Donner Party Later On...

NOT the Breens

The latest issue of the East Bay Monthly (out of Berkeley) contains my article about J. Ross Browne, a famous-but-lost-to-time author who dined with members of the Breen family after their rescue from what is now called Donner Lake. His imagination got the best of him and he imagined his hosts as blood-thirsty cannibals, which is actually very sad when we consider that they were not ghouls but people pushed to the outer limits of hunger.

How can any of us predict how we would act in the same circumstances? The urge to live is strong, and the Donner Party people lived under the hope that rescue was imminent if they could just hold out one more day. All accounts show how desperate and shamed the people were who had to partake in human flesh. Definitely not their first choice!

The article can be found here.

One unexpected bonus of this article is that I was contacted via email by a descendant of the Breens. She very graciously and diplomatically pointed out that the photo that ran with the article, identifying Patrick and Margret Breen, was not in fact of a photo of them. I thanked her profusedly, offered to collect an oral history, and let her know that I would pass the information along to the magazine. The magazine will be running a correction. In the meantime....I'm so excited to have had email contact with someone with a true connection to the Donners. She is my version of a celebrity!

J. Ross Browne's lithograph of a sperm whale hunt

The photographs and illustrations that ran with the story (including a great lithograph of a sperm whale surfacing, about to be harpooned: J. Ross Browne's harrowing stories of whale hunting inspired no less than Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick)  were under the magazine's art direction, and it'd be hard to fault them for using that photograph. That photograph is circulated everywhere with the misidentification of the couple depicted; it reminds me of another situation, in which a portrait has been repeatedly shared on the web as depicting Mary Bliss Parsons. It's not. There are no known portraits of Mary Bliss Parsons, my ancestor accused of witchcraft on at least two occasions. Here's my blog post about that particular situation. 

Anyway, I think it's important to remember that some people's lives continued after the disaster in the Sierra. Marysville, California, for instance, is named for Mary Murphy, another Donner Party survivor, and many went on to become important town leaders wherever they settled. Louis Keseberg: another matter.

Speaking of other matters, my friend Lynn Carthage's book Haunted: The Arnaud Legacy launched last week, and I've been watching her progress with interest. The book is a young adult neo-Gothic thriller (a fancy way of saying "haunted mansion story") and I highly recommend it.

Members of local Historical Novels Society help Lynn Carthage launch her novel. From left,
Erin McCabe (I Shall Be Near to You), Susan Spann (Blade of the Samurai),
Jennifer Laam (Secret Daughter of the Tsar), and Lynn Carthage.
Three other HNS folks were at the reading but unfortunately departed before
photo time: Mark Weideranders, Kathy Boyd Fellure, and Pam Munn.

Tahoe

This photo is from last weekend. We didn't get to Donner Lake, but I thought this image from the shores of Lake Tahoe gives the same dramatic impression: that the mountains can be snow-filled and dangerous while just down in the valley it's a beach day. A beach day with sweaters, but definitely a day we knelt in the sand and made castles.

My sister was here visiting and we watched the Ric Burns documentary on the Donner Party she had given me for Christmas. That documentary mentioned one thing I hadn't heard before (which I want to run by Kristin Johnson)--the idea that everyone else would've happily climbed the pass the day before snow fell, except they were waiting for the George Donners et al. to catch up.

Regardless of whether that's true or not, it kills me every time (reading or watching) that they missed it by one day. If the snowstorm had been delayed, they would have summited and been on the descent by the time snow flew. It's extraordinary to travel for months and months: and then miss your chance by one day.

I have an article coming out in Oakland Magazine about the aftermath of the Donner Party, when J. Ross Browne visited the Breens at their San Juan Bautista hotel after the disaster and couldn't sleep thinking that Mrs. Breen had the fearsome face of a cannibal. His imagination got the best of him. I'm hoping my article stresses enough that I pity the Donners. They have been the subjects of gruesome speculation, but truly they suffered almost unbearable agonies.

I can't imagine how much cold, low dread they felt as they saw the fast snow flying and realized they'd have to winter at the lake...when their food supply was already so low they'd sent others ahead to bring something back. A nightmare. Especially considering how many of the party were just children, including nursing babies.

. . . . .

