On This Day in History: May 12

Donner Party

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Maybe don’t read this one while you’re having breakfast. The idea of eating peoplemeat gives me the barfies. But if you get hungry enough, and cousin Jedediah has gone to the great beyond and isn’t using those thighs anyway, and that’s all there is to eat . . . you might decide to go Donner Party on his frozen ass. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: May 12, 1846--

My kingdom for a fucking GPS. The post-apocalyptic movies with roving hordes of cannibals have me thinking I’d just rather die. Going cannibal to survive a winter lost in the mountains while you hope to make it back to civilization? Okay. Cannibal forever because society collapsed? Excuse me while I leap from this very high cliff. 

I’ve been to the Midwest, and I’ve been to California. I can understand the desire to leave the former for the latter. And that’s what the pioneering Donner-Reed party did on May 12, 1846. Leaving Missouri on the Oregon Trail, they decided hey let’s try this unproven shortcut. Oh, shit. That wasn’t a short cut at all and now we’re way behind schedule. Good thing we left early in the season. Wait. You’re saying we should have started a month earlier? Well, fuck. 

Now we’re in the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s November but it’s only a hundred miles to go. Come on, Donner clan! We can do it! It’s not gonna snow early this year. Famous last fucking words. It did snow early. They were so close, and yet so very fucked. 

The mountains went from passable to a giant frozen roadblock. They were trapped. Eighty-one people made camp at Truckee Lake—now called Donner Lake because some person in charge of renaming shit was a sick motherfucker—which is at 6,000 feet elevation and not far from Lake Tahoe. More than half of the 81 were under the age of 18, and six of them were infants. 

Now the nasty stuff. A month after getting stuck, 17 men, women, and even children tried to hike out. Called the “Forlorn Hope,” they got real hungry and thought about drawing lots for a human sacrifice to eat. Or maybe fight a duel with the loser becoming trail mix. Then some of them up and conveniently died the natural way and got turned into Donner kebobs. Two in the hiking party were Native Americans who refused to go cannibal, and they fled the group. But they were hunted down and shot because the other hikers were all hey we can’t let that food get away! Seven of those hikers made it to safety. 

Back at Truckee Lake, they ate the pack animals and the dogs and tree bark and, occasionally, each other. It’s estimated half those left behind resorted to cannibalism. Starting in February, three months after they were first trapped, the rescue began. It took a couple of months to lead all the survivors out to safety. Of the 81, 45 made it out alive. 

One of the survivors was one-year-old Isabella Breen, who lived to be 90. 

Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.

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