Truckee Lake — 1846, the Camp That Waited Out the Winter

Summary

When the Donner Party reached the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada at the end of October 1846, the high passes were already choked with snow. The bulk of the company — about sixty people at the lake and roughly twenty more at Alder Creek, a few miles back — turned the failed crossing into a siege. They threw up rough cabins beside Truckee Lake (today's Donner Lake), killed and ate their last oxen, and settled in to wait out a winter that buried their roofs under more than ten feet of snow. This entry follows the people who stayed; the desperate snowshoe escape of the fifteen who tried to walk out, the 'Forlorn Hope,' is told in our companion entry SV-002.

The cabins became the geography of the ordeal. The Breens took an older shelter from an 1844 crossing; the Murphys built another, sharing with the Eddys; the Graves and Reed families shared a double cabin apart, and Lewis Keseberg added a lean-to against the Breen cabin. At Alder Creek the two Donner families and their teamsters made do with tents and brush, worse off than the lake camp. As the meat ran out the trapped emigrants boiled cattle hides into a foul glue, gnawed boiled bones, ate the family dogs and mice, and finally — as the dead accumulated and could not be buried in the iron ground — some among them ate the bodies of those who had already died.

Much of what we know comes from one of the most chilling documents in American history: the pocket diary kept by Patrick Breen, an Irish-born farmer, from November 20, 1846 to March 1, 1847. His entries are terse, misspelled, weather-obsessed, and shot through with prayer. He recorded the snow ('still snowing now about 3 feet deep'), the killing of the last cattle ('Killed my last oxen today'), and the diet that kept them alive: 'hides are the only article we depend on.' On February 26, 1847 he wrote one of the most haunting lines in the record — that Mrs. Murphy had spoken of beginning to eat the body of Milt Elliott — and on the same page, of the hides, 'we eat them with a tolerable good apetite. Thanks be to Almighty God.'

Four relief expeditions fought up from the Sacramento Valley between February and April 1847 to carry the survivors out in stages, each rescue thinning the camp and leaving the weakest behind for the next. Of the roughly eighty-one people trapped in the mountains, about forty-five lived. The last man found alive, Lewis Keseberg, was discovered alone among the dead in April, and the accusations that followed him for the rest of his life made his name a byword for the whole grim affair.

Timeline

The Setup

The Donner Party had already doomed itself before it saw the Sierra. A late start, a quarreling, oversized company, and the disastrous 'Hastings Cutoff' across the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert had cost them weeks and worn down their oxen by the time they straggled up the Truckee River in October 1846. The story of those choices belongs to the wagon journey, told on our sister site Wagon Wheel Diaries; what matters here is that the party arrived at the lake at the worst possible moment, exhausted and short of food, just as the first heavy snows closed the pass.

They made one push for the summit and failed. A foot of new snow, then more, turned the pass into an impassable wall; the oxen floundered and the wagons could not follow. The company fell back to wait, telling themselves the snow would settle or a thaw would open a window. It never came. The winter of 1846–47 was hard even by Sierra standards, and the snow at the lake eventually stood far deeper than a person's height — deep enough that the cabins were entered down holes cut through the drifts from above.

So the camp dug in. The Breens occupied the old Schallenberger cabin from a previous party; the Murphys and Eddys sheltered nearby; the Graves and Reed families built a third cabin a short walk away. The Donners, slowed by a broken axle and George Donner's infected hand, were caught some six miles back at Alder Creek and never reached the lake, riding out the winter under tents and woven brush — the most exposed and one of the deadliest positions of all. The strongest cattle were slaughtered and the meat cached in the snow, and for a while there was something like a plan: ration the beef, melt water, keep the fires going, and outlast the mountain.

The Disaster

The plan failed because there was simply not enough food, and the cold did the rest. The cached beef ran out within weeks, and with it any margin. People turned to the cattle hides, singeing the hair off and boiling the leather for hours into a gluey paste; 'hides are the only article we depend on,' Breen wrote on January 17, and nine days later, 'liveing on short allowance of hides.' They boiled bones until they crumbled, ate the family dogs — Breen records, on February 23, that he 'shot Towser today & dressed his flesh' — and gnawed mice, bark, and the leather of moccasins and harnesses. Children grew skeletal and apathetic. The weakest began to die — Baylis Williams late in December, then others — and the survivors, too feeble to dig graves in the frozen ground, could only lay the bodies in the snow.

