The Donner Party Disaster | The Frontier

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier. All built into a single platform you can use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit servicenow.com slash UK slash AI for people. The gazelle is downwind from the lion. Suddenly the lion strikes and... Noir? Is that a shoe shop? What are you doing in the savannah? Avoiding cyber criminals of course! Must be an easy way. Cyber criminals can find your business anywhere. Get protection against online threats with cyber essential certification. For cyber security from the experts visit ncsc.gov.uk slash cyber essentials. The lion has picked up the man's scent and he's going to need those trainers. It is September 1846 in what will one day be called Nevada. They have come so far these travelers across thousands of miles of hard packed prairies, roiling rivers, rugged wilderness, even a desert that nearly cost them their lives. But at last here they are along this river, the Humboldt, with the mountains rising far ahead and the promise of California beyond. The journey has taken a brutal toll. They've lost oxen, equipment, supplies. Some of them are dreadfully sick. Every mile seems to come harder than the last. Weeks earlier they'd made a fateful decision to abandon the established trail for a new route, one that promised to save time or so they hoped. Instead it cost them weeks. And now time is the enemy. In the distance, high in the Sierra Nevada, for these travelers known as the Donner Party, winter is already on its way. Hi everybody, Don Wildman here. I'm your host and this is American History Hit. Welcome. In 1846, in the midst of the Great Migration West, a group of pioneering families set out across the frontier to settle new lands and start new lives. But a series of poor decisions, consequential delays, and misleading directions led them to a dreadful fate. It is a story that has become synonymous with doom and disaster in the American imagination. It is the story of the Donner Party. What happened to these unfortunate folks has become legend. But their ordeal was all too real, and it is detailed in an incredible book entitled The Indifferent Stars Above, The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party, published in 2009 and has since then become one of the most widely read and respected accounts of this extraordinary tragedy. And the author of that book is our guest today, Daniel James Brown, New York Times bestselling author of historical nonfiction, great books like Boys in the Boat and Facing the Mountain, both on my shelf here in the office. Mr. Brown, welcome to American History Hit. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me. You're well known for your vivid portraits of historical events, for breathing life into history. On the page, curious what drew you to this tale of so much suffering and death? Yeah, well, for one thing, I have a sort of remote and improbable family connection with the Donner Party tragedy. My great-great-uncle who led the first rescue expedition up into the Sierra Nevada mountains in spring of 1847. And so when I was growing up, actually, my uncle Bill had a copy of the diary from that rescue expedition. I remember handling it. So for me, the Donner Party was just sort of, it felt real to me. It felt like there must be real people behind it because I could actually hold this book in my hand and look at the handwriting. Well, talk about a primary source. Yeah, it was terrific. It's now at the Dancroft Library in Berkeley. Fantastic. It is interesting when you visit this story geographically when you're up there around Tahoe and up in the Sierras. It's so close to us if you're in California nowadays, but that was so far away back in the day and that was the problem. The story happens in 1846, which is in the earlier half of the Great Western migration, which actually goes back to the 1700s, of course, but ramps up in the 1840s and lasts then until the 1880s. At this point, what were people like those in the Donner Party expecting to gain from their new lives out west? Were they cognizant of the danger at hand? I think they were cognizant, but probably not cognizant enough. So most of the people that made up the Donner Party came from the upper Midwest, from the drainage of the Mississippi River Valley. Life had been hard in the mid-1830s and 40s. There had been a great financial panic in 1837 that had caused the price for farm commodities to plunge. There was a form of malaria called the Agu that afflicted many of the people that were trying to farm the bottom lands along the river there. On top of that, in the middle of that, they began to read pamphlets about California, this land of milk and honey, this land where crops practically sprang out of the ground. So there was a carrot and stick effect at work in terms of people wanting to get out of this old dank place with long miserable winters, the Agu, and reading about and wanting to go to this much more promising land called California. Boy, it speaks to the lack of hygiene in those days. The fact that back east, you had terrible water systems and terrible sewage systems, if they existed at all, and it was creating these terrible plagues in the cities especially, but all over the place. And we don't talk about that as much as we talk about economic distress as being the prompter for so much, but really that was what was going on. It was. I mean, it was just, it was a really tough life, particularly for people that were trying to farm the land. But as I say, the real draw was what they were reading about in this almost mythical place called California. And California figures heavily into this conversation, into this whole tale really, because there's a pivotal moment we'll get to in a moment. I'm really fascinated by the fact that there were guidebooks that were published for these settlers and such a sort of popular information was available to people. I guess they had been hearing about it through magazines and so forth. I mean, that's how they'd order these pamphlets. I just, I'm interested in that kind of nuts and bolts of life. There were. There were magazine articles being published in the Midwest and the East. There had been Americans trickling into California for a couple of decades at this point, although it was sovereign Mexican territory. Many Americans had just sort of slipped in and settled down. Some of them got permission from the Mexican government and some just settled where they happened to be. So there was an American presence in California, even before the Donner party and these large wagon trains began to move. We're part of a series of podcasts here on the frontier in general. And we, of course, talked about the Oregon Trail. That figures centrally into this, but there are also many other trails as well. And that's the kind of thing they were hearing about and reading about and interested