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 late summer of 1826 a young, devout, teetotal trapper named Jedediah Strong Smith led a small fur brigade south and west from the Great Salt Lake into country no American had crossed before, leaving the Bear River on August 7, 1826, with fifteen men. By the time his desert journeys were over he had made the first documented overland crossing into Mexican California across the Mojave Desert, the first known east-to-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada, and the first crossing of the central Great Basin — a string of firsts paid for in men’s lives and his own near-death from thirst.
The outbound trip took Smith and his men down to the Colorado River near present-day Needles, to the villages of the Mohave people, who fed the strangers, let them and their horses recover for some two weeks, and gave them guides across the desert westward to the missions of Alta California. They reached Mission San Gabriel in November 1826. There the Mexican governor, José María Echeandía, found an armed band of Americans deep inside his territory alarming, and detained Smith before letting him go on condition he leave the way he had come. Smith instead pushed north to trap, and when spring came he faced the problem of getting home across the mountains and deserts that had nearly stopped him on the way in.
The return in 1827 is the heart of the survival story. Leaving most of his brigade camped in California, Smith and two companions — Robert Evans and Silas Gobel — forced a crossing of the snowbound Sierra Nevada in late May and then struck east across the central Great Basin into a furnace of salt flats and waterless ranges. Smith called it a land where ‘high rocky hills afford the only relief to the desolate waste,’ the intervals between them ‘sand barren Plains.’ Their horses died, then nearly the men: Evans collapsed from thirst, and Smith and Gobel left him in the only shade they could find, pushed on, found water some miles ahead, and carried it back to revive him. They reached the Bear Lake rendezvous on July 3, 1827, as walking skeletons.
Smith’s luck on the desert routes finally broke the next year. In 1828, leading a second party back down the same southwestern road, he reached the Colorado crossing to find the Mohave’s goodwill gone, soured by violence with other American trappers in the interim. The Mohave attacked, killing ten of his men — Silas Gobel among them. Smith and the handful of survivors crossed the Mojave a second time on foot and reached California again. He was killed in 1831 by a Comanche party on the dry Cimarron crossing of the Santa Fe Trail. His crossings, recorded in his own journals and his clerk’s, opened the southwestern routes later emigrants would follow.
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 small hours of April 27, 1865, the side-wheel steamboat Sultana was laboring up a flooded Mississippi River about seven miles above Memphis, near a cluster of islands called the Hen and Chickens, jammed with somewhere near 2,100 people — the great majority of them gaunt Union soldiers just released from the Confederate prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba, going home at last. The boat had been built to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85. It was carrying more than five times that. At roughly two o’clock in the morning, three of her four boilers exploded with a roar heard for miles, blowing the center of the vessel apart, scalding men in their sleep, and turning the splintered superstructure into a torch.
The explosion and the fire and the cold spring river together killed an estimated 1,100 to 1,200 people — the most recent careful tally puts the dead at about 1,168, though official counts of the era ranged higher. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history, with a death toll greater than the Titanic’s. And yet almost no one remembers it. The country was reeling: Robert E. Lee had surrendered eighteen days before, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 14, and John Wilkes Booth had been cornered and killed only the day before the Sultana burned. The news of a thousand homecoming soldiers drowned in the Mississippi was swallowed whole by larger headlines.
The horror was compounded by its cause, which was not bad luck but human greed and negligence. The men aboard had been loaded in their hundreds because the steamboat’s officers stood to collect a government bounty for every prisoner ferried north — and a corrupt army quartermaster at Vicksburg helped funnel a crushing, profitable load onto one vessel. The fatal boiler had been patched, not repaired, days earlier so the boat would not lose time. A river running high with spring melt made the overloaded, top-heavy steamer roll from side to side, sloshing water away from hot boiler plates until they failed.
This entry follows the survivors — the men who came through the blast and then faced the river itself. Roughly 700 to 800 of those aboard lived, many of them already weakened by months of starvation in prison, now thrown into a black, frigid, flood-swollen current in the middle of the night. What saved them was a mix of luck, debris to cling to, the warmth of bodies pressed together, and the boats and people of Memphis who came out into the dark to pull them from the water.
