The Forlorn Hope — 1846, the Donner Party’s Snowshoe Escape

Summary

By the middle of December 1846 the Donner Party had been trapped for over a month beneath the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada, snowed in at Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) and along Alder Creek, with the high passes choked under fathoms of snow and the food nearly gone. The overland journey that delivered them there — the Hastings Cutoff, the lost weeks in the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert — belongs to our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries. This entry begins at the snowline, with the decision that fifteen of the strongest emigrants would strap on improvised snowshoes, abandon the camps, and try to walk over the mountains to bring back rescue. They called themselves, with grim accuracy, the "Forlorn Hope."

Seventeen people left the lake camp on December 16, 1846, but Franklin Graves — a Vermonter who knew the craft from the northern winters of his youth — had been able to fashion only fourteen pairs of snowshoes from sawn oxbows and rawhide. Two of those without them, Charles "Dutch Charlie" Burger and ten-year-old William Murphy, turned back almost at once, leaving fifteen to go on: ten men, five women, and among them the two Miwok vaqueros Luis and Salvador, who had been sent up from Sutter's Fort weeks earlier with relief mules and had themselves become trapped. They carried what amounted to about six days' rations — finger-thin strips of dried beef, a little coffee and sugar — and expected to reach the Sacramento Valley in perhaps a week or ten days. Instead they were on the snow for roughly a month, and what happened in that time became the most harrowing single episode of the entire Donner catastrophe.

Within days the small column was lost, snow-blind, frostbitten, and starving. A blizzard pinned them down at a place the survivors afterward called the "Camp of Death," where the first men died and where, in extremity, the living first cut flesh from the dead to keep from dying themselves. The cannibalism was deliberate, agonized, and openly recorded by the survivors afterward; they were careful to note who had eaten and who had not, and to keep relatives from being made to eat their own kin. Near the end, two of the party — the Miwok guides Luis and Salvador, who had refused to take part — were shot by another member, William Foster, and their bodies eaten as well, the only killings in the ordeal and a stain the survivors did not hide in their testimony.

Of the seventeen who set out, seven came down out of the mountains alive — two men and all five women. They reached the edge of the Sacramento Valley near Johnson's Ranch in mid-January 1847, more than thirty days after leaving the lake, and it was their arrival, and the story they carried, that set the first organized relief expeditions moving back toward the buried camps. The Forlorn Hope did exactly what it was named to do: it brought help. The cost was that fewer than half of those who carried the message survived to deliver it.

Timeline

The Setup

The Donner Party had reached the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada at the very end of October 1846, weeks behind any safe schedule after the disastrous detour known as the Hastings Cutoff (that overland story is told on Wagon Wheel Diaries). An early, heavy snowfall sealed the pass above Truckee Lake before the wagons could cross. Roughly eighty people settled into a scatter of crude cabins and brush shelters at the lake and at Alder Creek a few miles back, killed and ate their remaining oxen, and waited for a break in the weather that never came. By December the snow lay many feet deep, the cattle were gone, and people had begun to die of starvation and exposure.

With no relief appearing from the west, the camp's strongest members concluded that someone had to go over the top on foot. The volunteers were the people judged most able to survive the crossing — and, just as importantly, the ones whose departure would leave fewer mouths at the lake. Among them were Franklin Graves himself with his daughters Mary Ann and Sarah and Sarah's husband Jay Fosdick; William Eddy, who would become the party's most determined leader and later one of its principal narrators; Charles Stanton, who had already once crossed for supplies and returned, bringing the two Miwok men with him; William and Sarah Foster; the widowed Harriet Pike; Amanda McCutchen; the bachelor Patrick Dolan; the herder Antonio; and twelve-year-old Lemuel Murphy. With them went the Miwok vaqueros Luis and Salvador.

The plan was simple and, on paper, almost reasonable: travel light, move fast, and reach Sutter's Fort or Johnson's Ranch in roughly a week. They took a few days' worth of dried beef apiece and little else, gambling everything on speed. What they did not have was a guide who actually knew the buried country, accurate knowledge of the distance, or any margin at all if the weather turned. Charles Stanton had crossed the mountains before, but he was already failing physically, his eyesight ruined by snow glare. The gamble was that a small, strong party could do in days what the whole company, with its wagons and weak, could not. The mountains did not cooperate.

The Disaster

Almost from the start the crossing went wrong. The snow was bottomless and the going slower than anyone had imagined; the few days' rations were soon gone, and the party was reduced to scraping the country for nothing. Charles Stanton, blinded by the glare and exhausted, began to fall behind. On about the fourth day out he sat down by a fire and told the others to go on without him; they left him there, and he died alone in the snow — the first of the Forlorn Hope to go.

