The story of the Donner Party became legendary because of the gruesome horrors faced by its participants. It is the unfortunate tale of eighty-seven pioneers and their desperate attempt to survive one of the harshest winters that California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range has ever seen. Most famed for its stories of cannibalism, it is also the tale of nineteenth-century settlers’ quest for the American Dream at the height of western continental expansion.
In 1845, Lansford Warren Hastings wrote The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California. Describing California as a veritable paradise, he urged Easterners to migrate as quickly as possible. In his book, Hastings advertised a shortcut to California, which he insisted would shave days and miles off the traditional route west. Unfortunately for his readers, Hastings was merely speculating. He had not actually traveled his suggested itinerary. This was to be the guidebook that the Donner Party would follow, ultimately to tragedy.
An illustration of the Donner Party winter settlement. Due to the sensational stories of cannibalism associated with the doomed expedition, the Donner Party was assured a lasting place in American folklore, and its very mention can evoke horror and disgust. During the brutal winter of 1846–1847 nearly half the original members of the party perished, and the Donner family suffered most of all. (AS400 DB/Corbis)
The Donner Party took to the road in April 1846 from Springfield, Illinois. George and Jacob Donner, James Reed, and their families made up most of the original group of settlers. George Donner brought his wife, Tamsen, and their children: Elitha, Leanna, Frances, Georgia, and Eliza. Jacob brought his wife, Elizabeth, and their children: Mary, Isaac, Lewis, Samuel, Solomon Hook, William Hook, and James Jr. James Reed brought his wife, Margaret, her mother, and their children: Virginia, Martha, Thomas, and James Jr. Along the way, the Graves, Breen, Eddy, Murphy, McCutchen, and Keseberg families joined with the Donner Party, along with several single men. This group was one of many that traveled west to California. It was initially led by James Reed and, encouraged by Hastings’s guide, the wagons set off for California in plenty of time to avoid spring rains and to cross the mountains before the winter snow.
The trip began with few incidents. Only one death occurred in the first leg of the journey: Sarah Keyes, mother of Margaret Reed, died at the end of May 1846. Her old age and delicate health were determined to be the cause. The wagon train made it to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming at the end of June, where Reed encountered James Clyman. Clyman had just arrived from a trip with Lansford Hastings, where their party traveled east from California to test Hastings’s shortcut on horseback. He warned Reed to avoid this option and take the regular, longer route to California. Clyman said that the shorter path was steep and difficult for the horses, making it nearly impossible for wagons. It was here that the immigrants decided to split up. Eighty-seven members of the larger group ignored Clyman’s advice and decided to take the southerly and supposedly shorter Hastings Cutoff. The assembly chose George Donner as their captain. At the end of July 1846, encouraged by a letter from Hastings himself, the party left for Fort Bridger in high hopes and with a new leader. It is interesting to note that of all the groups involved in the westward immigration of 1846, the Donner Party was the only one that did not arrive safely in California that year. They chose to ignore advice from an experienced guide like James Clyman and their impatience led to severe, deadly errors later.
The Donner Party followed Hastings’s directions from Fort Bridger to Echo Canyon in present-day Utah. Crossing the mountains and river proved to be an arduous task for the wagons. Rather than the predicted one-week travel time, it took the group closer to a month at the crawling pace they were forced to endure because of the harsh terrain. Another letter from Hastings encouraged the party to cross the Great Salt Lake, insisting that it was only a two days’ journey across. It took the Donner Party five days and they lost many oxen, several wagons, and a lot of hope. Two men, William McCutchen and Charles Stanton, rode ahead to Sutter’s Fort in present-day California to gather more supplies.
Problem after problem arose. Fights broke out. After the death of John Snyder, James Reed was exiled from the wagon train and forced to pursue an alternate path, leaving his wife and children in the protection of the larger group. Native Americans attacked and killed the dwindling supply of oxen. By the time the party reached the Truckee Lake in late October, their food was almost gone. Stanton luckily returned with supplies, news, and two native guides, Salvador and Luis. He told the others that they had close to a month before heavy snow would prevent them from crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Mere miles from the last obstacle, the Donner Party camped for several days. By the time they attempted the summit for the first time, it had begun to snow. Unable to push through the snow drifts, the group was forced back to the lake to make camp. They set up temporary winter shelters from a crude preexisting cabin and set up what other shelter they could in the form of a basic lean-to shed, a quickly constructed second cabin, and pitched tents.