Breen's diary is the camp's pulse through this period, and its restraint is what makes it terrible. He logs the snow depth and the wind almost every day, the slaughter of the last animals, and his own family's dwindling stores, and he prays — 'May we with Gods help spend the comeing year better,' he wrote on New Year's Eve. Then, on February 26, 1847, he records the sentence the diary is remembered for, of Levinah Murphy: 'Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him. I dont that she has done so yet, it is distressing.' Milt Elliott, a teamster, had died; by that point the lake camp had crossed into the territory the Forlorn Hope had already entered out on the snowshoe trail — the consumption of the dead by the living.

The cannibalism at the lake and at Alder Creek was, by every credible account, a last resort among the starving and grief-stricken, not murder; people ate kin and companions who had already died of starvation, often agonizing over it, sometimes refusing. Tamsen Donner reportedly refused to leave her dying husband at Alder Creek even when rescue offered to carry her out, and died there. The exact extent of the cannibalism has been argued over for more than a century — some of the most lurid claims came from sensational newspaper accounts and from men with reputations to defend — but that it happened, soberly and out of true starvation, the survivors themselves attested.

The Ordeal

What the people who stayed actually did, day after day, was endure. There were no heroics available — no trail to walk, no game to hunt under ten and more feet of snow, nothing to do but keep the fire alive, melt snow to drink, share what little there was, and wait for help that might never come. Endurance was itself the act of survival: the discipline of the Breens in rationing their hides, the labor of keeping a fire in a snow pit, the simple refusal to lie down and stop. Families that pooled food and stayed together in a roofed cabin generally fared better than the exposed and the isolated, which is part of why Alder Creek, in its tents, suffered worse than the lake.

The arrival of the relief parties did not end the ordeal so much as stagger it. The First Relief, led by Reasin Tucker and Aquilla Glover, climbed to the lake on February 18–19, 1847 after a brutal ascent from the valley, carrying what little food the rescuers could backpack over the pass. One of them recalled finding the people in distress such as he had never witnessed; Levinah Murphy emerged from a hole in the snow and asked whether they were men from California or had come from heaven. The relief led out a first group of twenty-three who could walk — though three children proved too weak and were sent back — leaving the rest behind with a promise of more help. The Second Relief, led back over the mountains by James Reed (himself a Donner Party member banished earlier on the trail), reached the camps around March 1 and started out with another seventeen, only to be pinned down by a savage storm at 'Starved Camp,' where more died and the survivors were reduced again to the bodies of the dead before they could be brought down.

For those still at the lake, each relief that left took the able and left the rest to wait once more — a cycle of hope and abandonment that ground on into spring. The Third Relief in mid-March, led by William Eddy and William Foster, carried out a few more, including the Donner girls and Simon Murphy, and brought Eddy and Foster up to find their own small sons already dead. By the time the snow began to rot in April, only one person remained alive in the camps, and the long winter of simply staying put had killed roughly half of those who had chosen, or been forced, to wait at Truckee Lake.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The Fourth Relief, a salvage party as much as a rescue led by the mountain man William Fallon, climbed to the camps on April 17, 1847 and found a single living person: Lewis Keseberg, alone in a cabin among the dead, with a pot of human flesh and the Donners' valuables at hand. He was carried out the last survivor of the mountain camps. Of the roughly eighty-one people trapped over the winter, about forty-five came down alive; the dead included George and Tamsen Donner, who would not leave each other at Alder Creek, and most of the single men and many children. The bodies that could not be brought out were left where they lay until summer, and the lake and pass took the Donner name.

Keseberg spent the rest of his life under a cloud, accused on thin and sensational evidence of murder and of preferring human flesh; he sued, and lost, and was hounded by the legend. The survivors scattered into California's new American society — some, like the Reed and Breen families, prospered — and the children who lived grew up to give the testimony historians still rely on. Patrick Breen's little diary passed to the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft and then to the University of California, where it survives as the camp's day-by-day witness.

The Donner Party became the most retold disaster of the overland migration, a cautionary tale wielded for generations against shortcuts and late starts. But stripped of the sensationalism, the story of those who stayed at Truckee Lake is quieter and harder than the legend: ordinary families in a snow pit, rationing leather and praying for clear weather, burying their dead in drifts, and outlasting a mountain one recorded day at a time until help came.

Lessons

References

• Donner Party Wikipedia
• The Diary of Patrick Breen PBS American Experience
• Patrick Breen Diary, 1846 November 20 – 1847 March 1 (finding aid) Online Archive of California
• Donner Party timeline Wikipedia