In September 1870, a small party of Montana citizens and soldiers — the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition — pushed into the strange, unmapped country of geysers and hot springs at the head of the Yellowstone River, the wilderness that would become the world’s first national park. Among them was Truman C. Everts, a fifty-four-year-old former federal tax assessor, badly nearsighted and the least woodsman-like member of the group. On about September 9, riding through dense lodgepole timber near the southern arm of Yellowstone Lake, Everts fell behind, became separated from the others, and lost track of the trail. Within a day he had also lost his horse — and with it his blankets, his gun, his matches, and nearly everything he needed to live.
What followed was thirty-seven days alone in the high wilderness as autumn turned to early winter. Everts was left with little more than the clothes he wore, a small knife, and a pocket opera glass — and the wits to use them. He survived mainly on the boiled roots of a thistle that would later be named for him — Everts’ thistle — and he kept from freezing by sleeping beside the hot springs and thermal vents that riddle the country, scalding himself badly when the thin crust gave way and burning his hip while he slept. He lost his glasses, half-blinding himself; he was stalked by a mountain lion; he was caught in snow; and as starvation and exposure wore him down he began to hallucinate, conversing with an imaginary companion.
The expedition searched for days, firing guns and building signal fires, then reluctantly gave him up for dead and rode out for the settlements. A reward was offered, and two frontiersmen — Jack Baronett, known as ‘Yellowstone Jack,’ and George Pritchett — kept looking. On October 16, more than thirty-seven days after he had gone missing, they found Everts over fifty miles from where he had been lost, crawling on his hands and knees, delirious, frostbitten and burned, and so wasted by hunger that accounts put his weight at around fifty pounds — a living skeleton whom they at first took for a wounded animal.
Everts recovered, and in 1871 he published his own account of the ordeal, ‘Thirty-Seven Days of Peril,’ in Scribner’s Monthly. It became one of the most widely read survival narratives of its day and helped fix the wonders of the Yellowstone country in the public imagination at exactly the moment Congress was being persuaded to protect it. In 1872 Yellowstone became the first national park; a mountain near Mammoth Hot Springs carries Everts’ name to this day.
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.
In the spring of 1869, a one-armed Civil War major named John Wesley Powell launched ten men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming Territory, bound for the last great blank space on the map of the United States. Below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado lay a thousand miles of unrun river and, at the bottom, the deepest canyon on the continent — what Powell himself would call the “Great Unknown.” No one knew whether the river was passable at all, or whether it dropped somewhere into unrunnable falls that would kill them.
Over roughly three months the expedition was ground down by the river. They lost a boat — the No Name — and a third of their provisions in a violent rapid on the Green, and the food that survived rotted and spoiled until the men were near starvation on rancid flour and dried apples. One man quit early and walked out. Then, deep in the Grand Canyon and only days from the end, with rations almost gone and one last fearsome rapid ahead, the party fractured. Three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn — decided they would sooner climb out of the canyon on foot than run the next rapid. They left at a spot Powell named Separation Canyon.
The six who stayed ran the rapid, and within two days reached the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers were watching the water for their bodies. They had survived. The three who climbed out did not. They were killed on the high plateau north of the canyon, in country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute. By one widely repeated account they were killed by Shivwits Paiutes who mistook them for other men; that attribution has been disputed for over a century, with some historians arguing they may instead have been killed by Mormon settlers. Their true fate remains genuinely uncertain.
The river ran through the homelands of many nations — the Ute of the upper Green, the Hopi, the Diné (Navajo), the Hualapai, the Havasupai, and the Southern Paiute of the canyon country — peoples who had lived along and within these canyons long before Powell declared them “unknown.” His expedition mapped the river and made him a national figure, but the phrase “Great Unknown” was always only true from the deck of a white explorer’s boat.
