The Shortcut That Cost Thirty-Nine Lives

The shortcut was supposed to save hundreds of miles. It cost thirty-nine lives.

In the spring of 1846, two prosperous families — the Donners and the Reeds of Illinois — joined the great migration west, bound for California with wagons, cattle, hired workers and children. They were not desperate people fleeing with nothing. George Donner was sixty years old, established and respected. James Reed was a successful businessman travelling with fine possessions and his elderly mother-in-law. They had comfortable lives behind them and everything to lose. At Fort Bridger that July, they decided to gamble it.

The gamble was called the Hastings Cutoff. Lansford Hastings had promoted a route south of the Great Salt Lake that he claimed would shorten the journey to California. Experienced frontiersman James Clyman had travelled part of it in the opposite direction and warned emigrants not to attempt it with wagons. Other warnings reportedly reached the travellers as well. But the Donners, the Reeds and the families gathered around them turned away from the established trail.

The “shortcut” became a trap almost immediately. The emigrants spent days hacking a wagon road through the Wasatch Mountains, cutting trees and clearing obstacles where no proper trail existed. Then came the Great Salt Lake Desert: roughly eighty miles of salt, mud and waterless glare. The crossing killed livestock, shattered wagons and consumed far more time than the route was supposed to save.

By the time the party reached the Sierra Nevada at the end of October, its people and animals were exhausted and weeks behind schedule. Snow had already begun falling in the mountains. They attempted the pass, came within only a few miles of the summit and were forced back. The road to California closed almost in front of them.

Most of the party took shelter in crude cabins beside Truckee Lake, now called Donner Lake. The Donner families, delayed several miles behind, remained at Alder Creek in hastily constructed tents and shelters. They slaughtered their remaining cattle and rationed the meat. When that disappeared, they ate dogs, mice and strips of oxhide. Bones were boiled repeatedly until they became soft enough to chew or produced a thin, glue-like broth.

Then they waited for rescuers who did not yet know they were dying.

The Horror

On 16 December, seventeen of the strongest emigrants attempted to cross the mountains on improvised snowshoes. Two soon turned back, leaving fifteen — five women and ten males, including a twelve-year-old boy — to continue with barely enough food for six days. History remembers them as the Forlorn Hope.

They wandered through the mountains for a month. Their provisions vanished, exhaustion overtook them and one person after another collapsed. When the survivors could go no farther, they ate the bodies of those who had died.

Two Indigenous guides, Luis and Salvador, had been sent by John Sutter to help the emigrants. They refused to eat human flesh and fled after hearing suggestions that they should be killed for food. Starving and too weak to continue, they were eventually found by the emigrants. William Foster shot them, and their bodies were eaten.

Only seven of the fifteen who continued across the mountains reached safety: five women and two men. Their arrival finally revealed that dozens of people remained trapped beyond the pass.

Rescue came agonisingly slowly. Four relief parties fought their way into the mountains between February and April 1847, carrying survivors out in stages and finding fewer people alive each time. Some of those taken by the rescuers were so weak that they could not walk. Others died on the journey out, while children were separated from parents who lacked the strength to accompany them.

Accounts from the camps describe children crying from hunger, families measuring out strips of boiled hide and people becoming too weak to gather firewood. Cannibalism among the Forlorn Hope is firmly documented, as is the consumption of human remains by some of those trapped at the lake. Later accusations concerning individual deaths and events at the camps became harder to prove, distorted by trauma, rumour and the public hunger for a monstrous story.

George Donner died at Alder Creek as spring approached. His wife, Tamsen, had opportunities to leave but repeatedly chose to remain with her dying husband. She survived him only briefly. What happened to her afterwards remains uncertain.

The final person removed from the camps was Lewis Keseberg, found alone in April among the remains of the dead. Rescuers accused him of murder and of cannibalism beyond what survival required. Keseberg denied the darkest allegations for the rest of his life, and they were never conclusively proved.

When it was over, 48 of the 87 people who had entered the Wasatch Mountains survived. Women endured at a markedly higher rate than men, partly because men repeatedly undertook the most dangerous journeys and physical labour. More than half of the original party had been children, and only the Reed and Breen families emerged intact.

The Modern Relic

The lake beneath the pass is called Donner Lake, and the site of the principal camp is preserved within Donner Memorial State Park. There stands the Pioneer Monument, completed in 1918: a bronze pioneer family raised upon a massive stone pedestal twenty-two feet high, traditionally said to represent the greatest reported depth of the snow during that terrible winter.

But the most extraordinary surviving relic fits inside an archive box. Patrick Breen, an Irish immigrant and father of seven, kept a diary at the lake camp from 20 November 1846 until 1 March 1847. Its entries are terse, cold and factual, recording the weather, the dwindling cattle, the deepening snow and the deaths of the people around him.

On the day the snowshoe party departed, Breen wrote: “The company started on snow shoes to cross the mountains.” As the winter continued, his words became increasingly desperate, yet he kept writing. Page by page, the diary remains the closest thing we possess to a voice speaking from inside that frozen camp.

Patrick Breen, his wife Margaret and all seven of their children survived.

The Donner Party became an American byword for disastrous judgement, and the story is often reduced to cannibalism or jokes about taking the wrong road. But stripped of legend, its horror is simpler: a series of avoidable delays, one untested shortcut and one early winter combined until ordinary families were forced to make choices no human being should face.

They had been warned.

They took the shortcut anyway.

The snow did the rest.

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