Then the weather broke over them. A multi-day blizzard caught the party on an exposed shoulder of the range, where they huddled with almost no fuel and no shelter, unable to move. Several more died in that storm: Franklin Graves, the man who had made their snowshoes; Patrick Dolan; Antonio, one of the herders; and the boy Lemuel Murphy. It was here, with the dead lying frozen among the living and the survivors days past their last food, that the unthinkable was finally done. The survivors named the place the "Camp of Death," and there they cut and roasted flesh from the bodies of those who had already died, taking pains, by their own later accounts, to keep husbands, wives, and children from being made to eat their own relatives.

What began as a swift dash over a pass had become a slow, grinding fight for each day's life. Frostbite blackened feet; snow blindness left some of them all but helpless; and the dried human flesh, carefully apportioned, was all that kept the rest moving. As the party descended at last into lower, timbered country, the food ran out again. Near the end, William Foster — by then desperate and, by some accounts, unhinged by hunger — proposed killing one of the weaker members for food. To prevent that, or in its place, he shot the two Miwok men, Luis and Salvador, who had separated from the group and refused all along to eat human flesh. Their bodies were eaten. It was the only deliberate killing of the ordeal, and the survivors recorded it plainly rather than bury it.

The Ordeal

The survival of the Forlorn Hope was, above all, an endurance contest measured in weeks rather than days, fought out by people whose feet were rotting in their moccasins and whose only reliable food was the dead. After the Camp of Death the dwindling group pressed downhill, out of the deep snow and into rain and timber, where the cold was less lethal but the country no easier. They followed the drainages westward, more lost than not, sustained by carefully husbanded strips of dried human flesh carried from the storm camp and by the certainty that to stop was to die where they sat. Jay Fosdick died along the way; his widow Sarah was among those who walked on.

The striking arithmetic of who lived is part of the story's grim fame: of the men, only William Eddy and William Foster came through; all five women — Mary Ann Graves, Sarah Fosdick, Sarah Foster, Harriet Pike, and Amanda McCutchen — survived. Physiology may explain part of it, the female survivors carrying slightly more fat and losing heat less fast, but so does sheer will and the brutal selection of the trek itself. Toward the end the party was guided down to safety by Indigenous people of the foothills — Nisenan (Maidu) communities — who gave the staggering, skeletal strangers acorns and bread and helped lead them to the first white settlement. Without that aid, by William Eddy's own account, the last of them would not have made it out.

Eddy, the strongest left standing, pushed ahead with the help of the local Native people and reached the cabin of an emigrant family near Johnson's Ranch on the edge of the Sacramento Valley. Rescuers were sent back along his track to gather in the six others scattered behind him, all of them found alive. They had been on the snow for roughly thirty-three days and had crossed the Sierra Nevada the hard way — on foot, in winter, eating their dead — to carry out the single most important fact in the whole disaster: that some sixty people were still trapped and starving at the lake, and would die without help. The first relief party set out within days.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The seven survivors of the Forlorn Hope reached the Sacramento Valley in mid-January 1847, and their arrival is the hinge of the whole Donner story. It was the first hard news to reach California that an entire emigrant company lay trapped and starving in the high Sierra, and it set the relief machinery in motion. Four separate rescue parties would fight their way up to the lake and Alder Creek camps over the following weeks and months, bringing out survivors a handful at a time and finding, at the camps, conditions as terrible as anything the snowshoers had endured — the subject of our companion entries on the Truckee Lake camp and the final rescue.

The survivors themselves carried the episode for the rest of their lives. William Eddy, who had lost his wife and both children at the lake, became one of the principal sources for the earliest published accounts. Mary Ann Graves, who had watched her father die in the storm, later spoke and wrote of the ordeal; her testimony, and that of the other women, is much of why the Forlorn Hope is documented in such unsparing detail. The killing of Luis and Salvador was not hidden by the survivors, and modern historians have been careful to name the two men — Miwok vaqueros who had come to help and were murdered for refusing to eat human flesh — rather than let them vanish into the anonymous body count.

The phrase "Donner Party" became, almost immediately, American shorthand for the horror of the frontier, and the cannibalism overshadowed everything else in the public memory. But within that story the Forlorn Hope occupies a particular place: it is the part where some of the trapped chose to gamble their own lives on a winter crossing rather than wait to die, and where that gamble — at a cost of more than half their number — actually worked. The people who came down out of the mountains saved the people who could not.

Lessons

References

• Forlorn Hope (Donner Party) Wikipedia
• Donner Party Wikipedia
• The Donner Party PBS American Experience
• Donner and Reed Wagon Train Incident National Park Service — California Trail