Doomed to Fail - Ep 196: Table for 87? - The Donner Party

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Consider, of course, the definition of 'doomed.' In 1846, several families left the Midwest in pursuit of the California Dream. Eventually, George Donner would be named their leader, and they would follow the Hastings Cutoff for a quick shortcut west. The rest is history. Of the 87 travelers, 48 will survive, mostly women & children. All will encounter incredible hunger, fear, and destitution before they reach California. Join us as we tell the stories of these families who risked everything for a better life. (There is also cannibalism, don't worry.)  The Indifferent Stars Above Daniel James Brownhttps://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-indifferent-stars-above-the-harrowing-saga-of-a-donner-party-bride_daniel-james-brown/352874/item/10276420/?Last Podcast on the Lefthttps://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-331-the-donner-party-part-i-salt-of-the-earth/id437299706?i=1000419328989petticoatsandpistols.comwestfield-chorustrust.orgdonnerpartydiary.com Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Taylor, we are recording, and I wanted to wish you while we're recording a Happy Mother's Day. You. How much is it going? It is good. I woke up, and I was like, okay, I'm not getting up until they come and get me. And then they brought me a very nice breakfast, and it was very fun.

Was it like the Beethoven breakfast where there was a bunch of shell, eggs of, egg shells inside of it? No, they did a really good job. It was very delicious. And then, yeah, Biles definitely, like, jumped on the bed and, like, tried to move it around. And then everybody had eaten the room and then it was the whole thing, but it was very cute. Well, the Pilemon Mom morning. Yeah. Very cool.

Very cool. Well, hope it's going to be a good one for the rest of the evening. Thank you. We can go in and dive in if you want to introduce us. Let's do it. Hi, everyone. Happy Mother's Day. welcome to doomed to fail we bring you history's most notorious disasters and greatest failures twice a week

i'm taylor joined by farce and we are going to be covering something fun probably today at least on my side i don't know if you're just going to be more doomsy or funsy it's doomsy but it's funsy who's going first today i believe that it is you ah okay well then i think you did i think you did it doesn't matter but i do think that last week we've re-released because we were tired fine we deserve it yeah and let's see oh no i did the i guess i can go first i should go first cool is that far away yeah of course okay um because i did the i did james murray and dr minor the last that's right yep yep you're right um cool okay so mine is loading it is an oldie but goody and this one was suggested by our friend justin who we don't know in real life but who

had emailed about also not necessarily wanting a dog so justin i see you i hear you um and justin asked if we could cover the donor party and i said hell yeah we can that is a very fun topic yes and very very doomed so both the most doomed yeah so obviously we listened to the last podcast on the left series. I think it's two episodes. It's good. And I reread because I read the book that they referenced after they did their show because they really couldn't recommend it more by David, Daniel, I'm sorry, Daniel James Brown

called The Indifferent Stars Above, which is like a full account of the whole thing. So pick that up. That is, if you ever want to get into the last podcast, I would say the Donner Party episodes are probably their best episode. That's the one I listened to the most. Yeah, I liked it a lot. Oh, good. So, well, you know, you'll know what's going on. Yep.

So we are on the Oregon Trail, which kids still do. Florence was doing Oregon Trail shit like yesterday in school. And I remember doing the Oregon Trail on paper because, I don't know, it was the early 90s, but I think it was, like, available on the computer. But we also had a way to play it on paper. Do you remember that? No, we never did paper. That was part of our, when we were in elementary school, we had computer lab.

And that was part of our learning how computers work, which is like, kind of bad educating kids. I mean, they didn't really too much. I don't know. Okay, fair enough. That was probably the most you could do with the computer at that time. Yeah.

I remember, like, you had to work on your manifest and mine. I was just like adding twine to it because twine didn't weigh anything. Yeah, it was logical. But you could be like, should I bring a piano? I don't know.

So I guess for anyone not in America, every American child plays an Oregon Trail where you have to get your family across the mountains to Oregon or California safely and they like throw all the stuff. stuff at you like starvation bears no water snow it is it is deceptively fun yeah yeah it is a it is a right of passage for the american child and it is fun which if they were to come out with like a new one for like xbox i would totally do it i wonder if they i wonder if they have we just don't know yeah that's

very very likely anyway um we are in 1846 and we are to start off in illinois but let me give you some context based on some of the other topics that we've covered. So in 1801, people started to go on honeymoons in Niagara Falls. So this is like the first time people started having honeymoons. And I forgot about this, but the first person to go on a honeymoon in Niagara Falls was Theodosia Burr, who's Erin Burr's daughter. I always think that's interesting. And we'll talk about honeymoon in a second. That's why I bring it up. The Alamo fell in 1836. The opium Wars started in 1839. The terror and the Arabis, the ships that set off the, in the Arctic, started off in 1845. The long walk of the Navajo by Kit Carson will be in 1864. And James Murray will start working on the dictionary in 1870. That was my last one. So kind of in the middle of all this, but there's stuff happening obviously all over the world. We've talked about before. So the American people want to go west for adventure, for opportunity. Do you remember, this is like a little bit before. this, but do you remember the movie far and away with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?

Nope. So it's like, I remember watching it in school and German class for absolutely no reason because it's about Irish immigrants, but they are like Irish immigrants in New York. This is a little bit later. I think it's like, it's supposed to be like 1870-ish, but they go to Oklahoma to get land. And the government is like, there's all this land. You can like pick a plot and they have like a run for the land where you literally have like your guys on a horse and he's going to run and try to like.

get the stake to get the land. So it was like, when you claim to stake or a stake to claim, you literally like put your stake in the claim of lands that this is mine. And fun fact, that is the reason why the Oklahoma University or University of Oklahoma called OAU, their team is called the Sooners because it was named after a bunch of settlers who went before the shock clock was announced to when you can go. Exactly. That's what happens in far and away as well.

