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.
In the summer of 1856, two emigrant companies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set out for Utah not behind oxen but pulling their own belongings in two-wheeled handcarts — a cheaper way to gather the poor of Britain and Scandinavia to Zion. The fourth and fifth handcart companies of that season, led by James G. Willie and Edward Martin, left the Iowa City outfitting grounds far too late, delayed by the wait to build hundreds of carts from green, unseasoned lumber. By the time they pushed west from Florence, Nebraska Territory, in late August, it was already perilously late, and a continent of plains and mountains still lay between them and the Salt Lake Valley.
They were caught on the high plains of present-day central Wyoming by the first heavy snows of an early, brutal winter. Rations, calculated for an earlier and faster trip, ran out. The cold settled into people already worn down by hundreds of miles of pulling, and they began to die — of exposure, of exhaustion, of starvation — at a rate unmatched in the overland migration except by the Donner Party. When word of their plight reached Brigham Young in Salt Lake City during the church’s October general conference, he halted the proceedings and called for an immediate rescue, and relief wagons turned east into the storms to find them.
Of roughly 1,075 emigrants who set out from Iowa City in the two companies, more than 200 died — a modern accounting places about 67 deaths in the Willie company (a rate near 14 percent) and 135 to 150 in the Martin company (about 25 percent). It was the deadliest single episode of the handcart experiment and is often called the worst non-military disaster on the western emigrant trails.
The places where they suffered — Rocky Ridge, where the Willie company climbed through a night blizzard, and Martin’s Cove on the Sweetwater, where the Martin company sheltered for days — became sacred ground in Latter-day Saint memory. The story is remembered soberly within that tradition as an account of faith, endurance, and rescue, and by historians as a hard lesson in how a small chain of organizational failures, compounded by weather, could turn an ordinary migration into a mass grave.
Tabitha Moffatt Brown was sixty-six years old in 1846 — a widow of a Massachusetts clergyman, born in Brimfield in 1780 — when she set out from Missouri for Oregon with her grown son Orus Brown, her daughter Pherne and son-in-law Virgil Pringle and their children, and her aged brother-in-law, the sea captain John Brown, who was past seventy. What began as an ordinary family migration turned into one of the most harrowing crossings of the entire overland era when much of the party was persuaded to leave the established Oregon Trail for a new and untested ‘shortcut’ into the Willamette Valley from the south — the Applegate Trail.
The southern route, blazed that same year by Jesse and Lindsay Applegate and others hoping to give emigrants a safer alternative to the dangerous raft passage down the Columbia, proved in 1846 to be a brutal, ill-supplied ordeal. Promoters met the wagons near Fort Hall with promises of an easier road; instead the emigrants were swung far south through high desert and the Klamath and Rogue River country, lost most of their cattle, and reached the terrible Umpqua Canyon with winter coming on. Provisions ran out, wagons were abandoned, and people died of fatigue and starvation in the canyon — some, by Tabitha’s own account, reduced to eating the flesh of cattle lying dead by the wayside.
Tabitha Brown survived it, and her account — set down in an 1854 letter to her brother and sister-in-law back East, later printed as ‘A Brimfield Heroine’ — became one of the celebrated firsthand records of the Applegate ordeal precisely because of who wrote it: an old woman who endured what killed younger travelers and described it with dry humor, faith, and grit. She wrote that the party was ‘carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon’ and that she ‘rode through in three days at the risk of my life, on horseback, having lost my wagon and all that I had but the horse I was on.’
What followed was a second act as remarkable as the crossing. The family reached the Willamette settlements at the very end of 1846; one account places Tabitha in Salem on Christmas Day. Penniless, she found a single coin and turned it into the seed of a livelihood, then took in orphaned and needy children and helped found a school — the Tualatin Academy and Orphan Asylum — that grew into Pacific University. For that work Oregon honors her as the ‘Mother of Oregon,’ and her trail letter remains a touchstone of pioneer endurance in old age.
