The Forlorn Hope

On the sixteenth of December, eighteen forty-six, seventeen people left the main camp at Donner Lake on homemade snowshoes, though two turned back within the first days, leaving fifteen to continue. They had been trapped on this side of the Sierra Nevada for six weeks. The pass above them had already received, by survivor accounts, somewhere near twenty feet of snow. They carried rations for six days.

The group was fifteen people: ten men and five women. They were not the strongest members of the camp. The strongest members were keeping the others alive back at the lake. These fifteen were simply the ones who could still walk.

The California settlement they were trying to reach was across a mountain range in the middle of winter with no trail, no map that matched the terrain they found, and no margin. Their six days of rations ran out long before they were off the mountain. By the sixth day, a man named Patrick Dolan had died in a snowstorm and the survivors faced what they had hoped they would not face. The historical record, beginning with the California Star newspaper in March of eighteen forty-seven and continuing through McGlashan's eighteen seventy-nine account based on survivor interviews, is explicit about what happened next. They ate the dead.

There is no point in softening this. It is what happened. It is documented in survivor depositions taken immediately after rescue, before any of them had reason to craft a story. Some of the depositions agree. Some conflict on details. What is beyond dispute is that people died, the survivors continued, and eight of the fifteen eventually arrived at a settlement in California in January of eighteen forty-seven after thirty-two days in the mountains. Seven did not arrive.

The families of some survivors spent generations contesting the published accounts. Lawsuits were filed. Certain names were disputed. The historical record was uncomfortable enough that for most of the twentieth century the standard treatment minimized the documented facts or treated them as a private shame. Recent archaeological work at the Murphy cabin site, bones analyzed by researchers working with the National Park Service, confirmed what the survivor accounts already said.

The monument at Donner Lake does not mention any of this. The pass you are crossing does not carry their names. What the Forlorn Hope walked through is what you are driving over now.