The Perfect Snowstorm, or, Why I'm Obsessed by the Donner Party

Unidentified books in Emigrant Trail Museum exhibit
To me, clearly Tamsen Donner's books

I’m fascinated  by the Donner Party. Believe it or not, my interest has very little to do with cannibalism. That’s of course the attention-getting, morbid fact that initially grabs you by the throat, but after that subsides, what you’re left with is a complex story whose narrative can be almost endlessly examined.

Sexism, racism, ageism, personal responsibility, survival tactics, starvation, greed, murder: all of these big topics fall under the Donner umbrella,  as well as the more mundane (but no less worthy of scrutiny) topic of group dynamics and how people get along—or don’t—during a multi-month road trip.

I was recently talking with historian Kristin Johnson about what fuels our interest in this long-ago community of emigrants. I told her I loved high adventure stories, like Shackleton and crew stuck on a ship in the frozen Weddell sea (well, until it was crushed by the ice and destroyed, whereupon they began living upon an ice floe), or the Everest teams beset by weather in 1996. Two words: Beck Weathers. The Donner Party faced incredible struggle, and roughly half of them survived.

But I realized later that that was only half my answer. When I thought about it more, I realized that a huge part of what appeals to me is the “perfect storm” (or in this case, perfect snowstorm) aspect. In Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm, the titular concept is that many small mishaps combine to form a huge tragedy. If only one of those would have gone differently, either the disaster could have been averted, or at least significantly abated.

I’ve always loved that child’s nursery rhyme about how a single nail (or lack thereof) brought a kingdom down.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Tiny actions have amazing and significant consequences. In the case of the Donner Party, any number of small adjustments (or large) could’ve meant none of us had ever heard of the Donners. The same is true for the sinking of the Titanic, another story I’ve been fascinated by since I was a young girl and read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember.

Let’s take a look at my rough list, off the top of my head, of the small events that gained potency in numbers, in a perfect storm scenario.

Titanic:

If only…

• The binoculars had been in the lookout as they were supposed to be
• Captain Smith paid better attention to the ice warnings instead of glancing at them and putting them in his uniform pocket
• The Marconi operator of a far closer ship than the Carpathia hadn’t turned off his machine and gone to bed (he was not negligent in doing so, by the way, but it would have been nice for all involved if he’d pulled an all-nighter)
• (relatedly) The Titanic had struck the same iceberg during daylight hours
• The crew had performed their required boat drill on April 14 and were confident enough to fill the lifeboats to full capacity (there were still not enough seats, but the loss of life would have been diminished)
• There were enough lifeboats for all passengers (again, not negligent: the Titanic was abiding by the absurd shipping rules of its era—one nice effect of the sinking was that it forever changed these archaic rules and ensured each passenger would have a seat on a lifeboat should the ship sink)
• Some would add, if only J. Bruce Ismay wasn’t aboard and therefore urging Captain Smith to dangerous speeds on the ship’s maiden voyage
• If only they had kept full engine speed to successfully turn the ship, rather than killing the engines
• The iceberg had struck a different spot on the ship, so that each of the watertight compartments wasn’t breached

On and on, a slew of factors which all went wrong, but if any one of them had gone right, we might have a far less dramatic tale to tell about the Titanic.

And here’s the same listing for the Donner Party:

If only:

• They didn't take the Hastings Cut-off, which ironically added weeks to their time
• They didn't waste a week waiting for Hastings to come back and guide them through the Wasatch mountains
• They had located the hidden cut-through that would have gotten them through the Wasatch just fine
• Indians hadn't stolen and killed so many of their oxen and cattle (both slowing them and also deleting their food stores)
• Hastings had correctly given the time required to cross the Salt Desert, rather than halving it; they might've better provisioned themselves before the attempt and not lost so much livestock
• George Donner's wagon wheel hadn't broken
• George Donner's hand hadn't been significantly injured by trying to repair the wheel (infection set in and ruined him...wish I could slip him some penicillin)
• Snow had fallen just three or four days later; they were so close to crossing the mountains to safety
• The emigrants had somehow fastened their cows so they weren't lost when literally buried by snow
•  They had backtracked and wintered in a more forgiving landscape
• Stanton had allowed the snowshoe company to continue forward instead of keeping a foolish promise to protect the mules over the emigrants (the mules died anyway, and so did Stanton...hindsight is so deliciously wretched, as well as 20/20)

 
Now, you'll notice I don't say:

• If only they hadn't stopped for the funeral of Sarah Keyes and other stops others have subsequently objected to. As Kristin Johnson points out, cattle need to rest.
•  If only they hadn't gotten such a late start. They caught up to other westbound trains and made up for their late start. If they hadn't taken the Hastings Cut-off, they would have been fine.

