Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How the Donner Party Worked

Episode Date: June 22, 2019

Did they or didn't they? There is plenty of written evidence that the ill-fated Donner Party resorted to cannibalism - except there are no bones. Learn the details of one of the worst disasters of the early West in this classic episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there, friends, it's me, Josh, and this week I've selected for SYSK Selects our episode on the Donner Party, which was pretty grim. I mean, we all know about the Donner Party, but once you start to learn the details of the whole thing,

it's pretty grim. Anyway, I guess I would say enjoy this normally, but yeah, okay, go ahead. Enjoy this episode in a grim way. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always

with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you should know. How you doing? I'm fine, good. How are you doing? Great, dude. I watched PBS today at work, which is always fun when you get to watch TV

via the computer at work. Yeah, it's too much of a job. Get paid for it. Yeah, man. I remember I watched American Grindhouse once at work while we were doing the exploitation films. Yeah, I did do, actually. That was awesome.

I watched the PBS's American Experience, which is an awesome show. Been around for years. Oh, yeah. And I watched there. Obviously, I watched the one on the Donner Party. Oh, is that the one you watched? Yeah.

Oh, gotcha. I just saw there was one on the Johnstown Flood, though. I wish I would have known. I would have watched it. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll still watch it. I still want to learn. You're not gonna, you only watch PBS at work for money.

Yeah, you're right. I was doing a little research and I came across something called Hufu, or Hufu. A play on Hulu? No, a play on tofu that's designed to taste like human flesh. Like human flesh. Oh, I was going in an entirely different direction. There is a big, yeah, no, this is about cannibalism now.

There's a big media push on it. It made the Daily Show. All sorts of articles came up about Hufu. There was a spokesman, there was a website, and it was the tofu that tastes like human. Gross. They were saying the reason why they were doing it is so anthropologists could better understand

their subjects when they were investigating cannibalism, and there's plenty of people out there who just wanted to try it. Well, how did they know? How did they flavor it like human? Well, they didn't. Oh. It turns out the whole thing was just a total farce.

Gotcha. But if you still look today, it was on the Snopesboard. It's not definitively, you know. Folds. Yes, but no one's ever had it. And apparently while you could access the website, you couldn't buy it. You got an error message whenever you tried

to check out or whatever. But it was pretty funny that everybody got taken on that. Yeah. I thought I'd mentioned that. I just did. Yeah, I did too. And if you look in Urban Dictionary, it's still, there's no mention of it being fake

or fictitious. Oh, really? Yeah, I think. Well, Urban Dictionary. I'm loathed to say it, but it was Wikipedia that initially said it's fictitious to me. All right. I feel dirty.

Yeah. But Chuck, we talk about Hufu or Hufu, depending on what region of the country you live in, to talk about the Donner Party, which is one of those very rare instances in the history of humanity, where we can say pretty much without doubt, people aid other people.

And they did so under some of the most horrific circumstances that humans have ever endured. Yeah. This group of people went through a holy hell. Yeah. It was pretty rough. Very tough. I can just keep going for the rest of the episodes,

just describing how bad it was. Yeah. And I learned a lot from this article, a lot of new surprising stuff that it's pretty cool. Like, did you know that it took two years when it should have taken six months? Not true. What are you talking about?

It took one year. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, did you know that the Donner Party was originally the Donner-Read Party, and the Read Party split off and made their way without event onto Fort Sutter, California, no problem?

That's not true either. What are you talking about? Yeah, this is not the best article on our site, I must say. And I read it, and then I did my own research, and was like, wow, how did you miss some of this stuff? We'll get to the bottom of that. And we'll make sure it gets changed.

Yes. I've already sent an email, actually, about that. Did you, an angry one? Well, just like, how could this be on our site? It's so wrong, and it's so easily figured out. It's not like rocket science, it's like, it took two years, no, look at a calendar, it took one year. So a caddy one?

Yes. It was a little caddy. Well, let's talk about the Donner Party. Let's talk about what's known, what's not known. So Donner Reed, Donner was a wealthy farmer in his 60s. Reed was an Irish American businessman, had some dough as well. He financed the trip.

Oh, did he? I believe so. Okay. But George Donner was the official guy in charge. Yeah, James Reed thought that he was gonna be in charge, and kind of was in a way, but they did elect Donner, the captain, because Reed turned off people with his RV, essentially.

