By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 8, 2026
What Was the Donner Party Tragedy?
The Donner Party was a wagon company of roughly eighty-seven Illinois and Missouri emigrants who left Springfield, Illinois in the spring of 1846 for California, took a poorly tested shortcut promoted by the lawyer Lansford W. Hastings, lost five weeks crossing the Wasatch Mountains and the Bonneville Salt Flats, and were caught by an early snowstorm at Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) on 31 October 1846. By the time four relief expeditions reached the snowbound camps in February through April 1847, thirty-nine of the eighty-seven had died. Forty-eight survived. The cannibalism for which the company is remembered is documented in the diary Patrick Breen kept inside his cabin between 20 November 1846 and 1 March 1847, and was confirmed in zooarchaeological detail by the Donner Party Archaeology Project’s 2003 to 2010 excavations at the Sierra-Truckee site led by Gwen Robbins Schug and Kelly J. Dixon [1][2].
The reason this episode keeps drawing readers, more than 175 years on, is that it sits exactly at the seam of three larger stories: the print-driven boosterism of the 1840s overland emigration, the geographic illiteracy of one self-promoting promoter, and the resourcefulness of women, children, and Washoe and Miwok people whose roles the nineteenth-century memorial press largely flattened. The narrative below traces the company’s chronology as the primary documents allow it, within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries.
Springfield to Fort Bridger: The Reed and Donner Wagons, April-July 1846
The two prosperous families at the center of the company were George Donner (1784-1847), a sixty-two-year-old farmer from Sangamon County, Illinois, and James Frazier Reed (1800-1874), a Springfield furniture-maker and Black Hawk War veteran who had read every emigrant guidebook he could find. They left Springfield on 14 or 15 April 1846 with nine wagons among the three founding families (the Reeds, George Donner’s family, and his brother Jacob Donner’s family), eventually pulling into Independence, Missouri to join the broader 1846 emigration that spring. The party that left Independence on 12 May 1846 numbered roughly thirty-two persons. By the time it reached the Little Sandy crossing in present-day Wyoming on 19 July, additional wagons under the Breens, Murphys, Eddys, Graveses, and others had brought the company to about eighty-seven.
At Little Sandy the company faced a decision. The conventional Oregon-California Trail bent north to Fort Hall in present-day Idaho, then west and south along the Humboldt River to the Sierra. A second option, advertised in Lansford W. Hastings’s 1845 Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, promised a shortcut south of the Great Salt Lake that Hastings claimed would shave roughly 350 to 400 miles off the route. Hastings had not, as of the spring of 1846, ridden the route west-to-east in a fully loaded wagon train. He had crossed it eastbound on horseback in the company of the mountain man James Clyman in May 1846, and his Fort Bridger letter of 12 July 1846 invited westbound emigrants to take it nonetheless. Tamzene Donner, George Donner’s wife and a former schoolteacher, recorded in a letter to a Springfield friend dated 16 June 1846 that she was wary of the cutoff. The men of the company, Reed prominently among them, were not [3].
The Hastings Cutoff: Wasatch, Salt Flats, and the Loss of Time
George Donner was elected captain at Little Sandy on 20 July 1846, and the company turned south for Fort Bridger, where Hastings had promised to guide late emigrants in person. He was not there when they arrived on 27 July; he had already started west with an earlier company. The Donner Party set out alone on 31 July to follow his trace down Weber Canyon, then turned aside at his note left in a sage bush directing them through the Wasatch by a more southerly cut. They spent eighteen days, between 11 and 28 August 1846, hacking a wagon road through the Wasatch Mountains, averaging less than two miles a day [4].
The Bonneville Salt Flats took five days to cross between 30 August and 3 September. Hastings’s letter had described the salt-desert traverse as a thirty-five-mile dry drive of two nights and a day. The actual distance was closer to eighty miles, and the company lost four wagons, thirty-six head of cattle, and most of the Reeds’ draft animals to thirst and the salt crust. By the time they regained the Humboldt at the Goose Creek headwaters in mid-September, the cutoff had cost them somewhere between three and five weeks against the conventional route. Joseph A. King’s Winter of Entrapment (1992) calls this the central mechanism of the disaster: the snow that closed the Sierra passes in late October would have closed them anyway, but the company had lost the time it needed to be already through them [5].
