Chapter 1: What led to the tragic fate of the Donner Party?
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The Old West is an iconic period of American history and full of legendary figures whose names still resonate today, like Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Butch and Sundance, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Bass Reeves, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, the Texas Rangers and many more. Hear all their stories on the Legends of the Old West podcast.
We'll take you to Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City. to the plains, mountains, and deserts for battles between the U.S. Army and Native American warriors, to dark corners for the disaster of the Donner Party, and shining summits for achievements like the Transcontinental Railroad.
We'll go back to the earliest days of explorers and mountain men and head up through notorious Pinkerton agents and gunmen like Tom Horne. Every episode features narrative writing and cinematic music, and there are hundreds of episodes available to binge. I'm Chris Wimmer. Find Legends of the Old West wherever you're listening now.
It is September 1846 in what will one day be called Nevada. They have come so far, these travelers, across thousands of miles of hard-packed prairies, roiling rivers, rugged wilderness, even a desert that nearly cost them their lives. But at last here they are along this river, the Humboldt, with the mountains rising far ahead and the promise of California beyond.
The journey has taken a brutal toll. They've lost oxen, equipment, supplies. Some of them are dreadfully sick. Every mile seems to come harder than the last. Weeks earlier, they'd made a fateful decision to abandon the established trail for a new route, one that promised to save time, or so they hoped. Instead, it cost them weeks. And now time is the enemy.
In the distance, high in the Sierra Nevada, for these travelers known as the Donner Party, winter is already on its way. Hi, everybody. Don Wildman here. I'm your host, and this is American History Hit. Welcome. In 1846, in the midst of the Great Migration West, a group of pioneering families set out across the frontier to settle new lands and start new lives.
But a series of poor decisions, consequential delays, and misleading directions led them to a dreadful fate. It is a story that has become synonymous with doom and disaster in the American imagination. It is the story of the Donner Party.
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Chapter 2: How did the decision to take a shortcut impact the Donner Party?
As you say, they were at various times part of a party called the Boggs Party and different times they were part of a party called the Russell Party. These families were joining and leaving different groups as they moved across the country. the core of the Donner Party got to Fort Laramie on 4th of July and then moved on towards Fort Bridger in Wyoming.
And that's when they encountered Wales Bonney and his letter from Lansford Hastings. So it wasn't really until they got to Fort Bridger that people had to make a decision. And that's the point at which they decided to follow Lansford Hastings' alleged shortcut.
A fateful decision, as we will soon find out. Tell me about James Clyman, who they meet at Fort Laramie. We did a show for History Hit actually at Fort Laramie, which is way out there even today. It's so far out there.
And then you can only imagine what a psychology – kind of personally, that's how I'm hoping the audience experiences this episode today, not only because of your book, but also – That sense of the pioneer mindset, which had to have been a bizarre experience.
I mean, you're among your own with this huge wagon trail, but endless skies, really hard travel, even before we get to where they're going to get. And this sense of like, when is this going to end has to be setting in in a big way. So the motivation to find a shortcut is very understandable.
It's very understandable. And you mentioned Clyman. Clyman was a sort of mountain man who knew the inner mountain west very well. And he advised the Donner Party, James Reed in particular, not to take that road, that there was no road through what Hastings had claimed was his shortcut.
And it should be probably pointed out at this point that Lansford Hastings himself up to this point had never traveled his shortcut. And he was... As they were heading west, he was heading east, and he was discovering that his shortcut was almost entirely impossible.
Oh, that's great to hear. So there's real deception going on here. He tries to make better for himself in the end, but in the beginning, this is really a scheme, isn't it?
It is a scheme. As I say, it's a real estate scheme when it comes right down to it. Hastings stands to make a great deal of money if he can get enough people to take this shortcut, get to California in time for him to sell land. There's another sort of co-conspirator here is Jim Bridger, the proprietor of Bridger's
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Chapter 3: What challenges did the Donner Party face while crossing the Wasatch Mountains?
How would they have found that letter? Was it just nailed to a tree or something?