He had a macked out wagon that everyone else was really pissed off about, because it was double decker, and it had a stove in it, and it had bunk beds, and it was like, apparently made a big commotion among the other people, because they were like, oh, who's this guy with his big wagon? And this was even before the Chuck wagon was invented by Charles Chuck Goodnight.

You wanna go ahead and tell that story? Well, there's not much to tell. Charles Chuck Goodnight was a cookie on the wagon trails, and after the Civil War, he had gotten very tired of not having a decent meal, so he bought an old government wagon and converted it into a kitchen, which became the first Chuck wagon named after him.

Yeah. And from that, if you follow it further and further, you get diners and food trucks. Chuck wagon. Yeah. Nice, Josh. Very slick. So the Donner Reid party, like a lot of people back then,

said, you know what, you know where it's at? This place called California that I've heard so much about. Yeah, and this was prior to the Gold Rush. Yeah. There was a movement toward populating California, basically resting control of California away from the Spanish, just through sheer numbers, by having a bunch of white folks show up,

and basically saying, Mexico, you can't control this land anymore. It'll be too expensive and costly. We're taking over, because we live here now. That's right. And Lansford Hastings was one of the main dudes behind this movement. He was an attorney from Ohio.

He went to California in 1842, and dreamed of wrestling this land from the Mexican, from Mexico, and governing California himself. Well, he, yeah. Big dreams. Also, with a guy named John Sutter, who was a German-born Swiss immigrant who had taken Mexican citizenship to get a charter, a land grant,

from the Mexican government. And he used it to form New Helvetia, or New Switzerland, AKA Fort Sutter, which is now Sacramento. Swiss, German, Swiss-born with Mexican citizenship. Yeah, I love it. Who was a traitor? Only in the 1840s can you do stuff like that. Exactly.

Only in California, you know. But Hastings will come back up in a very big way, because it's pretty much all his fault. Gotcha. So they basically set out for California in May, while they set out from Springfield in April. But Missouri and May is when they had the whole gang together, the big wagon train.

They said, we're going west. We're following the California Trail. Everyone goes that way. Everyone, actually, that year, made it, except for the Donner Party. Oh, yeah? Yeah, all the immigrants going to California checked in, OK. Except for these sad folks.

And it was really all because of one fateful decision to tell the truth. They were just like any other wagon train, just like any other pioneers. They weren't trailblazers. They were following trails that they'd learned of, and they were well-equipped. They weren't stupid.

No, no. But they did make one fateful decision. Like you said, Hastings. What was his first name? Landford. Landford Hastings comes up in a big way, because a lot of people laid the disaster, the calamity, of the Donner Party at Hastings' feet,

because he was also a trailblazer. And he came up with a fanciful thing called the Hastings Cut-Off. That's right, a shortcut, essentially. Yeah. He wrote a book called The Immigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, which Donner had on the seat of his wagon.

And there was a very brief sentence about the shortcut, the Hastings Cut-Off, that was supposedly going to cut off about 350 to 400 miles. A full three weeks off of the trip. Which is a big chunk. For a six-month trip, that's definitely worth the trip. Yeah, the cut-off. The problem was Hastings had never taken this route himself

and had certainly never taken a wagon over it. But that didn't stop him from claiming that all of the roads were high and hard and level, that there was plenty of water and grass for the livestock, and that there were no aggressive Indian tribes in the area. Yeah, he basically painted it out like a pleasure cruise. Because he was trying to get as many people as possible to California.

Yeah. He actually would go and hang out on the way to Oregon, on the Oregon Trail, and be like, you don't want to go there. You want to come down to California. Yeah, and he would lead people. Yeah, so this is why he came up with the Hastings Cut-Off. And it was a dangerous gamble. And the Donner party said, well, we

want to shave three weeks off of our trip. Well, yeah, part of the Donner party went left. Part of them went right. The part that went right did just fine. And you don't hear about them. They're not the Donner party any longer. I don't know what they called themselves. But it wasn't the Reeds.

It was not the Reeds. Gotcha. The Reeds stayed with the Donners. And they went left. Went on to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. They were going to meet up with Hastings there. And they got there a little late. And Hastings was no longer there.

But he sent message. Oh, he left a note somewhere along the trail, along the Hastings Cut-Off saying, this may not be as good as I thought. You should probably turn back. Well, yeah, and before that, this other dude named Climon was headed east from California by way of the Hastings Cut-Off. And he said, don't go this way.

