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.
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.
In the autumn of 1856 two companies of Mormon emigrants pulling their belongings in handcarts — the Willie company and, behind it, the Martin company — were caught by early winter storms on the high plains of central Wyoming, hundreds of miles short of the Salt Lake Valley. Late departures and worn-out carts had left roughly a thousand people strung out across the trail as the temperature crashed and the snow came, and they began to die of cold and starvation. More than two hundred would not survive. This entry follows the rescue itself; the companies’ long journey from Iowa is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries.
The rescue began with a single fast rider. On October 4, 1856, the returning church official Franklin D. Richards reached Salt Lake City and told Brigham Young that hundreds of emigrants were still out on the plains with winter closing in. The next day, at the church’s October general conference, Young set aside the planned program and ordered an immediate relief, telling the congregation in stark terms: ‘Go and bring in those people now on the Plains, and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal, or temporal duties, otherwise your faith will be in vain.’ Within days, wagons loaded with flour, blankets, and clothing rolled east under Captain George D. Grant, the first of a stream of relief teams driving into the storm.
On October 19, 1856, the rescuers found the Willie company first, snowbound and starving on the Sweetwater near South Pass. The relief wagons got food to them, but the company still had to cross Rocky Ridge in a blizzard — a single march of some fifteen miles in deep snow and brutal wind that killed roughly thirteen people, the worst stretch of the disaster for the Willie company. Scouts pressed on east and on October 28 found the Martin company, far worse off, stalled near Red Buttes at the last crossing of the North Platte. They were later guided into a sheltered hollow on the Sweetwater, Martin’s Cove, to wait out the storm while wagons shuttled them west in stages.
It took weeks to bring everyone in. The rescuers carried the weakest in the wagons, walked the rest, buried the dead where they fell, and drove the survivors back across the mountains in relays as fresh relief teams came out from the valley to meet them. The Willie company straggled into Salt Lake in early November and the Martin company near the end of the month. Of the two companies, roughly a third died — about sixty-seven of the Willie company and well over a hundred of the Martin company — in what remains the deadliest single episode of the overland Mormon migration, and one of its most enduring stories of rescue.
In the deep winter of 1874, a Pennsylvania-born prospector named Alferd Packer led five other men out of a Ute encampment near present-day Montrose, Colorado, and into the high San Juan Mountains, bound for the gold camps to the southeast. They had been warned — by the Ute leader Chief Ouray and by their own experience of the snow — to wait for spring, and they ignored it. About two months later, Packer walked out of the mountains alone and conspicuously not starving, carrying money and possessions that had belonged to his companions. The other five were never seen alive again.
What happened in those mountains has been argued over for a century and a half, because the only living witness was the man with the strongest reason to lie. When the five bodies were found that summer near the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River, below what is now called Slumgullion Pass outside Lake City, they had plainly been butchered, stripped of flesh, and partly eaten — and most showed signs of violent death, with hatchet wounds to the skulls and evidence of gunshots. Packer admitted to cannibalism but insisted he had killed only in self-defense. His story changed in important ways between his telling in 1874 and his telling in 1883, and the physical evidence never fully matched either version.
Packer was tried twice. In 1883 he was convicted of the premeditated murder of one of the men and sentenced to hang; the Colorado Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1885 on a technicality of statute. Retried in Gunnison in 1886, he was convicted on five counts of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to forty years — at the time among the longest prison sentences ever handed down in the United States. He served eighteen, was paroled in 1901 after a newspaper campaign on his behalf, and died near Denver in 1907.
This is the most infamous case of survival-cannibalism in the history of the American West, and it sits uneasily between two stories that the surviving facts cannot fully separate: a party of starving men in a death-trap of snow, and a robber who murdered five companions for the money in their pockets. Modern forensic work, including a 1989 exhumation of the remains, strengthened the case that the men were killed rather than simply dying — but it could not settle the central, genuinely contested question of who struck first, or whether Packer’s claim of self-defense holds any truth. The facts that are solid are grim enough; the rest remains uncertain, and this entry tries to keep those two things apart.
In the winter of 1848-49, John C. Frémont — the celebrated “Pathfinder” of the American West, lately disgraced by a court-martial — set out to redeem his name with a privately financed expedition. His backers, including his father-in-law Senator Thomas Hart Benton, wanted proof that a central transcontinental railroad could be pushed along the 38th parallel through the central Rockies and crossed even in deep winter. To prove it, Frémont resolved to do the one thing every experienced mountain man warned against: take a party of thirty-three men and well over a hundred mules straight up into the high San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado in December.
It was a decision made against the explicit counsel of his own guide. The aging trapper Bill Williams — “Old Bill” — knew this country, and the men later recalled his unease at the route and the season. Frémont pressed on anyway, into snow that fell deeper and colder than anything the plains-bred mules could endure. By late December the expedition was bogged in drifts on the high divides above the Rio Grande, the animals dying in their tracks, the men hauling baggage by hand through chest-deep snow at well over 11,000 feet.
When it was over, ten of the thirty-three men were dead — frozen, starved, or simply unable to take another step — and the survivors had been reduced to eating their dead mules, their belts, their rawhide, and, by the darkest accounts, possibly one another. The mountains they died in are the homeland of the Nuche (Ute) people, who had hunted and wintered in the San Juans for generations and who would never have attempted what Frémont attempted. The survivors straggled out in broken groups to Taos, in present-day New Mexico, where Kit Carson and others took them in.
It was one of the worst exploration disasters of the era, and unlike most, it was almost entirely self-inflicted. Frémont never fully accepted the blame, hinting that his guide had led them astray; the survivors who left written accounts — chiefly the artist Richard Kern, whose brother Benjamin died on the mountain — told a different story, of a commander who would not turn back.
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.