Hastings Adobe: The Man Who Doomed the Donner Party

Near here stood an adobe built in eighteen forty-six by Lansford Hastings, the Ohio-born lawyer whose ambition helped send the Donner Party to its catastrophe. Hastings had gone west in eighteen forty-two, first to Oregon and then to California the next year and published an emigrant guide promoting a shortcut across the Sierra Nevada that he called the Hastings Cutoff, a route he had never actually tested with wagons. While the Donner Party followed his unproven advice to their doom in the winter of eighteen forty-six and eighteen forty-seven, Hastings himself was here at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, building this adobe as the first structure in a town he planned to call Montezuma, intended as a Mormon colony site.

When American forces raised the flag in San Francisco in July of eighteen forty-six, the Mormons lost interest, Hastings abandoned the project, and the adobe slowly returned to the earth. A frame house was later built around the remaining walls.