Donner Party

Donner Party group of emigrants to California who in the winter of 1846-47 met with one of the most famous tragedies in Western history. The California-bound families were mostly from Illinois and Iowa, and most prominent among them were the two Donner families and the Reed family. In going West they took a little-used, supposedly shorter route after leaving Fort Bridger; the route proved arduous and and they were delayed. They suffered severely in crossing the salt flats W of Great Salt Lake, and dissensions and ill feelings in the party arose when they reached what is today Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada. They paused (Oct., 1846) to recover their strength, and early snow caught them, falling deep in the passes and trapping them. Their limited food gave out, the cold continued, and the suffering of the group, some two thirds of them camped on Alder Creek and the remaining 22, including all of the Donner family, camped at Donner Lake, grew intense.

A party of 15 snowshoers that attempted to make its way through the snow-choked passes in December to get help suffered horribly; about half of them survived to get aid from Sutter's Fort. Many of the emigrants died during the winter. Some surviving members of the Donner Party were reputedly driven to cannibalism, but despite archaeological examinations of the remains, cannibalism has never been definitively proved. Finally, expeditions from the Sacramento valley made their way through the snowdrifts to rescue the hunger-maddened migrants. Only about half of the original party of 81 reached California. The survivors later disagreed violently as to the details of (and particularly the blame for) the disaster. Donner Lake, named for the party, is today a popular mountain resort near Truckee. The large bronze Pioneer Monument (1918) erected at the lake is dedicated to the party. Nearby Donner Pass has a U.S. weather observatory.

Bibliography: See C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party (1879, repr. 1966); G. R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger (1936, new ed. 1960); and an epic poem by G. Keithley (1972).

Donner Party. Of all the tragedies on the migration west in the mid–nineteenth century, none has earned more notoriety than the ill‐fated Donner Party whose eighty‐seven members were trapped by snow in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846 and reduced to cannibalism. Part of a large wagon train that had left Springfield, Illinois, in April, the Donner Party, named for the family of wealthy George and Tamsen Donner who owned three of the twenty wagons, split off from the main party to try an untested shortcut through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. The party reached Truckee (now Donner) Lake just east of the summit of the Sierra Nevada mountains on 31 October only to be caught by a blizzard. After the first death on 16 December, ten men and five women set out on makeshift snowshoes to get help. In their thirty‐three‐day trek, eight members, all males who either died or were murdered, were eaten by the remainder. When a rescue party reached the surviving members of the group that had remained behind, they, too, reported that they had resorted to cannibalism to survive. All told, forty members of the party died before the last one was brought out in April 1847. Although the trek westward reveals many examples of personal sacrifice and sharing, the Donner Party's fate highlights the ambitiousness, folly, recklessness, and ruthlessness that also marked the westward movement.

Bibliography

Jared Diamond , Living through the Donner Party, Discover (March 1992): 100–7.
Joseph A. Kind , Winter of Entrapment: A New Look at the Donner Party, 1992.

Clifford E. Clark Jr.