Sarah Ann Charlotte Murphy Foster (1826-1906) was one of the earliest European-American settlers in Marysville and the oldest sister of Mary Murphy Covillaud, for whom Marysville was named.
Sarah was born in South Carolina, the oldest child of Jeremiah Burns Murphy and Levinah W. Jackson Murphy. When Sarah was about seven years old, the Murphys moved to Weakley County, Tennessee. In 1836, her parents converted to the Mormon church. After Jeremiah died, Levinah took the children to the Mormon capital at Nauvoo, Illinois, for about two years, but returned with them to Tennessee in late 1842 on a steamship. On the way, the ship became icebound, which gave the girls and the crew ample time to get acquainted. Sarah, 16, and her sister Harriet, 14, were married to two of the crew mates in a double wedding on board the ship—Sarah to William McFadden Foster and Harriet to William M. Pike. William Foster was 27 at the time, and a convert to Roman Catholicism.
Sarah and William had a one-year-old son, Jeremiah George Foster (called "George"), when they traveled to California as part of the Donner Party in the winter of 1846-1847, along with Sarah's widowed mother and her six younger siblings. At the end of October, the party became trapped in the snowy mountains at what is now known as Donner Lake. On October 30, Sarah's husband, William Foster, accidentally shot Harriet's husband, William Pike, killing him almost instantly and leaving Sarah's two young nieces fatherless.
On December 16, 1846, Sarah and William set out on snowshoes with Sarah's younger siblings Harriet, Lemuel, and William (aged 18, 13, and 10, respectively) and twelve of the other survivors—including three other women—to look for help, leaving their son George (who was two years old by that time) behind with Sarah's mother and some of Sarah's other younger siblings at Donner Lake. Sarah's 10-year-old brother William had no snowshoes. He and an adult man who also had no snowshoes turned back to Donner Lake the next day, unable to keep up with the other members of the snowshoe party. Her 13-year-old brother Lemuel had already been feeble from starvation before they left, but he continued with the snowshoe party.
In later years, the snowshoe party would be dubbed the Forlorn Hope party, using a military term derived from the Dutch phrase verloren hoop (meaning "lost group") and used to refer to a small portion of a larger group that was sent on an especially dangerous mission. The snowshoe party had brought a bare minimum of rations, knowing that they had a better chance of finding more food than the weaker Donner Party members they left behind had. Around December 21, the rations ran out. One man, Charles Stanton, was too weak to leave camp in the morning; he sat in the snow, smoking his pipe, and told the rest of the snowshoers to go on without him. They did. Around December 25, at a place that became known as the Camp of Death, the remaining fourteen discussed killing one of their number for food and drew lots. A man named Patrick Dolan drew the short straw, but no one could bear to kill him. Two men died of starvation that night—Franklin Graves and a Mexican teamster named Antonio. The following day, Patrick Dolan died. Another day or so after that, Sarah's 13-year-old brother Lemuel died. Sarah held Lemuel while he suffered from delirium, and in later years, she often spoke of how when they had only half a biscuit each to eat, Lemuel had tried to give his half to her, but she had refused. The day after that, the survivors resorted to eating their dead companions for the first time, "averting their faces from one another and weeping." The only remaining food taboo they observed was that they made sure no one had to eat their own family members' bodies.
The snowshoe party's human meat lasted four days; then the people were starving again. Another man, Jay Fosdick, died and was eaten. Sarah's husband murdered the party's two Indian guides, Luis and Salvador, and the seven remaining survivors ate them, too. Luis and Salvador had already been on the brink of death from starvation when William Foster shot and killed them, but one of the reasons they were so starved was that they had separated from the rest of the snowshoe party, in fear of their lives after being informed that William Foster had previously suggested killing them for food. Because they had been in hiding, they didn't get to eat Jay Fosdick's body or the deer that another snowshoer, William Eddy, had recently killed.
On January 12, 1847, the seven remaining survivors in the snowshoe party found footprints in the snow and excitedly followed them to an Indian village. The Indians gave them acorn bread. The snowshoe party struggled on, reaching a second Indian village on January 17. Sarah and her husband and sister and the three other surviving women were too weak to continue any farther. The next day, they remained at this Indian village while the strongest survivor, William Eddy, gave one of the Indians a pouch of tobacco in exchange for the Indian half-carrying him several miles to nearest European-American settlement, Johnson's Ranch (owned by William Johnson), in what is now Wheatland. Shocked to see how emaciated Eddy was, the settlers at Johnson's Ranch followed Eddy's bloody footprints back to the Indian village and brought the other six survivors of the snowshoe party back to Johnson's Ranch to recover.
When the First Relief rescue team arrived at Donner Lake February 19, they rescued Sarah's 15-year-old sister Mary, her by then 11-year-old brother William, and her 3-year-old niece, Naomi. Sarah's 17-year-old brother Landrum had died of starvation January 31, 1847. As the oldest male in the Murphy family who remained behind after the Forlorn Hope snowshoe party departed, he had taken over most of the wood-chopping and snow-shoveling duties at that point, which wore him out and probably contributed to his death. Sarah's nine-month old niece, Catherine, died the day after the First Relief team arrived.
Sarah's son George, her 8-year-old brother Simon, and her mother Levinah were all too weak to travel when the First Relief team arrived. Her husband William Foster, along with fellow survivor William Eddy, led the Third Relief team, which arrived March 13 and rescued Simon. Sarah and William's son George had already died and been eaten earlier in March. Levinah was still too weak to travel; she died and was eaten later that month.
Sarah and William went on to have six more children: Alice E., Georgiana C., William Budd, Minnesota "Minnie," Harriet "Hattie," and Frances S. In the ensuing years, Sarah spoke often of her their experience in the Donner Party. One man who heard her speak in Marysville two years after her arrival reported:
| Mrs. Foster was then about twenty-three years old. She had a fair education, and possessed the finest narrative powers. I never met with any one, not even excepting Robert Newell of Oregon, who could narrate events as well as she. She was not more accurate and full in her narrative, but a better talker, than Newell. For hour after hour, I would listen in silence to her sad narrative. Her husband was then in good circumstances, and they had no worldly matter to give them pain but their recollections of the past.1 |
William Foster died in 1874, when Sarah was almost 50. Sarah then moved in with her brother William in Marysville. She later moved to Mendocino County and lived there alone for many years. She died at the age of 80 and is buried in Fort Bragg.
Links
New Light on the Donner Party: The Murphy Family by Kristin Johnson History of Yuba County, California (Chapter 6) by Thompson & West, 1879 Donner Party Donner Party timeline
Footnotes
1. New Light on the Donner Party: The Murphy Family by Kristin Johnson