in. But in general, in summary, these folks were basically looking for a way to a better life, free or very cheap land and general opportunity for them and their younger ones. Let's introduce some of the main characters in the story. But we should first say that this is a larger group of travelers than most folks, certainly I realized. This is some 87 people who will comprise the Donner party alone, but you focus on two families. Where had these two families come from and where was their destination specifically? The Reeds had come from Springfield, Illinois, and the Graves came from a little town called Sparland just north of what is now Peoria, Illinois. And they were both large families. The Reed family was somewhat different from most of the immigrants in the party were farmers intending to find land to farm, or they were like the Eddy family, they were cabinet makers, tradesmen. But the Reeds were actually, James Reed was a businessman, a quite successful businessman and quite a prosperous businessman. So he and his family traveled in this oversized wagon with a door on the side. It was almost like a little cabin on wheels, whereas all the other families were traveling in these little farm wagons. And so there was a certain amount of resentment about the Reeds from the very beginning. They were perceived as having a good deal more money than the rest of the party and sort of holding themselves above the rest of the party. They were in the Airstream, weren't they? They were in a kind of Airstream, yes. Everybody else was in the camp trailer that I camped in as a kid, that's for sure. Donner family, George, his wife, Tamsen, several children. There was George's brother, Jacob, his wife and five children. The Reed family, as you say, James, his wife Margaret, and their four children. And all of these folks together have decided to head for California, as opposed to other places, right? They were specifically decided not to go to Oregon, but they were going to California, which was in a few years going to turn out to be a whole different story, but for now it was about the land. Yes. So along the trail, some of them were undecided whether to go to Oregon or to California. I see. And sort of infamously, they came across this character named Lancert Hastings. Yes. Lancert Hastings had written up one of these pamphlets that people have been reading backies called The Immigrant's Guide to Oregon and California. In that pamphlet, Lancert Hastings had talked about this, what was theoretical cutoff that would take people directly down to California, rather than going up to Fort Hall in Idaho, a much longer route from which one could go either to Oregon or to California. But Lancert Hastings had an ulterior motive. He had made a deal with John Sutter. John Sutter was this Swiss immigrant who had established a little kingdom in the Sacramento Valley. And they had agreed to create a real estate development, if you would, where they would sell land to these immigrants who came to California. So Lancert Hastings, having published his book, realized that he didn't want people going to Oregon. He needed people to turn south and head for California. Wow. And as the Donner Party was traveling westward, many of them had read Hastings' book. But they came on, I think it was July 11th, they came across a character named Wales Bonnie, who was carrying an open letter from Lancert Hastings, saying, it's great, I've got this cutoff. When you get to Fort Bridger, take the south road, and I've got a cutoff that takes 300 miles off the trip for you. And so at that point, some of those who had been thinking about going to Oregon, revised their thinking and decided to head for California instead. And at that point, they would have been traveling for a long, long time, because this all really begins in mid-May of 1846. And it's all about when they leave, right? This is a major theme of this story. They leave Illinois first, and they reach Independence, Missouri in mid-May 1846. Here is where traditionally folks stocked up on provisions, joined the trains that they would join, and they do so, heading out with a train of 500 wagons, am I right? I mean, this is a major migration of people. Yes. At this point, they're part of that larger migration until they get to Fort Laramie in Wyoming territory, right? Or Montana, I guess it is. Yes. So it's actually when they get, they arrive at Fort Laramie on July the 4th with a large party. As you say, they were at various times part of a party called the Boggs Party, and at different times they were part of a party called the Russell Party. These families were joining and leaving different groups as they moved across the country. The core of the Donner Party got to Fort Laramie on 4th of July, and then moved on towards Fort Bridger in Wyoming. And that's when they encountered Wales Bonney and his letter from Lancet D'Eisting's. So it wasn't really until they got to Fort Bridger that people had to make a decision, and that's the point at which they decided to follow Lancet Hastings' alleged shortcut. A fateful decision, as we will soon find out. Tell me about James Climan, who they meet at Fort Laramie. We did a show, Four History Hit, actually at Fort Laramie, which is way out there even today. It's so far out there, and then you can only imagine what a psychology, kind of personally that's how I'm hoping the audience experiences this episode today, not only because of your book, but also that sense of the pioneer mindset, which had to have been a bizarre experience. I mean, you're among your own with this huge wagon trail, but endless skies, really hard travel, even before we get to where they're going to get. And this sense of like, when is this going to end has to be setting in in a big way. So the motivation to find a shortcut is very understandable. It's very understandable. And you mentioned Climan. Climan was a mountain man who knew the inner mountain west very well. And he advised the Donner Party that James Reid in particular, not to take that road, that there was no road through what Hastings had claimed was his shortcut. Probably pointed out at this point that Lancelot Hastings himself up to this point had never traveled his shortcut. And as they were heading west, he was heading east, and he was discovering that his shortcut was almost entirely impossible. That's great to hear. So there's real deception going on here. He tries to make better for himself in the end. But in the beginning, this is really a scheme, isn't it? It is a scheme. As I say, it's a real estate scheme when it comes right down to it. Yeah. Hastings stands to make a great deal of money if he can get enough people to take this shortcut, get to California in time for him to sell land. There's another co-conspirator here, Jim Bridger, the proprietor of Bridger's board. He also had a vested interest in people taking this southern route, so they would