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He drags this bear back to the camp, where the people are getting increasingly desperate. William Eddy keeps saying,“We’ve got to send a team for help,”but no one else is strong enough to go, and he’s obviously too worried about leaving his family behind to go himself. But now the game has gone down from the mountains, and the snow keeps falling, and finally one night he talks with his wife, who begins the film as a quiet woman, someone who has suffered life more than lived it. Now she takes a deep breath. “Will’m,” she says,“you’ve got to take those who are strong and go. Get help.”He protests, but she says, “For our children. Please.” What can he do?
What if the only way to save the ones you love . . . is to leave them behind?
By this time the pioneers have eaten all of their horses and mules and even their pets. People are making soup out of saddles and blankets and shoe leather, anything to flavor the snow water. William Eddy’s family is down to a few scraps of bear meat. He has no choice. He asks for volunteers. By then, only seventeen people are strong enough to try: twelve men and boys, and five young women. They make crude snowshoes out of harnesses and reins and start out. Right away, two of the boys turn back because the snow is too deep. Even with snowshoes, the rest fall two feet with every step.
Eddy leads his party of fifteen away and they struggle; it takes two days just to make it to the pass. On the first night, they camp and Eddy reaches in his pack and—like a blow to the gut—he realizes his wife has packed the remaining bear meat for him. It’s only a few bites, but her selflessness destroys him. She has sacrificed her share for him. He looks back and can just see a curl of smoke from their camp.
What if the only way to save the ones you love . . . is to leave them behind?
They move on. For days and days, the fifteen walk, making slow progress across craggy peaks and snowy valleys. Blizzards blind them and stop them in their tracks. It takes days to go a few thousand yards. With no food except a few bites of Eddy’s bear meat, they grow weak. One of the men, Foster, says they must sacrifice one of themselves for food for the others, and they talk of drawing lots. William Eddy says that if someone is going to be sacrificed, then that man must be given a chance. They should pick two men and have them fight to the death. He volunteers to be one of the men. But no one moves. One morning, an old man and a boy are dead of starvation. They have no choice. They build a fire and eat the meat of their companions.
But we don’t linger on this aspect. It’s just . . . what it is. People hear Do
And why do the men die and the women survive? Because women have more body fat to live off of, and are lighter, so they use less energy walking through snow. It is the great irony: muscles kill men.
Eighteen days. That’s how long the rescue party walks. For eighteen days they stagger through forty-foot drifts, ice so hard it cracks their skin. They are seven skeletons in tatters when they finally descend below the snow line. In the woods, they see a deer, but William Eddy is too weak to lift his gun. It is wrenching—William Eddy finally sees game, tries to shoulder his rifle, and fails. He just drops the gun. And walks on. For food, they graze on bark and wild grasses, like deer. And then, William Eddy sees a curl of smoke from a small Indian village. But the others are simply too weak to move, so William Eddy leaves them behind and goes on himself.
Remember, this is before the Forty-niners and the real boom in California. The state is virtually empty. San Francisco is a town of a few hundred people, called Yerba Buena. Now we’re tight on a cabin at the edge of the mountains. We pull back to see it, idyllic and peaceful, a stream ru
. . . is William Eddy! The ranchers get him some water. A bit of flour, which is all his constricted stomach can handle. His eyes well with tears. “There are others . . . in an Indian village near here,” he tells them. “Six.” A party is sent off. He’s done it. Of the fifteen who went for help, William Eddy has brought Foster and the five women to safety and told the ranchers about the others back in the mountains.
But the story’s not over. First act, trek into the mountains; second act, descent and escape; third act, the rescue. Eddy has left seventy people up in the mountains, waiting for help. A rescue party is raised, forty men led by a fat, smug cavalryman named Colonel Woodworth. Eddy and Foster are too weak to help, but Eddy wakes momentarily in his bed to see dozens of men riding past the frontier cabin.
When his fever finally breaks, days later, he asks about the rescue party. The ranchers tell him that Woodworth’s men are camped only two days away, waiting out a snowstorm. A small rescue party of seven made it back to the Do
The rancher shakes his head. “I’m sorry. Your wife and daughter were already dead. Your boy is still alive, but was too young to walk over the pass. They left him in the camp.” William Eddy rises from his bed. He must go. His old enemy Foster also left a son behind, and he agrees to go with Eddy, even though they are weak still.
At a camp, miles from the pass, Woodworth tells Eddy a spring snowstorm has made it too dangerous to attempt—but Eddy won’t take no for an answer. He offers Woodworth’s men twenty dollars for every child they will carry over the pass. A few soldiers agree and they press on—and are nearly killed traversing the pass they’ve just crossed weeks earlier. Finally, Eddy and Foster and a handful of men stagger back into the Do
Foster’s son is still alive! Foster cries as he holds his boy. But for Eddy . . . he’s too late. His son died days earlier. William Eddy has lost his whole family. He goes into a rage and stands above the villain, Keseberg, who may have eaten the children, this man who is nothing more than an animal. Eddy looks down at this beast. He steps forward to kill the man . . . but he can’t. He falls down and stares at the sky again, at the very sky that dropped that first snowflake on him. And his head goes to his hands. Foster steps forward to kill Keseberg for him, but a voice comes from the heap that is William Eddy. “Leave him,” he tells Foster. Because Eddy knows that this evil lives in all of us, that we are all animals in the end. “Let him be,” he says.