Young Man Alone: Snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, 1844

Written for readers "sheltering in place" during the Covid pandemic: whatever loneliness that brought, it invites a comparison with a 17-year-old who spent three months alone in the Sierra Nevada with none of today's comforts.

In 1844, early in the overland migration, Moses Schallenberger was travelling to California. Orphaned at six, he had been raised by his sister Elizabeth, and he went west with her and her husband, Dr. John Townsend, in the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party: 23 men, eight women and 15 children. He thought of himself as "only a boy"; he would turn out to be an exceptional man.

The passages quoted below are from Schallenberger's own reminiscences, set down 42 years later.

Into the Sierra

The journey from near Omaha, Nebraska, went mostly smoothly until the party reached the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, the 400-mile range between today's Nevada and California. No wagon road crossed it yet. Earlier emigrants had left their wagons behind and gone on by foot or horse; this party meant to be the first to bring its wagons all the way into interior California, but did not know how.

A Northern Paiute chief showed them, with gestures and lines drawn in the dirt, which stream to follow into the mountains. The emigrants named the river after him: Truckee. By one story, Truckee was not his name at all but a Paiute word meaning "all right" — a mistake he did not mind, and a name he kept for the rest of his life.

Looking east from the Donner Lake viewpoint at Donner Summit. NPS photo.

Three stay behind

Hauling their 11 wagons up the rushing, boulder-strewn river, the party reached the clear alpine lake now called Donner Lake, near the modern town of Truckee, around November 14. The way ahead was unknown and very rough, and light snow was falling.

Moses and two married men in their twenties, Joseph Foster and Allen Montgomery, offered to stay and guard six of the wagons while everyone else went on. Once the women and children were safe in the settlements, men would come back for the three of them and the wagons. Moses saw little danger in it: game seemed plentiful, the three were good hunters with ample ammunition, and none of them doubted they would eat well.

The wagons moved off toward the pass on December 6, leaving the three young men with two thin, worn-out cows to butcher if they had to. That turned out to be lucky. The emigrants were easterners, and none had any idea how hard a Sierra winter could be.

A cabin, then snow

The three cut saplings at once and built a small cabin, 12 by 14 feet, roofed with pine brush and rawhide, with a wooden chimney lined inside with stones. There were no windows, and the logs were notched to sit close rather than chinked. The doorway was a hole that they never closed, day or night: there was light to let in, bedding from the wagons to keep warm, and no burglars to fear.

Three feet of snow fell the night the cabin was finished. The weather was mild, and they expected it to melt; instead, more came. Within a week the cows could no longer get about to feed, so the men killed them — skin and bone — and hung the carcasses on the cabin's north side under pine brush, where the meat froze and kept fresh without salt.

Montgomery and Foster made rough round snowshoes from the wooden bows that held up the wagon covers, and with them could walk on the snow to fetch firewood and hunt. But there was nothing to hunt. In snow ten feet deep they sometimes saw the tracks of a fox or a coyote on the crust, and never the animal itself. The beef would not last long.

Monument to the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party. NPS photo.

One goes back alone

They set out to walk out, each carrying about 10 pounds of beef, two blankets and a rifle with ammunition. But they had tied their snowshoes to their boots at heel and toe, so every step lifted the whole shoe; snow crumbled in on top, and before long, Moses recalled, each shoe weighed about ten pounds.

Moses, still growing, could not keep up: again and again he fell with cramps in his legs while the others waited. By the time they reached the summit, six miles from the cabin, he could go no further. They lit a fire on the snow and lay on pine boughs, too cold and worried to sleep. In the morning the fire had melted a hole 15 feet deep down to the ground.

Moses knew he would collapse on the trail and that the others would have to leave him to die. He told them he would go back to the cabin, live on the beef left there as long as he could, and then set out for California alone. They agreed unwillingly, and promised to come back for him if they reached California and it could be done. "While our decision was a sad one," he wrote, "it was the only one that could be made." They shook his hand and said goodbye, sure they would not see him again.

Coyote and fox

The snow had frozen hard, so Moses walked back without snowshoes. He reached the cabin at dusk so weak that he had to lift each leg over the doorsill with his hands.

The next morning's hunt failed like all the others. Then he noticed some animal traps left with the wagons. He baited them with beef, and that night caught a starving coyote. However he cooked it, he could not make it palatable, yet for three days it was all he had. Then he caught two foxes, and roasted fox was delicious. He went on trapping foxes, hanging up the occasional coyote for emergencies, and never grew hungry enough to eat one again. "There were eleven hanging there when I came away."

Moses Schallenberger. Public domain.

Killing time

He remembered those months as more miserable than he could describe: a daily fight to stay alive, and constant worry, not only for himself but for the people who had gone ahead. At night he lay awake thinking of them.

To fill the time he read the books Dr. Townsend had left in the wagon — aloud, to hear a human voice — late into the night by firelight, and slept as late as he could so the days would pass faster. After food, he wrote, what he wanted most was to kill time; he thought the snow would never go, and the few months felt like years.

Rescue

Moses did not know that the wagon party had split again beyond the pass. The women and children waited in a mountain camp with the remaining wagons, at present-day Big Bend, while the men pushed on through deepening snow for supplies and help. Foster and Montgomery stopped briefly at that camp and went on to safety at Sutter's Fort, now Sacramento.

Months later the first man to come back was Dennis Martin, of the same party. Others soon followed to bring out the starving women and children, but Martin, who had promised Elizabeth Townsend he would look for her brother, kept going east over the pass. Near sunset one evening around the end of February, Moses saw a figure coming towards the cabin — an Indian, he thought at first, and then he knew Dennis Martin's face. "My feelings can be better imagined than described."

Martin had lived in Canada and knew winter gear. He narrowed Moses's snowshoes and showed him how to fix them at the toe only, leaving the heel free, which made walking on them far easier.

The Pioneer Monument at Donner Pass. The plaque at its base reads: "Virile to risk and find; kindly withal and a ready help, facing the brunt of fate: Indomitable—Unafraid." NPS photo.

Safe

The two walked into Sutter's Fort in March 1845. Moses had been in the mountains since November, three months of it alone, and had shown himself resourceful, self-reliant, unselfish and brave. He later married, had two children and lived to 83.

Everyone else in the party survived as well — and arrived with more people than had set out, since two babies were born on the way. The emigrants went back for their wagons later that spring, and the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party is remembered as the first to bring covered wagons over the Sierra Nevada. Moses is said to have kept a wheel from one of them.

Over the winter of 1846–47 the little cabin he built with Foster and Montgomery sheltered two families of the Donner Party, snowbound at the same place. A statue honouring the emigrants now stands there, in Donner Memorial State Park.

Sources

• National Park Service, California National Historic Trail, Young Man Alone: Snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, 1844. A trails map on a commercial basemap and a stock-style wagon photo are left out.
• Schallenberger, Moses, Horace S. Foote, Elisha Stevens and George R. Stewart. 1953. The Opening of the California Trail. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles — Schallenberger's reminiscences, set down for H. H. Bancroft about 1885 and printed by Foote in 1888.
• Stewart, George R. 1962. The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.