I believe Bob Fowler (above, center) was confident on Saturday, 23 September, 1911, when the repairs to his "Cole Flyer" were finally completed, and he finally took off from Colfax, California - altitude 3,306 feet - in the Sierra foothills. He certainly looks confident in this photo.
His confidence was, however, seriously misplaced. When the bundled up Fowler reached six thousand feet up the Sierra Nevada mountains, he hit headwinds that his 40 horsepower Cole motor just could not overcome. He was forced to return to Colfax.
That same Saturday - 23 September - back east, the little jockey Jimmy Ward was following the “iron compass”, as pilots referred to following railroad lines. In this case he was tracking the Erie Railroad westward out of Middletown, N.Y. Jimmy landed safely at Callicoon, New York (above) and refueled,at 10:05 a.m., as planned. He refueled again at Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and took off again at 2:15 P.M.
Two hours later, after avoiding crowds waiting for him at other landing fields, the shy Jimmy touched down on a farm outside of Owego, N.Y. Here the jockey hitched a ride into town, where he ate a quick dinner with Maude while a local mechanic refueled his plane.
He wanted to make it to Corning, New.York. before dark, so he hurried his take off. But as the jockey lifted into the air his engine coughed, his wheels snagged a fence and he was yanked to an abrupt halt. His lower left wing was bent, his wheels destroyed. Jimmy Ward (above) was unhurt, physically, but it would take almost two days before a crew on loan from Curtis Aircraft could repair the damage.
On the Monday, 25 September, Bob reached 8,000 feet before running into headwinds again. This time Bob decided to land at Emigrant Gap, to get a head start start the next day. But flying in the thin air at high altitude was a skill not yet mastered by anyone, including Bob, and while turning around his wings lost lift and he plowed into the trees. They had to send out a search party to locate him, and when they did he had two broken wings and and two broken propellers - I mean his "Cole Flyer" did. Bob himself was somehow largely uninjured. But for the time being his continental flight was… waiting for repairs, again.
Anxious to make up for lost time, at 7:18 A.M. on Tuesday, 26 September, James took off from Addison. And about five miles west of town he crashed again. He had to walk almost the whole way back to Addison, just to tell people he had crashed. This was getting really hard.
Back at the hotel, waiting for her husband, Jimmy‘s wife, Maude Mae, overheard some gamblers taking five-to-one odds that her husband would be dead before he reached Buffalo, New York. Now, Maude May knew that Jimmy was not actually planning on heading to Buffalo, but she also knew that town was still 60 miles further to the west. And at the rate Jimmy's flight was progressing, he could have been beaten by a Conestoga wagon,
In fact, the way Maude Mae figured things, at the rate Jimmy was crashing, the gamblers were being a bit optimistic at about her husband's lifespan. So Maude Mae decided to be practical - leave it to a wife to destroy a daredevil sporting event with practical thinking. Maude Mae spoke to the shaken Jimmy that night. And after his long walk and his two crashes over the previous four days, Jimmy was inclined to listen.
Jimmy's manager announced his decision to the press the next morning, Wednesday, 27 September. He was dropping out of the race. Later, Jimmy Ward would explain his decision in less than pragmatic terms. “It was a plain case of a jinx”, he said. And then he went on to prognosticate. “Rodgers is a mighty fine fellow, " said Jimmy, "and I wish him all kinds of luck, but...To win that $50,000 he's got to complete his journey by October 10th. He can't do it."
Given his skill at fortune telling, I am surprised that Jimmy Ward (above) had no inkling that just seven months later Maude Mae would have him arrested in Chattanooga and charged with bigamy. She had discovered that Jimmy was never legally divorced from his first wife. Poor Maude Mae. Poor, Jimmy Ward. And without him, the race went on.
- 30 -
It began as a romantic’s quest. The Gold Rush would not begin for two years when they set out from Ohio, in April of 1846: George Donner and his brother Jacob and their families, along with the family of James Reed: including hired hands, thirty-three souls all together, with oxen and cattle and chickens, all bound for California. In mid-May, while crossing the Green Rive Basin over the Rocky Mountains, they met a misbegotten bunch who had read of a “better way west”, a shortcut called the “Hastings Cutoff”. It was the brainchild of Landsford Hastings, a better author than a trailblazer. And on Monday, 31 August, 1846, the two groups elected George Donner as their leader. They then turned their backs on the established trail at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Their numbers had grown to 89 humans in 21 wagons.
The “Cutoff” was a disaster from the very beginning. It twisted and wound up and through and over the Wasatch Mountains. You cannot imagine the difficulties until you have walked a hundred yards up hill, straight through a dense wood. Now imagine trying to clear a path through those same woods for a Conestoga wagon, five feet wide and sixteen feet long, without springs, with iron sheathed stiffened wooden wheels, pulled by four oxen and loaded with seven tons of everything you think you might require to start your life over. At the summit they walked themselves to the very edge of a cliff with no room to turn around, and had to unload the wagons and then lower them and their cargo and their oxen on ropes to the valley below. They finally rejoined the trail on Saturday, 26 September. The shortcut of the “Cutoff” had left them three weeks behind.
After the mountains, came the desert, where, at the “Humboldt Sink”, an entire river is consumed by the heat. By the first week in October the bold romantics had started to die. A sixty year old farmer from Ohio, known to them only as Mr. Hardcoop, was first. His feet had swollen to bursting, and he was abandoned beneath a sage brush in the Nevada desert. Finally, on Thursday, 15 October they reached the valley of the Truckee River, and at Truckee Meadows - modern day Reno - they paused, spending six precious days gathering their strength for the hurdle that faced them; the abrupt, front wall of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Stand on the shore of Mono Lake (to the south of the Truckee) and you see what gave these romantics pause. A sudden and steep wall of granite rises 1,500 feet straight into the air. And that is only the first step of a staircase that quickly climbs to over 12.000 feet. The “notch” or “Pass” through the mountains that the Donner party sought out stands at 7,000 feet high. And there the moist Pacific air climbing the gentle western slope of the Sierra, meets two lakes (Tahoe and Donner) and produces 415 inches of snow in an average year. In an average year winter storms produce ridge line winds of 100 miles an hour and higher, and temperatures down to -45 F. It was into this that the Donner Party began to climb during the last days of October, 1846. There was already a dusting of snow in the pass. But this was not destined to be an average year in the Sierra.
It started to snow heavily on Saturday, 31 October 1846 - Halloween. The party was already broken. A wagon had flipped over and snapped an axle. George Donner and his family had stopped along Alder Creek to repair it. Meanwhile the majority had pressed six miles farther on. They had actually reached the summit of the Sierras. They were at the very edge of safety. Had they been one day, maybe one hour, sooner, they might have made it. They would have all lived. But within hours of that first gentle flake floating down to melt on a human cheek, six feet of snow fell, driving the romantics back to the eastern shore of the lake where there was a cabin and level ground. And there they stayed. And there almost half of them died.
The wonder is not that so many died, or that they were reduced to cannibalism, but that any at all lived. In that endless winter, 41 died and 46 survived. Out of fifty-five males, thirty-two died. Out of thirty-four women just nine died. All the single males over twenty-one years old starved to death.
If you get the chance to walk Alder Creek meadows, or the trails around the Eastern edge of Donner Lake please, say a prayer for all of those who preceded you. And for all of us who are destined to follow.
