Eliza Donner & the Last Rescue — 1847, the Children Carried Out

Summary

By the spring of 1847 the Donner Party's winter camps in the Sierra Nevada had become a slow catastrophe of starvation, with the overland journey long behind them and four separate relief expeditions fighting through the snow to carry survivors out. The wagon journey itself is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries; the snowshoe escape of the Forlorn Hope and the long wait at the lake cabins are covered on this site as SV-002 and SV-005. This entry follows what those efforts were finally for — the children, and the last people carried alive out of the high camps.

The Donner families had not even reached the lake. George Donner's wagons had broken down some miles short, at Alder Creek, where they sheltered the winter in tents and brush lean-tos that were even more exposed than the cabins by the water. George had gashed his hand badly trying to repair a wagon axle before the snows closed in; the wound festered through the winter, the infection creeping up his arm, and it would not heal. As the food gave out, the adults at both camps faced the unbearable arithmetic of who could walk out and who could not — and again and again, the answer was that the small children could not, and that someone had to stay.

The relief parties came in waves through February, March, and April of 1847. The First Relief reached the camps on February 18 and led out those strong enough to walk; the Second Relief, which included James Reed coming back for his own family, followed in early March; a Third Relief in mid-March took out more, including the surviving Donner girls; and a final Fourth Relief, or salvage party, reached the lake on April 17 to find almost everyone dead and a single living man, Lewis Keseberg, among the bodies. Of roughly eighty-seven in the party, about forty-eight survived — but a striking share of those who lived were children, carried on the backs and in the arms of rescuers who plunged repeatedly back into the mountains for them.

Among the smallest survivors was three-year-old Eliza Donner, youngest daughter of George and Tamsen Donner. Her father died of his infected wound at Alder Creek; her mother, Tamsen, healthy enough to leave, chose to stay with her dying husband and perished after the last relief had gone. Eliza and her sisters Frances and Georgia were carried out as orphans, raised by others, and Eliza grew up to spend much of her life answering for the disaster — culminating in her 1911 memoir, 'The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate,' a daughter's lifelong work to set the record straight.

Timeline

The Setup

The Donner Party had been trapped since late October 1846, when early snow sealed the high passes of the Sierra Nevada and stranded the emigrants short of California. Most of the party dug in at Truckee Lake — later Donner Lake — in a few cabins. But the two Donner family wagons, led by the brothers George and Jacob Donner, had fallen behind and made their winter camp separately at Alder Creek, several miles to the northeast, where they had no cabins at all, only tents and shelters of brush, branches, and quilts banked against the snow.

At Alder Creek the situation was, if anything, worse than at the lake. George Donner had cut his hand while working on a wagon before the snows closed in, and through the winter the wound turned septic and the infection spread up toward his shoulder; he grew steadily weaker and could not travel. His wife, Tamsen Donner — a former schoolteacher, capable and clear-eyed — nursed him, kept their three small daughters alive, and by most accounts remained strong enough that she could have walked out with the relief parties when they came. Jacob Donner died early in the winter; the two families were left to boil hides, bones, and finally worse as the snow piled to the tops of the shelters.

The children were the crux of every decision. Of the roughly eighty-seven people in the party, a large number were children, many of them very young — the Donner, Reed, Breen, Graves, Murphy, and Eddy families all had little ones in the camps. They could not cross the pass on foot through deep snow, and they could not be left without someone to carry them. Every relief that came in had to weigh how many children it could physically move and who among the adults would have to stay behind to mind those it could not.

The Disaster

Help came in painful, partial stages. The First Relief reached the camps on February 18, 1847, after a brutal climb from the Sacramento Valley, and led out a first group of about twenty-three of the strongest survivors — but it could carry only so many, and small children who could not keep up were among those who had to be left or turned back, some dying on the way out. The Second Relief, which included James Reed returning for the wife and children he had been forced to leave when he was banished from the party on the trail, came in around March 1 and took out more, among them the rest of Reed's family.

