Last updated: January 13, 2022
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Young Man Alone: Snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, 1844
Are you “sheltering in place” because of the Covid pandemic? Feeling lonely, bored, and sad?
Consider the plight of 17-year-old Moses Schallenberger, stranded alone in the Sierra Nevada for three months with no smartphone, cable TV, social media, energy drinks, snack foods, or central heating.
The year was 1844—still very early in the overland emigration era. Moses, orphaned at age six, was heading to California with his sister, Elizabeth, who had reared him as her own, and her husband, Dr. John Townsend. They traveled with the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, a group of 23 men, eight women, and 15 children. It’s unclear whether the party counted Moses among the young ones or viewed him as an adult. He considered himself “only a boy.” He would soon prove himself to be a most exceptional man.
The inset, bold quotations provided below are from Schallenberger’s reminiscences.
Into the Sierra
The trip west from the vicinity of Omaha, Neb., was mostly uneventful until the party reached the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, a 400-mile-long mountain range that separates today’s states of Nevada and California. In 1844, no wagon road led through this mass of peaks, cliffs, and canyons. Previous emigrants had been forced to abandon their wagons and pick their way on foot or on horseback. This bunch, though, meant to be the first to get their valuable wagons all the way through to the interior of California. They just weren’t sure how to do it. A Northern Paiute Indian chief, with gestures and lines drawn in the dirt, directed them to follow a certain stream into the mountains. In recognition of the helpful chief, the emigrants named the river after him: Truckee.
(Lore holds that Truckee was not, in fact, the chief’s name but a Paiute word meaning “all right.” He did not mind the mistake and carried that name for the rest of his life.)
NPS Photo
Three Stay Behind
Maneuvering their 11 wagons up the rushing, boulder-filled stream, the party reached a clear alpine lake known today as Donner Lake, near the present town of Truckee, Calif., around Nov. 14. The terrain ahead was unknown and extremely rugged, and a light snow was falling. Moses Schallenberger and two married men in their twenties, Joseph Foster and Allen Montgomery, volunteered to stay and guard six of the wagons while the rest of the party pushed on. Men would return for the three young fellows and the remaining wagons once the women and children were safe in the California settlements.
“There seemed little danger to me in undertaking this,” Schallenberger recalled 42 years later. “There seemed to be plenty of game, and we were all good hunters, well furnished with ammunition, so we had no apprehension that we would not have plenty to eat.”
The wagons rolled toward the pass on December 6, leaving behind the three men and two skinny, worn out cows. In a pinch, the cows could be butchered for food. It proved to be a lucky decision. As easterners, none among the emigrants had any notion of the severity of winter in the Sierra Nevada.
A Cabin in the Woods
Schallenberger, Foster, and Montgomery immediately set to cutting saplings and building themselves a tiny cabin, 12 by 14 feet and roofed with pine brush and rawhides. It had a wooden chimney lined with stones on the inside, and a hole for a doorway.
We had no windows; neither was the house chinked or daubed, as is usual in log-houses, but we notched the logs down so close that they nearly or quite touched. A hole was cut for a door, which was never closed. We left it open in the daytime to give us light, and as we had plenty of good beds and bedding that had been left with the wagons, and were not afraid of burglars, we left it open at night also.
Snow and More Snow!
Three feet of snow fell the very night the young men finished their cabin.
This prevented a hunt which we had in contemplation for the next day. It did not worry us much, however, for the weather was not at all cold, and we thought the snow would soon melt, but we were doomed to disappointment. A week passed, and instead of any snow going off more came. At last we were compelled to kill our cows, for the snow was so deep that they could not get around to eat. They were nothing but skin and bones, but we killed the poor things to keep them from starving to death. We hung them up on the north side of the house and covered them with pine brush. That night the meat froze, and as the weather was just cold enough to keep it frozen, it remained fresh without salt.
Snow continued to pile up around the cabin. It was far too deep to wade through, and the crust would not bear a man’s weight. Montgomery and Foster fashioned some crude, round snowshoes—which they may have heard of but probably had never seen before—out of the wooden bows that supported the wagon covers. Now they could walk on top of the snow to find firewood and to hunt. Except—
There was no game. We went out several times but never saw anything. What could we expect to find in ten feet of snow? It would sometimes thaw a little during the day and freeze at night, which made a crust on the snow sufficiently thick to bear the weight of a coyote, or a fox, and we used sometimes to see the tracks of these animals, but we were never fortunate enough to get a sight of the animals themselves.
They’d been in camp about a week, perhaps two, and had already killed and butchered the starving cows. That meat would not last long.
NPS Photo
One Returns Alone
They loaded themselves up for the trek out, each carrying about 10 pounds of beef from the cow carcasses, two blankets, and a rifle with ammunition. But they did not know how to use their snowshoes properly.
We fastened them [to our boots] heel and toe, and thus had to lift the whole weight of the shoe at every step, and as the shoe would necessarily sink down somewhat, the snow would crumble in on top of it, and in a short time each shoe weighed about ten pounds.
