WINTER BECAME A GRAVEYARD… The Donner Party – Grief, Guilt, and Ghosts
In the winter of 1846, 87 pioneers became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where starvation forced impossible choices and tested the limits of human survival.
Hope can sour into nightmare faster than anyone expects. Nine covered wagons rolled out of Springfield, Illinois on April 15, 1846, packed with families dreaming of California gold and fertile land. They had no idea their names would become synonymous with one of the darkest chapters in American westward expansion.
The Promise of California
George Donner was 60, prosperous, and ready to move west. His brother Jacob, 56, felt the same pull. They partnered with James Reed, a 45-year-old Irish businessman who had the kind of ambition that made people follow him—sometimes to their benefit, sometimes not. Between them, they organized 32 people for the journey, hiring teamsters to drive the wagons and bringing along servants to help with the daily work.
California’s central valley had been drawing settlers for years with promises of cheap, fertile farmland and year-round growing seasons. Reed had been reading a book that winter—Lansford Hastings’s “The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California”—and he’d become convinced that a brand new shortcut could save them 350 to 400 miles. The terrain was supposedly easy. The route was supposedly tested. Neither of these things was true, but Reed didn’t know that yet.
George Donner brought his wife Tamsen, who was 44, and their three little girls: Frances was six, Georgia was four, and Eliza had just turned three. Two teenage daughters from George’s first marriage came along too—Elitha at 14 and Leanna at 12. Jacob Donner’s family was even bigger: his wife Elizabeth, 45, and seven children ranging from 14-year-old stepson Solomon Hook all the way down to one-year-old Samuel.
James Reed traveled in style. He’d commissioned a two-story wagon with an iron stove inside, spring-cushioned seats, and actual sleeping bunks. His 12-year-old stepdaughter Virginia called it “The Pioneer Palace Car,” and she wasn’t exaggerating. Virginia was Margaret Reed’s daughter from a previous marriage, but Reed had raised her as his own—never treating her any different from his biological children. She adored him for it. For the journey, Virginia brought her beloved pony Billy, riding alongside the wagons while her younger siblings stayed inside.
Reed’s wife Margaret came along with their four children, plus Margaret’s 70-year-old mother, Sarah Keyes. Sarah was dying of tuberculosis—what they called consumption back then—and could barely walk. She refused to stay behind. She wanted to die near her daughter, not alone in Illinois.
The Donner families had hired a crew of teamsters: Hiram Miller, 29; Samuel Shoemaker, 25; Noah James, who was only 16; Charles Burger, 30; John Denton, 28; and Augustus Spitzer, 30. Reed hired Milt Elliott, who’d worked in Reed’s big sawmill on the Sangamon River for years. Reed also brought Eliza Williams and her brother Baylis as household servants.
The families had spent the previous winter preparing. Young Virginia Reed remembered later that “we suffered vastly more from fear of the Indians before starting than we did on the plains.” Her grandmother Sarah Keyes filled those long winter evenings with stories about her aunt who’d been captured by Native Americans in early Virginia and Kentucky, held prisoner for five years before escaping. Virginia would sit with her back pressed tight against the wall, convinced “no warrior could slip behind me with a tomahawk.” The real dangers wouldn’t come from Native Americans.
The Journey Begins
They left Independence, Missouri on May 12, 1846, right in the middle of a thunderstorm. Friends and family camped with them that first night, and Virginia’s uncles rode along for several days before finally turning back. The Reed children were afraid of the oxen at first—the animals had no bridles, and the kids figured that meant the oxen could just wander wherever they wanted.
A week later, near Indian Creek about 100 miles west of Independence, they caught up with a much larger wagon train led by Colonel William Henry Russell. Hundreds of people, dozens of wagons, all headed for California or Oregon. The combined caravan stretched so far across the prairie you couldn’t see from one end to the other.
High water at the Big Blue River near present-day Marysville, Kansas stopped them cold on May 25. The emigrants spent days building rafts to ferry their wagons across. On May 29, Sarah Keyes died and was buried under a tree near Alcove Spring. Edwin Bryant, a newspaper editor traveling with the group, helped conduct the funeral. Sarah became the first casualty of a journey that would claim 40 more lives before it ended.
Warnings Ignored
By mid-June, they’d covered 450 miles and had about 200 more to go before Fort Laramie. The weather had slowed them down—rain, rising rivers—but Tamsen Donner wrote an optimistic letter back to friends in Springfield: “Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.” Virginia Reed remembered being “perfectly happy” during those first weeks. The prairie stretched out endlessly, and California seemed close enough to taste.
On June 18, William Russell quit as wagon train captain. He and Edwin Bryant, along with several others, decided to trade their slow wagons for faster pack mules. They rode ahead to Fort Laramie to make the exchange, planning to reach California weeks before the wagon trains. This decision would save Bryant’s life and put him in position to try warning the Donner Party—a warning they’d never receive.
More families joined along the way. Franklin Graves, 57, caught up with his wife Elizabeth and their nine children. Levinah Murphy, a 37-year-old widow from Tennessee, led a group of thirteen family members, including five young children and two married daughters with their families. The wagon train now traveled under Lilburn Boggs, a former Missouri governor. Things still seemed manageable.
