The Pioneer Wagon Train of 87 People Trapped by Snow in the Sierra Nevada in 1846-1847 of Whom 48 Survived and Some Ate Each Other

The wagon train that became known as the Donner Party had left Independence, Missouri, in May 1846 — one of approximately 500 westbound American emigrant wagons that summer. The party was approximately 87 people when fully consolidated at Wyoming in mid-July, principally the families of the brothers George and Jacob Donner and of James Reed, with several other family groups and single travellers.

At Fort Bridger in eastern Wyoming on 20 July 1846 the party made the consequential decision. The conventional emigrant route — the California Trail via the Snake River and Humboldt River — was the safer of the two options. The promoter Lansford W. Hastings was advertising a new shortcut — the Hastings Cutoff — that went south of the Great Salt Lake, claiming to save 350 miles to California. Hastings had personally travelled the western part of the cutoff on horseback but had never taken a wagon over its eastern section. The Donners and Reeds chose the cutoff.

The shortcut was not a shortcut. The Wasatch Range crossing took the wagons nineteen days through previously untracked country and arrived at the Great Salt Lake desert in mid-August 1846 with the eastern provisions largely consumed and the oxen exhausted. The 80-mile salt-flat crossing (the Bonneville Salt Flats) cost the party four wagons abandoned in the dry lakebed and approximately a third of the surviving oxen dead of thirst. The remainder of the Hastings Cutoff to its rejoining with the conventional California Trail at Humboldt Wells took another month.

The party reached the conventional trail in late September 1846, about three weeks behind schedule compared to wagon trains that had taken the conventional route. They were entering the Sierra Nevada at the start of October.

Trapped

The Truckee Pass crossing of the Sierra Nevada — the gateway to California’s Sacramento Valley — usually closes to wagons in mid-November. The 1846 winter began about a month early. The first major snowstorm hit the Donner Party on the eastern side of the pass on 28 October 1846. They were 5 miles from the summit.

They spent four days trying to push the wagons across the pass. The summit had approximately 3 metres of snow accumulation by 31 October 1846. The wagons could not climb it. The party retreated to the shore of Donner Lake (the original Truckee Lake), about 6 km below the summit, and set up two camps: the main group at Donner Lake itself, and the Donner family — whose wagon had broken an axle further east — at Alder Creek about 9 km away.

They expected the storm to break. It did not. The Sierra Nevada was entering one of the heaviest winters of the 19th century. Approximately 7 metres of snow accumulated over the next four months at Donner Lake. The party’s improvised cabins were buried; chimneys were dug as snow shafts to maintain ventilation. The remaining oxen, intended as winter food, were progressively buried under the snow and most of the meat was lost.

By mid-December 1846 the party was starving.

The Forlorn Hope

A group of fifteen of the strongest party members — ten men and five women, mostly young adults — set out on 16 December 1846 in improvised snowshoes to attempt the pass on foot and reach California. The group was named afterwards the Forlorn Hope. The crossing was a thirty-three-day march through deep snow at temperatures sustained below minus 25°C.

Eight of the fifteen died on the march. The seven survivors — five women and two men — reached the western side of the Sierra Nevada at the Indian rancheria of Johnson’s Ranch on 17 January 1847. They had survived the final two weeks of the march by eating the cooked flesh of their companions who had died earlier.

The Johnson’s Ranch survivors organised relief expeditions back into the Sierra. The first relief party reached Donner Lake on 18 February 1847 — four months after the party had been trapped. They found approximately 50 survivors at the two camps, several of whom had been eating the bodies of family members who had died.

What happened at the camps

Four relief expeditions over the next ten weeks brought out the surviving members of the Donner Party. The relief expeditions found, at each visit, a smaller surviving population and progressively more advanced cannibalism. The final relief expedition reached the Donner Lake camp on 17 April 1847 and brought out Lewis Keseburg — the sole surviving party member, who had been alive at the camp for approximately a week alone after the death of all his companions. Keseburg’s testimony, repeatedly questioned by the relief party for moral and legal reasons, described the consumption of the dead as a calculated survival measure once the available alternatives had been exhausted.

The party of 87 had been reduced to 48 survivors. The 39 dead included two-thirds of the adult men, most of the elderly, several children below age 5, and four members of the Forlorn Hope party. The youngest survivor was an infant born during the entrapment.

Modern archaeological work at the Donner Lake and Alder Creek camp sites in the 2000s by the historical archaeologist Donald Grayson has identified cooking-related bone modification on multiple human bone fragments — confirming the cannibalism documented in the contemporary survivor testimony — and has also identified a substantial volume of domestic-cattle, oxen, and family-pet (dog) bone consistent with the survivors first exhausting the available non-human protein sources before turning to the dead.

The route over the Sierra Nevada that the Donner Party failed to cross is now called Donner Pass. Interstate 80 crosses it. The pass is open year-round to modern traffic, though the National Weather Service issues winter storm warnings for it on average 20 times per year.

A monument was erected at Donner Lake in 1918 by the Native Sons of the Golden West. The monument’s plaque commemorates the dead by name and includes specific reference to the cannibalism without ascribing moral blame. The plaque has been quietly defaced in approximately every decade since installation by people uncomfortable with that aspect of the inscription. The monument has been quietly restored each time by the California Department of Parks and Recreation.