11 Facts You Didn’t Know About the Donner Party

Conditions took a grim and immediate turn. Once they ate the few remaining oxen and horses, the snowbound travelers relied on mice, tree bark, pine cones, and strips of leather for food. They also boiled ox hides to make a foul smelling, glue-like substance.

In mid-December, a group of 15 people that would later be known as the “Forlorn Hope” left the Truckee Lake camp to find help. Weak with hunger and carrying few provisions, they were caught in the open by a blizzard. They wandered lost and confused in the mountains for more than a month. Eight members of the troop died, but two men and five women eventually made it to a small farming community on the Bear River.

It took four rescue attempts to bring the last surviving member of the Donner Party to safety in April 1847. Unfortunately, nearly half of the emigrants had perished during one of the most brutal winters on record. Many of those who lived admitted that some members of the party had to resort to eating the dead, and the gruesome specter of cannibalism has hung over the episode ever since. But this morbid detail has obscured some of the most intriguing facts about this remarkable chapter in American history.

As a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln often helped his friend James F. Reed in business matters. The two had been messmates during the Blackhawk War, and Lincoln counseled Reed through bankruptcy proceedings shortly before the latter left for California. According to one historian, Lincoln considered joining the Donner Party, but his wife Mary Todd was strongly opposed to the idea. American history might look very different if the future president and his family had made the ill-fated voyage.

Most historians agree that the Donner Party’s fatal mistake was taking the Hastings Cutoff. It put them almost a month behind schedule and severely depleted their resources before the critical last stage of their journey. But the emigrants might have returned to the main trail if they’d received a letter left for them at the southwestern Wyoming trading post of mountain man Jim Bridger.

The letter was written by journalist Edwin Bryant and addressed to James F. Reed. It warned that the Hastings Cutoff was too rough for the Donner Party’s wagons. But as the trading post stood to profit enormously if the new route proved popular, Reed never received the letter. Both Reed and Bryant later suspected that Bridger had concealed it in order to improve his business prospects.

One: Tensions were running high well before the Donner Party was trapped. Around the time they rejoined the California Trail near modern-day Elko, Nevada, a fight broke out between two teamsters over tangled wagons. When James F. Reed intervened, he was whipped for his efforts. He pulled a knife in self-defense, killing his attacker, John Snyder.

Two: Shortly afterwards, a German immigrant named Karl Wolfinger stopped to cache one of his wagons and never rejoined the wagon train. Two men who went with him claimed that he had been killed by Paiute raiders. Months later, as one of the men was starving to death, he confessed to murdering Wolfinger for his gold.

Three and Four: In December 1846, the members of the Forlorn Hope were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive their brutal ordeal. First, they consumed the flesh of five emigrants who had died from starvation and exposure. However, the group had joined with two Miwok men who had refused to eat the dead party members. Still starving, the Forlorn Hope group shot and killed the two outsiders before eating their bodies.

Five: In April 1847, Lewis Keseberg was the last survivor to be rescued. In his cabin he had pistols, jewelry, and gold belonging to George Donner. He also had a pot of human flesh.

Keseberg claimed that George’s wife, Tamsen, had given him the valuables for safekeeping shortly before she died. However, his rescuers accused him of murder and nearly lynched him. For the rest of his life, a cloud of suspicion hung over Keseberg. Rumors circulated that he preferred human flesh to beef, and that he had once claimed that Tamsen Donner’s liver was the “sweetest morsel” he’d ever tasted. 

After James Reed killed a man in self-defense, he was banished from the wagon train. Forced to leave his wife and four children behind, he rode ahead on horseback. He made it down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in late October and organized a party to bring food and supplies to the emigrants. Unfortunately, he was turned back by deep snow. 

At this point, most of the able-bodied men in Alta California were caught up in the Mexican-American War. Reed traveled to San Jose to try to raise another rescue party, but volunteers were hard to find. Beyond that, communication lines were down and roads throughout the region were blocked. It wasn’t until February 1847 that he was able to round up enough men and provisions to head back into the mountains. 

One of the saddest facts of the Donner Party's story is that more than half of the 81 people trapped in the camps were younger than 18 years old. Six of them were infants. Mothers, fathers, and older siblings were forced to make terrible choices to protect their youngest family members.

In the most famous case, Margaret Reed made the agonizing decision to leave behind two of her four children when they proved too weak to make it down the mountain with the first rescue team. Eight-year-old Patty said, “Well, mother, if you never see me again, do the best you can.”