I have to admit, I love/agonize over the "coulda, shoulda, woulda" of the Donner Party's circumstances. I'm the kind of person who dissects my failures and falls prey to self-recriminations; the Donner Party narrative rewards such a personality. I'm sure that for the rest of their lives, the people who survived the trauma never ceased their sleepless nights, their burning feelings of "Why didn't I....?"

The women in particular must have suffered helpless self-excoriation, for they truly did not get a vote. It's always said of Tamsen Donner that she was sulky or grumpy about the choice--made by men of the party--to take the cut-off. She must have chastened herself that she wasn't more persuasive, that she couldn't gain George Donner's ear the way she would've wanted to.

To me, one of the most poignant exhibits at the Emigrant Trail Museum near Donner Lake shows several school books. Almost without a doubt, they must have been Tamsen's, as she planned to set up a west coast school. (The plaquing at the museum does not specifically identify the objects in that case, although I'm sure somewhere in their records the books' provenance is logged .) She was one of those women who bristled at the constraints her century forced upon her gender. The decision-making of the wagon trains did not permit women's voices to be heard. 

As she tended her husband, dying from a simple hand wound that traveled up his arm to kill him from an infection we'd swiftly derail with medication today, did she have to bite her tongue to not question him for the fatal choices he'd made--not only on his behalf, not only on grown women's behalf, but on the behalf of the dozens of small children that composed the Donner Party?

And that's what wrenches me most about the Donner Party story. There were kids involved. Newborn babies who died because their mother's milk dried up. Toddlers who starved to death. Young kids who tried valiantly and just couldn't make it.

There's a great morbid interest around the Donner Party, especially for those who read the harrowing accounts of body parts and organs left stranded around the camp. But those bodies weren't strewn because of a ghoulish lack of concern. It was because the residents of the camps were so close to death themselves. They were weak--it's hard to carry or drag bodies even when you are in full health. They needed to leave the bodies close by enough to cut tissue from them to eat. In Keseberg's cabin, it's said the bodies were left where they died. A horrible fact to contemplate, as the living continued their fragile existences mere inches away--but the cabin was so buried in snow (above its roof) that the unhappy inhabitants had had to carve snow steps up out of the snow. How on earth do you pull a corpse up those steps when you yourself have eaten nothing, or simply trace amounts of, say, buffalo hides, for days?

Prisoners liberated from Mauthausen concentration camp, 1945

When I think the people at the camps, I picture people from another kind of camp. I think of the photographs of starved, gaunt Jews from the concentration camps. The hollow cheeks, the sudden architecture of the forehead, the eyes so stark and large...that's what I believe the Donner Party victims looked like too. In fact, it is said that when the snowshoe party wandered into a Native American village, the inhabitants there were terrified and thought the Donner Party people were ghosts. 

I feel pity for the Donners and the other families stranded in the Sierra that terrible winter of 1846. They perhaps didn't make the most savvy decisions--but they were pioneers in every sense of the word, doing something very few had done before. And let's be honest: the snows of the Sierra are so much more heavy/deep than anything these midwesterners had ever seen before. They knew snow; they just didn't know snow. They thought they were doing fine. 

And they would've been fine, if only one of the myriad things that went wrong had instead....gone right.


. . . .
 

Shelters of the Donner Party

Members of the Donner Party were not all housed together. Far from it. The literal Donners--George and his family, and Jacob and his family, and their teamsters and a few others--fell behind the others and were forced to create makeshift shelters as snow literally piled up on them. They built those shelters at Alder Creek. George and his family built their shelter against a tree. The images show the tree that was long believed (but since disproved) to be that tree, and a drawing of how it could've worked. Jacob and his family built a separate shelter.

The tree? Probably not.

Building against the tree trunk

Gratuitous selfie in Alder Creek parking lot

A full seven miles away, on the shores of what is now Donner Lake, three other shelters served the non-Donner members. One was a fairly decent log cabin used by Moses Schallenberger two winters before (like the Donners, he wintered at the lake, and his memoirs make good reading). Patrick Breen and his family were presumably the first to arrive at the lake, and first come-first served. On the site of the Breen cabin now stands the Pioneer Monument, a fairly ghastly depiction of man, woman and child groping their way to California.

