{"id":19084,"date":"2017-11-08T05:07:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T09:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=19084"},"modified":"2017-11-10T17:34:23","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T21:34:23","slug":"10-things-you-should-know-about-the-donner-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=19084","title":{"rendered":"10 Things You Should Know About the Donner Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

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James and Margaret Reed, Donner Party members. (Credit: Public Domain)<\/h6>\n

In 1846, the Donner brothers led a wagon train of pioneers heading to California.\u00a0 Caught in the Sierra Mountains in one of the worst winters ever recorded, the settlers were forced to hunker down.\u00a0 As their food and supplies ran out, and over half of the party died, most of the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism.<\/p>\n

Evan Andrews and History.com present\u00a010 Things You Should Know About the Donner Party<\/a>.\u00a0 Here are three of my favorites…<\/p>\n

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2.\u00a0\u00a0They fell behind schedule after taking an untested shortcut.<\/strong>
\nAfter reaching Wyoming, most California-bound pioneers followed a route that swooped north through Idaho before turning south and moving across Nevada. In 1846, however, a dishonest guidebook author named Lansford Hastings was promoting a straighter and supposedly quicker path that cut through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Salt Lake Desert. There was just one problem: no one had ever traveled this \u201cHastings Cutoff\u201d with wagons, not even Hastings himself. Despite the obvious risks\u2014and against the warnings of James Clyman, an experienced mountain man\u2014the 20 Donner Party wagons elected to break off from the usual route and gamble on Hastings\u2019 back road. The decision proved disastrous. The emigrants were forced to blaze much of the trail themselves by cutting down trees, and they nearly died of thirst during a five-day crossing of the salt desert. Rather than saving them time, Hasting\u2019s \u201cshortcut\u201d ended up adding nearly a month to the Donner Party\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0 Not all of the emigrants engaged in cannibalism.<\/strong>
\nAs their supplies dwindled, the Donner emigrants stranded at Truckee Lake resorted to eating increasingly grotesque meals. They slaughtered their pack animals, cooked their dogs, gnawed on leftover bones and even boiled the animal hide roofs of their cabins into a foul paste. Several people died from malnutrition, but the rest managed to subsist on morsels of boiled leather and tree bark until rescue parties arrived in February and March 1847. Not all of the settlers were strong enough to escape, however, and those left behind were forced to cannibalize the frozen corpses of their comrades while waiting for further help. All told, roughly half of the Donner Party\u2019s survivors eventually resorted to eating human flesh.<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0 One rescuer singlehandedly led nine survivors out of the mountains.<\/strong>
\nPerhaps the most famous of the Donner Party\u2019s saviors was John Stark, a burly California settler who took part in the third relief party. In early March 1847, he and two other rescuers stumbled upon 11 emigrants, mostly kids, who been left in the mountains by an earlier relief group. The two other rescuers each grabbed a single child and started hoofing it back down the slope, but Stark was unwilling to leave anyone behind. Instead, he rallied the weary adults, gathered the rest of the children and began guiding the group singlehandedly. Most of the kids were too weak to walk, so Stark took to carrying two of them at a time for a few yards, then setting them down in the snow and going back for others. He continued the grueling process all the way down the mountain, and eventually led all nine of his charges to safety. Speaking of the incident years later, one of the survivors credited her rescue to \u201cnobody but God and Stark and the Virgin Mary.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James and Margaret Reed, Donner Party members. (Credit: Public Domain) In 1846, the Donner brothers led a wagon train of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-trivia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19084"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19127,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19084\/revisions\/19127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}