The Archaeology Of The Donner Party
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The Archaeology Of The Donner Party

Donald L Hardesty

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eBook - ePub

The Archaeology Of The Donner Party

Donald L Hardesty

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About This Book

The tragic saga of the Donner Party has inspired both legend and scholarship ever since the survivors were rescued from the High Sierra snows in the spring of 1847. When archaeologist Donald L. Hardesty and four colleagues—a historian and three other archaeologists—turned their collective attention to the ordeal of the Donner Party, the result was an original and sometimes surprising new study of this pioneer group and their place in the history of overland migration. Now available for the first time in paperback, The Archaeology of the Donner Party combines the fruits of meticulous investigation of the Sierra Nevada sites with scientific analysis of artifacts discovered there and interpretation of the documents of the party and the memoirs of survivors. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Hardesty and his colleagues offer new insight into the ordeal of these ill-fated emigrants and demonstrate the vital role that archaeology can play in illuminating and expanding our understanding of historical events. Contributions by Michael Brodhead, Donald K. Grayson, Susan Lindstrom, and George L. Miller.

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Year
2005
ISBN
9780874173666

1 : The Donner Party Saga

The opening of the California Trail by the Bartleson-Bidwell party in 1841 launched an episode of cross-country emigration unparalleled in American history. In the years between 1840 and 1860, an estimated 300,000 emigrants journeyed overland to what is now California, Oregon, and Utah.1 Despite the large number of emigrants who took the overland route and the many hardships they faced along the way, only a few groups met with real disaster—the Donner party in 1846–1847, the Jayhawker party in Death Valley in 1849, and the Willie handcart party in 1856 are the best known.2 Of these, the Donner party tragedy exemplifies particularly well both the myth and the reality of the overland emigrant experience. The events that took place in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–1847 have become an icon of the American westward movement.
George Donner, a prosperous sixty-two-year-old farmer from Illinois who had moved five times before, was the elected captain of the party. He started the journey with his sixty-five-year-old brother Jacob and James Frazier Reed, age forty-five, an ambitious and well-off furniture maker. The three families—thirty-two people and nine wagons in all—left Springfield, Illinois, on April 16, 1846. Sometime during the second week in May, they arrived in Independence, Missouri, the eastern terminus of the California Trail. There they joined 2,700 other emigrants and five hundred wagons that had aggregated for the trip west. The wagons left Independence without much coherence but later formed into more organized parties. Reed and the Donners joined one of these, a company of forty-nine wagons under the captainship of Colonel William “Owl” Russell, somewhere in the vicinity of the Kansas River on May 20, 1846. They arrived at Fort Laramie, in what is now Wyoming, toward the end of June without event—although Mrs. Reed’s mother, Sarah Keyes, died of old age on the way—and continued on their journey to the Rocky Mountains.
On July 19, 1846, the Russell party reached the Little Sandy River just beyond South Pass, Wyoming, and the Continental Divide. Here, the emigrants had to decide whether to follow the more established trail or take the new shortcut advocated by California promoter Lansford Hastings in his popular 1845 emigrant guidebook. The shortcut went past Fort Bridger, Wyoming, down through the Wasatch Mountains, and across the Great Salt Lake Desert to the Humboldt River, where it rejoined the main California Trail. For the first few years after the California Trail was opened, overland emigrants hired guides to take them the rest of the way. By 1846, however, as historian John Unruh notes, that had changed: “By now the trails were clearly visible, informative letters from previous overlanders had been published and otherwise widely circulated, and guidebooks were also available. Many emigrants that year carried Lansford Hastings’s volume.”3 The Donners and the Reeds did. They convinced themselves that the shortcut would save time and disregarded the advice offered at Fort Laramie by mountain man James Clyman, who had served with Reed in the Black Hawk War and had just completed a trip with Hastings eastward from California along the shortcut.4
Most of the Russell company opted conservatively for the well-marked trail to Oregon, but some split off from the main group and moved toward Fort Bridger with the intention of taking the Hastings cutoff. Among them were the nine wagons of the Donner and Reed families along with eleven other wagons. They were among the last of those traveling in the great emigration of 1846 to leave the Little Sandy. The group elected George Donner as its captain, although the aristocratic James Reed appears to have been more influential. After reaching Fort Bridger, the party stayed for a short time, lost some members but added several others, and then continued toward the Hastings cutoff on July 31, 1846. The company reached its maximum size—eighty-seven people traveling in twenty-two wagons—after the Franklin Graves family and their teamster, John Snyder, caught up with them in the Wasatch Mountains. The trip through the Wasatch Mountains proved to be much more strenuous than any of the party expected. Instead of taking the canyon route marked by Hastings, the company opted to cut a new trail to the crest of the mountains—the trail followed the next year by Brigham Young and his Mormon pioneers. The new route required cutting a path through miles of narrow and heavily wooded canyons with hand axes, an exhausting ordeal that may have played an important role in bringing about the early deaths of the adult males after the party became trapped in the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada. The trek through the Wasatch took at least eighteen days, much longer than expected, and it was not until August 22, 1846, that the company finally reached the Great Salt Lake Valley. They had lost precious time. The group’s diverse ethnic, national, and cultural composition, together with clashing personalities, fragmented the party. Small cliques, such as the wagons of the Donner family, traveled separately, spreading the wagon train out for miles along the trail. The party’s lack of social cohesion also had much to do with the difficulties that arose on the way to California.