At Fort Laramie on June 27, Reed ran into an old friend named James Clyman, a mountain man who’d just crossed the same “shortcut” Reed was planning to take. Clyman didn’t mince words: Don’t do it. The road was barely passable on foot. Wagons would be impossible. He described the brutal desert ahead and the towering Sierra Nevada mountains. Clyman had seen it all firsthand just weeks earlier.
Reed listened politely and ignored every word. He figured Hastings, who’d written the guidebook, must know better than some mountain man traveling alone on horseback. This would prove to be one of the deadliest mistakes in the history of American westward migration.
On July 11, at the Continental Divide, a messenger met the wagon train carrying a letter from Lansford Hastings himself. The letter promised Hastings would be waiting at Fort Bridger to personally guide emigrants across his new route. That promise convinced even more families to risk the shortcut.
The Fatal Turn
July 18, 1846. The Little Sandy River in Wyoming. This was the moment everything split apart. The wagon train reached a fork where the trail divided—right toward the proven route through Fort Hall and Idaho, left toward Hastings Cutoff and the unknown. Most of the massive wagon train turned right, choosing safety over speed.
Twenty wagons turned left. They elected George Donner as their captain, officially creating what history would call the Donner Party. As the two groups separated, Tamsen Donner stood apart from the celebration, looking gloomy and dispirited. A fellow traveler named Jesse Quinn Thornton noticed and later wrote that she considered Hastings “a selfish adventurer.” She was sad about turning off the main trail on his advice. Tamsen had sized these men up early and found them wanting, but her objections were overruled.
The Donner Party reached Fort Bridger on July 27, expecting to meet Lansford Hastings. They found a note instead. Hastings had left a week earlier on July 20, leading the Harlan-Young party—40 wagons, 200 emigrants. The note told later groups to follow and catch up. Simple enough, except the route ahead was about to reveal itself as a death trap.
Fort Bridger wasn’t much—just a corral and two log cabins run by mountain man Jim Bridger and his partner Louis Vasquez. They operated a trading post for both Native Americans and passing emigrants. Business had been terrible lately. Most wagon trains had started taking Sublette’s Cutoff to the north, completely bypassing Fort Bridger. The fort was dying, and Bridger and Vasquez knew it.
They needed the emigrant trade back, which meant they needed emigrants to take Hastings Cutoff. So when worried travelers asked about the route, Bridger and Vasquez lied through their teeth. The cutoff was “a fine, level road,” they said, “with plenty of water and grass.” Only a 40-mile dry stretch to worry about. The route would save 350 miles. Every word was designed to keep people moving through their fort and buying supplies.
What they didn’t mention: the “40-mile” desert was actually 80 miles of hell. The “fine, level road” included mountain passes no wagon had ever crossed. And those letters Edwin Bryant had left weeks earlier, warning James Reed and others to avoid Hastings Cutoff at all costs? Louis Vasquez kept those letters in his pocket and never delivered them. Years later, Bryant would publicly state his belief that Bridger deliberately hid the letters. Reed, testifying after the disaster, agreed.
Seven weeks. They wouldn’t reach Sutter’s Fort for six months. Most of them wouldn’t reach it at all.
The party spent four days at Fort Bridger—resting oxen, repairing wagons, taking on new members. They left on July 31 with 74 people in 23 wagons, already eleven days behind the Harlan-Young group. Nobody told them the people ahead were about to face catastrophic difficulties that would slow them to a crawl. Nobody told them because Bridger and Vasquez didn’t care what happened past the edges of their property.
Into the Wasatch
They waited. Days passed. No Hastings.
After eight days of sitting there watching their food supplies dwindle, Reed and two others rode ahead on horseback to find Hastings and demand he keep his promise. They followed the Harlan-Young party’s tracks through terrain that got worse with every mile. The “easy” route showed evidence of desperate struggles. Wagons had been lowered by rope down sheer cliffs. Trees had been cut to build roads where no roads existed. At one point they found evidence that a wagon had fallen 75 feet off a cliff, killing the oxen pulling it.
They caught up with Hastings at the south shore of the Great Salt Lake. Hastings refused to come back. He stood on a mountaintop, pointed vaguely toward some distant peaks, and told Reed to find his own way through. Then he rode off with his group, leaving the Donner Party to figure it out alone.
On August 11, the Donner Party started cutting a road through completely unexplored wilderness in the Wasatch Mountains. Oak, maple, and aspen trees grew so thick you couldn’t see ten feet ahead. Boulders the size of houses blocked the path. Steep ravines forced them to backtrack and find new routes. Men worked ahead with axes, saws, and shovels while women and children waited with the wagons. Progress collapsed from the usual 10 miles per day to barely two miles. Some days they covered less than a mile.
The Graves family, which had been traveling behind, caught up during this nightmare. Franklin Graves brought his wife Elizabeth, their nine children, and three hired men: 25-year-old John Snyder, 30-year-old William Foster and his wife Sarah (one of the Graves daughters), and 23-year-old Jay Fosdick, who’d married another Graves daughter. The party now numbered 87 people—the final count.
By August 22, they finally emerged into the Salt Lake Valley through what would later be called Emigration Canyon. Hastings’ “shortcut” had cost them 18 days. They’d spent three weeks traveling 36 miles. Summer was running out fast, and they still had 600 miles to go. Luke Halloran, who’d been sick with tuberculosis the whole journey, died on August 25 and was buried in a makeshift coffin at a fork in the road.
