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

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.

Alferd Packer — 1874, the Colorado Cannibal

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.