C.F. McGlashan and the Two Histories of Truckee

Charles Fayette McGlashan arrived in Truckee in eighteen seventy-five to edit the Republican newspaper. By eighteen seventy-nine, he had produced the first authoritative history of the Donner Party. He had done something that no one had managed before: he tracked down the survivors, wrote to them, traveled to interview them, and got them to describe what happened in the winter of eighteen forty-six to forty-seven while their memories were still alive. His History of the Donner Party remains a primary source. Historians still cite it. Without McGlashan, much of what we know about the specifics of that winter would have died with the last survivor.

McGlashan is remembered in Truckee for this. His name appears in local history. His Donner history is in print.

He is remembered much less for the other thing he was doing at the same time.

McGlashan was already the owner and publisher of the Truckee Republican when the Caucasian League formed in eighteen seventy-six and launched its campaign to expel the Chinese community. He was not the architect of that original campaign, but he served as a defense lawyer for men accused in the anti Chinese arson attacks that followed, used Truckee as a model in his writing, and contributed to the broader statewide movement to eliminate Chinese presence from California's economy. The California History Journal and Bancroft Library archives document that the Truckee expulsion was used as evidence by those lobbying for what became the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two. How directly McGlashan's specific advocacy reached congressional sponsors is a question that archival historians have flagged as requiring further verification in the Bancroft correspondence files, but his role in framing the Truckee story as a success worth repeating elsewhere is documented in secondary scholarship.

So here is the man. He memorialized one set of victims with meticulous care and decades of work. He simultaneously promoted the expulsion of another community from the same town. He is remembered for one and largely not the other. The Donner Party gets the state park. The Chinese community gets no marker at all.

That asymmetry is not an accident. It is a choice, made again every year that the markers remain as they are.