“Bad luck never lost a race.”- Mark Getty
The reasons hundreds of thousands of nineteenth century emigrants took the arduous journey to the west coast were many. For most the decisions involved obtaining better living circumstances, amassing wealth, or even the adventure of moving to a new location.
For Luke Halloran, relocation was a matter of life and death. Luke was a twenty-four of twenty-five-year-old Irish immigrant living in St. Louis. He had prospered running a successful store and amassing a half dozen properties in the city. The future looked bright for the young man, and it is unlikely that selling everything and heading west was the future he envisioned.
The decision for his journey West likely started with a persistent cough, fever, difficulty breathing, fatigue, sneezing, and spitting. When the home remedies proved ineffective, Luke likely visited a doctor. It probably did not take the doctor long to ascertain that Luke appeared to have consumption (Tuberculosis).
In the 1840s roughly one out of seven of all Americans died of the disease. It was named consumption as the bacteria involved eats away at those inflicted with it. In 1846 identification of the bacterium was decades in the future. The condition had several names, with “Great White Plague” most prevalent in the 17th century. That name related to the many patients who became quite pale as the disease progressed.
It is not known which of the, mostly ineffective, treatments available to the medical profession Luke tried. There likely were courses of bleeding, purging, inhaling hemlock, vinegar massages, and inhaling turpentine. These would be supplemented by lifestyle changes such as exposure to sunlight, resting, exercise outdoors, and good nutrition.
Loaded Up The "Truck"
Doctors recognized that consumptive patients improved in dry climates and often prescribed a move to the West. Luke sold off his properties and headed for California in the spring of 1846 under the advice of a physician.
Luke joined up with a family at one of the many jumping off places for wagon trains. His supplies likely were combined with those of the family and carried in their wagon. Luke acquired a horse to carry him and a few possessions. History does not record details of his travels with his new companions. Odds are that they joined one of the wagon companies.
Consumption is contagious in situations where people are crowded together. Perhaps his symptoms were not extreme at the start of his journey. Perhaps by distancing while traveling and bedding down alone he avoided raising contagion concerns of his fellow emigrants.
Were it not for the horse, it is doubtful Luke could have gotten far. Even so, it must have been difficult for him to keep up. Luke likely lacked the energy to participate the communal work that emigrants in a wagon train were expected to contribute. As the journey continued it is likely that the severity of his symptoms increased.
As the wagon train left the Great Plains to cross the Rocky Mountains the several thousand-foot increase in altitude would have affected his breathing even more. Healthy emigrants sometimes wished they had a third lung as they struggled to hike the mountain passes. Luke’s failing lungs must have labored even more in the mountains.
See Ya'
Luke survived with his traveling family through the South Pass (7,412 feet above mean sea level) of the Rockies to somewhere around the Little Sandy River (east of modern Farson, Wyoming) before he was abandoned by his fellow emigrants.
Feverish and too weak to move his former fellows had to realize that Luke was being left alone to die. Even if by some miracle he could find the strength to get up and move forward, he would starve to death without supplies to sustain him. Luke’s horse and personal gear were left near him.
We do not know how long he lay on the ground waiting to die. Over the sounds of his own coughing and wheezing Luke likely heard the familiar sounds of his wagon company on the move. The noises faded as the distance between him and the wagons grew.
Eventually he was left with the sounds of his horse, birds at the nearby river, insects, and the wind moving through the vegetation. If he retained consciousness, he likely heard similar wagon and livestock sounds approaching. Perhaps he heard children and their pets playing and adults talking as another wagon company neared. Eventually the sounds were very close and at least one wagon stopped.
The Rescue
Luke’s luck suddenly seemed to have changed. He was approached and strangers asked him if was alright. The strangers assessed that Luke was in no condition to travel. He was gently lifted into a wagon and bedding was prepared to cushion him, likely on sacks of dry goods like flour with heavy quilts on top. He was given water and food, if he could handle them. The couple that rescued him from certain death introduced themselves and George and Tamsen Donner.
We can only speculate as to what Luke thought about this turn of events. Was he fully aware of his abandonment? Did he wish to be rescued, or give in to death and cheat the consumption of eating his organs and killing him slowly? Was his rescue good luck?
As it turns out being “saved” by the Donner-Reed wagon train put him among a collection of emigrants who were on their way to a frozen hell from which roughly half of them would perish. The Donner Party became the boogie-man story of how dangerous the overland trip to California could be.
The accommodations for Luke in the back of the Donner wagon were uncomfortable. Normally only those who could not walk rode in the back of a covered wagon. The wagons generally did not have springs to absorb the shock of traveling across unimproved trails.
