by Bill Schutt
Three days later the line jumper was said to have gone insane and died. Then, in a demonstration that the crew of the Peggy had lost none of its well-honed survival skills, they tossed their mate’s body overboard, fearful of the harmful effects of consuming a crazy man. Soon another round of straw-drawing took place, but this time the most popular and competent sailor drew the stubby stick (in this case an inked slip of paper). After making a final request that he be killed quickly, the man’s drunken shipmates acted accordingly and gave him a 12-hour reprieve, during which the doomed man reportedly went deaf and lost the remainder of his mind. Just before the Peggy’s second homicide/buffet was set to commence, a rescue ship was spotted. Now, though, the crew feigned sobriety long enough that they were actually rescued (although they nearly forgot the evening’s main course, whom they had locked below deck). In an appropriately downbeat end to the story, the reprieved man reportedly never recovered his hearing or his sanity.
Lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains with no food, the members of The Forlorn Hope also drew lots to determine who would be killed to provide food for the others. Patrick Dolan, a 35-year-old bachelor from Dublin, was the loser. At this point, though, no one had the heart, or possibly the strength, to carry out the killing. Someone suggested that two of the men fight it out with pistols “until one or both was slain” but this proposal was also rejected. Two days later, and before they could reconsider their options, a snowstorm rendered these choices unnecessary. Three of the group members, including Patrick Dolan, died during the night.
The next morning, according to historian Jesse Quinn Thornton, after one of The Forlorn Hope survivors was able to light a fire, “his miserable companions cut the flesh from the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan, and roasted and ate it, averting their faces from each other and weeping.” Parts of the other corpses were eaten over the next few days, but it wasn’t long before the survivors ran out of food again.
By now the survivors of The Forlorn Hope were exhibiting another symptom of starvation: They were bickering amongst themselves. A 30-year-old carpenter, William Foster, reportedly suggested that they kill and eat three of the women (presumably not his own wife), but when this idea failed to take hold he proposed that they shoot their Indian companions, Luis and Salvador, instead. The two men registered their votes by slipping away from the camp. Foster and the others eventually came upon them somewhere along the trail and there are several versions of what happened next.
In most accounts, Foster murdered the men, about whom little is known except that they had risked their lives on multiple occasions to save the stranded pioneers. In another version, Salvador was already dead when the hikers discovered them and Luis died an hour later. But however these men died, there is agreement on what happened next. According to John Sinclair, the alcalde (municipal magistrate) of Sacramento, who later presided over hearings related to the tragedy, “Being nearly out of provisions, and knowing not how far they might be from the settlements, they took their flesh likewise.” Foster, who survived the whole ordeal, was never prosecuted, nor did he garner much blame for the incident. Most descriptions of the murders portray Foster’s actions as being those of a decent man deranged by starvation.
Back in the mountain camps, more people were dying, and by the midpoint of The Forlorn Hope’s dreadful trek, four men at the Alder Creek campsite, including George Donner’s younger brother, Jacob, had perished.
Beginning in early 1847, four rescue parties (First through Fourth Relief) trekked into and out of the Sierras in fairly rapid succession. They met with varying degrees of success, tempered by cowardice, greed, and inhumanity. There was weather-related mayhem along the trail and there were deaths as well. During the ill-fated Second Relief, a blizzard forced rescuers to abandon two families of Donner Party survivors at what became known as “Starved Camp.”25 Alone on a mountain trail they thought would lead them to safety, the 13 starved pioneers huddled in a frozen snow pit for 11 days. Three of them died and the survivors were forced to eat their own dead relatives, including children. They were eventually discovered by members of Third Relief, several of whom led them out of the Sierras and to safety.
One month earlier, in mid-February, First Relief, minus several men who had decided to quit, crossed the high mountain pass where the Donner Party had been halted in November. They set up camp for the night, building their fire on a platform of logs that sat atop snow they estimated to be around 30 feet deep. The following day, seven men descended the eastern slope of the Sierras and set out across the icy expanse of Truckee Lake, arriving at the spot where the survivors of The Forlorn Hope had told them the cabins were located. First Relief member Daniel Rhoads told historian H. H. Bancroft what happened next.
We looked all around but no living thing except ourselves was in sight and we thought that all must have perished. We raised a loud halloo and then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her several others made their appearance in like manner, coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine and I never can forget the horrible, ghastly sight they presented. The first woman spoke in a hollow voice very much agitated and said “are you men from California or do you come from heaven?”
The First Relief rescuers were shocked by the condition of the survivors. Many of the skeletal figures could barely move as they spoke in raspy whispers, begging for bread. Some appeared to have gone mad. Others were unconscious as they lay on beds made of pine boughs. The stunned Californians handed out small portions of food to each of the survivors—biscuits and beef mostly—but that night a guard was posted to ensure that their provisions would remain safe from the starving pioneers.
Outside the cabin, the members of the rescue party saw smashed animal bones and tattered pieces of hide littering the area. Then there were the human bodies, twelve of them, scattered about the campsite, some covered by quilts, others with limbs jutting out of the snow. There were no signs of cannibalism.
