On this day in 1847, rescuers found the Donner party, trapped high in the Sierras near Truckee Lake. Daniel Rhoads later remembered the scene:
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At sunset, we crossed Truckee Lake on the ice, and came to the spot where, we had been told, we should find the emigrants. We looked all around, but no living thing except ourselves was in sight. We raised a loud hello. 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?
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There’s not much left to say about the Donner party that hasn’t already been said. It remains a tragic story, best told, in my view, in this documentary. Which film, by the way, suggests that Ric Burns got the lion’s share of the talent in that family. Burns’s movie apparently contains some errors. But it remains a masterpiece of tone and mood. It begins with high hopes, sweeping along, as the Donner party leaves Illinois, bound for good fortune in the promised land of California. Suspense and dread then slowly build as the emigrants opt for an ill-fated shortcut across Utah. You may find yourself imploring the screen, “hurry, hurry.” But the group doesn’t. Claustrophobia and despair arrive next, as the party gets caught in the mountains and a brutal winter sets in. The quiet horror of the situation, conveyed by the sound of the wind on the soundtrack, is eerie and awful. And the rescue, finally, is less joyful than one might expect, because of the stigma attached to the members of the Donner party for having resorted to cannibalism.
On that last point — the stigma, not the cannibalism — my colleague, Louis Warren, paraphrasing California historian Kevin Starr, suggests that the Donner story has endured all these years because the Golden State needs a Gothic narrative to balance the Gold Rush as a founding myth. The more longwinded Starr writes:
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The tragedy of the Donner party provided California with its most compelling counter-fable…Taken collectively, the Donner party was Everyman in a morality play of frontier disintegration. As a group, acting democratically, representative of the variety of settlers coming into California, amateurs on the frontier, filled with hopes of a better life, the Donner party showed itself capable of bad behavior and bad decisions — which the wilderness compounded into disaster…When they were rescued in the spring, Californians forgot their heroism and remembered only that they had eaten one another’s flesh.
And with that, I’ll leave you with some friendly advice, originally offered by Virginia Reed, a survivor of the ordeal: “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” Those, my friends, are words to live by.
17 comments
February 19, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Vance Maverick
In high school, I wanted to write an opera on this subject. I was too scattered to do more than discuss the scenario with a classmate and write a few bars of an overture. (In the meantime, I see it’s been done, though who knows with what success.)
On a pedantic tangent — Ari, you should prepare right-sized versions of these large images, when you want them to appear scaled down. The image of the monument, for example, appears at 190×285, but its intrinsic size is 1995×2992! With a standard image-processing tool, you could easily scale the big image down, making a thumbnail to use in this page, loading faster and looking better. (There’s a weird glittery look in Firefox that betrays the scaling.)
February 19, 2008 at 11:08 pm
ari
you should prepare right-sized versions of these large images, when you want them to appear scaled down
I would so totally do this if I had the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Kidding aside, I noticed that they were huge images. But I had no clue what to do about that other than futzing with them in the post. So: I’ll speak to my tech guru tomorrow and try to work this out.
February 19, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Vance Maverick
The top image is a good one. I wasn’t surprised to find that it’s by Timothy O’Sullivan. He made some real classics: see the photo of Canyon de Chelly.
February 19, 2008 at 11:23 pm
ari
That’s a beautiful shot, really stunning.
February 19, 2008 at 11:24 pm
ari
Now I have to go to bed. Tomorrow’s a big day: I learn how to scale images.
February 19, 2008 at 11:56 pm
teofilo
Yeah, that’s a great shot of Canyon de Chelly.
February 20, 2008 at 12:21 am
Megan
Donner Party is also the name of an accomplished Ultimate team from Tahoe.
February 20, 2008 at 6:26 am
RobinMarie
This is all you ever hear about in elementary school growing up in the Sierra Foothills. The Gold Rush and the Donner party. Don’t know what to do with the children today? Throw them all in a bus and go look at Sutter’s Mill one more time in Coloma. Better yet, regale them on the way with cold, terrifying stories of the Donner party. Then take them on a ski trip to Tahoe and regale them cold, terrifying stories of the Donner Party on the way there, as well. On the way, stop at the park and look at the tree stump. THAT very tree stump that someone clung to dying! How thrilling! Isn’t California history amazing, kids?
So have you touched the famous tree trunk? I’ve touched the famous tree trunk, several times. I notice the tree trunk goes unmentioned here. Have we never been to the park? Or maybe this is just a distorted childhood memory, but I could swear there’s a tree you get to touch and pretend your dying and cannibalistic.
So I agree with Louis’s and Starr’s theory. This fits my experience pretty well.
My father in particular likes to reference this. Whenever it drops bellow 60 he claims an empathy with their suffering.
February 20, 2008 at 6:27 am
RobinMarie
ed: you’re. Ack.
February 20, 2008 at 9:20 am
rootlesscosmo
My father in particular likes to reference this. Whenever it drops bellow 60 he claims an empathy with their suffering.
