The Donner Party — 1846, California Trail

Summary

In the spring of 1846 a cluster of prosperous Illinois families — the brothers George and Jacob Donner and their friend James Frazier Reed among them — rolled out of Springfield bound for California, the kind of well-provisioned, optimistic company the trail had begun to make ordinary. They were not poor, not reckless, not inexperienced beyond the ordinary measure of their time. What undid them was not the wilderness so much as a map: a promised "shortcut" called the Hastings Cutoff, talked up in Lansford W. Hastings's emigrant guidebook, that they chose at Fort Bridger over the proven road. The detour bled them of the one resource the mountains would not forgive them for spending — time.

The cutoff hurled them into the tangled Wasatch Mountains, where they hacked a wagon road foot by foot, and then onto the burning salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake, an 80-mile dry crossing that killed oxen and stranded wagons. By the time the company regained the main trail along the Humboldt River, they were weeks behind, short of cattle, short of food, and increasingly short of one another's trust. When they reached the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada in late October, the first heavy snows had already closed the high pass. Roughly eighty-odd people — many of them children — were trapped on the wrong side of the mountains for the winter.

What followed has fixed the Donner Party in American memory as the darkest single episode of the overland migration. Through the winter of 1846–47, marooned in crude cabins and brush shelters at Truckee Lake (today Donner Lake) and at Alder Creek a few miles back, the emigrants starved. They ate their oxen down to the hides, boiled the hides themselves, ate field mice and bark, and, as the dead piled up, some of the living survived by eating the bodies of those who had died. A desperate party of fifteen who tried to walk out on improvised snowshoes — the "Forlorn Hope" — endured the same on the way down. Of the roughly eighty-seven people associated with the party, about forty-eight came out alive.

The horror has too often flattened the people into a single ghoulish image. The truer story is one of ordinary families making a string of survivable mistakes that compounded into catastrophe, of children who lived because adults gave them the last food, of relief parties that climbed back into the mountains four times to carry strangers out, and of survivors — Virginia Reed, Patty Reed, the Breen and Graves and Murphy children — who went on to long lives in California and left behind some of the most-quoted firsthand words of the entire migration. It is a story to be told soberly, because real people lived and died in it.

Timeline

The Departure

The Donners and the Reeds were not desperate people fleeing a failed life. George Donner was a well-off farmer in his sixties; James Reed was a successful manufacturer who had a custom "family wagon" built for the journey, a two-story affair with spring seats and a stove, mocked later as the "Pioneer Palace Car." When they left Springfield, Illinois, on April 14–15, 1846, they went the way comfortable people went: with hired teamsters, good oxen, and provisions to spare. Reed's invalid mother-in-law, Sarah Keyes, rode along and died early on near the Big Blue River, the company's first grave. They went west for the usual mix of reasons — land, health, opportunity, the restless American conviction that the next country would be better than this one.

At Independence and along the early trail they were simply one more company in the great 1846 migration, traveling for a time in larger trains. The fateful turn came from a book. Lansford Hastings's "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California" advertised a new route that promised to cut hundreds of miles by swinging south of the Great Salt Lake. Hastings himself had ridden much of it on horseback but never guided a wagon train over it. At the Little Sandy River the company that would become the Donner Party formally organized, electing George Donner captain, and resolved to try the cutoff. It was a decision made on paper assurances rather than tested road, and it would cost them everything.

The Route

From Fort Bridger the party turned onto the Hastings Cutoff with the guidebook's confidence and almost none of its promised guidance — Hastings, ahead with another group, left only notes pinned to the brush. The route plunged into the Wasatch Mountains, where there was no road at all. For weeks the men felled timber and pried boulders to cut a wagon track through the canyons, advancing only a mile or two a day. By the time they broke out of the mountains into the Salt Lake valley they had burned through August and much of their margin of safety.