The trip for Luke was one of constant jarring, much like being pummeled. The dusty air within the covering was stifling, adding more to Luke’s lung difficulties. The long hours of travel were torture. Through them all Tamsen Donner did her best to comfort Luke. The wagons had to continue their journey to California before the winter snows closed the trails.
Bad Decisions
The wagons crawled along to Fort Bridger where they rested for four days. Here the wagon company made the first of several disastrous decisions. They were misled to take the new cutoff which promised a substantial savings of time to get to California. The route was promoted by Lansford Hastings even though he never had traveled along it.
Jim Bridger, who knew much of the difficulties ahead on the Hastings cutoff did not warn the Donner-Reed party from taking a fraudulent route. Hastings had already left Fort Bridger, with the Harlan-Young wagon train, offering to guide following companies along the route.
It might have been feasible to leave Luke at Fort Bridger. There is no evidence this option was considered. In early August, the Donner Party, including Luke and several other late additions, followed in Hastings’ wagon tracks. The route turned out to be much rougher than Hastings promoted. There were delays in repairing wagons and in sending messengers back and forth to Hastings.
It was clear that Hastings was making the route up as he went along and the Donners were directed not to follow the route through the Wasatch Mountains to one that Hastings said looked less rough from a distance. It was equally daunting and the progress of the Donners slowed to a crawl as they had to blaze a trail into the Great Salt Lake Valley.
The weary emigrants managed to cover only thirty-six miles in fifteen days and broke through to the area which would become Great Salt Lake City on August 25. On the tried-and-true wagon roads most companies could have made 150 or more miles in that time span. The Donner-Reed wagon train soon rejoined the path taken by the Harlan-Young train.
See Ya', Part Two
During all this time, Luke’s health declined. Once free of the mountains, the wagons improved their speed. However, the wagon with Luke followed at a slower pace to ease his suffering. On August 29, the wagon bearing Luke’s corpse rolled into the camp near the start of the Great Salt Desert. It was the last wagon to make camp that night. Luke was buried adjacent to the grave of John Hargrave, a member of the Harlan-Young wagon company.
Luke’s death saved him from experiencing the incredible string of misfortunes the Donner-Reed Party members endured. The Great Salt Desert crossing represented one of the greatest physical challenges on the Hastings Cutoff. Once back on the usual emigrant trails, the Sierra Madre Mountains tested the mettle of the emigrants.
As supplies ran out and hardships increased, the social fabric of the group disintegrated. The wagon company separated into tiny groups which only reassembled under threats to Indian raiding. The party had a high number of murders. Members were banished and abandoned.
The final trials came as unusually heavy snows trapped the Donner-Reed party on the eastern slopes of the mountains. Many perished in desperate attempts to break through the deep snows. The starving emigrants fell apart and cannibalism was practiced by widely dispersed groups. Rescue and salvage groups brought out survivors, but almost half of the wagon train perished.
When Luke passed away, the Donners went through his possessions. In doing so they found Luke’s nest egg for his new life in the West. It consisted of hundreds of coins of unknown denominations and national origins. By modern standards Luke’s savings was a tidy windfall. Each one hundred dollars of 1840s coins had roughly four thousand dollar of twenty-first century value. Luke had amassed sufficient wealth to build a store in California as he recovered his health.
Keep The Money
The Donners kept the money as they had cared for Luke in his final weeks. This created a little internal tension with some others in the wagon train who would have preferred an equitable sharing. However, the wagon company as a whole was already wealthy.
Exaggerated rumors claimed the party walked into Fort Bridger with as much as $15,000 dollars (worth roughly $600,000 dollars today). In the 1840s there were few impoverished people able to outfit a move to California.
When in extremis, the emigrants cached their fortunes. In 1847, the last Donner Party survivor brought in from the mountain camps was saved by a salvage party looking for treasure. The previous rescue party believed that further rescue parties would be unnecessary. The salvage party tortured the unexpected survivor, Louis Keseberg, to get him to reveal what he knew about the money caches. The salvage group was about monetary profit not beneficent heroics.
There is no grave marker or epitaph for Luke Halloran. The location of his grave is a matter of speculation. He was an unwilling participant in history and there is no evidence he did anything to deserve his fate. Except for his chance “rescue” he likely would be lost to history. Is that good luck or bad? I leave the answer for the reader.
Luke Halloran’s place in history is that of a man with luck so bad that he was the only man rescued by the unluckiest wagon train in American history. His rescue had only inflicted several weeks of additional suffering.
Terry A. Del Bene can be reached at terrydelbene@me.com. He is the author of The Donner Party Cookbook.