The Reed Banishment
Tempers, by early October, had broken. On 5 October 1846 along the Humboldt, James Reed stabbed John Snyder, a teamster, during a dispute over double-teaming a wagon up a sand hill. Snyder died within twenty minutes. The company, with George Donner absent ahead, voted to banish Reed rather than hang him. He left the next morning, bound on horseback for the relief settlements at Sutter’s Fort with a single companion, Walter Herron. Margret Reed, his wife, remained with the wagons. Reed’s banishment, by accident, would save several lives: he reached Sutter’s Fort by 28 October 1846 and would lead the second relief expedition back into the mountains in February 1847.
Snowbound at Truckee Lake, 31 October 1846 to February 1847
The company reached the eastern foot of the Sierra on the last days of October 1846. Snow had already fallen at the pass; an attempt to drive the wagons up the granite shelf on 1 November failed. They retreated to the lake at the foot of the climb, where the Breens occupied a small abandoned cabin built by the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party in November 1844, and the rest threw up two new cabins and a series of brush-and-hide lean-tos. The Donner family’s wagons, six miles back at Alder Creek, never reached the lake; they wintered in three brush shelters covered with wagon canvas and pine boughs. Patrick Breen, an Irish farmer from Keokuk, Iowa, opened his diary on 20 November 1846 and would close it on 1 March 1847. His entries, with their plain reckoning of the weather, the diminishing food, and finally the eating of the dead, are the single most cited primary source for the winter [1].
Snowfall on the lake side of the pass that winter was extraordinary. Tree scars later measured by U.S. Geological Survey staff put the maximum snowpack at the Donner camp between twenty-two and twenty-five feet. The cattle the company had driven over the pass with them died and were buried in the drifts; meat had to be cut from the snowpack with axes. Margret Reed boiled hides for soup. Tamzene Donner, at Alder Creek, kept her three small daughters and the older children in storytelling and lessons for as long as she could. Eliza Donner Houghton, who was three years old that winter and survived to write The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate (A. C. McClurg, 1911) sixty-five years later, remembered the cold and her mother’s voice [6].
The Forlorn Hope: 16 December 1846 to 17 January 1847
On 16 December 1846 fifteen of the strongest of the snowbound company, ten men and five women, set out on improvised snowshoes to walk the hundred miles down the western slope to Sutter’s Fort. They carried six days’ rations. They were guided as far as they could be by the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador, vaqueros sent from Sutter’s Fort with provisions in October who had been caught with the company. The party became known, after the fact, as the Forlorn Hope. Of its fifteen members, seven survived: five women (Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Murphy Foster, Harriet Pike, and Amanda McCutchen) and two men (William Eddy and William Foster). Eight died on the snow: four men, including Charles Stanton, who walked into the storm on 21 December rather than slow the party further; the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador, shot by Foster on 9 January 1847 when the company had been twenty-five days without food; and two more from cold and exhaustion. The seven survivors reached the Indian rancheria at the head of Bear Valley on 17 January 1847, after thirty-three days on the trail and unmistakable cannibalism of those who had died. Eddy’s testimony, taken down at Sutter’s Fort in late January, was the first detailed account of the company’s situation to reach the settlements [7].