He said, you're never going to make it alive. Your wagons aren't going to make it. And you probably wouldn't even make it. So don't go that way. So they continued. They continued. They found the note. And when they found the note, Reed

spent five days looking for Hastings. To kill him. No, to talk to him about what the deal was. He just said he wanted to talk to him. Yeah, he wanted to kill him. He did find him, actually. And he didn't kill him. And Hastings said, I'm not coming back with you to lead.

Sorry. But hey, I'm up on this high bluff. And there's another route. And that one looks a lot better. And so they went that way instead, which was still the southern route under the Great Salt Lake. But it was not a good move.

And that's what started the beginning of the end for the Donner Party. Two miles a day, at that point. In 36 days, they went 16 miles, which is horrible, considering that they averaged about 12 miles a day normally. They ended up going an extra 125 miles. And it added three weeks to the trip, rather than subtracting three weeks to the trip.

They also lost four wagons, which is a big deal in a wagon train. Yeah, they lost a lot of oxen of their cattle as well. And that's where they lost some of their first members, because essentially, they were in the desert. Yeah, 80 mile stretch of desert on that trail. Yeah, the salt desert. So you got the heat during the day,

and then it was very cold at night. And this was in August. This was like, they eventually met back up to the California Trail, but they thought, oh, man, that was rough. But now we're all set, because we're back on the original trail. So that time that it took them, I mean,

that extra three weeks wasn't it. That wasn't what did them in. They were going slower than they predicted. Yeah, and it's important to know right here, during that Hastings Cut-Off Route, where they started to encounter a lot of hardships, they sent this dude named Stanton. He was a bachelor from New York.

And he was one of the only single dudes there. They sent him out for provision. So he took off for a period of time and did come back with five mules loaded with food and two Indian guides, Lewis and Salvador, to help him out. So they weren't apart, like the article says, of the original wagon train either. He came back with the provisions with Stanton.

During this time, Reed got in a fight. It was basically the first incident of road rage. His wagon became entangled, his big RV wagon, became entangled with a guy named Snyder. They fought. Reed killed Snyder with a knife. They had a little kangaroo court. First said they should hang him.

And then said, no, you know what? Just pack your stuff and get out of here. And so he did the next day without his family. He left. So there's two stories going on. Now you've got the Donner Party and the Reed family. Then you've got Reed, who goes on his own, makes it to California, actually, just fine.

Well, he was no worse for the wear, at least. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, wow, the drama's high already.

Yeah, the drama's high. The amount of time, all the setbacks, all the problems that they encountered conspired to put them back on the California trail after that disastrous Hastings cutoff. And right at the eastern edge, so that would be the, what, the Nevada side, maybe, of the Sierra Nevada mountains in November

at the first snowstorm. And it was a pretty bad snowstorm, and they thought, we can't make it through these mountains in the middle of winter. It's November. Let's just hunker down here. And it would turn out to be one of the worst winters, one of the harshest winters on record,

that they were unknowingly hunkering down for. And they made camp, two very famous camps. There was the Donner camp at the edge of a little lake in the area. Truckee Lake. And then there was the Alder Creek camp, which apparently was founded because of a broken wagon wheel that was six miles back, where they're back along the trail.

And that's where the two groups camped in the Donner party. If I may, a reading from the diary of one of the members of the Donner party. November 1st, 1846. It was a raining then in the valleys and snowing in the mountains. So we went on that way three or four days until we came to the big mountain,

or the California mountain. The snow was then about three feet deep there. There was some wagons there. They said they had attempted to cross and could not. We set out the next morning to make a last struggle, but did not advance more than two miles before the road became so completely blocked that we were compelled to retrace our steps in despair.

When we reached the lake, we lost our road. And owing to the depth of the snow in the mountains, we're compelled to abandon our wagons and pack our goods upon oxen. So this is early November, and they are in bad shape. And basically, the wagons can't even pass anymore. They set up these camps and are like, we got to hunker down for the winter.

And ultimately, they ended up in an area where there was, through the winter, 30 feet of snow. Not over time, like that was the snow pack was 30 feet deep. Yeah, I mean, it's still one of the worst winters on record, like today, not just for the time. Right. And these people, this group of fairly greenhornish people from back east are settled down

in one of the most dangerous spots in the country at the time, at least climate-wise. Yeah. They're all illogically dangerous. Provision started to run out. Another diary entry, November 6th. We have now killed most of our cattle, having to stay here until next spring

and live on poor beef without bread or salt. It snowed during the space of eight days with little intermission after our arrival. Mr. Curtis remarked that in the oven was a piece of the dog, and we could have, and we could have it. Raising the lid of the oven, we found the dog well baked and having a fine, savory smell. I cut out a rib smelling and tasting,

found it to be good, and handed the rib to Mr. McCutcheon, who, after smelling it sometime, tasted it and pronounced it a very good dog. Apparently, that was Uno, the Donner's dog, or the Reed's dog. It was one of the main family's dogs. Uno was met that fate. Yeah.