The next day the weather broke clear, and three of the First Relievers headed for the Alder Creek Camp. In a pair of tentlike shelters they found Tamzene Donner (George’s wife), her newly widowed sister-in-law Elizabeth (who could barely walk), the twelve Donner children, and several others, including George Donner. Feverish and infirm, his wounded hand had become a slow death sentence.
Taking stock of the situation, Reason Tucker, co-leader of First Relief, knew that they needed to get out of the Sierras before another storm trapped them all there. Tucker’s other realization was a difficult one, for he knew it would be physically impossible for many of the starving pioneers to hike out with them. Some were too young, others too far gone, and although he and his men had cached provisions along the trail, there would not be enough food for the entire group. It was now time for some painful decisions.
Sickly Elizabeth Donner decided that four of her children would never make it through the deep snow, and so they would remain with her at Alder Creek. George Donner’s wife, Tamzene, on the other hand, was healthy enough to travel and she was urged to leave with her five daughters. Mrs. Donner refused, insisting that she would never leave George alone to die. She decided to keep her three youngest children with her, presumably waiting for the next relief party, whose arrival they apparently believed to be imminent.
On February 22, six members of the Alder Creek Camp hiked out with First Relief, accompanied by 17 others from the Truckee Lake Camp. That left 31 members of the Donner Party still trapped and starving.
A long week later, members of Second Relief arrived at the mountain camps, but by then the conditions at both sites had taken a dramatic downturn. In late 1847, reporter J. H. Merryman published the following account, obtaining his information from a letter penned by Donner Party member James Reed. Exiled earlier in the journey for stabbing a man to death in a fight, Reed had ridden on to California. Now he had returned, leading Second Relief:
[Reed’s] party immediately commenced distributing their provision among the sufferers, all of
whom they found in the most deplorable condition. Among the cabins lay the fleshless bones and half-eaten bodies of the victims of famine. There lay the limbs, the skulls, and the hair of the poor beings, who had died from want, and whose flesh had preserved the lives of their surviving comrades, who, shivering in their filthy rags, and surrounded by the remains of their unholy feast looked more like demons than human beings.
In 1849, J. Q. Thornton (who also interviewed James Reed in late 1847) wrote the following about Reed’s initial entry into one of the Truckee Lake cabins:
The mutilated body of a friend, having nearly all the flesh torn away, was seen at the door—the head and face remaining entire. Half consumed limbs were seen concealed in trunks. Bones were scattered about. Human hair of different colors was seen in tufts about the fire-place.
Reed soon headed toward the Alder Creek Camp, where Thornton’s account continues:
They had consumed four bodies, and the children were sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half-roasted liver and heart of the father [Jacob Donner], unconscious of the approach of the men, of whom they took not the slightest notice even after they came up. Mrs. Jacob Donner was in a helpless condition, without anything whatever to eat except the body of her husband, and she declared that she would die before she would eat of this. Around the fire were hair, bones, skulls, and the fragments of half-consumed limbs.
Second Relief departed the camps on March 1, but their blizzard-interrupted trek out of the mountains would become yet another misadventure.
When the small party of men that made up Third Relief arrived at the mountain camps nearly two weeks later, they found further scenes of horror at the cabins and more dead bodies at Alder Creek. With the last of her surviving children finally accompanying the rescuers, Tamzene Donner turned down one last opportunity to save herself, deciding instead to return to the side of her frail husband. When George Donner died in late March, she wrapped his body in a sheet, said her last good-byes, and headed back to the Truckee Lake Camp. It would be Tamzene’s final journey.
Donner Party member Louis Keseberg (who had not come down from the mountain because of a debilitating wound to his foot) later testified that Mrs. Donner had stumbled, half frozen, into his cabin one night. She had apparently fallen into a creek. Keseberg said that he had wrapped her in blankets, but found her dead the next morning. Sometime after the Fourth Relief (in reality a salvage team) showed up on April 17, their leader, William Fallon, wrote in his diary, “No traces of her person could be found.” There was no real mystery, though, since by his own admission Keseberg, whom they had found alive, had eaten Mrs. Donner as well as many of those who had died in the mountain camps. In fact he had been eating nothing but human bodies for two months.
On April 21, 1847, Fourth Relief, accompanied by Louis Keseberg, left the Truckee Lake Camp, and four days later they reached Sutter’s Fort (in current-day Sacramento). The last living member of the Donner Party had come down from the mountains.
That summer, General Stephen Kearny and his men were returning east after a brief war with Mexico. They stopped at the abandoned camp, finding “human skeletons . . . in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed,” wrote one of Kearny’s men.
The general ordered the men in his entourage to bury the dead, but instead they reportedly deposited the mostly mummified body parts in the center of a cabin before torching it. At Alder Creek, Kearny and his men found the intact and sheet-wrapped body of George Donner. There is no consensus about whether they buried him or not.
Although the tale of the Donner Party has become one of the darkest chapters in the history of the American West, time has also transformed it into something else. The dead pioneers who stare at us blankly from cracked daguerreotypes are too often a source of amusement (“Donner Party, your table is ready.”) and the butt of macabre jokes. To a public that has, for the most part, become anesthetized to the concepts of gore and gruesome death, the Donner Party is no longer the stuff of nightmares. Instead, any thoughts we might have about these pioneers usually relate to vague notions about cannibalism or perhaps the perils of taking ill-advised shortcuts.