Pioneer Monument

Famously, the base of the statue is 22 feet, the snowfall the winter of 1846. Lots of people dispute that number, saying it was the accrued snowfall that melted and refell--that at no time would 22 feet of snow stand. But check out this factoid from Truckee's wikipedia entry: "The maximum 24-hour snowfall was 34.0 inches (86.4 cm) on February 17, 1990." Unfortunately, there were no meterologists monitoring things at Donner Lake that year, but we have reports of unrelenting snowfall from Breen's extant diary.

Here's a close-up of the plaque on the monument. I cannot believe it mentions virility, since it was the men who made the disastrous decision to take the fatal Hasting's Cut-off, while poor Tamsen Donner clearly advocated staying on the proven trail. A fellow traveller's journal reports her sour disposition as the men overruled her.

Here's a drawing of the Schallenberg cabin as it might've appeared when the emigrants first arrived, before it dawned on them that they weren't going over that mountain range anytime soon...

And the same cabin now covered in snow, only its two chimneys visible. Sobering sight.

The Breen cabin, windowless, with no true roof and covered by buffalo hides, was the best of the shelters. The Murphy family built their shelter against the side of an enormous rock.

Murphy cabin site with docent

Here's a drawing of how the rock/cabin combo might've worked.

Yet a third structure was built, for the Graves and Reed families. Here's what's so extraordinary. Of course the Donners were far away at Alder Creek; George had become injured fixing his wagon, so they had to stop and reassess. But the families that made it to the lake--why did they build their structures so far apart? After all, there is safety in numbers, especially for people that had seen firsthand how Native Americans could endanger them (major historical irony). Historian Kristin Johnson thinks they were just so exhausted by dealing with each other--after the worst.roadtrip.ever.--that they chose to set their cabins far apart, even if meant terrible slogs through 22-foot snow to reach each other with news or to ask for food.

Standing at the Pioneer Monument (i.e, the Breen family cabin), you can barely see in the distance the tall Shell gas station sign (a yellow blob atop a pole in the center of this photo: look just to the right of the green road signs) which marks the approximate spot of the Graves-Reed site. In the opposite direction, walking from the Breen site to the Murphy site is a good, brisk walk in decent weather, and would be quite an undertaking in snow.


The layout:
 Murphy rock ---> Breen (pioneer monument) -------> Graves-Reed

Walking from the Murphys to the Graves? You'd need a car.

 

At Breen site, looking towards Graves-Reed

Tired of the Donners yet? There's more to come.



. . . . .

The movie Donner Pass

A few nights ago, I watched "Donner Pass," since it streams for free on Netflix. I want my hour and a half back. Besides being a hardly-scary horror movie (they filmed some stuff in broad daylight, which was so corny it was laughable....at least give us some darkness to lend an air of fright. I guess it's harder to figure out lighting in night scenes and this was a low-budget film.)

But instead of taking pot shots at its quality (two words: fish and barrel), I'd like to focus attention on something far more deplorable. In the opening scene of the movie, George Donner shoots three other men and sinks to his knees to ferociously rip out their innards and eat them.Worse, modern-day characters later say that he lured the party to the mountains to eat them.

Really? George Donner? That poor elderly man whose world came to a halt after his hand got cut? Antibiotics would save his life today, but in 1846 he and his family had to hunker down in the snow at Alder Creek, seven miles from the rest of the people trapped at Donner Lake, while the infection traveled from his palm to his shoulder and killed him. He made a lot of mistakes, but undergoing endless months of strength-stripping travel simply to feast on flesh at the end does not make a lot of sense.

The Donner Party people were victims. They did not kill each other to eat (oh wait, yeah, it's believed a small subgroup of the party, far from the camps and trying to make it out through the pass, did intentionally murder Luis and Salvador. And those were two men who had come in relief parties to try to help them. Horrible! But the people trapped in the camps only ate flesh of corpses, and that with great reluctance.)

They were victims. They were starving to death, trapped in snow so high that they could barely walk. Try to hunt in that. Try to cut down a tree for firewood in that (it sinks down through the snow and you have to dig to retrieve it). Try to locate your lost cattle in that so you can eat their frozen carcasses--you won't be able to find them although you'll endlessly try with a nail stuck to a pole, sinking it into the snow and hoping to feel the pole stick on something.