So there's like that happening. People are excited to like, you know, expand, expand their living space. of the people that we oh also like land isn't like available people live there but you know right you know we know of the people we meet 87 people of a donor party signed up to go together be able get stuck the sierra nevadas like the beer on Truckee Lake which is now called Donner Lake yep so I have a joke that is like a family inside joke so my brother went to UNR University of Nevada Reno which is right where this is and his him and his friends would go tubing on the river and one time like they were tubing all day long and they had like a cooler beer and they were like laying on these things and having a great time and his friend Leah like kind of looked up and was like where where are we and this like woman was like on a canoe going by and she goes you're on the trucky river and so we say that all the time because it's so funny because they're like of course they're on the river they knew that but she was like

where on the river are we anyway so I also go that no trucky river so of the 87 people 48 survived and mostly women survived, which is a note maybe because women need less calories to survive. But this is also in like a turning point in humanity where women don't die all the time during childbirth. So like now statistically women live longer than men due to like lifestyle usually, you know, kind of things. But before like the 18, mid-1800s, you know, women died all the time. They also live longer than men because y'all get to stay on the life rafts. We've been over this.

It doesn't happen often enough for that to be statistically relevant. It does not. No. No. So what we need to get there is it on the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri. And there is a well-laid path, and then there's the Hastings cutoff, which is new, which we'll get to. But that's what's going to happen. So that's going to happen, but I'll tell you how we get there.

so first let's meet Lansford Hastings he is not great he was born in 1890 in Ohio and he wants to be emperor of California which is not a job but he would like to have it if it worked to become available yeah that's all coming back to me yeah so he is a man who wants people to come to California he wants to lead people into California he wants to be an explorer all of these things so he writes a book called the emigrants guide to Oregon in California and in it he writes quote, the most direct path would be leave the Oregon route about 200 miles east of Fort Hall, then sparing west-southwest to the Salt Lake, and thence continuing down to the Bay

of San Francisco, end quote, which is not true because it's almost impossible to do that. There's huge mountains, huge cliffs, and then a huge salt desert, and Hastings had never done it. He had told people you could do it, but he was like making it up. He had never done it. Okay. One thing I'll call out is this is still. like a modern problem and I'm going to go on a little bit of a soapbox here because every time I go to this one restaurant in Austin there's a very obvious way to get there and for some reason

if I put it in Google Maps it routes me into these neighborhoods where then I have to cross the busiest intersection that's like six lanes of traffic whereas I could have just take in like a protected left at a red light do you remember when you had an Uber driver that wouldn't take left that person was crazy okay quick story so for for anybody I was in LA and at the time, I guess it was my fiance at the time, we called an Uber tickets to work. And then we get in the car

and the person was like, we're like, oh, just go up here and take a left because I was like, just drop her off at her place and then take me to work. And we get to this intersection, Hollywood Boulevard, a super busy intersection. And the person says, I don't take lefts. I don't take left turns.

They're like, oh, this is going to be crazy. And they just accelerated it blindly into the intersection and just popped the left and then and then we got to like her place and i was like we're done thank you i'm gonna get out i'm also i'll walk from here that's so funny and i never try to take anybody's livelihood away but that person i made a point to not stop until i got a response from uber like you have to yeah no it's not safe that's not safe that's not safe yeah oh my god so funny but yes yes there's often there are many routes to get places but sometimes a shortcut or like a weird one

it's not great. So the Donner Party, especially James Reed, who will meet, really believed this. They believed Hastings. And also, again, when Hastings says California, California is Mexico. And so they are illegal immigrants into Mexico walking over the Sierra Nevada's. So is that true? I thought it was, I thought it was native land. I don't think it was Mexico. It is Mexico. California is going to become a republic in the middle of this. Okay, okay. Yeah. So, and the Mexican-American War is going to be like at the end of this saga slash going to go on for another however many years after this.

Anyway, so Hastings, oh, to do this, to get people to come to California and like be a thing, he wanted to like get a bunch of land in California. He killed a bunch of Native Americans. He's just not a good guy. Later, Hastings is going to be a colonel in the Confederate Army. And he's so mad that they lose that he tries. that he tries to do a thing, which is a whole thing that I did not even read into, where they tried to get Confederate families to leave the South and go to Brazil

and start colonies in Brazil. And so he writes, The Emigrants Guide to Brazil in 1867. And he's ready to like do that again. But he dies of yellow fever in the Virgin Islands before he gets there. So that's Lanceford Hastings. Kind of a charlatan. So he,

you said again, he never actually did the path. No, he's going to, try to do it later, but he tries to do it much after his book has already been published. People have been reading it, like, trying to do it, you know? Yeah, yeah, got it. So our party, the Donner Party themselves are a bunch of Americans who've been, like, in America, I guess for like 200 years.

Some of them have, like, we're in, like, they're, I was I going to say? They're children of the revolution. Like, their dads were in the American Revolution. And there are also some German immigrants And then a couple of native folks who are joining as well So they're going to eventually be called the Donner Party But a lot of it starts with a man named James Reed So let's start with the Reed family

And I'm going to read you a lot of names But I just wanted to bring it out now That like also most of the people on this trip are kids Yeah, yeah You know, literal infants in some cases Which is fucking terrible If I recall correctly, this family is cursed Yes

Well actually none of the reads die It's not great for them That's right. But the entire Reed family makes it. So James Fraser Reed, he's only 45. He's a wealthy businessman from Illinois. And in everything that I was reading would make you think he was like a gnarled 65-year-old man. But he's 45.

But he is, he has like lived a pretty interesting life. He was in the Black Hawk Wars and the same battalion as Abraham Lincoln, which was a war led by a person named Black Hawk, who was a leader of the South Indians, which also I want to learn more about as well. And then his wife, Margaret, was 32. They had, I'm going to again, read a bunch of names, but Virginia, Martha, James, and Thomas were their kids. Also, Margaret's mother, Sarah Keyes came. She was 70. And there's also a bunch of people who are, like, hired help. They're like servants, their tradesmen.

