Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Donner Party

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the spring of 1846, a group of intrepid pioneers set out from Independence, Missouri, to cross the Oregon Trail to seek a better life in the fertile country of California. However, almost nothing went according to plan for this group. They got a late start, they took a devastating wrong term, and were delayed by many natural obstacles. They ended up being stuck in the mountains during the winter in one of the most horrific episodes in the history of the American West. Learn more about the Donner Party, what went wrong and their horrific fate, On this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Starting point is 00:00:32 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Before we can understand what happened to the Donner Party, it's necessary to understand what the Donner Party was and what they were attempting to do. The 1840s saw an upsurge in people migrating to the western coast of North America.

Starting point is 00:01:24 There were promises of ample, cheap, fertile land in California and the Oregon Territory. This was an incredibly enticing prospect for people who otherwise had no opportunities back home, back home, usually being the eastern United States or somewhere in Europe. However, claiming this land was in no way easy. To get there, you had one of two choice. The first was an extremely long and expensive journey by ship, which required you to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America. The only other option was an even more dangerous journey across the mountains of Western

Starting point is 00:01:58 North America and the Great Plains. The route that most settlers took became known as the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail began in Independence, Missouri, although many people would have traveled quite a distance just to get there. In Independence, they would stock up on supplies and join a wagon train with other settlers. who were going in the same direction. The pace of travel was slow, often going no more than 15 miles per day, with the total trip taking anywhere from four to six months. Along the way, they had to deal with dangerous river crossings, wild animals, the threat of starvation, storms, disease, accidents,

Starting point is 00:02:32 and possibly angry native people who didn't want them there. If you've ever played the game Oregon Trail, you also probably know that people died of dysentery. Overland travel to Oregon only began in 1839 and didn't see widespread migration until 1843 when 1,000 people finally made the journey. For the most part, the first section of the Oregon Trail was the same for most immigrants up until the continental divide, from which different routes could be taken. However, the most difficult part of the journey for those going to California was the last 100 miles over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Not only were the peaks exceptionally high, but they also experienced some of the highest snowfalls in North America. So this was the situation in the spring of 1846. That spring,

Starting point is 00:03:23 500 wagons had assembled in Independence, Missouri to begin the trip out west. At the tail end of the wagon train were nine wagons that belonged to the Donner and Reed families. George Donner was 60 years old. He brought with him his wife, children, children from previous marriage, his brother, his family, and several other people in his employment. James Reed was a 45-year-old Irish immigrant, with him or his wife, children, stepchildren, and the men he hired for the trip. In total, the Donner and Reed families,

Starting point is 00:03:53 plus the people they employed, numbered 87 people in total. What time of the year the wagon set out was a very tricky proposition. If you started too soon, there wouldn't be grass for your pack animals and cattle to eat. And if you started too late, you risk not getting over the mountains by winter. The Donner-Reed party set out on May 12th, which was a relatively late start for setting out on the Oregon Trail. For the first month and a half, things went relatively fine. On July 31st, they made a decision to go off the main trail and try the Hastings cutoff. Lansford Hastings was the author of a book titled The Immigrants Guide to Oregon and California.

Starting point is 00:04:33 It was a handbook for settlers who were going west and also a track designed to encourage people to migrate west. Hastings had only previously made the trip once in 1842 going from Ohio to California. In the letter he sent to people on the wagon train, he encouraged a route which was known as the Hastings cutoff. Typically, the Oregon Trail would go north through an area known as the Snake River Plain in Idaho. It was a reasonably safe and well-known route. Hastings proposed a more direct route, which was supposed to shorten the distance by 300 miles as it would go through the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake Desert. The route was actually only given a brief mention in Hastings' book.

Starting point is 00:05:15 He said, quote, The most direct route for the California immigrants would be to leave the Oregon route about 200 miles east from Fort Hall, then sparing west-southwest to the Salt Lake, and thence continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco. End quote. The route was completely theoretical as Hastings hadn't actually traveled the entire route, and no one had ever traveled the route with wagons.

Starting point is 00:05:40 He was basically just looking at a map without really understanding what was on the route that he created. Hastings himself only traveled the route for the first time in 1846 after the book was published, and then he only went from the Great Salt Lake to Wyoming, going west to east, when you didn't have to worry about beating the winter. The Donner and Reed parties believed Hastings, so they took his route. Suffice to say, the Hastings cut off was a horrible idea. Going through the Wattash Mountains was a disaster because there was no obvious trail, because no one had taken it before.

Starting point is 00:06:15 It was necessary to cut down trees in order to move, which took an inordinate amount of time. When they finally got to the Great Salt Lake, things didn't get any better. The salt flats had turned to mud, and now they had to throw away their possessions for Oxidon to be able to pull their wagons. There was no obvious trail to follow, and worst of all, there was an 80-eastern mile stretch in the middle of the desert where there was no water to be found. Some oxen died and some ran away. They did finally make it through the desert, but by the time they had made it to one of the more established trails, they were now a month behind schedule. By late October 1846, the group had

Starting point is 00:06:52 made it to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They only had about a hundred miles or so to go, but these were to be the most difficult. When they reached the mountains, the passes through the mountains were initially clear, but just when they arrived, there was an early winter snowstorm that filled the mountain passes with snow and ice. With their way forward blocked, they settled into Truckee Lake, where they planned to stay the winter. It was at an elevation of 7,056 feet or 2,151 meters. If they had arrived just a few days earlier, they would have been able to beat the snowstorm. And I should note that the Sierra Nevada Mountains gets an enormous amount of snow, due to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean.