The Desert of Death
On August 29, they made camp to prepare for the desert crossing. They spent the entire day collecting water and grass for the animals. Hastings had left another note warning of a two-day dry drive, though he didn’t bother specifying how many miles.
The desert sand was moist and deep. Wagons sank and bogged down over and over. The oxen strained and struggled, getting weaker by the hour. The sun hammered down during the day. Temperatures dropped hard at night. Water supplies ran low, then lower. Oxen started panicking, breaking free and running blindly into the darkness. Nobody ever saw those animals again.
On the third day, the water ran out completely. Oxen collapsed and died still strapped into their yokes. Some emigrants unhitched their weakest animals and pushed forward with lighter loads, planning to come back for the abandoned wagons once they found water. They never made it back. The crossing took six days and covered 80 miles—double what Hastings had promised.
They lost 32 oxen, either dead or run off. Reed had to abandon two of his wagons, including that elaborate “Pioneer Palace Car” he’d been so proud of. The Donners each lost a wagon. So did Lewis Keseberg. Virginia Reed’s pony Billy couldn’t handle the conditions and gave out completely. The girl who’d spent weeks riding happily across the prairie now had to walk like everyone else, watching her beloved pony struggle until he collapsed.
Food supplies were dangerously low with 600 miles still separating them from California. They’d fallen way behind schedule. Winter would hit the Sierra Nevada in eight to ten weeks, and they’d barely made it out of the desert.
The Long Road to Nevada
On September 9, two men volunteered to ride ahead to Sutter’s Fort and bring back supplies. William McCutcheon, 30, and Charles Stanton, 35, took the best remaining horses and left. Stanton didn’t have any family with the party. He volunteered anyway. That selflessness would define everything he did in the months ahead.
The rest of the party continued along the Humboldt River through present-day Nevada. The trail was already littered with possessions and dead cattle from earlier wagon trains that had struggled through. The landscape offered almost no game to hunt. Paiute Indians, angry about mistreatment from previous emigrants, started harassing the train and shooting arrows into their cattle.
October 5, near Iron Point—now called Golconda, Nevada. Two wagons got tangled up while climbing a sandy hill. John Snyder, the young teamster driving for the Graves family, lost his temper and started brutally whipping his oxen. The animals screamed and struggled. James Reed, who loved animals more than he loved most people, ordered Snyder to stop. Snyder cursed at him. Words turned into violence in seconds.
Reed rode away alone on October 8, heading toward California with no food, no weapon, and almost no hope of surviving. His family watched him disappear into the distance, not knowing if they’d ever see him again.
Two days later, Lewis Keseberg did something that revealed just how cruel he could be. He threw an elderly Belgian man named Hardcoop out of his wagon. Hardcoop had been riding because his feet were too swollen to walk. The old man knocked on other wagon doors, begging for help. Nobody took him in. He was last seen sitting exhausted under a big sagebrush, abandoned to die on the trail. Several party members would later say they were ashamed of this, but none of them had stopped it from happening.
On October 19, Charles Stanton came riding back from Sutter’s Fort. He was leading six mules loaded with beef and flour. Two Miwok Indian guides from Sutter’s Fort rode with him—Luis and Salvador, both in their twenties, both Catholic converts who worked for John Sutter. Stanton had traveled over 500 miles round trip and could have stayed safely in California. Instead, he rode back to help people who weren’t even his family. The starving emigrants wept when they saw the food.
The caravan was now just 50 miles from the base of the Sierra Nevada. They rested for five days to let their exhausted oxen recover before the final push over the mountains. Those five days would haunt the survivors forever. Every single day mattered now. Snow could close the passes at any time.
Meanwhile, James Reed had reached Sutter’s Fort on October 28. He immediately started trying to organize a rescue expedition for his family. The outbreak of the Bear Flag Revolt and armed conflicts with Mexican forces in California temporarily delayed his plans. Reed ended up fighting at the Battle of Santa Clara on January 2, 1847, while his family starved in the mountains. He met up with William McCutcheon, who’d arrived earlier, and they both started gathering supplies for a relief mission.
The Trap Closes
As the main party approached the mountains in late October, disaster hit the Donners. George Donner’s wagon axle broke while crossing rough terrain. The party made camp near Alder Creek while George and Jacob went into the woods to cut timber for a replacement. George was working with a chisel when it slipped and cut deep into his hand between the thumb and forefinger. The wound bled heavily but seemed minor. They bandaged it and kept working.
The group fell further behind the others at the lake, not knowing that cut would get infected, that the infection would spread up George’s arm, and that it would eventually kill him.
On October 31, snow started falling as the lead group reached what’s now called Donner Lake, sitting at 5,935 feet elevation, just 12 miles from the summit of the pass. The Breen family, the Graves family, the Reeds (now led by Margaret without her husband), and several others made camp at the eastern end of the lake. They found a crude cabin that had been built two years earlier by another wagon train. The Breens claimed it immediately. The Murphy, Foster, and Pike families started building two more cabins nearby.
Charles Stanton and the Miwok guides scouted the pass that evening. The trail was still visible, even with snow falling. Stanton wanted to try crossing immediately before conditions got worse. The families, exhausted after months of brutal travel, decided to rest until morning and make the attempt with fresh strength.
That decision killed most of them.
