Charles Stanton, the bachelor who had ridden ahead for food and supplies returned to find the party as safe as could be expected, minus Wolfinger, Snyder, Hardcoop, Halloran, Reed, and five score of cattle.

He returned with the requested provisions and two of John Sutter's Indian vaqueros, whom the Benedictine monks had baptized Luis and Salvador. The other man with whom he had ridden—the hardy one—had taken ill and remained at the fort recuperating.

Stanton also traveled with news for Margaret Reed and her four children: he had not three days prior passed James Frazier Reed, who was now safely at Captain Sutter's fort. What he did not know was that Reed took no time to rest and had made a deal with a different sort of Devil:

After pleading with Sutter for additional supplies and support, which were readily provided, Reed decided he could take no chances and requested the manpower of the most experienced military men in California, men who knew the land, yet men who would empathize with his urgency as fellow Americans.

These men happened to be serving under that very same John C. Fremont—the very officer who approved my shortcut and was once again at Sutter's fort, awaiting his next set of orders in the Mexican War. Fremont agreed to lend his men for a trip up to the pass that yet bore his own name (since nothing extraordinary had yet happened to rename it).

However he extracted a promise from Reed in return: a single tour of duty. Reed's hands would be tied for an indeterminate amount of time...But no one could anticipate just what the weather would do—or how soon it would do it. And Reed most certainly needed to jump that murder charge with a convincing display of American decency.

† October 30, 1846

One crisp autumn afternoon, William Pike, who was married to one of the Graves daughters, was cleaning a gun, which he then handed to his brother-in-law and close friend, William Foster. The gun was perhaps too near to a fire they had built and somehow the heat caused it to explode, and fire forth from Foster's hands, mortally wounding Pike in the back. He died that same afternoon and was buried, pushing back plans to cross the mountains by one, final day.

That very night, James Frazier Reed looked up at the full moon from one side of the Sierra Nevadas as his wife and children glimpsed it from the other. The moon had a bright and perfect halo crowning it more brightly than a silvery starburst:

It was a sure sign of snow the next day.

[He drinks.]

In fact, it was the first blizzard of the year: just as I had beat the onset of winter by a single day in my previous arrival in California, the Donner Party was caught in it by that same, exact interval of time.

However, I had tempted Fate on Christmas Eve of 1845; it was not even November when the hardest of winters descended the following year.

This is of no matter now.

Upon his return to the fort, Reed was ordered to report to duty near Santa Clara where he would serve as an acting lieutenant under Captain Marston. Fremont himself headed south to San Jose, taking with him all his very best men—in other words, all the men who knew the mountain passes.

END PART FOUR

‡