They're people who are coming to, like, help with the trip. So there's Eliza, Bayliss, Milt, Walter, James, and Hiram, all with them. So another strong indicator of survival in situations. like this so like I imagine even like in the Titanic this would also be something that would be a thing is you're more likely to survive if you're in a family rather than in a single man so a lot of the single men they you know when it came down to it like if I have a little bit of food like I'm going to feed my family first you know and look out for your family first so the single men they banded together in some cases but in some cases they were like really really alone in this whole

thing. So the Donner family, which is George and Jacob Donner, their brothers. George is 60. He's a farmer from Illinois. He is elected the leader in a little bit. His wife's name is Tamzin. She's 45 years old. It's a second marriage. So he has Elisa and Leanna from his first marriage. And they have three other kids, Francis, Georgia, and Eliza. Then Jacob Donner, the brother is 56. He's with his wife Elizabeth and their kids, Solomon, William, George, Mary, Isaac, Samuel, and Lewis. Lewis is only three. So, like, right now, all the youngest kids are three, but there's even kids are younger than this. But Donner's employees are Noah, Samuel, Jean-Baptiste Trudeau, and Luke Halloran.

So just people who are with them. Luke Halloran actually was, like, on his own separate trip, and he got tuberculosis, and they picked him up and took him just to be nice. So that was nice of them. There's the Breen family, Patrick Breen, and his wife, Peggy. Their kids are John Edward, Patrick Simon, James. James Peter and Isabella, who was only one. When they start, she's 11 months old.

And then they have a friend named Patrick Dolan. And then also there's a man named James Clyman, who is there as well. Climmon, to note, had seen George Washington in person, which I think is fun. Let's say. Yeah. There's a Graves family, Franklin, his wife, Elizabeth, their kids, Sarah. Sarah is the daughter of Franklin and Elizabeth. She's 22.

she was newly married to a guy named Jay and she's the subject of the book The Indifferent Stars Above. He tries to follow her actual journey and like figure out like what happened to her afterwards. But basically her backstory and everyone's backstory is like they wanted a different life. They wanted more space. They wanted to get out of like where they were in Illinois. They were really sick in Illinois. They had something called the Illinois

shakes, which is probably just malaria from mosquitoes, but everybody was sick. They just wanted like something else. But they've already been through a lot. lot living there. I mentioned the honeymoon earlier because this is like kind of her. M.J.'s honeymoon. We get to go on a trip with their family, which is what a honeymoon was for a very long time. It was like a party, a trip here to go on to be able to see your family that couldn't make it to the wedding. So it was like, you know, an adventure and they're excited. With them, the other siblings are Mary, William, Eleanor, Levina, Nancy, Jonathan, Franklin, and Elizabeth, who's also just one year's old. And then another single,

man that joins them is John Snyder. He's 25. He joins them to be a teamster. And I'll talk about him later, but John Snyder is the hot guy. So there's like one hot guy on this trip, and it's John Snyder. I can believe it.

Every group has one. Yeah. There is the Murphy family. There's poor, poor Lavinia, whose fate is also, like everyone, is very terrible, but she's 37 years old. When people find her at the end of this, they think she's like in her 50s because she's just like she's a skeleton she looks terrible she does not get out

she looks awful um their kids are john mary lemuel william simon and then they have a a daughter sarah who has her husband and then another daughter harriet who also has her kids um who are naomi and katherine who's also one so so many people um are there the eddie family is william eddie his wife eleanor are their two kids james and margaret three and one in the Keseberg family, they're German immigrants. There is Lewis, Elizabeth, Julianne, another Lewis, an infant. And then they have two people named Charles Berger. And then like an old, an elderly Belgian man just named HardCoop, who sounds fun, but he's seen a bunch. And then there's the Wolfinger Party, the McCutcheon family, and then some more single men. So just a bunch of families, a handful of single men, but like mostly kids on this. So. There's also some people who are going to go, like, they're not always together from the very beginning. They, like, add new wagons, people leave, all those things. There's two men only at the very end named Lewis and Salvador.

They were two Miwok Native Americans, and they joined to try to guide them out at one point, so they'll be there later. But, so that's everybody. And then here are the plans. So first, you have to pack your wagon with everything that you own. Have you ever seen a covered wagon to get the size in your head? Yeah, I can visualize it Because it was bigger I saw one at a museum in San Bernardino

And it was a lot bigger Than I thought it was going to be They're very tall They're much tall than I thought that would be Yeah So like the vision I had Before I saw a real one Was smaller than they actually are

So they're pretty big And they're heavy So it's good and bad Because you can take your stuff But also like you have to go over a river So there's times They're like having a weak delay Because they have to build a bridge

And bring like 30 wagons over a river That like no one's built a bridge on before So that takes forever and they're pulled by, like, oxen, and it goes really, really slowly. But let's pretend that we're in a family of five, and we need stuff for four to six months. We don't know how long it's going to take. We're going to be on this walk for four to six months. And you're not riding in the wagon.

You're walking next to the wagon. Oh, yeah. By the way. So typical wagon supplies, you would bring your wagon, obviously, and your animals. So you have your wagons, like 10 to 12 feet long, four to six feet wide. There's a cover. It can carry like 2,000 to 2,500 pounds of stuff. Again, most of them were pulled by oxen. They were slower than horses, but, like, could take more.

So that's why you would use an ox rather than a horse. And also you'd bring, like, cows and horses. You'd also bring food. So per adult, you would need, like, almost 200 pounds of flour, 20 pounds of cornmeal, 150 pounds of bacon, 40 pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of coffee. And the coffee was not, like, ground. there were like green coffee beans and you had to like roast them and then make yourself coffee

and then so like all this food you which is like I mean imagine heavy and also takes up a lot of space you know plus you have to like make stuff out of it after that there's a lot of work so they had cows that could get milk from their cows

they could also put the milk from the cows in a barrel and have it just in the wagon and it would turn itself into butter from all the bumping up and down which is nice so there's that you also like could hunt probably but in some places you weren't going to be able to and you had to like plan for that right as long as you could hunt you would you would have clothes but only like two changes of clothes per person for a six month walk it's going to get gross yeah real fast um you would have some soap um 25 pounds of soap would be like the suggestion for your family which seems like a lot of soap but it's for you it's for the clothes um you'd also have to like bring tools and stuff for starting your life. So you bring farming tools because you were going to start a farm in California. So you had to like bring all that with you.