I didn't read that he was delicious. Well, I imagine if you're dying of starvation, anything is going to be delicious. They ate their shoestrings. They ate the kids would sit in front of the fire and pick off pieces of the hide skin rug and eat that, and then they eventually ate the hide from their roofs of the cabins,

because there were actually cabins at the lake. Yeah. There were no cabins at the creek. No. But they weren't much help against this kind of snow. In fact, apparently they were completely packed in at one point and couldn't even get out of the cabin. Wow.

I was like the thing that happened to Mr. Burns in Homer Simpson. Oh yeah, was it the camping trip or was it the ski trip? It was the corporate retreat. Right. Boy, that was a good one. They also, they boiled their blankets into like kind of a pasty glue, apparently.

Yeah. You said they're shoelaces, right? They ate their shoelaces. Yeah, because I think they were made of like animal hide or something. Bark, twigs, anything they could get their hands on, anything that might have any kind of protein they were eating.

Yeah, they boiled the bones so much for soup that they became just brittle. So they ate the bones of the animals because they could like bite into them. Wow. So it's pretty rough. They also, it should go without saying they ate their pack animals.

They managed to hunt for deer, which is pretty good in 30 feet of snow to hunt deer in the middle of winter and successfully. Hats off to them for that. Yeah, they got other things. They got birds here and there, like ducks and owls and I think they got a wolf one time. So they were able to forage here and there,

but it's a long winter. Everyone's clearly starving by this time. And it's the writings on the wall to the parties at these camps. So they select a group of, well, the strongest people, including the two Indian guides. Yeah. And I think it was the strongest 15 people,

equipped them with homemade snowshoes and set them out to walk across the Sierra Nevada mountains in the middle of winter with almost no food. They had six days starvation rations per person. And they were called the Forlorn Hope. That was the name of the group. Yeah, or the snowshoe group. Yeah.

And I just want to point out that this is some of the most beautiful land you'll ever see in your life. So it's not like they were in a gulag in Siberia. I mean, this was like gorgeous Sierra Nevada mountain range and this lake, it's absolutely amazing. So it must have been a bitter pill to be that close. So they're only like 150 miles away at that point

and just stuck and dying. I think even beyond the beauty, the fact that they were 150 miles from their destination dying, like you said, that's rough. It was the Forlorn Hope group where cannibalism first came up because they all ran out of food very quickly. And apparently six days in,

a guy named Charles Stanton, who you mentioned, Stanton, didn't you? Yeah, he was one of the early heroes. He was saying, hey, you guys go on without me or take me with you as provisions maybe. And everybody said, no, we can't do that. It's crazy, stop that. And they left him to die, right?

Yeah. Couple of days after that, they thought, hey, maybe Stanton wasn't so crazy. Let's figure out, let's explore the possibility of cannibalism and they did, they discussed it. And apparently at first, they decided that they were gonna draw lots, draw straws and then whoever is like the customer of the sea,

whoever drew the shortest straw was going to die and whoever drew the second shortest straw was the person who had to kill him. And this one guy, I can't remember his name, drew the straw, the shortest straw, but nobody had the heart to kill him. So they kind of just waited instead for the next person to die and they all agreed.

Yeah, they proposed dueling too at one point, like let's do a shoot out and see whoever dies will just eat them. But it was very grim, another reading perhaps? Yes. This was in December. Actually right before Christmas, sadly. In this melancholy, and this is from the snowshoe group,

the Forlorn Hope. In this melancholy situation, they consulted together and concluded they would go on trusting in Providence rather than return to the miserable cabins. They were also at this time out of provisions and partly agreed with the exception of Mr. Foster that in case of necessity, they would cast lots who should die to preserve the remainder.

So it's coming. They know it. So I think a couple days after they started talking about cannibalism, the first guy died. His name was Antoine. Yeah. And Antoine was eaten by the Forlorn Hope group. He was the first one, but definitely not the last.

No. There was a guy named Jay Fosdick. Yes. He was the next and a lady named Mrs. Foster cut the meat from his bones, boiled it and served it to everybody and everybody ate. But the one thing that was agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat relatives.

