Donner Pass: The Actual History Is Harder Than the Myth

The pass you are approaching is named for a wagon train that became snowbound here in October of eighteen forty-six. The Donner Party story, in the simplified version that appears in American schoolbooks, is a story about cannibalism. That is true but not the whole truth.

The Donner and Reed families and their companions were among the thousands of emigrants moving west on the California Trail that year. They made a series of decisions that slowed them, a new shortcut that was not shorter, early stops along the way, and arrived at the Sierra Nevada passes in late October, a month later than the seasonal window usually allowed. The snow came early.

They were trapped in camps at the eastern base of the pass, in what is now known as Donner Lake, for about four months. Eighty-seven people were stranded. Forty-eight survived.

Those who survived did so partly by consuming the bodies of those who died. Survivor accounts describe it, though archaeological work at the camp sites has been inconclusive. What is less often noted is that the two individuals who unambiguously did not participate in cannibalism and who helped others survive were Luis and Salvador, two Miwok men who had been hired by John Sutter as guides.

They were shot and eaten by members of the snowshoe party after the group went about nine days without food. Their names are not on the monument at Donner Lake. The monument commemorates the emigrants.

The railroad that eventually cracked this route in eighteen sixty-nine came over this very pass, completing the hand-drilled Summit Tunnel in eighteen sixty-eight after hundreds of Chinese laborers spent almost three years drilling and blasting granite. Today trains use a longer tunnel about a mile to the south. Most of those workers' names are not recorded either.