You would have like a lot of some pots and pans that were pretty heavy. Like a Dutch oven, I have a Dutch oven that's heavy. But you could like, you know, use that to bake bread to make stews. You also need stuff to like start a fire. You need water. So whenever you are near clean water,

you put it in a barrel and save it. But like that water is going to go bad and be full grossness anyway. And it's going to be happy. Yeah. Very heavy. And then you also might bring some stuff that's like, you'd bring your Bible, you'd bring candles, you'd bring toys for the kids, maybe like a clock. I do remember in my Oregon Trail manifest, they were like, do you want to bring your piano?

That's ridiculous. No. The answer is obviously. But I get it. In some cases, people would like just have to abandon stuff on the side of the road as their oxen got more tired. And then sometimes they would bury it, hoping to come back and get it later, things like that. But a lot of, most of the stuff that people brought didn't make it all the way there.

especially for the daughter party but also for a lot of people they'd get rid of stuff so the reeds though somehow had a two-story wagon which like sounds insane so they made it so that like the inside was like a box you entered it through the middle and then the second story was where you would like sit and then there would be there are beds in the second story as well it feels like it'll be oh like a pain for that oxen to pull stuff like something like that exactly that's not going to last forever but like it also seems like very luxurious and nice to be able to have that um so okay you have your stuff we have our people and the thing to remember is that you need to leave early like you need to leave by april first to be able to get up mountains before there's too much snow and that's on like

the regular Oregon trail that everybody knows about so you know stuff is going to happen it's going to delay you anyway so like you need to plan for delays to happen So the initial group leaves Springfield, Illinois on April 11th, and they start walking west. On the 23rd, John Snyder joins. He's handsome and carefree. Again, he's the hot guy, so he's fun to have around. He dances. It's cute.

He's like full of life. You know, he's there. And again, they're like meeting people and leaving people along the way. Like last podcast described it as like an accordion. So you're not like in a line. You know, like one family might go ahead a couple hours, and you come up together, then you circle up your wagons, then you move on for the next day.

So you're not always together. Downers and the reeds leave Independence, Missouri, and May 12th, and they meet others on the road. They have a four-day delay because Sarah Keys, who's 70 years old dies, and like, that's expected. But they have to bury her and all that. So I have a whole bunch of cultural notes, and the first one is about death.

So this is when you still care for your dead bodies. So the reason it takes four days to have Sarah Keys' funeral is because they have a funeral for her. They like get a box and wash her body and put her in nice clothes and bury her and mourn for a day and like do all these things. So right now in America especially it's called the death industry and it's like a billion dollar industry obviously. So it costs a lot of money to die to have a funeral, to do it a funeral parlor to get a coffin, to get a plot. all those things are expensive. And the death industry came out of the Civil War because before the Civil War, you would do it by yourselves.

So if you died, you know, your family would, you know, wash your body, dress your body, you'd sit in the living room for a couple of days to make sure you were really dead. If they had ice, they'd put ice underneath you, hoping for the best, and then they would bury you in the backyard. I'm glad the death industry exists. Well, I don't love it. I mean, I'd rather be buried in.

backyard and then like embalmed and buried in like a concrete box. I don't want my family washing my body. Well, I mean, it's like I also read I think I said this before, but I've read a book called Smoke Is In Your Eyes by Caitlin Dottie, the woman who is a mortician. And it like helped people understand death more if you were like near it, you know? Anyway, I guess. I don't want to do any of these things. I don't want to be around it. But after the Civil War, during Civil War, you wanted to like, you know, see your dead, but they were far away. So that's when they started embalming people, and it started to be a job to move dead bodies around. So that started to be like what we have now.

Also on the road, kids are going to die a lot. There's a lot of kids die anyway, but there's all sorts of ways that kids died on the Oregon Trail. They drowned crossing the river. They just walked away into the, and we're never found again because you can get lost so easily in like their reeds or in the woods. Sometimes they were captured by native tribes. They got bit by rattlesnakes. They got struck by lightning. They got kicked by horses.

get hit by hail guns would just go off all the time because it's not like a there's a safety on them so that could happen they had food poisoning um 19 or 1846 this year is not the year if there's cholera on the trail but that will happen it'll be a year when like have people die of cholera also if your husband dies you're fucked like you need to have a man do take care of you and your family if you don't have one other families will like try to help you but essentially you have to try to manage it all by yourself. And sometimes they would just leave single women and their kids behind because they couldn't do it anymore.

Because you need someone to help with the big things. There's a woman that was mentioned in the book who's not part of the Donner Party, but a woman named Polly Owen was left her dead with her kids. And someone picked her up and took her. And then later she went on to get married and have four sets of twins. That's just fun. But like, how scary? They just leave you in the middle of the.

nothing. Also being a woman is terrible, lots of gross things. Like, you know, you try not to get pregnant as best as you can, but like part of the reason to do that is like weird duches and like things and like weird sponges and everything smells terrible and you always have a yeast infection, like almost always. And then if you got pregnant, they didn't think, they didn't like acknowledge her pregnancy until the quickening, which is when you feel the baby, which is like three months in. So before that, if they stopped getting their period and thought that maybe they were pregnant, they would do things like ride a horse and try to get rid of it, try to like unblock their period, you know, but like they knew they were pregnant. But like, you know, so they would like

take poisons and like fun things like nightshade and foxglove that sounds like which would give you to have an abortion. Right. So all that's terrible. And then also everyone is annoying because you're on this long trip with them. It does sound kind of exhaust. I just got a family trip and as much as I had fun with it I was like I want to be alone Yeah no and you got to be alone And you had food

And you don't have to walk in the entire time There's a podcast I've listened to before called The History of the Crusades And it's been around for a long time It's on episode 329 But I remember in some of the beginning episodes Talking about like the first Crusades Like even then

The kids on the road to Jerusalem Were like, are we there yet? I'm sure And that was you know Thousands of years ago So that's just a tale is old as time Kids are going to be annoying Everyone's going to be mad at each other

some people aren't fighting and that's the teens that's because they're probably going to marry each other which is true like if you're in a wagon train and you're going to a blank slate you don't know what you're going to see when you get there and there's like two people your age on the wagon train you're going to find someone and be like I'm probably going to marry them yeah yeah so they was sing and dance and fiddle and john Snyder would dance and it sounds like he and mary and graves were going to get married like they were like eyeing each other on the road And then I think my last, well, no, another note, so many notes, another note is you need more food when you're walking all day, obviously, like you are constantly moving. So Daniel James Brown did a little bit of math and like Sarah Graves, who he followed in his book, was tall, maybe 5'8 and probably weighed like 125 pounds. So she needed like 15,600 calories to maintain if she did nothing, if she just like sat around all day. Because she's walking constantly, she needs like three, to four thousand calories which is absolutely not getting and like you need fat and you need salt

you need these things that get like harder and harder to get so they're getting very lean and skinny like very fast well it should we should preface all this with um the reason that's happening is because this trail that they chose to go on was dramatically more difficult and longer than they thought they're not even on that trail yet they're just working okay got okay because you're just walking for like eight or nine hours a day. Got it. So either of you do it or not, like it's going to be like that.

