They Left From Here

In the spring of eighteen forty-six, two families who had been living in and around Springfield, Illinois, set out westward. George Donner was about sixty years old. James Reed was forty-five.

They organized nine wagons, loaded them with supplies and furniture, gathered thirty-two family members and employees, and rolled out of town. They met other families as they traveled south and then west, crossing Missouri to join a larger emigrant train at Independence. By late spring they were moving along the California-Oregon Trail with eighty-seven people total, a group that came to be called the Donner Party.

In late July, at a fork in the trail in present-day Wyoming, they made a decision that would become famous. A promoter named Lansford Hastings had been advertising a shortcut, a route south of the Great Salt Lake that he claimed would save three hundred and fifty miles. James Reed argued for it.

Despite a warning from a veteran scout named James Clyman, who had already traveled the route and urged them not to take it, and a warning letter from a journalist named Edwin Bryant that never reached them, they voted to follow Hastings's Cutoff. The shortcut did not save time. It cost them more than a month.

When they reached the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada in late October, the snow had already closed the passes. Of the eighty-seven people who entered the mountains, forty-eight survived the winter. Springfield had no particular claim on the disaster, except that two of its families organized it and set it in motion.

George Donner and James Reed had lived here, planned here, provisioned here. This is where the journey that ended in the Sierras began.