all comes out ok at the end and One More River takes us to the end of the story (as does Truckee’s Trail). So the question becomes how well did Mrs. Kirkpatrick do?

Since there are few details about the Stephens party’s trip across the continent Mrs. Kirkpatrick had a broad canvas on which to paint her stories and to come up with stories or details to put on the skeletal framework. One strength of the book is the characters. First there’s a focus on the women who are empowered throughout the story which is not typical in Western literature. Kirkpatrick has written dozens of books, many from the woman’s point of view, so that theme in this book has been well-practiced.

Another thing that’s well-practiced is character descriptions and Kirkpatrick describes her characters well from the very first sentence and does it through the characters actions and speech rather than the author’s descriptions. For example Mary Sullivan was washing clothes by the river thinking to herself about standing on her head, her poetry, and fulfilling her responsibilities including “expressing decorum.” Little details build characters over time, such as Allen Montgomery spending too much time on his mustache. Characteristics of the people come out a little at a time over the course of the book. That kind of description is so much more powerful than an author’s listing personality traits of what the characters look like.

Kirkpatrick’s narrative also contrasts, through their actions, the Stephens Party with the Donner Party of two years later. If we know the story of the Donner Party we can hardly imagine people helping each other with laundry or inviting someone to dinner as happens with Kirkpatrick’s Stephens Party. One can’t imagine the Donner Party singing or having laughter “sprinkled through the company” in an effort to keep singing going. There are other contrasts too: good leadership, good planning, good dispute resolution, and cooperative decision making. To highlight those differences, for example, one of Kirkpatrick’s little vignettes has Mary Sullivan reading a story with relevant morals to her two younger brothers. She compliments the boys as they think through the possible morals. The final thought is “God will weave into your future as long as you are willing to share your fortune with others.” The members of the Donner Party, in general, didn’t subscribe to that. Joe Foster, in Kirkpatrick’s telling, considers the trip was charmed. They’d had no deaths, no Indian problems, no lost animals. That sounds like good luck as opposed to the Donner’s luck, but then too, how much did the characters of the participants factor into the luck? Captain Stephens noted the families supported each other. The various Donner Party tellings cannot mention anything like that

The Stephens Party had many major decisions to make: splitting up just before Donner Lake, leaving wagons at Donner Lake along with guards, and leaving the women at Big Bend so the men could go off for supplies. Kirkpatrick does well reporting realistic conversations about the decisions and how we might react to the ideas.

Then there are details that show Kirkpatrick has studied the topic. Mary Sullivan’s wagon was painted, a common thing among the emigrants but a detail seldom noted elsewhere. There was blood on Mary’s knuckles from using the washboard on laundry. Sarah Montgomery had strong nails meaning she was eating the right food.

Those little details enrich the story. Not all the details are true though. For example the wagons were used for carrying things and were full of those things. In Kirkpatrick’s telling there seems to be a lot of room for meetings, for the dog to go bounding between people in the wagon during a meeting, and for people to stand “shoulder to shoulder.” There are beds in the wagons. Here we’ll include some pictures of emigrant wagons taken from an outdoor museum in Genoa, NV. The wagon beds were scarcely four by ten feet. There’s no room for a bed and for people to stand “shoulder to shoulder.”

Then there’s what the people decided to bring when they left half their wagons at Donner Lake. There were trunks with extra clothes, a number of butter churns and even a rocking chair. The people were in trouble. They had to leave everything not important to survival behind. Were they really going to carry a rocking chair up the mountain through feet of snow? One character even carries a large two volume dictionary. That’s life saving?

Kirkpatrick says of the cabin built at Donner Lake that the occupants were “snug as a bug as could be” which one can’t imagine given that the thing barely had a roof, no chinking between the logs and not even a door. The weather inside must have been very close to the weather outside until the snow built up against the walls and then nearly as cold even with a fire. There’s an ox in a five foot trench. It needs to be staked so it doesn’t escape?

Kirkpatrick also didn’t visit the geography she describes. She remarks on a thirty foot stone wall that prevented the party’s moving forward but where they found the cleft for the oxen to travel up. There isn’t one in real life. The Greenwoods were gone for two days looking for the cleft. It couldn’t have taken that long for a distance of just three miles and how were they looking for a cleft all that time? One also cannot see the lake from the cabin built for Moses Schallenberger and his friends.

The horseback group of four men and two women broke off just before the party reached Donner Lake. They got to Lake Tahoe and then up over the ridge. The author has the group riding horses that swam across a river. There is not a river that large on the west side of Lake Tahoe. It had just snowed five feet at Donner Lake so it would have done the same on the horseback party so there would have been no muddy bank. It would have snowed more at Big Bend and as the party was summiting the pass. How was that dealt with?

That brings up another issue which is what was left out. There’s a lot of talking among the characters as each of the main stories (highlighted by the author as: the horseback group, wagon guards, wintering women, and cross country men) but there’s not much detail of the main conflict in the book, the characters against the weather or the environment. We’re told it snowed and it got cold but how exactly did that affect the characters? What was it like to slog through feet of snow to get to the top of Donner Pass? It must have been exhausting. How did they encourage the oxen or the seventeen children? What happened at the top? They must have been wet outside from melted snow and wet inside from sweat. How did they warm up, keep their spirits up, and keep going? How did they go the next ten or twelve miles to Big Bend? Evocative descriptions are missing as they are from the group left at Big Bend, from the three guarding the wagons, and from the horseback group. A baby was born at Big Bend. It sounds like it was the easiest thing and the children, all seventeen were so tractable. Today kids can’t go a few miles before whining about arrival time. The Stephens Party children must have been saints.

There’s a problem with some of the vignettes Kirkpatrick draws. For example, as the horseback group is working their way along the west side of Lake Tahoe they stop at one point and a horse steals someone’s hat. That’s then taken by the dog. That’s cute but is it a good substitute for the travails facing the small group?

Then there are some lapses in logic. Moses didn’t want to kill an ox because “that would be the end of their food supply.” That’s nice of Moses to want to protect “Bill” but it makes no sense. Whether alive or dead the food is still there and arguably more food would be there with the ox dead than kept alive to waste away.

Unless you’ve lived a winter in the Sierra you can’t understand what it’s like. In the middle of winter a warm breeze will not come up and take away most of the snow in order to buoy the spirits. And there are no grouse in the mountains in December.

Another lapse has some of the women and kids leaving Big Bend and just happening to run into the rescuers. How did the women know the route to Sutter’s Fort and how did the rescuers end up on the same route?

How did the wagons at Donner Lake where Moses was get crushed but the wagons left at the other end survive?