A movie like this is kind of like a movie about the Titanic disaster in which the people deliberately try to drown each other with demented glee.

This movie made me outraged on behalf of the Donners. Had I lived through such suffering, I would be bitter that the circumstances of my months of terror were now fodder for a cheap horror movie.


. . . .

The Patty Reed Doll

My registration with the annual Donner Party Hike permitted me free entrance to the Emigrant Trail Museum. I think this was my third visit. Each time, I watch their half-hour video in the theater and each time I regret it. Why don't I learn?!

Seriously, although small, this is a fascinating collection. And there are dioramas, which I can never get enough of. History + Dollhouses = Diorama. Please don't get me started on the gigantic, ever-circling diorama at the O.K. Corral, narrated by Vincent Price. I hope it's still there.

Anyway, the museum displays a doll that apparently once claimed to be (well, the doll herself didn't claim; her humans did) the original one hidden by Patty Reed when her parents demanded they leave everything behind when they had to abandon the wagon(s).*

Let's back up. A few weeks prior, I visited Sutter's Fort. The true Patty Reed doll is on display there. I asked a docent if it was really was, because I knew there had been some controversy over the two museums' displaying of the doll. He rolled his eyes and diplomatically reported that there had been much trouble over the doll. Patty Reed left it to Sutter's Fort upon her death, in thanks for the free and generous care given to the emigrants when they finally made their way down to Sacramento--not to mention the fact that Sutter organized and funded the rescue parties--but apparently the museum at Donner Lake had it for a while and wanted to keep it. It's also traveled to Washington, D.C., to be exhibited at the Smithsonian.

This is from Gabrielle Burton's fine memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner:

"A sign said that the original doll was on display at Sutter's Fort, but the ranger told me privately that over the years and the swapping back and forth, the original and the replica had gotten mixed up; no one knew anymore which museum had the original. I was appalled that even the experts didn't know, even more appalled when I got to Sutter's Fort and saw a shiny wooden copy of the doll that no one could possibly mix up with the weathered doll at Donner Pass. The ranger, training for his summer job, was passing on a good story, but not a true one."

I don't know much about object sharing between museums, but I believe a paper trail must accompany any shipment of an artifact. I don't buy the ranger's story that they got confused over the years--he makes it sound like they threw the doll in a cardboard box and sent it over the pass in a pickup truck. Also, possibly the two dolls have been switched since 2009 when Burton's book published, but I'd wager the Emigrant Trail Museum doll is the shiny one with overly-bright cheeks, and with a dress that looks like someone rubbed some dirt on it to make it look vintage. Who knows? I don't have an expert's eye and I believe that's why I was never asked back to be an evaluator on Antiques Roadshow. ;)

Judge for yourself. Below is the Emigrant Museum's doll in her fabricated snow habitat, and below that is the Sutter's Fort doll (supposedly the original).

 

I wish I had been able to obtain better images--you can google around and find excellent professional photographs. One last thought: the Sutter's Fort doll is certainly treated like she's the real deal. She's in an enclosed, temperature-controlled exhibit case (see below). The doll itself is surprisingly small, perhaps 3-4 inches.

*It's maybe just me, but I'm sure the parents knew. How can you not play with a doll you have when you're snowbound for four months, and how can your parents not notice? Perhaps they smiled privately and enjoyed letting her think she had gotten away with it. After all, in Ethan Rarick's book he closes with the lovely anecdote that after the rescue, Patty sat by the fire enacting the voices of the rescuers, using her doll. That shows that she played with the doll by voicing it--something she surely hadn't been able to suppress during the long entrapment. She was only eight, after all.





. . . . .

The Donner Party encampment at Alder Creek

Last weekend I did the annual Donner Party hike, and wanted to talk briefly about the tent the George and Tamsen Donner family wintered in, 1846-47.

Here's the plaque that shows an artist's rendering of how they might have fashioned their shelter, by propping poles diagonally against an existing tree trunk, and covering it with the wagon canvas, branches and buffalo hides.

The only problem is, that structure simply isn't large enough. Into that space went George and Tamsen and their five children. Eliza Donner Houghton, three at the time, wrote in her book that sleeping platforms were built by driving poles straight into the ground and then lying branches horizontally: the depiction above would not permit such platforms. George Donner was an invalid from his hand-injury-turned-infection and surely had to lie down: a grown man takes quite a bit of space when resting on his back. Add in the fire--and the space around it which is too hot for human occupancy--and you've run out of room. Did the tent possibly completely encircle the tree?