In mid-December 1846, a group within the Donner Party planned to overtake the summit and obtain assistance. Seventeen members made the journey and identified themselves as Forlorn Hope. Two men turned back after the first day, leaving fifteen to press onward. The group hoped to reach Sutter’s Fort, taking only homemade snow-shoes and six days’ worth of food. Six days came and went, food was long gone, and the group lost their bearings. The members of Forlorn Hope spoke of sacrificing a member for consumption so that all of the party would not have to die. They drew slips of paper and Patrick Dolan drew the marked slip. However, at that point in the ordeal no one had the heart to murder another person for sustenance.
That night, a ferocious storm swept over the campsite of the Forlorn Hope. Though huddled together and covered as best they could, three members died in the night. There was no question about consuming the bodies since the remaining members were starving and the argument about sacrifice was now moot. The only question that remained was which bodies to eat. To retain some amount of respect for their comrades, the survivors “avoid[ed] the relatives of the living,” according to one historian (Rarick 2008). The Native Americans, Salvador and Luis, were the only ones who refused to partake of the meat from the cadavers. Days later, in much the same circumstances as before, there was a proposal to murder and consume the two Indians. Understanding the danger, Salvador and Luis left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, the remaining members of the Forlorn Hope found the two men near death, and William Foster shot them each in the head. As far as anyone can tell, “the deaths of Luis and Salvador were the only time during the ordeal of the Donner Party that anyone was killed to be eaten” (Rarick 2008). Nearly a month after departing the campsite at the lake, the seven remaining members of the Forlorn Hope reached Johnson’s ranch, which was the furthest American settlement on the western side of the mountains.
By February 1847, alarms were raised concerning the horrifying conditions of the Donner Party trapped at Truckee Lake. Within a few days, the first relief party was sent with supplies and a mission to bring back survivors. A second mission led by James Reed left a few days later.
The first relief party made it to the Donner Party camp in late February. Taking only a few hours to assess the situation, their plan was to load up as many able survivors as possible and head back across the summit that same day. Twenty-three survivors at the Truckee Lake camp accompanied the seven rescuers. However, two of the younger Reed children were too weak to continue. They were taken back while the other twenty-one continued onward, including their mother and two siblings.
The Oregon Trail
Stretching more than 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in present-day Oregon, the wagon-ruts of the Oregon Trail opened the West to thousands of settlers seeking gold, farms, and opportunity in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the National Park Service maintains the Oregon National Historic Trail through six states, and one of the earliest and most abiding educational computer games was based on the Oregon Trail.
C. Fee
While the situation by the lake was dire, and starvation was apparent, cannibalism had not been considered an option in February. However, between the time of the first and second relief parties, several more people had died, and the survivors had begun to eat the dead because it was the only source of food left in the camp. The second and third relief parties rescued numerous live members of the Donner Party, but they also found “partially butchered corpses” and “limbs and skulls littered the ground” (Rarick 2008). By the time the fourth and final rescue party entered the Truckee Lake camp, only one survivor remained; it was Lewis Keseberg, who confessed to eating the body of Tamsen Donner, whose body was never actually found.
Of the original eighty-seven members of the Donner Party, only forty-six survived the trip to California. The Donner family suffered the most, while the Breen and Reed families suffered the least. Early newspaper articles published stories of the Donner Party’s trials, emphasizing the scintillating details of cannibalism and warning other immigrants of the bogus Hastings Cutoff. It is a story aptly described as “more thrilling than romance, [and] more terrible than fiction” (McGlashan 1907). The site became famous, and Truckee Lake was renamed Donner Lake. A statue now memorializes the events of the winter of 1846–1847, reminding visitors, as McGlashan writes, that “Donner Lake was the scene of one of the most thrilling, heart-rending tragedies ever recorded in California history.”
Josianne Leah Campbell
See also Bridger, Jim; Legend Tripping; Mountain Men; Windwagon Smith
Further Reading
Breen, Patrick. 1910. Diary of Patrick Breen: One of the Donner Party. Berkeley, CA: Academy of Pacific Coast History.
Burns, Ric. 1992. The Donner Party: A Film by Ric Burns. PBS Home Video.
Haughton, Eliza P. Donner. 1920. The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark.
McGlashan, Charles Fayette. 1907. History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra. Sacramento, CA: H. S. Crocker.
Rarick, Ethan. 2008. Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Donner Party—Primary Document
Selection from Francis Parkman Jr., The Oregon Trail (1849)
The migration of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the trans-Mississippi West in the 1840s and 1850s gave birth to countless stories and legends. One of the most important writers to record the experience of traveling in the West is Francis Parkman Jr., a Harvard graduate and law student who at the age of twenty-three followed the route of the Oregon Trail and published a series of installments in Knickerbocker Magazine about life on the trail. These essays were gathered together and published as The Oregon Trail in 1849, and became an instant classic.
