CUT FROM THE SHOW
When we decided to write a musical about the Donner Party, we chose the subject because we’d always been fascinated by the story of the pioneers, trapped in the icy mountains for the whole winter without food. We’d heard the story as school children, but as playwrights we had a lot of research to do, to learn all we could about the 87 people who were the Donner Party.
The more we read, the more we learned about each of them, and with each real person’s storyline, we found there was a wealth of more material, more STORY, than we could ever use. In a 2-act musical there isn’t enough time to tell the details of 87 stories, and some of our favorite people and incidents were eliminated from subsequent drafts of the show.
One of the stories that was cut was the tale of Old Hardkoop.
Very little is known about Old Hardkoop other than he was a Belgian immigrant, single, older than most of the Company, and traveling with Keseberg’s family. In the historical narrative of the journey, which began in May, Hardkoop’s name doesn’t even come up until October 8.
The date is significant. Until October, the group had suffered great hardships – fording flooded rivers, a couple of deaths from natural causes, loss of much of their cattle and near-death experiences while crossing the Great Salt Desert. Those hardships had worn on the company’s spirts; they argued amongst themselves, they had lost valuable time, and they were anxious and afraid. But things got worse in October as anxiety and fear turned deadly. As they trudged across the landscape we now call Nevada, the heavy wagons were bogged down in the sand, slowing them down to a crawl. Item after item was thrown out of the wagon and abandoned. Tools, furniture, trunks of clothes: anything that could be spared was tossed aside to make the wagons lighter.
On October 8, the Company stopped and made camp for the night, Old Hardkoop wasn’t with them. Keseberg was questioned about the old man, and he admitted he had turned Hardkoop out of the wagon to lighten the load. Hardkoop was made to walk on his own, to keep up as best he could. Two of the young teamsters reported seeing Old Hardkoop sitting beside the trail; his feet had given out and he had simply sat down to rest. In camp, Mr. Eddy and Mr. Elliot kept a fire going to serve as a beacon for the old man, but the old man never arrived.
The next morning, Eddy and Elliot begged to be given a horse to ride back on the trail to find Old Hardkoop, but no one would lend them a horse. The Company packed up and moved on, westward. The young men asked again at midday to borrow a horse and again they were told no. No time could be spared for hopeless rescue missions. Everyone was certain the old man must already be dead.
That’s it. That’s all we know of Old Hardkoop. Just a tiny footnote to an epic journey of 87 pioneers seeking a better life. Yet that tiny footnote fascinated me, and I tried to keep Old Hardkoop in our telling of the story. He made it into the First Draft of the show, and even had a little monologue, describing the scene from his point of view as he watched his companions disappear beyond the horizon. But then Rockwell & Rose became ruthless, as writers must, and we focused our storytelling by eliminating what was unnecessary. Old Hardkoop was left behind again, relegated to an archived .pdf file of a long-ago version of Meet Your Mountain.