During the night, a major storm slammed into the Sierra Nevada. By morning, five to ten feet of new snow had fallen, with more coming down constantly. The pass, at 7,088 feet elevation, was completely blocked. On November 3, the families made a desperate attempt to break through with their wagons. They struggled through drifts, couldn’t find the trail, made it about three miles from the summit, and had to turn back.
On November 13, fifteen people tried again. The snow was too deep. They failed. On November 22, twenty-two people and seven mules made another attempt. Arguments broke out about whether to push through or turn back. Some wanted to risk everything. Others were afraid of dying in the snow. They retreated to the lake again.
Fifty-nine people were trapped at the lake. Twenty-two more were stuck with the Donners six miles back at Alder Creek. They were trapped for the winter, and everyone knew it. The snow kept falling. By the time spring arrived, the snow would be 22 feet deep.
Patrick Breen, an Irish immigrant traveling with his wife Margaret (who everyone called Peggy) and their seven children, started keeping a diary on November 20. His entries, written in a small notebook in simple, direct language, would become the only contemporary written record from inside the camps during that winter. Nobody else had the presence of mind or the paper to write anything down.
The Descent into Desperation
The pioneers at the lake threw together rough cabins and lean-tos. The Breen family took over the existing cabin. The Murphy, Foster, Pike, and Eddy families built a larger cabin nearby. The Graves and Reed families constructed a smaller one. At Alder Creek, the Donner families didn’t have time to build proper shelters before the deep snow arrived. They stretched quilts and buffalo robes over frames, piled brush on top, and called it shelter. It barely kept the cold out.
On November 29, they killed the last of their cattle. The meat wouldn’t last long with 87 people to feed. Animals they’d sent out to graze before the heavy snows had wandered away and gotten buried under the drifts. Their bodies were lost until spring. The emigrants had planned to hunt deer and other game through the winter, but the snow was too deep to move around, much less hunt.
Baylis Williams died on December 15—the first to die from malnutrition. His sister Eliza mourned him while continuing to care for the Reed children.
They started eating anything that might provide calories. Shoelaces boiled until they were soft enough to chew. Bones from cattle they’d slaughtered weeks earlier, boiled over and over to extract any nutrition left in the marrow. The buffalo-hide roofs of their cabins, scraped clean and boiled into a disgusting paste that tasted like glue. Tree bark stripped from pines and boiled into bitter mush. Twigs and branches ground up into powder. Some kids, delirious with hunger, ate pieces of a rug.
Patrick Breen wrote in his diary on December 17: “We have some beef yet, but it is entirely too poor to keep us well.” Three days later: “We have but a little meat left and only part of three hides has to support Mrs. Reed, she has nothing else.” When you boiled those hides for hours, they produced a substance like glue that provided minimal calories but left people constantly, agonizingly hungry.
Mice that wandered into the cabins were caught and eaten immediately. Patrick Breen shot a coyote that came near the cabin, and the meat disappeared among several families within hours. William Eddy, who was a skilled hunter, managed to kill a grizzly bear back in November. The meat was gone in days, divided among 60 people.
On December 16, fifteen people strapped on crude snowshoes they’d made from oxbows and rawhide strips. Ten men, five women (including two teenagers), and one 12-year-old boy. They walked away from the camp carrying eight pounds of dried beef each for what they hoped would be a six-day journey to Sutter’s Fort. The fort was actually over 100 miles away through deep snow. History would later call them “the Forlorn Hope,” though they didn’t give themselves any dramatic name. They just walked into the snow, knowing they’d probably die but hoping at least one person might make it through to bring help.
The group included William Eddy, 28; Jay Fosdick, 23, and his wife Sarah, 22; Franklin Graves, 57, with three of his adult daughters—Mary, 19, Sarah, 21, and Harriet, 21; Patrick Dolan, 35; Antonio, a Mexican rancher; Lemuel Murphy, just 12 years old; William Foster, 30, and his wife Sarah, 19; Charles Stanton, 35; and the two Miwok guides, Luis and Salvador.
The Forlorn Hope
They made four miles the first day. The snow was soft and deep. They had to break trail with every step. The crude snowshoes kept sinking through the surface. On December 21, their sixth day out, Charles Stanton went snow-blind from the sun’s glare off all that white. Exhausted and unable to see, he fell behind near what’s now Cascade Lake. He sat down by the trail, lit his pipe, and told the others to keep going without him. Nobody ever saw him alive again. They found his body the following summer, still sitting in that same position.
A massive storm hit on December 24. The group huddled under blankets in falling snow, unable to build a fire because everything was soaking wet. They had no food left. On Christmas Day, Patrick Dolan started losing his mind. He stripped off his clothes and ran screaming into the snow. The others caught him and held him down. He died that night. Antonio, the Mexican rancher, died shortly after. Franklin Graves died Christmas morning.
The survivors faced a choice nobody should ever have to make. On December 26, they started eating the dead. They cut flesh from the bodies, roasted it over a fire, and consumed it to stay alive. Patrick Dolan’s body was first. Franklin Graves’s daughters ate their father’s flesh because the alternative was watching their own children starve to death.
Luis and Salvador, the Miwok guides who’d volunteered to help these strangers, refused to eat human flesh. They sat apart from the group, getting weaker by the hour, unwilling to cross that line. On December 30, 12-year-old Lemuel Murphy died after hours of incoherent rambling.
