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.
In the winter of 1849–50 a scattered company of gold-seekers, chasing a rumored shortcut to the California mines, drove their wagons off the established Old Spanish Trail and straight into the basin that one of them, looking back from its western rim, would damn forever as “Death Valley.” The long overland approach — the wagon roads, the breakup of the larger party, the fateful choice to follow a map of a cutoff that did not exist — is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries. This entry is about what happened after the wheels stopped: the families pinned in the desert with their oxen dying and no way out, and the walk that saved them.
The group at the center of the story is the Bennett-Arcan party — the families of Asabel Bennett and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Arcan (often written Arcane), with their wives and small children, plus a few single men. By the time they understood the trap they were in, late in December 1849, they were camped near a spring on the floor of the valley, their oxen too weak to haul the wagons over the wall of mountains to the west, their food nearly gone. They made a desperate plan: two of the strongest and youngest men, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, would go ahead on foot to find a settlement and bring back provisions, while the families waited at the spring.
Manly and Rogers were gone far longer than anyone had dared expect — about twenty-six days. They crossed the Panamint Range, struck out across the Mojave for nearly 300 miles, and finally reached the settled country near Mission San Fernando, north of Los Angeles, where they obtained food, three horses, and a one-eyed mule. Then they turned around and walked the whole brutal route back into the valley, fully expecting to find the families dead. They were not all dead. Most of the Bennett-Arcan people were still alive at the spring, just barely, and Manly and Rogers led them out on foot over the mountains, reaching the safety of Rancho San Francisco — near present-day Santa Clarita — in March 1850.
The death toll in Death Valley was, remarkably, very low — only one man of the Bennett-Arcan group, the ailing Captain Richard Culverwell, died in the valley itself, and the families and children all came through. What gave the place its terrible name was not a mass grave but the experience of it: the heat, the salt, the dead oxen, the weeks of waiting, and the conviction of everyone in it that they had walked into a country that meant to kill them. As they climbed out at last over the mountains, one of the party is remembered to have turned and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley” — and the name stuck to the map.
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.
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.