I'm wondering if perhaps the poles were much longer and hit the tree further up, creating a wider, taller space. In one of the sources, I read that when visitors came--such as rescuer Clark, who spent two weeks with the Donners--there was not enough space for everyone unless if they laid in their beds. That says to me that besides the beds, there was open space.

There's also question about whether a teamster or two sheltered with them. One of the sources says that besides the nearby tent for the Jacob Donner family, there might have been a third structure for the teamsters. Given that they had tried first to construct a genuine cabin and abandoned the effort when it was four logs high, thanks to the fast-flying snow, it's hard to imagine that they bothered to make a third structure. But maybe they did...as we know, emotions were running high and maybe nuclear families wanted to withdraw and be with their own.

EITHER WAY, this was a terrible place to ride out the incredible storms of the Sierras. They couldn't have been very windproof, and they were soon covered with snow (like, completely buried in the snow, and they had to dig their way out to try to hunt or cut firewood): as the sun came out and warmed the snow, it would drip into their lodging. One source says Tamsen once despaired because her children had been wearing wet clothes for two weeks straight.

So, the tree itself...

There's a tree still extant that purports to be the exact tree the George Donner family built their structure against. This is it:

It's labeled with a sign from Peter Weddell, who says he was shown the tree by Charles McGlashan, the Truckee man who compiled survivor testimony in the first book about the Donner Party.

There are several problems with this identification. McGlashan had been unable to locate the site as late as 1879: after three decades in a woodland area with repeated snowfalls and melts, it might be pretty dicey to locate such a temporary shelter. Moreover, the area had been unceasingly picked by relic hunters and scavengers: both human and animal. The fourth relief--who brought out the sole survivor Lewis Keseberg-- reported that the Alder Creek encampment had clothing and property strewn across the snow: the camp's demise was coming as quickly as that of its unlucky inhabitants.

In 1884, McGlashan walked the Alder Creek area with Jean Baptiste Trudeau and still couldn't determine the precise spot for George's shelter. The same was true in 1892 when John Breen visited McGlashan.* Weddell may have misunderstood McGlashan.

Another key bit of data that had been forgotten and then rescusitated by Donner Party historian Kristin Johnson: the mention in Eliza's book that relief party men had cut down the tree their shelter rested against, for firewood. If so, there would be no tree to label and revere. This is problematic too: how could they remove the tree that everything rested upon, without the entire structure collapsing? Is it possible they cut the tree farther up, above the snow line and above where the supporting poles rested?

One of the frustrating things about this story is that much of the information is confusing or in some cases contradictory.

Meadow at Alder Creek

Guide Carrie Smith holds up a tiny piece of bone found at Alder Creek

There has been a lot of archeology in the meadow. Our guides told us that a hearth was located: of course, nothing so blatant as a circle of stones, but instead an accumulation of orange dirt that indicated long-term fire that changed the composition of the soil (I'm only halfway through An Archeology of Desperation  or I'd probably be able to write something smarter). Long-term fire is key: the Donners were here for four months, but many others have trooped through the area and built their fires. The discovery of the hearth almost certainly means one of the Donner sites was found: but which one? The site is not labeled and that's intentional. After a century and a half of people disturbing the site in their quest for Donner money or Donner relics, they want to protect it. An object, once taken from its original resting place, is of no use to an archeologist; it must remain in situ.

Sidenote: the guides told me of a similar situation, the nearby petroglyphs by the Washoe people. After a decision to plaque it and mark it for others, the holy site has been ravaged. "We have a sign saying please don't climb on the rock, and then I see 20 people up there," said one of the guides sadly.

So...the bones. They located thousands of fragments of cooked bone--and not one of them was human. That fact, when first released, caused a sort of hubbub where people jumped to the conclusion that cannibalism had not taken place at Alder Creek. The important distinction is that only cooked bone (and the guides talked about the "pot polish" on the bones, showing they had been boiled and stirred so much that they took on a surface from the metal pot) can survive. An uncooked bone--and anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that viscera were removed, and tissue cut from the bone, for consumption--would not have survived all these years.

My shadow: holding a bone fragment

 There was a little Tupperware that went around our group, holding bone fragments and even a piece of clear bottle glass. So remarkable to hold these things!