The remaining members of the Forlorn Hope tracked them through the snow for days. When they finally found Luis and Salvador collapsed and barely conscious, William Foster shot both men in the head. He and the others butchered the bodies right there, cut the flesh from the bones, packed it to carry, and kept walking. The meat of men who’d volunteered to help them kept them alive for several more days.
They eventually stumbled into a Maidu Indian village. The Maidu people, showing more compassion than the white emigrants had managed, gave them food and shelter. The Maidu had no idea that the people they were helping carried pieces of Luis and Salvador in their packs.
On January 19, 1847, seven survivors of the original fifteen reached Johnson’s Ranch in the Sacramento Valley. Of the ten men who’d started, only William Eddy and William Foster were still alive. All five women survived: Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Foster, Mary Graves, Harriet Pike, and Amanda McCutchen. They weighed less than 90 pounds each. Their feet were frozen black. Several would lose toes to frostbite.
When Harriet Ritchie opened her cabin door at Johnson’s Ranch and saw William Eddy standing there, supported by two Maidu men, she broke down crying. Eddy was emaciated, exhausted, barely able to speak. Blood had frozen in his footprints in the snow. Others followed the trail back and found the six remaining survivors.
Cannibalism at the Camps
Back at Donner Lake, all the food was gone by late January. Patrick Breen’s diary entry from January 15 reads: “Clear day…Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that she thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t think that she has done so yet, it is distressing.”
Milt Elliott, one of Reed’s hired teamsters, died at the Murphy cabin on February 9. His body lay in the snow outside the cabin. By late January, the people trapped at both Donner Lake and Alder Creek had crossed a line that would haunt them forever. Bodies of the dead were cut into pieces, carefully separated from anything that would identify whose body it was, and preserved in the snow.
At Donner Lake, after Milt Elliott died, Levinah Murphy made the decision to use his body for food. The flesh was prepared and distributed. Parents fed their starving children meat and refused to tell them what it was. When the children asked, the parents lied.
At Alder Creek, things were just as bad. Jacob Donner had died back in mid-December. George Donner’s hand infection was spreading up his arm, slowly killing him. When hired hands died, their bodies were used for food. Survivors later testified that they tried to separate the meat from anything identifying, maintaining some psychological distance from what they were doing, but that distance was paper-thin.
When children died, witnesses reported that siblings begged to be allowed to eat them. One mother had to physically stop her surviving children from eating their dead brother’s body before she could bury him. Patrick Breen struggled with the morality of it all but eventually reasoned it was worse to let living children starve when meat—any meat—was available. The biological drive to survive proved stronger than the psychological horror.
Levinah Murphy’s grandson James Eddy, three years old, died in early March. His body was eaten. William Eddy’s son James also died and was consumed. The psychological toll on the survivors was crushing. People who’d eaten human flesh reported being unable to stop thinking about it even after rescue, haunted by what they’d done and what they’d tasted.
The First Relief
News of the trapped emigrants had reached the California settlements. On January 31, 1847, fourteen men left Johnson’s Ranch carrying food and supplies. The group included Aquilla Glover, Reason Tucker, and two brothers named Daniel and John Rhoads. The Rhoads brothers were Mormons who’d come to California in 1846 under orders from Brigham Young. They were risking their lives for complete strangers.
The journey to Donner Lake required traveling 95 miles and ascending 15,000 feet in elevation through deepening snow. Each man carried a 50-pound pack. Several turned back as altitude sickness and exhaustion broke them. By February 17, only seven men were still pushing forward.
On February 18, they crossed Donner Pass and came down to Donner Lake. Instead of water, they saw a smooth sheet of snow. They estimated the snow was somewhere between twelve and eighteen feet deep. At sundown, they reached the spot where they expected to find the cabins. They saw nothing but white.
They shouted. Silence.
Then, from a hole in the snow, a head appeared. A woman’s voice, hollow and weak: “Are you men from California or do you come from heaven?”
Daniel Rhoads wrote later: “At sundown we reached the Cabins and found the people in great distress such as I have never witnessed there having been 12 deaths and more expected every hour the sight of us appeared to put life into their emaciated frames.”
They found thirteen dead and 48 survivors barely hanging onto life. Human skeletons lay scattered around the camps, mutilated in ways that made even hardened mountain men feel sick. Skulls had been split open and emptied. Body parts were strewn in the snow. Half-eaten corpses were frozen in positions that looked almost alive.
The rescuers had brought limited supplies—only what they could carry in their packs. They carefully distributed small amounts of food, knowing that starving people who ate too much too quickly would die. They spent two days feeding people and preparing the strongest ones to walk out.
Two rescuers went to check on the Donners at Alder Creek on February 20. They found conditions even worse than at the lake. Jacob Donner was dead. George Donner was dying from that infected hand. Tamsen Donner was healthy enough to travel but refused to abandon her dying husband. Four of the older Donner children were strong enough to try the journey out.
The first relief left on February 22 with 23 refugees, including most of the Reed family. Margaret Reed’s youngest son Thomas and daughter Patty were too weak to walk, so they had to stay behind. Every step through that deep snow exhausted the refugees. Three-year-old Ada Keseberg died on February 25. Her father Lewis was too weak to leave the lake and wouldn’t learn about her death for weeks.
