Even before his personal contributions to the growth of San Jose began, Reed was well-known as a member of the famous—many would say ill-fated—Donner Party. Eighty-seven men, women, and children trekked bravely into the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the fall of 1846 but they did not manage to cross the summit before the first great winter storm hit in late October, when the mountains soon became wrapped in a frozen silence. Heavy snowfalls made walking through waist-deep drifts impossible, although they struggled on for as long as they had any strength left with which to try. Bitterly cold temperatures, as well as lack of food and supplies, threatened to turn these mountains into a graveyard for each of them.
As it was, the mountains became the final resting place for nearly half of them. That all of these California-bound pioneers did not perish is due in large measure to the exertions of James Reed, albeit through a set of most unusual circumstances. Reed, after reaching California, made repeated efforts to rescue his wife, four children, and the other families who remained trapped in the bitter cold and deep snow. They were caught in the middle of an unusually severe winter that was to make rescue efforts as equally difficult as any further travel by the entrapped and starving pioneers.
James Reed had been forced to go on ahead of the rest of the party, alone and on foot, through the mountains to California because in a bitter altercation with another man near the Humboldt River,[1] Reed had killed the man in self-defense. The adult members of the Donner Party met and banished Red from traveling any farther with them: swift rudimentary justice. Surprisingly, although forced to complete part of the journey alone and over unknown land, Reed made it, arriving at Sutter’s Fort on October 28, 1846. He then began to organize relief-and-rescue parties, an effort much complicated by internal California politics and the Mexican-American War then under way.
But I anticipate our story once again. Let us return to a description of James Reed as he might have been seen in late October of 1846: stumbling down out of the wintry Sierra Nevadas, half-frozen, days without food and—utterly exhausted—making his way to Sutter’s Fort, there to recover and begin the task of trying to save the lives of any survivors in the lonely cabins around Donner Lake. Was there hope for them? Their hopes depended nearly entirely on James Reed, although at the time—during that long period of endless frozen captivity—they could not have known if he had survived and made it safely out of the mountains.
Indeed, out of sheer desperation, another group from the snowbound Donner Party tried to finish crossing the mountains. The Forlorn Hope, as this group of fifteen brave men and women became known, left in December of 1846 to break out of their icy winter entombment. A month passed: nothing. What did the remaining survivors around Truckee Lake (later, Donner Lake) feel and think?
No one was coming. No Reed, no member of the Forlorn Hope returned. Had they made it? Or had they perished? All the hopes of the survivors depended on rescue or else all was lost. Unbeknownst to those who waited for rescue, the snows had also been unusually heavy on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada range, much delaying—but not preventing—the final rescue.
As a consequence of the heavy snows that winter of 1846-47, the “rescue” would prove no simple affair to arrange. For whoever made the attempt, it meant plunging into a deep, white blanket of snow, without roads or maps or certainty of direction. The rescuers themselves would be risking their own lives in trying to get to the Donner Lake area at an elevation of some 7,000 feet. In short, it was not at all clear if the rescuers themselves would be able to penetrate the dense banks and walls of fresh-fallen snow in order to complete such a mission: in fact, the first men could not.
Disappointed, defeated by ice, wind, cold, and snow, the first rescue parties were forced to turn back. The mountains were impassable. For one man, however, “giving up” was not an option. For James Reed, to give up was unthinkable. Perhaps because he had endured so much already, he had gained special insight into the limits of human endurance. Perhaps it was because the lives of his own wife and children were at stake. Impossible or not, he had to learn how to organize rescue teams in such a way that they could succeed. His wife and his four children were still alive and waiting for his return; he would not give up! He would rescue them—or die trying. If the first attempts failed, there was only one answer: to try again!—racing against time, hoping for the best, fearing the worst, never knowing if he would ever see any of his family alive!
