The Donner Party is a story that is branded right on Truckee’s behind. Kids learn about it in the schools, the adults see it plastered onto merchandise downtown, and the tourists enjoy its seemingly endless details at the local museum. It’s a relic, an oddly entertaining tragedy that put strong Americans through immense pressure, and produced a fat diamond that the modern yankee is still enjoying to this day. There wouldn’t be these streets to walk on, these waters to swim in, and these mountains to lose yourself in without the horrors they endured. And there’s plenty of reason to be interested, many parts of this musty mukbang that aren’t common knowledge, even to a seasoned Truckee resident. Here are my top five picks for the best obscure facts about the Donner Party.
- Abraham Lincoln nearly joined them.
One surprising “what if” is that Abraham Lincoln almost thought about going West. James F. Reed, a key leader in the Donner group, had served with Lincoln in the Black Hawk War and asked him to consider emigrating to California with his family. Lincoln reportedly thought about it, but stayed in Illinois because of family and other obligations. It’s kind of brain-wracking to think of what America would look like today had Abe taken up on Reed’s offer, as this was years before the Civil War.
2. History focuses on the cannibalism, but there were some other last resorts.
Long before the desperate acts that later captured headlines, the stranded emigrants survived by eating whatever they could find. Contemporary accounts and diaries list mice, boiled ox hide (to soften it into something like gluey protein), strips of leather, and even pine bark and pine cones when nothing else remained. These creative yet gritty meals worsened over time. They ate any mice crawling around their makeshift cabins, and went through every pet.
3. The exiled man who became a rescuer.
James F. Reed, the same man that could have brought Abraham Lincoln along for the ride, was banished from the main wagon train after he stabbed another man during an argument, a punishment that left him separated from his family. Instead of dying as the banishment intended, Reed rode to the nearest settlement (Sutter’s Fort), raised money and volunteers, and helped organize the rescue parties that brought survivors down from the mountains. On a funnier note, I can’t imagine how scary it would feel to see the person you beefed with and got stabbed by collecting people to rescue, it would have to be a pretty earnest apology.
4. The Breen diary is our clearest day by day record.
Patrick Breen, a member of the party, kept a plain, daily dairy while the group was snowbound. It reads less emotional initially and more like an inventory and weather log: snowfall depth, who died that day, and how the food stores were dwindling. Historians often point to Breen’s entries because they’re consistent, present, and brutally honest, exactly the kind of source that helped tie together what happened without the usual historical embellishment. It reads like a grocery list of doom, with entries going from basic updates to pleas to god.
5. Survival wasn’t equal.
Survival rates in the Donner Party were uneven: roughly two thirds of the women and children survived, while about one-third of the men did. Being a woman or child in this group made you almost twice as likely to survive as being a man. Historians suggest many reasons, mostly to the different roles, task allocation in crisis, and pure luck.