The trip across the valley and the salt flats south of the lake was another great ordeal. Several wagons had to be abandoned on the Great Salt Lake Desert, including the large “Pioneer Palace” of James Reed (see chapter 5), which was later recovered. On September 4, 1846, the company finally reached Pilot Peak on the western edge of the desert, set up camp, and went back to retrieve the cattle and wagons they had lost or abandoned in the desert. More time was lost and more dissension set in. One member of the group, Luke Halloran, died of illness, the first death recorded since the party had left Fort Bridger. Only eighteen wagons remained, and supplies were running very low. Charles Stanton and William McCutchen volunteered to go ahead to Sutter’s Fort in California to bring back some desperately needed food.
After spending a week in the Pilot Peak camp, the company continued on, finally reaching the main California Trail at the Humboldt River in what is now central Nevada on September 26. Another member of the party died while the group was traveling down the Humboldt. During a squabble on October 4, James Reed killed John Snyder, the driver of one of the Graves family’s wagons, and was banished from the party. Reed’s family remained with the party, but Walter Herron, his teamster, joined him in exile. They managed to reach Sutter’s Fort on October 28, and Reed later helped to rescue the survivors of the Donner party in the Sierra Nevada. With Reed gone, the company rapidly lost whatever social cohesion had remained and began to fall apart. During the next two weeks, as the group continued the trek to the Humboldt Sink and crossed the Forty-Mile Desert to the Truckee River Canyon, two more members of the party died: a Mr. Hardkoop from Belgium and Jacob Wolfinger—the former abandoned and the latter apparently killed by other members of the party. More wagons and possessions had to be abandoned along the way. A letter written by twelve-year-old Virginia Reed to her cousin in Springfield on May 16, 1847, describes what happened to her family:
in 2 or 3 days after pa [James Reed] left we had to cash [cache] our wagon and take Mr. Graves wagon and cash some more of our things. Well we went on that way a while and then we had to get Mr eddies wagon we went on that way a while and then we had to cash all our close [clothes] except a change or 2 and put them in Mr. Bri [Breens] Wagon and Thomas and James rode the other 2 horses and the rest of us had to walk. we went on that way a While and we come to a nother long drive of 40 miles [the Forty-Mile Desert] and then we went with Mr. Donner We had to walk all the time we was a traveling up the truckee river.5
The party reached the Truckee River in mid-October with only fourteen wagons. Three days later they encountered Charles Stanton, who was returning from Sutter’s Fort in the company of Luis and Salvador,6 two of Sutter’s Indian employees, with seven pack mules carrying much-needed food. William McCutchen, who had traveled to the fort with Stanton, was too ill to make the return trip.
Sometime during the third week of October, the company arrived in the Truckee Meadows (now Reno) at the base of the Sierra Nevada and stayed for several days before attempting to cross the mountains into California. The written records do not indicate exactly where they camped. Most later emigrant parties, however, left the Truckee River near the present-day Reno-Sparks sewage treatment plant and traveled for about two miles along the eastern edge of the meadow before turning west at the base of Rattlesnake Mountain, camping anywhere along that stretch. The Donner party probably camped there as well. Archaeological remains of emigrant camps have been reported from this area, but the construction of modern housing developments destroyed all traces of them before a systematic study could take place. During their stay in the Truckee Meadows, the group lost another member, William Pike, to the accidental discharge of a firearm. They stayed about a week in the Truckee Meadows—in retrospect probably much too long, but understandable given the poor health and social condition of the emigrants and their draft animals—and finally left in three separate groups. The Donner family contingent was the last to begin the trek up the Truckee River Canyon toward the mountains. The weather failed at the same time. An early winter storm began in the mountains on October 28 and continued with only short breaks until November 11.
Some accounts of the Donner party’s trip up the canyon suggest conflict between the emigrants and local Indians. Years later, for example, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins related a story about the Donner party burning her people’s winter caches:
Well, while we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were. They set everything we had left on fire. It was a fearful sight. It was all we had for the winter, and it was all burnt during that night. My father took some of his men during the night to try and save some of it, but they could not; it had burnt down before they got there.