Four Relief Expeditions, February-April 1847
Four organized relief parties carried survivors out of the mountains between mid-February and late April 1847. The First Relief, seven men under Aquila Glover and R. S. Mootry, reached the lake camp on 18 February 1847 and led twenty-three survivors out on foot starting 22 February. The Second Relief, ten men under James Reed himself and William McCutchen, reached the lake on 1 March 1847 and led seventeen more out, with a smaller forward column under John Stark distinguishing itself by carrying three children physically through the worst stretch of Summit Valley. The Third Relief, four men under William Eddy and William Foster (both veterans of the Forlorn Hope) reached the lake on 13 April 1847 and brought out four more, including Eddy’s son Georg Foster’s daughter Catherine had already died. The Fourth Relief, the so-called Salvage Party under William Fallon, reached the camps on 17 April 1847, found Tamzene Donner and Lewis Keseberg as the last survivors at the lake (George Donner had died at Alder Creek on or about 25 March 1847; Tamzene refused to leave him, then walked the six miles to the lake to die there in early April), and brought Keseberg out on 21 April 1847. Tamzene’s body was never recovered [8].
The Final Tally
Of the eighty-seven members of the Donner Party as it crossed the Wasatch in August 1846, forty-eight survived to enter California. Thirty-nine died: in the deserts and on the trail before the snow, in the cabins at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek, on the Forlorn Hope march, or during the relief expeditions themselves. Of the families, the Breens (nine persons) lost no one; the Reeds (five persons in the snowbound camp after Reed’s banishment) lost no one; the Donner brothers’ households together lost both fathers, both mothers, and four children, with the Donner children themselves carried out by the relief expeditions. Statistically, women and children survived at higher rates than men. Joseph A. King, working from the registers compiled by the survivor Eliza Poor Donner Houghton and by the Sutter’s Fort relief logs, presents the ratio as roughly two to one for adult women over adult men, a pattern subsequent demographic work by Donald Grayson has corroborated [5].
The Cannibalism Question and the Sierra-Truckee Excavations
Patrick Breen’s diary entries for late February and early March 1847 are explicit. On 26 February 1847 Breen wrote that “Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would commence on Milt. & eat him. I dont [sic] think that she has done so yet, it is distressing.” On 28 February he recorded that the Donners at Alder Creek had been eating their dead “for some time.” His final entry, 1 March 1847, notes that James Reed and the Second Relief had arrived. The diary, with the Reed family papers, is held at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where Kristin Johnson’s transcriptions and contextual notes have for thirty years been the standard scholarly access [1][9].
For most of the twentieth century the cannibalism question rested on the survivors’ verbal accounts, the relief-party reports, and Breen’s diary. The Donner Party Archaeology Project, directed by Gwen Robbins Schug (then at Appalachian State University) and Kelly J. Dixon (University of Montana), excavated the hearth at the Donner family’s Alder Creek camp between 2003 and 2004 and analyzed the assemblage through 2010. The recovered faunal assemblage included roughly sixteen thousand bone fragments. Schug’s zooarchaeological analysis identified cattle, horse, dog, deer, rabbit, and rodent. Conspicuously, she did not identify human remains in the Alder Creek hearth. The interpretation Dixon and Schug published in American Antiquity in 2010 is careful: cannibalism is amply documented in the textual record at both camps, the Alder Creek hearth simply did not preserve cut-marked human bone, and a hearth that hot would have destroyed cancellous bone in any case. The Sierra-Truckee site analysis is consistent with the Donners eating, in extremity, every other available source first [2].
Why the Forensic Picture Differs from the Documentary One
The textual record, anchored by Breen’s diary, James Reed’s letters and 1871 narrative published in the Pacific Rural Press, William Eddy’s deposition, and the relief-party reports of Reed, Glover, Eddy, and Fallon, is unambiguous about cannibalism at both camps. The forensic record, recovered 156 years later from a hearth that had been disturbed by twentieth-century treasure hunters, is incomplete by chance and by chemistry. Holding the two registers together, as Schug and Dixon do, is precisely the discipline of working from absence: the missing forensic signal does not falsify the documentary one, it qualifies what the surviving material can tell us [2].
