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.
The Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841 holds a peculiar distinction: it was the first organized company of American emigrants to set out from the Missouri frontier specifically for California, and it succeeded mainly by luck, grit, and the willingness to throw away almost everything it had brought. They had no maps worth the name, no guide who had been where they were going, and only the vaguest idea of the geography between them and the Pacific. That they got through at all marked the rough, improvised opening of the California Trail.
The company grew out of “California fever” stirred up in Missouri by glowing reports of the Mexican province, much of it secondhand or exaggerated. A schoolteacher named John Bidwell helped organize a Western Emigration Society whose membership swelled and then collapsed when the rumors soured, leaving only a hard core willing to actually go. When they gathered at the rendezvous point in May 1841, perhaps sixty-some people were ready to start — and not one of them knew the way. Their salvation, early on, was that a party of Catholic missionaries under Father Pierre-Jean De Smet was traveling the same direction with a genuine guide, the veteran mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.
The two groups traveled together up the well-worn fur-trade corridor — the Platte, Fort Laramie, the Sweetwater, South Pass — as far as Soda Springs in present-day Idaho. There the company split. The missionaries and about half the emigrants turned northwest for the relative safety of Oregon. The remaining contingent, around thirty-some people, turned southwest toward a California they could not find on any reliable chart, leaving the guide behind. What followed was a months-long ordeal across the Great Basin: wagons abandoned one by one in the desert, oxen and mules eaten as the food ran out, a near-blind crossing of the Sierra Nevada on foot, and a final stumble down the western slope into the San Joaquin Valley.
They reached the ranch of John Marsh, near Mount Diablo, in November 1841 — starving, ragged, but alive, every one of the California-bound party having survived. Among them was Nancy Kelsey, the eighteen-year-old wife of Benjamin Kelsey, who made the entire crossing carrying her baby daughter and is often remembered as the first Euro-American woman to enter California overland. The party blazed no clean road and left no easy route behind them, but they had proved the thing could be done, and John Bidwell’s account of it became one of the founding documents of the California emigration.
Two years before the Donner Party left its wagons and its dead in the snow at a high Sierra lake, another company of emigrants stood at the foot of the same granite wall and faced the same weather. They were the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, about fifty men, women and children — ten families — who in the autumn of 1844 became the first emigrants ever to bring wagons all the way across the Sierra Nevada into California. Where the Donner story is remembered for horror, theirs deserves to be remembered for the opposite: a company that met every disaster the mountains could offer and did not lose a single soul.
In fact they arrived with more people than they started with, for two children were born along the way. They had left Council Bluffs on the Missouri with about fifty and reached Sutter’s Fort as fifty-two. The party was a study in plain competence and luck made out of good decisions. Their elected captain was Elisha Stephens, a taciturn blacksmith and former trapper; the company hired the seasoned mountain men Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock to help guide them. Among the families were the Murphys, a large Irish Catholic clan led by the widower Martin Murphy Sr. that alone made up some twenty-six of the company, and the household of Dr. John Townsend, a physician whose name, with Stephens’s and Murphy’s, attached itself to the party in later memory.
What sets their crossing apart is that they were inventing the route as they went. There was no California Trail in 1844 — only the Oregon road to Fort Hall, then a near-blank. From the Humboldt Sink, where earlier opinion said wagons must be abandoned, they followed the advice of a Northern Paiute leader the emigrants called Truckee and struck west up the river that still bears his name, into the highest, most broken country in the range. At the summit they did what conventional wisdom said could not be done: they unloaded and dismantled their wagons, hauled them up a granite cliff, and reassembled them on the far side.
Then winter caught them, as it would catch the Donners, and the party split and improvised its way to survival — some on horseback to Sutter’s Fort, some pushing wagons over the snow, three young men left to guard the goods at the lake, and one teenaged boy, Moses Schallenberger, left utterly alone for months and living to tell it. By February 1845 the whole company had come through. Their wagon road over the pass became, almost unchanged, the way the world would later pour into California in the Gold Rush.
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.
Early in January of 1849, in a winter of national hard times, Catherine Margaret Haun and her young husband sat in their home near Clinton, Iowa, and decided to go to California. They had been married only a few months and were, in her words, “financially involved in our business interests near Clinton, Iowa” — in debt — and the gold news from the West had made the whole country restless. They reasoned, as thousands did that year, that a season in the diggings might let them “pick up” gold enough to come home and pay off what they owed. By late April they had outfitted their wagons, gathered about twenty-five neighbors into a little band, and rolled out across Iowa toward Council Bluffs and the open plains.
What Catherine Haun left behind is one of the most-quoted women’s narratives of the Gold Rush year — but it is important to be clear about what it is. She did not keep a daily field journal in the dust of the trail. Instead, years later, she wrote the story of the crossing as a reminiscence, looking back on 1849 from the distance of an old woman’s chair. The account therefore has the shape and polish of a story told and retold, smoothed by memory and by the conventions of late-Victorian recollection. It is a memoir, not a contemporaneous record, and a careful reader weighs its vivid scenes accordingly. It survives today through Lillian Schlissel’s anthology Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, where it appears as “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849.”
Read with that caution, the narrative is extraordinarily rich. Haun set out to explain the whole experience rather than merely log the miles: the contagious “gold fever,” the crowded jumping-off settlement at Council Bluffs, the code of regulations her company drew up for “train government and mutual protection,” the daily division of labor between men and women, the graves that lined the road through the cholera summer of 1849, the Indigenous nations met along the Platte and across the Great Basin, and the small civilizing rituals that women carried west. “At that time the ‘gold fever’ was contagious,” she wrote, “and few, old or young, escaped the malady.”
Her party was, by the standards of that deadly year, fortunate: after nine months and some 2,400 miles they reached Sacramento on November 4, 1849, having suffered only a single death among their own number. Looking back, Haun could write the line that has become her epitaph for the whole experience: “Upon the whole I enjoyed the trip, spite of its hardships and dangers and the fear and dread that hung as a pall over every hour.” That double vision — adventure and dread held together — is exactly why her reminiscence endures as a window onto the year the trail belonged to an army of fortune-seekers, among whom a handful of wives quietly insisted on order, decency, and a sense of home.