Thankfully, the second relief effort, led by Patty’s father James Reed, arrived shortly thereafter. All four Reed children were lucky enough to survive. The doll that Patty brought with her to California is currently on display at the Emigrant Trail Museum at Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee.

John Stark was a stout and sturdy settler from California who went along with the third relief party in the March of 1847. Accompanied by two other rescuers, he found a small group of emigrants who had been left behind in the mountains by the last relief effort. Two of these emigrants were adults, while the other nine had been children.

While his fellow rescuers each grabbed a single child, Stark wasn’t going to leave anyone behind again. As the children were too weak to walk, Stark would haul up two children in his arms and trek a few yards before returning for the next pair. He travelled back and forth again and again under the weight of multiple children and his already heavy provisions. He did this heroic and exhausting task until he led the group all the way back to safety.

Of the 35 members of the Donner Party who perished in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 25 were male and 10 were female. The discrepancy can be attributed to numerous factors. First of all, women generally have higher levels of stored body fat and lower metabolism rates. The men were also in a weakened physical condition after performing backbreaking labor during the trek along the Hastings Cutoff.

It should also be noted that the mothers and wives of the Donner Party fought ferociously to protect their families. In one particular act of incredible sacrifice, George Donner’s wife Tamsen sent her children off with rescuers while she refused to leave her dying husband’s side.

The Donner Party was made up of 12 families and 21 individuals. Only six of the solo travelers—many of whom worked for the families—are known to have survived the frozen pass. Two families escaped the adventure fully unscathed, while the other 10 lost a combined 23 loved ones. Although that number is much higher, only 25% of the members who were a part of a family on the trail were lost, while over 70% of those on their own were killed by cold, starvation, or violence.

Lansford Hastings was born in Ohio in 1819 to a comfortable family. Before starting his career as a lawyer, the ambitious Hastings decided to move across the country to Oregon in 1842, taking the overland route that the Donner Party ought to have taken four years later. Shortly after, Hastings relocated to California, which was then largely Mexican territory. 

Hastings saw many opportunities in the territory if it became part of the United States and wrote The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California to encourage westward expansion there. He devised the Hastings Cutoff, which looked good on paper, to further entice settlers, despite never having actually traveled it himself. 

Hastings’ ambitiousness and carelessness would prove disastrous for the Donner Party, though it didn’t seem to dissuade him from future colonial ambitions. Hastings would go on to serve as a captain in the Mexican-American War and a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, during which he tried to convince Jefferson Davis to seize—you guessed it—California from the Union. He died of yellow fever while trying to colonize Brazil for ex-Confederate soldiers. 

If only it was there when the Donner Party was trying to cross the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the story might have ended differently. Donner Pass Road now crosses the same mountain pass where the group lost their lives. There’s also the nearby Highway I-80, completed in 1964, which runs from Northeastern New Jersey to San Francisco, California. It replaced historic U.S. Route 40, which once ran directly through steep terrain of the original Donner Pass two miles to the south of the current I-80 route. 

Don’t let the presence of a highway deceive you, though: the journey across the Sierra Nevada can still be treacherous. Donner Pass is closed during the winter. I-80 regularly receives snowfall at higher elevations in every season except summer, and the California Department of Transportation sometimes requires vehicles to take precautions like snow tires and other traction devices during and after snowstorms, frequently setting up checkpoints to enforce these restrictions. 

The tale of the Donner Party has become so infamous that few stop to think about what happened to the survivors afterward. Despite the disastrous start to their lives in California, because they arrived before the 1848 Gold Rush, many went on to become wealthy and well-established Californians whose legacies are still scattered across the state today. 

The Reed family, for example, one of two families to survive the ordeal intact, eventually settled in San Jose in 1847, where James ran a fruit farm. The family’s wealth exploded when James struck gold in Placerville in 1848. Reed, Margaret, Carrie, Keyes, Martha, Patterson, and Lewis streets in San Jose are all named after members of the Reed family. 

Another member of the party, William Murphy, went on to study law at the University of Missouri and was admitted to the bar in 1863. He served as district attorney of Marysville, California, named after his sister Mary, who was thirteen when the Donner tragedy unfolded. Like many of the Donner Party women left without a patriarch, and therefore a source of income, she married just months after her rescue. After escaping that initial abusive marriage, she went on to marry a French immigrant who struck gold and became a prominent landowner, eventually erecting and naming Marysville for her. 

Even the villain of the Donner Party, Lewis Keseberg, founded Sacramento’s first brewery, introducing lager to California. 

Featured photo of an encampment of tents and covered wagons on the Humboldt River in Nevada: Wikimedia Commons