pass through his fort on the way to California. So he also talked up this supposed shortcut. Yeah. I mean, the irony is, of course, in two years or three years, I guess, the whole story is going to change and everybody will be charging to California because of the gold rush. But at this point, that doesn't exist. So they have to find these ways of drawing people away from the Northwest, which is a more popular alternative. They understand that the shortcut that we're talking about takes them across what's called the Great Salt Lake Basin, right? The Great Basin, which is an enormously desert region, and we'll get to this in detail. On July 20th, 1846, the bulk of the Springfield Group turned on to that familiar route towards what's called Ford Hall. That would be the Oregon Territory. But not the Donner Party. They have decided not to. Twenty wagons of them, including the Donner Reads families, turn left to Fort Bridger and the Hastings Cut-Off. There are 29 men, 15 women, 43 children. They choose George Donner to lead them. Why is that? You know, it's not entirely clear to me why. George Donner doesn't actually... Well, he gets injured fairly soon after they get to the mountains. He doesn't seem to particularly exert a great deal of leadership, as far as I've been able to tell. And so, you know, I don't have a crisp answer for that. He was willing to do it, or something. Being a captain of one of these expeditions was kind of like being the sole law authority. They had quite a bit of authority over discipline and so forth. My understanding, and maybe this is a false opposition thing, but maybe my understanding is that he was a more peaceful, a more peaceful disposition than, say, James Reid, who was known to be kind of an authoritarian, right? I think that's true. I mean, people, as I mentioned earlier, people didn't particularly like James Reid. James Reid had a reputation for being somewhat haughty and authoritarian and ill-tempered. And so, it makes sense that they would have chosen somebody like George Donner, who could theoretically pull people together. This turned out to be a very fractious bunch of men and women also with very independent spirits. Many of them were descendants of people who had fought in the Revolution. They believed very strongly in their individual rights and their individual prerogatives. And so, as we will see as time goes on, they weren't a group that was going to naturally knit together very well. So, let's take a short break here. But before we go, hold this thought in mind that a whole lot of people, they were 500 wagons in this train. Most of those head off to the Oregon Territory. This group of 20 or so wagons decides on this trickier route. They believe they're making the right choice. Little do they know the fateful consequences of that dubious decision. It's glow time on Magic Radio. The gazelle is downwind from the lion. Suddenly the lion strikes and... What? Is that a shoe shop? What are you doing in the savannah? Avoiding cyber criminals, of course! That's been an easy way. Cyber criminals can find your business anywhere. Get protection against online threats with cyber essential certification. For cyber security from the experts, visit ncsc.gov.uk The lion has picked up the man's scent and he's going to need those trainers. There once was a woman who lived in a shoe. A size too snug but what could she do? But that's not where her story ends. Thanks to a little help from her experience friends, she got her score into much better shape and relocated to a box fresh new place with room to grow and a mortgage to suit. Now, she lives in a spacious four bedroom cowboy boot. Better your experience credit score to help get mortgage ready. Experience. Better your score. Better your story. We're back with author Daniel James Brown talking about the Donner party. So the party, this group of 87, has split off from the wider party and are now heading to their supposed shortcut but things soon begin to go wrong. How so? Yes. So as they turn southwest, they come to the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. And this is really where things start to go terribly wrong for them. This was the route that Hastings, Lancet Hastings, had proposed to them. When they get there, they find a note fluttering on a bush from Lancet Hastings who had met a previous group and tried to lead them through the mountains. Hastings' note says, the road ahead is not good. Wait here or send somebody ahead to meet me. So James Reid goes ahead, makes it through the Wasatch Mountains. The Wasatch Mountains are this dense jumble of boulders and scrub oaks and just extremely difficult terrain. James Reid makes it over the mountains to the Salt Lake Valley. Finds lands for Hastings. Hastings only agrees to go partway back with them to show a better route. So they ride up to the top of the mountains. Hastings sort of waves it some canyons to one side and say, try that route there and then disappears back to guide the party. He has a head of them across the salt flats. So what is now the Donner Party, as you say, it's full complement of 87 people now. They spend days trying to hack their way up through this canyon in the Wasatch Mountains. Just almost completely impenetrable. They're having to cut oak trees down and roll boulders out of the way and it takes them days just to get finally to the summit of the Wasatch Mountains. So it delays them terribly. Just to clarify things, we're not even at the Sierra Nevada yet. This is long before that. There's going to be a desert after this. This is the first of these obstacles that happens up. Now I just have to clarify, they find a letter. How would they have found that letter? Was it just nailed to a tree or something? It was literally a fluttering on a bush. It's almost, it seems somewhat improbable, doesn't it? But the reality is, and I traveled the whole route of the Donner Party and you could see this in places, there were literally ruts cut in the rocks from the wagons that had come before. So it was fairly easy and also many of these people were good trackers. It was reasonably easy for them to see where wagons had come before. And it was in one of these roads, if you will, that they found this letter from Hastings. And he didn't know that it would get so hard because he'd never traveled that far east because he was doing this backwards, right? He was doing it from California. Yes. Wow. Amazing. But he's so close. So this is why I have to read this book because there's so many details that even heighten it even more than we think we know. It gets really heightened later on. But even beforehand, the ironies and the switchbacks of the story, if you will, are incredible. By late August, they'd gotten out of the wasatch and they'd begun to cross this desert. The desert we're talking about is the Great Basin, right? First thing to have to cross actually is the salt flats, Great Salt Lake