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On this day nearly two centuries ago, the first round of rescuers reached a group of travelers on the brink of death in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
You’ve likely heard of the shocking lengths taken by the Donner Party to survive after opting for a fateful shortcut to California that proved anything but.
The group of around 87 people was headed to what’s now California for a fresh start. At the time, wagon trips out West had to follow a tight schedule: If they didn’t cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains by the end of October, they’d face brutal, Arctic-like conditions.
The Donner and Reed families began their journey in Springfield, Illinois, on April 15, 1846, and joined a large train of fellow wagon travelers. Once they made it to Wyoming in June, they decided to embark on the Hastings Cutoff: It was touted by California promoter Lansford Hastings, who claimed it could shorten their journey by up to some 400 miles. Hastings had never actually traveled it, but he hoped to attract people to his business schemes along the way. But explorer James Clyman, who knew James Reed of the Donner Party from the Black Hawk War in 1832, warned him against it.
The group ignored this advice. They chose 60-year-old George Donner as their captain, and took off from Wyoming in mid-July. This was already too late in the year for a safe journey. This shortcut through the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Wasatch Mountains ended up extending their trip by 30 days, making them the last wagons on the trail that year.
It also put them in rough terrain that wasn’t suitable for wagons. With things already going sour, two men forged ahead to California to return with supplies. They ended up in Sutter’s Fort, which is now Sacramento.
At this ranch and farm, Swiss settler John Sutter forced Indigenous Miwok and Nisesan people into grueling work. Sutter gave the members of the Donner Party supplies, and sent two young Miwok men with them as well. They were known as Luis and Salvador, names from Spanish missionaries who converted them to Catholicism.
After several weeks, the Donner Party finally arrived at the Sierra Nevada range, where it was beginning to snow. On October 20, 1846, the group was hit by an early blizzard. They set up camp at what’s now known as Donner Lake, which was just 100 miles from their destination.
At the camp, people ate the last of their oxen, including the hides, and some unsuccessfully tried to reach the other side of the mountain. On January 26, 1847, party member Patrick Breen, an Irish immigrant, wrote (sic throughout): “Provisions getting very scant people getting weak liveing on short allowance of hides.”
Read more: “A Truer Story of Native America”
A month earlier, the party sent 15 people who were in relatively good shape to trek out west on snowshoes and seek help at Sutter’s Fort, including Luis and Salvador. They had met up with the party not long before the ferocious storm. This group, now referred to as the Forlorn Hope party, began to entertain cannibalism as they suffered in the snow.
Luis and Salvador were the only ones to object to this, and a man named William Foster shot them so that the rest could survive on their flesh. Meanwhile, people also resorted to cannibalism back at the snowed-in camp.
Ultimately, Luis and Salvador “were treated as no different than any animal the party may have come across,” Dahlton Brown, executive director for the Wilton Rancheria tribe in California, told KQED.
More than 30 days after the Forlorn Hope group began their hike, seven survivors reached a Miwok village, where people gave them meals and shelter. Once they made it to Sutter’s Fort, news of the Donner Party quickly traveled and rescue efforts began. The first rescuers reached the camp by Donner Lake on February 19, 1847. Ultimately, only 45 members of the Donner Party ever made it to California.
In addition to the Miwok community that helped the snowshoe survivors, the Washoe people say they offered aid to members of the Donner Party. Some of the families broke off from the group and spent the winter at a site called Alder Creek. There, according to Washoe oral history, they tried to provide food to the stranded travelers. In one instance, they say the Donner party shot at them as they attempted to bring over a deer carcass. “The migrants at Alder Creek were not surviving in the mountains alone,” wrote archeologist Julie M. Schablitsky for Archaeology in 2012. “The northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help.”
While the sacrifices and generosity from local Indigenous groups often get left out of the Donner Party narrative, these details have finally come to light over the past decade. 
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Lead image: Kmusser / Wikimedia Commons