A low undulating line of sand-hills bounded the horizon before us. That day we rode ten consecutive hours, and it was dusk before we entered the hollows and gorges of these gloomy little hills. At length we gained the summit, and the long expected valley of the Platte lay before us. We all drew rein, and, gathering in a knot on the crest of the hill, sat joyfully looking down upon the prospect. It was right welcome; strange too, and striking to the imagination, and yet it had not one picturesque or beautiful feature; nor had it any of the features of grandeur, other than its vast extent, its solitude, and its wilderness. For league after league a plain as level as a frozen lake was outspread beneath us; here and there the Platte, divided into a dozen threadlike sluices, was traversing it, and an occasional clump of wood, rising in the midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste. No living thing was moving throughout the vast landscape, except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass and prickly-pear just at our feet. And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their original natures.
We had passed the more toilsome and monotonous part of the journey; but four hundred miles still intervened between us and Fort Laramie; and to reach that point cost us the travel of three additional weeks. During the whole of this time we were passing up the center of a long narrow sandy plain, reaching like an outstretched belt nearly to the Rocky Mountains. Two lines of sand-hills, broken often into the wildest and most fantastic forms, flanked the valley at the distance of a mile or two on the right and left; while beyond them lay a barren, trackless waste—The Great American Desert—extending for hundreds of miles to the Arkansas on the one side, and the Missouri on the other. Before us and behind us, the level monotony of the plain was unbroken as far as the eye could reach. Sometimes it glared in the sun, an expanse of hot, bare sand; sometimes it was veiled by long coarse grass. Huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere; the ground was tracked by myriads of them, and often covered with the circular indentations where the bulls had wallowed in the hot weather. From every gorge and ravine, opening from the hills, descended deep, well-worn paths, where the buffalo issue twice a day in regular procession down to drink in the Platte. The river itself runs through the midst, a thin sheet of rapid, turbid water, half a mile wide, and scarce two feet deep. Its low banks for the most part without a bush or a tree, are of loose sand, with which the stream is so charged that it grates on the teeth in drinking. The naked landscape is, of itself, dreary and monotonous enough, and yet the wild beasts and wild men that frequent the valley of the Platte make it a scene of interest and excitement to the traveler. Of those who have journeyed there, scarce one, perhaps, fails to look back with fond regret to his horse and his rifle.
Early in the morning after we reached the Platte, a long procession of squalid savages approached our camp. Each was on foot, leading his horse by a rope of bull-hide. His attire consisted merely of a scanty cincture and an old buffalo robe, tattered and begrimed by use, which hung over his shoulders. His head was close shaven, except a ridge of hair reaching over the crown from the center of the forehead, very much like the long bristles on the back of a hyena, and he carried his bow and arrows in his hand, while his meager little horse was laden with dried buffalo meat, the produce of his hunting. Such were the first specimens that we met—and very indifferent ones they were—of the genuine savages of the prairie.
They were the Pawnees whom Kearsley had encountered the day before, and belonged to a large hunting party known to be ranging the prairie in the vicinity. They strode rapidly past, within a furlong of our tents, not pausing or looking toward us, after the manner of Indians when meditating mischief or conscious of ill-desert. I went out and met them; and had an amicable conference with the chief, presenting him with half a pound of tobacco, at which unmerited bounty he expressed much gratification. These fellows, or some of their companions had committed a dastardly outrage upon an emigrant party in advance of us. Two men, out on horseback at a distance, were seized by them, but lashing their horses, they broke loose and fled. At this the Pawnees raised the yell and shot at them, transfixing the hindermost through the back with several arrows, while his companion galloped away and brought in the news to his party. The panic-stricken emigrants remained for several days in camp, not daring even to send out in quest of the dead body.
The reader will recollect Turner, the man whose narrow escape was mentioned not long since. We heard that the men, whom the entreaties of his wife induced to go in search of him, found him leisurely driving along his recovered oxen, and whistling in utter contempt of the Pawnee nation. His party was encamped within two miles of us; but we passed them that morning, while the men were driving in the oxen, and the women packing their domestic utensils and their numerous offspring in the spacious patriarchal wagons. As we looked back we saw their caravan dragging its slow length along the plain; wearily toiling on its way, to found new empires in the West.
Source: Parkman, Francis, Jr. The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life. New York: George P. Putnam, 1849.