In the autumn of 1849 a long, dust-caked wagon train gathered near Salt Lake City, arriving too late in the season to risk the snowbound Sierra Nevada. They hired Captain Jefferson Hunt, a Mormon who had already walked the Old Spanish Trail, to lead them south and west toward Los Angeles — a longer road, but one that would not bury them in the high passes. For a while the plan held. Then a rider caught up to the train carrying a crude map that promised a shortcut straight west across the mountains, a line that would supposedly cut weeks off the journey. The pull of the gold diggings did the rest. Roughly a hundred wagons broke away from Hunt to chase the cutoff.
Most of the deserters soon lost their nerve at the rim of an impassable canyon and straggled back to the safer road. But several knots of families, along with a restless band of young men who called themselves the Jayhawkers, pressed on into country no emigrant wagon had ever crossed. They were not, as the legend sometimes implies, the first people to lay eyes on this ground. They were walking into the homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone, who had lived in and around the valley for centuries, moving with the seasons between the cool pinyon-pine heights and the mesquite groves of the valley floor, and who knew exactly where the springs were. The emigrants, lost and parched, did not.
By late December 1849 the Bennett and Arcan families — led by Asabel Bennett and John Arcan, traveling with their wives, small children, and a handful of single men including the young teamster William Lewis Manly — found themselves stalled on the floor of a salt-crusted basin walled in by mountains on every side. They could find no wagon route out. Their oxen were wasting to bone and hide. Their food was nearly gone. What followed became one of the most remarkable survival stories of the overland migration, and it ended, against every expectation, with nearly everyone alive.
The valley claimed only one confirmed life among the Bennett-Arcan party during the weeks they were trapped. But the ordeal — the aimless wandering, the thirst, the slow slaughter of the work animals for meat, and the roughly 300-mile walk two men made to bring back rescue — branded the place forever. When the last survivors finally climbed out through the western mountains, one of them looked back at the basin that had nearly swallowed them and, in the telling that Manly later set down, gave it the name it has carried ever since.
In the late summer of 1845 a great column of emigrant wagons reached the Malheur country of what is now eastern Oregon, weary and worried about the hard miles still ahead. The standard route from there meant crossing the rugged Blue Mountains and then running the deadly rapids of the Columbia River or paying dearly to be portaged around them — a stretch that had already cost lives and money. So when the mountain man Stephen Hall Meek rode up offering to guide them on a shortcut straight across the central Oregon high desert to the Willamette Valley, for a few dollars a wagon, hundreds of families listened.
Meek had trapped through parts of the interior and spoke with the easy confidence of a man who knew the way. He did not. Somewhere on the order of 150 to 200 wagons, carrying perhaps a thousand or more people, followed him off the established trail and into a country of sagebrush plains, dry lake beds, alkaline seeps, and jagged rimrock with no clear path through it. The shortcut became a trap. The train wandered for weeks, unable to find reliable water, the oxen failing, the children sickening, and the guide increasingly unable to say where they were.
What killed people was not one catastrophe but a slow accumulation: bad water, exhaustion, and above all “camp fever” — almost certainly typhoid spread by contaminated water in a weakened, crowded company. By the time the survivors finally stumbled out toward The Dalles on the Columbia, dozens were dead, buried in shallow graves scattered across the desert that the emigrants would never be able to find again. Stephen Meek, blamed for it all, narrowly escaped being hanged by the very people he had led astray.
Out of the ordeal grew one of the West’s most enduring legends: the Blue Bucket Mine. Children of the lost train were said to have picked up shiny yellow pebbles in a dry creek bed and carried them off in a blue bucket — pebbles that, after the California gold strike a few years later, people decided must have been gold. Prospectors searched for the spot for generations and never found it. It is almost certainly more legend than fact, but it gave a grim chapter a glint of lost treasure, and it has never quite let go.