Right. So there was a guy named Jay Fosdick who died next and he was butchered and cooked and served by a lady named Mrs. Foster. But one of the things they agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat relatives. Right. Yes.

So, but apparently his father was part of the Forlorn Hope group too. Yeah, he wasn't having it. And then things apparently started to turn on the two Indian guides who the group started discussing, murdering and eating them. Yeah. And one of the other Forlorn Hope group said,

hey, we're talking about doing this, you guys might want to take off. So the Indians apparently had trouble believing it at first. They finally said, oh, wait, that's right. You guys are white men. I forgot. You totally would do that and they disappeared into the woods.

Yes, but they were later found, they tracked them by their blood. So apparently they weren't in great shape and they found them, this is where it gets a little hinky. Some accounts say they found them dead and ate them. Some accounts say they found them alive and like passed out basically and they shot them both through the head

and then ate them. Either way, they ate them. Even though there's no anthropological proof. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. We'll get to that. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with a Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So this whole, all these events take place over 33 days. The Forlorn Hope. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, the, and I imagine the cannibalism, it came in starting on day nine, um, no day 10 or 11. And then, uh, after that, they had 23, 22 more days of this. Uh, and they finally made it to Fort Sutter and said, hey, um, we got big problems. We need your help. Yeah. So let's start sending out some rescue parties.

How many was like seven of them? Uh, yeah, seven made it. Of the original 15? Yeah. So, all right, so that story's going on. You've still got the Donner party back at the camp by the lake and the river. And you've still got Reed who made it to Sacramento,

to Sutter's Fort. He tried to get supplies and men to take back to, to rescue his family. And, uh, the Mexican-American war prevented that from happening. He was essentially forced to kind of join up that effort and he couldn't get any of the men anyway because they were, everybody was fighting in the war.

So, uh, he would later go on to be part of the second relief party that went to go find them. So we'll pick that up when we get there. Right. Cause meanwhile, while the Forlorn Hopes engaged in this horror in the woods, the same stuff's going on back at the, um, camps on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevadas.

It took a little longer, I believe, but eventually, um, people started to eat the dead that a dive of starvation, right? That's true. So like I mentioned, there were some rescue efforts. There were four groups that went from California because word got back and they even started writing about it in the paper in San Francisco

that these people were stranded in the Sierra Nevadas. So, uh, February 5th, there was a quote, uh, we concluded we could go or die trying for not to make any attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us and to California for as long as time lasted. And that was, uh, one of the members of the very first relief group of seven men, 50 pounds of provisions headed out.

But Reed was a part of the second group. Right. The first group didn't leave for 13 days after the Forlorn Hope came to Fort Sutter. Um, and then yeah, Reed led the second group. So 21 survivors were brought back by the first group, 17 by the second group. The third group, um, rescued four.

And then they had to leave four people behind, including a guy named Lewis Keesburg. And, um, when the fourth group came back, Lewis Keesburg was the only person alive. Suspiciously. Well, yeah, he was accused, um, almost immediately of murdering the other three people and eating them. He was said to have been discovered surrounded

by the disfigured and cannibalized corpses of the other three people that in the frying pan, there was like lungs and livers, buckets of blood. Basically he was in this, um, crazy place that he had created himself through cannibalism. Yeah. They said he's completely off his rocker at that point. But the big kicker was that there were three uneaten oxen

legs and that when asked, he had said that he, the oxen didn't have a very good flavor. So he had resorted to eating the other people, but they had died of natural causes. He hadn't murdered them. So when the rescue party comes and gets them, Keesburg has kind of kept their arms length. Like no one's talking to them.

They don't want to have anything to do with them. Yeah. When they made camp one night, he apparently was looking at the snow and saw like a little piece of cloth and tugged at it. It was in the snow. Tugged at it a little harder, little more. And all of a sudden, he jars loose his dead daughter,

the corpse, the frozen corpse of his dead daughter who he'd last seen sending off with his wife on the third rescue party. Wow. So he had it pretty rough one way or another. Yeah. He sued for defamation later on in the court. Like right when he got back.

Yeah. The courts awarded him one dollar. Yeah. The man that he paid the court cost on top of that. So he lived the rest of his life pretty much a hermit. Well, yeah. He was derided as a murdering cannibal. Yeah.

Who enjoyed it. He denied that the rest of his life. And other people denied too. Like first, they would say like, yeah, we resorted to cannibalism here and here and here. Then later on, some of them would say, no, we didn't actually, that was just sensationalized. Well, yeah, there's a big question.