The two fully grown men were strong enough to endure, but young Mose “was still a growing boy with weak muscles and a huge appetite, both of which were being used in exactly the reverse order designed by nature.” He repeatedly fell to the ground with severe cramps in his leg muscles, holding up progress as his companions waited for him to recover.
By the time they reached the summit, six miles beyond their cabin, Moses could go no farther. They built a campfire on top of the snow and lay down for the night upon beds of pine boughs, but the fire did not warm them and worry kept them from sleep. Morning revealed that their fire had melted a 15-foot-deep hole through the snow to the ground.
His muscles stiff and sore, Moses knew he could not continue the trek. He would give out along the way, and Foster and Montgomery would be forced to abandon him to his death.
I fully realized the situation, and told them that I would return to the cabin and live as long as possible on the quarter of beef that was still there, and when it was all gone I would start out again alone for California. They reluctantly assented to my plan, and promised that if they ever got to California and it was possible to get back, they would return to my assistance….
While our decision was a sad one, it was the only one that could be made.
The two companions sadly shook Moses’s hand and told him goodbye, certain they would never see him again.
Hunger
Moses backtracked along their trail from the cabin. To his relief, the snow now was hard-frozen, allowing him to walk without the snowshoes. He arrived at dusk, so weakened by his exertions that he had to lift each leg with his hands in order to step over the cabin’s doorsill.
His hunt the next morning was as unsuccessful as ever, but then he spotted some animal traps that had been left behind with the wagons. He baited them with beef and set them around camp, catching a starved coyote that night.
I cooked him in every possible manner my imagination, spurred by hunger, could suggest, but could not get him into a condition where he could be eaten without revolting my stomach. But for three days this was all I had to eat.
Then he caught two foxes and found the roasted meat delicious. He continued catching foxes, along with an occasional coyote that he hung on the side of the cabin for emergency use. “I never got hungry enough to eat one of them again,” Moses remembered. “There were eleven hanging there when I came away.”
Image/Public Domain
Passing Time
Life alone in the cabin was grim.
My life was more miserable than I can describe. The daily struggle for life and the uncertainty under which I labored were very wearing. I was always worried and anxious, not about myself alone, but in regard to the fate of those who had gone forward. I would lie away nights and think of these things…
To pass the time, Moses read the books that his brother-in-law, Dr. Townsend, had left behind in their wagon. He read them aloud, for the sound of a human voice. He read late into the night by the light of the fire and slept as late as he could in the morning to help the days pass more quickly.
What I wanted most was enough to eat, and the next thing I tried hardest to do was to kill time. I thought the snow would never leave the ground, and the few months I had been living here seemed years.
It’s not uncommon for a person in extreme isolation like this to suffer hallucinations. If that happened to Moses Schallenberger, he made no mention of it in his reminiscences.
Rescue!
Unbeknownst to Moses, the wagon party had split again west of the pass. The women and children stayed behind in a mountain camp with the remaining wagons while the men pushed through the deepening snow for supplies and help. Schallenberger’s companions, Foster and Montgomery, stopped briefly at the “women’s camp,” at present-day Big Bend, before continuing to safety at Sutter’s Fort (now Sacramento). The first man to return to check on them, months later, was Dennis Martin, a member of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party. Other men followed shortly to evacuate the starving women and children. Martin, having promised Elizabeth Townsend that he would look for her brother Moses, continued eastward over the mountain pass.
One evening, a little before sunset, about the last of February, as I was standing a short distance from my cabin, I thought I could distinguish the form of a man moving towards me. I first thought it was an Indian, but very soon I recognized the familiar face of Dennis Martin. My feelings can be better imagined than described.
Martin—having lived in Canada and being familiar with winter gear—adjusted Moses’s snowshoes to make them narrower and showed him how to attach them to the toe of his boots, leaving the heel free. These changes made snowshoeing much easier.
NPS Photo
Safe at Last
The two walked into Sutter’s Fort in March 1845. Moses Schallenberger had camped in the mountains since November, spending three of those months alone. The young man proved himself to be resourceful, self-reliant, unselfish, and brave. He later married, had two children, and lived to be 83 years old.
All other members of the party survived, too. In fact, the group reached the California settlements with more members than it had set out with, as two infants were born along the way. The emigrants retrieved their wagons later in the spring. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party is known to history as the first to take covered wagons over the Sierra Nevada. Moses reportedly kept a wheel from one of those wagons as a memento.
Two years later, over the winter of 1846-47, the tiny cabin built by Schallenberger, Foster, and Montgomery would shelter two families of the Donner Party, trapped by snow at the same location. Today at that spot, in Donner Memorial State Park, stands a statue that commemorates the emigrants.
For Further Reading
- Schallenberger, Moses, Horace S. Foote, Elisha Stevens, and George R. Stewart. 1953. The Opening of the California Trail. (The story of the Stevens Party from the reminiscences of M. Schallenberger as set down for H.H. Bancroft about 1885, edited and expanded by Horace S. Foote in 1888 [in "Pen Pictures from the Garden of the World"], and now edited with introduction, notes, maps, and illustrations by George R. Stewart.). University of California Press: Berkeley & Los Angeles.
- Stewart, George R. 1962. The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.