Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

... Bodies of men, women, and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father—the mother that of her children—children that of father and mother.

Worse still, survivors had lost their most basic humanity. Once they would have "shuddered and sickened" at the thought of cannibalism, but now they "coldly" calculated which of their comrades would make future meals. Family members no longer cared for one another. Some preferred human flesh to the provisions of the rescue parties.

Earlier newspaper stories had described desperation and even cannibalism, but none had sketched so vivid a picture of depravity. Most of the details were false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Of the forty-five survivors, for example, only about half tasted human flesh. Perhaps another half dozen people resorted to cannibalism before dying. A precise count is impossible, nor would one matter. The abiding mark of the Donner Party was an act of desperation, nothing more. Faced with imminent starvation and death, the pioneers did what was necessary to survive. Eating the flesh of people who had already died wasn't barbaric or animalistic. It was the only logical and reasonable course of action open to those left alive.

But such caveats made no difference. Two weeks after the Star story the yarn was repeated in a paper in Monterey, this time embellished even more richly: Mothers had refused food to their famished children, then eaten the youngsters once they starved.

The mold was set. The story of the Donner Party went from paper to paper and mouth to mouth, spreading across the country in a titillating admixture of exaggeration, half-truth, and lie. The tall tales worsened in the retelling, as tall tales always do. Occasionally, even the survivors themselves spread bizarre and incredible anecdotes. Frances Donner once insisted that Eleanor Eddy "died deranged:"

In the forenoon before she died she got the benches and arranged them in the floor in imitation of people and danced the cotilliion and other dances untill she was exosted and then died.

Such sagas found purchase in the public mind for several reasons, perhaps including, ironically, the fact that the Donner Party represented no great turn of history. For a story that has fascinated the national psyche for decades, it was an evanescent affair. Like the survivors, history trudged ahead. Migration to California plummeted the next two years, but almost surely that had more to do with the uncertainties of the Mexican-American War than with the distant travails of a few families. When gold glittered, the allure washed memories clean. A renewed flood of humanity started marching across the continent to California, willing to risk anything for a chance at life's mother lode.

Indeed, the Donner Party was far more anomalous than typical. During the twenty years at the heart of the great overland migration— from 1840 to i860—a quarter of a million people crossed the continent, few with a result similar to that of the Donner Party. The best estimates are that perhaps 4 to 6 percent of emigrants died on the route, and of course some of those would have died back at home. Gauging the number who gave up and turned around is almost impossible, but it is clear that the great majority of those who loaded a wagon and steered westward reached their destination in safety. In the end, of course, the migration peopled California and Oregon with astonishing speed, and thus helped spread the reach of the nation toward the "manifest destiny" in which so many emigrants fervently believed. Thus the tale of the Donner Party is mismatched with its broader context, for it is a cautionary warning about an enterprise that was largely, from the standpoint of the participants, a splendid success.

Early newspaper accounts often seemed at pains to make the point that most travelers had no trouble. The California Star noted that some companies reached the golden shore in less than four months. Even with time to spare for resting the cattle, no more than four and a half months was needed. All "candid persons" knew as much. Mere "ordinary industry and care" ensured a crossing of the Sierra before the first snow.

The real trouble with the Donner Party, according to this line of argument, was not the inherent risks of the journey west but the company's own sloth and foolishness. Even before the first rescuers reached the cabins, the Star blamed the party's delay on "a contrary and contentious disposition." Everyone would have completed the trek safely, the paper claimed, if only "the men had exerted themselves as they should have done."

It would be specious to claim insight into the motives of long-dead editors, but it's worth noting that this focus on the alleged shortcomings of the Donner Party suited the interests of the emerging American establishment in California, which was eager for more emigrants. If the Donner Party could be at least partly blamed for its own travails, other prospective newcomers might not be discouraged. The last thing anyone in California wanted to suggest publicly was that a harrowing catastrophe was simply an intrinsic—if highly unlikely—risk of westward migration.

In the early years, therefore, the public imagination took on a twofold perception of the Donner Party—first that they were ghouls, second that they bore a substantial responsibility for their own misfortune. Together, these two ideas intertwined into an ugly and depressing perception of the emigrants. Some survivors rarely spoke of the events, almost as if they were hiding a shameful family secret.

But in time, a new tableau emerged. In 1879 the editor of the newspaper at Truckee, near the site of the tragedy, published a history of the Donner Party, downplaying the occurrence of cannibalism and justifying almost everything the emigrants did. The book proved popular and began to change the public perception. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Native Sons of the Golden West were ready to erect a monument to the Donner Party, a grand statue of a pioneer family striding boldly into the future. It was set atop a massive pedestal said in popular legend to reflect the height of the winter snows of 1846. No longer were the men and women of the Donner Party the sad and incompetent counterpoise to the success of the westward migration; now they were the avatars of its glories, symbols of the Pioneer archetype. The Native Sons wanted "to acknowledge the Donner Party to be typical of the entire race of pioneers, strong, resourceful, self-reliant, fearless, unconquerable spirits—who even in their death added luster to California's name." Where once "there was reproach heaped upon it," now the party's name enjoyed "a day of renown." Eventually the head of the society's monument committee went well beyond that, declaring that the Donner Party reflected not only the best of the pioneer spirit but the best of human endeavor generally. The great edifice, he declared, would "charge the minds of all who behold it with a reverence for those characters who 'gird their armor on,' who square their shoulders to the world and who take the brunt of life."

If a single day typified the rehabilitation of the Donner Party name, it was the dedication of the monument, on a hot June day in 1918, more than seventy years after the tempest. Eight survivors were still alive, three of them at the dedication: Patty Reed and Frances and Eliza Donner. Eliza had become something of a celebrity, having written a book about the Donner Party in which she attempted to disprove her family's cannibalism, and so she was seated at the head of the honored guests, just to the right of the speaker's podium. There had already been a reception the previous day, an event at which Eliza, attempting to say a few words, had choked up with uncontrollable emotion. At the dedication ceremony, she looked out over the crowd, but the faces dissolved into ghosts. She could see her mother walking away from the cabins at Donner Lake, back toward her dying husband, "her small figure moving in and out among the pine trees." Her gaze shifted, and she could see herself and her two little sisters climbing up the massive escarpment hanging above the lake.