So like of whether there actually was cannibalism in the Donner party or if it was all sensationalized and fabricated by the newspapers. Right. The big question is if the Donner party hadn't resorted cannibalism, why would they lie? Well, the answer to that is they wouldn't lie about resorting to cannibalism

and the reports are probably true. But in the great tradition of William Aaron's, you need to see it to believe it as far as cannibalism goes. Sure. Most people don't genuinely dispute that the Donner party did engage in cannibalism. But the problem is there is a lack of forensic evidence. Like you said, they ate the bones and bones of animals

like the dog, uno, horses, deer, foxes, that wolf. All these bones have been found at the campsites, but they haven't found any human bones. Right. So there's a lot of explanations for that. We know for a fact that some people who came upon these scenes after the Donner party had left, ordered these things to be cleaned up and buried.

Makes sense. Other people have suggested that the Donners didn't try to process the human cadavers like they did the animal bones very gently. So they wouldn't have left butcher marks on the bones. Right. And then others say that if they didn't cook the bones, like they did the animal bones,

then those bones would have disintegrated a long time ago. Right. Then lastly, the argument against that is that these things of cannibalism, like you said, happened here and here and here and here. We only know of one legitimate Donner site that's been excavated. The others haven't been found.

They can't find them. Oh, really? Yeah. So it's possible there is evidence out there and just hasn't been discovered. But the point is, why would these people, if they did actually say this, and these are their journal entries,

why would they say that they engaged in cannibalism if they hadn't? Exactly. So Reed, in the meantime, made his way back with the second relief group, was convinced that his family was dead, but was very surprised and relieved to find that they were alive.

So can you imagine this reunion that happens when his like eight, two-year-old son was still alive? Yeah, they were one of two families that didn't have any deaths. Yeah, the Reed suffered no deaths and I believe the Breen's did not suffer deaths. All of the Donners died. Every single one of them.

Wow. Which is pretty sad. And out of the group, I think two-thirds of the women and children survived, two-thirds of the men died. And everyone over 50 died? Yeah, that was, yeah, 50 was pretty old back then I think, especially for those kind of conditions.

So there you have it, the Donner party. Basically what that did was halted a lot of immigration to California for a while until word of gold came around and then they said, screw it, I'll take my chances. It was like a year before the first gold rush and then there was the movement of 1849, the big gold rush of 1849 and that was that. I think Reed, one of the Reed wife sent a letter out

afterward that was like, don't be afraid to come out here. Just don't take any shortcuts and hurry. Right. It was basically, don't listen to Hastings. And Hastings was like, the whole time dude, he was being cursed, like on a daily basis, he was vilified and cursed.

And that pretty much scrapped his reputation as a trailblazer and anyone to be trusted. And that was the end of him. I couldn't find anything up about the rest of his life, but I know that he was pretty well disgraced by the cold. He went on to be like a merchant and, like he lived a life after that, but he apparently was remorseful for the rest of his life.

I'm sure. That's Langford Hastings. I guess if you want to know more about him, you can type his name. L-A-N-G-F-O-R-D-H-A-S-T-I-N-G-S in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And it will coincidentally enough bring up this article on the Donner party.

And I said, search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, right? This soon to be changed article on the Donner party. And yeah, since it's gonna be changed soon, maybe give us a minute. Yeah. But I said HowStuffWorks.com and search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, this is back to the future, Josh.

Okay. Josh, Chuck. Exclamation points. I just listened to the Zero podcast and heard your cries for help from across the ages. We all heard you guys go get into the Wayback machine, but I think only few of us realized that you never came out.

I could tell that something had gone wrong by the tone of your voice as you near the end of the show. I know that you were trying to send us a message. You are stuck in fifth century India. I hope you have found somewhere safe to bunker down. Do not try to fix the Wayback machine on your end. Jerry and I are working on a way to fix the broken flux capacitor remotely and bring you back.

We hope to hear you return to us on a podcast soon. And one final warning, do not, under any circumstances, use the Wayback machine while you are still strapped inside the Wayback machine. The last thing we need is an inception style time travel within time travel scenario. And that says Max Prince, Godspeed from Max Prince, assistant to Dr. Emmett, Lathrop Doc Brown.

Nice. A little bit of fun there. I've been enjoying the heck out of the saag paneer that I've been eating morning, noon, and night. Oh, yeah, man. Can't get enough of this lavash. Yeah, if you have a bit of amusement for us, I found that highly amusing.

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visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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