It was literally a fluttering on a bush. It seems somewhat improbable, doesn't it? But the reality is, and I traveled the whole route of the Donner Party, and you can see this in places, there were literally ruts cut in the rocks from the wagons that had come before. So it was fairly easy. And also, many of these people were good trackers.
It was reasonably easy for them to see where wagons had come before. And it was in one of these roads, if you will, that they found this letter from Hastings.
And he didn't know that it would get so hard because he'd never traveled that far east because he was doing this backwards, right? He was doing it from California. Yes. Wow. Amazing. But he's so close. So... This is why I have to read this book, because there's so many details that even heighten it even more than we think we know. It gets really heightened later on.
But even beforehand, the ironies and the switchbacks of the story, if you will, are incredible. By late August, they'd gotten out of the Wasatch and they'd begun to cross this desert. The desert we're talking about is the Great Basin, right?
First thing they have to cross actually is the Salt Flats, Great Salt Lake Salt Flats. And that turns out to be another absolutely horrific experience. When I was writing The Indifferent Stars Above, I traveled the whole route of the Donner Party and And I wanted to experience what they did. So I managed to be at the time of year that they were there, I would be there.
So I went to Salt Lake City in August and walked out on the salt flats to see what that was like. And I can tell you from personal experience, just a few minutes walking across the salt flats in August, You go kind of blind, the glare off the salt is so intense that your field of vision shrinks down to almost nothing. And of course, it's just beastly, beastly hot.
And it's just, I walked for maybe 20 minutes and I couldn't wait to get back to the car. But they set off, so the Donner Party sets off across the salt flats. And they start by traveling at night, but they travel the whole first night. And then they're only partway across and the day comes and it gets hotter and hotter. They run out of water.
Their oxen, which are extremely important to them, that's the only way they're going to get anything anywhere is if they get their oxen to pull their wagons. The oxen start to break down. The next night, the oxen start wandering away into the dark. And so one by one, they wind up having to abandon their wagons and just sort of stagger ahead on foot.
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Chapter 4: What were the consequences of the Donner Party's delays and decisions?
So they, as the snow starts coming down, they hastily try to erect just some shanties, brush shanties to take some shelter in. Because George Donner's hand is so badly injured, he's unable to do much physical work. I have to cut trees and try to make actual The rest of the party gets as far as, say, the eastern end of Donner Lake. It's snowing heavily now.
They decide they better try to get over the pass while they can. So they start up this boulder-strewn rock wall that is Donner Pass at the other end of the lake. And they struggle and they slide and they just run into a terrible amount of trouble trying to get their oxen up this snow-covered boulder-strewn cliffs that are in front of them. And they can't make it.
The wagon starts sliding backwards. So they try again. They still can't make it. Stanton and the mules go ahead to try to break a path. For the rest of them, they get bogged down. The snow is falling now at just an extraordinary rate. This is what happens in California. Sometimes we get these atmospheric rivers. They usually go into the northwest.
But when they come into California and hit the Sierra Nevada mountains, you just get extraordinary levels of snow. So finally, they realize they're not going to make it, and they retreat back to the eastern end of the lake in desperate situations now.
Yeah.
And then over the next couple of days, they hastily erect some shelters, log cabins. There's one cabin pre-existing from an earlier party. And then they build two other primitive log cabins.
That's interesting to me. I did not know about the previous existing cabin. That would have been the plan, I guess. Oh, let's do this. We could all live in these kinds of things. I always wondered how that happened. I also wondered about it being just a few cabins, but indeed it's a whole community of cabins, right?
They are good enough at building these things, and they're kind of spread over an area, a larger area.
There's three main cabins. They're spread over, yes, several miles. One thing, Franklin Graves, the family I follow most closely and in different stars above is the Graves family for a number of reasons. I'm focused on one young woman in that party. But Franklin Graves, the father of that family, is a particularly independent-minded man.
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Chapter 5: How did the arrival of winter affect the Donner Party's survival?
We'll go back to the earliest days of explorers and mountain men and head up through notorious Pinkerton agents and gunmen like Tom Horne. Every episode features narrative writing and cinematic music, and there are hundreds of episodes available to binge. I'm Chris Wimmer. Find Legends of the Old West wherever you're listening now.