Salt Flats. And that turns out to be another absolutely hervick experience. When I was riding the indifferent stars above, I traveled the whole route of the Donner Party and I wanted to experience what they did. So I managed to be at the time of year that they were there, I would be there. So I went to Salt Lake City in August and walked out on the salt flats to see what that was like. And I can tell you from personal experience, just a few minutes walking across the salt flats in August, you go kind of blind. The glare off the salt is so intense that your field of vision shrinks down to almost nothing. And of course, it's just beastly, beastly hot. And it's just I walked for maybe 20 minutes and I couldn't wait to get back to the car. But they set off, so the Donner Party sets off across the salt flats. And they start by traveling at night, but they travel the whole first night and then they're only partway across and the day comes and gets hotter and hotter. They run out of water. Their oxen are extremely important to them. That's the only way they're going to get anything anywhere is if they get their oxen to pull their wagons. The oxen start to break down. The next night, the oxen start wandering away into the dark. And so one by one, they wind up having to abandon their wagons and just sort of stagger ahead on foot. There is a place called Pilot Peak where there's a spring at the base of the peak that they are aiming for. Eventually, they all get in there. But by then, they have abandoned some of their wagons on the salt flats. Many of their oxen have wandered away and can't be found again. So they're starting to get in serious trouble even before they start trekking across the deserts of Nevada. It also takes a big toll on their wagons. The wagons get stuck in the muck because there's moisture underneath the surface, right? Yes, exactly. In places the salt is very hard crust. In other places where there's moisture underneath, it's very boggy and so the wagons get bogged down. Yeah, this sort of classic scenario of the really, really hot days and then the really cold nights, all the conditions that that causes, they're losing their animals. How many days does it take it to get over this desert because they've run out of water, right? Yes, they've run out of water. As I say, some of them, like the Reed family, had to leave their wagon and some Reed would have part of his family in the wagon. He had to go back, bring water back to them and bring them in off the desert. So it took three or four days altogether to get everybody finally across the salt flats to Pilot Peak in the Springs and try to reconstitute what was left of their resources. They're starting, by the way, to have to sort of jettison possessions along the way because as the oxen are wearing down, getting weaker and weaker, they've been carrying hundreds and hundreds of pounds of provisions and their furniture and tools in their wagons and they're starting to have to jettison things now to still lighten the wagons to make it possible for the oxen to proceed. All of this has the consequence of delaying this trip further and further. What was supposed to take just, I guess, two days? This was supposed to be a 40-mile trip in the shortcut. It takes 80 miles of desert in six days, which doesn't sound overwhelming, but they start to pile up these days and it's going to all become this problem of having been late-leavers and then also these delays along the way. At some point, they rejoin the original trail at Humboldt River and that Hastings Cut-Off has cost them, by that point, a month of time fateful. Do they know they're in trouble at this point? I think they must because they're looking at this point. They're at the Humboldt River. They can see this here in Nevada ahead of them and they see that there's snow up in the mountains already. To be honest, they should still have been able to get over the mountains. What's about to happen happens a little earlier in the winter than it ordinarily would. Ah, interesting. As late as they are in another year, they might have made it over, but they're not going to make it over in 1846. There's a moment, a personality thing that happens here when two wagons become entangled and all the tensions that have been going on, they reach a boiling point. Out of frustration, one of the hired help who's trying to work on these wagons, a guy named John Snyder, I think, began to beat the oxen of Reeds and James Reed in a Veins and Snyder, they have a huge fight. He pummels them with his whip handle. This has a chain reaction of sorts. Yes. John Snyder was a teamster for the Graves family. He got into it with Reed over these tangled up teens. James Reed wound up stabbing John Snyder and Snyder died flying there in the sand. As I mentioned earlier, Reed was not particularly popular in the party. Now he's murdered this very popular young man, the Graves family's teamster. Many of the party wanted to hang him then and there. Particularly a character named Lewis Kiesberg wanted to upend one of the wagons and hang Reed. Finally, they decided against that, but they exile him from the party. They send him ahead with no resources at all, no gun, no mount, no food, nothing. That night, his stepdaughter, Virginia Reed sneaks out of camp, goes ahead and finds her stepfather, gives him a gun and some biscuits, and that's all the only resources she has to give him. He heads off on his own, looks like it will be a death march because he has no resources at all, but he heads off towards California on foot. That'll turn out to be important later in the story because he actually does eventually very disbarrely, but he makes it through the mountains before the snow is closed in. All the while, he's thinking about his Airstream wagon back behind him. Darn it all. How'd that thing get over the mountains, by the way? Anyway. That was not going to. An elderly man named Hart Koop is also was ejected from the wagon and forced to walk on his own to relieve the animal load. I mean, they're basically losing their animals as they go along. They find this guy a few days later sitting by a stream, feet swollen. This is like a movie, as far as foreboding symbols, isn't it? He was not ever seen again after that. Yeah, so Hart Koop, the reality is, he was an older man. He was 60-something, which to me, doesn't seem so old, but he was one of the oldest people. He was a Belgian immigrant. As his feet were swelling up and getting worse and worse, he kept begging different families to take him in their wagon so he could ride in the wagon. Most of these people did not ride these wagons. Most of these people walked a thousand miles across the continent. They used wagons for hauling provisions, but they walked. Hart Koop got to the point where he couldn't walk anymore. Finally, they just left him sitting by the roadside that the day came when nobody else would take him in the wagon. The