Quite often, small artifacts represent monumental heroism, and such is the case with Patty Reed’s doll. As a docent at Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park in Sacramento, California, I’m just as awed by the tiny doll, and the triumphant symbolism it represents, as anyone else.
Patty Reed was eight years old when she left Springfield, Illinois with her family, joining other members of a large caravan of covered wagons bound for California. The journey from Independence, Missouri should have been difficult but bearable. Instead, Patty’s family group, who named themselves the Donner Party, split from the main wagon train in present day Wyoming, the first of many unfortunate decisions that contributed to the entrapment of 87 men, women, and children in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the winter of 1846-47. Only half survived. Their story of bad decisions, personal conflicts, mishaps, starvation, suffering, and death remains one of the most tragic in the annals of western migration. For Patty Reed and others, the tale is a saga of desperation, determination, and courage.
Patty, whose given name was Martha, took several toys on the journey. As the wagons began the dry drive across the Great Salt Lake Desert in late August of 1846, Patty and the other children were told to bury all toys and nonessential items. Patty, however, was unable to resist hiding the cherished wooden doll she named Dolly inside her dress. Dolly’s appeal was in her prettily painted face and hair, lovely cloth gown, and diminutive size. At just under four inches tall, Dolly was most likely a doll-house figurine.
Dolly’s hidden presence might have reassured Patty when her father, James Reed, was banished from the train in early October for killing a teamster, a punishment that left Mrs. Reed and her young children to fend for themselves as the party pushed on. Grievously behind schedule by late October, the group was unable to cross the snow-covered mountain passes, and their provisions were all but depleted.
It would be February of 1847 before the first relief party found those still living in makeshift cabins at Truckee (now Donner) Lake, or camped in tents at Alder Creek. Too weakened by malnourishment to scale thirty-foot snowdrifts with the ill-equipped rescuers, Patty and Dolly stayed behind with several others to await a second rescue attempt.
While adults clung to their sanity with prayers and diary entries, the little girl found comfort and hope in Dolly’s sympathetic face, later claiming that love for her doll kept her alive. By the time her father rescued her in March, Patty shrewdly guessed that the relief team would discard her treasured friend as useless weight if they knew she was carrying it, so she slipped Dolly back inside her dress until they reached safety.
Martha J. (Patty) Reed Lewis married and lived to be a grandmother, keeping Dolly until she died in 1923. In 1946, the hundred-year anniversary of the ordeal, her estate donated Patty’s collection of memorabilia, manuscripts, and other archival material to Sutter’s Fort. On display at the fort for several years, Dolly delights and intrigues thousands of children and adults from all over the world as an icon of the frigid winter nightmare.
Rico says there's one tough kid...
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