Donner Party

During the winter of 1846–1847, the Donner party of 79 overland trail emigrants were trapped in the snows of the Sierra Mountain Range and resorted to [Page 209]cannibalism for survival. One might feel pity and sympathy for their sufferings, but one might wonder if their fate was unavoidable. Thousands made the same journey at about the same period, meeting similar dangers yet arriving in Oregon or California safely. What made the Donner party different?

George and Jacob Donner and James Reed organized families from Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio into a wagon train in April of 1846 and set out from Springfield, Illinois. After crossing the crest of the Rocky Mountains, the party split up, some wagons joining other trains. George Donner, a 62-year-old farmer, led his party and made a fateful decision.

At Fort Bridger, Lansford Warren Hastings' Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California (1845) gave the emigrants an option. It told of a good road, 300 miles shorter than the route usually followed by wagon trains to California, which led southwest of Fort Bridger, then through Utah's Wasatch Mountains, along the fringe of the Salt Lake Desert, and rejoined the main California trail. George and Jacob Donner and James Reed thought this the best route to follow, and thus led their party away from the main trail into the miseries of the desert and trackless mountains.

Opinions of historians regarding Lansford Hastings differ. Julia Altrocchi (1945) calls him “well intentioned but utterly unwise” and tells that “he had made all his Western investigations on horseback and knew nothing of the 15 miles a day travel by oxen, with long intervals between watering places.” Joseph Pigney states that “Hastings and James Clyman had crossed the Sierra Nevadas on horseback a few weeks before the Donners reached Little Sandy (the beginning of the cut-off) and had barely made it through.” He went on to say that, at the time, Hastings knew nothing of his “cut-off,” and Pigney (1961) called Hastings “an ambitious young man seeking colonists for a new empire that he, himself, hoped to rule.” Pigney's statement was supported by a contemporary, John Bidwell. According to Morgan (1963), Bidwell asserted that Hastings wanted to instigate a revolution that would wrest California from Mexico and establish an independent republic, of which Hastings might be president:

There was another motive attributed to Hastings. He was employed as an agent for Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez, who operated the trading post that was virtually the whole town of Fort Bridger, which lay on the route of the cut-off Hastings was to describe in his guide. In this capacity, Hastings would have every reason to lead all prospective customers possible through Fort Bridger, which lay on the route of the cut-off. In fact, C. F. McGlashan (1962), publisher of the Santa Barbara Press and the Truckee Republican in the 1870s, who interviewed many of the survivors of the Donner party, stated

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