On February 26, during the journey back, they discovered that animals had destroyed one of their food caches. People were now walking on empty stomachs through deep snow. John Denton, one of the hired teamsters who’d been rescued, collapsed and died.
On February 28, at a place called Bear Valley, the refugees ran into James Reed leading the second relief party up the mountain. Reed was reunited with his wife Margaret and their two oldest children, Virginia and James Jr., after five months of forced separation. They held each other and cried. Reed learned that his two youngest children were still trapped at the lake, too weak to be moved.
William Hook, a 12-year-old from Jacob Donner’s family, had made it down with the first relief. In the overwhelming relief of having food again after months of starvation, he ate too much too fast. He died from it.
The Second Relief
James Reed’s second relief party included ten men, among them Hiram Miller, who’d traveled with the Donner Party until July before splitting off. They reached the lake camp on March 1 and found more evidence of cannibalism. Bodies had been systematically butchered. Skulls were split and emptied. Several of the rescuers became physically ill at what they saw.
Reed found his two youngest children alive but barely. Eight-year-old Patty had managed to keep her wooden doll hidden inside her dress through the entire nightmare. The doll had been a gift from her grandmother Sarah Keyes, who’d died at the very beginning of the journey. That doll was the only toy any child had managed to hold onto.
Reed’s party reached Alder Creek on March 3. George Donner was clearly dying. The infection had spread through his entire body. He couldn’t stand up anymore. Tamsen Donner, still relatively healthy, refused again to leave. Reed begged her. She wouldn’t budge. Instead, she gave Reed money and valuables and begged him to take any remaining children who could travel. She sent her three young daughters away with strangers—Frances, 6, Georgia, 4, and Eliza, 3—because she would not abandon George.
Two young men, Jean-Baptiste Trudeau (16) and Nicholas Clark, were ordered to stay at Alder Creek to care for the Donners. Reed promised more help was coming.
Reed left with 17 emaciated refugees on March 3, including his two youngest children and Tamsen’s three daughters. On March 5, a massive blizzard caught them. Snow fell heavily. Wind screamed through the trees. The refugees couldn’t walk anymore. They huddled together, burning logs to create some warmth.
The fire melted the snow beneath them, creating a pit that sank deeper and deeper. By the time the storm cleared on March 8, they were sitting at the bottom of a hole 20 feet deep with ice walls around them. Someone had cut crude steps into the walls so people could climb up and down.
Reed made a desperate choice. Taking three of the strongest people—William McCutcheon, Hiram Miller, and one other—he pushed ahead through the fresh snow to find cached supplies and bring back help. He left the others in what would become known as “Starved Camp.”
Things got bad fast at Starved Camp. Elizabeth Graves and her five-year-old son Franklin died the first night after Reed left. Patrick and Margaret Breen struggled to keep everyone else alive. They had no food except the bodies of Mrs. Graves and her son. Within days, both corpses had been cannibalized. Isaac Donner, age 6, died on March 6.
The Breen family somehow managed to keep not just their own seven children alive, but several Graves children and others who’d been left in their care. Patrick prayed constantly. Margaret, called Peggy by everyone, rationed what little they had with ruthless precision. Of all the nuclear families in the Donner Party, only the Breens and Reeds would come out with every member still breathing.
The Third Relief
The third relief party reached Starved Camp on March 12. William Eddy and William Foster led the group—the only adult men who’d survived the Forlorn Hope. Both were desperate to reach their children at the lake. They’d each paid two men $50 to come along, which was an enormous amount of money. John Stark, a big man who weighed 220 pounds, was the only one who volunteered without payment. He said: “I will go without any reward beyond that derived from the consciousness of doing a good act.”
They found eleven people at the bottom of that deep pit formed by fire melting through snow. Dead bodies lay among the living. The pit’s walls rose twenty feet to the surface. The survivors had been there for days in freezing temperatures with almost nothing to eat.
William Eddy described it later: “The fire at the Starved Camp had melted the snow down to the ground (bare dirt), and the hole thus made was about fifteen feet in diameter, and twenty-four feet deep. As the snow had continued to melt, they made steps by which they ascended and descended. The picture of distress was shocking indeed.”
Patrick and Margaret Breen had kept seven children alive for five days in those conditions—two infants, their own kids, and several Graves children. Their sheer determination saved those lives.
Eddy and Foster didn’t stick around. They pushed ahead to Donner Lake with the two men they’d hired—Hiram Miller and John Thompson. Both fathers were focused on one thing: finding their children.
John Stark and two others—Howard Oakley and Charles Stone—stayed at Starved Camp with the eleven survivors. Stark made a promise: he’d get every one of them down the mountain alive. The task looked impossible. Most were children. All were severely weakened. The snow was deep and soft.
Stark started carrying the children two at a time. He’d pick up two kids, carry them a hundred yards, set them down, go back for two more, then move the first two forward again. Over and over, mile after mile, day after day. The children were so starved they weighed almost nothing, but the deep snow made every step exhausting work.
James Breen, one of the Breen children, wrote years later: “To his great bodily strength, and unexcelled courage, myself and others owe our lives. There was probably no other man in California at that time, who had the intelligence, determination, and what was absolutely necessary in that emergency, the immense physical powers of John Stark. He was as strong as two ordinary men. On his broad shoulders, he carried the provisions, most of the blankets, and most of the time some of the weaker children.”
