Living Through the Donner Party

Nearly a century and a half after it happened, the story of the Donner Party remains one of the most riveting tragedies in U.S. history. Partly that’s because of its lurid elements: almost half the party died, and many of their bodies were defiled in an orgy of cannibalism. Partly, too, it’s because of the human drama of noble self-sacrifice and base murder juxtaposed. The Donner Party began as just another nameless pioneer trek to California, but it came to symbolize the Great American Dream gone awry. By now the tale of that disastrous journey has been told so often that seemingly nothing else remains to be said--or so I thought, until my friend Donald Grayson at the University of Washington sent me an analysis that he had published in the Journal of Anthropological Research. By comparing the fates of all Donner Party members, Grayson identified striking differences between those ...