Donner Memorial State Park & Emigrant Trail Museum

July 26, 2019

Donner Memorial (California) State Park, opened in 1928, preserving the site of the Donner Camp, where members of the ill-fated Donner Party were trapped by weather during the winter of 1846–1847. Caught without shelter or adequate supplies, members of the group resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Donner Memorial State Park Visitor Center

12593 Donner Pass Road,
Truckee, CA 96161

Donner Memorial State Park Visitor Center, takes about 1 hour to visit.  It depicts the history of the area and the people who came into this part of the Sierra, including local Native Americans, the Donner Party, and Chinese laborers that built the transcontinental railroad.

The Emigrant Trail Museum (located inside the Donner Memorial State Park) sits almost at the spot where the Donner Party made their final camp sites. The small collection contains books, maps and personal items that once belonged to members of the Donner Party, as well as a replica of the doll young Patty Reed smuggled to safety in her petticoats.

Artifacts recovered during Donald Hardesty’s local excavations are displayed in a case.

Outside the museum a self-guided tour goes past the Donner Party’s Murphy family cabin site, and Pioneer Monument  dedicated to the pioneers who crossed the Sierra on their way to the west, it stands on the spot where the Schallenberger, and later the Breen, cabin once stood. The monument is topped by a forward-looking pioneer family and marks the remarkable height of the snows from the winter of 1846 – 1847. California Historical Landmark #134 it was completed on June 6th 1918, and sits atop a 22 foot pedestal and faces westward toward Donner Pass.

The Donner Party (sometimes called the Donner–Reed Party) was a group of American pioneers who migrated to Californiain a wagon train from the Midwest. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.

The Donner Party departed Springfield, Missouri on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1846, behind many other pioneer families who were attempting to make the same overland trip. The journey west usually took between four and six months, but the Donner Party was slowed after electing to follow a new route called the Hastings Cutoff, which bypassed established trails and instead crossed Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert. The desolate and rugged terrain, and the difficulties they later encountered while traveling along the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada, resulted in the loss of many cattle and wagons, and divisions soon formed within the group.

By early November, the migrants had reached the Sierra Nevada but became trapped by an early, heavy snowfall near Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) high in the mountains. Their food supplies ran dangerously low, and in mid-December some of the group set out on foot to obtain help. As they began to freeze and to starve and die, the survivors began to contemplate the unthinkable, lots were drawn, and then ignored, but finally the desperate hunger became more than they could bear and the unlucky dead were served up to feed the starving living.

Rescuers from California attempted to reach the migrants, but the first relief party did not arrive until the middle of February 1847, almost four months after the wagon train became trapped. Survivors were brought to the safety of Sutter’s Fort in what is now Sacramento. Of the 87 members of the party, only 48 survived to tell the tale.

Back in San Francisco, sordid reports began filling the newspapers, labeling the survivors as cannibals. “A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side.” – The California Star, April 1847.

While the Star’s lurid description was a gross exaggeration of the tragedy of the Donner Party, the horror of their situation has fascinated generations since, inspiring books, music and films, art and memorials.

Historians have described the episode as one of the most spectacular tragedies in California history, and in the entire record of American westward migration.

Most historians agree that the Donner Party’s fatal mistake was taking the Hastings Cutoff. It put them almost a month behind schedule and severely depleted their resources before they reached the critical last stage of the journey. But the emigrants might have returned to the main trail if they’d received a letter left for them at mountain man Jim Bridger’s trading post in southwestern Wyoming. The letter, written by journalist Edwin Bryant and addressed to James F. Reed, warned that the Hastings Cutoff was too rough for the Donner Party’s wagons. But Fort Bridger, as the trading post would later be known, stood to profit enormously if the new route proved popular. Reed never received the letter, and both he and Bryant later suspected that Bridger had concealed it in order to improve his business prospects.

Map showing route of the Donner Party.

(Credit: Kmusser/Wikimedia Commons)

To learn more about the Donner Party check out this article from the History Channel.

Here is an interesting fact. Abraham Lincoln was almost a member of the Donner Party. As a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln often helped his friend James F. Reed in business matters. The two had been messmates during the Blackhawk War, and Lincoln counseled Reed through bankruptcy proceedings shortly before the latter left for California.  According to one historian, Lincoln considered joining the Donner Party, but his wife Mary Todd was strongly opposed to the idea, they had a toddler son and she was pregnant. American history might look very different if the future president and his family had made the ill-fated voyage.

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