Okay, we're back with the story of the Donner Party in California. Daniel, at this point in early 1847, this ordeal has lasted for months. October when they first hit the snow, now we're in January, and the group is in a hopeless state. But there appears to be a light at the end of this tunnel for at least some of these people. How did the rescue attempts pan out?
So once Sarah Graves and the rest of the Snowshoe Party reached Johnson's Ranch and told the Americans there what was happening, a number of the people they found at Johnson's Ranch were had traveled with them earlier with the Donner Party, traveling across the plains. So the Tucker family and the Ritchie family, for instance, they already knew them.
And so when the Snowshoe Party had reached Johnson's Ranch and told their tale of what was happening in the mountains, A gentleman named Reason P. Tucker, and this is a gentleman who was my great-great-uncle, led the first expedition up into the mountains to try to get to the lake camp and the Alder Creek camp where the Donner family was to try to get them some kind of relief.
The problem was the snow was still deep and still falling on and off. And so they could take supplies on pack animals up to the snow line. But from that point on, traveling east now back towards where the Donner party was entrapped, all they could take was what they could carry on their backs. And of course, they had to feed themselves, these rescue parties.
And so by the time they reached the encampment at Donner Lake, there was not that much help they could provide. They handed out little bits of dried beef, but they didn't have the kind of resources that people would need there to continue to survive. So about all they could do was take the healthiest of them and try to lead them back out of the mountains.
And so the first Retsu expedition was fairly successful than that. They took a number of particularly children, young, relatively young, healthy people back out of the mountains. And at this point, cannibalism hadn't actually begun to happen at the camps, but it was about to begin. So there was a first rescue expedition.
And then we mentioned earlier that James Reed had been exiled from the party. Santa Head had made it through the mountains before the snow to California.
So tell me how James Reed is reunited with his family.
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Chapter 6: What were the key events leading to cannibalism among the survivors?
And she lost, as I say, she lost her husband and her father on the snowshoe party coming out. She married one of her rescuers, a man named Richie, And they settled in the Napa Valley. And they had a couple of children. But within a few years, William Dill Ritchie, her husband, was apprehended with some stolen mules. And he was lynched from an oak tree. So she was widowed a second time.
She married the third time a man named Samuel Spires and settled and had more children. But Sarah died at 46 of heart failure. I think many of them suffered physically from the after effects of the ordeal and certainly suffered mentally from the after effects.
Yes. Well, certainly the PTSD aspect of this must have lived with them for ages. Though it was sensationalized, they did prove that the cannibalism actually happened, right? I mean, there was archaeology done on this.
Yes, there's been some archaeology, but it's also, if you discount all the sensationalist newspaper accounts, none of them can be counted on. If you look at the actual documentary evidence, for instance, Sarah and her sister both wrote afterwards, wrote letters back to Illinois, talking very frankly about what had happened.
Reason Tucker, who led the first rescue expedition and then subsequent expedition, saw firsthand bodies that had been butchered at the lake camp. So there's a lot of sort of dispassionate, objective documentary evidence also. A number of these people just frankly said what they had done. And so it's not really an open question at this point.
But the tenor of the whole thing has changed, certainly largely due to your book, I guess, from 2009. Over these last years, you must have felt the change as well. I mean, it's gratifying to know that the positive aspect of what these people pulled off is underscored as much as the scandalous stuff.
The whole event, the Donner party in general, just reminds us how thin the line can be between ambition and catastrophe, especially on the frontier, which we've been talking about so much in this series we've been doing.
It's a tale of suffering, but also a warning about the risks of overconfidence, the limits of human endurance, the impossible choices people face when their survival is on the line. But that was the story of so many of these wagon trains, especially the ones that went off the trail. For the few among us who have not read this man's book, I recommend you do.
We have been discussing The Indifferent Stars Above, the harrowing saga of the Donner Party. Boys in the Boat, about the Olympic rowers, became a George Clooney movie, and then there was Under the Flaming Sky and Facing the Mountain, about Japanese internment. There's a whole list of books that you must get and read this man's work. It's been a great honor to meet you, Daniel.
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