And you can also, there's also science behind how mad you get when you're hungry. Because you can live for a while without food, but you're not, obviously not happy. It like messes with you in every way possible, you know?

Yeah. So other things like I was telling you earlier, California is becoming a republic. They're going through a lot of Native American areas like they meet the Pawnee. Some of them are nice. Some of them will steal their stuff and laugh at them, like literally like steal their cattle and laugh as I run away with it,

which is kind of funny, but, you know, that will happen. So now we're back to the Donner Party themselves. That's just like notes on the time period, notes on what you'd bring, notes on everybody who was there. And now everybody who's going is in Laramie, Wyoming, and it is June. So they left mid-April. Now it's June. Wyoming is drier than they've been in before.

So they are starting to get really dry and dirty. there's like dust everywhere it's like like inches of dust that kind of on everything and it's getting starting to get like really really miserable they're a little bit behind but so far it's not too bad so I think this is a point where someone like wrote in their journal I'd say the trouble is in getting started like it's not going to get worse than this you know so optimistic never write down so nobody knocked on wood that was a problem yeah for real so now it's July and they're walking through Wyoming, and this is where they make their decision. So they get to the point, they need to go the regular route or take the shortcut by Hastings, which again, isn't short

and hasn't been done, but he said it would take off 300 miles on their trip. So some people they're with don't do it, and they go somewhere else. They even meet someone that James Reed knew from his time in the Blackhawk War. It was kind of walking the opposite direction, and he says, like, hey man, turn back, like, don't do this, but they do it anyway. So on July 20th, 20 wagons who decide to take the Hastings cut off from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, elect George Donner as their leader. And this is their very last chance to turn around and take the well-worn path. At Fort Bridger, which is like an outpost, kind of like a convenience store, you know, essentially on the way there. There is someone who wrote a letter to the people who were the proprietors of

Fort Bridger and said, do not let people take this shortcut. It is not a shortcut. It does not work. But they didn't tell the Donor Party that because if they did, then, like, they might lose their business. So, yeah, so greedy. Yeah. It's like if you're, if you're a convenience store is, like, on the highway and they shut down the highway, like, you're fucked. But I thought that Donna was named Reed's replacement later on. No.

This is before Reed leaves. Okay. Yeah. So this is called the parting of the ways and the Donner Party turned south into Utah's Wastatch Mountains. they think that Hastings is going to be able to meet them. They've never actually met Hastings in real life. But he said that he would be there waiting for anybody who wanted to take the cut off. But the time to get to the spot that they, he said he would be,

they actually find a letter from Hastings in a bush, which is so nuts. So the famous letter. And he's like, actually, it's a little bit hard. I'm a little bit in front of you. Hold on. I'll come back and meet you. So they wait for a little bit. And they send some men ahead.

And they're like, hey, this is actually a lot more rocky. and a lot more steep than we thought, you know, is this still going to work? And Haysing's was like, yeah, but like go a little bit that way and like pointed another direction and they went that way instead. But again, like, he sings doesn't know what he's talking about. It kind of just like slinks away. It is crazy to think like now how impossible is to really figure things out on your own without like GPS. And these people are doing it across country or like a note. It's stash in a bush.

I can't believe that they got it. It's like. So crazy. really insane. And like I also was flying over the mountains on my way home from Atlanta this week thinking, this is super easy. We're lucky if I can do this. For all this shit we talk about flying, it was super easy to get from Atlanta to Vegas and from Vegas to Palm Springs. So they have to go over the mountains and the wagons. Again, like walking over it would be hard, but they have wagons and animals. And then they get to the Great Salt Lake Desert, which is 80 miles of

nothing. It is hot and dry and there's no water and there's no vegetation. And so they're walking across this, what Hastings told them this desert would take them two days and it took them five, which is a huge difference when your animals are dying. So some of the animals were dying, they would walk at night because it was so hot. You probably remember this, but there's like a part in one of the men's journals where they name a campsite, mad woman camp. Yes, I remember this. And like the women probably just like have been mad for a very long time. So you just noticed these women are mad. Yeah.

While they're walking, some of the Shoshone's steal their things, like, it's not great. They rest at a hot springs, but a hot springs isn't drinkable. You know, like, they can't drink that sulfuric water. So other things that happen during this time, like a boy falls and almost gets his

leg amputated. They, like, hire a mountain man to try to cut it off, but they're like, no, let's not do this. Again, we're really lucky that it's not amputation. It's like the number one thing for a broken leg anymore. Real quick for context, because I'm looking at a map, from Fort Bridger, the traditional trail would lead you north so that you approach Sunter Fort, which is basically Sacramento now, from the south, or sorry, from the north. But the Hastings come off takes them down south, and that's like, that's the big, that's the big divide. Like, if you actually look at it on a map, it's not a whole trail.