Starting point is 00:07:35 The region averages 222 inches or 5.6 meters of snow every year. I've been to some sites in the area as late as the end of May when I still saw snow banks that were 12 to 20 feet high. So this wasn't a case of not wanting to trudge through some snow, but rather an amount of snow that was impossible to pass through, especially with wagons. By this time their party was down to 81 people, over half of whom were children. By this point, and with the winter already starting, they had already lost many of their animals and much of their supplies. They settled into several log cabins that had been built by an earlier party and tents that they had with them.

Starting point is 00:08:19 When they made camp at Truckee Lake, they were already low on food from their disastrous diversion through the Hastings cutoff, and winter was just starting. Things got even worse. There was a snowstorm that lasted for a week, which ended up killing their oxen and horses, but they were lost in the snow and could have been a source of food. One of the men did manage to kill a bear, but that was the only food that they were able to gather from the area. Conditions in the camp were miserable. It was cramped and there was so much snow that people would be stuck indoors for days.

Starting point is 00:08:50 They quickly got to a point where they were boiling leather straps and cooking animal bones just to make some sort of soup. One of the cabins had an ox-hide rug that was eventually eaten piece by piece. Eventually, party members started to die in early December. A plan was devised where a group of the strongest party members would head out with handmade snow shoes to try to find help. On December 16th, 17 men, women, and children set out in an attempt to get the group rescued. Two of the members who didn't have snow shoes had to turn back rather quickly. After several days of walking aimlessly, most of the group was subsequently. most of the group was suffering from snow blindness from the sun reflecting off the snow,

Starting point is 00:09:29 and they were unable to properly camp in snow that was 12 feet or 3.7 meters deep. On December 21st, one of the men who had set out on foot fell behind and eventually died. After a few more days, one of the men Patrick Dolan proposed that one of the party members should be sacrificed to feed the others. A duel was proposed, as was a lottery, but eventually they decided to just keep moving until the next person fell. A blizzard once again stopped their progress for several days. One of the men known only as Antonio, the animal herder, died, and Franklin Graves soon followed him. Dolan, the man who first suggested cannibalism, soon began ranting and hallucinating due to hypothermia. He stripped off his clothes, ran away, only to come back later and die with the group.

Starting point is 00:10:17 At this point, some in the group began to cut up and eat the bodies of Antonio, Dolan, Graves, and a 12-year-old named Lemuel Murphy. After resting for three days, they set off again, and there was now talk of killing two of the party members, Native American men known only as Lewis and Salvador, so they could be eaten. The two men caught wind of the plan and left the group. Two party members, Mary and Eddie Graves,

Starting point is 00:10:44 were able to go out and hunt a deer, but when they got back to the group, they found that another group member, Jay Fosdick, had died, and he had already been cut open for food. 25 days after the journey began, they came across Louis San Salvador, and both men were shot dead by William Foster, who used their bodies for food. Several days later, the emaciated group came across a native settlement.

Starting point is 00:11:08 They looked so ragged that they initially frightened the people in the camp. The native people gave them what little food they had, and then a man named William Eddy went on to a settlement at the edge of the Sacramento Valley. There they organized a rescue party that found the remaining six or six or two, survivors from the hike on January 17th. James Reed was one of the original party members who ended up separating from the main group early on. He had made it to Sutter's Ford on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in early October and waited for his group and other family members to arrive.

Starting point is 00:11:40 He sent out a search party, but they were unable to find the group at Truckee Lake. It wasn't until news of the group that had hiked out reached Reed that they were able to organize a full-blown rescue mission. They first set out from Sacramento Valley on February 4th with a team of 10 people and ample food. They cashed their food along the way so they wouldn't have to carry everything, and so they also had food on the way back. On February 18th, the rescue party made it to Truckee Lake, where they found that 13 more people had died. 23 people were selected to go back with the rescue group, and 33 were left behind with some food provisions. During the trip out of the mountains, two of the 23 died,

Starting point is 00:12:21 and another boy, Jacob Donner's stepson, fatally gorged himself with food when he arrived at the fort. Known as re-feeding syndrome, it can happen when people who are starving eat too much too quickly. While the first rescue party was on its way, a second party was sent out as well. They arrived in Truckee Lake on March 1st. Between the arrival of the first and second rescue parties,

Starting point is 00:12:43 shockingly, no one died. The second rescue party found evidence of cannibalism at the camp. 17 people were taken with the second rescue party, 14 of which were children. Two children and one adult died on the way back to Sutter's Fort. A third rescue party only managed to bring back five children. A fourth and fifth rescue party were unable to reach the camp due to inclement weather. Eventually, a salvage mission was sent out on April 10th to get whatever supplies they could to sell to help the orphan children. When the salvage team arrived, they found only one person.

Starting point is 00:13:20 alive. Louis Keyesburg. He was found with a pot of human flesh cooking and $250 in gold coins. He was the last member of the party to be rescued. Of the original 87 party members who left Independence, Missouri, only 45 survived. When news of the Donner Party spread, it was covered in newspapers around the country in totally different ways. Some papers buried the story because they didn't want to discourage westward travel. Some papers played up the cannibalism. Some papers played up the cannibalism angle, while others touted the Donner Party as demonstrating the heroism of the pioneers. The number of settlers moving west over the next few years actually began to drop as more stories about the difficulties of the journey began to spread. However, that was short-lived and it abruptly

Starting point is 00:14:06 changed after gold was discovered in California in 1849. The story of the Donner Party remains one of the most famous from the entire period of westward expansion of the United States, primarily due to the cases of cannibalism. As the 20th century historian George Stewart noted, quote, the cannibalism, although it might be considered a minor episode, has become in the popular mind the chief fact to be remembered about the Donner Party. For a taboo always allures with as great strength as it repels. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:14:44 The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in everything everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Donner Party

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