Donner Party in Truckee, California

Donner Party

In Truckee, California there stands a large stone and metal statue depicting the famous Donner Party, one of the great survival stories in the expansive history of the American taming of the West. The monument represents the spirit of adventure and perseverance that have become synonymous with the ill-fated Donner Party, but perhaps it should represent more. In fact, perhaps the statue stands as a symbol of one of the most unfairly maligned family names in American history.

To this day, when many people think of the Donner Party, their thoughts travel beyond survival and perseverance and to a much darker concept: cannibalism. For more than a century and a half, stories have circulated about how the snow-bound Donner Party, in a battle for its very survival in the winner of 1846-1847, turned to acts of cannibalism when supplies of food were exhausted.

Now, research has shown that these stories of cannibalism, which have caused a painful black mark on the Donner family name, may be completely false as they pertain to the Donners themselves. Perhaps cannibalism did occur among the Donner Party, which consisted of several different families, but evidence seems to suggest the Donner family itself never took part.

How did this story get so out of hand and why did the Donners go on to bear the brunt of the public's disgust when reports of cannibalism surfaced? The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how a series of events collaborated to create a sensational, and not entirely factual, account of the deeds of the Donner Party and, by extension, the Donner family.

Among the events that led to widespread speculation and factual inaccuracies about the Donner Party - and the Donner family itself:

An unfortunate decision was made to name the entire traveling party after the Donner family after George Donner was named captain

The improbable survival and rescue of the Donner Party touched off a media firestorm

Far-fetched reports on how the Donner Party survived became regrettably accepted as fact.

The collaboration of these three factors allowed for the wide dissemination of factually inaccurate information about the Donner Party that led the members of the Donner family to be unfairly maligned in their times and, to a certain extent, to this day.

Donner: The name of tragedy

In order to fully understand how the Donner family name became officially linked to a crisis-stricken band of Westward travelers, we must take a closer look at this group's journey and how the Donner family became the face of the group.

In 1846, George and Jacob Donner made the fateful decision that was being made by scores of American families at the time - they decided to head west for a new life in California. In April of that year, the Donner families teamed up with wealthy entrepreneur James F. Reed and the entire group headed to Independence, Missouri, which was a common start point for groups heading west (Burns, 1997). It is worth noting that, at this point, the group was not known as the Donner Party and that Reed, as the most successful of the travelers, was arguably the head of the group (Burns, 1997).

In Independence, the Donners and Reeds joined an even larger group of wagons heading west, and by late June had reached Fort Laramie at the base of the Rocky Mountains, a week behind schedule owing mostly to poor weather (Johnson, 2006). Eager to make up time, Reed convinced the group to take a shortcut that was being promoted at the time by famous western traveler Lansford Hastings, even though a friend of Reed's familiar with the route warned him that the route was treacherous and inhospitable for wagons (Burns, 1997).

Part of the larger traveling group, including the families of George and Jacob Donner, decided to take the shortcut with Reed, while the rest decided to stay on the main trail. Reed's victory, however, was far from complete. Some members of the group that had agreed to try the shortcut had grown tired of Reed's aristocratic attitude and the group instead elected George Donner captain (Burns, 1997). The Donner Party was born.

Now, of course, anything that happened to the Donner Party - good or bad - was going to have the Donner family name attached to it, due to George Donner's captaincy of the traveling party. However, it is worth nothing that the vast majority of the members of the Donner Party were not members of the Donner family. Of the 91 members of the Donner Party, only 16 belonged to the families of George or Jacob Donner, and 12 other families and a variety of teamsters comprised the 75 other members of the group (Johnson, 2006).

But George Donner had now made himself the face of a group that, unbeknownst to him at the time, was headed on a one-way trip into a snowy and frigid hell. The shortcut that was to take a week instead took a month, and when the Donner Party reached an area near modern-day Truckee, California, they found that there was now too much snow for the trails through the mountains to be passable. With dwindling food supplies and limited fuel, the Donner Party was forced to settle down for the winter and do whatever they had to in order to survive.

And everything they did was going to have their captain, George Donner's, name attached to it.

A media firestorm erupts

For the past century and a half, historians and descendants of the Donner Party have hotly debated how the group survived during that dreadful winter of 1846-1847 and whether sensational media reports at the time were accurate. Some facts, however, are more or less undisputed.

As could have been predicted, the Donner Party found itself under several feet of snow as the winter wore on, using makeshift shelters and whatever fuel they could fund to stave off the numbing cold. Donner Party member Edwin Bryant's diary entry from Dec. 1, 1846 tells of the harrowing circumstances as the snow accumulated:

"Snow about six or six and a half feet deep; very difficult to get wood, and we are completely housed up; our cattle all killed but two or three, and these, with the horses and Stanton's mules, all supposed to be lost in the snow; no hopes of finding them alive" (Bryant, 1848).