party just proceeded without him. That was the end of Mr. Hart Koop. So the party is becoming very fractious at this point. Tempers are running very short. The whole thing with John Snyder has happened. Hart Koop thing happens. One of the young men is killed by an accidental discharge of a weapon. Another young man dies of tuberculosis, all this while they're crossing the van. Those things are really unwinding before they ever get to the mountains. Right. And they have run unto Native Americans. There are contentious moments. They chase away their animals, shot some of the horses. By that time, by the time we're moving into September, they have lost nearly 100 oxen and cattle, which of course means they can't take as many provisions as they would like. They're having to leave things behind, I imagine, because they can't carry them. So as we move into September, this becomes the fateful time. There is a little bit of good luck. One of the men has returned with provisions and two Native American guides, right? Miwok guides named Salvatore and Louise. There must be a sense of ah good. We're not that far away if they can find us. Yes. I think there was some hope at that point. They had sent a man named Charles Stanton ahead, realizing that they were in trouble as they crossed Nevada. They sent Charles Stanton ahead over the mountains to Sutter's Fort. And he returned with a number of mules carrying several hundred pounds of flour and supplies and also accompanied by these two young Native American Miwok young men, Louise and Salvatore, who were to act as guides through the mountains going forward from that point. So that was a kind of ray of hope. All of a sudden there were some mules for carrying stuff and then some additional provisions. So as they actually entered the Sierra Nevada mountains, start working their way up the Truckee River, that's the situation. Yeah. Now we're moving dangerously into the season that we will talk a lot about. By October 20th, the group reaches Truckee Lake, which is now known as Donner Lake. Snow begins to fall and they face the worst terrain yet through what is now known as Donner Pass. We're about 7,000 feet in elevation, which in a car doesn't seem like that much, but boy, when you're walking it and you're feeling altitude sickness, don't forget these people, don't know what they're doing out here. Family by family, they begin to traverse this landscape and the Donners, being the leaders of this group, remain in the back. They're bringing up the rear. And an axle breaks on Donner's wagon and they have to stop and repair it, yet another delay. At that point, something really bad happens to George Donner. George Donner cuts his hand, slices his hand open, trying to repair this axle. And it's a bad wound. And at the same time, this monster snowstorm rolls in. So the rest of the party proceeds another 5.5 miles to the eastern end of what we now call Donner Lake, which was then called Truckee Lake. But the Donner family, George Donner and Jacob Donner and their families, get bogged down short of Donner Lake. So as the snow starts coming down, they hastily try to erect just some shanties, brush shanties to take some shelter in. Because George Donner's hand is so badly injured, he's unable to do much physical work, like to cut trees and try to make actual cabins. The rest of the party gets as far as I say the eastern end of Donner Lake. It's snowing heavily now. They decide they better try to get over the pass while they can. So they start up this boulder-strewn rock wall that is Donner Pass at the other end of the lake. And they struggle and they slide and they just run into a terrible amount of trouble trying to get their oxen up this snow-covered boulder-strewn cliffs that are in front of them. And they can't make it. The wagon starts sliding backwards. So they try again. They still can't make it. Stanton and the mules go ahead to try to break up path for the rest of them. They get bogged down. The snow is falling now at just an extraordinary rate. This is what happens in California sometimes. We get these atmospheric rivers that usually go into the northwest. But when they come into California and hit the Sierra Nevada mountains, they just get extraordinary levels of snow. So finally they realize they're not going to make it and they retreat back to the eastern end of the lake in desperate situation. And then over the next couple days, they hastily erect some shelters, log cabins. There's one cabin pre-existing from an earlier party and then they build two other primitive log cabins. That's interesting to me. I did not know about the previous existing cabin. That would have been the plan, I guess. Oh, let's do this. We could all live in these kinds of things. I always wondered how that happened. I also wondered about it being just a few cabins, but indeed it's a whole community of cabins, right? They are good enough to building these things and they're kind of spread over an area, a larger area. There's three main cabins. They're spread over yes, several miles. One thing, Franklin Graves. The family I follow most closely and in different stars above is the Graves family. For a number of reasons. I'm focused on one young woman in that party. But Franklin Graves, the father of that family, is a particularly independent-minded man. He builds his cabin off a mile or so from where the others are. We now have the Donners living in Brush Shanties at a place called Older Creek. They have the Graves living in their cabin a mile or so away and the rest of them encamped at the eastern end of the lake in these log cabins. They just didn't like each other at this point, did they? They were not getting along. They were not getting along very well now. When we talk about cabins, we're talking about, obviously, one room, right? I mean, these are small spaces with a fireplace in there at least. Yeah, actually, the Graves cabin, they built a partition in the middle. The Reed family moved into one half of it and the Graves family moved into the other half of it. They were just square or rectangular log structures covered with hides. One of the things they did when they realized they were trapped was they began to slaughter their oxen. For one thing, oxen were wandering around getting lost in the snow and it couldn't find them. So they lost a number of potential meals in that way. But the oxen that they still had, they slaughtered for the meat. Then they used the hides to cover these cabins. So the roof structure of these cabins was composed largely of the hides of their slaughtered oxen. Yes, not very stable. And I just wanted to underscore, we're not talking about a foot of snow here. We're talking about 10 feet of snow, maybe even upwards of 20 feet, correct? That's an impossible scenario. It's impossible to move around in. And as I say, one of their principal problems was the mules that Stanton had brought, the oxen they'd