Desperate for men to help him but finding none due to the political turmoil, he headed south to San Francisco to try and raise enough men there for a successful rescue party. He found it necessary during this time to become part of the American military action: “He was First Lieutenant of Captain Charles M. Weber’s Company of United States Rangers of the Pueblo of San Jose and helped to defeat the enemy in the Battle of Santa Clara, January 2, 1847, while he was enroute to procure relief for the Reed-Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”[2] Reed’s sojourn among Weber’s Rangers while engaged in organizing a relief-and-rescue party was more than expedient: it was absolutely necessary and ultimately proved to be the key to his success.
There, in San Francisco, he got the promise of the men he needed: “Commodore Hull consented to send relief to the starving immigrants, and men were paid four dollars a day to enlist in their behalf. The Commodore sent an order by Mr. Reed to Mr. Yount at Napa for meat and flour; Mr. Yount had a presentiment of starving immigrants, and at the time the order reached him had Indians drying meat and grinding flour.”[3]
Commodore Hull’s actions in turn made possible the eventual rescue from the mountains of numerous survivors. Forty-seven members of the Donner Party survived in all, including seven members of the Forlorn Hope (eight died) and Reed himself. One suspects that any one of the Donner Lake survivors by then gladly would have forgiven James Reed his previous misdeed; in place of the life he took, he helped bring forth nearly forty souls from the frozen summit.
He himself endured a spell of snow blindness, yet still managed to lead the rescue of thirteen of the trapped party—including his wife Margaret and the two youngest of his children, 3-year-old Tommy and 8-year-old Patty. “Each of the relief parties, especially that conducted by Mr. Reed endured sufferings equal to those experienced by the unfortunates in the winter camp. History has no parallel to the heroism displayed by these people in their efforts to rescue suffering relatives and friends.”[4]
As part of the saga of the Donner Party tale, Reed’s own family—initially the family with the biggest and best-supplied wagons in the whole outfit—had by stages of bad luck and adversity fallen on ever harder times, even before the tragedy in the mountains struck and threatened to write their final epitaphs. Ultimately, they lost nearly everything: all their animals and material possessions, becoming dependent on charity from others. And now, by strange irony, Fortune smiled on them once more. Reed’s was only one of two families to have survived intact. In that undulating series of successes and setbacks that marked his life, here—at perhaps the darkest hour—came a success more important to him than any of his commercial ventures: the triumphant rescue of his entire family, alive and intact! Not a single Reed perished in the mountains. All survived to reach California and went on to lead useful and productive lives. What kind of man was James Reed, then? In the final analysis, no one can dare gainsay this truth:
“He assisted in rescuing 13 of the members, including three of his own family, and delivered them to Captain John A. Sutter, at Sutter’s Fort near Sacramento. He and Mrs. Reed subscribed $500 of the sum of $780 raised in San Jose for the relief of the distressed immigrants and was a member of the committee appointed by Josiah Belden, then Mayor of the city, to co-operate with the Mayor and Common Council in the relief work undertaken.”[5]
The one man banished from the Donner Party clearly played the pivotal role in the rescue of half of the trapped families. The Donner Party would have been an even greater disaster had it not been for his willingness to use all of his physical strength and material resources to effect this rescue. The great physical stamina he demonstrated and the new sufferings he endured in re-entering the mountains before the snows had melted in the high country make for a thrilling, courageous adventure tale in its own right. The “banished one” was now a hero in the eyes of many.
For others, and perhaps in his own eyes as well, James Reed remained simply a family man: unpretentious, generous, and compassionate. He did what he had to do—a modern-day adage which covers well both the modesty and arrogance, the mistakes and triumphs, the anger and the love, of his long and productive life.
[1] Ibid, p. 71.
[2] Scrapbook D, California Room Shelf, Main Library, p. 25: “Memorial Services to be Held at Grave of Late J. F. Reed Memorial-Day.”
[3] Cooper, “Patty Reed”, Overland Monthly, p. 519.
[4] Sawyer, Eugene T., History of Santa Clara County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1922), p. 46.
[5] Ibid.