The Third Relief, reaching the lake about March 14, found the survivors at the end of their endurance, the dead unburied in and around the shelters, and the living kept alive only by eating those who had died — the grim necessity that has defined the Donner story ever since. It was this relief that carried out the three small Donner girls, along with Simon Murphy and the camp helper Jean Baptiste Trudeau. By the accounts that survive, Tamsen Donner walked her daughters Frances, Georgia, and Eliza over to be entrusted to the rescuers, having been told another relief would come for her, and then turned back to her dying husband. The girls were small enough that they had to be carried much of the way; Eliza was three.

The Fourth Relief, really a salvage party sent in April partly to recover property, arrived at the lake on April 17 to a scene of near-total death. Of all the people who had wintered at the camps, they found one alive — Lewis Keseberg, surrounded by human remains, the last survivor. George Donner was already dead at Alder Creek of his infected hand; Tamsen, who had stayed past the last chance to leave, was dead as well, the circumstances of her final days a matter of grim and disputed legend. Keseberg was brought down to Sutter's Fort, reaching it on April 29. The relief efforts had, by then, carried out everyone they were going to carry out alive.

The Ordeal

For the children, rescue was only the start of the ordeal. They were brought down out of the mountains starved, frostbitten, and in many cases newly orphaned, into a California that was a sparsely settled frontier in the middle of the Mexican–American War. The three Donner sisters had lost both parents; Frances was about six, Georgia four, and Eliza three. They were taken in by families in the Sutter's Fort area and beyond, separated at times, and raised among strangers who had their own struggles in a raw new country.

What is remarkable, against the death toll among the adults, is how many of the youngest survived. Of the children who reached the relief parties, the great majority lived — carried on rescuers' backs, wrapped against the cold, fed first from the thin stores the parties hauled in. The very helplessness that made them a burden also made them the priority: grown survivors and rescuers alike spent themselves to get the small ones out. Eliza Donner survived because others — her mother, who put her on the relief and stayed behind to die; the rescuers who carried her; the families who took her in — decided that she would. By her own account, she and Georgia were taken in by a kind Swiss couple who kept them for some seven years before they rejoined their older half-sister Elitha.

The second ordeal was the story itself. The Donner name became a byword for horror, the cannibalism sensationalized in the press, and the survivors spent their lives being asked about the worst weeks of their childhood. Eliza grew up determined to answer not with sensation but with record. Educated, married to the lawyer and later congressman Sherman Otis Houghton, she gathered documents, letters, and the testimony of other survivors over decades, defending in particular her mother Tamsen's memory against the ugliest rumors that had attached to her death. The result was her 1911 book, the closest thing the disaster has to an account from inside the youngest generation that lived through it.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The four relief parties closed the active phase of the Donner disaster on April 17, 1847, when the salvage party found only Lewis Keseberg alive among the dead at the lake. Of the party of about eighty-seven, roughly forty-eight survived the winter and the rescues — but a disproportionate number of the survivors were children, the very people the relief efforts had strained hardest to save. The orphans were brought down to the settlements and parceled out among families to be raised.

Eliza Donner was three when she was carried out and never knew her parents as anything but a few fragments of memory. She and her sisters Frances and Georgia grew up in California; Eliza was educated, taught school, and in 1861 married Sherman Otis Houghton, a Mexican–American War veteran who became a U.S. congressman. She spent much of her adult life as a kind of guardian of the Donner record, corresponding with other survivors and historians, collecting documents, and pushing back hard against the sensational and slanderous versions of the story — above all the rumors that smeared her mother Tamsen in her final days.

That lifelong work became 'The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate,' published in 1911, written from the perspective of one of the smallest survivors and built on decades of gathered testimony and her sisters' recollections. Eliza Donner Houghton died in 1922. Her memoir remains one of the essential primary sources on the disaster — a daughter's attempt to turn the worst thing that ever happened to her family into something accurate, and to give the dead, especially her mother, their dignity back.

Lessons

References

• Eliza Poor Donner Houghton Wikipedia
• Donner Party Wikipedia
• Eliza Donner Houghton National Park Service
• The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate (1911) Project Gutenberg