Westward 2014: Donner's Pass

I can easily say that Yellowstone was my second favourite place I visited out west but my first is Donner’s Pass. I’ve had a long running interest/obsession with the Donner Party. We had learned a bit about them in middle school, all wrong facts and cutsieness for age appropriate social studies.

In reality the Donner-Reed story is gruesome and a little bit epic. I know. I know. I have such odd fascinations with the weirdest things.

I was overly excited to be there and i'm not ashamed to admit it!

At it’s start there were 87 people and 23 wagons. That’s a lot of people, should have been a ton of fun right? Nope.  They decided they were going to take a short cut on the California Trail. It was called the Hastings Cutoff. I guess they had heard it would save them time. Now the usual time for the journey was four to six months, the smart people left early enough not to hit trouble in the Sierra Nevada’s. The Donner-Reed party had done the same but their trip on the Hasting’s Cutoff cost them time and wagons aka supplies.

Since they lost time they got nailed by snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada’s and they couldn’t move forward. They made camp, obviously and waited for the snow to clear up. Well two camps actually. One at Donner Lake and the other in Alder Creek Valley. They were a few miles apart two at the least. In a blizzard that’s a long way. The weeks started to drag on and their food started to run out. So hey good idea why don’t we send people to go fetch help!

Great idea! Why didn’t they think of it sooner. 15 people made snow shoes and off they went into the mountains to go find help in California! Only seven people made it to Cali. And along the way for food they ate their companions that had died of exposure.

While those 15 soon to be 7 were traipsing about the mountains the camps were starting to get creative with their food sources. I was reading this cool article on Discovery about what they ate in their final days, so like January of 1847. They had started with their dogs and the oxen and cows that died. They ate literally every part of it. They found that if they cooked the bones and hides long enough they turned into a “glue” that they could eat. Then they moved onto twigs and string. One guy, Solomon Hook said he chewed pine pitch for two weeks.

Eventually they were running out of ideas and people began to drop dead, so they ate them too. Even though there were no human bones found in the some 16,000 bone fragments at the camp site there are records that show they ate the bodies of their fellow emigrants who had died of starvation and exposure.

Remember those seven who made it to California well they convinced California to mount rescue effort. There were four relief groups all together. The first group took 21 people back with them. The second took 14. The third took the rest of the children but had to leave 5 people behind. When the fourth relief group arrived there was only one man left, he’d been eating the other four to stay alive. I don’t know why he relief groups didn’t bring extra food or something or just had everyone follow along.

So of the 80 (give or take a few along the way) who had joined the party 44 made it California. James Reed and his wife went on to become community leaders in San Jose. If you want to know what happened to everyone check out this site. It’s actually pretty accurate. A few highlights of who survived and did what…..

George Donner’s girls all married and had children, like a lot of kids!

The Reed family did quite well, they didn’t lose any of their family, even Margret’s 75 year old mum made it through. The children went on to get married and have tons of kids, except Thomas (who was 3 at the time) he never married.

Patrick Breen is a bit of a bad ass. He kept an honest diary of events. He was rescued by the second relief but abandoned at Starved Camp but John Stark of the third relief rescued him. BY the Way Patrick was 51. And two years alter he and his wife Margret had another kid!

Isabella Breen was one at the time of this all. She was rescued by John Stark and the third relief. She lived and got married and was the last survivor of the Donner Party, she died in 1935.

William Eddy was the only one of his family of four to survive. He lead the third relief and married twice before he died in 1859.

Did you know there were two Indians along for this? Charles Stanton had brought them along from Sutter’s Fort when he got supplies in October of 1846. Stanton was the mind behind the Snowshoe Party. He survived but the two Indians died or were killed.

There’s more but I’ll save you from the minutia. But seriously go read up on the families. Any how the one things researchers find interesting is the death ration of male to female. Of the 36 dead 28 were males and 8 were females…. Interesting no? 20 males survived and 24 females.

What makes this a decently epic ending to this all is the fact that the 44 survivors went on to live pretty normal lives. They didn’t go crazy and become murderers or anything weird. That’s pretty badass that they pulled themselves together after that. Like seriously! They were stuck in the mountains for months and resorted to some crazy shit to stay alive then they make it to California and the children that survived all went on to get married and have a decent family.

I really would like to go back and explore more of the area. As it was it was a small stop over on the road trip home. I had to persuade the boys to let me stop and run around the mountains for a while. They really weren’t keen on the idea at the start but I’d like to believe my over enthusiasm at the whole thing won them over. But they ended up being very happy we stopped because honestly it was such an amazingly beautiful place. If I had to get snowed in and way laid somewhere I wouldn’t mind it being there in Donner’s Pass. Maybe in a past life I was…

That little hour or so detour made my trip to San Francisco/ San Jose so much fun.

Cheers,