It actually matches up to the trail at some point, but it only does that midway into Nevada, which is kind of interesting. Right. And then it takes, but the, the shortcut adds an extra like 300 miles. It adds miles. It doesn't retract miles and it adds the worst miles because you're cutting across the Sierra Nevada. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

At some point, like one of the, an old man named Mr. Hardcoop, his feet were just so bad. Like, their shoes are falling apart also. Also, they're not wearing like nice shoes. wearing like she's leather shoes are going to fall apart immediately um and his feet are just so bad he just stops and they they leave him and he dies um william pike has shot by accident and dies um and then the hot guy dies which is a bummer and it reminds me of a certain television show that just killed the hot guy that i no longer made a certain watching is this about last of us because i don't watch that yes it is not watching without peter pascal there's no reason to

So please keep listening even though the hot guy's dead to this story. And it's not a spoiler. If you really like last of us, you would know that it happened in the game, which I did not know, but like, whatever. October 5th, everyone is mad. And James Reed and John Snyder are trying to get some oxen to move. And Snyder gets frustrated.

And he hits the ox, and then he hits Reed, and reads stab Snyder in the chest, and he dies. And everyone was mad because you need a hot guy. And also he was nice and fun. And Reed's not as fun or nice. Understandable. So they wanted to hang him for the crime, but instead they'd let him go just a horse. His kids come up at night and give him some crackers and a gun, but he ends up going and actually doing fine.

He ends up going a different direction, finding a fort, and inexplicably joining the Mexican-American War in exchange for some help. And his wife gets a smaller wagon, and she goes on. Yeah, because it's so much easier to do this on a horse. wagons that are the problem. It's if you're carrying all this heavy stuff. And like the wheels are falling off the axles and you have to fix it. And then if you don't have someone who's going to have to fix it, like, yeah, the wheels are made out of wood. They're not meant to be flexi and bendy the way rubber is. So like it's a, he got off easy. He did. He definitely did. So they're about to hit this year in Nevada's and now like in the Midwest where they're

from in Illinois, snow is dense and freezes so you can walk on it. Like, It's easy to, like, snow shoe in parts of the country and the world because it, like, it snows and then it freezes and then you can, like, walk on it. But the snow they're about to encounter is, like, eight feet of powdery snow per day that is, like, impossible to move through, you know? So is this the worst winter in a while? Is it also their awful luck that this is such a bad winter? And it might be true. So this is also the winter of the Franklin exhibition. And that was one of the, that was, like, also very bad.

you know so it might have just been a really bad winter for both of them yeah yeah it was it would have been the worst place across anyways and also it was like the worst seasonably cold yeah so like later they will see like the trees around where they camped were cut like 10 to 20 feet off the ground because that's how high up they were because they were on the snow that's crazy that makes sense like that was like so you could see that they were like not near the ground when they cut a tree down So on October 28th, there's a really big storm, and the Brains and the Kesebergs try to go through a pass that's now called Donner Pass, where they can't do it and they come back. And they are kind of stranded around Truckee Lake, which is now Donner Lake, but at a point with Truckee Lake.

And there's 60 people. So there's an old cabin. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry. There's 87 people. So 60 people go by the lake. It's the brains, the reeds, and the children, the eddies, the graves, the Murphy. Casabergs and some and like all of their hired help they huddle in three cabins near a trekkie lake so there was like one old cabin that had already that was there when they got there so the breans take that and they just kind of like repair it but the other cabins are built out of like pine trees like they don't have time to like make them into like boards you know they're like putting pine trees together hoping for the best i also think they're called lean twos they're not real cabins they're not meant to be like standalone structures right and like so there is like one that leans against a rock and like they do lean against each other kind of so like the hired men will

like have a lean to outside of the cabin as well got it yeah tried like get some of the heat from the cabin so and then 27 people with the donners the donners and some teamsters are intense at alder creek which about like five minutes away so they ate their animals pretty soon because they were going to die anyway like what's the point in waiting for your ox to live a couple more weeks if he's going to get sicker and sicker, you know? Yeah, yeah. So they did that first. They did try to ice fish, but they didn't get anything, but they could see the fish under

the ice, but they couldn't get any fish. And the cabins, like, et cetera, like, again, like you said, like, they're not, it's not a cabin. It's not nice. They're awful. I learned that they use chamber pots with, like, I was like, part of the thing the chamber pots. Oh my God.

But also, like, you can't really get out of it to go to the bathroom in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. So, you know, it's funny is like the more you think about the logistics of what they were dealing with, like the more nightmares you guess where my head went to even before you mentioned the chamber pots was that it's the worst feeling when you're out in the cold and you have to do something physical because your hands and everything gets so numb by the cold that it's like it makes everything so much more painful even if you could do it, which a lot of times you can't. And then later on when the numbing goes away and you realize what you did to your hands and you're like, it makes everything so much more painful, even if you could do it, and then later on when the numbing goes away and you realize what you did to your hands and you're like, like oh my god everything hurts so much worse yeah oh my god and then people are like losing fingers and losing toes you know all that's happening it's bad um there's also lice and bed bugs everywhere and just like smells terrible because it keeps snowing so the snow is now like above their structures so they have to like climb out to get wood and do things which means like all

of the like dank terableness stays inside yeah you know so several people are die during this time and by so it's about like a month and a half and by december 16th 15 people are like we have to try to do something like we have to try to leave we're not going to make it um they were eating like you know eating their shoes eating their leather like you could like you can boil like a leather strap until it's like a goo and like you're not going to live on that you know no it'll fill your stomach but it won't give you any nutrients yeah so 15 people make some snow shoes and they set out later this group is going to be called the forlorn hope it's a group of 10 men and five women

and they start walking and immediately again obviously they're freezing but also they started to get snowblind so i don't know where they are and they can't see anything um and then i know they joke about this in the last podcast but i'm sorry to say the short guy gets um hurt by snowblindness the most and he just like can't see and he just sits down and five months later they find his body in a stump and like they hope that he just got tired and like willed himself to die you know those are a bit where he was like the original keeper elf i think yeah oh okay um the irish immigrant patrick dolin he is like we should draw straws and kill someone and eat them um people were like no like we're not doing that like what's wrong with you like they hadn't

been like super long without food yet so they're just like no um but of course Patrick dolin dies first and they think that he dies of hunger, but he probably died of, like, hypothermia, you know? Right. Because they weren't, like, they were hungry, but you can last a long time being hungry longer than you'd think. So it probably didn't need to eat him,