In the spring of 2010 all that changed. The long-dead travelers were back in the news, and this time the story behind the renewed media interest was neither funny nor lurid. It was actually quite remarkable. In the 1920s, schoolteacher Peter Weddell had studied the Alder Creek area and posted signs, pointing out the presumed locations of Donner Party campsites. Although he never formally presented evidence for just how he’d come to his conclusion, sites like the George Donner Tree and the Jacob Donner Camp became popular and well-marked stops at what is now the Donner Party Picnic Ground/Historical Site. Although it took more than 80 years, modern science was finally able to show that Weddell’s camp localities were simply wrong.
In 2003–2004, an archaeological team from the University of Montana and Appalachian State University unearthed the remains of a campsite at Alder Creek that would become known as the Meadow Hearth. It contained artifacts like cooking utensils, fragments of pottery, and percussion caps—small, explosive-filled cylinders of copper or brass that allowed muzzle-loaders to fire in any weather. Each of these items dated to the 1840s. There were also thousands of bone fragments, and given the Donner Party’s reputation, interest soon centered on whether or not any of these bones were human in origin.
Six years later in 2010, the researchers had completed their analysis of the artifacts and were preparing a scientific paper that would detail their findings. Now, though, and before their paper could be published, a spate of articles and news blurbs announced that the scientists had uncovered physical evidence that led them to seriously question the very act for which the Donners had attained their infamy.
“Analysis Finally Clears Donner Party of Rumored Cannibalism,” read one media report, while Discovery News informed its readers that the “Donners Ate Family Dog, Maybe Not People.” The original subtitle, “Did ethnic prejudice spur the now infamous legend of the Donner Party’s cannibalism?” hinted at an intriguing new explanation for the notorious and long-held accusations. The subtitle resulted from the author’s mistaken belief that Louis Keseberg, the most notorious Donner Party member, was Polish (he was German) and that a prejudice against Poles had led to claims that he became a subhuman cannibal when the going got tough.26 Even the New York Times got into the act. “No Cannibalism Among the Donner Party?” read the bet-hedging headline in a Times-associated blog. My personal favorite was a headline from a blog post at The Rat: “Scientists Crash Donner Party.”
So how did this information come about? And was there any truth to it?
Initially, the archaeological team working at Alder Creek uncovered a thin layer of ash that they eventually determined to be the remains of an 1840s-era campsite. What became known as the Meadow Hearth dig also revealed concentrations of charred wood and deposits of burned and calcined bone fragments. The latter occurs when bone is subjected to high temperatures, resulting in the loss of organic material, like the protein collagen. What’s left is a mineralized version of the original bone and, importantly, one that is more resistant to decomposition than it was in its original form. Calcined bone also provides anthropologists with strong evidence that the bones in question were cooked.
All told, the university researchers collected a total of 16,204 bone fragments from the Meadow Hearth excavation, a number that makes it far easier to understand why it took them six years to analyze their data. Unfortunately, not everyone was as patient as the scientists had been.
On April 15, 2010, the Office of Public Affairs at Appalachian State University (ASU) issued a press release titled “Appalachian Professor’s Research Finds No Evidence of Cannibalism at Donner Party Campsite.” Posted on ASU’s University News site, it began with the following statement:
Research conducted by Dr. Gwen Robbins, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at
Appalachian State University, finds there is no evidence of cannibalism among the 84 members of the Donner Party who were trapped by a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the mid-1840s.
The piece mentioned Robbins’s preliminary results and how the osteologist “had been asked to determine whether or not the bone fragments were human.” Robbins, they said, analyzed 30 bone bits as a grad student and 55 more several years later while working at ASU. After using an array of histological techniques, she concluded that the bones had come from cattle, deer, horse [probably mule], and dog, but that none of the fragments could be identified as human in origin.
Next, the ASU blurb writers trotted out their big gun—statistics:
A power analysis indicated that, statistically, Robbins and [fellow researcher] Gray can be 70 percent confident that if cannibalism made up a small fraction of the diet (less than 1 percent) at the site in the last few weeks of occupation, and if humans were processed in the same way animals were processed, at least one of the 85 bone fragments examined would be human.
With statistics firmly on their side, the PR scribes at ASU loaded up, took careful aim at their own feet, and fired off this bold statement:
The legend of the Donner party was primarily created by print journalists, who embellished the tales based on their own Victorian macabre sensibilities and their desire to sell more newspapers.
They went on to add, “The survivors fiercely denied allegations of cannibalism,” a statement contradicted by Donner Party survivors, rescuers, and historians alike. Finally, and as if to further convince the world that Donner Party members were actually humans and not crazed cannibals, the ASU PR crew announced that pieces of writing slate and broken china found near the cooking hearth “suggest an attempt to maintain a sense of a ‘normal life,’ a family intent on maintaining a routine of lessons, to preserve the dignified manners from another time and place, a refusal to accept the harsh reality of the moment, and a hope that the future was coming.”