West of the Great Salt Lake lay the worst stretch: a glaring salt desert that Hastings had called a short dry drive and that proved to be roughly eighty miles without water. Wagons mired in the salt crust; oxen, maddened by thirst, bolted into the night and were lost. James Reed alone abandoned wagons and lost most of his teams there. When the survivors finally rejoined the established California Trail down the Humboldt River, the cutoff had saved them no distance at all and cost them perhaps a month — the difference, in the Sierra Nevada, between an open pass and a closed one.

The last barrier was the granite wall of the Sierra Nevada and the pass above Truckee Lake — the same gap by which the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy company had taken the first wagons over the range in 1844. Two years earlier that crossing had been hard but survivable. The Donner Party reached the lake in the last days of October 1846, and found the pass already choked with early snow. They tried more than once to force the summit and were turned back by drifts. The mountains simply closed, and they were on the wrong side.

The Crossing

Tempers had already broken before the snow. On the Humboldt, on October 5, 1846, a tangle of wagons and whipped oxen ended with James Reed stabbing the teamster John Snyder to death in a fight; the company, instead of hanging him, banished him to ride ahead alone to California — a sentence that, by chance, put a capable man outside the trap and able to help organize rescue. Behind him the rest settled into the lake camps and the separate Alder Creek camp as the snow deepened past the cabin eaves. They butchered the last cattle, then boiled the hides, then the bones. Margret Reed reportedly made a kind of glue-soup of hide scrapings to keep her children alive.

In mid-December a party of seventeen — fifteen of whom kept going — set out on handmade snowshoes to cross the mountains for help, the group later called the "Forlorn Hope." Caught by a blizzard and lost in the high country for weeks, they too came to eat the bodies of their dead companions to survive; only seven, five of them women, staggered down to a settlement at the end of the ordeal. Their arrival, and Reed's and others' efforts in the Sacramento Valley, set the relief in motion. Between February and April 1847 four relief parties fought their way up into the snow and back, each carrying out a handful of the weakest, mostly children, through drifts and storms that killed rescuers and rescued alike.

At the camps the dying went on through that winter. With nothing left, some of the survivors ate the flesh of those who had already starved — an act the survivors themselves described plainly in later accounts, without melodrama, as the thing that had kept their children alive. Tamzene Donner refused to leave her dying husband George at Alder Creek and perished there. Lewis Keseberg, found alive amid grim evidence in the last camp, was the final survivor brought out in April 1847. Thirteen-year-old Virginia Reed, who lived, soon wrote to a cousin back east a letter that ended with the migration's hardest-won advice: "Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can."

What Decided It

Arrival & After

Of the roughly eighty-seven people bound up with the Donner Party, about forty-eight survived. The dead included George and Tamzene Donner, Jacob Donner, and many of the Murphy, Graves, Eddy, and Breen children's kin; whole families were thinned, and a few were nearly erased. The survivors scattered into a California that within two years would be transformed by the Gold Rush, and most of them rebuilt ordinary, often prosperous lives — the very future the journey had been meant to reach.

The Reed family came through largely intact: James Reed, banished on the trail, helped lead the rescue, and he and his wife Margret and their children, including Virginia and little Patty — who carried a tiny wooden doll hidden through the whole ordeal, now a famous museum relic — settled in San Jose, where Reed prospered. Virginia Reed's letter and the later reminiscences of survivors became core documents of the overland story. Their plain, unsparing voices are the reason we can speak about the winter at the lake with specifics rather than legend.

Donner Lake, Donner Pass, and Donner Memorial State Park now carry the name, and a monument stands with its base set at the depth the snow reached that winter — twenty-two feet. The lesson the survivors themselves drew was not that the wilderness was monstrous but that the trail rewarded the proven road and punished delay. Their catastrophe became, for every emigrant who came after, the cautionary story at the center of the westward migration: go the known way, and do not lose the season.

Lessons

References

• Donner Party Wikipedia
• The Donner Party (American Experience) PBS American Experience
• Donner Memorial State Park California State Parks
• Virginia Reed Murphy, 'Across the Plains in the Donner Party' National Park Service