process ended up reduced to unspeakable barbarity. It was the American Dream turned inside out.
“The two main characters in the drama were George Donner and his wife, Tamzene. George was a big man with a hunger for land. All his life, he wanted more of it—for farming. His wife was a schoolmarm. She was small and slender, with the manners and education of a lady. But underneath was a woman with an ironbound sense of right and wrong. The two had three daughters together, and George had two other daughters from a previous marriage.
“In 1846, California was still part of Mexico. But war was brewing, and everyone expected the U.S. would soon grab the territory. Donner saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, and get his hands on some of that rich new land. He was a good talker and he drew his brother, Jacob, and Jacob’s family into his vision.
“George, Tamzene, and their five young daughters left Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1846, with a large group of other emigrants. These were not ragtag settlers: they had money. This was a caravan of well-heeled, even wealthy, pioneers stocked with the best of everything. Tamzene planned to start a ladies’ school and had brought books, school supplies, slates and chalk, religious pamphlets and Bibles, even oil and watercolor paints. George had loaded a wagon with bolts of velvet, silks, and satins to sell at high profit to the Californios. Some people carried sums of money with them. A man named Jacob Wolfinger, for example, carried a lockbox containing gold with which he intended to buy land, build a house, and start a business.
“The fact is, aside from their wealth, this was pretty much a normal emigrant wagon train heading west. It would have been forgotten to history except for one thing: a fateful decision they made along the trail. In Wyoming, Donner and the others decided to take a shortcut. It was called the Hastings Cutoff, which was being talked up at the time by a promoter named Lansford Hastings. Donner and about ninety souls voted to take the cutoff. The rest of the emigrant train voted to continue on the regular route.
“So they split up. The Donner Party went southwest into Utah, following the cutoff. The new trail took them through the rugged Wasatch Mountains. Donner and the rest began to realize something was wrong when the mountains turned out to be far worse than Hastings had described. But it was too late to turn around. Once out of the mountains, they were forced to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert. As they struggled on, they began to suffer terribly from lack of water. Some of the children were given flattened bullets to suck on, to relieve their desperate thirst. They ran low on food. Things started to fall apart. Arguments flared up. Indians stole some oxen and shot others full of arrows. Several travelers were also hit—potshots taken from behind rocks and trees—resulting in wounds. Another man, who became unable to walk, was put out of his wagon and left to die by the trail. And all this time, Tamzene Donner kept a careful record of events in her journal.
“As they were crossing the Nevada desert, Wolfinger’s wagon became mired. The rest of the train continued on while he stayed behind to dig it out. Soon afterward, two men named Reinhardt and Spitzer volunteered to go back and help Wolfinger. They were gone a few days. When they later caught up with the wagon train, they explained that they’d been attacked by Indians and that Wolfinger had been killed.
“By the time the emigrants reached the foothills of the Sierras in late October, they were badly behind schedule and already starving. But the mountains were still free of snow, and they hoped to hurry across before winter arrived in earnest.
“They almost made it. Less than a day’s travel from the top of the pass, a sudden blizzard buried them. At the time, the pack train was strung out along the mountain trail. The blizzard literally froze everyone in their tracks—and there they would remain. Fifty-nine people in the vanguard were caught near Truckee Lake and forced to hunker down. Another twenty-two, including George and Tamzene and their five little daughters, were stuck six miles back in a meadow by Alder Creek. These two camps have been found and excavated by archaeologists.
“But the historical record mentions a third camp—usually referred to now as