been driving, cattle and horses they'd been driving all the way across the country, were wandering around dying and then getting buried in the snow and they had no idea where they were. So those cabins began to be built in around late October, October 31st, I believe, by the middle of December, things have grown desperate, obviously. And they begin to think we have to send out some kind of mission, some sort of rescue attempt. And they come up around December, the mid-December, December 16th with what they call the four-lorn hope trek. And I had to go over this a little bit because it sounds kind of like, wow, they really got organized about this thing and they even named it, right? Yeah, I think it was named a little later by a guy named Charles, who in a cat fashion wrote the first history of the Donald Party. But this is actually the focus of my book. I was very focused on the Graves family partly because this was the idea of Franklin Graves, the father of that family. After several attempts to hike out of the mountains, all of which failed, it occurred to him to try to manufacture snowshoes out of some oxbows that they had saved. So they made 15 pairs of homemade snowshoes. And then Franklin Graves is daughter Sarah, who's the character I follow principally in the book, another daughter named Marianne Graves, and a number of other relatively young, healthy people set off on snowshoes to try to get over Donner Pass, what we now call Donner Pass, and get down to a place called Johnson's Ranch. Johnson's Ranch is the first American settlement they would come to in the foothills of this year in Nevada. So they set off and they take six days worth of provisions. All they're down at this point, all anybody has is just dried beef, basically jerky, if you will. They take six days worth of rations, thinking that it will be a six-day journey. It turns out to be over a month long journey. And it's just a horrific thing. It's a very interesting thing. One thing I often like to remind people is that the Donner Party is a story of death and tragedy, and we have these caricatures of people sitting around lying on bones. It's also a survival story, though. Slightly more than half the people survived. And many of them who survived survived because some of these people who set off on the Borgorn Hope expedition, a few of them actually made it through and got word out that the rest of the world was happening. Incredible, not only physically making it, surviving this thing, but navigating it. In those conditions, there'd be no trail. Of course, there's no trail. We're in 10 feet of snow at best. It's outrageous to think that they could even move, let alone find their way to the place. Yeah, they did fairly well the first few days. Charles Stanton, who had been over the mountains once before, volunteered to go with them. And these two young Miwok boys, Native American boys, also went with them. So they were among the 15 who set off to get over the mountains. But Stanton went snow blind and died relatively early in the trip. And it was very clear that the Miwok boys didn't really know where they were. It was impossible. The snow was so deep that landmarks weren't there. So they got lost relatively quickly, started to wander down into the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, and things just went terribly wrong. And that's actually where the first cannibalism happened was amongst that party that was trying to hike out. Let's talk about that. What happens when human beings decide to do this, from what you understood from accounts and so forth? Do you just become kind of insane and make decisions that are irrational, or was this a highly rational decision? I don't think it was terribly rational. I think it was emotionally driven. So the Snowshoe Party, the Forkhorn Hope Party, got bogged down on Christmas another a second giant snowstorm bogged them down. And for days they couldn't go anywhere. And they began to die. Well, several of them began to just lose it mentally, raving and stripping off their clothes and running out in the snow and just acting insane. And so several of them died within the first 24 hours or so of getting bogged down there. The thing is, they believed that they were starving to death, but I don't think they were. People can go weeks and weeks without eating. They can't go without water. They can't go a long time without eating. People were dying of hypothermia and exposure, but they thought they were dying of starvation. They were terribly hungry. I mean, you'll get me wrong. Their bodies were wasting away. They were terribly hungry. But they believed that their problem was that they were starving to death. And so that's really, I think, where the rationale for cannibalism began, was that they literally thought that if they ate something, they would survive. And you have to remember these people in the Snowshoe Party, they had a mission. They all left loved ones back at the lake camp. They needed to get to California not just to save their own lives, but to save the lives of their brothers and their sisters and their mothers and their fathers who were still stranded back at the lake camp. So they were highly motivated to survive, and they thought they needed to eat something in order to survive. There were those in the group that would not partake in this. Some were ensured that they wouldn't have to eat their own relatives, which is always a nice thing. Yes. Among this guide to be reminded, there are two native guides, Salvador and Luisa, we mentioned before, Miwok, who were separately warned by one group, one person in the group, that there were those plotting to butcher them for their meat. And they quickly scat out of town. How quickly they can do that, but they're gone. They were then found a few days later near death with starvation, and they were shot, right? Yes, if here's their word, there were conflicting stories about how they met there, and exactly. William Foster, I'm quite sure, actually shot them. He claimed later that they, well, there were various versions of the story that they either were already dead, or that they were nearly dead. But they had followed Luisa and Salvador's bloody footprints and tracked them down and killed them and then consumed their flesh as well. I see. It's pretty gruesome. January 17, 1847, six survivors of the Forlorn Hope mission reach a ranch in California and spread the news of the trapped immigrants. This would have been the first people heard that this group was up there, right? Yes. And that's why it was so important that some of them get through, was that otherwise nobody in California would have known what was happening in the mountains. Okay, let's take another break, digest this, so to speak. Daniel and I are going to discuss the rescue attempts and the legacies of this tragic tale. Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit servicenow.com slash UK slash AI for people. Okay, we're back with the story of the Donner party in California. Daniel, at this point in early 1847, this ordeal has lasted for months. October when they first hit the snow, now we're in January and the group is in a hopeless state. But there appears to be a light at the end of this tunnel for at least some of these people. How did the rescue attempts pan out? So once Sarah Graves and the rest of the snowshoe party reached Johnson's Ranch and told the Americans there what was happening, a number of the people they found at Johnson's Ranch had traveled with them earlier with the Donner party traveling across the plains. So the Tucker family and the Ritchie family, for instance, they already knew them. And so when the snowshoe party reached Johnson's Ranch and told their tale of what was happening in the mountains, a gentleman named recent Pete Tucker, and this is the gentleman who was my great, great uncle, led the first expedition up into the mountains to try to get to the Lake Camp and the older Creek Camp where the Donner family was to try to get them some kind of relief. The problem was the snow was still deep and still falling on and off. And so they could take supplies on pack animals up to the snow line. But from that point on, traveling east now back towards where the Donner party was in trap, all they could take was what they could carry on their backs. And of course, they had to feed themselves these rescue parties. And so by the time they reached the encampment at Donner Lake, there was not that much help they could provide. They handed out little bits of dried beef, but they didn't have the kind of resources that people would need there to continue to survive. So about all they could do was take the healthiest of them and try to lead them back out of the mountains. And so the first rescue expedition was fairly successful than that. They took a number of particularly children, young, relatively young, healthy people back out of the mountains. And at this point cannibalism hadn't actually begun to happen at the camps, but it was about to begin. So there was a first rescue expedition. And then we mentioned earlier that James Reed had been exiled from the party, sent ahead, had made it through the mountains before the snow to California. So tell me how James Reed is reunited with his family. So yes, Reed was reading the second rescue expedition up into the mountains. And he came across the first Relief Party coming back down out of the mountains. And lo and behold, there was his wife Margaret and some of his children. And this was an incredible moment of reunion. They had asked each other when Reed had been exiled from the Donner Party back in the desert of Nevada. And Reed had no particular reason to think her husband was alive and vice versa. So it was an incredibly moving moment. But it only lasted for a brief time because Reed had to continue on up into the mountains while his wife was being brought back down out of the mountains, traveling west. But an incredibly moving moment. But Reed and his expedition got to the Lake Camp and brought a number of people, mostly children, started back out. And then they got caught in yet another horrific snowstorm right up on the top of Donner Pass. And they got stuck there. They built a fire on a raft of pine logs. And over several days, that fire just melted this pit deeper and deeper into the snow. And so all these children and other people that Reed had brought out ran out of food while living in this pit in the snow and again began to die. And some of those bodies were eventually cannibalized as well. Wow. I want to have perspective on this. So we're talking about, eventually, we'll be talking about four different rescue attempts, one in February, one in March, two in March, and one in April. The first gets out at that time in February, living in those snow cabins. They had lived for a month in there, that's, or much more, what am I saying? Yeah, 13 people had died, but they were managing to survive. And at that point without the cannibalism, when they arrive, when those rescuers arrive, they take out, I think 23 survivors leave with those rescuers, some were just too weak to go with them, and they remain behind. It's just another one of these details of the story that most people don't realize is that there were these chapters of rescue attempts that kept coming in small waves with massive amounts of time in between, which had to have been terrifying for the people left there, because they were the weak ones anyway. March 1st to the 4th is the second relief. That's the James Reed mission, and all that tragedy that follows. Meanwhile, George Donner, we've lost track of what happened to him. So things are particularly grim at the Donner camp, which they say is at Alder Creek, about 5.5 miles east of the Lake Camp. The Donners were living there with a number of young men who had been teamsters and drovers for them. And these were young men who had no resources at all. And so they began to die. George Donner, believe it or not, is still even alive, even though his hand has been infected and this infection is creeping up his arm. He's got gangrene. He's got gangrene spreading. But he and his wife, Tamzene, are still alive. Sometimes called Tamzene, are still alive. The things are very, very grim at the Donner family camp as well. Yeah. And this is the, by March 14th, there was the third relief to what becomes known as the Starved Camp, which has been where the cannibalism is discovered among those trapped individuals. George Donner dies at Alder Creek, his wife, Tamzene, refused to leave and later is found dead too. The fourth and final rescue comes on April 17th, where they finally remove those last survivors from the camp. And that is kind of known as the end of this ordeal, really, because they are taken to California. So let's talk about the final outcome of all of this tragedy. We began with 87 folks leaving, you know, from that fork in the road. We end up with 48 survivors and 39 deaths. That's still pretty good compared to what I would have thought, right? Yeah, well, that's why I do like to remind people, and in my book, I try to approach it to this to some extent, that this is also a survival story. Yeah. And that's what's always interesting to me as a writer is people that confront great adversity and survive. And that's why I focused on this one young woman, Sarah Graves, who was a member of the Snowshoe Party, lost both her father and her husband on that expedition. But there were survivors and those people did remarkable things in order to survive. So I like to celebrate that. They weren't killing each other to do this. They were using the bodies of those who were deceased and using that protein, basically, right? Yes, that's true. I think in all cases, except for Luis and Salvador, these Miwok boys who were pretty clearly killed by William Foster on the