I really like this. I was on a ferryboat once and now I stoppeth one in three.
February 20, 2008 at 9:22 am
PorJ
Is the frontier-cannibalism-morality tale a genre? Australia’s got one, too (see Hughes’ The Fatal Shore for more *juicy* details on this one)… Anybody know anything about unlucky Canadians in Alberta? Or hungry Russians heading past the Urals? (The Chilean (or Argentine?) rugby team in “Alive” doesn’t count, I don’t think).
February 20, 2008 at 10:47 am
Jamie T.
Don’t forget Alfred Packer in Colorado. His ordeal was made into a musical by the guys from South Park.
February 20, 2008 at 11:14 am
rdale
In Salt Lake City, reminders of the Donners are all around if you know where to look. At the mouth of Emigration Canyon, east of the city and the old pioneer route into the valley, is Donner Hill. Supposedly they decided to haul their wagons over the hill because the brush in the canyon was too thick, thereby adding to the fatal delay. On a clear day, from anywhere on the east bench, including the University and where I live, you can see Pilot Peak, on the other side of the Salt Flats. Hastings had visited it, or saw it, I forget which, and noted that there were springs at the base, so that all parties crossing the Salt Flats aimed for the peak, including the Donners. It’s over 100 miles away so it has to be a clear day, sadly rare but not unknown (I love to embarrass my teenage daughter to her friends by pointing it out as I’m driving them to the mall). I don’t remember Hastings’ doings here in the valley; he left a note somewhere, but that might have been up at the mouth of Weber Canyon, the even older route into the Wasatch Front. Years ago, I was doing a historical study of the bombing range and got to ride around in an Army helicopter, criss-crossing the Salt Flats all one day, seeing all the tracks out there, some of which are the Donners, although it’s hard to say which ones. (the coolest thing we saw that day, though, was an intact V-1, that had been fired off after the war, that was laying in the mud not half a mile south of Interstate 80). So I often think of the Donners.
For cannibalism, though, you can’t help but love Alferd (so he spelled it) Packer, for the sheer humor it engendered, from the apocryphal comment by the judge who sentenced him (”Damn you, there were only six Republicans in the whole county and you ate five of them!”) to the student cafeteria at the Univ. of Colorado/Boulder being named, by almost unanimous student vote, the Alferd Packer cafeteria. And don’t get me started on Packer and Preston Nutter, about whom I ran off at the keyboard here a while ago. Nutter was prospecting in the Utah Mountains and hooked up with Packer when the latter and his companions decided to head for the San Juan mountains; when they got to western Colorado they ran into a band of Utes led by Ouray, who warned them against continuing, so Nutter split off, spent the winter with Ouray, and thus missed being munched by Packer. Nutter later was the star witness at one of Packer’s trials. The transcript is in the Nutter Papers at the University of Utah.
February 20, 2008 at 11:19 am
rdale
One last thing I forgot above: I saw the premier of the documentary about the Donners, which was in Salt Lake City, and was struck by how a number of the people in the party had just lived through the Irish potato famine. None of them, as I remember, ate any human flesh; they were used to hunger. Also, Donner Hill is now capped by a number of big condo buildings, which provide a fabulous view of the valley but are right on the Wasatch Fault. Should the big one ever come, they’ll fall right down, thereby allowing me to call it “the Revenge of the Donners!”
I promise I’ll stop now.
February 20, 2008 at 11:43 am
Louis
Great posts, people.
Another recommendation: if you’re interested in how cannibal frontier stories have shaped popular culture you might want to see “Ravenous,” the 1999 Antonia Bird film starring Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, and Jeffrey Jones. It’s about a cannibal vampire in the Sierra Nevada in the 1850s, it’s very creepy, and also very funny – - intentionally so. Be warned: it’s gory, too. But I find it a striking meditation on the boodthirst of frontier expansion.
PorJ’s query is a good one. I don’t know if all frontiers have cannibal stories, but in general, I’ve long suspected borderlands and frontiers can inspire stories of decay and degeneration as easily as they can triumphalist sagas. I once was captivated enough by the plethora of frontier cannibal stories to write something on the vampire (the cannibal who transcends death by eating human flesh) as a frontier figure. Stoker’s own Dracula was formed in the endless wars on the “frontier of Turkeyland” – - which is to say on the border between East and West. If you have a strong stomach for such fare, You can read the results of my foray into that subject here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.4/ah0402001124.html
February 20, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Vance Maverick
Apparently cannibalism was an important element in captivity narratives — but cannibalism by the evil Other, not by the pioneers.
And Bret Harte wrote a novel based on the Donner Party — Gabriel Conroy, a name that will be familiar to readers of James Joyce.
April 16, 2008 at 5:05 pm
donner party tragedy
[...] in the …http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/27487/33_movies_that_deserved_more_than_they_got.html???Are you men from California? Or do you come from heaven???? On this day in 1847, rescuers found the donner party, trapped high in the Sierras near Truckee [...]