Hastings, the Truckee Washoe, and the Story That Got Told
Lansford Warren Hastings (1819-1870) survived the disaster he had helped cause. He fought in the Mexican-American War, practiced law in San Francisco, attempted to organize a Confederate colony in Brazil after 1865, and died at sea in 1870. His Emigrants’ Guide, the document on whose advice the Donner Party turned south at Little Sandy, was reissued through 1849 with the cutoff still in it. The road he had described as a shortcut became, in James Clyman’s later phrase, “the most god-forsaken country I ever saw.”
The Truckee River and the lake the company starved beside take their names from Truckee, a Northern Paiute leader (named Tru-ki-zo by his own people) who guided the 1844 Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party over the Sierra by what would become the wagon road. The country east of the lake is also Washoe homeland; the Washoe word dao for the lake’s deep blue water predates Truckee’s. Throughout the Donner winter the snowbound company rarely crossed paths with Washoe families, who wintered at lower elevations along the Truckee River and Carson Valley by long practice. Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage (Oxford University Press, 2008) restores the Washoe and Miwok contexts to the standard narrative, alongside Kristin Johnson’s archival recovery of the Reed and Breen family papers and the women’s correspondence the nineteenth-century editors had truncated [10][9].
What the Record Will Not Tell Us
Tamzene Donner’s last weeks at Alder Creek and at Keseberg’s cabin between roughly 25 March and 21 April 1847 are inferred from Keseberg’s later testimony, contested at the time and contested since. The exact date of George Donner’s death is given variously between 22 March and 28 March 1847. The number of emigrants who left Independence in May 1846 is given variously between thirty-one and thirty-three depending on which children of the Reeds and Donners are counted. The Forlorn Hope route through the canyons of the North Fork of the American River is reconstructed from Eddy’s account, the Graves and Murphy women’s later interviews, and the topography itself; an exact track has never been demonstrated. The 1847 relief-party numbers in some early newspaper accounts differ by one or two from the registers compiled by Houghton in 1911 and corrected by Kristin Johnson in the 1990s. The discipline here is to give the range and to name the source for each end of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people were in the Donner Party and how many survived?
The company numbered about eighty-seven persons as it entered the Wasatch Mountains in August 1846. Forty-eight survived; thirty-nine died. The eighty-seven figure consolidates the Reed, Donner, Breen, Murphy, Graves, Eddy, McCutchen, Keseberg, and several smaller households who had joined the company at the Little Sandy crossing on 19 July 1846. Eliza Poor Donner Houghton’s roster in The Expedition of the Donner Party (A. C. McClurg, 1911) and Kristin Johnson’s corrected lists in the 1990s are the registers historians use today.
What was the Hastings Cutoff and why was it disastrous?
The Hastings Cutoff was a route advertised in Lansford W. Hastings’s 1845 Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California as a shortcut south of the Great Salt Lake. Hastings had crossed it eastbound only, on horseback, in May 1846 and had not tested it with a fully loaded wagon train. The Donner Party turned south for the cutoff at Little Sandy on 20 July 1846, spent eighteen days hacking a road through the Wasatch (11 to 28 August), and lost four wagons and dozens of cattle on the eighty-mile Bonneville Salt Flats traverse (30 August to 3 September). The detour cost three to five weeks against the conventional Fort Hall route, time the company needed to be already across the Sierra before the snow.
What was the Forlorn Hope expedition?
The Forlorn Hope was a fifteen-person snowshoe party (ten men, five women) that left the Truckee Lake camps on 16 December 1846 to walk to Sutter’s Fort for help. They carried six days’ rations and were guided in part by the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador. Seven survived the thirty-three-day march, including Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Murphy Foster, Harriet Pike, Amanda McCutchen, William Eddy, and William Foster. Eight died, including Charles Stanton, the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador (shot by Foster on 9 January 1847), and others to cold and exhaustion. The survivors reached the rancheria at the head of Bear Valley on 17 January 1847.
How many relief expeditions were there and who led them?