but, like, they've been eating their leather, and everything is terrible. So he's the first person that they eat. It probably, like a lot of people do, when you eat someone as you remove their heads and feet, so you forget that you're eating a person. They probably eat the liver, the heart and the kidneys first because that's the most nutrient part and they also when they

would do this especially this group they would make sure that you didn't eat your family members yeah they like the life rules yeah um to cook the food they would just light entire trees on fire like dead trees and try to like go around it and then cook um unfortunately there's a part where if they would have walked over a ridge they would have been really close to where they wanted to be but they went the wrong way but again to your point like how are you supposed to know that that happened now that I mentioned it that happened

in a live too where if they just like crested this one mountain they were like on the edge of it they would have looked down and seen a road that people were just like

driving on yeah but you're like you just don't I mean how are you supposed to figure that out yeah all the things so

they at one point they do kill a deer they shoot at it and they miss and then they like attack it and let its throat and drink its blood

and then so to the people who find the deer they are like a day ahead of the other group people in the group and they're like shooting guns in the air so they can hear them and going to me to get the meat so they do do do that but

they do end up you know everybody else who dies they do eat them um lewis and salvador are like everyone's looking at us like we are comforting ketchup you know like because they're like we don't know you guys you guys are just like here the two muwarks who are there to help them um and so they run away and by the time that they get to them like they literally follow their bloody footprints to find them because their feet are bleeding so badly um they're so sick and they're so um just like so malnourished that they shoot them and then eat them as well so those guys knew that that was going to happen um so after 33 days of walking in the snow seven of the 15 people are left and this is when they walk into that native village and the people are like these are ghosts wait how many how

many were so alive seven seven okay yep um five women and two men um they were almost naked because their food their clothes had been like rotting off of them and they didn't have much clothing to begin with so they were like nearly naked they didn't have shoes their feet were black and they kind of walk out of the out of the nothingness and go into this village and like the children start to cry you know because they're like are these ghosts like what is this like these people are awful so they feed them like acorns and and nuts try to get them a little bit of sustenance and then william eddie from the group he goes to find a small community in sacramento and that's when the rescues begin but they walk for 33 days before they had to be the four the four

Lauren oh the forlorn hub did okay so meanwhile James Reed is making promises to go to war he might have gone for a little bit and come back he had tried to rescue them in October they weren't where he thought they would be because he thought they would have gotten further than they did so he couldn't even go in to rescue them because he couldn't get past the part they were stuck in you know so the first relief comes on February 18th when they go to where the cabins should be like where they heard the cabins should be and the reliefs are like you know some I'm like single men from the forts and all these things who are like coming together to go to help them. It's sort of like a promise of like getting paid later, that kind of thing.

When they get there, there were like holes in the snow and some smoke but no cabins. And they realized that the cabins were buried. And they kind of looked down a hole and Mrs. Murphy pops her head down the snow hole. And she says, are you men from California or from heaven? You know, just like, can't believe I've seen another person. Of all the people that were left at the camp, 13 of them died. The roofs were rotting under the snow. It smelled horrible.

And there are 44 people left. And the people who rescued them were like, this is just the worst thing I've ever seen. Out of 80, right? Yeah, it was 87 in total. Yeah. So 15 had gone on the Forlorn Hope. Seven of those people meet it.

And now they're back. And 21 people leave with the first group. Three of them will die on the way. Because it isn't, not that they're rescued, it's still they don't have like, they still have to get out you know like they still have to go for a walk through the snow out um poor and a lot of the kids

go in like the first one three of them like I said died on the way um poor William Hook was 13 years old I believe and he dies from eating too much when he gets there because you can't do that either you know poor boy to

poor baby yeah um they actually meet James Reed on the way and they're like what the hell like we can't believe that you we can see you again he's on his way to go with like the second relief and they end up going to Sutter's Fort for safety and staying there. The second group, the second relief, arrives back at the Donner Camp on March 1st. Poor Lavinia Murphy, she's the one that they thought was 50 because when they find her, she is nearly dead in a cabin with like a bunch of kids. She's like taking care of like 15 kids by

herself and she's like nearly blind from everything. Like everything is terrible. She doesn't even make it out. She dies before they even get back to her because she can't walk out right now. But the second relief takes 17 more people out, mostly kids. On the way out, there's more snow. And the kids just stop moving. Like, they're just like, I can't do this. You know, like, you can't, like, we cannot physically do this. When the kids sit down, they call their camp, starved camp.

And that is where they will eat Elizabeth Graves and her five-year-old son, Franklin. And some of the kids were later carried all the way down the mountain, like, by mountain men. They just picked them up and carried them because the kids just like absolutely couldn't do it. Yeah. They were probably, so they ate Elizabeth Graves and Franklin in starved camp, but they were obviously doing this at Donner Lake as well. Keseberg is one of the German immigrants, and he had really just lost his mind. When they found him, he was by himself in a cabin. He had George Donner's head in a pot, and there were bones everywhere.

So he definitely ate George Donner. He told William Eddie that he ate his son, and he said that Mrs. Donner had stopped by begging him to hide her money, because a lot of them had money that was also heavy, you know? And they were like, she absolutely did not do that. You killed her and ate her. And then he had to like, finally after they tried to kill him, he disclosed that he had a bunch of her money, like hidden somewhere. Basically, let me go and I'll tell you where the money is it in.

Yeah. Yeah. So Keseberg walked out at some point. I don't know how he got out. Later, he would sue some of the survivors for defamation. And he won $1 in court and had to pay the court fees because they were like, no. Later, he said, quote, I often think. that the Almighty has signaled me out

among all men on the face of the earth in order to see how much hardship suffering and misery a human being can bear. And then everybody else called him the cannibal of the dinner party. So it didn't go great for him. Justifiably so. Of our last to be rescued,

came out, John Baptiste Trudeau, 16 years old, was taken out and the people that he had been watching over were Eliza, Georgina, Francis, and Simon, who were three, four, six, and eight. So a 16-year-old is taking care of the last of the kids on their way, on their way out.

