Donner PassAmerican Folklore Mythology

The Donner Party is America's definitive survival horror story, and it is all true.

In the fall of 1846, a group of 87 emigrants — families, mostly, with children — took an untested shortcut through the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, losing weeks and cattle. By the time they reached the Sierra Nevada in late October, early snow had sealed the pass. They were trapped.

The party split into two camps: one at the east end of Donner Lake, the other at Alder Creek, six miles to the north. They built rough shelters. They ate their oxen, then their horses, then their dogs, then boiled hides and bones into glue. By December, people were dying.

A group of fifteen — later called the Forlorn Hope — set out on snowshoes to cross the pass and reach help in the Sacramento Valley. Seven survived, partially by eating the dead. Rescue parties eventually reached the lake camp and found survivors living among the remains of the dead. Of the 87 original members, 36 died.

The story crystallized something in the American imagination: the West will kill you. The land does not care. The mountain does not want you here.

Donner Pass (elevation 7,056 feet) is the mountain pass through the Sierra Nevada where Interstate 80 now crosses between Reno and Sacramento. Donner Lake sits in the valley directly below the pass, a blue alpine lake 3 miles long.

The Donner Memorial State Park preserves the eastern lakeside campsite. The Emigrant Trail Museum at the park contains artifacts and a detailed account of the ordeal. A large stone pedestal near the museum marks the campsite — its base is 22 feet tall, representing the depth of snow that winter.

The Alder Creek campsite — where the Donner family camped separately — is six miles north, on private land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. It was archaeologically excavated in the 2000s.

The Donner Party left Springfield, Illinois in April 1846 as part of a larger wagon train. They separated from the main group at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, taking the unproven Hastings Cutoff on the advice of promoter Lansford Hastings, who had never actually taken the route with wagons.

The shortcut cost them a month. They reached the Sierra in late October with early storms already dropping snow. The party was trapped from November 1846 to April 1847.

Archaeological work at Alder Creek by the University of Oregon (2003-2006) and at the lake camp by earlier excavations confirmed the campsites and recovered artifacts but found less evidence of cannibalism than the popular narrative suggests. The cannibalism at the Forlorn Hope and at the lake camp is well-documented from survivor accounts; its extent at Alder Creek is less certain.

The name 'Donner' now belongs to the lake, the pass, the memorial park, the ski resort, and the local school. The family's name became the landscape.