ARTICLES

Ordeal by History

Catholic Members of Donner Party Get Respect, Recognition

By Joe Marti

"We pray the God of mercy
to deliver us from our present calamity
if it be his Holy will. Amen."
Patrick Breen, Sr., January 1, 1847

Most people know this much about the Donner party: that it was a group of westward migrants who became stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the coldest winter ever recorded, and in their deprived state was moved to consume the bodies of those who had died. However, few know the group included a family of Irish Catholics whose prayer life was an inspiration to fellow expedition members and lead several to convert to the Catholic faith.

The bare facts are that out of 89 people in the Donner Party, 41 died. It is known that far more men died than women and that they died earlier. What is not widely known is that of those eighty-nine people and fourteen families, there was only one family, the Catholic Breens, that survived the ordeal without suffering a fatality.

The Breen family came to Canada from Barnahasken Townland, County Ireland in the late 1820s. After several false starts they decided that California was the place to go to find a decent life and livelihood. In 1846 around two thousand men, women, and children set out for California and the Oregon Territory from points along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. None of these has provided as popular a story as that of the Donner party.

The story of the Donner expedition would not be told in complete detail until the mid-1990s, nearly 150 years after the events. Until then, the definitive book was written by George R. Stewart, a former University of California, Berkeley professor. His 1936 Ordeal by Hunger describes events mainly through the testimony of William Eddy, who lost his wife and two young children that winter. Eddy, known along the trail as "Lying Eddy," describes his own heroics throughout the book to the point of contradiction when cross-referenced with other accounts. Stewart's book treats the Breens with disparagement. At best, Stewart ignored the contributions made by the Breens and the good that they did for others throughout the winter of 1846-47.

In Stewart's account, Patrick Breen is a forty year-old and "in the full vigor of life." In fact, Breen was baptized on June 11, 1795, making him fifty-one at the onset of the migration. Those who were present describe Breen as one of the most senior members of the group and in poor health. Stewart depicts Breen as a lazy, fiddle-playing shirker-of-duty, when others say that Breen performed difficult physical chores. According to Patty Reed, a survivor who benefited from the Breen's generosity, Patrick Breen would often do the job of "digging out." Inside their cabin, Breen would measure the distance from the fireplace to the door. He would then climb up the chimney, shovel the snow off the roof, measure the distance from the chimney, and clear the snow below in order to unblock the door.

In several passages, Stewart refers to the Breens as "prodigal Irish" (due to their seven children). He also muses on the possible reasons for Patrick Breen's assiduous note-taking, suggesting the motive was nothing more than the "self-importance felt by a man near death." Added to this is the distaste Stewart had for the Catholic faith, evidenced, in part, by his disparaging comments of the family's daily prayers.

Virginia Reed, another survivor, did not begin the journey a Catholic. After she spent time with the Breens and witnessed their faith, she lay with her family and imagined death to be close at hand. Stirred by the Breens' faith and serenity, she vowed that if she could just live long enough to just see her father again, and if the Lord would also spare her family from death, that she would convert to Catholicism. As she tells it in her own account, Across the Plains in the Donner Party, "The Breens were the only Catholic family in the Donner party, and prayers were said aloud regularly in that cabin night and morning." She continues, speaking of a night when she was sleeping, "Everyone had gone to bed, but I could not sleep. Looking up through the darkness with my hands clasped, I made a vow that if God would send us relief and let me see my father again, I would be a Catholic.'' Virginia Reed survived that winter and became a Catholic, to the dismay of her Protestant father. Reed was not alone. Eventually, party members Mary Murphy Covillaud and William and Sarah Foster also converted to Catholicism.

Fifty-eight years after Stewart's book, in 1994, a new perspective was submitted of the events of that winter. The late Joseph A. King, a former professor from Contra Costa College, disputed much of Stewart's account in his book, Winter of Entrapment. King had been assigned the subject to teach to a history class. The fact that nothing had been written for some time stimulated his curiosity, and he discovered that no major work had been written based on the journals of Patrick Breen. After he researched the subject, King concluded that Stewart's work was questionable in its assertions. According to King, Stewart's main flaw was relying on the testimony of William Eddy "who had earned a reputation on the trail for telling tall tales involving himself." Instead of the uncooperative, lazy, and "cunning" Patrick Breen found in Ordeal by Hunger, King's research discovered a more nuanced and sympathetic view of Patrick Breen. Where Stewart saw him as a never-do-well, King saw a late middle-aged Catholic husband and father of seven who, along with his wife, Margaret, did all he could to save his family and other members of the party. King regards Stewart's anti-Catholicism as a kind of spiritual jealousy. In particular the conversion of Virginia Reed, which moved Stewart to write that Reed had a "childish lack of logic forgetting that her own mother and many others were praying just as fervently and probably just as efficaciously in their Protestant fashion."

As to the oft-mentioned cannibalism, the Breens were among those who partook in the grisly meals. However, this was done as a last resort, after the family and others had spent weeks surviving on the boiled skins of their dead oxen and horses. Certain his children would not survive otherwise, Patrick Breen used the flesh of two dead children who had been with them, and later that of Elizabeth Graves.

After 111 days without food or supplies, having survived the winter intact, the Breens arrived in San Juan Bautista near Hollister in February. In their deprived state, they were given free shelter in the vacation home of Mexican General Jose M. Castro, who refused rent. At age sixteen, John Breen left home to seek his fortune in the gold fields of Placerville. The next year he returned with a $12,000 fortune and in December 1848 the Breens purchased the Castro adobe and 400 acres of land in the San Juan Valley.

Many descendants of the Donner party, and in particular the Breen family, still live in and around San Juan Bautista. Patrick Breen's great-great grandson, Philip Hudner, a San Francisco lawyer and former head of the society of California pioneers, said that the ordeal suffered by his predecessors and the faith that helped them endure has not been forgotten by subsequent generations. He said, "We're proud of the Breen history, and strong Catholics remain throughout the family."

Hudner's past is revisited from time to time when he encounters descendants of other families who survived. "I went to law school with one of the Murphy family's descendants, and I still have many friends who are descendants of a party that went through in 1844, the Townshend-Murphy-Miller Party," he said. During the sesquicentennial in 1996, he was able to renew old friendships and speak to others who share his unique boasting rights. However, one thing he doesn't discuss is Stewart's account of his family's history. "That never comes up."

Nevertheless, Hudner has his own opinion on the account, having helped King with his research and later becoming friends as a result. "[Joseph] King had it right," he said," I agree with King that Stewart had a bias against Irish Catholics, and that his book is influenced by that bias. I think he had a rather typical bias of that time." Noting that Stewart was best known as a fiction writer," and a good one," he shies away from saying anything disparaging against him, preferring instead to let history do the talking. Still, he points out that it is sad that Stewart "demeaned" the Breens' strong points, namely that they were a resiliently religious family. "I guess anti-Catholicism was and is the last respectable prejudice."

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