Disclosure: not my hand

Shoemaker's arm? No, just a branch

*An Archeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp, edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky and Shannon A. Novak. This very recent (2011) book was recommended to me by Kristin Johnson, and represents the latest knowledge about Alder Creek, fortified by the archeological digs performed there.

Getting to the Donner Party Hike 2013

Last weekend, I returned to the annual Donner Party Hike which I last did many years ago, when we still lived in Oakland. This hike (which has now evolved into many different hike selections over two days, depending on your preferred level of strenuousness) follows part of the emigrants’ trail. I remember last time spending all day hiking to sites where the guides pointed out scars on tree trunks, from where the wagons scraped through, and where we saw the infamous Roller Pass.

Our group: there were maybe 25 of us

 This year I chose to do the hike (maybe more like a tour--not much walking involved) that focused on Alder Creek, the separate encampment area seven miles from Donner Lake, where the two Donner families and a few others set up their fragile domiciles to wait out the winter of 1846-47.

Tree long thought to be where Tamsen and family built shelter against

I was obliged to leave the house at 6:45 a.m. in order to get there in time. Just like the Donners leaving Springfield, Missouri, I got a bit of a late start. My delay was only 10 minutes, but still…

Barely a mile from my house, I looked down at my gas gauge. I had a third of a tank. Definitely enough to make it there, but maybe not enough to make it back? I reasoned I could fill up on the return trip, but maybe I’d be rushing even more then, so I stopped to fill up my tank. This might be akin to the Donners during one of their many time-killers: maybe the reason they were so late starting on the trail was that they stopped for the equivalent of gas. Remember Tamzene wrote that, “Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”

Plaque: how the shelter may have been constructed against tree trunk

Now, you’ll think I’m making this up for purposes of parallelism, but as I drove along I began to feel excruciatingly hungry. I had left the house without breakfast because of the early hour, reasoning I’d grab coffee and something quick along the way. But I was really, really hungry. I let the feeling sit for a while, thinking it was good practice to imagine how the Donners felt this way for months on end. Ultimately, I had to stop. I was trying for a breakfast burrito, but driving around the strip mall I couldn’t locate the intended purveyor, so instead I went to a donut shop in that outlet. I picked a cake donut, thinking it looked a little healthier than its fluffier peers (I got it chocolate frosted; I’m not a martyr), and some decaf coffee and was back on the road.

Close-up of tree: aging Peter Weddell sign and Earl Rhoads blaze

I made good time, but my “Wasatch Mountains/Great Salt Desert” was the fact that I couldn’t determine the proper exit off the highway. I got off and suddenly somehow thanks to a roundabout found myself back on it. I drove, I looked at the time, I started to panic. I pulled into a ranger station and got some good advice, unlike the Donners. I made it to the hike rendez-vous with 15 minutes to spare.

At their registration table ("Johnson Ranch")? Coffee and donuts. Ha!

Their restroom was completely locked up thanks to the government shutdown. I had to walk into the woods and wonder if I was watering the same soil the Donners had.

Where I guiltily ate almonds. Excellent guides: Carrie Smith, left, and Gayle Green

And there the coincidences stop. I was not entrapped at Alder Creek. Snow did not fall. No one’s hand was injured. Buffalo hides were not eaten, nor were shoestrings nor fire rugs. I had brought a little sack lunch in my backpack that satisfied. I did feel like a turncoat standing there at the tree once thought to be the one the George Donner family had built their structure against, munching on a handful of almonds. If I could’ve slipped that food back in time, believe me, I would have. 

This young tree was planted by Donner descendants

This story pulls at my gut, has me obsessively reading three books at a time on the topic, carrying on a wonderful email correspondence with a highly-regarded Donner Party historian, and even giving my poor community college students writing assignments like, “Write a letter to Lansford Hastings, pretending you’re a survivor.”

Not too long ago, I told my husband a particularly disturbing anecdote from the Donner Party annals—not about cannibalism; oddly enough, I don’t find that aspect that compelling or interesting—and he said, “That’s why you can’t sleep at night. You read this stuff right before you go to bed.” He was, well, suggesting I stop doing so. It was a gentle suggestion on his part, so I didn't say what I thought, which was, “If you want me to stop reading about the Donner Party, then you married the wrong woman!”

He just wants me to sleep soundly. In our warm bed, where we can hardly even hear the wind blow outside, where a few rooms away cupboards await us, filled with food.

. . . . .