Why Is Luis And Salvador Unethical

While going through this tragedy of being stuck in the snow, Charlie, Luis and Salvador have come to try and help the Donner Party out of the mountains. When the party gets snowed in, the cattle start to be killed for food and soon everyone runs out. This is where people start dying and other begin to talk about feeding off of the bodies. It is said that Luis and Salvador never participated in the act of cannibalism, but did that help or hurt them? When traveling in one of the parties that tried to get through the snow, Luis and Salvador along with Charlie, Bill Foster, and a couple other Donner Party members started running out of the food that they had prepared before leaving, and people started dying from the cold and lack of food and it came done to one question between the ones who were still alive; Do we bury the bodies or do we use them as food?
After a bit of contemplation, they started cutting the flesh from the dead cold bodies of their fellow travelers and eating it.
Luis and Salvador never participated in this which makes me wonder why and how they lasted so long. I think Luis and Salvador may have not participated because of a higher moral or respect for the people who had passed away or maybe it was a type of voodoo in their tribal traditions. Whatever it may have been, might be the reason they could not run from the danger of Bill Foster. If Luis and Salvador had eaten just a piece or two, I think they would have had the strength to get away from Bill Foster and gotten to the other side of the snow. This brings up another question of why did they not run away earlier? I think they felt a dedication to serving Charlie and helping him help others that were stuck. I also think they had a soft heart for all the women and children they saw trapped in the snow. And because of that, they stuck by the people who despised their kind and later were murdered because of
it.
Later, through our reading of the book Snow Mountain passage, we learn that Jim Reed had been warned about the failure of the trail and book he followed. The mountain man they encountered, “was the first person [they] met who’d actually been where [they] were headed”, and yet, Reed chose to agree with the book written by Mr. Hastings. Reed asked the mountain man what he thought of Mr. Hastings and he said Hastings, “knows how to cover country… but he’s a talker too”, meaning he bullshits too (SMP 51). There had to have been a point along the journey that Reed wondered what would have happened had he took the mountain man’s advice of “go[ing] north by Fort Hall [and they would] get there”, with little to no trouble, unlike the way Hastings and his book took them (SMP 53). The Donner Party lost a majority of their cattle following Hastings’s trail and they had a lot of arguments and turmoil between all families. If they had gone towards Fort Hall I think they would have ended the journey with more cattle and the Party might have even been closer. With the chance of less fighting I do think the killing of Johnny and the banishment of Jim would have never happened and the anger that fueled some of the members of the party would not have been there. Overall, if the party had traveled along with the other wagon parties going north, they would have never had to deal with the difficult terrain, the early winter snow, the lack of food or cattle, and the need to survive.
In today’s world, not everyone gets along and in some situations, it can be harmful. Like Mullen says, we live in a world, “where people blame each other instead of working together”, which causes a lot of our everyday problems (FM 27). I think if we could learn to communicate and work together and make decisions together, we would survive this world better.
Work Cited
Houston, James D. Snow Mountain Passage: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2001. Print
Mullen, Frank. “We Are The Donner Party.” Great Basin News Service. N.d. Web. 10 March, 2015.
Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: Ecco, 2010. Print.