The party quickly depleted their available food rations and even slaughtered their oxen and the Donner family dog for meat. When that ran out, members of the Donner Party tried everything from boiling ox hides to leather shoe laces in order to provide sustenance for their weak and increasingly sickly lot (Bryant, 1848). Men, women and children alike were starving to death and in mid-December the Donner Party finally dispatched a 17-person crew to try to break through the snowed in passes and find help (the Donner Party, no date). Two returned, but 15 pressed on and a little more than a month later they reached Johnson's Ranch, where a relief party was dispatched.

It had been nearly two months from the time that the 17 members of the Donner Party left to get help and the time that the first relief party arrived (the Donner Party, no date). As additional relief parties arrived, what they saw was a scene out of their worst nightmares. Dozens of members of the Donner Party were dead. Forty two members of the Donner Party would die in all, including 8 of the 16 members of the Donner family, George and Jacob Donner included (Johnson, 2006).

The horrors that had been suffered by the Donner Party created a media firestorm in a nation that was obsessed with the migration west. News of this doomed party, which lost nearly half its members, was snapped up by an eager American public, enticed by lurid details.

The travails of the Donner Party were interesting news in their own right, but the story became quickly sensationalized as reports surfaced that the group had resorted to eating dead members of their party to survive. Rescuers, and even party members, reported seeing wild scenes such as dead bodies with limbs hacked off, presumably for eating, and even boiling pots of human flesh (Johnson, 2006). For example, a story that ran in the California Star in 1847 described stories of members of the Donner Party eating body parts of their family members and of one woman boiling and eating her husband's heart (Distressing news, 1847). The story goes on to say that what occurred at the Donner Party camps was "more suitable for a hangman's journal than the columns of a family newspaper" (Distressing news, 1847).

The degree of cannibalism committed by members of the Donner Party -- and, in particular, the Donner family - has long been the subject of debate. However, as stories of possible cannibalism were widely reported in the American press, the Donner family name was inextricably linked and a wave of shame spread to their descendants (Candiotti, 1996). Never mind that most of the group members were not Donners; or that the family itself camped about six miles away from most of the other families; or that the chosen route that had led to the party's despair was not selected by the Donners, but by James F. Reed, who, coincidentally, survived the tragedy.

Cannibalism accepted as fact

For a century and a half, the American public has essentially labeled the Donner Party, and, by extension the Donner family, as cannibals. The sensationalized media reports that first emerged after the rescue of the Donner Party became widely accepted with time, although they were based mostly on unreliable first-person reports and gossip (Donner cannibalism, 2006). In fact, Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, a member of the party, recalls how Donner Party members would read supposed first-person accounts in newspapers and become shocked with how remarkably accurate information was interspersed with wild fabrications and innuendo (Houghton, 1911).

Descendants of Donner Party members bemoan how, to this day, the first thing that comes to the minds of many Americans when they think of the Donner Party is cannibalism (Candiotti, 1996). "We get tired of the focus on the cannibalism. it's not a big part of the story. The strength it took to survive and the contributions they made to the settlement of California are more important," said Joseph Williamson of Corte Madera, great-grandson of survivor Nancy Graves (Candiotti, 1996).

The Donner family link to stories of cannibalism caused surviving members of the family, and their descendants, to face a degree of ostracism, even though survivors and their forebears insist that the Donner family never participated in cannibalism (Bailey, 2006). In fact, there is some growing evidence that supports the Donner family claims. According to findings announced by a University of Oregon and University of Montana research team in 2006, there was no evidence found at the Donner family campsite that suggested the family ever resorted to cannibalism (Donner cannibalism, 2006).

The research team studied bone fragments and other debris from the site, looking for tell-tale evidence such as bones cut by tools or bones that developed a polish from being boiled - no such evidence was found. Dr. Julie Schablitsky, one of the leaders of the research team, said the stories about the Donner Party had fallen victim to "sensationalized media accounts," as well as "false assumptions and oversimplifications" (Donner cannibalism, 2006). Donner family descendents said they were pleased by the research, pointing out that relatives had steadfastly maintained that no one from the Donner family had ever engaged in cannibalism.

Of course, Schablitsky herself admits the research is not perfect, and that there are not enough surviving bone fragments to make a definitive analysis that there were no instances of cannibalism at the Donner family camp site (Donner cannibalism, 2006) but, at any rate, before we label the Donner family as cannibals, we ought to have some scientific proof, and that proof is non-existent.