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

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.