Also, just a mention is a lot of the places that the forlorn hope camped at and like where people died and where they gave up and where they were going was like they were just sitting on top of gold and they didn't know. No way. I didn't know that. Not that the gold would have helped them, you know, or whatever, but like it's exactly where the gold rush would be is where they were right now. Oh, wow. Yeah. So later, a Mormon battalion during the Mexican-American War would pull all of the bodies and all the bones, everything that was left at Donor Lake, like, at a time when there was no snow, put it in one of the cabins in a hole and just burn the whole thing, just to get rid of it, you know?

Lansford Hastings received death threats, obviously, because of what he had done. And someone who had done it before the Donna party when it was like hard, but not like you get stuck hard. you know tried to kill him and like you know tried to it was like yelling at him about the things and hastings said quote oh it's oh he said what did he say he could say nothing but he was very sorry and that he meant well you know annoying um of the 48 people who survived no reeds or brains died but there were lots of orphans you know and a lot of widows um william eddie was alone who lost his whole family um only three mules made it. So three animals made it out. And then also most of their possessions were gone. Like obviously, like the thing they brought came through. Virginia Reed, one of the

girls who made it wrote a letter to her cousin, Mary Keys, that ended up being published in a newspaper. But on May 16th, 1847, she said, you know, I'm not going to tell you everything that happened, you know, but here's some of the things. And then at the end, she said, quote, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can, which is good advice. And then a lot of the women who were widowed and left alone, you know, they lived their lives out in the West. They married, some of them married several times because their husbands were like killed in the war or killed in, you know, having like arguments with people or just like falling, you know, whatever, all the things are, you know, so the West is so dangerous. And then a lot of the, like, some of the last survivors, they died in like the 1920s, you know, because they were kids when it had happened and they died like in their 80s, which is crazy. They survived that to also survive the Great Depression, which is kind of rough.

I know. For real. Yeah. Every time it's a rough time to be alive, as we know. So it is what it is. There's gradients to rough, though. There are, though. There are. But yeah, that is the story of the Donner Party. So now I've been to Donner Lake. It's very pretty. But I've been there in the summer. I've never been in this year in Nevada. I've never done Tahoe. or Reno or any of that. It's very pretty. Like my aunt owns a house in Tahoe. And I remember like a couple years ago, there was a winter that,

I mean, there's winters there that are so bad all the time. And there was one that was so bad that like her and my uncle were like on the roof shoveling snow off the roof so the roof wouldn't collapse. And that's in their like nice house in Tahoe. You know? That's well. Yeah. So like it's definitely like there's places in Tahoe that like you can't go during

certain times still, obviously. Like it's not like a thing. There's also like that there's also like a Disney ski resort up there. That's like supposed to have been like with some of the. the best to know in America. I heard Jeremy Renner, remember, you know, you know that name, right? Mm-hmm. And he was talking about what happened with his accident where we all thought he was, like, dead or dying.

Have you heard the story? What happened to him again? So, apparently he has a amazing house in the Sierra Nevada's in Tahoe. And he has a, what if they called, Black Cat or? oh yeah yeah yeah like a snowmobile kind of thing like a snowmobile thing and um and we know what i'd heard is like he got injured by this thing and i didn't really appreciate what it really was and then he explained what it is and it's it's like a tractor like it's like a tractor size thing it's wider than like a highway road or lane would be and it has um treads like a tank

tank treads that rolls over the ice or the stone and so he was out doing stuff on his property with this thing and well that part of it's the relevant part because I was like oh like even if you're that rich and have that great of a place you also buy this 250,000 dollar tractor thing to like get around yeah yeah you can't just like walk around there even like with today yeah you have to be like exceptionally well equipped yeah yeah well yeah he ended up leaving it running while he was standing on the tread and then something knocked it out of gear and then he fell and his his whole body was laid out lengthwise for the entire tread as the thing sort of moving over his entire body oh my god and so yeah it was uh it was gnarly it sounds like but it but also

illustrated like how crazy like wild that part of the country is even for yeah yeah even now even for the richest people totally totally so i do want to visit i only know it through the godfather because that's where the wedding scene took place was their house in tahoe yeah it's very pretty yeah reno is very pretty that whole area is nice fun well that was that was great that was a fun episode it was really nostalgic it took me right back to a lot of those old episodes yeah um cool what else you got for us um we pronounced papal incorrectly yeah it's papal what I say

Papal I'm sorry it's people Nadine pointed that out so we apologize it's papal I probably went back and edit I've shared

since we've talked oh don't do that I've shared a lot of memes with you because we're very excited that the Pope is from Chicago hey the bears are going to make a comeback this is a sign

I've seen so many hilarious memes there was one like a whole like to the tune of High Hopes by Panic of the Disco it was called Chaitown Pope it was so funny like we have a Chitown Pope

like everyone is just like hilarious like oh my God like the Bears are definitely going to win this year like he's like he's a socks fan whatever it's only one team one football team in Chicago it's the Bears and then like it's the one where it was like

the white smoke was actually like the Cardinals grilling like brats that's funny I love a Chicago joke I'm not really I'm not religious whatsoever, but there is a certain sense of pride that he is an American.

I know, it's fun, and he's a good one, you know. And he's a nice guy, he's a good one. For all the, that we could get, we got one of the better the kind of ones. And it goes against the whole thin Pope, fat Pope thing around like their ideology shifts dramatically from like more

progressive or conservative. It sounds like this this guy's more in line with Pope Francis. Yeah, it sounds like they knew each other and like were friends. So. Yeah. That was cool. Congratulations to Chicago for producing a Pope. Yeah.

Where do you go, guys? You did it all. Congratulations to the Bears for the upcoming win. Cool. Do we have any listener mail besides the Nadine? Nope. That was it. Thank you, 18.

We're sorry. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing Taylor. I guess if there's something else, we can go ahead and cut things off. Cool. Yeah. Well, find us on all social media. We have a Patreon, Doom DeFell Pod.

And let us know if you have any ideas. zoom tofillpod at gmail.com and thank you Justin for suggesting this. I loved you know revisiting it not like we ever did it but like there was a while ago where I thought about it a lot so it's an incredible story grateful to be able to fly

over the Rocky Mountains yeah and the more you know about it the more terrifying it gets which is fun yeah yeah yeah um cool well thanks Taylor we'll go out and cut off thank you Thank you.