Stark succeeded. All eleven people from Starved Camp made it to safety. All nine children survived. One of them later said the rescue was the work of “nobody but God and Stark and the Virgin Mary.”
Eddy and Foster reached Donner Lake on March 14. They searched frantically for their boys. Both children were dead—William Eddy’s three-year-old James and William Foster’s four-year-old George. Their bodies had been eaten. The two fathers stood in those dark cabins.
Only four people were still alive at the lake: Levinah Murphy, her ten-year-old son Simon, Lewis Keseberg, and three Donner girls whose mother Tamsen had sent them away before the Second Relief. At Alder Creek, only Tamsen had a real chance at survival. George Donner and Jacob’s son Samuel were both near death. Jean-Baptiste Trudeau and Nicholas Clark had abandoned their post days earlier, fleeing down the mountain to save themselves.
Eddy told Tamsen Donner to leave with them right then. She refused again to abandon George. Eddy begged. She held firm. That was the last time anyone saw Tamsen Donner alive.
The Third Relief left on March 14. Each man carried a child—the three Donner girls (Frances, Georgia, and Eliza) and Simon Murphy. Five people were left behind to die: George Donner, Tamsen Donner, Lewis Keseberg, Levinah Murphy, and her son Samuel.
The Last Survivor
The fourth relief party reached the camps on April 17, nearly a month after the Third Relief had left. They found scenes that would give them nightmares for the rest of their lives.
At the lake camp, only Lewis Keseberg was still alive, surrounded by mutilated corpses and scattered body parts. Human bones and skulls lay everywhere. At Alder Creek, George Donner’s body lay on the ground with his skull split open and emptied. A pot nearby held pieces of human flesh. Tamsen Donner’s body was never definitively identified, though rescuers later found remains they believed were hers.
At the Murphy cabin, they found Lewis Keseberg, age 32, with a large pan containing human liver and lungs sitting right there. His waistcoat pocket held $225 in gold from the Donners’ private stores, plus jewelry and other valuables that had belonged to Tamsen.
Keseberg claimed Tamsen had shown up at the lake camp about a week earlier, exhausted and confused. He said she died of natural causes within a day or two, and he’d eaten her to survive. The rescuers pointed out that Keseberg had access to oxen meat at the time. They didn’t believe him for a second.
Witnesses later testified that Keseberg had taken William Foster’s four-year-old son George into his bed one night. The boy was alive when they went to sleep. By morning, the child was dead. Mrs. Murphy had accused Keseberg of murder. Keseberg hung the boy’s body on a wall peg like you’d hang a piece of meat and later cut it up for food.
Similar accusations surrounded several other deaths. Some people said Keseberg hadn’t just eaten the dead—he’d hastened their deaths when they were too weak to fight back. Others defended him, saying he was simply the last one alive and had done what was necessary.
Keseberg faced trial on six murder charges later. All charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. No jury could determine what had actually happened in those final weeks when only the dying and Lewis Keseberg remained. He also brought a defamation suit against rescue party members who publicly accused him of killing Tamsen Donner for her money. The rumors destroyed him anyway.
Lewis Keseberg arrived at Sutter’s Fort on April 21, 1847, as the last member of the Donner Party to be rescued. His reputation never recovered. He tried various businesses but failed repeatedly. People refused to trade with him. The rumors that he was a murderer and cannibal followed him everywhere. He died poor in 1895 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Sacramento.
The Toll
Of the 87 people who got trapped in those mountains, 41 died and 46 survived. The survival patterns told their own story. Two-thirds of the men died. Two-thirds of the women and children lived. Women generally had more body fat reserves and could survive starvation longer than men. Women also tended to stay in the shelters conserving energy while men exhausted themselves trying to hunt or gather firewood in impossible conditions.
Five people died before they even reached the mountains: Sarah Keyes, Luke Halloran, John Snyder, William Pike, and old Hardcoop. Thirty-five more died at the camps or while trying to cross to safety. One more—William Hook—died just after reaching safety because he ate too much too fast after months of starvation.
Many survivors lost toes to frostbite. William Eddy, Harriet Pike, and others had to have amputations. Every single survivor carried psychological scars that never healed. Some refused to speak about what happened. Others, like Virginia Reed, wrote detailed accounts years later, trying to make sense of it. Children who’d been young during the ordeal remembered fragments—a mother crying, the taste of boiled hide, cold that never stopped.
The Aftermath
On June 22, 1847, General Stephen Watts Kearny came through leading a group of Mormon Battalion veterans east to Fort Leavenworth. They reached Donner Lake and found human remains exposed by the melting snow scattered everywhere. They gathered what they could find, threw it all into the Breen cabin, and burned the cabin to the ground, trying to erase the physical evidence. It didn’t really work. Body parts, bones, and skulls stayed scattered around the site for years.
Newspaper accounts spread fast across the country. Many were sensationalized beyond recognition. Some papers claimed all the survivors had eaten human flesh, which wasn’t true. Some reported that people had been murdered and eaten while still alive, which might have been true in a few cases but was never proven. The survivors gave conflicting accounts—some out of shame, others because they genuinely didn’t remember clearly what had happened during months of starvation and freezing delirium.
The letter also included something Virginia wanted people to know: “Thank the good God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh.” Historians have debated whether that was completely accurate, but it was clearly important to the Reed family that people believed they’d avoided cannibalism.
