User:Moni3/Donner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Donner Party (also called the Reed-Donner Party) was a group of American pioneers who traveled in a wagon train from Missouri to California during several months from 1846 to 1847. Eighty-seven members of the group started out, most of them in large family groups or as teamsters. After reaching Wyoming, they chose to take a route promoted by Lansford W. Hastings, one that he himself had never traveled. It wound through the Wasatch Mountains and Great Salt Lake Desert, resulting in serious delays, the loss of many of the party's cattle and wagons, and disintegration of the group into bitter factions. They were a month and a half behind schedule when they reached Truckee Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains near the border of California, and winter forced them to stop. An unusually heavy snowfall bound them in and their food stores ran out. Despite several rescue attempts and excursions by individuals to get help, after they had eaten their food caches, oxen, and hides, they were forced to eat some members of the party who had died from starvation and sickness. A little more than half the original members survived the trip, making it into California.
News of the harrowing tale of the Donner Party made its way across the United States, and for the next year western immigration dropped significantly. Gold was discovered in California in 1848, however, and the effects of the Donner Party tragedy became relatively insignificant in the overall movement of westward migration. It has endured in U.S. history as a tragic episode requiring the members of the party to resort to cannibalism. Historians have described it as "one of the most most thrilling, heart-rending tragedies in California history",[1] justifying continuing interest in the events because "the disaster was the most spectacular in the record of western migration".[2]