These were the last white men that came along that fall. My people talked fearfully that winter about those they called our white brothers. My people said they had something like awful thunder and lightning [firearms], and with that they killed everything in sight.
This whole band of white people perished in the mountains, for it was too late to cross them. We could have saved them, only my people were afraid of them. We never knew who they were, or where they came from. So, poor things, they must have suffered fearfully, for they all starved there. The snow was too deep.7
The first two parties, about two-thirds of the company, reached what is now Donner Lake on October 31 (Figure 3). They tried to continue, but deep snow and a winter storm forced them to turn back to the lake. Here, after another failed attempt to cross the mountains, they set up what they expected to be a temporary camp on November 4 and waited.
The Donner family entourage, the last group to leave the Truckee Meadows and further delayed by a broken wagon axle on the trail, found themselves trapped by the same winter storm. Years later, Elitha C. Donner Wilder related that part of the story to her sister Eliza:
We were 12 to 15 miles from the place where we camped for the winter coming down a long sliding hill, father was driving, you [Eliza Donner Houghton] and Georgia [Donner] were in the wagon, your mother and Frances were walking ahead when near the bottom the axel of the fore wheel broke and the wagon tipped down tumbling everything over you two children. Father and Uncle Jake rushed to get you out. Georgia was soon drawn out through the opening at the back, but you were out of sight and father feared that you were smothered for you did not answer his anxious call. Uncle kept right on pulling things out until he came to you.8
George Donner severely cut his hand while preparing a new axle for the wagon. The cut became infected and made him an invalid who had to be cared for by his wife and family. The Donner family set up a camp near what is now Alder Creek, about five miles northeast of the lake camp. Trapped by deep snow, the two groups lived in their mountain camps for much of the winter. No outsider reached either camp for nearly four months. Some information about what went on during this time, however, is recorded in a diary kept by Patrick Breen between November 20, 1846, and March 1, 1847. On December 15, 1846, the first death in the mountain camps occurred when Baylis Williams, one of the Reed family’s servants, died of starvation and exposure. More deaths rapidly followed. Of the eighty-one people trapped in the camps, only forty-eight were still alive when the last survivor left the mountain camps on April 21, 1847, and reached safety four days later (see Table 1).
Image: Figure 3: Donner Lake, looking southeast. The site of the Donner party lake camp is at the east end of the lake (left).
The company did not sit docilely in the mountains all winter without trying to get out, of course. There were three attempts to escape, and there were also attempts from outside to rescue the stranded emigrants. The first rescue effort failed to get off the ground. On reaching Sutter’s Fort, James Reed tried to organize a rescue expedition. He and William McCutchen, now recovered from the illness that had prevented him from returning with Charles Stanton and the food, left the fort on October 31 with the intention of bringing aid to the party. Unfortunately, the same early winter storm that forced the Donner party into the mountain camps doomed that attempt. Not until the end of February was Reed able to organize a successful rescue. In the meantime, he participated in the now-raging Mexican American War.
What happened to the first attempt by the survivors to escape from their mountain entrapment is recorded in Patrick Breen’s November 23 diary entry: “the Expedition across the mountains returned after an unsuccsful [sic] attempt.”9 The second attempt by the stranded company to escape the mountain camps resulted in a terrible tragedy. On December 16, seventeen members of the group left the lake camp on snowshoes fashioned out of oxbows and rawhide. Two turned back after one day. The rest, ten men and five women, soon lost the trail over the mountains. On January 18, a month later, the seven survivors of the “Forlorn Hope,” the name often given to the snowshoe party, finally arrived at Johnson’s Ranch in Bear Valley, seventy miles away. All five of the women and two of the men survived the ordeal. The snowshoers seem to have been the first members of the Donner party to cannibalize their dead. Mrs. James Reed led the third escape party on January 4, but it too was forced to turn back after several days. Patrick Breen’s January 8 entry notes that “Mrs. Reid [sic] & company came back this mor[n]ing could not find their way on the other side of the mountain.”10
In the meantime, back at the mountain camps, five more members of the stranded company, all males, had perished from exposure and starvation by the end of December. Death had taken two others, also males, by the end of January. No outsider reached the camps until February 18, when the first relief party arrived at the lake camp. Nearly four months had passed since the Donner party had been trapped in the mountains. On February 22, the seven rescuers left the two mountain camps with twenty-three members of the Donner party, most of them children. Two of the Reed children were unable to continue and soon returned to the lake camp, but the rest of the group reached the head of Bear Valley on February 27 and continued on to Johnson’s Ranch. During the trip, three more members of the Donner party died, including John Denton, an Englishman who had traveled with the George Donner family.
The second relief party was not far behind the first. Reed and McCutchen organized the expedition and left Johnson’s Ranch on February 22. They met the first relief party on its way back at...

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