way out. And there's also the possibility, to be honest, that Lewis Keisberg. Lewis Keisberg was the last survivor, the last living person at the lake. And when he was found, he was surrounded by butchered bodies. And he also had in his poppets gold coins that belonged to the Donner family. So there is and was, always has been a certain amount of suspicion about whether Keisberg killed the other three. There were four survivors at that point, whether Keisberg killed any of the other three. And in fact, Keisberg later in life was demonized as a deliberate cannibal, whether true or not, that followed him for the rest of his life. Yes. This story becomes very quickly legend, right? I mean, there's a lot of outlets that tell these kinds of stories about the West a lot back east. And boy, they jump all over the story, don't they? Yes. Even before the last of the survivors were brought out of the mountains, there were, I guess we'd call them, cabalade stories that were largely fabricated, but which dwelt very heavily on the cannibalism. And there had been cannibalism, and that's just an undeniable fact. But the stories exaggerated those and were based on almost no factuality at all. So almost immediately in the popular imagination, and this is prevailed for the 180 years since, as I think I said earlier, when we think of the Donner Party, we think automatically of people sitting around campfires and lying on human bones. And there's just so much more to the story, and these people were real people. But yes, it became a sensational story and entered American mythology even before the last of the survivors were out of the mountains. Did they publish all the accounts? I mean, is there just a drove of stuff to read from that time, like primary source material? Yeah, a guy named Charles McClashen published the first history of the Donner Party, and he was able to interview and did interview many, many survivors. This was, I don't remember, about 15, 20 years after the fact. But he was able to go around California interviewing the grave sisters and the reeds and various people. So that first book, the history of the Donner Party, is full of firsthand accounts. Now, they don't all match. There's common contradictions, but that's the first reliable source of information about the tragedy. Yeah. What happens to Lansford Hastings? He caused this whole thing, didn't he? Lansford Hastings, he was just a scoundrel through and through. He briefly fought in the Mexican-American War in California. Denny became a major in the Confederate army. And after the Civil War, he got the idea of creating a Confederate state in Brazil. So he wrote the Emigrants Guide to Brazil. Oh, no. Don't go, folks. Don't go. He had a sort of checkered career and continued to be something of a scoundrel. Awful. Oh my God. Yeah, he really was. Greed and his family settled in San Jose, California after their rescue. They dabble in proscopes. Along comes the gold rush. Some of these folks were in exactly the right place at the right time, ironically, weren't they? Yeah, so a number of them prospered from the gold rush. But he'd prospered mostly from real estate transactions. He became quite well to do, bought a great deal of land in San Jose. The campus of San Jose State University is built on some of his land. So among the survivors, he was one who prospered. They did not all prosper, though. Many of them had actually relatively short and tragic lives after the event. The person I focus on in my book is this young woman named Sarah Grace Fosdick. She lost, as I say, her husband and her father on the snowshoe party coming out. She married one of her rescuers, a man named Richie. They settled in the Napa Valley and they had a couple of children. But within a few years, William Dill Richie, her husband, was apprehended with some stolen mules and he was winched from an oak tree. So she was widowed a second time. She married the third time, a man named Samuel Spires, and settled in Hanmore Children. But Sarah died at 46 of heart failure. I think many of them suffered physically from the after effects of the ordeal and certainly suffered mentally from the after effects. Well, certainly the PTSD aspect of this must have lived with them for ages. Though it was sensationalized, they did prove that the cannibalism actually happened. I mean, there was archaeology done on this. Yes, there's been some archaeology, but it's also if you look at if you discount all the sensationalist newspaper accounts, none of them can be counted on. If you look at the actual documentary evidence, for instance, Sarah and her sister both wrote afterwards, wrote letters back to Illinois, talking very frankly about what had happened. Reason Tucker, who led the first rescue expedition and then subsequent expedition, saw first-hand bodies that had been butchered at the Lake Camp. So there's a lot of sort of dispassionate, objective documentary evidence also. A number of these people just frankly said what they had done. And so it's not really an open question at this point. But the tenor of the whole thing has changed, certainly largely due to your book, I guess, from 2009 over these last years, you must have felt the change as well. I mean, it's gratifying to know that the positive aspect of what these people pulled off is underscored as much as the scandalous stuff. The whole event, the Donner party in general, just reminds us how thin the line can be between ambition and catastrophe, especially on the frontier, which we've been talking about so much in this series we've been doing. It's a tale of suffering, but also a warning about the risks of overconfidence, the limits of human endurance, the impossible choices people face when their survival is on the line. But that was the story of so many of these wagon trains, especially the ones that went off the trail. For the few among us who have not read this man's book, I recommend you do. We have been discussing the indifferent stars above, the harrowing saga of the Donner party, boys in the boat about the Olympic rowers became a George Clooney movie as well as, and then there was the under the flaming sky and facing the mountain about Japanese internment. There's a whole list of books that you must get and read this man's work. It's been a great honor to meet you, Daniel. Thank you so much for doing this. Well, thanks so much for having me. I've enjoyed it. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. It's glow time on Magic Radio. Jack and Jill went up the hill in their new convertible roadster. The handling was good and under the hood was a hybrid electric motor. Their new set of wheels came with a great deal thanks to their experience score. They got a better rate because their score was in shape. Now their walking days are no more. Better your experience credit score to help unlock better rates on car finance. Experience. Better your score. Better your story.