The Donner Party — A shortcut that stranded a wagon train to die in the snow

Summary

The Donner Party was a group of roughly 87 American emigrants — families and hired hands travelling in ox-drawn wagons — bound for California in 1846 under the nominal leadership of the Illinois farmer George Donner and the businessman James Frazier Reed. Lured off the established trail onto an untested "shortcut," they reached the Sierra Nevada too late in the season and were trapped by early snow near Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) in the first days of November 1846. They remained snowbound for some four months. Of the roughly 87 who set out, about 39 died of starvation, cold and exhaustion, and the survivors — split between two camps and a doomed escape party — resorted to eating the bodies of the dead.

The catastrophe was made by decisions, not weather alone. The party's fate was sealed when it adopted the "Hastings Cutoff," a route promoted by Lansford Hastings in a guidebook he had never fully travelled. Far from saving distance, the cutoff added an estimated 125 miles, wrecked the wagons in the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake Desert, killed oxen, and consumed the weeks of margin the party needed to clear the mountains before winter. By the time they reached the Sierra crest, the first blizzard had closed the pass.

Through the winter the emigrants sheltered in three crude cabins at the lake and in tents at Alder Creek, six miles back, where the Donner families had been forced to halt. As food ran out — first the cattle, then dogs, then boiled hides — people began to die. On 16 December 1846 a party of seventeen, soon called the "Forlorn Hope," set out on improvised snowshoes for help; of the fifteen who pressed on, eight died, their bodies eaten by the survivors, and two Miwok guides, Luis and Salvador, were shot for food. Seven reached the Sacramento Valley after about a month and raised the alarm. Four relief parties struggled up between February and April 1847; the last survivor, Lewis Keseberg, was brought out around 21 April. Two-thirds of the women and children lived; only about a third of the men did.

Timeline

The shortcut and the lost weeks

The emigration of 1846 was a mass movement of ordinary families gambling their futures on a continent crossing. What singled out the Donner Party was its decision, at the Little Sandy River in July, to follow a route it had never seen described by anyone who had travelled it whole. Lansford Hastings, an ambitious booster of California settlement, had published The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California advertising a cutoff south of the Great Salt Lake that, he claimed, would shave hundreds of miles from the journey. He was, in effect, recruiting traffic for a road he was still inventing. Several families, James Reed among them, found the promise persuasive; against advice to keep to the proven trail, they turned south.

The cutoff nearly destroyed them before the mountains ever did. In the Wasatch Range there was no road, and the men had to fell timber and break a track yard by yard, a labour of weeks under a burning sun. Beyond it lay the Great Salt Lake Desert, far wider than Hastings had implied; oxen died of thirst, wagons were abandoned, and the column emerged scattered, short of animals and supplies, and weeks behind schedule. By the time the survivors regained the main trail near the Humboldt River, the saving the cutoff was supposed to deliver had inverted into a deficit of perhaps 125 miles and a month of lost time. Tempers frayed into violence; in a quarrel on the trail Reed killed a teamster and was banished, riding ahead toward California and, unknowingly, toward the role of rescuer. The party that climbed toward the Sierra in late October was already weakened, divided and dangerously late.

The two camps and the long winter

The first snow caught them at the crest. Storm after storm walled the pass with drifts too deep for the exhausted oxen and emaciated families to force, and the party fell back to the eastern shore of Truckee Lake. There they crowded into three rough cabins, about sixty people in all. Six miles to the east, the Donner families — delayed by a broken wagon axle — were stranded at Alder Creek with no time to build cabins, sheltering some twenty-one people in tents banked with brush and snow. Between the two camps the snow eventually lay many feet deep, burying the shelters and the dwindling herds.

Food failed by degrees. The remaining cattle were slaughtered and frozen, then exhausted; the families boiled ox-hides into a foul glue, ate field mice, bark and the camp dogs, and watched the children weaken. Patrick Breen's terse daily diary at the lake recorded the deepening cold, the storms and the deaths in a flat, exhausted hand. The first to die were the men, whose larger frames and harder labour burned reserves faster; in the end roughly two-thirds of the men in the party died, against about a third of the women and children. As the dead accumulated and could not be buried in the frozen ground, the living — facing the certainty of their own starvation — began, separately and without coordination between the camps, to eat the bodies of those who had already died. The record is plain and the survivors did not all deny it; the Reed family, who did not, were noted as an exception. It was an act of last extremity by people watching their children starve, and it is properly understood as such.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The survivors' accounts, the Breen diary and the relief parties' reports made the Donner Party a national byword almost at once, fixing the cannibalism at the centre of the story in a way that often eclipsed the families' suffering and endurance. Lewis Keseberg, dogged by accusations of murder, sued for defamation and won token damages but never escaped the rumours. Many survivors — among them the Reed and Breen families — went on to settle and prosper in California, and several, including Virginia Reed, left memoirs that remain primary sources. The pass and the lake took the name of the family that died there.

Later generations turned the camps into a place of study and memory. Archaeologists have excavated the Alder Creek and lake sites; the area is preserved as Donner Memorial State Park, with a monument whose pedestal stands as high as the snow is said to have lain that winter. Modern scholarship has worked to correct the lurid early framing — emphasising that the cannibalism was an act of necessity among people watching their children die, and recovering the wronged Miwok guides Luis and Salvador, who came to help and were killed for it, from the margins of the story. The Donner Party endures less as a horror than as a cautionary case in how ordinary errors — a salesman's shortcut, a lost month, a thin margin — compound into disaster.

Lessons

References

• Donner party ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
• Donner Party WIKIPEDIA
• The Donner Party PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
• Donner Party rescued from the Sierra Nevada Mountains HISTORY
• Donner Party Survivors Were Rescued on This Day in 1847 SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE