Donner Hill: The Shortcut That Cost Everything
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Just east of Salt Lake City, this hill marks the spot where the Donner-Reed Party made one of history's most fateful decisions. Lured by Lansford Hastings's promise that his new cutoff would save two hundred fifty miles and weeks of travel to California, the group arrived here on August twenty-third, eighteen forty-six, after sixteen days spent hacking a road through the Wasatch Mountains. The men spent four grueling days cutting a wagon road over this hill and through the bottoms below, exhausting their oxen and supplies before they even reached the Salt Lake Desert.
The delay Donner Hill and the cutoff inflicted pushed the party into the Sierra Nevada too late in the season. They became trapped in the mountains that October. Of the eighty-seven people who set out, only forty-eight survived.
The hill stands as a monument to the cost of following an untested shortcut.