Mary Donner, one of the three girls Tamsen sent away, was seven years old during the ordeal. She admitted years later: “I could not help it. I had eaten nothing for days and I was afraid to die.” The psychological burden these children carried shaped their entire lives.
The surviving Donner children—Frances, Georgia, Eliza, Mary, and several others—were taken in by various California families. In 1911, Eliza Donner wrote a book called “The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate,” trying to set the record straight and defend her mother’s memory against rumors that Tamsen had been murdered for gold.
Immigration to California dropped sharply after news of the tragedy spread. Hastings Cutoff was abandoned. Lansford Hastings received death threats and was confronted by angry emigrants who’d suffered on his route. He apologized but faced no legal consequences for promoting an untested, deadly route to desperate families.
Then gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848. Within months, over 100,000 people flooded into California during the Gold Rush, rushing past the same places where the Donner Party had suffered and died. The tragedy got swept aside in the rush for wealth.
Several Donner Party survivors did well in the Gold Rush. John Breen, who was 14 when rescued, struck it rich in 1849 and brought home $12,000 in gold—enough for his family to buy the historic Castro Adobe in San Juan Bautista, which they ran as an inn. The Breen family settled in California and became prosperous.
James Reed also did well in the Gold Rush and became a successful San Jose businessman. The Reed family lived comfortably. Virginia married John Marion Murphy in 1850 when she was 16, running away with him when she worried her parents might object. They had nine children together. Virginia became a skilled horsewoman who won riding competitions. She lived until 1921.
Mary Murphy was rescued by the First Relief at age 13. Just three months later in June 1847, she married William Johnson, who owned Johnson’s Ranch. The marriage was a disaster. Johnson reportedly beat her, refused to give up his two Native American wives, and drank heavily. Mary obtained what’s recorded as California’s first divorce. She later married Charles Covillaud, a merchant who founded the town of Marysville and named it after her. Despite her much better circumstances, Mary wrote in 1849: “I shall always wish that it had been Gods will for me to die with my Mother.”
The Breen family came through most intact. All seven children and both parents survived—the only large family to make it through completely whole. Patrick Breen’s simple diary, written in cramped handwriting on small pieces of paper, became one of the most important historical documents about westward migration. The family kept it private for years. When it was finally published, newspapers didn’t even credit Patrick by name, just calling him “a member of the party.”
Isabella Breen was only one year old during the winter of 1846-47. She became the last survivor of the Donner Party, dying in 1935 at age 89. She remembered nothing of the ordeal but carried that legacy her entire life.
The Site Today
Donner Lake is now a popular mountain resort near Truckee, California. The campsite has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Donner Memorial State Park, created in 1927, gets about 200,000 visitors every year.
Back in 1866, a photographer named Carleton Watkins took a picture showing tree stumps from trees the pioneers had cut for firewood and building materials. Those stumps stand 22 feet high—marking exactly how deep the snow got during the winter of 1846-47. The photograph provided undeniable proof of what they’d endured.
A monument stands at the site now. The pedestal is 22 feet tall, representing that snow depth. Many visitors report feeling something heavy and oppressive when they visit, as if the suffering from that winter still hangs in the air somehow.
The pass above the lake is officially named Donner Pass, sitting at 7,088 feet elevation. Interstate 80 crosses it now, carrying millions of travelers each year through the same mountains that trapped the Donner Party. Modern drivers cross in minutes what took the pioneers months. Most have no idea what happened down below in the winter of 1846-47.
The people who got stuck at Donner Lake were ordinary folks—farmers, merchants, families looking for better lives. They made poor decisions based on bad advice and worse luck. They faced extraordinary horror and made impossible choices in impossible circumstances.
Some showed remarkable heroism, like Charles Stanton riding back hundreds of miles to help people who weren’t his family, or John Stark carrying starving children through deep snow when everyone else said it couldn’t be done. Others, like Lewis Keseberg, revealed the darkest things human beings are capable of when survival is the only thing left.
The story stands as a warning about shortcuts and unproven routes, about trusting the wrong people at the wrong time. It’s also a testament to how far people will go to survive, how much they’ll endure, and how the human will to live can push through almost anything—even when that survival comes at a cost that haunts you forever.
References
- Donner Party timeline – Wikipedia
- Donner party | History, Facts, & Survivors | Britannica
- Donner Party – Wikipedia
- The Hastings Cutoff and Highway 80 Tragedy of the Donner Party | FHWA
- Map of the Donner Party Route | American Experience | PBS
- The Donner Party | Route, Timeline & Significance | Study.com
- Donner Party encounters first delay | August 6, 1846 | HISTORY
- The Tragic Story of the Donner Party – Legends of America
- The Diary of Patrick Breen | American Experience | PBS
- Donner Party rescued from the Sierra Nevada Mountains | February 19, 1847 | HISTORY
- Donner Party Sources – DonnerPartyDiary.com
- Virginia Reed Murphy Accounts and Letters
- Heroism and Pathos on Donner Summit
- 10 Things You Should Know About the Donner Party | HISTORY
- The Harrowing Rescue Missions to Save the Donner Party Survivors | HISTORY
- KQED Bay Curious Documentary Transcript
- The Lore Lodge Video Transcript
- Historical Lecture Transcripts from Sacramento Historical Society
NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.
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