Daniel James Brown

And there had been cannibalism, and that's just an undeniable fact.

But the stories exaggerated those and were based on almost no factuality.

at all.

So almost immediately in the popular imagination and this has prevailed for the 180 years since.

As I think I said earlier, when we think of the Donner Party, we think automatically of people sitting around campfires and lying on human bones.

And there's just so much more to the story and these people were real people.

But yes, it became a sensational story and entered American mythology

even before the last of the survivors were out of the mountains.

Yeah, a guy named Charles McLashan

published the first history of the Donner Party.

And he was able to interview and did interview many, many survivors.

So this was, I don't remember, 15, 20 years after the fact.

But he was able to go around California interviewing the Graves sisters and the Reeds and various people.

So that first book,

The history of the Donner Party is full of firsthand accounts.

Now, they don't all match.

There's some contradictions, but that's the sort of first reliable source of information about the tragedy.

What happens to Lansford Hastings?

He caused this whole thing, didn't he?

Lansford Hastings, he was just a scoundrel through and through.