Four organized relief parties reached the snowbound camps between February and April 1847. The First Relief, under Aquila Glover and R. S. Mootry, reached the lake on 18 February and led twenty-three survivors out from 22 February. The Second Relief, under James Reed and William McCutchen, reached the lake on 1 March and led seventeen out. The Third Relief, under William Eddy and William Foster, reached the lake on 13 April. The Fourth Relief (the Salvage Party) under William Fallon reached the camps on 17 April and brought Lewis Keseberg out on 21 April 1847.
What did Patrick Breen’s diary record about cannibalism?
Patrick Breen, an Irish farmer from Keokuk, Iowa, kept a daily diary inside his cabin between 20 November 1846 and 1 March 1847. His entries for late February 1847 record explicitly that Levinah Murphy had spoken of eating the body of Milt Elliott, that the Donners at Alder Creek had been eating their dead “for some time,” and that the snowbound families at the lake had begun to do the same. The diary, held at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, is the contemporaneous primary source on which most subsequent reconstructions rest. Kristin Johnson’s transcriptions remain the standard scholarly edition.
What did the Donner Party Archaeology Project find?
The Donner Party Archaeology Project, directed by Gwen Robbins Schug and Kelly J. Dixon, excavated the central hearth at the Donner family’s Alder Creek camp between 2003 and 2004 and analyzed the assemblage through 2010. The hearth produced about sixteen thousand bone fragments representing cattle, horse, dog, deer, rabbit, and rodent. Schug’s zooarchaeological analysis did not identify human bone in the Alder Creek hearth, a result Dixon and Schug interpreted in their 2010 American Antiquity paper as consistent with the camps having exhausted every other food source before the documented cannibalism began, and with hearth temperatures sufficient to destroy cancellous bone in any case.
Who was Tamzene Donner and why did she stay at Alder Creek?
Tamzene Donner (1801-1847) was George Donner’s third wife, a former teacher from Newburyport, Massachusetts, and the mother of three small daughters who would survive the winter. The Fourth Relief reached Alder Creek on 17 April 1847 and offered to bring her out. She refused to leave George, who was dying of an infected hand wound; he died within days. Tamzene then walked the six miles to the lake cabins. She died at Lewis Keseberg’s cabin in early to mid-April 1847; her body was never recovered. Eliza Donner Houghton’s 1911 The Expedition of the Donner Party reconstructs her last weeks from the testimony of the surviving children and the relief-party records.
What role did the Truckee Washoe and Miwok people play?
Two Miwok vaqueros from Sutter’s Fort, Luis and Salvador, were sent ahead in October 1846 with provisions and were caught at the lake with the company; they were among the Forlorn Hope and were shot by William Foster on 9 January 1847. The Truckee River and Donner Lake (Washoe dao) sit on Washoe homeland; the Washoe wintered at lower elevations and rarely crossed paths with the snowbound emigrants. Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage (2008) and Kristin Johnson’s editorial work restore the Washoe and Miwok contexts that nineteenth-century memorial accounts elided.
What happened to Lansford Hastings?
Lansford Warren Hastings (1819-1870), the lawyer whose 1845 Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California advertised the cutoff that delayed the Donner Party by three to five weeks, served in the Mexican-American War, practiced law in San Francisco, and after 1865 attempted to organize a Confederate colony in Brazil. He died at sea in 1870. His Emigrants’ Guide was reissued through 1849 with the cutoff still in it. James Clyman, the mountain man who had ridden the route eastbound with Hastings in May 1846 and warned westbound emigrants against using it with wagons, called it “the most god-forsaken country I ever saw.”
Where can the Donner Party be studied today?
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley holds Patrick Breen’s diary, James Reed’s letters and Reed family papers, William Eddy’s deposition, and the bulk of the surviving correspondence. The Sierra State Parks system manages Donner Memorial State Park at the lake site, including the High Sierra Crossings Museum. The Alder Creek archaeology assemblage is curated at the University of Montana. Kristin Johnson’s edited Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party (Utah State University Press, 1996) and Joseph A. King’s Winter of Entrapment (1992; 2nd ed. 1994) are the working scholarly references. Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the standard one-volume narrative.
