Christmas morning found me walking with Jasper the Wonderdog up
a street called Slalom, approximately 6,500 feet above sea level in the
Sierra, on the outskirts of the town of Truckee, which lies athwart
Interstate 80, not far from Lake Tahoe, Calif. Jasper and I walked past some
30 houses, each of them selling for around a million dollars. All but three
were vacant, their owners either preferring their third homes in Hawaii or
discussing the beauties of Chapter 11 in some bankruptcy court. If the
Donner party had staggered out of their graves and into those stately homes
on Slalom, they probably would have found as little provender as they did on
the snowbound shores of Mountain Lake in the winter of 1846-1847.
Later that day we all had Christmas lunch overlooking that same
Mountain Lake, renamed Donner Lake in honor of the mostly doomed party of
midwesterners who tried to survive one of the worst winters in the history
of the Sierra on its eastern shore.
They got to the lake at the very end of October 1846, realized
they couldn't make it over the pass, which was already covered with four
feet of snow, and set up camp. As they ate their pack animals and the
situation worsened, some men did manage to make it to Fort Sutter to sound
the alarm. One of these returned, later to perish. In late December, another
group of 15, later known as the Party of Forlorn Hope, set out for the pass
on crude snow shoes. Eight men died, while two men and five women reached
safety.
As Joanne Meschery writes in her vivid little book "Truckee,"
"These survivors could not have pushed through if they hadn't resorted to
cannibalism." Clearly, the age of chivalry was alive and well that winter in
the California Sierra. The weaker sex were mostly spared. Then again, maybe
the women were simply better negotiators in the Survivor parleys before the
bludgeon took its toll and another haunch of human was readied for the
table.
The first relief party from Sutter's Fort reached the lake on
Feb. 19, 1847. Little Virginia Reed, 13 years old, heard them come, crawled
from a snowbound cabin, and greeted them with the words, "Are you men from
California, or do you come from heaven?" Of the 81 who had arrived at the
lake in October, 45 survived by dint of cannibalism, of whom 32 were
children.
Their travails had been observed by Paiute Indians, who'd fled
into the mountains to escape the whites. Sarah Winnemucca later recalled,
"All the Indian tribes had gone into the mountains to save their lives ...
There was a fearful story told us children. Our mothers told us that the
whites were killing everybody and eating them. These were the last white men
that came along that fall ... We could have saved them, only my people were
afraid of them." As I recall, there's a fine description of the Paiutes
viewing the white cannibals at the start of Thomas Sanchez's novel "Rabbit
Boss."
There's not too much to recommend Truckee, Calif., whose past is
freighted not only with cannibalism but also the bloody eviction of the
Chinese, who had come to the mountains to build the transcontinental
railroad. Of the peak Chinese work force of 10,000, some 1,000 remained in
Truckee once the job was done. By the 1870s, a national depression was
fueling racism, and the stage was set for one of California's most terrible
chapters. "The Chinks must go" was the cry in the saloons of Truckee, and a
Caucasian League began to burn down Chinese dwellings. The Chinese fought
back, but were finally burned out in 1880. According to Alexander Saxon,
author of "The Indispensable Enemy," Truckee set the pace for anti-Chinese
activities throughout the west. These activities included a law
criminalizing the smoking of opium, a habit favored by the Chinese, though
consumption of opium in liquid form, as practiced by the genteel classes,
was not similarly penalized. Remind you of the varying penalties for powder
and crack cocaine?
You either like snow or you don't, and these days, I'm of the
latter persuasion, having spent too many winters of my adolescence at a
fierce Scottish school where early morning runs in one's underclothes
through the snow were mandatory. Our party, Jasper excepted, did make its
way on Christmas Eve to Squaw Valley, Calif., south along highway 68 from
Truckee. We were carried to the summit in a cable car ($58 per head for an
all day ticket) filled with so many families of visibly Middle Eastern
origin that I wondered whether, aside from the profuse Iranian families,
some were detachments of the Al Qaeda forces that had successfully made
their escape from Tora Bora and were now enjoying a spell of R&R.
Though we were suspended several hundred feet above the valley
floor, sitting ducks for a terrorist attack, a spirit of interracial harmony
prevailed, I'm glad to say, without so much as a downward glance at a ski
boot or snow shoe to see any detonation was imminent. The entire carload of
100 or so listened cheerfully as a couple of Middle Eastern brothers on a
bus excursion with their girlfriends from Reno, Nev., described their
gambling misfortunes the previous night. It was one of those moments when
one feels the human race, or at least that section of it roosting on these
shores, has a fighting chance of vindicating one's most foolish optimistic
hopes. These weren't notably rich or stylish folk, just crowds of genial
holiday-makers clutching their boards or skis, having a good time and well
disposed toward everyone else slithering and tumbling down the slopes, all
set for another year ...
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