In the summer of 1846, with the United States newly at war with Mexico, the federal government asked the displaced Latter-day Saints — then encamped in misery on the Missouri after being driven out of Illinois — to raise a battalion of volunteers for the army’s invasion of the Southwest. Roughly five hundred men, with a handful of wives and children along as laundresses and family, enlisted. What followed was one of the longest infantry marches in American history: some two thousand miles on foot, from the Missouri River through Santa Fe and across the deserts of present-day New Mexico and Arizona to the Pacific at San Diego.
The Mormon Battalion fought no battle against the Mexican army. Its real enemies were distance, thirst, hunger, and the country itself. Under the hard command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke — who took over after the original commander died — the men hauled wagons across waterless stretches, dug and chopped a road for the wagons through the rock of a place they called Box Canyon, and marched until their shoes and rations gave out. Their one “battle,” near the San Pedro River in present-day Arizona, was against a herd of wild bulls that gored mules and men and wrecked wagons before being driven off.
Nearly all of them survived. The deaths — perhaps around twenty over the whole enlistment — came from illness, exhaustion, and exposure rather than combat, and many of the sickest were spun off into “sick detachments” sent to winter at Pueblo rather than die on the trail. When the survivors reached San Diego in late January 1847, Cooke issued an order that has become famous: “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry.” The road they cut became a wagon route to California used by gold-seekers within two years.
The march cannot be told honestly without its context. It was a campaign of the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest that would strip roughly half of Mexico’s territory and bring the homelands of the Apache, the Tohono O’odham, the Pima (Akimel O’odham), the Yuma (Quechan), the Kumeyaay, and many other nations under United States control. The road the battalion opened was also a road of dispossession.
On March 18, 1851, a family of Brewsterite emigrants — a splinter group of Latter-day Saints led by Royce Oatman — was attacked on the Gila Trail in what is now western Arizona, on the banks of the Gila River some eighty miles east of modern Yuma. The attackers are generally identified as Tolkepayas, a band of the Western Yavapai, though Olive herself later called them Apache. Most of the family was killed at the bluff. Thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her younger sister Mary Ann, about seven, were carried off; their older brother Lorenzo, beaten and left for dead, survived and made his way back to raise the alarm. What followed for the two girls was about a year of captivity among the Yavapai and then several years living among the Mohave along the Colorado River.
The distinction between the two peoples matters and is often blurred in the popular tellings. The Tolkepaya Yavapai who attacked the family held the girls in hard, servile conditions — hauling water and firewood, foraging, beaten and burned by children of the camp. About a year later the sisters were traded to a Mohave family — that of a leader recorded as Espaniole — for horses, vegetables, blankets, and beads, and taken down to the Mohave Valley. There the girls were given a different place. Olive later described being taken into the household, given a plot of land and seed to cultivate, and tattooed on the chin in the blue vertical lines that were a customary Mohave marking — by Olive’s own insistence a sign of tribal belonging, meant to be recognized by ancestors in the land of the dead, not a brand of slavery. When drought and famine struck the Colorado around 1855, food ran short for everyone, and Mary Ann died of starvation along with many Mohave.
In early 1856, word reached Fort Yuma that a young white woman was living among the Mohave. Through the intervention of a Quechan (Yuma) messenger named Francisco and the post authorities, Olive was ransomed and brought to the fort on February 28, 1856 — nineteen years old, sun-darkened, and marked with the tattoo she would carry the rest of her life. Her brother Lorenzo, who had spent five years searching and petitioning officials, was reunited with her there, and their meeting made headlines across the West.
Within a year a Methodist minister, Royal B. Stratton, published ‘Life Among the Indians: or, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls’ (1857), a bestseller of some 30,000 copies that made Olive famous and funded the siblings’ schooling. The book is also the root of much that is doubtful about her story: it leaned hard into the lurid captivity-narrative conventions of the era and almost certainly distorted her years among the Mohave, casting them as villains. Olive lectured on the strength of it, married a Texas cattleman and banker named John Brant Fairchild in 1865, and lived quietly in Sherman, Texas, until her death in 1903 — her real experience always partly hidden behind the sensational one that had been written for her.